Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump announced giant new tariffs on Canada, which are scheduled to start in 30 days. Now negotiators from both countries are scrambling to see if they can be avoided.

What happened? Late on Monday, the White House announced 50 percent tariffs on a slew of Canadian goods — including whiskey, cheese, down jackets, and (naturally) hockey sticks. Because the Supreme Court sharply limited his tariff powers earlier this year, Trump is invoking a largely forgotten and possibly defunct authority under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930.

Previously, these goods had been covered under the USMCA, the trade deal Trump negotiated with Canada and Mexico in his first term to replace NAFTA. But on July 1, the agreement expired and the US declined to renew it. 

Why is Trump doing this? The White House claimed three key grievances: Canadian duties and restrictions on American alcohol, dairy products, and automobiles. Liquor appears to be a special irritant: All but two Canadian provinces have pulled US-made booze from government liquor stores, and even some Democrats have complained.

However, the alcohol boycott began as retaliation for the trade war Trump launched in early 2025, when he was talking regularly about Canada becoming America’s 51st state. Much like his effort to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, Trump is trying to fix a problem he caused in the first place.

Interestingly, the tariffs will not go into effect for 30 days. This suggests that they may be less a serious policy initiative than a negotiating tactic. 

What’s the takeaway: Trump’s lifelong fascination with economic warfare has survived the Supreme Court’s rebuke, and he continues to fixate on Canada as a special target of his ire. It is unclear why; both countries have suffered from the breakdown in bilateral relations. 

But whatever the motivation, the ultimate outcome is clear: Icy relations to the north are a permanent fixture of the Trump presidency.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

The Odyssey officially had the biggest opening of any live-action movie of the year, as the new Avengers: Doomsday trailer is greeted with yawns. Here’s to the new MCU: the Mycenaean Cinematic Universe.

Even as the US conflict with Iran threatens to escalate once again, diplomatic talks break down, and US and Israel officials again flirt with the idea of pushing for regime change, President Donald Trump remains reportedly very reluctant to send US ground forces into Iran. That would risk causing large numbers of American casualties and pushing a war that many Americans have largely tuned out, even if they oppose it, back to the center of public debate. 

But that, tragically, does not mean that American troops involved in the conflict are necessarily safe. The past few days have been the deadliest for US forces since an initial ceasefire went into effect in April. On Friday, two US servicemembers were killed in a missile strike on a base in Jordan, marking the second time in two days that Iranian missiles had managed a direct hit on the base. On Saturday, a third US servicemember was killed in Iraq during the attempted controlled detonation of a downed Iranian attack drone. Altogether at least 17 US servicemembers have now been killed since the beginning of Operation Epic Fury in February. 

The US escalated its own attacks on Iran in retaliation, including a strike against the missile base in Tabriz, Iran where the attack on Jordan is thought to have originated. Iran has also fired missiles and drones at targets in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar in recent days, most of them intercepted, as well as at several commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz, where traffic has again ground to a near halt.

If Iran’s ability to shut down the strait has been the biggest surprise of this war, it’s ability to hold targets on land throughout the region at risk, including energy infrastructure and US military bases, with missiles and drones, may be the second. 

This suggests the risks to the US military as well as US allies from Iranian retaliation may only grow, the longer this conflict drags on, even if Trump never commits to “boots on the ground.” The president has sought to portray this as a war where the risk of death and destruction is borne only by one side, and certainly Iran has sustained far more damage. But there have already been a number of surprises in this war and the risks to the American military may be higher than most anticipated a few months ago.

The growing risk to US troops in the Middle East 

In the early days of the war, the military began shifting troops and equipment from bases in Persian Gulf countries like Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar farther west to Jordan and Israel, where they are subject to fewer local restrictions and where they sit farther from Iranian missile launchers. Satellite imagery and subsequent reporting has revealed that Iranian strikes did far more damage to these bases during the first phase of this war than was revealed at the time. 

More distant US bases may be harder to hit, but they are clearly still within the range of Iran’s missiles and Shahed drones. Some analysts also say the shift may have created new vulnerabilities by concentrating US personnel and equipment in fewer locations. 

The missile strike that killed Lt. Tyler James Feehan and Pvt. Isabella Gonzales on Friday was one of four Iranian attacks against bases in Jordan in just five days. The Iranians in fact appear to be striking Jordan more than Israel in recent days, which could be because these targets are less well-defended than Israeli bases or because they carry less escalation risk: Israeli leaders, unlike Trump, are eager to rejoin the war. 

 US officials suggested to the Wall Street Journal that Iran is adapting to US air defenses by “firing missiles that travel at extremely high speeds and can maneuver as they streak toward the earth,” making them harder to intercept. The officials also suggested the Iranians may be receiving targeting assistance from China or Russia. 

Or it may simply be that if Iranians can keep firing missiles and drones, no system will be able to provide perfect protection. 

“What it actually shows is that Iran is in a lot better shape than was assumed,” said Nicole Grajewski, an expert on Iran’s missile program and professor at Sciences Po in Paris. “Contrary to a lot of the US statements from early parts of the war, Iran still retains quite a significant amount of missile and drone capabilities, and because they’re not operating now under constant aerial bombardment, they may have been able to reconstruct part of it.” 

According to assessments reported in June, Iran still has access to most of its missile sites and around 70 percent of its prewar stockpile. 

And while Iran still possesses the ability to punch, there are growing questions about whether the US air defense capabilities are depleting. At the time of the April ceasefire, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated, the US had likely burned through more than 1,000 of its roughly 2,300 stockpile of Patriot interceptors, and between 50-80 percent of the highly advanced THAAD interceptors, designed for use against high-altitude, long-range ballistic missiles. 

The Pentagon has been pushing defense manufacturers to accelerate the production and bring down the costs of advanced interceptors, but that will take months if not longer, depending on the system. In the short term, missile defense scarcity is going to continue to be a source of stress if this conflict escalates. 

“We do not have enough [munitions] to safely sustain operations, and I don’t think the White House is aware of that,” one US official told the Washington Post this week. 

The US no longer dominates the skies the way it once did

US troops in the Middle East have long been vulnerable to missile attacks. One particularly infamous Iraqi Scud missile strike killed 27 American soldiers during the first Gulf War in 1991. 

But the proliferation of one-way attack drones like Iran’s Shaheds have shifted the balance, giving weaker adversaries the ability to target US bases at low cost. The attack that killed the two servicemembers on Friday was, like many of Iran’s attacks in this war, a combined missile and drone barrage intended to overwhelm the facility’s defenses. The best-case scenario from these strikes, from a US perspective, is that they are intercepted, albeit at the cost of draining valuable air defense resources. In the worst case, US soldiers are killed. 

A strike on another base in Jordan in early 2024 by the Iran-backed militia group the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, during the war in Gaza, that killed three US servicemembers was in some ways a warning of the risks US troops would face in a scenario where Iran itself targeted them with its full capabilities. Since at least the Korean War, the US military has gotten used to fighting with more or less full control of the skies. As far back as 2022, Gen. Frank McKenzie, commander of US forces in the Middle East, warned that “air superiority is something that we no longer have all the time” due to the proliferation of low-cost drones, which he compared to the improvised explosive devices, many planted by Iranian proxies, that killed hundreds of US troops during the war in Iraq. 

