2025-12-07 20:30:00
目前，数百万高中生正在完成大学申请，并期待着未来四年将在哪里学习和生活。如果以TikTok上最热门的大学标签为参考，很多学生可能会选择南方的大学。你可能听说过#RushTok，这是TikTok上一个专门展示南方大学女生在联谊会（sorority rush）期间活动的角落。阿拉巴马大学的联谊会选拔过程，也就是“Bama Rush”，因一部同名Netflix纪录片而进入主流视野，并似乎成为该校的招生工具。然而，南方校园生活的吸引力早已超越联谊会的范畴，越来越多的北方学生开始涌入南方的大型大学校园。
据《星期日泰晤士报》最近的报道，从2014年到2023年，加入东南联盟（SEC）学校（包括阿拉巴马大学、田纳西大学和奥尔默斯大学）的东北部本科生数量增长了91%。这些学校自2002年以来，东北部学生的数量增长超过500%。与此同时，这些公立学校也在加大对外州学生的招生力度，因为它们越来越依赖外州学生的学费收入。
这种招生趋势与过去十年中南方文化影响力的扩大相吻合，从乡村音乐到时尚，再到企业向红州迁移。因此，高等教育领域出现这一趋势并不令人意外。南方大学之所以更具吸引力，部分原因在于学费较低和气候宜人。但这也无法完全解释为何这些以体育和兄弟会闻名的大学突然变得像常春藤联盟一样有吸引力。
Kaley Mullin，文化相关性咨询公司Cool Shiny Insights的创始人表示：“年轻人越来越清楚上大学可能意味着数十年的贷款，因此他们更倾向于寻找乐趣、享受和社区感。”在TikTok时代，学生们更重视能够拍照、分享的校园体验，例如大型社交活动如橄榄球比赛和希腊生活。Z世代似乎更关注他们能在社交媒体上发布什么内容，以及能参与哪些热门标签，而不是他们简历上看起来最棒的成就。
尽管TikTok的影响力很大，但南方大学的社交氛围不仅仅是网络关注的问题。对于在疫情封锁中成长的一代年轻人来说，进入南方的大型州立大学可能是一种弥补失去时光的方式。此外，他们也希望通过这种方式在日益数字化的世界中找到更有意义的社交体验。
#RushTok的突然走红，似乎也与参与其中的女性形象有关——大多数是白人、金发、瘦削的女性，更可能出现在用户的For You页面上。这些TikTok用户通常会分享传统上被视为女性活动的内容，如为联谊会活动挑选服装，这些内容往往呈现出一种现代南方淑女的风格。Mullin表示，南方女性在公开展示女性特质和在社交媒体上分享这些内容方面，比北方女性更被社会接受。
至于北方女性是否会改变这些较为保守的传统，目前还不清楚。与此同时，无论他们被吸引的是橄榄球队、希腊生活还是大学本身，Z世代对SEC生活方式的兴趣与他们的消费习惯密切相关。与前几代人相比，他们从小就在品牌营销中成长，因此也更倾向于将大学视为一种品牌。
除了社交媒体影响力和校园文化之外，对于一些新生来说，南方大学的吸引力可能还源于经济因素。他们对未来经济状况的不确定性，促使他们更重视校园氛围而非学术严谨性。毕竟，在如今这个本科学位未必能带来职业成功的时代，他们可能更愿意花时间和金钱去享受大学生活，结交朋友。正如Mullin所说：“如果我要花很多钱和四年时间做一件事，而没有明确的回报，那我还不如去享受一下，交些朋友。”
Right now, millions of high school seniors are finalizing their college applications and anticipating where they’ll spend the next four years studying and sleeping on bunk beds. If the most hashtagged universities on TikTok are any indication, a lot of them will be headed below the Mason-Dixon line.
You’ve probably heard about #RushTok, the corner of TikTok where young women at mostly Southern schools post their way through sorority rush season. The University of Alabama’s sorority selection process, commonly known as Bama Rush, brought the phenomenon to the mainstream with an eponymous Netflix documentary and seemingly turned into a recruitment tool for the school itself. The draw of Southern campus life has spread well beyond the sorority set, however.
Northerners are flocking to big Southern campuses in large numbers. From 2014 to 2023, the number of undergraduate students from the Northeast rose 91 percent at schools belonging to the Southeastern Conference (SEC), according to a recent Sunday Times report. That includes Alabama as well as the University of Tennessee and Ole Miss, which have all seen the number of Northeastern students grow by more than 500 percent from 2002 to 2022. Meanwhile, their recruitment offices are making more of an effort to target these students, as these publicly funded schools become more dependent on out-of-state dollars.
The shift in enrollment lines up with a broader cultural shift over the past decade with the growing influence of Southern culture — everything from the popularity of country music to fashion to businesses moving to red states. So it’s not a huge surprise to see this trend in higher education. There are plenty of practical reasons why these schools have become more appealing, like lower tuition rates and warm weather. But it doesn’t fully explain why universities that have historically been famous for their sports teams and frat parties suddenly seem to have the aspirational sheen of the Ivy League.
“Young people are more aware that attending college will likely come with decades of student debt, so the mentality is trending towards one of fun, enjoyment, and community,” says Kaley Mullin, founder of cultural relevance consultancy Cool Shiny Insights.
In the TikTok era, students are prioritizing a more visual and shareable college experience, one that includes large-scale social activities, like football games and Greek life. Gen Z seems to be driven by what they can post on their social media feeds and which hashtags they can partake in rather than what looks most impressive on their resumes.
The social aspect of attending these colleges isn’t just about TikTok views and clout, though. For a group of young people who came of age during pandemic lockdowns, attending a big state school in the South might represent an attempt to retrieve the years they lost. It’s also, according to what they see online, a path to finding more meaningful social experiences in an increasingly online world.
Greek life at Southern state schools is a particular draw for students from the Northeast. These campuses have entire villages with mansions for fraternities and sororities as well as massive parties and events every week. And thanks to #RushTok, the fascination with Greek life has become an even bigger international cultural fascination.
There’s some evidence that #RushTok is making the Southern sorority experience more popular with American college students, too. The National Panhellenic Conference, the trade association for 26 sororities in North America, reported that there’s been a “13 percent increase in recruitment registration” in the past two academic years. Aspiring chapter members from big state schools across the country have gone extremely viral with dance videos, in particular — which have taken on a life of their own with conservative commentators. Politics notwithstanding, TikTok users end up elevating their favorites to influencer status every fall.
Mullin says that the TikTok component of SEC and their evolving appeal to Northerners is related to the “overall feminization of college in America,” as women outpace men in college enrollment.
“Online college content tends to be about showcasing the vibe and aesthetics of a school,” she says. “Painting with a broad brush, Southern women are better positioned to succeed in that.”
