Fico himself is a creature of the modern age, a former communist apparatchik who rose to power by railing against economic liberalism and who, more recently, took to engaging in Trumpian culture wars. The murder attempt is a product of those culture wars, which see every political difference catastrophized.

When the Slovak Republic was born on Jan. 1, 1993, political assassinations were thought to be a thing of the past. The partition of Czechoslovakia had been amicable, and Slovakia, historically the poorer partner, began a rapid rise toward Western European living standards.

That is what countries did back then. They moved, however fitfully and patchily, toward the kind of society that people in North America and Western Europe took for granted. On every measure, the world in the 1990s became more peaceful, more democratic, and more law-based. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.

What changed? Why, after seven decades of steady advance, did liberal democracy begin to retreat after 2012? Why did a country like Slovakia, a textbook exemplar of the benefits of globalization and democratization, elect a Putinite with thinly veiled authoritarian tendencies?

And why are other countries doing the same? Even in the United States, taboos against threatening the division of powers and refusing to acknowledge democratic election results have weakened perilously.

There are three possible explanations for what has gone wrong. First, the global financial crisis delegitimized the market system. Low- and median-income families were hit by taxes in order to bail out wealthy bankers and bondholders. For the first and only time in history, an essentially Marxist critique of the capitalist system seemed vindicated. The rich really did use state power to hang on to their wealth. Voters have not forgotten.

Second, there has been an unprecedented increase in global migration, a völkerwanderung enabled by advances in technology. The spread of smartphones allows people to transfer information and credit, so making feasible journeys that their grandparents could not have contemplated.

Rapid demographic change is unsettling. We are a territorial species and, when people move without permission into what we regard as our space, we react. Slovakia is no exception. Excluding Ukrainian refugees, the country saw a nine-fold increase in illegal immigration last year. “God alone knows how many of them are terrorists or how many have infectious diseases,” declared Fico during the Trump-flavored election campaign that saw him returned to office.

Smartphones bring us to the third explanation. Put simply, screens have addled our minds, shortened our attention spans, placed us in political silos, and made us grumpier. Jonathan Haidt has written a compelling book called The Anxious Generation, which shows how smartphones have left young people more frightened, more credulous, more unhappy, and more stupid. Starting in 2012, in every developed country, the mental health of young people deteriorated, self-harm and suicide rates increased, and test scores fell. No other explanation fits the timeline.

Haidt’s interest is in children under the age of 16, whose minds are more plastic and therefore more vulnerable. But why assume that adults are immune? We can all see the way screen addiction has made people less interested in nuance, readier to reason backward from their preferred conclusions, and more prone to conspiracy theories. I don’t believe the demented and largely fact-free arguments over the 2020 election would have taken off in an earlier age.

“Wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government,” wrote Thomas Jefferson. After he wrote those words, people became steadily better informed, as literacy spread, the price of printing fell and, in time, the internet arrived.

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But might we have reached saturation point? More words are being written and read than ever before, but we are becoming lazier about applying the filters of plausibility, consistency, and common sense. Like our pre-literate and pre-Enlightenment ancestors, we have taken to assuming that those who disagree with us are simply bad people.

When Putin and Xi talk, as they did at their summit this week, of replacing the Western world order, they have cause to be confident. That order, the liberal order that became ascendant from the 18th century and dominant after 1945, depends on a habit of mind that we are losing. In the world that succeeds it, political assassinations will be the least of our worries.

One reason is that the majority of you did nothing other than offer disapproval in a poll. All those years of your teachers telling you to “be an upstander, not a bystander,” and you still blew it. You could, as students at the University of California, Los Angeles, did, have fought back. But you didn’t. As the dead, white, cis, colonialist male Edmund Burke once said, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” The bad among you have done the rest. 

Some of you will rip up your diplomas onstage today. The rest of you can rip them up later. Your master’s degrees in social work, gender studies, consciousness-raising, cuddle therapy, and English Lit are all worthless, except if you crawl like some kind of dying animal into the academic shrubbery and spend the rest of your life in the subprime educational industry. There, you can become a teacher in the barren field of your expertise and recite the content of your worthless degree to people whose ignorance and sloth remind you of you when you were young. 

