2026-04-13 18:45:00
2026年3月11日，OpenAI首席执行官萨姆·奥尔特曼在华盛顿特区的贝莱克基础设施峰会上发表讲话。OpenAI在其最新愿景声明中提出了一系列激进政策，包括对富人征税、扩大福利国家、让工人决定雇主如何使用人工智能，以及让所有人分享科技行业的利润。该公司声称这些措施旨在通过“广泛分享繁荣”来应对“智能时代”的经济变革。然而，这些政策与OpenAI高层的实际政治行为存在明显矛盾。尽管公司倡导这些改革，但其领导者却在资助反对福利政策的团体，例如OpenAI总裁格雷格·布罗克曼及其妻子向支持特朗普的超级政治行动委员会（PAC）捐赠了2500万美元，而公司CEO萨姆·奥尔特曼也在2024年向多位共和党议员捐款，并向特朗普的就职基金捐赠了100万美元。这些行为与他们所倡导的经济平等理念背道而驰，例如特朗普去年推动的食品券和医疗补助的新工作要求，直接威胁到低收入群体的基本医疗保障。尽管OpenAI的员工在2024年普遍支持民主党，但其领导层显然更倾向于共和党利益。作者认为，这些“仁慈的亿万富翁”应专注于实际的立法斗争，而非仅在社交媒体上进行象征性的财富再分配呼吁。
OpenAI wants to raise taxes on the rich, expand the welfare state, let workers decide how their employers use artificial intelligence, and give everyone a cut of the tech industry’s profits.
Or so the company claims in a new vision statement.
In that document, the AI titan argues that the government needs to enact sweeping economic reforms, so as to “share prosperity broadly” in “the age of intelligence.”
The plan received far more attention than your typical policy white paper, due largely to its improbable author. Tech companies do not typically issue sweeping proposals for restructuring the American economy.
This said, OpenAI’s vision statement is not entirely unprecedented. AI moguls have long warned that their technology could cause mass unemployment, while gesturing toward the need for income redistribution.
Still, even by those standards of Silicon Valley thought leadership, the agenda OpenAI outlines is remarkably progressive. In fact, it overlaps heavily with Sen. Bernie Sanders’s own AI proposals (minus his moratorium on data center construction). Since advanced AI could shift income away from workers and toward business owners, OpenAI proposes the creation of a “public wealth fund.” Essentially, the government would purchase a stake in the nation’s most profitable companies and then give shares to every US citizen. In other words, it would give Americans a little socialism, as a treat.
OpenAI also calls for, among other things: higher capital gains taxes; more public funding for jobs in health care, education, and community service; giving workers more influence over corporate governance; and holding AI companies accountable to new safety regulations.
All of these policies are hazily sketched. The document is 13 pages and dedicates only a short paragraph to most of its proposals. It reads a lot like something that ChatGPT would spit out, if you asked it to research ideas for combating AI-induced inequality for 10 minutes.
For OpenAI’s progressive critics, however, its agenda is less irksome for its laziness than its hypocrisy: The political behavior of its top leaders belies the firm’s purported commitment to egalitarian reform.
In truth, OpenAI is engaging in one of Silicon Valley’s most annoying traditions: advertising its support for radical new social policies that have no actual chance of becoming law in the near-term, while ignoring — if not abetting — attacks on actual welfare programs in the here and now.
For years now, tech billionaires have been worrying aloud about how artificial intelligence could swell inequality and unemployment. And many have argued that the government must create a universal basic income (UBI) — a guaranteed minimum salary for every American — to account for this risk. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg were all making versions of that argument as far back as 2017.
Of course, there was no actual prospect of Congress creating a UBI that year. By contrast, congressional Republicans did try to gut the Affordable Care Act in 2017.
The people in charge of OpenAI have made their political priorities clear — and sharing “prosperity broadly” is not among them.
It is hard to see how one could believe that 1) everyone should collect an income, regardless of their employment status and 2) people shouldn’t necessarily receive health insurance if they don’t have a job.
If tech-induced inequality justifies universal cash benefits, presumably it also demands universal health care. Yet Musk, Zuckerberg, and many of the Valley’s other UBI proponents made little effort to thwart the GOP’s attempted repeal of Obamacare. Nor did they mobilize to prevent the expiration of Joe Biden’s enhanced Child Tax Credit, a policy that effectively guaranteed a minimum income for all parents with young children.
In 2026, the disconnect between OpenAI’s advocacy for legislatively irrelevant reforms — and its approach to live political debates — is even larger. While the company floats collective ownership of the AI industry in PDFs, its leaders are bankrolling the welfare state’s opponents.
OpenAI itself is staying out of political races. In September, though, OpenAI president Greg Brockman and his wife gave $25 million to a pro-Trump super PAC. Along with OpenAI investor Marc Andreessen, Brockman has also poured funds into Leading Our Future, a PAC dedicated to electing opponents of state-level AI regulations. As part of that effort, the group is supporting a wide array of Republican candidates.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, meanwhile, maxed out donations to several Republican lawmakers in 2024, while throwing $1 million toward Donald Trump’s inauguration fund.
If this cash bought Altman and Brockman any influence with the White House, there’s no sign they used it to oppose Trump’s push for new work requirements on food stamps and Medicaid last year.
And yet, those policies are totally antithetical to the economic philosophy that OpenAI is now broadcasting. Surely, if the threat of mass, AI-induced unemployment demands the creation of a public wealth fund, it must also forbid choking off basic medical care to millions of people who can’t find work.
Nevertheless, OpenAI’s leaders did not feel compelled to publicly oppose Trump’s legislation. And Brockman’s super PAC appears to put zero weight on its candidates’ social welfare policies. Whether it is intervening Republican primaries or Democratic ones, the group’s sole concern seems to be blocking state-level AI safety regulations — including several that OpenAI ostensibly endorses in its vision statement.
Of course, there are worse things than hypocrisy. I’d rather see AI companies virtue signal about wealth redistribution than, say, build chatbots who rant about “white genocide.”
Further, I suspect that the actual authors of OpenAI’s “industrial policy” document are sincere. The company’s leadership and employees don’t have the same politics (the latter donated overwhelmingly to Democrats in 2024).
Nevertheless, the people in charge of OpenAI have made their political priorities clear — and sharing “prosperity broadly” is not among them.
Wealthy techies who are genuinely concerned with that objective, however, should probably spend a bit less energy on cooking up half-baked UBI proposals — and a bit more on intervening in actual legislative fights over social welfare policy.