The sudden and largely unexplained popularity of #RushTok has been chalked up to the type of women involved — most of them white, blonde, thin and more likely to land on users’ For You pages. Of course, these TikTokers tend to post about traditionally feminine activities, like selecting their outfits for different rush week events, which often resemble a modern Southern belle aesthetic. Mullin says, broadly speaking, it’s “more socially acceptable for Southern women to publicly perform femininity and to post that demonstration online than for Northern women.”
It remains to be seen if the influx of Northern women will reshape these more conservative customs. Meanwhile, whether it’s due to #RushTok or their well-documented shift to the right, young men also seem drawn to the SEC lifestyle and the more traditional institutions that characterize it.
This is all a far cry from the public concerns surrounding sororities and fraternities in the 2010s, with movies and documentaries highlighting hazing and criticisms about racial exclusivity and traditional values among these groups. Cautionary tales about campus rape culture often centered around fraternities. Notoriously, Rolling Stone published a report in 2014 about an alleged gang rape by members of University of Virginia’s Phi Kappa Psi fraternity that made shock waves before it was eventually retracted and ruled as defamatory.
The stigma surrounding the unruliness of Greek life still lingers, but for Gen Z, the appeal of fraternities and sororities is more complicated. They aren’t necessarily drawn to the debauchery of this college culture for the same reasons as millennials were, according to Pietro Sasso, an associate professor at the University of Delaware who studies higher education. He says that the previous generation “mainly wanted to party,” but were also “attracted to the mysticism” around these secretive clubs. Gen Z, on the other hand, desires the visibility and virality that comes with being a part of a recognizable name.
“The 2010s was that Asher Roth, ‘I want a party’ era that was very reflective of millennials just wanting social experiences,” he says. “Gen Z wants that, but they want the visual pieces of it. They want to be seen and be tagged in pictures.”
Sports culture is another gravitational force for Northerners, especially because these SEC schools host Division I football teams that draw NFL-sized crowds. Their games, which are broadcast nationally, attract viewers from around the country. These live spectacles are another event that Gen Z can post on their feeds but also a fun experience that they can have in person, as they especially crave more live events. Plus, interest in sports has been on the rise for Gen Z over the past few years, whether through the influence of WAGs like Taylor Swift, betting, or national sports leagues making intentional efforts to recruit young fans.
Whether they’re attracted to football teams, Greek life, or the universities themselves, Sasso says Gen Z’s interest in the SEC lifestyle falls directly in line with their consumerist habits. More than previous generations, they’ve grown up with a heightened exposure to, and thus identification with, brands. It’s not surprising that they’ve also come to look at schools primarily as brands.
Social media clout and campus culture aside, the shift toward Southern schools might just come down to money for some incoming freshmen. Uncertainty about their economic futures seems to be influencing Gen Z’s decision-making and their tendency to prioritize vibes over academic rigor. After all, they’re going to college and searching for collective experiences in an era when getting a bachelor’s degree doesn’t guarantee professional success.
According to Mullin, “They’re thinking, ‘If I’m going to spend a bunch of money and the next four years of my life doing something without the promise of return on investment,’ I might as well have some fun and make some friends.”
2025-12-07 20:00:00
像Kalshi和Polymarket这样的预测市场正在迅速增长。Gabby Jones/Bloomberg via Getty Images 你认识的每个人即将开始将钱投在自己的观点上。预测市场正在蓬勃发展。可以把它们想象成股票市场，只不过不是购买公司的股份，而是购买现实世界事件结果的股份，你可以几乎对任何事情下注。目前领先的平台Kalshi和Polymarket允许你对从选举和战争结果到你所在城市明天的天气，甚至是年度最佳专辑的格莱美得主进行下注。这里没有庄家设定赔率，而是根据其他人的投注情况来决定价格。当投注结果确定时——比如PTA赢得奥斯卡奖——你就会得到相应的报酬。该行业最近迎来了最强劲的一段时期，仅在上个月，Kalshi和Polymarket就吸引了近100亿美元的投注。然而，随着体育博彩丑闻的增加，预测市场也面临着自身的道德审视。既然我们可以对任何事情下注——甚至是对政治——这是否意味着我们应该这样做？为了帮助我们探讨这个问题，Vox的Noel King采访了《纽约杂志》的技术专栏作家John Herrman。他解释了为什么这些市场让人感到不安，并讨论了它们可能如何为政治腐败打开新的机会，尤其是在特朗普政府时期（值得注意的是，Kalshi和Polymarket都聘请了特朗普之子唐纳德·特朗普 Jr. 作为顾问）。以下是他们对话的节选，内容经过删减和润色。完整播客内容更多，因此请在Apple Podcasts、Pandora和Spotify等平台收听Today, Explained。如果我们能接受对赛马和足球比赛下注，为什么对选举下注却让我们感到不适？回想一下在线体育博彩如何迅速占据体育媒体，早期也曾有很多人感到不安。这种不安可能花了五年才被打破，十年才完全消失。而当时我们只是在对比赛下注，这些比赛并不涉及生死，也不像现在在Polymarket或Kalshi上可以下注的那样，比如未来六个月将被驱逐出境的人数。将政治与金钱挂钩，这并不是人们想要的世界。更明显的是，这里存在巨大的腐败机会。如果我们考虑一下对总统选举下注可能带来的问题，最坏的情况会是什么？在最近的选举中，我们看到了一种完全不同的政治参与方式。一些人已经从民主程序中抽离出来，转而参与市场过程，这使得每个人变成了投机者，而不是选民。在一个人们只关心谁会赢的世界里，每个人不仅成为投机者，还成为评论员。这似乎让人们脱离了对世界产生巨大影响的决策过程，并可能用一种更抽象的方式参与政治，这在我看来是一种退出政治的表现。最糟糕的情况——让我想想，你是否觉得我太夸张了？有人如果某个候选人被暗杀就能赢1000万美元，这显然有巨大的动机去制造不良事件。实际上，预测市场的一个早期核心概念就是人们设想如何建立一个明确以暗杀市场为目的的预测市场。现在，这些实际平台都有禁止此类投注的规定。但在我们所处的世界中，有人可能会故意制造事件，以符合他们想要的Polymarket或Kalshi的投注结果。我认为我们最好为一个世界做好准备，就像体育已经几乎无法脱离赔率和投注结果来讨论一样，政治也可能会开始以这种方式被看待。我们之前做了一期关于体育博彩的节目，其中粉丝表示，当他们反复听到博彩丑闻时，对这项运动的信任开始下降。如果人们正在失去对体育的信任，那么如果开始对选举下注，也许在几年内我们就会看到人们对选举结果失去信心。这是否是一个合理的担忧？你提出的一些观点非常有趣。其中之一是，如果你支持的候选人输了选举，你可能会感到失望、害怕，或者担心未来。但这些感受与输掉大量赌注并不相同。它们不会以同样的方式让人感到羞辱，也不会让人与所投注的事物产生隔阂。这是一种新的政治参与方式。我不认为政治本身，尤其是美国的选举政治，是一个充满信任的环境。但如果人们对这个过程失去更多信任，那又意味着什么呢？我并不知道还能有多低。但看起来我们正在寻找一种方式，而有人可能因此赚了很多钱。我一生中看到政治领域的一个问题是，人们参与度不高。如果允许人们对选举下注，是否有可能让他们更加积极参与？我可以说，这有可能，但我不认为赌博本身是通向其他事物的门户。不过，我想强调的是，预测市场作为信息来源在世界上确实非常有趣且有用。我会为预测市场作为信息聚合器的潜力辩护，并认为它们也允许人们检查自己在投票和下注方面的立场。这些是互补的吗？还是彼此冲突？我认为它们有可能是冲突的。总统身边的人非常喜爱这些市场。唐纳德·特朗普 Jr. 正在为Kalshi和Polymarket提供建议。你认为预测市场在特朗普政府中会扮演什么角色？他们在这个政府中发挥作用意味着什么？我认为特朗普政府对非公开信息、交易、市场和腐败的态度是很多人关注的问题。因此，如果你来自一个拥有全球最多非公开重要信息的家庭，并且你正尽一切努力通过各种方式赚钱，那么这里就存在一种情况，即你可以合法地对一个你已知结果的事件下注。这本身就是一种优势。
Everyone you know is about to start putting their money where their mouth is.
