Opinion | This Movie Is Not Just About My Family (2025)

Jan. 5, 2025, 4:00 p.m. ET

Anna Marks

Opinion Staff Editor

Pop Stars Inc.

At Sunday’s Golden Globe Awards, two of the nominees for best supporting actress are probably better known to the world as pop stars: Ariana Grande and Selena Gomez.

Pop stars in films are not a new phenomenon. Cher dazzled the world in “Moonstruck,” David Bowie dominated the cult-favorite “Labyrinth” and, more recently, Lady Gaga growled her way through “A Star is Born.” To succeed in films like these, a star has to suppress the overwhelming performance of identity she has concocted over a long career, to become someone else. It is surely a tremendous and fulfilling artistic challenge.

But over the last half-decade or so, pop stardom has dominated the wider entertainment industry at new heights. Consider Grande and Gomez. Each nominee got her start on children’s television (Gomez on Disney; Grande on Nickelodeon); each climbed to wider cultural prominence atop the Billboard Hot 100; each has a cosmetics line — Gomez’s has made her a billionaire. Unlike their antecedents, they possess the sort of cultural and economic power once only in reach of the most beloved royals, in the form of mastery of the global attention economy, impeccable personal branding and a horde of deeply devoted, adoringly parasocial fans.

In 2022, the researcher Adam Mastroianni wrote convincingly that pop culture has become an oligopoly, in which the bulk of audience attention to films, books, television shows, music and video games has become concentrated around a handful of predictable, largely familiar projects. In no industry was this more visible than film, in which studios, wanting safe economic bets with preexisting audiences, prized features with already baked-in audiences, leading to a glut of sequels and franchises and astronomical box office figures.

Pop stars can bring audiences without the messiness and fatigue that franchises do, since their fans are usually happy to put their purchasing power behind any project of their star’s, no matter how weird or experimental.

On its face, this doesn’t necessarily seem like a bad state of affairs. Gomez and Grande are passable actresses and the films for which they were nominated were a thousand times more interesting than yet another sequel in an over-baked cinematic universe. But I worry that their ascendance is a warning sign of a forthcoming shift: instead of power concentrating among specific projects and formats, it will now coalesce around a precious few stars who largely were selected by executives for their prized societal position when they were merely teenagers. It’s easy to imagine that the entertainment industry might be leaving its pop culture oligopoly behind, in favor of a pop culture oligarchy that crosses media and industries.

In the long run, this state of affairs may serve studios and stars, but audiences should be wary. Pop stars aren’t just artists; they’re also multinational brands with financial aims and carefully calibrated images. Plumbing the contradictions of their presence in other media risks shattering the delicate illusion that underpins popular art — that it’s art first and commercial second — thus revealing the whole enterprise as deeply cynical.

Is the Golden Globes an awards show for the most talented actors or, as Brooks Barnes noted in The Times last month, is it a “cash register” to promote movies and hawk fashion? Would “Emilia Pérez” have received such attention if a superstar wasn’t attached to it? Was “Wicked” a film that just had to be told in two parts, or a conveniently lengthy vehicle to sell every product tie-in known to man, on the back of another superstar’s never-ending press tour?

The answer is at the box office.

Jan. 4, 2025, 12:28 p.m. ET

Jonathan Alter

Contributing Opinion Writer

A New York Judge Forces Trump to Live With His Disgrace

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On Friday, the judge in the Trump felony trial signaled what he will do with Donald Trump when he sentences him on Jan. 10, just 10 days before Trump takes the oath as president.

Justice Juan Merchan will simultaneously let Trump off scot-free and give him a life sentence as a felon.

Rather than delay sentencing until Trump leaves office in 2029, as the prosecution recommends, Merchan said in his ruling that it’s important to “ensure finality” in the case, in which Trump was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records in a criminal scheme to cover up hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and interfere in the 2016 election.

So Merchan is opting for an “unconditional discharge,” which means no jail, probation or fines. Once Trump was re-elected, jail was no longer a serious option. It may never have been, given his age and status as a first-time offender. (About one-fifth of all those convicted of falsifying business records serve time.) Probation isn’t practical for a president of the United States. And the judge is limited by law in what he can fine Trump, as he was when he fined him only $10,000 for repeatedly violating his gag order during the trial.