2026-04-13 18:00:00
美国民主的现状呈现出一种矛盾：一方面，它似乎受到损害，另一方面又仍能正常运作。特朗普总统的独断行为，如威胁抹除整个文明、对盟友发出吞并领土的威胁、对国内反对者发起毫无根据的刑事调查，以及派遣戴面罩的武装部队进入城市，都对民主构成了挑战。然而，他的这些野心却屡次受到法院裁决、大规模基层抗议运动以及国会选举中反对党可能翻盘的制约。
近期有三份权威报告试图量化评估美国民主的健康状况。总体来看，这些报告指出，尽管特朗普执政第一年对民主造成了一定损害，但美国民主仍保持活力，甚至可能正在恢复。深入分析报告细节，可以更清楚地理解这一现象的原因，并对民主的未来抱有一丝希望。
这些报告在评估方法上存在差异。V-Dem研究所主要关注民主制度本身，如政府是否以民主方式运作，是否遵循民主原则。而自由之家（Freedom House）则更侧重于公民的实际体验，强调规则如何转化为人民的自由。例如，在言论自由方面，V-Dem数据显示美国出现明显下降，而自由之家则认为美国的媒体和学术自由仍相对独立。
第三份报告——Bright Line Watch则关注特朗普政策随时间的变化。数据显示，美国民主在2025年初遭遇严重下滑，但此后趋于稳定，甚至有所回升。最新报告指出，美国民主评分已从2025年4月的低谷53分回升至57分。
尽管特朗普政府采取了一系列削弱民主的措施，如扩大行政权力、攻击国会授权机构、推动中期选举的干预行动等，但这些努力并未成功。例如，FBI在佐治亚州调查2020年选举数据、10个州移交选民名单、中期选举期间的选区重划等，均未带来持久的共和党优势。此外，自由公正的选举仍是民主健康的重要检验标准，2025年中期选举的结果表明，反对党仍能公平竞争，这为民主的未来提供了希望。
综上所述，虽然美国民主面临严峻挑战，但其制度韧性依然存在，选举系统的正常运作为民主的存续提供了保障，因此仍值得对民主的未来保持谨慎乐观。
The status of American democracy feels paradoxical: somehow both damaged and well-functioning at the same time.
On the one hand, the United States has a president who is acting like a dictator: threatening to wipe out an entire civilization, menacing allies with threats to annex their territory, targeting domestic enemies with spurious criminal investigations, and deploying masked armed forces to cities.
On the other hand, his ambitions have been continually frustrated by court rulings, a grassroots protest movement that has turned out millions of Americans on three separate occasions, and an opposition party that’s all but certain to flip at least one house of Congress in November’s elections.
So what do you call this — authoritarianism, democracy, or something in between? In recent weeks, three major studies have tried to answer this question, using rigorous methodologies to provide a quantitative estimate of democratic health in America.
Broadly, the reports’ findings converge on a similar picture: that American democracy has been damaged in President Donald Trump’s first year, perhaps severely, but remains alive and functioning. In fact, it might even be healing.
A close look at the reports’ details, including careful attention to their disagreements and divergences, helps clarify the reasons why that’s true — and maybe even give a little bit of optimism about democracy’s future.
Studying democratic health is tricky. There isn’t an objective instrument you can use to measure it the way that, say, thermometers can tell you body temperature.
So instead, the three reports rely on surveys. They ask leading experts to respond to detailed questionnaires on different aspects of a country’s politics, and then put the results together to construct a kind of overall assessment.
The first two reports, from the V-Dem Institute and Freedom House, respectively, try to do this not just for the United States but for the whole world: ranking every country in the world on 100-point scales designed to evaluate the nature of their regimes. Developed democracies like Norway or Japan score very highly; outright authoritarian states, like North Korea or Saudi Arabia, are near the bottom.
Editions of each report are released annually, and, for decades, the United States was a top performer in both. But the 2026 edition, whose findings assess changes in the previous calendar year, showed a real decline. Both agree that Trump’s unilateral assertions of executive power, his assault on checks on said powers, and his threats against the political opposition have all damaged the health and quality of American democracy.
Yet the assessment of the scope of that damage is strikingly different.
V-Dem’s Liberal Democracy Index showed a 22-point year-over-year drop, from 79 to 57. This is the largest single-year decline ever recorded for the United States, and is the lowest rating it has held since 1965 (when Jim Crow was formally abolished). The US currently scores 31 points below the top-ranked democracy, Denmark (88), and has fallen below countries like Sri Lanka and Israel.
Freedom House’s Freedom in the World rankings, by contrast, show a decline of just three points: from 84 down to 81. That’s still well below top performer Finland, which scores a perfect 100, but it’s much higher than Sri Lanka and Israel — more in the class of South Korea (83) and Italy (87).
Why the difference? When I spoke with authors of each report, they emphasized that they were each trying to measure subtly different things.
V-Dem is primarily interested in assessing democratic institutions: whether the government functions in a way that can reasonably be described as democratic, and is passing laws that are consistent with democratic values and principles. Freedom House, by contrast, is more focused on the experience of citizens in a country — its rating is less about what the formal rules are and more about how those rules translate to the actual freedoms of the people living there.
Take freedom of speech, a notable area of divergence between the two reports. V-Dem’s data shows a significant American decline in that area, citing Trump administration efforts to punish critical journalists and restrict academic funding on political grounds. Yet Freedom House registered no change to America’s score in either press or academic freedom, as the US remains (in relative global terms) a place with large and independent media outlets and universities.
The third report, from the Bright Line Watch scholarly consortium, adds yet another layer of complexity: how Trump’s impact changed over time.
In raw numerical terms, its expert surveys record a democracy score drop between 2024 and 2025 that’s somewhere in the middle V-Dem and Freedom House estimates (roughly 15 points on a 0–100 scale). Yet unlike the others, Bright Line Watch fields multiple surveys per year. This means that while the others provide one score for the entirety of 2025, Bright Line Watch can track democracy’s health during different periods of the year.
This approach suggested something surprising: that most of America’s democratic decline happened during the early months of 2025.
When Trump took office, experts rated US democracy as about a 70 — where it had been for most of the first Trump administration and the Biden years. The score plummeted in the early months of 2025, reaching a nadir of 53 in April 2025. The outlook has since stabilized and even improved: The most recent report, published in late March, has American democracy rated at about a 57. That’s still alarming, but at least it’s moving in the right direction.
Taken together, these reports give us a helpful lens for understanding the events of the past year: what was really dangerous, how much damage it did, and what matters going forward.
The first key point is that the early months of 2025 were an exceptionally perilous time for American democracy. The blitz of executive orders, and the DOGE demolition of congressionally authorized agencies like USAID, represented a massive and unprecedented expansion of executive authority.