Prediction markets are booming. Think of them as like a stock market, but instead of buying shares in companies, you buy shares in the outcomes of real-world events — and you can bet on almost anything. The top platforms, Kalshi and Polymarket, allow you to stake money on everything from the outcomes of elections and wars to the weather in your city tomorrow to who will win the Grammy for Album of the Year. There’s no bookie setting the odds — instead, the prices are set based on how other people have bet.
When the bet is settled — maybe PTA gets that Oscar win — you get paid.
The sector just had its strongest period yet, pulling in nearly $10 billion combined in bets on Kalshi and Polymarket last month. But at a time where sports betting scandals are on the rise, prediction markets are facing their own ethical reckoning. Just because we can bet on anything — even politics — does it mean we should?
To help us navigate that question, Vox’s Noel King spoke with John Herrman, a tech columnist at New York Magazine. He explained why these markets feel so unsettling and how they might open up new opportunities for political corruption, especially under the Trump administration (both Kalshi and Polymarket, notably, have enlisted Donald Trump Jr. as an adviser).
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 podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
If we’re ok with betting on horses and football games, why does betting on elections skeeve us out so much?
If we think back to the way that sports betting online took over sports media, there was a lot of squeamishness early on. That took maybe five years to break, and 10 years to be completely meaningless.
And that’s in a situation where we’re betting on games. We’re betting on things that aren’t life or death — that aren’t the types of things you can bet on now on Polymarket or Kalshi, like how many people will be deported in the next six months. And giving that to betting — it’s not the world that I think people would say they want. More obviously, you have just unbelievable opportunities for corruption here.
If we think about the ways in which betting on, say, a presidential election could go sideways, what is the worst-case scenario?
You have a vision in recent elections of a completely different type of engagement in politics. You have people who have basically removed themselves from the democratic process to engage instead in a market process — it turns everyone into a speculator rather than a voter.
A world in which people are just trying to figure out who’s going to win makes everyone into not just a speculator, but a pundit. It sort of takes them out of this decision that will have a massive effect on how the world works, and it potentially just replaces a lot of the also-problematic ways that they interact with elections and politics, through media and through social engagement, with something that is just reading the financial news or reading about options calls or something like that. It’s a completely abstract way to engage with politics and, to me, it represents kind of an exit from politics.
The dark scenario — here’s where my brain went, tell me if I’m being nuts. Someone has the opportunity to win $10 million if a candidate is assassinated. There’s an enormous incentive to do a very bad thing.
That’s actually one of the early foundational concepts of prediction markets, where people were imagining and contriving ways where a prediction market might be set up to function explicitly as an assassination market. Now, these actual platforms in the world have prohibitions on that. But I think it’s completely plausible in the world we live in that someone might manifest events in order to settle a Polymarket or a Kalshi bet in the way that they want.
We should probably prepare for a world where, much in the way that sports has become nearly impossible to follow or talk about without talking in this meta way about odds, betting outcomes, etc., politics will start to feel like that.
We just did an episode about sports betting, where fans are saying that when they learn about betting scandals again and again and again, their trust in the sport starts to erode. If people are losing trust in sports, it seems possible that, if we bet on elections, we could be looking within a couple of years at people losing faith in the outcome of elections. Is that a viable worry?
There are a couple really interesting things that you bring up there. One is that if your candidate, for example, loses an election, you might be crestfallen, you might be scared, you might be worried for the future. But none of those sensations are quite the same as losing a bunch of money on a bet. They’re not humiliating in the same way. They don’t alienate you from the thing that you’re betting on in the same way. That is a new flavor of interaction with politics.
I wouldn’t say that politics in general, and certainly American electoral politics, is a trust-rich environment. But losing even more trust in the process is — I mean, I don’t know how much lower you can go. But it seems like we’re trying to find a way, and someone is maybe making a lot of money on it.
One of the problems that we’ve seen in politics my entire lifetime is that people are not engaged. Is there a possible upside here, if we’re letting people bet on elections, that they become more engaged?
I could sort of see that, but I don’t think that gambling in general is the type of thing that is a gateway to other stuff.
But I do want to make sure that we mention here that prediction markets as an additional source of information in the world are really interesting and useful. I will make a case for prediction markets as good aggregators of information, and I think they also allow people to check out where you are, on one hand, voting, and on the other, betting. Are these things complementary? Or are they at odds with one another? And I think it’s very possible to imagine that they could be at odds.
The people who surround the president absolutely love this stuff. Donald Trump Jr. is advising both Kalshi and Polymarket. What role do you think prediction markets are going to play in this administration, and what do you think it means that they’re playing a role in this administration?
I do think that the Trump administration’s relationship to non-public information and trading and markets and corruption in general is something that a lot of people are concerned about. And so if you are in the family that has arguably more non-public important information than any other family in the world, and you are doing everything you can to make as much money as possible in a variety of ways, here is a situation where it’s basically not illegal to bet on something where you know the outcome. That’s just your advantage.