Thankfully, US casualties in this war are still nowhere close to those of either Iraq war. Trump told reporters on Sunday that “We feel very badly” about the deaths but that “those great patriots were out there fighting so that Iran does not have a nuclear weapon.” In recent weeks, the main focus of the war has been control of the Strait of Hormuz, rather than Iran’s nuclear program. 

The hard logic is that just as high fuel prices and declining poll numbers have not yet been enough to deter Trump from continuing to fight Iran, a few American casualties are not enough to be a deterrent to military action. In fact, as this weekend’s retaliatory strikes against Tabriz showed, they may only pull the US deeper into the war. 

As long as Trump avoids a ground invasion, Iran’s ability to target and kill US troops will remain limited. But as this past weekend’s events showed, that ability exists, and there is only so much the US can do to prevent it. The risk of an even larger catastrophe for American troops in the Middle East will only grow the longer this war goes on.  

A decade’s worth of grudges and feuds between the Democratic establishment and the insurgent left is coming to a head in one election this year: Michigan’s Senate primary.

The contest between Rep. Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed has somehow unearthed every fault line that’s divided the two factions over the years — from gender and racial politics, to Israel and Gaza, to questions of electability and fair play, to money in politics, and much more.

On one side there’s Stevens, a four-term House member who is the preferred candidate of the Democratic establishment — and of AIPAC, which has spent nearly $30 million to support her campaign. 

On the other is El-Sayed, a former public health official who’s been backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and their network of supporters and fans. 

But the race has quickly gone beyond just them and become about something bigger — the national struggle for influence in the Democratic Party. 

“This is the quintessential contest between the establishment wing of the Democratic Party and the economically populist wing,” said Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of the left group Our Revolution.

In contrast, Jonathan Cowan, president of the center-left group Third Way, argued that nominating El-Sayed — a “super extreme candidate who will alienate lots of voters in the middle” — is a dangerous risk.

In this one race, the Democratic factions are relitigating the 2016 presidential primary, the 2020 presidential primary, and several major controversies of the past few years, all at once. And whoever wins will have to find a way to somehow unite the party and win a competitive general election against presumptive Republican nominee Mike Rogers. 

On gender and racial politics, we’re doing 2016 again

When Sanders challenged Hillary Clinton for the 2016 presidential nomination, her supporters frequently implied he had blind spots related to gender and race. They argued, for instance, that certain criticisms of Clinton (and remarks by Sanders) were sexist, and that Sanders’s poor performance with Black voters demonstrated the limits of his appeal. 

The discourse also sometimes focused on so-called “Bernie Bros” — online Sanders supporters who, critics argued, directed toxic abuse and vitriol toward people not in his camp. Sanders’s backers argued that the accusations of sexism were themselves a dishonest and inaccurate smear to distract from Clinton’s own shortcomings. 

All of this is happening again now in Michigan.

On gender, a comment from El-Sayed a few weeks back — he said Stevens was unable to “string together two coherent sentences” — was criticized by the Stevens camp as sexist. 

Then, last week, a video of an enthusiastic speech by Stevens on the campaign trail went viral as online El-Sayed supporters mocked her diction and delivery, viewing her way of speaking as self-evidently ridiculous. 

Seeking to tamp down this behavior, El-Sayed posted Friday that the way “people online” were making fun of Stevens “for things that have nothing to do with her policies” was “unkind and unhelpful.” He also told Vox’s America, Actually podcast that the accusations of him being disrespectful to women have gotten back to his daughter, and been hurtful.

Meanwhile, on race, a poll last week shows Black Democrats splitting 67 percent for Stevens, and 21 percent for El-Sayed. Days later, the Congressional Black Caucus PAC endorsed Stevens. Just like Clinton in 2016, Stevens is hoping support among Black voters who are longtime stalwarts of the Democratic base will be enough to carry her to victory. And just like Sanders in 2016 and 2020, El-Sayed is facing questions about whether the party’s left vanguard can expand its support beyond white, college-educated voters. 

“The progressive brand really, really underperforms with Black voters all around the country,” said Adrian Hemond of the Democratic advocacy firm Grassroots Midwest. “I think it’s worth Democrats, media, and people in the nonprofit blob asking themselves why that is.”

The establishment vs. insurgent tension, and the Obama of it all

In both of Sanders’s presidential runs, his team griped about the behavior of the Democratic establishment, arguing that they weren’t truly playing fair. For instance, they pointed to how the DNC initially scheduled very few debates for the 2016 presidential contenders, arguing the supposedly neutral committee was in fact trying to help the frontrunner, Clinton, by limiting attention on her opponents.

To Sanders’s supporters, the bitterest pill was the perceived late intervention of former President Barack Obama into the 2020 campaign just as Sanders appeared well-positioned to win the nomination. (Days before the crucial Super Tuesday primaries, two other candidates, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, dropped out and endorsed Joe Biden. Obama was publicly neutral, but privately called Biden and Buttigieg during this key period, raising speculation about his role.)

In Michigan, again, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is officially neutral, but Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has long been understood to favor Stevens, and reportedly has privately asked donors to back her.

Obama, too, has become a flashpoint. An AIPAC-linked group has spent millions on an ad showing Obama praising Stevens — even though he has not endorsed her in this race. The praise is from comments Obama made during Stevens’s first House campaign, in 2018. (Stevens had worked on his presidential task force to rescue the auto industry during the Great Recession.)

El-Sayed’s supporters have argued that this is an attempt to mislead Michigan voters into thinking Stevens has Obama’s backing. “It is disgusting that AIPAC — which spent tens of millions attacking Obama — is now spending like crazy to lie and suggest he endorsed Haley Stevens,” Ben Rhodes, a former Obama White House official who supports El-Sayed, posted on X.

Others suspect that Obama does in fact tacitly support Stevens, and that’s why he’s letting the ad stand without clarifying things. (El-Sayed thought Obama was too “centrist” and “middle of the road,” he told Vox in 2017.) And yet again, people are fighting over 2016: Some Stevens supporters point out that Sanders used footage of Obama praising him in a 2020 primary ad despite the senator’s own criticism of the former president. 

Israel/Gaza, AIPAC, antisemitism, money in politics, Hasan Piker, etc…

Of course, the issue that has come up repeatedly in tense Democratic primaries this cycle — Israel — is present in this race in a major way. 

Many on the left argue that the war in Gaza contributed to former Vice President Kamala Harris’s defeat by disillusioning some of her potential supporters and dissuading them from turning out. The evidence that this phenomenon occurred in significant numbers due to Gaza specifically is thin. But it arguably may have been a factor in Michigan, where 2 percent of the population is Muslim and Trump worked hard to court disaffected voters with vague promises to end the war.

Here, Stevens is an unapologetically pro-Israel candidate who wants to continue US military aid to the country and does not believe Israel committed genocide in Gaza. (She said during a Hanukkah event once that “Israel comes to me in my dreams.”) El-Sayed, in contrast, has been sharply critical of Israel throughout this race.