Both V-Dem and Freedom House cite executive power grabs, and congressional inability to override them, as a major reason for America’s democratic decline. In fact, V-Dem’s data shows that the metric designed to assess this, called “legislative constraints,” was “the worst affected aspect of democracy” in 2025. Bright Line Watch, for its part, registered the vast bulk of its decline during this period.
But the pace of power grabs proved unsustainable. DOGE, the principal agent of much of the most aggressive activity, collapsed under the combined weight of Elon Musk’s incompetence and a targeted protest campaign. While Trump has continued to attempt to govern unilaterally since, the early months’ assault on democratic constraints on power has slowed down significantly.
This points to a second conclusion, one supported both by the V-Dem/Freedom House and the Bright Line Watch timing finding: that Trump has had difficulty converting attacks on democracy into successful repression.
There is no doubt, as V-Dem’s data shows, that Trump has continued a multi-pronged attack on democracy. In the past year, we’ve seen the administration attempt to bully ABC into censoring Jimmy Kimmel, impose tariffs based on risible claims of an emergency, and deploy masked and unaccountable agents to the streets of American cities.
Yet there’s also a reason why these didn’t translate into a similar drop in Freedom House scores, with their focus on outcomes for citizens, or further drops in Bright Line Watch scores: Much of what they’ve attempted has been repulsed. Kimmel was reinstated, the Supreme Court overturned the emergency tariff power, and the White House pulled back its immigration operation in Minneapolis.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, America still looks good on the most significant test of a democracy’s health: its elections.
The essence of democracy is power alternation determined by free and fair elections: So long as the opposition can compete and win without undue burdens, democracy remains alive. In its report, Bright Line Watch singled out the results of last fall’s elections as a key reason for US improvement over the early 2025 nadir.
“The defeats Republicans faced at the polls in off-year elections in 2025…showed that the playing field had not been tilted against the opposition and that free and fair elections were still possible,” the authors write.
When I spoke with Marina Nord, a V-Dem researcher, she said that high-quality elections created a kind of democratic baseline for the United States. It’s almost impossible for drops on other V-Dem metrics, even ones as severe as they recorded in the past year, to take America out of the realm of democracy altogether as long as experts continue to rate its elections highly.
Now, no one should be complacent here. What’s happened in the past year is deeply damaging to democracy’s good function, and the Trump administration is constantly trying to push the frontiers of its power and authority.
That includes several actions that appear like clear preludes to a campaign against the midterm election. The Trump administration sent the FBI to seize data on the 2020 election from a government office in Georgia, convinced 10 states to turn over voter roll data, spearheaded a round of mid-cycle gerrymandering, and announced an intent to federalize election administration as they see fit.
So far, none of these efforts have amounted to a durable GOP advantage. All but the gerrymandering push are either hypothetical or haphazard, and Democrats have successfully countered Trump’s partisan redistricting with their own in blue states. In general, the legal delegation of election administration to the states has proven an effective bulwark against federal tampering with the vote.
So while the fight over the midterms is hardly over, the current state of affairs gives some cause for small-d democratic optimism. As do the events of the past year.
2026-04-13 04:45:00
在2026年4月10日匈牙利议会选举前夕，支持者挥舞匈牙利国旗，匈牙利总理维克多·奥班在选举集会上向选民发表讲话。根据周日的选举结果，反对党蒂萨党（由佩特尔·马加尔领导）击败了奥班的执政党青民盟（Fidesz），这是该党20年来首次失利。奥班在计票结束后几小时内便致电马加尔承认败选。蒂萨党的胜利不仅体现了马加尔的个人政治能力，也反映了匈牙利民众对奥班政权的广泛不满。
奥班政权的长期执政源于其对选举制度的系统性操控。自2010年赢得选举后，青民盟通过修改法律，构建了“政治力场”，使反对党难以撼动其地位。例如，他们通过选区划分使农村地区获得更多代表权，将公共媒体变为宣传工具，并压制独立媒体，迫使反对党相互竞争。此外，不平等的竞选资金规则也使青民盟占据优势。尽管如此，马加尔的胜利仍令人震惊，因为他不仅击败了奥班，还可能获得议会三分之二的席位，从而拥有修宪权力，这将使蒂萨党能够逐步废除奥班建立的威权体制，恢复真正的民主。
然而，奥班仍可能利用其剩余的政治影响力，例如通过快速召集议会修改宪法，将匈牙利从议会制改为总统制，甚至可能自任总统。即便没有这些举措，蒂萨党若未能获得足够的席位，其执政能力也将受到青民盟对司法、媒体和行政机构的控制所限制。因此，马加尔能否成功取决于蒂萨党在议会中的席位数量。
奥班的威权体制不仅影响选举，还渗透到匈牙利国家的各个层面。过去16年，他通过扶持亲政府的寡头集团，掌控了司法、监管机构、官僚体系，甚至艺术等看似中立的领域。要恢复民主，蒂萨党需要采取一系列措施，包括清除奥班的盟友、打破政府对媒体的垄断、重建反腐机制，并同时应对乌克兰战争、与欧盟关系修复以及美国对奥班的支持等挑战。这几乎等同于进行宪法制度变革，而实现这一目标几乎不可能，除非蒂萨党获得议会三分之二的多数席位。
因此，尽管马加尔赢得了选举，但匈牙利民主的未来仍充满不确定性。若他未能获得足够席位，奥班的威权体制可能在下一次选举中卷土重来。这次选举结果标志着匈牙利民主的希望重燃，但真正的变革仍需面对重重困难。
Viktor Orbán, the European Union’s only autocrat, has fallen.
Results from Sunday’s election in Hungary show that the opposition Tisza party, led by Péter Magyar, has defeated Orbán’s Fidesz party — the first election the party has lost in 20 years. Orbán called Magyar to concede the race within hours of the polls closing.
There is a reason for Fidesz’s longevity: After winning the 2010 election, they had so thoroughly stacked the electoral playing field in their favor that it became nearly impossible for them to lose. That Magyar has beaten them is a testament both to his skills as a politician and the overwhelming frustration of the Hungarian population with life under Fidesz.
His victory also required overcoming an extraordinary last-minute campaign by President Donald Trump to save MAGA’s favorite European leader, which included sending Vice President JD Vance to Hungary to rally with Orbán last week. On the eve of the election, Trump promised to devote the “full economic might” of the US to boosting Hungary’s economy if Orbán asked.
But Magyar didn’t just win the election: He won by a massive margin, potentially enough to secure a two-thirds majority of seats in Hungary’s parliament. This would be a magic number: enough, per Hungarian law, for Tisza to amend the constitution at will.
With such a majority, Magyar would have the power to begin unwinding the authoritarian regime that Orbán has spent his tenure in power building — and potentially restore true democracy to Hungary.
