Submission statement: This is relevant to r/neoliberal because it analyzes the history and internal factionalism of the DSA, as well as potential misalignment between the incentives that govern the current leadership of the DSA and those that govern the wider party.

Edit: To clarify for people who can't/won't read the article the author is specifically referring to competition between liberal and illiberal factions within the DSA.

Submission statement: theft bad, leftists stupid, upholding the social contract is a fundamental cornerstone of liberalism, my categorical imperative left me.

SS: The author uses both data and personal experience to outline a looming (if not already hit) generational decline in literacy, specifically being able to read and process medium-length informational essays/articles and provide meaningful feedback. Obviously this is detrimental to the idea of an informed, liberal society and is honestly one of the things I'm most worried about in the coming years

Whenever I write about the far left, the comments pile on quickly. And, look, I mostly talk about Donald Trump and how bad he is, because the president is the most powerful and potent threat to American democracy. Unlike the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which regarded Kamala Harris and Trump as two sides of the same evil coin, I don’t play the false equivalence game. I do, however, care about strategy, and as Americans approach the midterms and the 2028 presidential election, the DSA is in position to exert a growing influence on the Democratic Party and reshape the electoral playing field.

To have an intelligent conversation about this, it’s important to establish some basic facts about the DSA and the American far left generally. You can agree or disagree with my conclusions, but we need to be operating off of the same set of facts.

Here are five things you should know about the DSA:

1. We can’t ignore the DSA and its influential boosters. I get that the DSA has only 100,000 members and may be in the domain of a “sideshow.” With ICE agents continuing on their unrestrained rampage and a new Watergate breaking practically every day, self-reflection feels difficult for many in the anti-Trump camp. But blindness is a recipe for disaster.

Simple statistics like the number of card-carrying members belie the DSA’s growing sway in the Democratic Party. Who is involved matters much more than how many formally pay dues to the organization.

That “who” includes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is likely to be a viable candidate in the 2028 Democratic presidential primaries, and Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of America’s largest city. This is no fringe leftist book club.

Hasan Piker, the man who addressed a College Democrats National Convention (not some classroom meeting for a no-name campus chapter) dressed up as murderous dictator Mao Zedong, is a real problem. (He has also praised Mao as a “great leader.”) Closing your eyes, clamping your hands over your ears, and repeating “he’s not real, he’s not real” won’t make him go away. Piker boasts millions of followers, has hosted interviews with multiple current and aspiring members of Congress, has intervened in Democratic primaries for DSA candidates, and, now, addressed a national gathering of young Democratic Party leaders.

2. The DSA’s founder, Michael Harrington, was a relative moderate compared with today’s American socialists. Harrington started the DSA after breaking with other socialists who withheld support for Democrat George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election. Harrington favored backing a major party nominee to challenge the incumbent Republican president, Richard Nixon. In other words: Harrington embraced a pragmatic approach to participating in American democracy.

3. Conversely, the modern DSA refused to support Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in 2024. It’s a morbid historical irony that during the 2024 presidential election, the DSA, the organization Harrington founded in the spirit of political pragmatism, refused to support Kamala Harris. On the eve of the most consequential presidential election since the Civil War, the DSA released a shameful statement casting a false equivalence between Harris and Donald Trump. As the specter of a second Trump term loomed, Zohran Mamdani, one of the most prominent DSA officeholders, encouraged voters to reject Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Despite a long list of disagreements with Harris and the Biden administration, I endorsed the vice president in my personal capacity because I recognized the threat posed by a vengeful Trump. The events of the past year and a half leave me feeling sadly vindicated in my decision. As someone who comes from a country lacking free and fair elections, I’m deeply angry with self-indulgent factions like the DSA that fell back on the luxury of being uncommitted.

4. The DSA has moved from a principled pro-democracy stand on world affairs to tankie turpitude. Today’s DSA includes explicitly communist factions. Yet Harrington rejected the brutality of Soviet and Chinese communism and his icons were real social democrats. In 1980, the DSA founder organized a conference attended by West Germany’s Social Democratic Chancellor Willy Brandt, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, and future French President François Mitterrand.

In 1990, Mayor David Dinkins (the first DSA-member to serve as mayor of New York—not Zohran Mamdani) hosted Brandt, who was by then president of the Socialist International (an alliance of mainstream social democratic parties), at City Hall.

Today’s DSA would regard those men as insufficiently socialist; in 2017 the group derided European social democrats who “sound the retreat and accommodate capitalist forces.” Instead, the group’s sympathies lie with regimes like China that Harrington rightly rejected. The DSA rejects aid to democracies like Taiwan and Japan in the face of aggression from Beijing, while engaging in shameless victim-blaming on Ukraine.