The center-left group Third Way has spent months attacking El-Sayed for campaigning with left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, arguing that comments of Piker’s — that “America deserved 9/11,” and that a certain sect of Israeli Orthodox Jews was “inbred” — are un-American and antisemitic. (Piker has said he calls lots of different groups he dislikes inbred.)

Meanwhile, Stevens has been the beneficiary of that nearly $30 million in AIPAC-linked spending — a topic she generally tries to avoid discussing. The ads in question don’t talk about Israel at all and instead praise Stevens on other issues. “It is just a clear indication of where the base of the party is right now that AIPAC has to continually do this spending through their allied outside groups,” Dani Negrete of Indivisible, a progressive group backing El-Sayed, told me.

Electability and the question of: who can’t win?

After a decade of factional squabbling, the left and the mainstream factions have each honed their talking points for why, when a Democrat loses the general election, it’s the other faction’s fault.

To the establishment, left candidates are risky bets: They’ve taken positions that may alienate swing voters and are less dependable than candidates with longer electoral pedigrees. 

In endorsing Stevens this month, Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) warned they needed someone who was “fully vetted.” El-Sayed’s supporters viewed these and other remarks from Stevens supporters as baselessly linking their candidate to Graham Platner, who dropped out of his race in Maine over sexual assault allegations that he denies. However, unlike Platner, who was plucked from obscurity, El-Sayed has been a political figure for nearly a decade and faced significant media scrutiny already. 

Another version of the critique is more about whether El-Sayed’s policy positions — for instance, his past support for defunding the police, and his backing of Medicare-for-all — are too far left for this swing state in the general election.

Meanwhile, the left’s argument for why establishment candidates flop is that they fail to excite the base and stimulate turnout. Therefore, they claim, El-Sayed is the safer choice.

Lately, this argument has focused on Israel and Gaza. Left commentators argue that the Biden administration’s support of Israel and failure to stop what they call a genocide in Gaza was a major — perhaps the major — reason Harris lost in 2024, because part of the Democratic base was disillusioned and didn’t turn out. So, some on the left have suggested, if Stevens is the nominee, Democrats are risking the seat by disillusioning the same voters.

The mirror of this argument, from the establishment, blames the left for causing this disillusionment. By criticizing rival Democrats in harsh terms and casting them as pawns of special interests, they prime their voters to sit out the general election after their own candidates fail to win the nomination. “Bernie Sanders is the reason that Donald Trump is president,” famed Democratic consultant James Carville said last week, arguing this was because Sanders convinced his own supporters the Democratic Party was corrupt. 

This fight has played out in miniature in Michigan. Stevens has accused El-Sayed of undermining Democrats in 2024 by backing the “Uncommitted” movement, which sought to protest Biden’s Israel policy in the primaries. El-Sayed, conscious of this criticism, has gone out of his way to emphasize his early support for Harris in 2024, in contrast to others who sat out the race. But he’s also warned that the wrong Senate candidate could recreate the conditions that led to her loss.  

Last week, a post from one El-Sayed supporter that he would not vote for Stevens in the general election went viral. “The Democratic Party needs to be anti-AIPAC, not pro-AIPAC, and it only happens if candidates like Haley Stevens don’t win in general elections,” Adeeb Hafeez posted on X.

The next day — after critics argued this could lead to an even bigger conservative Supreme Court majority — Hafeez walked it back a bit. He posted that he “may hold my nose and end up voting for” Stevens after all in the general if she advances — but that he’d “be very uncomfortable in doing so.”

The exchange underscored the challenge for Democrats in coming together after the primary. No matter who wins, they’ll carry the scars of not only this race, but election after election pitting left-wing candidates against moderates, each of which have left behind bruised feelings and mutual suspicion. 

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

The first thing you need to know about the UK’s new prime minister is that he’s previously moonlighted as a DJ. 

Okay: probably not the first thing you needed to know. And sure: That DJ gig was for charity. 

But it still tells you a little something about Andy Burnham, who today became the UK’s seventh prime minister in 10 years. He’s widely seen as a pragmatic, affable, down-to-earth kind of guy — more Zohran Mamdani than Keir Starmer. 

As the longtime former mayor of Manchester, the UK’s second-largest city, Burnham won adoration for his focus on improving public transit and affordable housing. His vocal advocacy for England’s post-industrial cities even earned him the nickname “the King of the North.”

Burnham’s first speech as prime minister, delivered (without notes!) on Monday morning, doubled down on some of those populist themes — including the need to bring down Britain’s cost of living and address homelessness.

Political observers don’t expect Burnham’s policies to actually differ all that much from those of Starmer, his predecessor. (They’re both members of Britain’s center-left Labour Party.) And the fundamental relationship between the UK and US is also expected to stay much the same. 

Asked how he’d relate to President Donald Trump, Burnham said: “I like to think I’ve got some personality myself.” You can be the judge of that! There’s video of his 2022 DJ set.

Will Britain’s new PM reverse Brexit?

Here’s one place where Burnham does break from his predecessor: He wants Britain to rejoin the European Union in his lifetime. (Though he’s also promised not to relitigate Brexit.)

Call it a breturn or a brejoinder — it’s a tantalizing prospect for the majority of Britons, who now either have soured on their country’s 2016 vote to depart from the EU or never supported Brexit to begin with.

But undoing Britain’s break with Europe would be a monumental undertaking. First, the government would likely need a clear political mandate from British voters, either through a second referendum or a general election where a breturn figured heavily. 

Then the UK would have to negotiate its way back into the bloc…and convince all 27 member states to give it another go. Some could approve accession with parliamentary votes. But others, including France, could require national referendums of their own. 

“Countries have very different views of Britain,” one European observer told Vox last month. “There are those that still think that the EU is better off without Britain.”

One link for later

➨ Slow down time — or at least your subjective experience of it. Neuroscience research shows that both novelty and strong emotions seem to stretch time out a bit. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that despite all the evidence to the contrary — license plates, hip-hop lyrics, etc. — a minority of American peaches are actually grown in the great state of Georgia? 
• Today’s trivia: Nahuatl is still spoken by millions of people today. But it was also the primary language of which former Mesoamerican civilization? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Friday’s trivia: On Friday, my colleague Dylan Scott asked you for a Russian name that means “holy.” That would be Oleg, as in Oleg Cassini — the Russian count turned designer who dressed former first lady Jackie Kennedy. 

Fermented food is the hottest new trend in the halls of the White House. Members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet are reportedly walking about with jars of sauerkraut in the hopes that it will give them glowing skin and tiny waists. 

Wall Street Journal’s Liz Essley Whyte told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram that “Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and Vice President JD Vance are all on this eat-a-lot-of-steak-and-sauerkraut diet.”

So, should we all be eating jars of sauerkraut? Or are ferments just the new Florsheims?

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Is there a name for this diet?

Kennedy calls it the carnivore diet. I think people mean different things when they say that, but for him, it includes a lot of yogurt, a lot of kimchi or sauerkraut, a lot of steak, a lot of eggs. Kennedy now travels with sauerkraut. His wife has said that he has asked her to carry it in her purse for him, and she has said, “I actually cannot,” which is an amazing phrase. It seems they all think their skin is glowing, and people online have commented that JD Vance is looking good.

Are we sure it’s not Wegovy?