Without it, Tisza will hold nominal power but ultimately be limited in how to wield it. Fidesz’s influence over institutions like the court and presidency would constrain their ability to undo much of what Fidesz already did. The most likely scenario: Tisza has four frustrating years in power, accomplishes relatively little, and then hands power back to Fidesz.
So much depends on the exact ways that the votes are tallied. But now, for the first time in a very long time, there is genuine hope for Hungarian democracy.
To understand how astonishing Magyar’s victory is, you need to understand just how much Orbán had stacked the deck against him.
After Orbán’s first term in office, from 1998 to 2002, his party claimed they were cheated — and he became dedicated to never losing again. For the next eight years, he and his allies in Fidesz developed a series of complex and precise schemes for changing Hungarian law to build what Orbán termed “a political forcefield” that could hold on to power for decades.
When they won a two-thirds majority in the 2010 election, they were able to put these ideas into action.
Fidesz reworked Hungary’s election system, gerrymandering districts to give its rural base vastly more representation than urban opposition supporters. It turned public media into propaganda, and strong-armed independent media into selling to the government or its private-sector allies. It created ballot access rules that forced the several opposition parties to compete against each other. It imposed unequal campaign finance rules that put Fidesz on a structurally superior footing.
The basic goal was to create a system where the government doesn’t have to formally rig elections, in the sense of stuffing ballot boxes. It could generally rely on the background unfairness of the system, the structural disadvantages opposition parties face, to reliably maintain a constitutional majority. Political scientists call this kind of regime “competitive authoritarianism” — a system in which elections are real, but so unfair that they can’t reasonably be termed democratic contests.
“The state became a party state, in which there is no border between the government, the governing party, [and] state institutions,” says Dániel Döbrentey, the Voting Rights Project Coordinator at the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union. “Sources, databases, and everything which should serve the public interest are sometimes not just handled but misused by the governing majority for their campaigning purposes.”
Recent evidence shows the Hungarian regime also employed more classically authoritarian tactics. A new documentary compiled damning evidence of widespread voter blackmail: where local Fidesz officials threaten voters in remote areas, perhaps with job loss or cutting them off from public benefits, if they do not vote for the party. Döbrentey estimates that this has affected somewhere between 400,000 and 600,000 Hungarians — a significant number in a country where the number of eligible voters tops out at around 8 million.
The result of all this has been a remarkably durable authoritarian system. In the 2014 and 2018 elections, Fidesz managed to retain its two-thirds majority in parliament with less than half of the national popular vote. In 2022, the various opposition parties united around a single candidate and party list to try and overcome its structural disadvantages — and Fidesz actually improved its vote share, easily retaining its two-thirds majority.
“The rules are so seriously rigged that Orbán can probably make up a 10, maybe even 15 point difference” in underlying public opinion, says Kim Lane Scheppele, an expert on Hungarian election law at Princeton University.
And yet Fidesz just lost resoundingly. How?
For one thing, Magyar was an excellent candidate. A regime defector — his ex-wife served as Orbán’s Minister of Justice — he shared many of its conservative views on social policy and immigration, making it difficult for the government to rally its base by painting him as a left-globalist plant.
Despite this, the entire opposition — including left-wing parties — threw their weight behind his new Tisza party, understanding that the only thing that mattered was ousting Fidesz. This allowed for the creation of a pan-ideological coalition, one united primarily by frustration with the current government and a desire to return to real democracy.
And this frustration ran deep — very deep.
Orbán had badly mismanaged the Hungarian economy, falling well behind other former Communist states like Poland and Czechia to become one of the European Union’s poorest states (if not the poorest). This economic underperformance was inextricably intertwined with his governance model: Fidesz secured its hold on power by empowering a handful of regime-friendly oligarchs to dominate the commercial sector. This system gave Orbán significant power to fend off political challenges and make himself wealthy, but it produced a stagnant and corrupt private sector where connections with the state were more important than having a high-quality business model.
Fidesz’s control over the flow of information, while powerful, simply could not compete with the reality that ordinary Hungarians experienced with their eyes and ears.
Perhaps Orbán might have held if he were facing a lesser opponent, a less united opposition, or a less impoverished electorate. But the conjunction of all three created a kind of electoral perfect storm, one powerful enough to overcome one of the most potent election-rigging machines in the world.
When autocrats lose elections, the immediate fear is that they’ll try to annul or overturn them — à la Trump in 2020. Orbán’s concession suggests Hungary may be avoiding the worst-case scenario.
Yet Orbán could still make use of his remaining time with a two-thirds majority to try and protect the system he built on the way out. There are a number of different ways to do so, most of which involve a rapid convening of parliament to pass new constitutional amendments. Perhaps the most discussed one among Hungary watchers is one in which Fidesz amends the constitution to change Hungary from a parliamentary system to a presidential one.
Hungary already has a president — a Fidesz loyalist with little to do given his party’s control over parliament. But Orbán may attempt to turn the office into Hungary’s chief executive, thus stripping Magyar of key powers before he even has a chance to wield them. Orbán might even figure out a way to appoint himself president, a maneuver pioneered by Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
But even assuming none of that happens, the future of Hungarian democracy will still be precarious — hinging, in significant part, on exactly how many seats Tisza has won in parliament.
For the past 16 years, Orbán has not just corrupted Hungarian elections: He has corrupted everything about the Hungarian state. The judiciary, regulatory agencies, bureaucracy, even seemingly apolitical institutions in areas like the arts — nearly everything has, in one way or another, become part of the Fidesz machine, either a vehicle for political control or a means of Fidesz leaders profiting off of power.
Restoring Hungarian democracy is thus not a simple matter of redrawing electoral maps. They will need to kick Orbán’s cronies off the courts, break up the government’s near-monopoly on the press, rebuild safeguards against corruption, create a truly non-partisan tax agency, and on down the line — all while trying to manage the nearby war in Ukraine, rebuild a relationship with the European Union, and deal with a United States that nakedly campaigned on Orbán’s behalf.
This amounts to a need for something like constitutional regime change — a transformation almost certainly impossible to accomplish without a two-thirds majority in parliament.
Absent the power to amend the constitution, Fidesz’s structural entrenchment in areas like the courts will hamstring the Tisza majority’s ability to make real change. A failed Magyar government, and Fidesz restoration in the next elections, would be the most likely outcome: the authoritarian system reasserting itself even after what might seem, on the outside, like a fatal defeat. For this reason, the size of the Tisza majority may matter as much as the sheer fact of them winning.
But if he does get two-thirds, then Péter Magyar and his allies have accomplished the near-impossible: beating an entrenched autocrat in elections that he had spent nearly two decades attempting to rig.