Merchan said this rare, extremely light sentence is “the most viable solution” to “allow Defendant to pursue his appellate options.”

And pursue them Trump will. His problem is that those options aren’t good ones. His lawyers’ appeals to get Merchan thrown off the case for bias have repeatedly failed in New York appellate court, and they have submitted zero evidence of the “jury misconduct” they allege.

Like most judges, Merchan is a big believer in the sanctity of jury verdicts. Deference to the jury, he wrote, is a “bedrock principle” of the law. And he logically demolished Trump’s many motions to dismiss, especially his newly concocted claim that the president-elect — still a private citizen — deserves some special dispensation.

Merchan referred to an earlier ruling in which he found that “no official-acts evidence was admitted at trial,” which renders Trump’s claims of immunity under the Supreme Court’s landmark decision “meritless.” The court has been carrying water for Trump lately but Merchan — who is clearly tired of Trump’s “baseless” and “irresponsible” attacks on him — included a footnote in his ruling from Chief Justice John Roberts’ 2024 Year End Report that does not bode well for the president-elect:

“Public officials, too, regrettably have engaged in recent attempts to intimidate judges — for example, suggesting political bias in the judge’s adverse rulings without a credible basis for such allegations,” Roberts wrote. “Attempts to intimidate judges for their rulings in cases are inappropriate and should be vigorously opposed.”

Ouch. Without mentioning any names, Roberts was clearly referring to Trump’s habit of trash-talking judges, including Merchan. The Supreme Court has not been eager to hear Trump’s appeals and with no real sentence to contend with, it’s hard to see why the justices would agree to take a case involving what Trump’s lawyers vaguely call “unconstitutional and unacceptable diversions and distractions from President Trump’s effort to lead the nation.”

So Trump will probably have to live out his years as a felon — a life sentence of disgrace that will stain the honors of high office. It’s not the punishment he deserves, but it’ll do.

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Jan. 4, 2025, 7:00 a.m. ET

Patrick Healy

Deputy Opinion Editor

What Linda Lavin Whispered to Me About Love and Need

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“I thought getting attention was the same thing as getting love,” the actress Linda Lavin told me in a hushed whisper in 2012, recalling performing for her family as a child, during one of our interviews when I was the Times theater reporter. She was radiant on Broadway and off then, in some of my favorite plays — Jon Robin Baitz’s “Other Desert Cities,” Nicky Silver’s “The Lyons” and Donald Margulies’s “Collected Stories.”

Lavin died on Monday and I’ve been thinking about her all week — but really, thinking about that comment about getting attention/getting love. I grew up in the 1970s watching her in the CBS sitcom “Alice,” playing a single mother who was a waitress at Mel’s Diner. Her character was unflappable and confident, but I remember that she wasn’t as colorful or funny as the other waitresses in the diner, like Flo and Vera, and maybe not as beloved. Her humor came more from playing it dry, straight, with great timing and just the right tone — even an “uh-huh” aimed at her son, Tommy, or her boss, Mel, could get a laugh. I loved “Alice,” but I didn’t necessarily love Alice.

During that 2012 interview, Lavin suggested to me that she knew she wasn’t always lovable. She had demons. She had high expectations for other people and for herself — those expectations seemed as if they came with a lot of pressure, including pressure she put on herself. She talked about her clash with some of her colleagues on the play “Other Desert Cities” — how she wanted to portray her character, a recovering alcoholic, as sober through the end of the play. Some colleagues had differing views on her choice, but she was firm, drawing on her own sobriety as a North Star for the character no matter what the play said.

Lavin ultimately left “Other Desert Cities” before it moved to Broadway; another favorite actress of mine, Judith Light, took over the role and subsequently won a Tony Award for her performance. Lavin starred instead in “The Lyons” on Broadway that season, and earned a Tony nomination herself. That show offered a bigger role and she was perfect in it — another comic performance of great timing, tone and feeling.

I sometimes find myself singing the first two lines of the “Alice” theme, which she sang on the show: “I used to be sad. I used to be shy.” I related to those lines, as a lonely kid who also acted for his family in hopes of getting attention. And I related to her comment about attention and love, too.

Lavin, by the end, earned enormous attention and love for a terrific body of work. She was also a complicated person with complicated needs, but aren’t we all?