2025-12-06 21:30:00
我住在纽约市，这座城市自诩为许多方面的中心：世界金融中心、媒体中心，当然还有世界比萨饼中心。但我倾向于认为它还是另一个方面：世界零和中心，或者至少是美国的。在这里，生活的基本事实是，想要居住在这里的人比我们允许存在的住房数量要多得多。纽约人谈论公寓、优质学校、优质餐厅的争夺，就像在谈论一场霍布斯式的“所有人对所有人的战争”。其实，不只是纽约，一旦你开始寻找这种直觉，就会发现它无处不在。从关于移民的争论（“他们抢走了我们的工作”）、住房问题（“我们已经住满了”）、大学录取、文化战争中谁被“取代”或“取消”的争论，背后都呈现出同样的图景：如果某一群体获得好处，那么另一群体就必须吃亏。社会科学家称这种思维为“零和思维”，即认为一个人或群体的收益通常是以他人的损失为代价的。现在有越来越多的证据表明，这种思维已经成为美国政治冲突的潜在推动力之一。这听起来像是个坏消息，但更积极的解读是：零和思维并不是人类天性中固定的一部分。它会随着增长、更好的制度以及我们对经济的叙述而变化。而目前，我们对经济的叙述过于零和了。
我们从小就在一个零和的世界中长大。但后来发生了一些奇怪的事情。在某种程度上，零和思维是可以理解的。在人类历史的大部分时间里，这种思维基本上是正确的，如下面的图表所示。人类学家乔治·福斯特认为，许多农民社区都是围绕“有限资源”的观念组织起来的：土地、财富、地位，甚至好运都被认为是固定数量的，因此一个人的收益往往意味着另一个人的损失。过去两个世纪的工业化和技术革新打破了这种逻辑；历史上第一次，大规模社会可以随着时间变得越来越富裕，大多数人生活水平都能同时提高。2015年，研究者乔安娜·罗齐卡-特兰及其同事开发了一种名为“零和游戏信念”的量表，并在37个国家进行了调查。他们发现，不同社会对零和思维的认同程度差异很大：有些社会强烈认同社会生活是零和的，而有些则不太认同。零和得分较高的地区往往出现在像安哥拉或墨西哥这样的国家，这些国家有冲突、不稳定和低增长的历史——在这种条件下，世界确实感觉像一个固定的蛋糕。
但在美国，这个世界上最富裕的国家，情况又如何呢？经济学家萨希尔·奇诺伊和他的同事最近发表了一篇论文，试图衡量当今美国的零和思维，并将其与政治联系起来。他们对超过2万名美国人进行了调查，询问他们对诸如“在经济中，当一些人变得富有时，一定是以他人的损失为代价”这类陈述的认同程度。从他们的数据中可以发现几个关键模式。零和信念在不同主题上保持一致：那些认为种族关系是零和的人，也倾向于认为经济竞争和移民是零和的，这表明这是一种普遍的世界观，而不是对某个具体问题的狭隘看法。在零和思维得分较高的人群中，即使考虑到他们在传统左翼或右翼意识形态光谱中的位置，他们也更支持再分配和肯定性行动，同时对移民等政策更加怀疑。当作者比较不同国家时，他们发现那些在18到25岁之间经历了更快经济增长的人，几十年后零和思维的程度显著降低——这表明在丰裕或匮乏的环境中成长，会对人们如何看待政治和经济产生持久影响。而且，这种趋势似乎正在加剧。心理学家沙伊·大卫艾最近进行了10项研究，涉及超过3600名参与者，发现当人们认为经济不平等程度高时，比如在纽约市，他们更可能将成功视为零和。所有这些现象都被“氛围衰退”（vibecession）所放大：多年关于经济危机的报道叠加在住房、育儿和地位竞争等现实问题上，让人们感觉资源是固定或减少的。因此，人们很容易将经济视为“谁抢走了我的那一份”而不是“我们如何扩大蛋糕”。
零和思维对经济和公平都不利。零和思维似乎与平等主义政治相辅相成。如果你认为富人变富是因为从其他人那里拿走资源，你可能更愿意支持税收和再分配。数据也支持这一点：零和思维更强的人更支持经济和权力的再分配。然而，同时这些人的移民态度和其他一些政策（如自由贸易）也更消极。这可能是零和思维政治的最大危险：它鼓励我们争夺现有资源的分配，而忽视了那些能扩大资源的政策。如果你坚信蛋糕是固定的，你就会抵制移民，阻止新建住房，把技术进步视为威胁，而不是资源增长的来源——即使这些变化正是创造更多机会的关键。在一个真正停滞、低增长的世界里，这种思维可能是理性的。但我们现在正站在一个技术革命的边缘，从人工智能到廉价清洁能源，这些技术可能大幅扩大蛋糕的规模。然而，如果我们仍用零和的视角看待未来，那就像是继承了一家披萨店，却只用来争论昨天最后一片披萨。我们需要更多的蛋糕！
解决之道在于增长。目前，美国正陷入一场可负担性危机。尽管我们的“可负担”概念随着价格和工资的上涨而膨胀，但愤怒是真实的，而哪个政党能最好地抓住这一议题，就可能在11月的选举中获胜。但我们要认识到，所谓的可负担性危机其实是一场增长危机。不是狭义上的GDP增长停滞（GDP其实是在增长的），而是人们最关心的生活领域——住房、育儿、医疗和大学教育——是我们最缺乏供应和生产率提升的领域。当然，如果人们最需要的东西被限制而非扩大，他们就会倾向于零和思维。这就是为什么增长比季度GDP数字更重要。当社会真正实现持续、广泛的生活水平提升时，人们会从经验中认识到，多个群体可以同时前进。那些在增长时期成长的一代，几十年后确实更少零和思维。增长不会神奇地消除不平等或地位竞争，但它为政治提供了更大的空间。一个能建造更多住房、利用技术让基本生活用品更便宜而不是更炫酷、将移民和创新视为扩大蛋糕而非重新分配蛋糕的国家，才是零和思维逐渐失去控制的国家。纽约可能永远都会让人感觉像零和世界的中心；这就是为什么如果你能在这里成功，你就能在任何地方成功。但如果我们可以认识到，这种稀缺感是人为造成的，那么想象一种以增加蛋糕切片而不是争夺最后一片为特征的政治就变得更容易了。
I live in New York City, which fashions itself as many things: the financial capital of the world, the media capital of the world, and obviously, the bagel capital of the world. But I like to think of it as something else as well: the zero-sum capital of the world. Or at least, the US.
The essential fact of life here is that more people want to live in New York than there are homes that we allow to exist. New Yorkers talk about the competition for apartments — or for slots in decent schools or tables at decent restaurants or virtually anything save tickets to your friend’s improv show — as if it is a Hobbesian war of all against all.
It’s not just New York. Once you start looking for that intuition, you see it everywhere. In arguments about immigration (“they’re taking our jobs”), housing (“we’re full”), college admissions, culture war skirmishes over who gets “replaced” and who gets “canceled,” the underlying picture is the same: If some group advances, someone else has to lose.
Social scientists have a name for this: zero-sum thinking, which is the belief that when one individual or group gains, it’s usually coming at the expense of others. There’s growing evidence that this mindset is now one of the quiet engines of political conflict in the US.