2026-04-12 20:00:00
在《Explain It Me》节目中，我们致力于为听众提供有用的信息，帮助他们理解并应对周围的世界。然而，近期人们普遍感到生活和未来充满负面情绪。调查显示，美国人对当前生活和未来前景的满意度较低，原因包括科技革命可能取代工作、国家处于战争状态以及全球经济的不确定性。面对这些压力，我们仍被期望保持积极，如整理房间、锻炼身体和坚持阅读。那么，如何在黑暗中找到希望？为什么有些人更容易看到积极的一面？
节目主持人引用心理学教授贾米尔·扎基（Jamil Zaki）的观点，指出乐观与希望的区别：乐观是相信未来会变好，但可能让人变得自满；而希望则是承认现实的困难，同时相信未来可能改善，并愿意为此付出努力。扎基认为，希望是一种坚韧、主动的态度，它让人看到改变的可能，并激励行动。研究显示，希望与乐观有一定遗传因素，但更多取决于个人经历，如成长环境和心理治疗。
扎基还提到，人们往往忽视生活中的美好，而将负面情绪视为智慧的象征。然而，数据表明，悲观者并不比乐观者更聪明，反而更难辨别真相。他强调，培养希望是一种“关注”的实践，而非忽视现实，而是平衡地注意到生活中的美好。例如，通过兴趣爱好，人们可以重新连接自己关心的事物，并与他人建立积极关系。
节目还提到，尽管当前生活艰难，但人类历史上曾多次克服危机。听众分享了祖父母作为民权活动家或在奥斯维辛幸存的故事，这些例子让人意识到，人类具有强大的韧性，尤其是在团结一致时。扎基认为，回顾父母或祖父母辈的经历，也能帮助我们看到过去的挑战与克服方式，从而增强对未来的信心。
最后，节目鼓励听众通过参与社区、培养兴趣爱好等方式寻找希望，并提醒大家，当前的困难并非前所未有，人类有能力共同面对并走出困境。
On Explain It Me, we try to give you useful information to help you navigate and understand the world around you. But lately there’s been an elephant in the room: Life feels kind of…bad.
Polling suggests that Americans are unsatisfied with their lives now, and with prospects for the future. It’s understandable why: We’re on the cusp of a technological revolution, but it could come for all our jobs; the country is at war; and the global economy can feel unstable at best.
All this uncertainty and we’re still expected to do things like declutter our homes, work out, and stay on top of our reading. So how do you face all that crushing negativity? Some make the case for optimism. Jamil Zaki, psychology professor and director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, makes the case for hope. “Optimism is the belief that the future will turn out well, and optimistic people tend to be pretty happy and healthy, but they can also be a bit complacent,” he told Vox.
By contract, Zaki says, hope is “the idea that the future could turn out well, but that we don’t know what the future holds. In fact, being hopeful acknowledges and embraces that things are difficult and asks, ‘Where can we go from here?’”
So how do you find hope in times of darkness? And why are some of us more predisposed to seeing the bright side of things than others? We answer those questions and more on this week’s episode of Explain It to Me.
Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to [email protected] or call 1-800-618-8545.
I’ve seen the phrase “toxic optimism” used to suggest that, at times, we tell people everything is going to be okay when it’s not. Are there times when we’re trying to get people to gaslight themselves into thinking things are better than they actually are?
A lot of the time there’s actually pressure to be negative about the future because there’s the view that if you’re positive, you must be a Pollyanna, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. If you think about it, yes, being a Pollyanna might encourage you to do nothing. An optimist might not feel like they have to fight for anything because everything’s going to turn out well, but a pessimist might not fight for very much either.
There’s a bunch of research that finds that people who are hopeless and cynical are less likely to vote or take part in social movements. Authoritarian regimes actually benefit a lot when people are hopeless. In fact, I think that a lot of propaganda is meant to make people hopeless because that negativity keeps people frozen in place, and that’s exactly what those authoritarian powers often want.
I think people assume there’s naivety if you’re not cynical or if you’re not pessimistic.
There’s an old quote: “Always predict the worst, and you’ll be hailed as a prophet.” I do think that there is an inherent sense that negativity and wisdom are the same thing. And you see this everywhere.
There’s evidence from psychology that bears this out. Research finds that 70 percent of people believe that cynical folks who have a negative outlook on humanity are smarter than non-cynical individuals, and 85 percent of people think that cynics are socially smarter — that they’re better able to tell who’s lying and who’s telling the truth.
That’s a stereotype in our culture, but it’s also one that’s wrong. The data actually find that cynical people are not any smarter than non-cynics, and they’re actually worse at knowing who’s lying and who’s telling the truth.
What do we know about people who are able to maintain hope in dark times? What makes them able to do that?
When I think about hopeful people, I think about activists. Was Nelson Mandela optimistic and thinking that everything was going to turn out great when he was in his jail cell? Hope is a stubborn, active sense of the world. It’s an acknowledgement that things are not what we want now, but a sense that they could improve and that we have something to do about it.
Hopeful people, as the science bears out, have the ability to envision that better future. They also have a will to pursue it. They have that grit and that passion to actually continue going for a goal, even if it’s difficult. And they have something known as waypower, which is that they’re able to map a path between where they are and where they want to be, and oftentimes that waypower requires not being alone.
Hopeful people often aren’t hopeful just as individuals. They find communities of people who want the same positive change that they do, and they work together towards creating that change.
What makes someone that way? Are we predispositioned to be hopeful or cynical?
There’s a bunch of research using twins where they look at the difference between levels of optimism and hope among identical twins versus fraternal twins. The idea is if identical twins are more similar, that’s probably due to their genetics. And that research suggests that things like optimism, pessimism, and hope have a little bit of a genetic component, but not much. Twenty-five percent of how hopeful or optimistic you are appears to be explained by your genes, which leaves the vast majority to be explained by your experience.
“I think of cultivating hope as a practice of noticing — not a practice of ignoring the bad side, but a practice of balancing that with real attention to what is beautiful.”
A lot of that experience has to do with what happens to us early in life. If you come from a nurturing, warm household, you tend to be more optimistic and hopeful, but there’s also evidence that we can make a difference for ourselves. Therapy, for instance, tends to be a practice that increases people’s sense of hope. So if you don’t feel like a very hopeful person, that’s not like a life sentence, you can do things to change the way that you perceive the world.
Every week we ask people to call in, and when we asked people how they’re cultivating optimism in their lives, I honestly thought, “Oh, no, people aren’t going to call. They won’t have anything to say. Everything is bad.” But, I was wrong!
I think it’s worth acknowledging that wrongness that you had, because that’s something I think a lot of people are wrong about. If we’re experiencing the world through our screens, it seems like first, everything is terrible, and second, everybody knows that everything is terrible.