Or you could become an enforcer for the diversity, equity, and inclusion mafia. In that scenario, your recent experiments in Jew-baiting will vouch for you in the way that a professor’s reference used to in the days when American universities were serious places. The world used to look to America, especially its rush to the technological and intellectual frontiers, as the future. Now, the world sees you and concludes that America’s time is over. Is this true?  

That is not a rhetorical question but a Socratic one, an attempt to establish what you do and do not know. Some of you — again, a minority — want America to be over. Although you believe you are unique and new, you are the pale shadows of old archetypes. Nearly a century ago, another dead, white, cis, colonialist male, the ex-Burma policeman George Orwell, observed that England was “the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.” 

Those of you who have lately taken down the Stars and Stripes and raised the Palestinian flag will recognize Orwell’s feeling that his left-wing contemporaries would “feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God Save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box.” I blame the adults. Your teachers have failed you, and deliberately. If John “Bluto” Blutarsky were to attend Faber College now, he would emerge much the same four years later. But if you’ve spent most of the last weeks eating Deliveroo in a tent, sniffing out Jews, and making new friends with Islamists, you have both paid attention and learned the wrong lesson. Much of it is lies and silliness, but some of it is, if taken literally, dangerous to yourself and others. 

The professors who taught you have no intention of risking their cozy positions, but they are happy to send you out as “activists.” Again, you are on a well-worn historical track, whether you know it or not. Orwell, writing in the “critical years” of 1941, said that his intellectual contemporaries had for years been “chipping away” at everyone else’s morale and spreading an outlook that was “sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British.” 

Your society is not yet in 1941, but these are still critical years. If the United States continues on its present path, it will fall apart internally and fall over internationally. You are supposed to be its future leaders. Instead, you are chipping away, with an outlook that is squashily pacifist when it comes to denying Jews the right to defend themselves from the worst kind of terrorism, violently pro-Islamist when it comes to killing Jews without consequence, and always, always anti-American. 

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Your future is in your hands. So is the future of the rest of us, because we have to live with you. Some of you will become the intellectual equivalent of acid casualties. You will never leave the campus. You will never grow up, only old. Most of you will turn into real adults. The sheer weight of your student loans will compress much of the silliness out of you. But a few of you will keep going after you enter the real world. Again, the familiar path awaits. 

The intelligentsiya of czarist Russia produced anarchist bomb-throwers and Bolshevik tyrants. The ’60s radicals produced the Weathermen. You don’t know it, but your ideology fuses the theatrical tradition of campus leftism, which is now as faded as your grandfather’s denim, with the real thing, Islamism. You have no idea what you are dealing with. Student loans can be forgiven. Terrorism and treason cannot.

Now, after after three days on the witness stand, Cohen is looking like a shaky foundation on which to build the first prosecution of a former president in U.S. history.

Trump’s defense lawyers have revealed two simple but important facts about Cohen. The first is that he has a deep, obsessive, and all-consuming animus toward Trump. “I truly f***ing hope that this man ends up in prison,” Cohen said on his podcast, which is part of a career as a Trump basher that Cohen began after serving a prison sentence for tax evasion and bank fraud, among other offenses. “You better believe I want this man to go down and rot inside for what he did to me and my family.” On another occasion, Cohen said Trump belongs in a “f***ing cage, like an animal.” 

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So Cohen is the critical witness in a case that could put Trump behind bars for a maximum of 136 years — like an animal. Cohen could make something he desperately wants to happen, happen. Clearly, when a witness has such an intense interest in a certain result for the trial, it is supremely important that the witness answer questions honestly. Will he tell the truth and only the truth? If the case depends on that witness, nothing could be more critical. 

Which brings the story to the second fact about Cohen: He has a history of lying about nearly everything. He has lied to business associates. He has lied to judges. He has lied to prosecutors. He has lied to the IRS. He has lied to banks. He has lied to Congress. On Thursday, Trump’s defense created the very reasonable suspicion that Cohen has lied to this trial, too.