That sounds like bad news. But there’s a more hopeful way to read this research: Zero-sum thinking is not a fixed feature of human nature. It responds to growth, to better institutions, and to the stories we tell about the economy.
And right now, our stories are more zero-sum than they should be.
At some level, zero-sum thinking is understandable. For most of human history, it was basically correct, as the chart below demonstrates.
Anthropologist George Foster argued that many peasant communities were organized around an “image of limited good”: land, wealth, status, even good luck were assumed to exist in fixed amounts, so any gain for one person was understood as a loss for someone else. The last two centuries of industrialization and technological innovation broke that logic; for the first time in history, large societies could become much richer over time, and most people’s material standard of living could rise together.
In 2015, researcher Joanna Różycka-Tran and her colleagues developed a scale called “Belief in a Zero-Sum Game,” and administered it in 37 countries. They found big variation: Some societies strongly endorse the idea that social life is win-lose, others much less so. High zero-sum scores tend to show up in places like Angola or Mexico with histories of conflict, instability, and low growth — the kinds of conditions where the world really does feel like a fixed pie.
But what about the US, the richest country to ever exist? A recent paper by economists Sahil Chinoy and his colleagues tries to measure zero-sum thinking in the US today and link it to politics. They surveyed more than 20,000 Americans, asking how strongly they agreed with statements like “In the economy, when some people become rich, it must be at the expense of others.”
A few key patterns jump out from their data. Zero-sum beliefs tend to stay consistent across different subjects: people who see race relations as zero-sum also tend to see economic competition and immigration that way, suggesting this is more of a general worldview than a narrow, considered opinion on any one issue. Respondents who score higher on zero-sum thinking are more supportive of redistribution and affirmative action and more skeptical of immigration, even after you account for where they fall on the usual left-right ideological spectrum.
When the authors look across countries, they find that people who experienced faster economic growth between ages 18 and 25 are significantly less zero-sum decades later — a hint that maturing in an era of abundance, or the lack of it, leaves a lasting mark on how we think politics and the economy work. And that share appears to be growing.
Psychologist Shai Davidai recently ran 10 studies with more than 3,600 participants and found that when people perceive economic inequality as high — when the gap between rich and poor feels large, like, I don’t know, in New York City — they become more likely to see success as zero-sum.
All this gets multiplied by living through a “vibecession”: years of headlines about economic crises layered on top of real problems in housing, childcare, and status competition for what feels like a fixed or shrinking number of elite slots. It’s not hard to see how you get a generation that experiences the economy less as “how do we grow the pie?” and more as “which group stole my slice?”
Zero-sum thinking seems like it should go hand-in-hand with egalitarian politics. If you believe the rich got rich by taking from everyone else, you’re probably more open to taxes and redistribution. And the data suggests that’s broadly true: More zero-sum respondents are more supportive of economic and power redistribution.
At the same time, however, many of the same respondents are more skeptical of immigration and other policies that economists see as pro-growth, like free trade. That may be the biggest danger of a politics that leans too hard on zero-sum intuitions: it encourages us to fight over the division of the current pie at the expense of policies that would expand it.
If you’re convinced the pie is fixed, you’ll resist immigration, block new housing, and treat technological progress as a threat rather than a source of abundance — even when those are exactly the changes that would create more opportunity for everyone.
In a genuinely stagnant, low-growth world, this might be rational. But we are on the cusp of technologies — from AI to cheap clean energy — that could dramatically increase the size of the pie. Seeing that future through a zero-sum lens is like inheriting a pizza place and using it only to argue over the last slice of yesterday’s pie. You need more pie!
Right now — as you will read again and again and again — America is in the grip of an affordability crisis. Putting aside the fact that our idea of what we should be able to “afford” has inflated along with prices and wages over the years, there’s no doubt that the anger is very real, and that whichever party can best seize on the issue stands to win next November.
But what we think of as an affordability crisis is really a growth crisis. Not in the narrow sense that GDP isn’t ticking up — it is — but in the sense that the parts of life people most viscerally care about, like housing and childcare and health care and college, are the parts where we’ve done the least to increase supply and productivity. Of course people start to think in zero-sum terms if the things they need most are rationed rather than expanded.
That’s why growth matters so much more than a quarterly GDP number. When societies actually deliver sustained, broad-based gains in living standards, people learn, from experience, that it is possible for many groups to move forward at once. Generations that came of age in eras of strong growth really are less zero-sum decades late. Growth doesn’t magically erase inequality or status competition, but it gives politics room to breathe.
A country that builds more housing, that uses technology to make essentials cheaper instead of just shinier, that treats immigration and innovation as ways to enlarge the pie rather than carve it up differently, is a country where zero-sum thinking slowly loses its grip.
New York will probably always feel a little like the zero-sum capital of the world; that’s why if you make it here, you can make it anywhere. But if we can recognize how much of that scarcity is manmade, the easier it becomes to imagine a politics organized around adding slices to the pie, not just fighting over the last piece.