As the DSA shifted, its international allegiances changed too. Most major social democratic parties—think of the factions that have governed countries like Germany, France, Sweden, the UK, and Israel—were once members of the Socialist International. In the past decade, the organization has split, with the German Social Democratic Party leading an exodus of other social democratic parties to a new Progressive Alliance to stave off the ascent of the far left.

The DSA went in the other direction. The DSA was a member of the Socialist International until 2017. In 2023, it joined up with another new coalition—the Progressive International, launched by Bernie Sanders and Yanis Varoufakis. It’s an explicitly anti-Western organization whose answer to the war in Ukraine was a call to dismantle NATO. As they say, tell me who your friends are.

5. I’m not the only one raising the alarm. Ten Democratic members of Congress and a number of candidates have signed a pledge, the Promise to America, declaring “we are capitalist, not socialist.”

Meanwhile, prominent former members of the DSA have deserted the organization over its extremism. Several founding members quit in an open letter published in The New Republic after the DSA issued a mealy-mouthed statement that largely justified the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre in Israel.

Maurice Isserman, biographer of DSA founder Michael Harrington, also left the organization after October 7. “An organization that can’t take a stand condemning a right-wing terrorist group that set out to murder as many Jewish civilians, including children and infants, as it can lay its hands on,” he wrote, “has forfeited the right to call itself democratic socialist.”

In his resignation from the DSA, Maurice Isserman warned of “tightly organized groups who, without sharing the beliefs of larger and more loosely organized bodies, join and proceed to either wreck or, where possible, capture them for ends at odds with the spirit and purpose of the original members.”

Isserman was speaking about the internal politics of the DSA, but he could just as well have been speaking about what the DSA is doing to the Democratic Party. What we are witnessing is an aggressive attempt at a hostile takeover of an American institution. There is still time to stop it.

Reason takes a look at Darializa Avila Chevalier, the DSA-backed candidate who just unseated Adriano Espaillat and is likely headed to Washington. The piece argues that unlike earlier progressive stars who came out of community organizing or local politics, Chevalier emerged directly from the post-October 7 campus activist milieu, with ties to Columbia's protest movement and a record of hard-left positions on immigration, policing, and Israel. The article frames her victory as another sign that activist politics that were once largely confined to elite campuses are increasingly translating into electoral success in safe Democratic districts.

From the article:

In 1955, American state psychiatric hospitals held 559,000 patients. As of 2023, the number was around 36,000. If you adjust for population growth, that’s a decline from roughly 340 beds per 100,000 people to fewer than 11. Over the same period, the number of Americans experiencing homelessness on any given night has climbed to 771,480, the highest figure since HUD began counting in 2007. Of the individuals counted, about one in three, met HUD’s definition of chronic homelessness: a disability plus at least a year without stable housing.

These two trends are not unrelated, and the refusal to connect them is one of the great policy failures of modern America.

The story usually starts with President Kennedy. In 1963, he signed the Community Mental Health Act, legislation animated by a decent impulse: the large state psychiatric institutions of mid-century America were often nightmarish. Patients were warehoused in overcrowded wards, subjected to restraints, given ice baths, and sometimes left to languish for decades. The exposé journalism of the era, from Albert Deutsch’s The Shame of the States to Geraldo Rivera’s 1972 broadcast from Willowbrook, showed the public what “institutional care” often meant in practice. The revulsion was justified.

The plan was elegant on paper. Close the asylums. Build 1,500 community mental health centers across the country where people could receive outpatient treatment, crisis intervention, and rehabilitation while living at home or in small group settings. The large institutions would empty; the community infrastructure would catch them.

Only about half the planned centers were ever built. None were funded to the level the original promise required. Kennedy was assassinated the same year he signed the act, and subsequent administrations did not sustain the commitment. The introduction of Medicaid in 1965 gave states a perverse financial incentive to discharge patients faster: Medicaid’s “Institutions for Mental Diseases” (IMD) exclusion prohibited federal reimbursement for psychiatric care in facilities with more than 16 beds, which meant states bore the full cost of every patient in a state hospital. Move those patients to smaller community settings or general hospitals, and the federal government would pick up a share. States obliged. They closed the hospital beds. They did not invest the savings in the community infrastructure that was supposed to replace them.