We don’t have any public knowledge of that, but we do know that he is eating eggs, sauerkraut, pickles, blackberries, and raspberries for lunch pretty often — and beef and lamb with sauerkraut for dinner. Then, when he’s on Air Force Two, he snacks on beef jerky and maybe eats a hamburger with cheese, no bun, and a side of fermented vegetables.

Now that you’re mentioning the full spectrum of JD Vance’s diet, it’s kind of reminding me of their new food pyramid. Is this part of that?

Earlier this year, Kennedy and the other health officials like to say they flipped the food pyramid. They recommended a lot more fruits and vegetables, red meat — which was controversial — and whole grains, and whole milk, that kind of thing. They also, and for the first time in the nation’s dietary guidelines, recommended fermented foods, which was something that was actually agreed upon by a lot of people, and they thought that was a good part of this, even if they had qualms about the red meat recommendations, because those can introduce more cardiac risk and risk of bad cholesterol.

How widespread is this in the White House? Does it go up all the way to the top, to the president?

Given what we have seen of his recent public dieting, I don’t think so. At the Knicks game, he was eating pizza and french fries, and, you know, he still has his Diet Coke button on his desk where he just pushes it and a Diet Coke comes. Kennedy said, once said on a podcast about him, “I don’t know how he’s alive.” 

Does the science back this up, or is this some kind of quackery that ferments can make your skin healthier and help you lose weight?

I don’t think there are a lot of good studies that show exactly that sauerkraut can help you lose weight, but there have been a number of studies that have shown health benefits. Researchers have generally agreed that sauerkraut and other fermented foods can help with digestion and inflammation. There was a 2025 study from UC Davis that suggested fermented cabbage could protect your gut and protect against illness. Basically, they found that the intestinal cells do better with sauerkraut. They help maintain the integrity of those intestinal cells. And, in general, that has a lot of other good health effects. Mainstream scientists, dieticians, are pro-fermented veggies. This is not something that is hotly debated.

Most people in the scientific community are realizing there’s a lot of good fresh science out there about how important your gut really is in your overall health. The part of the diet that is a little more controversial is the focus on red meat. Obviously, that comes with some cardiac risk and some cholesterol risk. That is why when the new dietary guidelines came out and recommended more of that for Americans, that part, in particular, made some dietitians a little upset.

Do you think fermented foods could help people with this parasite that gives you explosive diarrhea?

I personally have not seen any studies on whether fermented foods help with explosive diarrhea, but let me know if you find one.

AI was supposed to make our lives better. Instead, it’s made many of us scared and angry. Communities are protesting against the building of new data centers — the warehouses of IT equipment powering the AI buildout — across the country, and increasingly they’re winning. And polling shows most Americans think AI is moving too fast.

So how did public opinion on AI curdle so quickly? Jasmine Sun, who reports on the industry from San Francisco, argues that the backlash treats AI less as a technology and more as a political project. “The debate was not about like, is ChatGPT useful to me?” Sun told me during a taping of Vox’s The Gray Area. “The debate was actually something more like, there are these big corporations and unaccountable billionaires…coming into my city, coming into my life and changing it without having any sort of democratic input?”

Filling in for Sean Illing, I talked to Sun about the rise of “AI populism,” the parallels with the Industrial Revolution, and how the backlash could crash into the 2028 presidential election. 

As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, which drops every Monday, so listen to and follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts.

You’ve been writing about a phenomenon you call AI populism. How would you define that? What is AI populism?

I define AI populism as a worldview where AI is not seen as an ordinary technology, but specifically as an elite political project to be resisted. I came to the term while thinking about the AI backlash and the reasons people are increasingly anti-AI — whether that’s LLM slop, whether that’s Waymos in their city, whether that’s a new data center project. One thing that occurred to me was that a lot of times the debate wasn’t about whether ChatGPT is useful to me, or whether Waymos are safer than a human driver. The debate was actually something more like: There are these big corporations and unaccountable billionaires who are coming into my city, coming into my life, and changing it without any democratic input.

When I talk to people who are opposing AI in various ways, they seem more concerned with this concentration-of-power, anti-elite dimension — which is where I take the word “populism” — rather than classic AI safety concerns, which are more about the technical characteristics that might introduce risk.

You wrote a piece that touched on some of this but went to a darker place — “AI populism’s warning shots” — and you wrote about actual shots. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was targeted by a Molotov cocktail and a shooting within the span of a couple of days. There was an Indiana councilman who voted for a data center and woke up to gunshots at his home and a note reading “no data centers.” Why do you think of those incidents of violence as warning shots of something to come?

It was pretty scary. I’m no Sam Altman fanboy, but it’s terrifying that assassination attempts are showing up in response to people’s worries about AI. One factor is that we’ve been seeing a rising wave of political violence and support for political violence in the US, especially among young people, over the past few years — the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting, the Charlie Kirk shooting. Increasingly, a lot of disaffected, maybe nihilistic young people are turning toward political violence as a way to express political beliefs they don’t feel they have other channels for. Or maybe that person is just unwell. But I do expect to see more of it, because my theory of political discontent is that if people feel they have institutional channels to bargain for their rights — if they feel the democratic process is working, or they’re part of a union and believe their union leader will go bargain about how automation shows up in the workplace — they’ll most likely go through those channels.

When it feels like the official channels aren’t working, opposition becomes much more diffuse and volatile. That’s part of why, in creative communities, you’ll see people witch-hunting each other over AI use. I think we’ll see more political violence against people seen as AI leaders, or as supporting AI leaders.

That’s really scary.

Yeah, I’m quite worried about it. But again, my sense is that it comes from a feeling of — what else is there to be done, when you have this level of concentration of wealth and power, and there’s no democratic input right now into how AI is regulated or built?

It’s like a jump straight from complaining at your community meeting about the data center to an act of violence.

I was talking to some friends about this. During the 20th century in the US, there was a wave of factory mechanization and automation, but unions were really strong — often when a company said, “We’re going to bring in these machines,” they’d sit down with the factory union leader and say, “Okay, you can bring in the machines, but we’re going to couple that with a wage increase,” or a 35-hour workweek, or earlier retirement. There was a channel to make a deal about how automation would show up in your workplace. That meant people were more likely to accept it as something lifting all boats. I don’t think that’s happening now — most of the industries affected by AI aren’t organized in labor unions, and the democratic channels are questionable at best.

It’s like when people have agency to be part of the transition, the process goes a lot smoother. Is there a historical analogy for a technological change that didn’t allow for input from the people involved? I’m thinking of the Luddites.

The Luddites are a good example. When the automated looms were introduced, there was a lot of violence against the looms. The book I’d really recommend here is Carl Benedikt Frey’s The Technology Trap. He’s an Oxford economist who studied a ton of historical examples — in Europe, in China, all over the world — including the Luddites and 20th-century automation. His central question was: In what contexts do workers successfully stop automation, and in what contexts do they allow it to be introduced? How does the political environment, or the balance of power between people and their leaders, change the outcome? He found that when automation was introduced alongside social welfare policies — a higher minimum wage, some form of redistribution — people were much more willing to accept it, which is fairly rational.