This series was supported by a grant from Arnold Ventures. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
2025-12-06 21:00:00
朱莉娅·布克利饰演阿格妮丝，保罗·麦斯卡饰演威廉·莎士比亚，导演赵婷的电影《汉密特》围绕莎士比亚儿子的死亡和《哈姆雷特》的创作展开。自今年电影节上映以来，这部电影就一直是奥斯卡的热门候选。然而，随着它在感恩节期间进入主流影院，人们开始质疑：这部电影是否是对悲伤和艺术力量的深刻反思？还是过于煽情和肤浅的“悲伤商品”？一些观众在影院中因强烈的情感而流泪，这使评论家们既感动又怀疑。《纽约客》的朱斯汀·钱格在评论中写道：“《汉密特》让人感受到原始的力量，但它是否只是高度有效的悲伤商品？”他承认自己在观看时“被泪水模糊了双眼，这些泪水既冲淡了我的怀疑，也重新唤起它。”《纽约时报》的艾莉莎·威尔金森则称《汉密特》“充满激情和情感，令人震撼”。但她的评价也带有一丝保留：“这种强烈的情感有时难以驾驭，容易陷入感伤。在某些地方，赵婷似乎无法或不愿控制这种情绪，一些镜头或导演手法显得过于矫情。”
《汉密特》的巨大情感力量，部分源于它将角色视为象征而非个体。赵婷曾表示，她试图在电影中探索阴阳平衡，而《汉密特》也不例外。她告诉《华盛顿邮报》：“整个故事都围绕着无法调和的两极之间的张力展开，比如生命与死亡、存在与不存在。”赵婷还提到，她最近的电影旨在唤醒“一种被我们的文明压抑了数万年的女性意识”，而《汉密特》中的阿格妮丝（莎士比亚的妻子）正是这种意识的象征。她被描绘成一个森林女巫的女儿，与自然、情感和魔法紧密相连。而威廉（莎士比亚，但直到后期才被称作“威廉”）则代表了城市、艺术和文明。他将情感隐藏在眼睛之后，通过诗歌表达。阿格妮丝将他送往伦敦追求诗歌梦想，而自己则留在乡村，与森林保持联系。这种象征性的对比使角色的情感显得深刻而原始。
然而，这种象征性有时也让角色显得不够真实。他们的经历被描绘得过于宏大，细节则被忽略。电影中最令人动容的场景是汉密特在母亲怀中痛苦死去，这一幕过于直白，让人感觉像是“作弊”。当然，看到一个孩子在痛苦中死去，看到母亲因悲伤而尖叫，任何人都会感动。但这种感动是否真的来自艺术？还是仅仅因为人类对死亡的本能反应？
《哈姆雷特》本身也探讨了悲伤的表现方式。剧中，哈姆雷特的母亲格特鲁德劝他不要过度悲伤，因为每个人的父亲都会死去。哈姆雷特反驳说，他不是在表演，而是真实地表达痛苦。他说：“但我在内心深处拥有这一切，这些只是悲伤的外在表现。”然而，随着剧情发展，哈姆雷特不断质疑自己是否以正确的方式哀悼，是否过于激烈或不够。他指责格特鲁德在父亲死后一个月就与叔叔结婚，认为她不道德。他还雇佣演员表演一段哀悼独白，却对演员的出色表现感到愤怒。他无法理解，为何演员能为虚构的悲伤哭泣，而自己却无法为真实的痛苦采取行动。
《哈姆雷特》的复杂之处在于，它并不直接回答这些问题，而是让观众自行思考。而赵婷的《汉密特》则试图通过将个人与普遍情感结合，来表达悲伤的普遍性。然而，这种结合有时显得不够自然，甚至产生冲突。电影结尾，阿格妮丝在伦敦观看《哈姆雷特》演出，最终被感动落泪。她伸出手与扮演哈姆雷特的演员握手，而观众也纷纷效仿。这一幕象征着艺术对悲伤的治愈力量，但也让观众感到困惑：为何《汉密特》和《哈姆雷特》这两种截然不同的艺术形式，会让人产生如此强烈的共鸣？它们各自的情感表达方式是否过于极端，以至于彼此之间难以调和？
赵婷的电影似乎在表达，只有当阿格妮丝完全投入《哈姆雷特》时，她才能真正从儿子的死亡中获得救赎。而《哈姆雷特》本身也因其深邃的艺术性和悠久的影响力，能够承受观众的质疑。但《汉密特》作为一部新作，因其直白的情感表达而显得脆弱。它所有的力量都来自于对悲伤的强烈呈现，一旦观众不再相信它，它的艺术价值就会大打折扣。尽管如此，我仍然认为《汉密特》不应因其情感力量而被排除在伟大艺术之外。
Chloé Zhao’s lyrical, elegiac new film Hamnet, based on the novel by Maggie O’Farrell, has been an Oscars frontrunner since its festival release earlier this year. But as it made its way to mainstream theaters over Thanksgiving week, a new narrative emerged with a central question: Is this film, built around the harrowing death of Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son and the writing of Hamlet, a moving meditation on grief and the power of art to help us process it? Or is it hokey and manipulative schlock?
There is something about the sheer force of emotion Hamnet evokes, in its theaters full of weeping audiences, that seems to make critics as suspicious as they are moved.
“‘Hamnet’ Feels Elemental,” went the headline of Justin Chang’s New Yorker review, “But Is It Just Highly Effective Grief Porn?” In the review itself, Chang confessed he watched the movie with eyes “blurred by tears, brought on with such diluvial force as to both quench my skepticism and reawaken it.”
In the New York Times, former Vox-er Alissa Wilkinson describes Hamnet as “ardent and searing and brimming with emotion.” The praise comes with a caveat: “That amount of heat can be tough to handle without veering into sentimentality. In a few places Zhao can’t, or won’t, keep it under control. …The parts of the film that feel beautifully full to overflowing are undercut, occasionally, by feelings of just a little too much, a shot or directorial choice that’s just a tad too precious.”
Shakespeare borrowed the plot for Hamlet from other sources, as he did with most of his plays. But he made one big change. In the source material for Hamlet, the melancholy Dane has a great reason for pretending to be mad. He’s a child when the story begins, and he has to hide out in his murderous uncle’s court until he’s big and strong enough to take his enemy down. He pretends to be crazy for years as a long game, so his uncle will think he isn’t a threat and spare his life.
As the Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt lays out, Shakespeare simply trashed that straightforward plot. Shakespeare’s Hamlet has no good reason to pose as a madman. His motives are opaque, apparently as much to himself as they are to us. It’s that very mystery that makes Hamlet such a profoundly complex figure. By destroying the story, Shakespeare created an indelible character.
When I saw Hamnet, the audience was audibly sobbing at more than one scene. I was sobbing myself. I felt emotionally drained, as though I had been dragged through some profound catharsis. Yet I also found myself a little leery of such a physical, overwhelming response. I wasn’t sure whether what I was seeing was moving me in a complex, productive way, or whether it was just playing a clumsy tune on the horrible human fact that I have seen death, as we all eventually will.
More broadly, the question I had was: Can we trust grief when it is shown to us in such a bare, raw fashion? Does seeing mourning unadorned give us anything?
Ironically, this question is at the heart of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a play obsessed with whether over-the-top expressions of grief are authentic or manipulative.
At stake for both Hamlet and for the Hamnet debate are fundamental questions about how we deal with the problem of death and why humans need art. How and why does art move us? When it shows us grief, what do we get out of it? What does it take for the art to be good?
Part of the enormous power of Hamnet, and part of what can also make it feel a little fake, is that it treats its characters more as archetypes than as individuals.
Zhao has spoken extensively about her interest in exploring a yin-yang balance in her films, and Hamnet is no exception. “The whole story is about existing in the tension between impossible polarities,” she told the Washington Post in November. “Life and death. To be or not to be. Grief keeps you in the past, but time is pulling you forward.” In her most recent films, Zhao has set herself the challenge, she says, of reviving “this feminine consciousness that I think has been destroyed in our civilization for tens of thousands of years, and that is very suppressed in myself because it doesn’t feel safe to bring out in the world.”
In Hamnet, the feminine consciousness is symbolized by Agnes Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife. (We usually call her Anne today, but in Shakespeare’s day names weren’t standardized the way they are now — hence Hamnet and Hamlet, which an introductory text informs us were considered the same name in the 16th century.) Played with unnerving intensity by Jessie Buckley, Agnes is the daughter of a forest witch. We see her nestled among enormous mossy tree roots that drip vaginally with dew; we watch her tame a ferocious hawk and teach her children secret herb lore. When her children are in trouble — and as Hamnet goes on, Agnes’s children seem to be always in danger — she screams with a profound, elemental force, as though she is dragging the screams up out of the ground and through her body.