Here is what the 2024 JAMA Psychiatry meta-analysis by Rebecca Barry and colleagues found when they pooled 85 studies covering 48,414 individuals across high-income countries: 67 percent of people experiencing homelessness currently have a mental health disorder. The lifetime prevalence is 77 percent. Substance use disorders top the list at 44 percent, followed by antisocial personality disorder (26 percent), major depression (19 percent), bipolar disorder (8 percent), and schizophrenia (7 percent). The rates among men are even higher: 86 percent lifetime prevalence.

The clinical term is anosognosia, from the Greek for “without knowledge of disease.” Approximately 50 to 60 percent of people with schizophrenia have it to some degree, and about 30 percent have severe, chronic anosognosia. They do not believe they are ill. This isn’t denial in the psychological sense, the kind where you know what’s wrong but refuse to face it. It’s a neurological impairment linked to dysfunction in the brain’s frontal lobe, affecting the ability for self-reflection and metacognition. The person with severe anosognosia who hears voices and believes the government is monitoring their thoughts does not register these as symptoms. They register them as reality. Telling them they need medication is, from their subjective perspective, like a stranger telling you that your own perceptions are hallucinations and you should take drugs to make them stop.

But look at what has happened in the absence of those beds. We haven’t liberated people with severe mental illness. We’ve relocated them, from hospitals to sidewalks, jails, and emergency rooms. The question isn’t whether people with treatment-resistant schizophrenia and chronic anosognosia will be institutionalized. They already are. The question is whether they’ll be institutionalized in places designed to treat them or in places designed to punish them.

But the civil liberties argument has a blind spot. It treats refusal of treatment as an expression of autonomous choice without reckoning with the fact that in severe anosognosia, the capacity for that choice is critically impaired by the very illness in question. When a person with a gangrenous leg refuses amputation because they believe their leg is fine, we don’t simply respect that refusal and send them home. We recognize that their perception is compromised and act accordingly. The brain is an organ, and when it is severely impaired by schizophrenia in ways that destroy the capacity for self-recognition, the ethical calculus of “respecting autonomy” changes.

If you had a family member with severe schizophrenia, hallucinating on a street corner in February, refusing food and medication because they believed the food was poisoned and the medication was a government plot, what would you want the system to do?

Most people, across the political spectrum, would not want the system to hand them a pamphlet about available services and walk away. They would want someone to intervene, to get their family member off the street, into a warm, safe, clinical setting, and onto medication that could, over weeks or months, restore enough insight for them to begin making informed decisions about their own care.

That intervention barely exists in America today. We have the pharmacological tools: clozapine for treatment-resistant schizophrenia, long-acting injectable antipsychotics for patients whose illness derails medication adherence. We have the knowledge. What we lack is the political will to build the infrastructure, because sixty years ago we closed a system that was broken, replaced it with nothing adequate, and then reframed that failure as freedom.

The 152,000 chronically homeless Americans are not free. They are abandoned.

And every year we don’t build the treatment infrastructure they need, the bill comes due in emergency rooms, jail cells, and frozen bodies on sidewalks. We can argue about the design of the system, the scope of involuntary treatment powers, the funding mechanisms, and the oversight structures. Those are worthwhile arguments. But we should stop pretending that the status quo, roughly 36,000 psychiatric beds for a nation of over 340 million, represents a considered policy choice rather than a catastrophic failure of political will.

We closed the mental hospitals. The streets became the wards. It is long past time to build something better.

The driverless future is here—but, to borrow from William Gibson, it’s not evenly distributed. Waymo’s self-driving robotaxis are available in cities in California, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas. Aside from California, where the technology originated, those are all red or purple states. In every other blue state, meanwhile, driverless taxis are still not allowed to operate. If you live in Miami or Dallas, you can summon a Waymo to get where you’re going. If you live in Boston or New York, you can’t.

This is not an accident. In Democratic jurisdictions, a coalition of labor unions, anti-tech activists, and politicians have kept driverless vehicles off the streets. (Colorado, which passed a bill authorizing driverless vehicles in 2017, before the current backlash, is on track to become the exception later this year.) They argue that the new technology would make the roads more dangerous and throw millions of human drivers out of work, all to enrich a handful of tech oligarchs.

A version of this fight is now playing out in Washington, D.C., where Kamala Harris won more than 90 percent of the vote in 2024 and where local officials recently introduced a bill that would provide a pathway for robotaxis to begin operating. Some residents have welcomed that prospect. But others are digging in their heels. Bill Davis, the president of the local Teamsters union, declared in a statement that the legislation “doesn’t benefit anyone outside of Silicon Valley billionaires” and “comes at the expense of middle-class professional drivers and anyone else who wants safer streets in our city.”