The short version is that Cohen testified that on Oct. 24, 2016, he called Trump’s bodyguard Keith Schiller in what Cohen said was an effort to reach Trump. According to Cohen’s testimony, when Schiller answered, he brought in Trump, and then Cohen, again, according to his testimony, told Trump that the Stormy Daniels payment was all taken care of. But the defense produced texts and phone records to say Cohen was instead irritated by a series of harassing phone calls he had received from a prank caller. Cohen appeared to want Schiller to sic the Secret Service on the prankster. All of that raised a lot of doubt about Cohen’s testimony, under oath, that the call was about the Daniels payment. Cohen’s defenders held out hope that the jury might believe Cohen also talked to Trump on the same call, which was one minute and 36 seconds long, but at the very least, he wasn’t straight with the jury about what happened.

The problem with all this for Bragg’s prosecution is that the whole case depends on Cohen. Trump is not charged with paying Daniels to remain silent — he did that, through Cohen, but that is not against the law. Trump is, instead, charged with making, with intent to defraud, false bookkeeping entries about the payments, categorizing them as “legal expenses” in the Trump Organization ledgers when in fact they were, in the prosecutors’ words, “hush money.” Bragg also claims that the payments were falsely labeled payments pursuant to a retainer agreement when, in fact, Cohen had no retainer agreement with Trump. Finally, Trump is charged with doing all that with “intent to commit another crime,” which Bragg has never clearly spelled out. 

There’s one clear problem with the base charge: Some of the money that Trump paid to Cohen was for legal expenses. Cohen was Trump’s lawyer, after all. Beyond that, the prosecution has not produced any evidence that Trump knew about the bookkeeping details of the arrangement Cohen made with others in the Trump organization about how the records of the Cohen reimbursement, plus his payment for other legal services, would be logged in the company’s ledgers.

Actually, prosecutors have produced one piece of evidence: Michael Cohen’s testimony. Cohen said that on Jan. 17, 2017, just a few days before Trump took office, he, Cohen, met with Trump and Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg to discuss Cohen’s payment. “And did Mr. Weisselberg say in front of Mr. Trump that those monthly payments would be, you know, like a retainer for legal services?” a prosecutor asked during Cohen’s first day of testimony. “Yes,” Cohen answered.

Bingo! There it is! The prosecution’s fans became very excited. Cohen had finally made the direct link to Trump actually knowing about the structure of the Cohen payments, at least whether there was a written or unwritten retainer agreement. There were still problems with that — What about the “legal expenses” entries in the ledgers? Did Trump order those? — but to some Trump antagonists, this seemed to be enough to send the former president to prison. (He faces a maximum sentence of 136 years behind bars for this bookkeeping dispute.)

The biggest problem was that the account came from the mouth of Michael Cohen. And that is one of the greatest weaknesses in a very weak case: It really does depend on Cohen. Prosecution supporters can talk about documents all they want, but the only evidence that Trump even knew about the details of the payment recordkeeping is Cohen’s testimony. And that is looking worse every minute.

Not everyone has agreed. More people, argued the late economist Julian Simon, means more inventors, more innovators, more creators. Benjamin Franklin was the 15th of his father’s 17 children. Would America, and the world, have been better off if the man had stopped at 14?

More people also means more consumers and more taxpayers. More consumers to pay for the goods and services of private sector workers. More taxpayers to pay for, among other things, benefits for the elderly and infirm. 

Whatever you think, will the world be better off with fewer people is no longer a hypothetical or rhetorical question. It is, it seems, a question squarely presented, or just about to be presented, by reality.

“Sometime soon, the global fertility rate will dip below the point needed to keep population constant,” Greg Ip and Janet Adamy write in the Wall Street Journal. “It may have already happened.”

The global replacement rate, they point out, is 2.2 children per woman, with the .2 representing the children who do not grow into adulthood and the excess of boys over girls in countries where many parents choose to abort girl babies. Demographers have long noticed that the world is heading toward 2.2, but expected it to take longer to get there. The United Nations pegged it at 2.5 in 2017, less than a decade ago. It fell to 2.3 in 2021 and incoming data suggest it’s declined significantly since.

Previous traumatic events have produced higher birthrates, like America’s and eventually Europe’s post-World War II baby boom. But the COVID pandemic, after an initial spike in births resembling ones occurring nine months after electricity blackouts, has produced even fewer births than pessimistic experts predicted.

Total world population won’t start falling immediately. One estimate is that world population, now about 8.1 billion, will peak at 9.6 billion in 2061. The fears that overpopulation would lead to mass starvation have proved unfounded, and population control efforts by the likes of the Rockefeller Foundation and Warren Buffett have petered out.