Jan. 3, 2025, 4:02 p.m. ET

Jessica Grose

Opinion Writer

This Movie Is Not Just About My Family

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I feel a bit sheepish writing a love letter to “A Real Pain,” which is nominated for four Golden Globe Awards, because the story is so similar to my own family’s story. But when faced with a glut of awards-season contenders, if there’s one film that’s worth your precious time, it’s this one.

Its two main characters, David (Jesse Eisenberg, who also wrote and directed the film) and Benji (Kieran Culkin), are cousins who journey to Poland as part of a heritage tour to see a concentration camp and their recently deceased grandmother’s childhood home. This sounds like it could be a drag, or a melodrama, but the charismatic-yet-annoying Benji and the tightly wound David make for a very funny odd couple. The real moments of pathos — this is still a Holocaust movie — peek through the black comedy without being maudlin.

My family made a similar pilgrimage to Vienna in 2023. We did not make the trek to Treblinka, where my great-grandparents were killed, but we did visit the last apartment my grandfather lived in before he fled Austria. Every time I passed an impossibly beautiful park in Vienna, I had the same thought Benji expresses in the movie about Poland: In some “parallel, black-hole universe” where the war didn’t happen, I would be living a totally different life in Austria. It is a miracle that any of us are alive.

You do not have to share this particular history to like this movie, because it is mostly about family relationships and the stories we tell ourselves about our ancestors. It is also about the way that grief travels through generations. I swear it is actually funny, even though I don’t think I’m quite selling it that way. A scene where Benji has a meltdown about traveling first class on a train when his ancestors had a, um, very different experience on Polish trains is an exemplar of dark Jewish humor.

And so, in the spirit of the movie, I will make a slightly different case for the film: It is a cool 90 minutes long. In an awards season with bloated monsters like “The Brutalist” (3 hours and 35 minutes with an intermission — who could possibly care about buildings that much?) and “Wicked” (2 hours and 40 minutes, and it looks like a screen saver), you can watch “A Real Pain” without blowing your whole afternoon.

Because you know what causes real pain? Too many hours in movie theater seats.

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Jan. 3, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ET

Farah Stockman

Editorial Board Member

Musk’s Misinformation About Tech Visas

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Elon Musk and the other tech moguls fluttering around Donald Trump claim that Silicon Valley needs more H-1B visas to bring in foreign workers because there aren’t enough Americans studying science and tech. American innovation requires “critical people” from abroad like Musk himself, they say, because Americans just don’t want to learn that stuff.

There’s some truth to that. But what they don’t tell you is that for more than a decade, Americans working in the tech industry have been systematically laid off and replaced by cheaper H-1B visa holders.See AlsoFeeling Through: Q&A with the Team — Feeling Through

I discovered this in 2013 when I reported an investigative project for The Boston Globe about widespread fraud in and abuse of the H-1B visa program. At the time, three companies got the largest number of visas in the H-1B lottery: Infosys, Tata and Cognizant. All three used a business model that cut costs by bringing over temporary workers from India and leasing them out to American firms like indentured servants. Prominent companies were jettisoning their locally hired I.T. departments and outsourcing those jobs.

Not much has changed. Today, those three companies are still among the top five recipients of the visas. When Americans realize they can’t make a living as software engineers, they leave the industry. The H-1B program worsens the very shortages it was supposed to address.

Most H-1B visa holders are lower-paid labor, not top talent. In May, Musk laid off more than 14,000 Tesla workers, including many H-1B visa holders. Reddit threads filled with laments by workers who had moved to the United States from India only to be let go with no warning. They were desperate to remain in the country, but because H-1B visas are owned by the employer, they had few options for doing so.

That’s why these workers stay compliant and cheap: They can’t leave the companies that control the visas. If they were really top talent, they should be getting green cards, not enduring six years of underpaid servitude.

Such mass layoffs in the tech industry should make us question the premise that more H-1B visas are needed.

“How do they get away with mass layoffs — then claim shortages?” Ron Hira, a Howard University professor who has written about this issue for two decades, asked me.

Confronted on X with evidence of relatively low pay for H-1B positions, Musk admitted what many of us already knew: The “program is broken and needs major reform.”

Does that mean he’s going to push for it to be fixed by raising the wages for temporary workers and making it based more on unique skills than on a lottery? Don’t hold your breath.