The funny thing is that when we return to our local communities, when we actually ask people about their lives, they’re doing wonderful things and you realize how excellent the average person is on a bunch of dimensions. A great thing about human beings, in my opinion, is that we like each other more the closer we get to one another.
Research finds, for instance, that most Americans do not think that most people can be trusted. We’ve become a very cynical nation. But if you ask people, what about the folks in their neighborhood — and this is not just your friends and family, but your grocer, your bus driver, your barber — people feel so much better about the folks that they actually encounter in real life.
People also told us their hobbies bring them joy. I remember people were trying all kinds of stuff at the height of the pandemic, and it seems like it’s still the case. I called 2026 the year of the hobby. I’m just going outside and trying things. What makes that such an effective strategy?
Well, first tell me about your 2026 hobbies. Which one has brought you the most joy?
I’ve gotten back into film photography. I used to do it in high school, and I just go shoot film all around the city.
Does it bring you a sense of hope or optimism to do this?
Oh, yeah. You just look at the world a little bit differently. It’s like, oh, look at that shadow. Look at that angle. What’s the reflection off that building? But also, when you have a camera, especially a film camera, people love to stop and talk to you.
I love this idea of noticing more. A lot of the data from my lab, from lots of other labs, suggest that yes, we don’t want to gaslight people into ignoring the bad things in life, but a lot of us go around missing the good things in life.
I think of cultivating hope as a practice of noticing — not a practice of ignoring the bad side, but a practice of balancing that with real attention to what is beautiful. I think in general, hobbies are a chance for us to pay attention to things that we care about and often bring us in connection to people who turn out to be often pretty great.
Something that I feel like needs to be acknowledged is that this is not the only time in the world where life has been hard. Humanity has survived a lot, and our listeners called in and really reminded us of that. People told us about grandparents who were civil activists, grandparents who survived and met in Auschwitz. Is that an argument that resonates with you?
Absolutely. One practice that I use is to think back to what life was like for my parents or for their parents. We’ve been through so much, and I’m not saying that everything will turn out well, but generally speaking, we are a resilient species, especially when we’re able to come together.
2026-04-12 19:00:00
《你的里程可能不同》是一档提供独特思考框架的建议专栏，探讨道德困境。它基于“价值多元主义”理念，即每个人都有多种同样合理的价值观，但这些价值观常常相互冲突。如果你有疑问，可通过匿名表单提交。以下是本周读者的问题（已简化并编辑以提高清晰度）：过去几年我们家庭经济困难，我和丈夫都在工作并创业，但进展缓慢，经济恢复需要时间。我们依靠政府援助来支撑六口之家。尽管听起来疯狂，但我们希望在经济状况改善前再要一个孩子，因为我的生育年龄已接近上限。我感到内疚，认为在依赖政府援助的情况下再要孩子是不负责任的，尽管我们有住所、健康和食物。我们拥有良好的支持系统，并且能为每个孩子提供个别关注。但我担心亲友的看法。在贫困的情况下生孩子是否不道德？我知道有些人认为如果无法为现有孩子全额支付大学教育基金，就不该再要孩子，但这种观点似乎过于极端。那么，道德上我们该如何界定界限？
亲爱的爱与经济困境的读者：
认为必须先储蓄一定金额才能生孩子的观念非常普遍。表面上看，这似乎合理，因为我们希望为孩子提供最好的条件。但一旦我们接受这一前提，就会陷入一个棘手的问题：究竟多少钱才算足够？有些人可能会说：“如果你在领取救济金，那就不够。”但请注意，这种说法实际上意味着接受公共援助就自动失去了生育选择权，这是错误的，我们应该拒绝这种观点。如果我们的道德原则是“只有拥有X金额才能负责任地生育”，那么我们便不得不承认，历史上绝大多数人类在经济上并不自给自足，却依然生育了后代。被奴役的人、被殖民的人、贫困中的人——他们只是因为满足了自然的强烈生物本能就被视为“不道德”？这显然荒谬。
那么，我们为何会陷入这种荒谬的观念？社会为何让我们认为只有达到某种经济门槛才能生育？理解这一观念的历史背景很有帮助。19世纪，英国的《贫困法》试图帮助贫困人口，但同时也区分了“值得同情的穷人”和“不值得同情的穷人”。如果一个人是残疾人、老人或病人，被视为值得援助；但如果他们是健康且被视作懒惰的，则会被指责为自身不幸的根源，并可能被送往劳役所或监狱。同时，经济学家马尔萨斯主张废除贫困救济，认为这会鼓励人们在无法独立抚养孩子的情况下继续生育，将贫困者视为不负责任的生育者。他的解决方案是：除非能负担得起孩子，否则不要结婚或发生性关系。
进入20世纪现代福利国家后，这些观念逐渐退居幕后，但并未消失。经济依赖仍被等同于道德软弱，社会普遍认为个人应为贫困负责，并据此限制其生育自由，而非关注结构性问题。我认为，回顾这一历史有助于你理解：如果有人暗示除非能独立支撑孩子，否则生育是不负责任的，那他们并非在陈述某种永恒的道德真理，而是在延续一种过时的观念。事实上，历史上绝大多数人无法保证给孩子一个“现代意义上的好生活”，婴儿和儿童死亡率高，饥荒频发，战争普遍，但人们依然选择生育。他们并非不负责任，而是理解到生育是人类共同面对不确定未来的尝试。
希望是人们即使在困难和不确定性中依然生育的重要动力。犹太传统中有一个故事：当古代以色列人被埃及法老奴役时，男人们不愿与妻子同房，以免孩子出生后也沦为奴隶。但女性们认为，只要不关闭人民未来的可能性，情况终将改善，于是她们打扮并诱惑丈夫，最终九个月后，摩西出生并带领以色列人脱离奴役。这说明我们无需在确保独立经济保障后才生育孩子。未来充满不确定性，但若因这种不确定性而放弃生育，就等于关闭了创造新生活、让未来更加光明的可能性。
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Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. Here’s this week’s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:
The last few years have been financially hard for our family. My husband and I are both working and building up a business. It’s been slow and the financial damages are going to take a while to recoup. We are relying on government assistance to help support our family of six.
Crazy as it sounds to most people, we’d like to have another child before it’s too late as I’m already in the upper ranges of my childbearing years. I keep feeling like it’s irresponsible to have another child because we are on government assistance, even though we have a roof over our heads, everyone is healthy, and there’s food on the table. We have a wonderful support system and we spend time with each child individually.
I’m worried, though, what friends and family might think of us if we have another. Is it unreasonable or morally wrong to bring another child into the world when we are poor? I know people who think it’s wrong to have more kids if you can’t fully fund college 529s for those you have, but that seems a bit extreme. So where do we draw the line morally?