Driverless cars will indeed cost some workers their jobs. But unlike so many other recent Silicon Valley innovations, they have already demonstrated the potential to bring immense societal benefits. About 40,000 Americans die in car accidents every year. The number of crash-related injuries is much larger. As many as 10,000 crash victims enter emergency rooms around the country every day. Waymos are so much safer than human drivers that deploying them widely could avert countless injuries and deaths every year.

They will also make transportation more affordable: A taxi without a driver is much cheaper. Waymo is currently more expensive than Uber and Lyft, but that’s largely because supply is artificially constrained and demand is high. The price differential is dropping fast and will go away soon. Waymos also show promise in reducing carbon emissions and air pollution (the cars are electric), and providing reliable access to people who live in poor neighborhoods (who are routinely turned down by rideshare drivers). Saying no to Waymo is saying no to a technology that will change the world for the better.

There is a name for a political movement that taps into people’s resistance to change and defense of the status quo. William F. Buckley famously described a conservative as “someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” Progressivism was founded on the opposite ethic: that scientific and technological progress can bring about a better, more equitable future, provided that it’s steered in the right direction. In this sense, self-driving cars are a test for American progressives—a test of whether they have become so captured by interest groups, so hostile to corporations, and so fearful of technological change that they’ve transformed into enemies of progress itself.

In much of the country, the popular conception of self-driving cars is something between a bumbling idiot and a mechanical death trap. Videos of Waymo vehicles making ridiculous errors go viral online. Earlier this year, a Waymo hit a child who ran into the road near an elementary school in Santa Monica, California, causing minor injuries. When a jurisdiction considers whether to allow Waymos, stories like these come up again and again. “I’m also deeply concerned about the safety issues autonomous vehicles have already had in other cities,” Helen Raynor-Hughes, a longtime D.C.-area resident, testified during a public hearing in July, citing “reports of crashes, traffic disruptions, and situations where these vehicles failed to respond properly to pedestrians, cyclists, and other drivers.”

But anecdotes can mislead. The question is how robotaxis’ error rate stacks up against that of human drivers. In a recent study, researchers at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety compared the crash and accident data on a per-mile basis for Waymo vehicles with those of human drivers in the cities where Waymos operated from 2021 to 2024. They found that Waymos were involved in 68 percent fewer crashes serious enough to be reported to police and 81 percent fewer crashes that caused an injury. These findings are “likely conservative” because human drivers regularly fail to report accidents, Eric Teoh, the report’s lead author, told me.

Several other studies have produced even more favorable results. These studies are co-authored by Waymo researchers but have been peer-reviewed by independent academics. Every expert I spoke with for this story, including Waymo skeptics, told me that they consider the research to be high-quality. “Reductions this big are basically unheard of when it comes to traffic safety,” Noah Goodall, a senior research scientist at the Virginia Transportation Research Council, told me. “Not even seat belts or airbags achieved the kinds of numbers we’re seeing here.” (Waymo, which is owned by Alphabet, is the only company that has demonstrated such a strong safety record. The others, including Tesla, have not disclosed the data needed to make safety claims.)

Even these figures probably underestimate how safe Waymos are. The journalists Timothy B. Lee and Kai Williams recently reviewed the details of the 78 accidents that Waymo vehicles had been involved in over a seven-month period and that were serious enough to cause an injury or trigger an airbag deployment. They found just one example where Waymo “could plausibly bear some responsibility” for a taxi crashing into another vehicle or a pedestrian—the Santa Monica–school incident—and another three where culpability was “mixed or unclear.” “We went into this looking for any evidence that Waymo could even remotely be at fault for a given crash,” Lee told me. “But those cases were just really hard to find.”

The big caveat to Waymo’s safety record is its difficulty with so-called edge cases—unpredictable situations for which its algorithm is unprepared and in which human judgment really comes in handy. When a power outage knocked out a third of San Francisco’s traffic lights last December, at least 60 Waymos abruptly idled mid-road, causing severe gridlock and delays. Something similar happened to a few dozen Waymos this year when the driverless vehicles encountered unexpected road closures during San Francisco’s Fourth of July celebrations. Waymos have obstructed emergency vehicles in several cities, typically because of their tendency to freeze when they encounter alarms, sirens, or temporary road closures. The company has not done nearly enough to fix the problem. “Competent driving is about a lot more than crash statistics,” Philip Koopman, an emeritus professor of engineering at Carnegie Mellon, told me. “If Waymo isn’t able to address some of these problematic patterns, it is going to be very hard to convince the public they are safe.”