Jan. 2, 2025, 3:35 p.m. ET

David Firestone

Deputy Editor, the Editorial Board

Trump’s Cabinet Picks Won’t Solve What Happened in New Orleans

Senate Republicans say the terrorist attack in New Orleans has increased the urgency to approve Donald Trump’s choices for top national security positions. “Lives depend on it,” said Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming. They’re right that the attack sends an urgent message, but they don’t see what the message is: The Senate needs to reject the political hacks Trump has selected and replace them with real professionals.

Investigators now believe that the New Orleans attacker, Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, acted alone, and there is no evidence that his rampage was connected to the explosion of a Tesla Cybertruck outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas. But the news on New Year’s Day serves as a reminder that lone-wolf terrorism, whether inspired by ISIS or some other extreme ideology, hasn’t gone away.

Individuals acting alone are always the hardest perpetrators to detect, and if these attacks lead to a resurgence of domestic terrorism by copycats inspired by bloodshed, the country is going to want the best possible people working to track them down. That description does not include Kash Patel, Trump’s choice for F.B.I. director, and Tulsi Gabbard, his pick for director of national intelligence. Both appear to have been chosen not because of any background in fighting crime or terrorism, but because of the grudges they share with Trump and their fealty to him.

Patel, if confirmed by the Senate, would take the leading role in investigating these and any similar attacks, a ludicrous position for someone who has said the F.B.I. intelligence divisions are its “biggest problem.” He wants to somehow break away those divisions and return the bureau to fighting street crime. “Go be cops,” he said on a podcast in September, as if the F.B.I. were a precinct house on the south side of Chicago. “Go chase down murderers and rapists and drug dealers and violent offenders. What do you need 7,000 people there for?”

In fact, as the departing director, Christopher Wray, has made clear, the bureau needs to increase its intelligence efforts to counter growing threats around the globe. Patel might know that if he had any real background in counterintelligence. As The Times recently reported, he was only a junior prosecutor in the Justice Department’s counterterrorism section, doing routine paperwork, and colleagues said he routinely exaggerated his importance. At the White House, his main job was rooting out members of the so-called deep state who had worked on the Russia investigation against Trump.

Gabbard has never been a member of a congressional intelligence committee nor worked in the intelligence world. “Not only is she ill prepared and unqualified, but she traffics in conspiracy theories and cozies up to dictators like Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin,” wrote Representative Abigail Spanberger, Democrat of Virginia, a former C.I.A. officer.

Many of the nation’s best case officers and special agents would probably walk out the door rather than work for these kinds of leaders, making the nation even more vulnerable to attack. To make the country safer, Senate Republicans should demand better choices.

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Jan. 2, 2025, 1:23 p.m. ET

Meher Ahmad

Opinion Staff Editor

The Growth in Homelessness Is an American Moral Failure

Homelessness in America has risen to record levels, according to a new report released by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It’s a worrying sign that the fragile social safety net that was erected during the pandemic has lapsed, and the country’s most vulnerable are worse off for it.

The agency’s annual count of people experiencing homelessness, taken over the course of a single night in January 2024, indicates an 18 percent increase in homelessness from the year before. Last year, 771,480 people — about 23 of every 10,000 — were experiencing homelessness, the highest number ever recorded.

A closer look at the report shows that the crisis greatly affects families with children, who had the largest increase in homelessness of any category in the report. Nearly 150,000 children were considered homeless on the night of the count.

There’s no single reason these numbers swelled so much last year. By January 2024, Covid-era eviction moratoriums and other programs, like rapid rehousing and the Emergency Rental Assistance Program, had come to an end. Backlogged evictions were resolved in court just as high inflation rates and exorbitant rents plagued rental markets. Natural disasters destroyed housing in several municipalities, leaving thousands without shelter. A growing number of asylum seekers sought temporary shelter in major cities.

The government’s report illustrates how homelessness is a crisis born of several compounded crises, a symptom of the varied ways our country is failing the most vulnerable.

Yet politicians and leaders have largely chosen to treat people without housing punitively. Last year, the Supreme Court ruled in a case called City of Grants Pass v. Johnson that outlawing sleeping outside is not “cruel and unusual punishment.” Gov. Gavin Newsom of California was among the first to make use of the ruling, swiftly “sweeping” at least 140 homeless encampments across his state. More than two dozen California cities and counties have since passed or proposed ordinances that bring harsher punishment to people who sleep outside.