As the technology historian Vaclav Smil points out, the discovery in 1908 of the Haber-Bosch process for producing synthetic ammonia has led to food production that can feed the world’s current billions and many more. Thomas Malthus, who in 1800 said that any population increase would result in famine and disease, is dead.

Today the negative effects of sub-replacement population growth are already being felt. Government pensions and elderly medical care are proving difficult to sustain in the United States and Western Europe. Economic growth seldom rises to pre-2000 levels because the labor force is growing little, or even shrinking.

More striking effects are seen in East Asia, as set out in Foreign Affairs by American Enterprise Institute scholar Nicholas Eberstadt. Even as Japan, South Korea, and China boomed economically, their fertility rates fell below replacement — Japan in the 1970s, Korea in the 1980s, China in the 1990s. After decades, the result is that East Asia’s working-age cohort is now shrinking. By 2050, it will have more people over 80 than children under 15.

These countries, Eberstadt writes, “will find it harder to generate economic growth, accumulate investments, and build wealth to fund their safety nets, and to mobilize their armed forces.” China may not be able to amass huge armies to overcome the U.S. and its allies as it did in Korea in 1950. But Japan and South Korea will not be able to raise troops in numbers they once did. And will China attack Taiwan before its cohort of military-age men shrinks further?

“The long-hailed ‘Asian century’ may never arrive,” Eberstadt worries. And maybe not on the other side of the Pacific Rim as well. Between 2020 and 2023, California’s population fell by 538,000, or 1.4%. This is a reversal of more than 150 years of above-U.S.-average growth, and despite the state’s physical climate and beautiful scenery.

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This astonishing trend owes much to dreadful public policies that have incentivized modest-income people with families, including immigrants, to move out, even though California still attracts high-skill college graduates from “Back East.” But how many children will they produce? Will a declining-fertility America produce enough offspring to replenish Silicon Valley and Hollywood?

Absent a horrific military clash, the Pacific Rim that has produced so much innovation seems about to settle into an increasingly uncomfortable, hardscrabble, and uncreative old age, with no gaggles of nephews, nieces, grandchildren, and cousins who give hope that things will keep improving. Not the paradise the population control people promised.

It was something they had fought over for as long as our country existed.

They have some similarities. Parts of Maryland are located in Appalachia, three counties to be exact, while all of neighboring West Virginia’s 55 counties are in Appalachia. Drive back and forth over the Potomac between the states and it is impossible to differentiate the culture, customs, and the warmth and independence of the people from one another.

For decades, their politics were also similar. Up until 2014, just about every elected office in West Virginia was held by a Democrat. The same held true in Maryland until that same year when Republican Larry Hogan ran and won the governor’s office, to the great surprise of almost everyone in the state and in the press corps.

In West Virginia, that change never stopped. Republicans now hold the governor’s office, the row offices, the majorities in the legislatures, and are poised to win the last holdout seat: the U.S. Senate seat held by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), who is set to retire at the end of this term. On Tuesday, popular Gov. Jim Justice (R-WV) won the party’s nomination for the Senate seat.

In Maryland, the change never happened. Hogan would go on and win a second term and would leave office in January 2023 with a whopping 77% of Marylanders approving of the job he did as governor. The poll, conducted for Gonzales Research & Media Services, also showed Hogan holding an 81% job approval rating among Democrats, higher than it was among Republicans, with 66% of nonaffiliated also approving.

Even more interesting was his job approval rating among black voters, which was at 81% compared to 76% for white voters.

The differences between Maryland and West Virginia begin interestingly at the South Branch of the Potomac, where Maryland heads east and its population booms in the greater metropolitan region of Baltimore (nearly 3 million) and in the counties that surround Washington, D.C.

In West Virginia, the largest metropolitan region in the state, Charleston, tops off at 255,000. Maryland is the most diverse state on the East Coast, according to census data, while West Virginia is a majority-white state.

Maryland’s Washington, D.C., suburban counties hold the distinction of being some of the wealthiest ones in the entire country, while West Virginia’s McDowell County holds the distinction of being one of the poorest counties in the country.

Maryland benefits from access to power and wealth and its proximity to Washington, New York City, and the entire East Coast. West Virginia is landlocked and has a stunning but stubborn-to-develop terrain.