I want to talk about Silicon Valley’s understanding of this backlash more generally. You’re painting a pretty dark picture, and you’re right in the belly of the beast in San Francisco — I’m sure you talk to people involved with AI every day. Is there a moment when it clicked for them that this backlash is real and something they have to take seriously? Or has that happened yet?

I’ve definitely noticed a huge difference, over the past six months, in how seriously people in Silicon Valley take the AI backlash.

Like what?

People just talk about it more. I’d bring up AI populism to people last year, and they’d normally say, “It doesn’t matter — technology always introduces some discontent, people get annoyed but they get used to it, like the internet.” That was the standard reaction last year. Not anymore. I think part of the reason OpenAI and Anthropic have felt pressure to introduce economic policy proposals around job automation is that they’re seeing how worried people are. The data center moratoriums and the broader data center backlash have been surprising and meaningful in getting AI leaders to recognize they have both a messaging problem and an actual problem with the product and the technology they’re introducing.

A lot of the increasing opposition to AI in Washington has caused people to see this too. At first, Trump — as you mentioned — was very pro-AI. He and David Sacks were accelerationists; they wanted AI to go faster and to block attempts at regulation.

He was the AI czar.

“The moratoriums, the regulation fights, even the booing at graduations, the literal assassination attempts — people in Silicon Valley have become much more worried.”

He was the AI czar — he’s no longer the AI czar. But it turned out a lot of other constituencies, both on the left and the right, were pretty opposed. For example, Trump and David Sacks tried to introduce a big federal bill that would preempt all state-level AI regulation — no state could regulate AI for 10 years. They tried to sneak it into a big omnibus bill so no one would notice. But members of Congress realized it was happening, and — whether for kid-safety reasons or frontier-safety reasons — people said, Wait a second, the idea of preventing any state from regulating AI for ten years is crazy. A lot of people organized in Washington to successfully stop that preemption. I think that showed the scale and bipartisanship of a coalition that was very keen to make sure it stayed possible to regulate AI was underestimated. As a result of all this — the moratoriums, the regulation fights, even the booing at graduations, the literal assassination attempts — people in Silicon Valley have become much more worried.

China is our big competitor in the AI race, and it certainly has all the conditions for a populist pushback to AI — youth unemployment is really high, and AI technology is in some ways more advanced at taking over real-world jobs. I was watching a video about fully automated factories and a robot pharmacist. You’re one of the rare American tech reporters who gets to spend time in China, and you wrote a piece that surprised me — you found there wasn’t really a populist backlash to AI there. Why not?

I was really interested in this question, and I was finishing my New York Times piece while in China for a few weeks, talking to both AI people and non-AI people. The main reason there’s not a big populist backlash in China is that there isn’t a lot of social unrest or populist backlash against anything — the entire MO of the Chinese government, the No. 1 priority, is domestic social stability. Any whisper of protest gets shut down; that’s why they have such strong speech controls. So one factor is that China doesn’t have much of a culture of resistance in general, whether in workplaces or politically. I’m not saying no one dissents — but it has a cultural effect too, because people don’t see it as useful or as an option. When I ask family members of mine in China about AI, sometimes they’re annoyed about specific things, but fundamentally, the idea of opposing AI is seen as almost unimaginable.

The other thing about China is that if you’re middle-aged there, you’ve lived through so many political, economic, and technological revolutions in your lifetime. When I was a little kid visiting Shanghai in the mid-2000s, there were no high-speed trains — now China has some of the best high-speed rail systems in the world. Technology has always gone hand in hand with dramatic economic advancement, with being lifted out of poverty. The modernization process has been aggressive and disruptive, but it’s not something the party has offered opportunities to resist, and it’s something most Chinese people still see as an inevitability that was mostly good for most people — because incomes did increase by dramatic amounts alongside the technological change. So I think people have a similar attitude toward AI: It’s much less about “Can I stop the AI wave?” and more “How can I take advantage of the AI wave to get ahead economically?”

We were just talking about this deep pessimism about what technology can bring us here in the US. I think a lot of people look around and think: We don’t have a cure for cancer yet, but we’ve sure seen our lives get worse in a lot of ways because of technology, social media, whatever. That pessimism probably fuels the backlash to AI, the skepticism about whether it can ever deliver on its promises. And that experience just isn’t the same in China, or probably much of the rest of the world, where technological progress has been faster and more concrete in people’s lives.

My 90-year-old grandfather said he’d love an elder-care robot to help him do tasks around the house so he doesn’t have to rely on his kids — he wants more freedom and mobility. It’s seen more as a tool to help individual goals. Even with the robot factories or pharmacies — one thing that struck me visiting a robot pharmacy was that the PR people happily said, “Yep, we’re doing these robots because human workers take too many smoke breaks and bathroom breaks and take too long.”

You’d never say that in the US, but they’re probably thinking the same thing — they just don’t say it. The other thing they mentioned is that this lets the pharmacy operate 24/7, because a lot of people need medications in the middle of the night and want to order via the DoorDash equivalent. There was actually a labor shortage before — Chinese workers weren’t willing to work night shifts — so these pharmacies are offering real consumer surplus. A significant percentage of orders come in overnight, when no other pharmacy is open. And with the factories, part of the issue is that Chinese workers, especially young people, don’t want to do factory work anymore.

“I think the 2028 presidential primary and election is really where I expect AI to become a centerpiece of the conversation.”

That anecdote gets at the promise and peril of AI, and the role of the backlash movement — which I’m still wrestling with how I feel about. On the one hand, I want to live in a world where cancer gets cured, where we live in an era of abundance, where things are cheap and easy to make because factories can run all the time with machine workers who don’t require anything — I want the future we were promised, of flying cars and everything working well.

But I also don’t want to lose my job, or see humanity wiped out by an angry machine god. Because we don’t really know what’s going to happen yet, it’s hard to work out my own feelings about the pushback here in the States — what’s appropriate, and what’s holding us back from real advances in our lives.

Totally, I agree. I like Waymos — I think they’re safer, and I’d prefer a safer robot car driv[ing] me around instead of me driving. I’m not a good driver; no one should let me drive. So I wrestle with some of the same things.

To close out the conversation — let’s come back to the United States. AI populism is brewing as a political force. We’ve seen it show up in a couple of races so far, but it’s early. We’ve got the midterms, then the presidential election. How do you think it’s going to affect American politics this November, and in 2028?

My sense is that this November, it’s going to be more about state and local races where AI really shows up. I’m going to spend some time in Michigan and Wisconsin this summer touring some of the data center sites facing the most opposition — those states also have contested governor and Senate races where AI and data centers have become a core issue, so I’m interested to learn more there. I think the 2028 presidential primary and election is really where I expect AI to become a centerpiece of the conversation — especially if we start to see some of the employment impacts people are expecting. As soon as we see something like a 2 percent rise in unemployment, if that happens, I think people will be very upset, and we should expect a ton of focus on the issue.

The other thing I’ll note is political opportunism — you’re already seeing a bit of this, where politicians are likely to raise the salience of AI above where people might ordinarily care about it, because it’s become a convenient boogeyman. It polls so poorly, people are so anti-AI and anti-data-center, AI billionaires are so unsympathetic, that no matter what your policy program is, AI is a great reason to push it. I think a lot of politicians who are being clever about this are going to move AI to the center of the conversation, raising its salience to manufacture urgency for proposals they’re already excited about. That’s definitely something I’m watching for 2028.