Throughout the government’s most recent homelessness assessment report, its authors wrote that “comparisons to pandemic years should be made with caution.” But it’s hard not to compare: 2020 and 2021 were among the lowest counts of homelessness recorded in our country’s history. The safety nets put in place to prevent a family from being evicted if they had no place to go, to help a child on the brink of homelessness with monthly stipends, actually worked.

It isn’t just a travesty that our leaders have decided these programs aren’t a continued priority. It’s unconscionable. Rather than look upon people experiencing homelessness as outsiders, as a problem to be swept away, American leaders — and the American people — must see them for who they are: a part of us.

Dec. 31, 2024, 4:28 p.m. ET

Anna Marks

Opinion Staff Editor

Ohio Is About to Make Queer Kids Miserable

In the late-night hours of its final legislative session, the 135th Ohio General Assembly decreed that queer kids do not deserve the same opportunity to love or live as freely as every other American. If Gov. Mike DeWine has any care for the young people he is duty-bound to protect, he will veto it.

The legislature passed H.B. 8, described as a “Parents Bill of Rights,” that ostensibly hands greater control over children’s education and mental health to parents. But in reality, this piece of legislation creates a sinister surveillance state that directly targets L.G.B.T.Q. kids for discrimination. In addition to banning mention of queerness in schools, the legislation, loosely written, could push teachers and administrators in public schools to out L.G.B.T.Q. students to their parents.

The measure is just one small piece of an ongoing reactionary culture war that preys on people’s ignorance about queer identity to divide Americans and court votes. Bills like this one are so insidiously effective because of their seemingly reasonable language. By shrouding sexual orientation under the idea of “sexuality content,” the bill’s text allows for discrimination on the frequent misunderstanding that gayness of any sort is exclusively about sex. It is not. By calling trans and nonbinary identities the product of “gender ideology,” the measure implies that a child’s gender expression is the product of some sort of external indoctrination. It is not.

The existence of this legislation implies that queer identity is nefarious or deviant, as if kids must be protected even from hearing about it. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. Exploring your queerness, especially while growing up, is a natural way of figuring out who you are and who you are likely to love. Encountering, or even experiencing, queer identity or culture doesn’t harm kids, but a discriminatory culture that forces people to hide their queerness certainly does.

Queer kids are not doing anything nefarious. They’re having their first kisses, trying on new clothes, falling in love and learning about themselves and the world. Constraining them from the experiences that are a normal part of growing up will not lead to more straight people. It will lead to a climate of fear, in which young people must hide their experiences from trusted adults and contend with society-imposed shame without support.

Should their parents be at all queerphobic, the consequences of state-mandated outing will be dangerous, if not deadly. And even if young queer people manage to covertly endure such a measure, they will be forced by their government to contend with the sort of shame that kills too, albeit more slowly.

History has proved as much. Should the governor sign the bill into law, as he has indicated he would, L.G.B.T.Q. kids in Ohio will be constrained by the same sort of legislation that stifled queer expression in Britain in the 1990s (Section 28) and in the U.S. military in the 2000s (Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell). The Ohio measure will almost certainly create the same shame as each of those failed policies, with the same deleterious health effects for the L.G.B.T.Q. people suffering under them. The only difference will be that this time, those affected will be Ohio’s young and vulnerable, who have the least power to protect themselves.

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Dec. 31, 2024, 11:17 a.m. ET

Jonathan Alter

Contributing Opinion Writer

Carter’s Inner Struggle Between the Engineer and the Poet

I spent five years researching and writing my biography of Jimmy Carter. Midway through, it struck me that he was the only American president who essentially lived in three centuries: His early life on the farm in the 1920s without electricity or running water might as well have been in the 19th, he was connected (before, during and after his presidency) to many of the significant events and transformative social movements of the 20th, and the Carter Center he founded is focused on conflict resolution, global health and strengthening democracy — major challenges of the 21st.