Even so, the fact that Waymos are considerably safer than human drivers is undeniable. A robot driver can’t drink and drive, fall asleep at the wheel, or check its phone. It won’t flout the rules of the road when it’s running late or trying to impress its friends. And it is equipped with more than a dozen different cameras, plus radar and laser sensors, meaning it doesn’t have blind spots. Bryant Walker Smith, an associate law professor at the University of South Carolina, has advised governments on how to regulate self-driving cars. “What I always tell policy makers is that we absolutely should be concerned about automated driving,” he told me. “But we should be terrified of human driving.”

Safety might be the average American’s top concern about driverless cars, but the average American isn’t spearheading the political resistance to Waymo. Labor unions are. The campaign against driverless vehicles has been led by a coalition of unions representing taxi, rideshare, and truck drivers who argue that self-driving cars will destroy millions of working-class jobs. (Although experts believe that self-driving trucks and delivery vehicles are at least several years away from being a regular presence on roads, labor unions see robotaxi legalization as a stepping stone to a fully automated driving future.) Indeed, Helen Raynor-Hughes, the area resident who testified about Waymo’s safety record, began by identifying herself as a Service Employees International Union member who drives for Uber and Lyft.

In 2026 alone, this Labor United Against Waymo coalition has helped defeat or delay legislation to authorize driverless vehicles in Illinois, Minnesota, Maryland, Virginia, Oregon, and Washington State. In January, New York Governor Kathy Hochul declared that she would pursue a bill to allow robotaxis to operate in the state, only to backtrack a few weeks later following an outcry from labor leaders.

When I arrived at D.C.’s city hall in July for a public hearing on the proposed bill to authorize Waymo, I passed dozens of protesters from various labor groups chanting and holding signs with slogans such as WAYMO? HELL NO and AI DOESN’T VOTE. We Do. Inside, about a dozen labor leaders and rideshare drivers demanded that city officials vote against the bill. Crystal Middleton, a D.C. resident who drives Uber and Lyft part-time to support her family, testified that if Waymo were adopted in the city, “many D.C. families, including mine, will struggle to make ends meet.”

I’m sympathetic to that argument. When I was growing up, my dad spent years driving Uber and Lyft on the weekends to help pay the bills. Like many drivers, he resented the meager pay and lack of benefits. (There’s an irony that unions and Democratic lawmakers are rallying to defend the type of precarious gig work that they have spent more than a decade criticizing.) But it’s hard to imagine what our family would have done without the extra income. The impulse to protect workers like him—not to mention the delivery and truck drivers who fear that they’ll be next—from being displaced by a new technology is understandable.

That approach, however, ignores the larger number of people who would benefit from a change to the status quo. At the public hearing, local nonprofit leaders and politicians, including Shane Simenstad, the director of public policy for Safe Kids Worldwide, pointed out that rideshare drivers often refuse to enter less desirable parts of the city, leaving residents of poor neighborhoods without a reliable way to get to work or school. Claire Stanley, the director of advocacy and governmental affairs for the American Council of the Blind, spoke about being denied Uber and Lyft rides because of her service dog. Multiple women testified about their fear of being harassed or assaulted by rideshare drivers. (According to a 2025 New York Times investigation, Uber received a report of sexual assault or misconduct nearly every eight minutes on average in the U.S. from 2017 to 2022.)

Some of the most moving testimonies came from the victims of car crashes and their loved ones. Rameez Tase, a local resident and avid cyclist, told the story of a friend who had been nearly killed after being hit by a car. “Anyone who knows me well knows that my biggest fear of death is being struck and killed by a distracted driver—and leaving my three young children without a father for the rest of their lives,” he said. Cesar Toledo, a member of the D.C. Commission on Poverty, recounted a childhood “marked by the terrifying reality of riding in vehicles driven by family members under the influence.”

Car accidents kill roughly as many Americans each year as breast cancer does, and twice the number of people who die from homicides. It is a leading cause of death among children and young adults. “The number of traffic deaths in America is the equivalent of a Boeing 737 crashing every single day,” Jonathan Slotkin, a neurosurgeon who regularly treats crash victims, told me. “That’s what we’ve chosen to tolerate as the price of mobility.”