Dear Love-Rich-and-Cash-Strapped,
The idea that we need to save up a certain amount of money before we have kids is really common. On the surface, it might seem reasonable, because we all want to do right by our kids. But once we buy the premise that we need to clear some financial bar, we’re left with a very tricky question: Exactly how much money is enough?
Some people might answer: If you’re on welfare, then you don’t have enough. But notice what that claim amounts to. It’s a claim that accepting public assistance means you automatically forfeit your right to reproductive choice.
That’s a terrible claim, and I think we should reject it!
Think about it: If our moral principle is “you need X dollars to responsibly reproduce,” then we’re committed to saying that most of humanity, across most of history and most of the present-day world, has been acting immorally by having families. Enslaved people, colonized people, people in poverty today — all “immoral,” just for responding to one of nature’s strongest biological drives? Absurd.
So how did we get to this absurd idea? How did society condition us to think that we should only be allowed to reproduce if we clear a certain financial bar?
Just fill out this anonymous form! Newsletter subscribers will get my column before anyone else does, and their questions will be prioritized for future editions. Sign up here.
Understanding the history of this idea is useful. In the 1800s, England’s Poor Law sought to offer relief to people in poverty — but along the way, it codified a distinction between the “deserving poor” and the “undeserving poor.” If you were disabled, elderly, or ill, you were considered deserving of relief. But if you were able-bodied and viewed as idle, then you were blamed for your own bad fortune, and you could be sent to a workhouse or a prison.
Around the same time, the economist Thomas Malthus was arguing that poor relief should be abolished altogether. It was counterproductive, he said, because it incentivized people to keep having children even if they couldn’t independently support them. He cast people in poverty as irresponsible agents making bad reproductive calculations. His solution? Don’t get married and have sex unless you can afford kids.
With the introduction of the modern welfare state in the 20th century, some of these ideas slipped into the background, but they never really disappeared. The conflation of economic dependency with moral weakness persists in the public imagination. So does the notion that we should hold individuals responsible for their poverty — and restrict their reproductive freedom accordingly — instead of placing the blame on structural failures.
I think bearing this history in mind can be helpful for you, because it’ll remind you that if somebody implies it’s irresponsible to have more kids unless you can fully support them independently, that person is not stating some timeless moral truth. In fact, it’s just the opposite.
For most of human history, the idea of a nuclear family that must be economically self-sufficient before it can morally reproduce would have been straight-up unintelligible. Traditions ranging from Confucian thought to Indigenous ethical systems to Catholic social teaching have insisted that the community has obligations to support families in need. You don’t “earn” the right to have children by first proving your self-sufficiency to your community. That’s a deep misunderstanding of what communities are for. Instead, relying on support from those around you is just a normal feature of human life.
Framing reproductive freedom as a privilege you have to earn shifts moral responsibility entirely onto individual families while ignoring the structures that determine why some families are poor in the first place — like health care costs, housing markets, and in your case, the precarity of entrepreneurship. It asks “Can you afford a child?” without bothering to ask “Why does raising a kid cost this much?” or “Why is a hardworking family’s labor not compensated enough to support their household?”
I’d argue the obligation to ensure a child’s well-being is primarily an obligation on society — particularly now that we live in an era of such wealth that everyone’s needs could be met if we redistributed money more equitably.
To the extent that some duty lies on the shoulders of the child’s parents, I think it’s a duty of care. As Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman write in their book What Are Children For?:
Money can buy many things, but the ethical justification to have children ought not be one of them… It is rather the other way around: in having a child, a human being assumes the responsibility to care for them, to the best of their abilities, whatever the challenges they will have to face. Parents who do so under circumstances of near-certain hardship, where that duty of care will likely exact more suffering and require more sacrifice, are not more morally blameworthy than their well-to-do peers; they might just be braver.
And when it comes to care, you seem abundantly able to fulfill your duty. Although your family might not be rich in terms of cash, you’re rich in love, attention, and social support, all of which have massively important effects on a child’s well-being. You and your partner are clearly also hardworking and courageous, which means you’ll be modeling key virtues for your kids — one of the greatest gifts any parent can give their children.
Can you guarantee that your kids will have everything they ever want in life? No. But the truth is, no parent can. Not today, probably not in the future, and certainly not in the past. Historically, virtually no one could be certain that they’d manage to give their kids a good life in the contemporary sense. Infant and childhood mortality were extremely high, famine was common, war was endemic — and guess what? People had kids anyway. Not because they were irresponsible, but because they understood children as participants in a shared, uncertain human endeavor.
One thing that has kept people having kids even in the face of all the difficulty and uncertainty is the idea that we can never quite see what’s around the bend. There’s hope in that.
The Jewish tradition illustrates this with a wonderful story: When the ancient Israelites were enslaved in Egypt, the Israelite men didn’t want to sleep with their wives because they didn’t want to bring kids into the world only to see them become slaves to the Pharaoh. But the women disagreed with this logic. They believed that, so long as they didn’t foreclose the possibility of a future for their people, things would get better and someone would save them. So they got gussied up and seduced their husbands. And lo and behold, nine months later, Moses was born — and he ended up freeing the Israelites from slavery.
The point is that we don’t need to clear some bar of guaranteed, independent material wealth before we bring kids into the world. The future is uncertain, but if we let that stop us from having children, we foreclose the possibility of a new life — a life that just might make the future brighter and more beautiful for everyone.