Agnes represents what is feminine, earthy, emotional, and nourishing. In contrast, Will (Shakespeare, but he is not named as such until late) is masculine, urban, intellectual, refined. As played by Paul Mescal, he keeps his emotions trapped behind his eyes, channeling them out into his poetry. Agnes sends him off to London so he can reach his potential as a poet, but she stays in small-town Stratford, where she can be connected to the forest. He is the city, art, and civilization; she is nature, wildness, and magic.
The symbolic associations here can make the emotional life of the characters feel profound, primal. When they first meet, and Will is so overcome he taps the iambic pentameter of love sonnets out against his beating heart, they are all young lovers beginning to court. When they grieve, they are all of us grieving. That’s why Agnes screams that way; that’s why the mourning poetry Will writes can still move us.
Yet characters who carry so much symbolic meaning sometimes have trouble feeling like their own real individual people. Everything that happens to them has to be painted with such a broad brush. The small intangible details seem to dissolve.
The part of the movie that makes everyone cry hardest comes when Hamnet dies in his mother’s arms, writhing in agony, a victim of the plague. His death is shown to us so nakedly that it feels something like cheating. Of course it makes you cry to see a child die in horrible pain. Of course it makes you cry to see his mother scream out her grief. Why wouldn’t it? Who wouldn’t cry? Where’s the art in that?
Then, too, there is something close to kitsch in the film’s final scene, which shows us Agnes finally seeing Hamlet, four years after the death of her son, and seeing how it allows both her and Will to grieve.
On the one hand: how monumental. What a testament to the power of art to help us work through the monstrous human problem of grief, and all the other emotions that feel too big to fit in our little bodies.
On the other hand: how vulgar, to treat a play as big and complicated as Hamlet as something utilitarian, a prop to emotional catharsis, an aesthetically pleasing antidepressant. Isn’t it bigger than that?
But after all, what’s bigger than grief?
The question of what grief should look like, and whether it’s wrong to represent it as too big, is one that Hamlet is profoundly invested in.
Early on in the play, Hamlet’s mother Gertrude tells him that he should stop mourning so intensely over his father’s death. Doesn’t he know, after all, that everyone’s father dies? Why is he acting as though his loss alone is so special?
Hamlet protests in response that he isn’t acting. Dressing in black and crying all the time are the kinds of things anyone would do if they were acting, he acknowledges, but he happens to be telling the truth. “But I have that within which passes show,” he says, “These but the trappings and the suits of woe.”
All the same, as the play goes on, Hamlet comes back again and again to the idea that there is a right and a wrong way to grieve, and that someone, maybe him, is doing it wrong. They are doing too much, or perhaps not enough.
Hamlet declares Gertrude to be wicked for not waiting more than a month to marry her dead husband’s brother. He hires actors to recite a mourning monologue, and then gets angry when they do too good a job: How is it possible that the actors should be able to cry over made-up grief, while Hamlet cannot even work himself up into committing a murder over his own grief? When he sees Ophelia’s brother Laertes climbing into her grave with her, Hamlet accuses Laertes of not caring as much as Hamlet does. He would eat a crocodile for Ophelia, and he doesn’t think that Laertes would do the same.
It’s not always entirely clear whether Hamlet is telling the truth about his grief to us in the audience, either. He tells us that he is entirely sane and sensible in his sorrow, and that when he starts to act mad, he’s faking it. But sometimes it seems as though Hamlet is not as sane as he tells us he is, as though his grief has become too big for his mind to hold.
We never get a straight answer from the play on any of this: whether Hamlet is really mad, why he takes so long to try to enact his revenge for his father’s murder, if he’s mourning the correct way. Hamlet isn’t the kind of play that answers the questions that it asks. In part, that’s because where Zhao’s characters are archetypes, Shakespeare’s are profoundly, horribly individual.
Hamlet is such a precisely rendered character portrait that it changed the way we think about human personality. It is the first great Western work of art to posit the self as something incoherent, inchoate, fragmented, and contradictory, all the psychological forces that the Greeks saw as externalized gods now rendered part of Hamlet’s stormy interior world. Hamlet is all of us grieving because he is so precisely himself, grieving in so many multiplicitous ways.
Part of the disconnect that critics are observing when they look at the difference between Hamlet and Hamnet is the difference between a work of art that finds the universal in the personal, and a work of art that aims to find the personal within the universal. It’s the difference between a scalpel and a sledgehammer.
In Hamnet’s final sequence, Agnes travels out of Stratford to London and sees one of Will’s plays for the first time: Hamlet. When she walks into the theater, she is outraged, betrayed by the idea that Will has taken their son’s death and turned it into a display for so many people. Yet as the play goes on, she succumbs to it, at last dissolving into tears.
When I saw Hamnet, I found myself feeling oddly embarrassed by this sequence. I love Hamlet, yet everything about it felt so heightened, so mannered, next to the brutal simplicity of watching a middle-class child die of a very common illness. All those highfalutin royals, the duels, the poison. The tonal shift was so intense I found it difficult to surrender myself to the play, in the same way it seemed to be difficult for Agnes to allow herself to do so at first.
Eventually, like Agnes, I was able to give myself over to the play. But once I had, I found myself embarrassed by Agnes, too. Hamlet is so playful, so provocative. Agnes suddenly felt like a character from a clumsier, clunkier universe. I could not make them both exist fully in my mind at the same time.
Zhao’s idea seems to be that the full redemption of Hamnet’s death comes only after Agnes fully gives in to the play, and then adds to it: She looks up at the actor playing Hamlet as he approaches his death, and she reaches out and takes his hand. And then the audience around her, all of them weeping, reach out to take his hand, too.
He gazes back at them, moved, redeemed. “The rest is silence,” he says.
The play, we see, has healed something in Agnes, something that was broken by the death of her son Hamnet, and it has healed some sort of grief in the rest of the play’s audience, too. But Agnes has in turn given something else to the play — something feminine and otherworldly that the classical masculine structure of the play could never achieve without her. Through her, the individual and the universal reach out and touch.
To the extent that the moment works, it does so because Hamnet and Hamlet are both such emotionally intense experiences: You can feel grief responding to aching grief, just as Zhao planned.
But both Hamnet and Hamlet are also so thoroughly themselves, and they exist in such separate aesthetic universes, that it can feel as though they each lose something when they come together.
That is one of Hamlet’s great insights: that we are suspicious of the grief of other people, that it can feel false and overstated when we compare it with our own terrible suffering. Art is a technology for bridging the gap between our experience of our own grief and of other people’s — one that helps break down that suspicion. It makes us feel Agnes’s anguish and Hamlet’s melancholy as though they are our own. Putting the two next to each other, though, creates a tonal clash that brings our natural suspicion back into play. It makes it hard to avoid wondering if there isn’t something wrong with the way either Hamlet or Hamnet shows us grief, if Hamlet isn’t too esoteric or Hamnet isn’t too crass and blunt.