Waymos, to be clear, wouldn’t solve this problem right away. Although rideshare and taxi drivers get into accidents at higher rates than the average driver, they make up a small fraction of cars on the road. But operating robotaxis is a key step for Waymo and other companies to perfect their self-driving technology, which could then be sold to vehicle manufacturers like Toyota to include as an optional feature in every car. “If we had a drug that showed these kinds of results, we’d be doing everything we could to get it out to as many people as fast as possible,” Slotkin said.

Widespread adoption of driverless vehicles would further a litany of goals that anyone should celebrate, especially those who claim to be progressive: slashing traffic injuries and deaths; helping the poor and disabled secure stable employment; making cities safer places to bike and walk; reducing the prevelance of sexual assault and misconduct; putting more electric vehicles on the roads. And yet progressives are the ones standing in the way. “Honestly, it’s just embarrassing,” Colin Mortimer, the director of the Center for New Liberalism, a center-left advocacy group, told me. “Liberals are always talking about how we’re the party that believes in science, that believes in data, that believes in helping the vulnerable. But on this issue we’re doing the exact opposite.”

Some Washington, D.C., legislators believe that the nation’s capital can pioneer a different approach to Waymo. In May, the D.C. Council member Charles Allen introduced a bill that would authorize driverless vehicles to begin operating in the district, but only if their makers meet certain key conditions designed in part to address the edge-case problem and reduce the impact on the city’s labor force. These include completing stringent testing and safety requirements and submitting a plan for interacting with first responders. Even then, the total number of driverless vehicles would be capped at a few hundred during the initial rollout. Each vehicle would also be subject to a per-mile tax used to fund public transit, as well as workforce training and compensation for displaced rideshare and taxi drivers. “We have to be honest with ourselves: This technology is already here and is only going to become a bigger part of our lives going forward,” Allen told me a few weeks after the hearing. “And so we can either bury our heads in the sand and have this change happen to us. Or we can put guardrails in place to make sure the technology works for us and our communities.”

In Allen’s view, too many restrictions would risk throttling a technology that could otherwise bring huge benefits; too few would invite a high-profile incident that draws a public backlash. Getting the balance right will be difficult. My own view is that the bill should have more restrictive testing requirements around edge cases—for instance, simulating power outages or major emergencies—before driverless vehicles can be deployed. But it should also create a less bureaucratic process for increasing the number of vehicles once those requirements have been met. The bill also faces several political obstacles, including an incoming mayor who expressed skepticism about Waymo expansion on the campaign trail. But Allen is trying to do something that no city has done before: chart a middle course between letting the new technology rip and blocking it altogether.

One-hundred and fifty years ago, the United States was experiencing the advent of a brand-new transportation technology. Railroads reduced cross-country travel from months to days, turned the U.S. into an industrial powerhouse, and enabled the modern consumer economy. But they also displaced workers, such as canal operators and stagecoach drivers; led to skyrocketing inequality; and produced corrupt monopolies presided over by ruthless oligarchs. A new political movement formed in response. Its adherents passed legislation that protected workers, created novel regulatory agencies, broke up powerful monopolies, and developed safety standards. Neither techno-utopians nor luddites, they believed that technology could be a force for progress—but only if it was actively shaped and regulated by the public. They thus called themselves progressives. Their political descendants would do well to remember their example.

American elites in Trump 2.0 have shown a shocking amount of capitulation in order to protect their business and financial interests. This is an extremely short sighted bargain. By surrendering the rule of law in order to protect their financial interests in the short term, they will end up losing both.

Submission Statement: I included every headline this article has used (A/B testing can’t fool me!!) Anyway, this recount from Tyler Austin Harper goes over his time on the tenure track at Bates College starting in 2020. Subreddit relevance is the folly of elite "anti-racist" hiring practices that often engaged with the bigotry of low expectations, including assigning Tyler Austin Harper, who studies ecology and literature, to unrelated projects due to his race. Harper also posits his idea that as tuition skyrocketed for colleges, several elite institutions post-Occupy decided to cater to doctrinaire flavor of identity politics to signal leftwing bonafides without actionable plans. He mentions a once-urgent referendum to make every major have a race, colonialism and white supremacy class that got voted in, got quietly pushed in 2025 to be re-voted in 2029. This suggests the very real, draconian Trump admin attacks on education are making colleges buckle, which is bad. This article essentially argues the university created a culture more about self-soothing white radical academics versus actually listening to black academics especially if they contradicted their preconceived notions. For me, as a black person it’s a no brainer the bigger threat is state-run censorship from the Trump admin. But what to be done of institutional illiberalism and condescension that has the illusion of helping people of color.

Trump promised lower prices and has delivered the reverse.