Last week presented a stark contrast in the trajectories of the Trump administration’s two riskiest foreign policy ventures. On July 13, the President Donald Trump formally declared a return to military action in Iran, making clear that a war that he had anticipated would last just four or five weeks will stretch past the five month mark and probably longer. Trump appears increasingly frustrated by Iran’s failure to concede to his demand to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, comparing the country to a “great boxer”: “You think you have them beat, and then all of a sudden he comes back and he gives you a shot.”

On the far side of the globe, however, the other country Trump attacked this term has proven much more manageable. Venezuela’s government — now led by former Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who took power when Nicolás Maduro was captured in a US raid in January — agreed to talks with an opposition leader handpicked by the US that aimed at “strengthening democracy.” 

The New York Times reported earlier this week that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is effectively the “viceroy” of Venezuela, ruling the country in absentia from Washington, DC. (“Viceroy” is traditionally an official who governs a country or colony as a direct representative of a monarch.) The US has direct control over the revenues Venezuela receives from selling its oil abroad, giving Rubio effective power over the country’s budget. The grip is so tight, the Times reports, that Rodriguez asks for White House approval before appearing on Fox News, much to Trump’s delight. 

Two different countries in two different parts of the world with two different responses to Trumpian military pressure. But when future historians tell the story of how this administration ended up enmeshed in exactly the sort of Middle East quagmire that he had run for office pledging to avoid, they’re likely to devote at least a few paragraphs to Venezuela. The easy success of one operation set the stage for the still unfolding disaster of the other. 

Exporting the Venezuela model

In a daring predawn raid on January 3, US Special Forces managed to capture Maduro in a matter of hours, with no US troops killed. Contrary to the warnings of critics that such regime change would result in chaos — and to the hopes of the Venezuelan opposition that it would lead to democracy — Trump and Rubio successfully replaced Maduro with his much more pliant vice president, who has proven more than happy to let Washington call the shots. Trump now regularly muses about making Venezuela the 51st state. 

The operation was, the Times reported, “evidence to the president of the unmatched prowess of U.S. forces” and, along with the relative success of the first round of airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear program last June, emboldened him to take further military action. 

“What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect scenario,” Trump said in early March, referring to prospects for regime change in Iran. And in one sense it worked; the US was able to remove the head of state within hours of launching military action, with Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei killed in a joint US-Israeli airstrike. 

 “I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy in Venezuela,” Trump said, when Iran’s regime was considering Khamenei’s successor. 

Trump was not involved. Iran’s Assembly of experts chose the former supreme leader’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, whom Trump dismissed as “unacceptable” and a “lightweight”.

Despite this, Trump continued to insist that regime change had effectively happened in Iran and that its new leaders were “much more reasonable.” While Iran’s new political system is still very much a work in progress, its insistence on maintaining control of the state and ongoing attacks against shipping and US allies in the region have made it fairly clear that it will not be taking orders from Marco Rubio or anyone else in DC. 

Why Iran is not Venezuela

On the surface, there are some striking similarities between Iran and Venezuela: They were once close allies of each other, as well as of Russia and China. Both are oil dependent authoritarian states espousing a revolutionary ideology defined in large part by opposition to the United States. Both are known for sponsoring foreign militant groups. Both have a history of disputed elections and crushing opposition protests. Both have large and vocal exile communities in the US. Both have struggling economies and have spent years under US sanctions. 

That’s where the similarities end, however. Start with the military: Iran’s combined forces are roughly three times the size of Venezuela’s and far better equipped, possessing missile and drone capabilities that have spread chaos across the region for months. Iran’s senior leaders came of age during the brutal Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and have spent decades engaged in proxy battles with the US and Israel, whereas Venezuela has not fought an interstate war in modern times. It’s telling that Maduro was relying on Cuban personnel for his own security. 

Then, there’s geography. Thanks to its fortuitous location on the western side of the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has means to retaliate against the US by blocking shipping through the world’s most important energy chokepoint, driving up oil prices. Venezuela may have the world’s largest oil reserves, but it doesn’t have anywhere near the ability to disrupt global energy flows. 

Iran was able to attack US allies throughout the Gulf with both its own missiles and via the military groups it supports throughout the region. Despite Trump’s misleading claims that Maduro’s government was in direct control of gangs in the US or weaponizing migration, Venezuela simply didn’t have the same kind of leverage with which to fight back. 

There’s history, too. Even at the nadir of relations with the US, when Venezuela was under heavy American sanctions and formal diplomatic contacts were cut off, there were still periodic talks over energy issues and prisoner releases. The US oil company Chevron continued to operate inside the country. Rodriguez herself was a familiar figure to US officials, having participated in talks with both the Biden and Trump administrations. 

And finally, there’s ideology. Venezuela’s rulers may still be publicly committed to the “Bolivarian” socialist vision of former leader Hugo Chávez, but, in reality, the regime operates as “an extreme form of crony capitalism with some pretenses of redistribution of oil windfalls to the poor,” said Chris Sabatini, director of the Latin America program at the think tank Chatham House. Senior civilian and military officials were heavily involved in a range of enterprises of varying degrees of legality from the oil industry, from gold mining to drug trafficking. When push came to shove, they were more interested in preserving their fiefdoms than standing up for a long-dead revolution. 

According to some reporting, denied by the Venezuelan government, Rodríguez had been in direct contact with US officials prior to Maduro’s capture, assuring them of her cooperation, which would make this less a regime change invasion than a US-enabled coup. Even Interior Minister Diasdello Cabello, considered the hardest of the hardline Chavistas with a US price on his head, has been more than happy to play ball with the country’s new American overlords. 

Iran has widespread corruption, as well, but the regime is far more organized, disciplined, and committed to the radical Islamist ideology of the 1979 revolution. Iran’s leaders had long been planning for invasion and had detailed succession plans in place for when top leaders were eliminated.  The fact that the US’s Israeli partners were reportedly cultivating Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former president best remembered for calling for Israel to be wiped off the map and promoting a long-shot plan to arm Kurdish rebels to mount a ground invasion, is an indication that there were simply no plausible candidates for an “Iranian Delcy.” 

It should have been obvious from the start that a quick and easy operation that would replace Iran’s top leaders with more cooperative ones without requiring a dangerous and costly ground invasion by US troops was never a realistic prospect. It’s notable that the administration sidelined many of its own Iran experts ahead of the war, but, in fairness, Trump’s own CIA director dismissed Israel’s optimistic regime change scenarios as “farcical.” 

“President Trump has not really taken the time to study the history of Iran-US relations going back to 1979, or even earlier,” said the Middle East Institute’s Alex Vatanka. “If he had studied that relationship, I think he would have taken a different approach.” But Trump may have been thinking less about what happened in Tehran in 1979 than what had happened in Caracas just a few weeks earlier. 

The end of hubris?