On Tuesday, voters in the parties of both states decided who they wanted to best represent them in the U.S. Senate. Justice is almost a shoo-in in West Virginia in the now dominant Republican state.

In Maryland, Republican voters overwhelmingly chose Hogan, and Democrats overwhelmingly chose Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks. Interestingly, despite Hogan’s high approval ratings with voters of all stripes, the race was immediately ranked “Lean Democrat,” and the racial undertones from reporters were out in full force the next morning.

Politico led the day with a headline that read “Larry Hogan is standing between Angela Alsobrooks and history” because Alsobrooks is black. Compared to the expectations from just a few months ago, Alsobrooks’s win was stunning. She worked hard for it by defeating Rep. David Trone (D-MD), a wealthy, self-funding three-term congressman, in a very nasty primary. Rather than focus on Alsobrooks’s resume and hard work, though, the national press insist on concentrating on her ethnicity.

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Yet Hogan’s formidability is real. He was OK with the press and with Democrats when he parted from former President Donald Trump, but he is not portrayed as OK now that he might give the Democrats a run for the money and maybe even win a Senate seat that Republicans have not won since the 1980s.

Maryland and West Virginia’s political divergences are real, but what is also real is that for the first time in a very long time, Republicans recruited solid candidates to run for the U.S. Senate. One of them is almost surely heading to the U.S. Capitol next January, and the other one, well, he has been underestimated before. 

Why did it happen? Certainly both campaigns recognized, as the Commission on Presidential Debates did not, that millions of people are going to vote well before Nov. 5, Election Day. Those voters need a chance to see the candidates debate before they vote, not after. That’s a reasonable concern for all people.

But Biden has something special to worry about. It’s a two-part problem for the president: 1) He is trailing in a lot of polls, especially in key states, and 2) a lot of voters have already made up their minds. In addition, this — right now — is a period in which the voters who have not made up their minds are getting closer and closer to doing so. So if the polls don’t change by late June, when the first debate is scheduled, Biden might be facing a large, hardened segment of the electorate that will not vote for him under any circumstances. He needs to get in front of them to make his pitch before it is too late.

In every presidential election this century except one, the candidate who was leading in the polls in late June went on to win. (The exception was 2016, when Trump was behind in the polls in June and went on to defeat Hillary Clinton.)

The general election polls, of course, are very close. The RealClearPolitics average of national polls has Trump ahead by a single percentage point, well within the margin of error. Biden’s bigger problem is this: It seems likely that Trump will win all of the states he won in 2020. If he does, he just needs to win a few key states — say, Arizona, Georgia, and any one of Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin — to win the White House. And in some of those key states, Trump has leads that appear to be both solid and durable.

Just this week, the New York Times released a poll that found Trump leading Biden in five of six key states, including Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, while leading in just one key state, Wisconsin. The new New York Times poll was very similar, indeed almost identical, to a New York Times poll from six months ago, in early November 2023. Despite everything that had happened in the last six months, such as Biden’s supposed “bounce” after the State of the Union and the beginning of Trump’s felony trial in Manhattan, Trump’s lead endured.

If that situation continues, there will be increasing pressure on Biden to shake things up. Maybe the Trump trial, if Trump is convicted, will boost Biden in the polls. But there is also the possibility Trump could be acquitted or have a hung jury — or that he will be convicted but that it will have little effect on the race. 

In any event, in June, Biden could be the candidate who needs change. A debate will give him that opportunity. Just imagine a debate followed by a series of events similar to what happened after the State of the Union, in which a chorus of Biden supporters praise his performance against Trump and declare that he is on the comeback trail. It might not work, but if today’s conditions continue, Biden needs something.

People swayed to the music being played by several pop-up musicians, brandished hand-held American flags or homemade signs, and greeted newly formed acquaintances like long-lost friends.

The hours leading up to the rally were a striking contrast to the daily, nonstop social media posts, press reports, and accusations from Democrats that the newly sworn-in president had dark ties to the Kremlin, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and a web of other Russian interests. It was a sea of accusations that had plagued Trump since the day he defeated Hillary Clinton in November 2016.