Throughout his long life, classmates, colleagues, friends and even members of his own family found him hard to read. The enigma deepened in the presidency. From my observations and from those of the people who worked for and with him in Atlanta and Washington, a complicated picture emerges. I concluded that Carter was a driven engineer laboring to free the artist within. He once told me that he could express his true feelings only in his poetry, which he wrote after leaving the presidency. Some of it is quite good.

I enjoyed trying to peel back the layers of his complex personality. Carter was a disciplined, driven and incorruptible president equipped with a sharp, omnivorous mind; a calm and adult president, dependable in a crisis, whose religious faith helped keep him focused on saving lives; a friendless president, who in the 1976 primaries defeated or alienated a good chunk of the Democratic Party; a stubborn and acerbic president, never demeaning but sometimes an S.O.B.; a nonideological and logic-driven president who worshiped science along with God and saw governing as a series of problem sets; an austere, even spartan president out of sync with profligate American culture; a sometimes obsessive president whose diamond-cutter attention to detail brought ridicule but also historic results; a charming and formidable president in small groups and when speaking off the cuff but often underwhelming and even off-putting on television, especially when reading prepared texts; an insular, all-business president, allergic to schmoozing, with few devotees beyond his intimate circle of Georgians, in part because — like his father and Adm. Hyman Rickover, two of his greatest influences — he rarely spared time for small talk and often had trouble saying “thank you”; and an unlucky president, hamstrung in Iran by his own humanity, who was committed first to doing what he thought was right in the long term, with the politics that often imperiled him distinctly secondary to his larger aims.

For some in Carter’s orbit, his impatient and occasionally persnickety style — a few called him the grammarian in chief for correcting their memos — meant their respect would turn to reverence and love in later years. Only then did many of those who served in his administration fully understand that he accomplished much more in office than they knew and that he did so with a passion and foresight they did not fully appreciate at the time.

Now the rest of us are learning that, too.

Jonathan Alter is the author of “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life.”

Dec. 27, 2024, 2:30 p.m. ET

David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

Why the New Fight Inside MAGA Matters So Much

Americans used to be enthusiastic about the idea of progress. If you had attended any of the World’s Fairs that were put on over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries in cities like Philadelphia, St. Louis, Chicago and New York, you would have seen great festivals celebrating the wonders of the future. If you went to Disneyworld, you could have visited Tomorrowland and the Carousel of Progress.

But gradually intellectuals and then lots of other people lost faith in progress, in the idea that growth, technology and innovation would make the future better than the past. In 2011 Virginia Postrel published a book called “The Future and Its Enemies,” arguing that the true division in politics is not left vs. right but dynamists vs. stasists. Dynamists believe in open-ended change. Stasists are in protective mode. We don’t need to rush pell-mell into the future, they say; we need to take care of our own.

This conflict is now roiling the Republican Party. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are dynamists. They want to welcome talented immigrants to the American economy for the same reason the New York Mets are spending over $700 million to sign Juan Soto. You could field a team with all native-born players, but you couldn’t hope to compete with the best in the world.

This has elicited howls of outrage from those who want to restrict immigration, including supporters of canceling the H-1B visa program for skilled immigrants. We should be employing Americans in these jobs, those on MAGA’s rightward edge respond. The vaunted technological progress the dynamists worship has ripped American communities to shreds.

This is not a discrete one-off dispute. This is the kind of core tension you get in your party when you do as Trump has done: taken a dynamic, free-market capitalist party and infused it with protective, backward-looking, reactionary philosophy. We’re going to see this kind of dispute also when it comes to economic regulation, trade, technology policy, labor policy, housing policy and so on.

It’s normal for people like me to have contempt for the reactionaries. We’re in an epic race with China over the future, over who will master A.I. and other technologies. Of course we need to attract the world’s best talent.

But the reactionaries have a point. One of my favorite sayings from psychology is that all of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. The reactionaries are right to point out that the past few decades of go-go change have eviscerated many people’s secure bases — stable families, vibrant hometowns, plausible career paths for those who didn’t want to go to college, the stable values that hold communities together.

I don’t know if Trumpism will ever evolve into a serious governing force, but if it does, then resolving the tension between its dynamists and its stasists will be its chief mission — that is, giving regular people a sense that they are being taken care of and seen, so that they feel secure enough to welcome all the bounty that skilled immigrants and technological change bring to our lives.

In its own cranky way, MAGA is now having an interesting internal debate.