Many scoffed in January when Trump suggested that the US would be “running” Venezuela for the foreseeable future, but that appears to be more or less what’s happening now. It’s not clear how long this arrangement can last. Discontent with both Rodríguez and Trump is growing in Venezuela, and many in the opposition accuse the government of using the recent devastating earthquake as a pretext to delay called-for democratic reforms. Venezuelans may come to hold the United States responsible for the failures of the government it is remotely controlling. 

But the initial success of the Venezuela operation was a vindication for a president who often sees himself as running the world in addition to the United States.

Has Trump faith in his ability to bend other countries to his will been shaken at all by the Iran experience? He has frequently described Cuba as “next” on the list of countries he’d like to “take” after Venezuela and Cuba.

In terms of culture and geography, Cuba may look more like Venezuela. But in terms of its political system, it’s “more like Iran,” said Sabatini. “It’s completely state-centric, vertical, disciplined.” Dealing with a system still fiercely devoted to its founding revolutionary ideology that has been largely isolated from the US for decades, the administration may have no better luck finding a “Cuban Delcy” than it did finding an Iranian one. 

Trump still hasn’t ruled out taking over Cuba in some fashion, and Pentagon planners are reportedly examining a range of options for action against the island, though he claimed Rubio wants to “get [Iran] finished first.” If that’s true, it may be a long wait until Iran is “finished.” 

On the other hand, Trump is once again talking about taking over Greenland and posting memes referencing his desire to annex Canada. Iran may have proven that Venezuela was the exception, not the rule, when it comes to regime change, but Trump’s ambitions for world domination do not seem to have disappeared. 

The Democratic Socialists of America say they are fighting for “a government by, for, and of the working class.” 

Yet the organization’s membership and candidates consist largely of educated professionals. As of 2021, 80 percent of DSA members over 25 were college-educated, while 28 percent earned more than $100,000 a year (putting them in roughly the top 15 percent of America’s income distribution), according to a DSA internal survey. Among the group’s most prominent politicians, meanwhile, is an Ivy League graduate student, a lawyer, and the well-educated son of a Hollywood director and famous academic. 

In recent weeks, as the DSA has racked up victories in Democratic primary elections, the apparent tension between the group’s self-conception and demographics has attracted critical scrutiny.

In the New York Times, Thomas Edsall argues that most of the DSA’s members and supporters in the electorate are “in no way working class.” The libertarian commentator Robby Soave, right-wing pundit Batya Ungar-Sargon, and liberal economics writer Noah Smith have all voiced similar sentiments. 

There are many cogent ways for socialists to respond to such criticism. One would be to note that an organization doesn’t need to have a uniformly working-class membership in order to fight for working-class interests. Another would be to observe that not all college graduates are well-heeled professionals, even as pundits often use educational attainment as a stand-in for class in political analysis. 

But some socialists prefer a simpler retort: The DSA’s critics are simply mistaken; in reality, the group’s membership is more or less entirely “working class” — because that term describes everyone who must sell their labor in order to meet their needs. 

This conception of the “working class” has deep roots on the left. As Jacobin’s Ben Burgis explains, orthodox socialists subscribe to a “two-class map of capitalist society,” in which “Some people are capitalists who own their own ‘means of production’ (like factories, farms, offices, or grocery stores) and other people work for the capitalists.”

Many contemporary socialists (including Burgis) find this dichotomy reductive, and endorse more nuanced portraits of America’s class structure. But the orthodox, “two-class” model informs a great deal of the modern left’s rhetoric, among both socialists and progressives. And the notion that lawyers and day laborers both belong to the “working class” is widely held among anti-capitalists. 

There’s something to be said for this idea. Educated professionals and manual workers surely do have some shared interests, due to their common status as laborers. For example, both benefit from the existence of a well-funded unemployment insurance system, in a way that the Elon Musks of the world do not. 

For the most part though, orthodox socialism’s “map” is badly out of date. And its expansive conception of “the working class” does less to illuminate modern America’s economic divisions than to obscure them.  

The long afterlife of Marx’s failed prophesies

Karl Marx and Frederich Engels laid the foundations for the modern left’s conception of class in The Communist Manifesto of 1848. 

In that book, the claim that there were just two important classes under capitalism — capitalists and workers — rested on a set of grim predictions about where industrialization was headed. 

According to Marx’s analysis, technological progress was in the process of obliterating “all distinctions” between different strata of working people, as automation was driving virtually everyone’s wages down to “the same low level.” The middle class of small manufacturers and shopkeepers, meanwhile, was poised to “decay and finally disappear,” as more productive, large-scale enterprises left them in the dust.

Society was therefore splitting into “two great hostile camps” — the capitalist and working classes, whose interests were impossible to reconcile. 

Under these conditions, a binary conception of class makes perfect sense. If all workers will soon be condemned to low wages, then there’s little point in dwelling on the (temporary) distinctions between them. Likewise, if shopkeepers and small-time capitalists have gone the way of the triceratops, one can more comfortably cast all business owners as members of the ruling elite.

You can’t navigate modern capitalism with a 19th-century map

But we don’t live in the future that Marx foresaw. 

Rather than melting all workers into a uniform proletariat, capitalism cultivated a kaleidoscopically diverse laborforce — one segmented by countless fine-grained distinctions of pay and prestige. And instead of immiserating ordinary people, industrial development brought unprecedented mass prosperity (albeit, with the aid of many socialistic reforms). 

As a result, old-school socialists’ “two-class map” makes for a poor guide to modern capitalism’s terrain. And anyone trying to impose Marx’s cartography onto the landscape will encounter several problems.

For one, in a world where some workers earn as much in a year as others do in a lifetime, the idea that there is only one fundamental class division — that between laborers and capitalists — becomes unconvincing. 

In the United States, some convenience store owners make $70,000 a year, while many surgeons earn upward of $600,000. It would be odd to say that the former are members of society’s dominant class (since they live off business income), while the latter belong to its subordinate one (since they live off salaries). After all, the minimart owner and Musk do not have especially similar material interests. Nor, for that matter, do the impoverished farmworker and high-earning neurosurgeon (much less, the superstar athlete with a $40 million salary). Yet this is what orthodox socialism’s binary would suggest. 

Ultimately, in a modern capitalist society, it makes a lot more sense to see class as a multidimensional continuum than as a binary.

A second, related difficulty is that the border between labor and capital has grown fuzzier since Marx’s time. Today, American workers often own both a home and some share of their nation’s financial assets, like a 401(k) filled with stock from major corporations. Many billionaires, meanwhile, choose to work. 

Socialists are well aware of this reality, which is why they define a person’s class status by their dependence on labor: The typical white-collar worker may own a little stock, but not enough to quit her job and live off dividends. Unlike a billionaire CEO, such a professional must work in order to meet her needs. 

This is a sound distinction. But it does not actually resolve the challenge of distinguishing the working class from the ruling one. This is because, in an advanced economy, whether someone “needs” to work is partly subjective. Millions of Americans survive on less than $25,000 a year in market income. If upper-middle-class families were willing to accept a similarly austere living standard, many would be able to live entirely off their investments.