The national press coverage of his third trip here struggled to understand why he was coming to a city he didn’t even come close to winning in 2016 and a county (Mahoning) he also lost. Still, local Democrats such as former congressman Tim Ryan sure understood.

He told me in an interview several weeks later he knew exactly why Trump came to Youngstown and “the Valley,” saying it was because they look like a lot of hometowns across the country that have been forgotten.

“That imagery of him, showing up in a place few politicians do, projected to voters across the country that live in places like the Mahoning Valley that he shows up and hears their concerns,” Ryan, no fan then or now of Trump, said.

In 2016, Clinton won Mahoning County with 49% of the vote, defeating Trump by a hair. For perspective, just four years earlier, then-President Barack Obama crushed Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney by a whopping 28 points in the Mahoning Valley, earning 63% of the vote of this mostly white working-class voter base.

Those same working-class white voters, on whom Democrats relied to carry the state twice for the first Black president, would soon be called racist, uneducated, and angry just four years later for supporting Trump.

Fast-forward to last weekend when Trump, plagued by nonstop reports of his trial for allegedly covering up hush money payments, held a rally in Wildwood, New Jersey, and attracted more than 80,000 supporters in a state no Republican presidential candidate has won since then-Vice President George H.W. Bush in 1988.

During the rally, Trump said he was “expanding the electoral map because we are going to officially play in the state of New Jersey,” adding, “We’re going to win the state of New Jersey.”

Maybe. Maybe not. Four years ago Trump lost the state by 16 percentage points. However, and this is big, here is what people are missing about his rally in Wildwood that is significant: what he talked about and who he was talking to.

Also, as a side note, Wildwood is the beach outside of Lake Erie’s Presque Isle that every working-class kid I grew up with went to in the summer, and it’s less than 90 miles from the Pennsylvania state line.

The headlines coming out of the rally were interesting in that it didn’t seem as though the national press was getting the point: “Trump attacks Biden, criminal charges at raucous New Jersey rally,” “Trump leads MAGA supporters in vulgar chants at New Jersey rally,” and “Springsteen Fans Roast Trump For Bizarre Boast About Size Of New Jersey Crowd,” to name a few. They completely missed the economic message he delivered that appealed not just to voters he already has but ones that have seemed long out of reach for a Republican candidate.

Messages, by the way, that began to chip away voters away from the Democrats in the Mahoning Valley eight years ago, where he discussed the dignity of work, the importance of a strong community which leads to a strong country, and recognizing why people feel so forgotten.

However, because Trump sprinkles in his usual Trumpisms that set the non-Trump voters’ heads on fire, as well as some Trump voters, the story becomes about what he said that offended rather than what he said that won over voters.

The Hudson Institute’s Paul Sracic, a political science professor at Youngstown State University, said the backdrop of Wildwood, home of the working-class vacation spot, with roller coasters and rides filling the background, could be Anywhere USA — and that is why it worked then in Youngstown in 2016 and has the potential to work now. It’s all about location and nostalgia.

Choosing places like Youngstown or Wildwood or Ashtabula, Ohio, or Erie, Pennsylvania, gives people a representation of cities and towns that either time, technology, and trade deals have left behind, or whose beaches and entertainment scream of chrome diners, mini-golf courses and Americana, rather than trendy, high-end bars.

And like Youngstown, which drew supporters from Michigan, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, Wildwood draws supporters from the all-important state of Pennsylvania.

Sracic said that Trump choosing places such as Youngstown or Wildwood is not just about those particular towns.

“These choices symbolizes communities that are the heart of the blue-collar working-class community, so he is not just speaking to the voters here, he is projecting to voters in the similar places with similar experiences across the country,” Sracic said, reinforcing what he observed firsthand at that rally in Youngstown. It was little different than the experience rock star Billy Joel evoked with his 1982 ballad for the working class, “Allentown,” which limned the plight of out-of-work blue-collar workers and their families.

Ohio’s former congressman Ryan said back in 2017, after recognizing his party was in trouble with the very people who had put him in office, people saw themselves through the lens of the lyrics in the songs “the same way they see themselves through the rallies.”

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“Voters see me and know I get it,” Ryan said ahead of his decision to run for his party’s presidential nomination in 2020 and the U.S. Senate race in Ohio in 2022. He may have “gotten it,” but by 2022, the national Democratic Party did not project what Ryan intuitively knew, and he lost.