2026-04-11 20:00:00
与唐纳德·特朗普的民调相比，政治媒体的处境更糟。我们这些记者正面临信任危机、相关性下降以及被注意力经济淹没的困境，这种经济模式可能会用Claude或网红取代我们。传统新闻报道的技能，如讲故事、街头采访，甚至“调查”一词，如今已成为现代TikToker的模板。然而，新闻业的核心流程——事实核查、等待评论、注重细微差别而非轰动效应，或以好奇心为先——正变得愈发孤独，与日益被激烈观点淹没的受众争夺注意力。我希望我的新节目《美国真相》能有所不同。随着国家迈向2026年中期选举和十年来首次开放总统初选，这感觉像是一个正在发生变化的国家的新故事的开端。新兴社区、人工智能、快速变化的工作经济以及全球冲突风险等议题，本应在上一次总统大选中占据核心位置，但现在却无法再被忽视。我们正面临“我们希望成为怎样的国家？”这一问题，而回答它需要一种更关注复杂现实而非表面现象的新闻报道方式。在过去十年的政治报道中，我走访了30多个州，关注大小选举，希望实现这一目标。作为《纽约时报》的政治记者和播客《The Run-Up》的主持人，我致力于扩大对黑人选民、中西部居民和福音派群体的报道，这些群体我认为长期被忽视。我曾担任参议员伊丽莎白·沃伦和时任副总统卡玛拉·哈里斯竞选活动的首席记者，探讨代表性的价值与局限。我还专注于报道特朗普选民的趋势，通过参加集会或社区活动（如“特朗普伍德斯托克”或“查理·基尔的转折点”活动）直接倾听他们的声音。我发现了一个比人们通常认为更政治化的国家：工人阶级无需劳工统计局的最新数据便能察觉经济放缓，选民虽无法说出“选区划分”一词，却直觉地意识到国会已变得极端化。选民普遍认为，2024年拜登与特朗普再次对决的前景，反映出政治体系已完全脱离民众意愿。所谓“极化”的叙事源于将这些观点简单归类为“红队”和“蓝队”，但这并非固有的现象。我认为，将特朗普从政治讨论的核心移除，有助于更清晰地看到这一新的故事。我一直认为，尽管特朗普是独特的独裁式人物，但他利用了一个与大多数美国人关切脱节的政治体系，使其更容易被操控。只有将关注点从政客和精英媒体转向广大选民，我们才能更清楚地看到这种脱节。《美国真相》旨在展现这个国家意见的多样性。我去年加入Vox，是为了穿透噪音，放大政治报道通常忽略的声音，并帮助观众理解当今美国政治中真正重要的议题。通过这个新节目，我们希望每周探讨推动美国后特朗普时代发展的民众和思想，并为2028年大选做准备。我计划探讨的问题包括：反对伊朗战争的共和党派系有多大？日益加剧的社会孤立如何影响政治？这是否是首个黑人选民不再决定民主党初选结果的选举？美国公众对以色列日益消极的情绪将如何体现在投票中？在首期节目中，我们现在在YouTube和各大播客平台上线，民意调查专家奈特·西格尔和文化播客主持人猎人·哈里斯讨论了节目的核心问题——没有特朗普的政治节目是否可能？以及塑造我们后特朗普时代的政治与文化因素。之后，节目将邀请专家、政界人士和地方记者进行访谈，这些访谈将通过与“报告美国”（Report for America）的合作实现，该计划将新兴记者派驻全国各地新闻机构，报道被忽视的议题。我们的目标是建立一种新的理解方式，以反映特朗普时代扭曲的国家面貌。并非因为特朗普不反映我们的现状，而是因为政治体系本身具有扁平化倾向。尽管白宫可能不考虑公众意见进行治理，但候选人无法享有这种奢侈。美国公众已重新回到政治讨论的中心。2026年中期选举和2028年总统大选将迫使我们进行一次自特朗普十年来被回避的重置。最终，一个后特朗普时代将到来，让我们共同书写它。
The only people with worse poll numbers than President Donald Trump are the political media that cover him. We, the journalists, are in a crisis: of trust, relevance, and being swamped by an attention economy that will either replace us with Claude or an influencer. The skills of traditional reporting: storytelling, man-on-the-street interviews, even the language of “investigations,” are the template for the modern TikToker. But it’s the process of journalism — fact-checking, waiting for comment, leaning into nuance over sensationalism, or even leading with curiosity generally — that is growing to be a lonelier pursuit, competing for attention from an audience increasingly inundated by hot takes.
I”m hoping my new show, America, Actually, will be different. As the country marches toward the 2026 midterms and the first open presidential primary in a decade, it feels like the first steps of a new story for a changing nation. Emerging communities, artificial intelligence, a rapidly shifting work economy, and growing risk of global conflict — all things that should have been front and center in the last presidential election — can now no longer be ignored. The question of “who do we want to be?” is open, and answering it will require the type of journalism that prioritizes the messy over the clean.
In a decade in political journalism, I’ve gone to 30-plus states and followed elections big and small, in hopes of doing just that. As a political reporter and host of The Run-Up podcast at the New York Times, I sought to expand the Times’ coverage of Black voters, Midwesterners, and evangelicals — communities I felt confident were underrepresented. I was the lead reporter for the presidential campaigns of Sen. Elizabeth Warren and then-Vice President Kamala Harris, exploring the values and limits of representation. I found a niche doing trend stories about Trump voters, either by attending rallies or going to community events (like Trumpstock; “Woodstock for Trump fans,” or Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point events) to hear from his voters directly.
And what I found most was a country that was more politically attuned than it’s often given credit for. Working-class people who did not need the latest revised figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to know that the economy was slowing. Voters who could not name gerrymandering — but intuitively understood that Congress had grown more extreme than ever. An electorate that more or less agreed that the mere prospect of a Biden-Trump rematch in 2024 was a reflection of a political system that had become completely untethered from the desires of its citizenry. The whole narrative of “polarization” came from the process of sorting those views into Team Red and Team Blue. It was not inherent.
By removing Donald Trump from the center of the political discussion, I think it gives space to see that new story more clearly. I have always believed this president, while a uniquely authoritarian actor with unique electoral traits, has exploited a political system whose distance from the concerns of most Americans made it even more vulnerable for exploitation. And it’s only in flipping our focus, from the concerns of elected officials and the elite bubble of industry and media that follows them to the voters at large, that we political journalists see that distance most clearly.
America, Actually will seek to see the country for that diversity of opinion. I joined Vox last year because I want to cut through the noise, amplify voices that political journalism typically hasn’t amplified, and help audiences understand the issues that really matter in American politics today. With this new show, we want to create a weekly space to think about the people and ideas who are driving the country’s post-Trump future — and prepare us for the 2028 election along the way.
Some of the questions I want to explore include: How large is the wing of Republicans against the Iran war? What’s the impact of growing social isolation on politics, which has long been a community activity? Is this the first Democratic primary where the Black vote won’t be determinative? How will Americans’ souring mood on Israel manifest itself in votes? Will it?
In our first episode, out now on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts, pollster Nate Silver and culture podcaster Hunter Harris discuss the show’s premise — Is a politics show without Trump even possible? — and the political and cultural factors that will shape our post-Trump future. Later, the show will feature interviews with experts, elected officials, and local journalists, who will regularly appear on the podcast through a partnership with Report for America, the national service program that places emerging journalists into local newsrooms across the country to report on under-covered issues.
The goal is to model something different: a new way to understand a country that the Trump era has distorted. Not because this president doesn’t reflect who we are, but because the political system inherently flattens it. And while the White House may govern without public opinion in mind, candidates don’t have that luxury. The American public is back in the center of the conversation. The 2026 midterm elections, and the 2028 presidential election, will force a reset that’s been avoided since Trump came down that golden escalator more than a decade ago.
There will, eventually, be a post-Trump future. Let’s write it together.