Of course, Americans shouldn’t be content to live in poverty. But it is harder to say precisely what standard of living qualifies as “enough.” In Marx’s time, a relatively good life for a wage worker might have meant reliable access to food and shelter for one’s family and a little time and money left for simple leisure. Today, the list includes high-quality education for one’s children, access to advanced medical treatments, modern home appliances for cooking and cleaning, Internet-connected devices for entertainment, and often personal transportation, like a car — all of which are typically (and justifiably) treated as basic necessities.

This raises the question: At what level of wealth does a person stop needing to work — even if they must keep clocking in to achieve their desired lifestyle? The socialist writer Matt Bruenig has proposed drawing the line at about $1.4 million (or roughly 20 times America’s average wage): Once you’ve accrued that much in housing and financial assets, your decision to sell your labor becomes voluntary and you cease to be working-class. 

This is a reasonable cut-off. But it’s still fairly arbitrary. Ask an American with a net worth of $1.4 million whether they need to work, and they’re liable to say yes. And typically, they will be correct — at least, in the sense that they could not sustain their way of life without earning a paycheck. You could say that their present lifestyle is too lavish — and that $1.4 million in assets is all that’s required to generate the amount of income one truly needs. But it’s not obvious why this threshold doesn’t actually lie at $1.6 million, or $800,000, or $500,000.

As a result, the only way to draw the upper boundary on who “needs” to work — without making arbitrary judgments about what standard of living is necessary — is to place it extremely far up the class hierarchy: The superrich generally don’t need to choose between sustaining their lifestyles and abstaining from work. But once your definition of “working class” becomes capacious enough to include low-end multimillionaires, it loses all plausibility. 

Ultimately, in a modern capitalist society, it makes a lot more sense to see class as a multidimensional continuum than as a binary. An individual’s degree of economic freedom and power is determined by a host of factors — above all, their household incomes and net worths, but also the market value of their skills (which shapes their future earning prospects) and familial wealth and connections. Even one’s eligibility for social welfare benefits can matter; after all, the largest group of Americans who don’t need to work to meet their needs are Social Security recipients.

Precisely how we should weigh these different sources of advantage is a tricky question. And implicit disagreements over it shapes our discourse about “the working class.” 

Take Graham Platner, the former Democratic Senate candidate in Maine. To his champions, Platner was a working-class candidate, due to his lack of a college diploma, years of service in the military, and low-income, physically demanding job farming oysters (along with his gravelly voice and tattoos). To his detractors, meanwhile, Platner was a pseudo-proletarian due to his upper-middle-class childhood, prep school education, and receipt of steady financial help from his father and mother, a lawyer and entrepreneur. Meanwhile, Platner probably would not qualify as “working class” under the orthodox socialist definition for multiple reasons: For one, he does not need to work in order to get by, thanks to his disability benefits and family support. For another, he is the owner of his oyster business, rather than a salaried worker who answers to a boss. 

In any event, whichever factors one emphasizes, it’s clear that a person’s class privilege increases continuously as their income, net worth, familial wealth, and “human capital” rises. There is no single point on any of these scales past which a person’s class position is abruptly transformed. The gap between “the 99 percent” and the billionaire class matters — but so does that between the top 15 percent and the working poor.

Of course, in ordinary political discourse, we inevitably need to boil down reality’s intricacies into rough categories. No politician will ever promise to fight for the “bottom six deciles in combined SES score, nor will any labor activists ever chant, “The 30th to 60th percentiles in household income, united, will never be defeated.” 

But a taxonomy of classes with several subcategories (such as “the poor,” “the working class,” “the middle class,” “the upper-middle class,” “the rich,” and “the superrich”) will capture a bit more of reality than a taxonomy with only two. 

“Working-class” rhetoric can camouflage professional-class interests

All this said, even if orthodox socialism’s “two-class map” is analytically flawed, it could still be politically beneficial. Perhaps, when affluent professionals decide that they belong to the same class as the working poor, they become more inclined to fight for the latter’s interests. 

Some of the DSA’s own activities lend credence to this theory: Despite its largely white-collar membership, the organization advocates for many policies that would principally benefit America’s most disadvantaged. More broadly, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, many college-educated millennials came to identify with “the 99 percent.” And as this cohort has grown more influential in Blue America, the Democratic Party has embraced more ambitious anti-poverty policies, such as a guaranteed monthly income for working-class families. 

The main fiscal barrier to American social democracy is that our middle class in general — and upper middle-class in particular — pays much lower taxes than their peers in Western Europe.

And yet, socialists’ expansive conception of “the working class” can be put to more dubious uses. Specifically, it can help relatively well-off professionals disguise their class’s particular interests as those of all working people.  

The left’s push to cancel all graduate student debt is arguably a case in point. During Joe Biden’s presidency, the DSA criticized the White House for attempting to forgive only $10,000 of most borrowers’ student loans (a plan that was ultimately blocked by the Supreme Court). Instead, the socialists called on Biden to cancel all student debt, including the balances accrued by the graduates of elite medical schools and MBA programs. 

On its face, the idea that the US government should transfer tens of thousands of dollars to young doctors and Harvard MBAs would seem wildly regressive. The median US physician can expect to earn more than $6.5 million over the course of their lifetime, while the median graduate of a top-five business school can expect to earn more than $8 million. Virtually all Americans have worse prospects than this. And in the inflationary conditions of the Biden era, increasing young professionals’ disposable income was liable to push up prices for everyone else. In other words, blanket student debt forgiveness would have likely transferred purchasing power from low-income workers to early-career physicians and management consultants.

Many socialists would struggle to defend such a policy, were it presented in these terms. But by eliding the class distinctions between low- and high-income borrowers,  the DSA was able to convince itself (if not the public) that across-the-board forgiveness was in the interest of “the working class.”

The socialist framework is similarly unhelpful in the realm of tax policy. 

In recent years, as socialist and progressive politicians have grown more dependent on professional class support, they’ve become more averse to endorsing broad-based tax increases.

From Zohran Mamdani to Chris Van Hollen, the Democratic left tends to reserve its tax hike proposals for the superrich. And yet, the reason that America lacks a comprehensive welfare state is not that our billionaires pay unusually little in taxes; to the contrary, our top rates are comparable to those of some Scandinavian countries. The main fiscal barrier to American social democracy is that our middle class in general — and upper middle-class in particular — pays much lower taxes than their peers in Western Europe. Simply maintaining our existing programs, like Social Security, will likely require a major tax increase on higher-end salaried workers. 

In this context, binary conceptions of America’s class structure — which pit an undifferentiated “working class” against the capitalist elite, or the 99 percent against the 1 percent — can help educated professionals evade responsibility for bankrolling a more egalitarian economic system.

Check your class privilege

Ultimately, the DSA’s ability to serve working-class interests hinges less on its own demographics than its policies and politics. When an organization mistakes the preferences of its most privileged members for those of all working people, however, its campaigning and policymaking is liable to suffer. 

Perhaps, before this century’s end, AI will bring about the calamity that Marx prophesied — and Ivy League lawyers and delivery drivers will find their skills equally devalued by an all-powerful ownership class. Until the robot apocalypse, however, educated professionals and low-wage workers will live in very different circumstances — and harbor distinct economic interests. To safeguard the wellbeing of the disadvantaged, well-off egalitarians need to mind these gaps, not paper over them with obsolete class categories.