Whether Trump did it intellectually or just instinctively, what he mastered in New Jersey was nothing short of political brilliance — and the kind of thing that shifts the electorate just enough to make a difference in November. 

The concern isn’t that any particular origin of foreigners is problematic. The worry is that even open, freedom-based nations such as the U.S. need to maintain a common culture to avoid balkanization. At some point, a rush of immigrants overwhelms a nation’s capacity to absorb so many people unfamiliar with the nation’s mores and laws, both through formal processes and through the slower but more organic acculturation driven by a natural desire of immigrants to “fit in.”

As my colleague Conn Carroll noted on Monday, Pew Research reports that “of 24 countries surveyed, adults in the U.S. felt the least connection to their fellow citizens.” As my colleague Tim Carney has written in several books, today’s atomized American culture has led to more pervasive unhappiness and to the breakdown of institutions that, in turn, support not just community but also the economy.

Meanwhile, Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto has made a career of showing that even in many countries with magnificent supplies of natural resources, extreme poverty reigns if the nation lacks a firm commitment to the rule of law and a commitment to property rights, applied with transparency and fairness.

There is a direct, logical connection from the concerns of Carroll, Carney, and De Soto to the anxiety about high foreign-born populations in the U.S. today. Again, it takes quite a while to understand a new culture and sometimes even longer to understand a new land’s thicket of laws and regulations, and the customs pertaining thereto. This is true even for educated immigrants and for those who take the ultimate step of navigating an oft-complicated and lengthy process to become U.S. citizens. If there are too many foreign-born residents, societal systems start breaking down even if most individual immigrants are eager to assimilate.

And if this is true even of legal immigrants and visitors, it is exponentially true for illegal migrants. People whose first act on entering the country involves breaking the country’s laws are hardly likely to acclimate or acculturate readily, much less become net contributors, not burdens, to the commonwealth.

This is why the new numbers are so worrisome. The Center for Immigration Studies reported on May 13 that the foreign-born population in the U.S. grew by 5.1 million just in the past two years, the largest such increase in history. The total number of foreign-born residents, at 51.6 million, and its proportion of the total U.S. population, 15.6%, also reached record highs. Since President Joe Biden took office 39 months ago, the foreign-born population has grown by 6.6 million, of which 3.8 million were illegal.

And it’s not as if most newcomers are productive workers. Less than half of those who have arrived since the beginning of 2022 are employed, and of the more than 2.5 million who are unemployed, only 8% are actively looking for work. Obviously, these numbers are not indicative of these immigrants’ constructive engagement with their new countrymen.

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On the other hand, if the flow of illegal immigrants were slowed to a trickle and if the process of legal immigration and legal visas or work permits were more orderly, streamlined, and purposeful, the U.S. is vibrant and big-hearted enough to accommodate a significant number of new arrivals.

The differences, though, between “significant” and “exorbitant” and between legal and illegal can be the difference between a healthy civic culture and one that is falling apart at the seams.

The story set off a mass freakout in the Democratic Party. A Biden Justice Department-appointed prosecutor had indicted former President Donald Trump twice and Democratic prosecutors in New York and Georgia had indicted Trump two more times — and the former president was still leading President Joe Biden in the most important 2024 states. How could that be? The poll led to an unusually intense round of the usual fretting over Biden’s age, the state of the economy, the border, and the rest of the president’s liabilities.

Fast-forward six months to May 13, 2024 — yesterday. The New York Times published a story headlined, “Trump Leads in 5 Key States, as Young and Nonwhite Voters Express Discontent With Biden.” A new poll showed Biden trailing in the same states by nearly the same margin as the old poll. Compare this sentence with the one from six months ago: “The surveys … found that Mr. Trump was ahead of Mr. Biden in five of six key states: Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden led among registered voters in only one battleground state, Wisconsin.” 

Think about it. In the past six months, Biden has traveled the country, touting what he believes are his economic accomplishments. He has spent zillions of dollars on advertising, focusing specifically on the key states. And at the same time, Trump was either preparing to go on trial or, since April 15, actually on trial in New York, facing a maximum of 136 years in prison. And Biden is still unable to catch Trump.

Last month, CNN reported that from March 6, the day after Super Tuesday, through April 21, “Biden’s campaign and other Democratic advertisers spent $27.2 million on advertising for the presidential race, while the Trump campaign and GOP advertisers spent about $9.3 million, according to AdImpact data. The Biden campaign’s ad spending has included millions in key battleground states such as Michigan ($4.1 million), Pennsylvania ($3.9 million), Arizona ($2.5 million), Wisconsin ($2.2 million), and Georgia ($2.2 million). The Biden network has used its plentiful airtime to promote the administration’s first-term record and to slam Trump, focusing on key issues such as the cost of living and abortion rights.”

Biden has also built his campaign schedule around trips to the key states. Meanwhile, Trump has had to squeeze in campaign events between time spent in a Manhattan courtroom. Trump has directed lots of contributions that could have financed campaigning into legal expenses instead. And he is obviously distracted. Being on trial for a maximum of 136 years in prison will do that. And yet, Trump leads Biden in the states that will determine who wins the presidency. 

Look at the Electoral College map. To win, Trump will need to hold all the states he won in 2020, which probably won’t be a problem. Then he will need to win at least some of the states in the Sun Belt, which turn out to be the states in which he has the biggest leads in the latest New York Times poll: 10 points in Georgia, 7 points in Arizona, and 12 points in Nevada. Then, Trump will need to win just one of the upper-tier states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin. In the New York Times poll, Trump is ahead by 3 points in Pennsylvania and 7 points in Michigan. It is only in Wisconsin, as it was last November, that Biden is ahead, by a mere 2 points.

For months, Democrats had hoped that the specter of Trump on trial would cut into the former president’s support. Now, we are in the fifth week of the trial, with wall-to-wall media coverage, and it appears to have not affected Trump’s support at all. Obviously, that means Democrats are now praying especially hard that Trump will be convicted. Then they can create ads labeling Trump a “convicted felon” and hope that at least a few Trump voters will abandon the former president.

Maybe that will happen. But Biden’s position is becoming quite serious. As RealClearPolitics analyst Sean Trende wrote recently, “The political science literature is pretty consistent that this is the time when the electorate’s views about the election start to harden, particularly with respect to the economy.” Yes, the Democratic dream that a prosecutor will save Biden is still alive, but the president’s situation looks more difficult every day.

Depending on which critic you are listening to, “neoliberalism” can include capitalism, it can include secularism, it can include internationalism, it can include the homogenization of cultures, or it can include the sexual revolution. Broadly, the various uses of “neoliberalism” include modern cultural and economic changes that flatten differences, increase individualism, grease the skids of commerce, and shove aside old ways.

Neoliberalism, in any fair understanding, is obviously a force for massive generation of prosperity. While progressive critics won’t agree, it’s also a force for widespread distribution of prosperity.

This chart is often drawn to illustrate the primary benefit of neoliberalism. It shows a massive decline in the portion of the world living in extreme poverty.

On the Left, many critics of neoliberalism will say that neoliberalism has eroded labor unions, exacerbated the worker’s alienation toward his work, exploited poor countries, and devastated the environment.

These criticisms, in my opinion, range from the slightly exaggerated to the mostly false. But I don’t deny that neoliberalism, like all of modernity, has dismantled many things of value, and that this has caused some human suffering — alongside the suffering it has alleviated, as shown by the above chart.

The question that all critics and defenders of neoliberalism should ask is: What has neoliberalism dismantled in American life?

I think this Pew Research Center survey gives us a hint:

The headline: “Americans are less likely than others around the world to feel close to people in their country or community.”

That is, neoliberalism has made it easier for us to go it alone, and it has subtly replaced many of our relationships with transactions. To give a small but telling example: First, Wal-Mart relieved us of the need to walk from store to store, spending a whole day on Main Street getting our needs for the week, and then Amazon relieved us of the need to leave the house at all.

Along the way, we steadily lost touch with our neighbors and neighborhoods.

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It’s the younger, more secular, liberal Americans who feel least connected, in this Pew survey. That is, the folks feeling most jilted by neoliberalism have every reason to think our modern, materialistic, and individualistic society is harming them because they are, far more than religious conservatives, disconnected from their neighbors.

Their mistake, however, is in imagining that they can have connection, belonging, and security while also eschewing those old-fashioned things such as faith, family, and community.