Hamlet, with its immense artistry and its centuries-long legacy, is strong enough to withstand those moments of skepticism. But Hamnet is so new and so plain-spoken that it wavers under the weight of it. All of the film’s power and energy is brought to bear through the sheer force of its pain, so that it has very little left to offer if its audience ceases to believe in it.
I don’t know if Hamnet is great art. I am too close to it to tell. But despite its weaknesses, I don’t think that it is disqualified from that title by its emotional force.
2025-12-06 19:00:00
2025年10月29日，美国总统唐纳德·特朗普在韩国庆州国立博物馆的仪式上，接受了韩国总统李在明赠送的古代新罗国王所戴王冠的复制品。特朗普曾多次在社交媒体上自称“国王”，并发布AI生成的自己戴王冠的照片。尽管这并非真正的王权，但两位政治学者认为，若想理解特朗普政府常常难以预测的外交政策，或许可以将其视为一种“新君主主义”（neo-royalism）。
“新君主主义”这一概念由斯蒂西·戈达德（Stacie Goddard）和亚伯拉罕·纽曼（Abraham Newman）提出，他们认为特朗普政府的行为方式更接近于中世纪欧洲的君主制，而非现代国家体系。这种模式的特点包括：将私人企业与外交政策结合，通过家族成员和旧有商业伙伴进行谈判，而非依赖传统官僚体系；同时，通过削弱较弱国家的主权来维护全球等级秩序。
特朗普并非第一个表现出这种行为模式的现代领导人，但鉴于美国在全球体系中的重要性，他有能力塑造国际秩序，并使这种政治模式成为常态。例如，俄罗斯代表在试图说服美国接受其对乌克兰的和平计划时，就试图绕过传统的美国国家安全体系，强调俄罗斯作为能源、稀土交易和太空探索等领域的“机会之地”。
此外，特朗普政府在外交政策中频繁将家族商业利益与国家事务交织，如在与越南的贸易谈判中批准特朗普高尔夫球场，或其子女在中东的房地产交易。在埃及一次聚焦加沙的峰会上，印尼总统曾要求与特朗普的儿子埃里克会面，而特朗普则提议将被清洗的加沙地区改造成海滩度假胜地，这正是新君主主义的体现。
特朗普对“威斯特伐利亚主权”（即所有国家主权平等）的概念也持轻视态度。他认为某些国家的主权高于其他国家，例如他提到购买格陵兰或让加拿大成为美国第51个州，这些并非传统意义上的领土扩张，而是强调对其他国家的支配地位。
特朗普的政策工具，如关税，也符合新君主主义的逻辑。通过“解放日”关税和“90天内达成90项协议”的承诺，美国要求其他国家以投资承诺换取更有利的贸易条件，而这些投资往往惠及特朗普的亲信。例如，美国商务部部长霍华德·卢特尼克的儿子们正在协助韩国在美国投资的数据中心项目。
各国还向特朗普赠送了象征性的礼物，如韩国的王冠、瑞士的金条和劳力士手表，以及卡塔尔的喷气式飞机。尽管这些礼物引发了道德争议，但特朗普似乎并不在意，甚至表示自己“愚蠢”才会拒绝如此昂贵的飞机。
两位学者指出，特朗普的“新君主主义”并非孤立现象。例如，意大利前总理西尔维奥·贝卢斯科尼曾依赖专属媒体和金融圈子巩固权力，而俄罗斯的权力集团也常被比作沙皇时代的宫廷。然而，特朗普的圈子之所以独特，是因为美国的经济和军事实力使其有能力重塑国际秩序，而这些改变一旦形成，将难以逆转。
例如，特朗普政府已部分收购英特尔，并从美国对华销售AI芯片中获利。他经常带着科技巨头如埃隆·马斯克和英伟达的黄仁勋出访，将美国的外交影响力与商业利益紧密结合。戈达德表示，这种做法起初可能不被重视，但随着时间推移，会逐渐成为国际关系的常态，并建立相应的基础设施，如沙特的数据中心和美国的F-35战机，这些都难以轻易撤回。
如果这种模式不被逆转，未来可能会面临国际秩序的动荡。纽曼认为，当特朗普卸任时，这不会是终点，而可能成为国际危机的时刻。因此，或许我们都需要重新学习一下马基雅维利的智慧。
It was not a particularly subtle gift, but as the recipient himself would probably admit, he’s never been a particularly subtle guy.
When President Donald Trump arrived in South Korea last month, President Lee Jae Myung presented him with a bejewelled golden crown, a replica of one worn by ancient Korean rulers. The gift came just a few days after millions across the US for the so-called No Kings rallies against Trump’s government. Trump has, in the past year, referred to himself as “the king” on social media and posted AI-generated images of himself wearing a crown.
This is all hyperbole, of course. Trump is not a king. But if you want to understand this administration’s often unpredictable foreign policy, it might be useful to think of him as one sometimes.
That’s what two political scientists argued in a recent article for the journal International Organization. Stacie Goddard and Abraham Newman coined the term “neo-royalism” to describe how the Trump administration behaves on the world stage.
This is not just another argument that Trump is an authoritarian — the article isn’t concerned with Trump’s domestic governance at all.
Rather, they argue that the traditional methods of studying international relations, which assume that sovereign nation-states are the primary actors on the world stage, are inadequate when it comes to talking about an administration that acts in often puzzling ways from a traditional international relations perspective, for instance by ratcheting up pressure on allies like Canada and Denmark while seeking deals with adversaries like China and Russia.
Instead, they argue, Trump’s reliance on a “clique composed of family members (primarily his children), fierce loyalists (Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem), and elite hyper-capitalists (often tech elites like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen).” The clique tends to mix private interest and national interests in an open and unashamed way that’s totally alien to modern state bureaucracies.
Other countries have taken advantage of this tendency: The Wall Street Journal recently reported that as it seeks to sell the White House on its preferred peace plan for Ukraine, Russian representatives have been looking to “bypass the traditional U.S. national security apparatus and convince the administration to view Russia not as a military threat but as a land of bountiful opportunity” involving energy, rare earth deals and even space exploration. It’s not the hardest sell for a president who, back in the 1980s, tried to sell Soviet leaders on a plan to end the Cold War while building a Trump tower across the street from the Kremlin.
“It’s misleading if you think of it just as corruption or just a degenerate category of neoliberalism,” Newman, a political scientist at Georgetown University, told Vox. “It’s an entirely different system of how actors distribute power amongst themselves.”
It is an approach that has more in common with royal houses before the Enlightenment than modern nation-states and one that has the power to reshape not just American politics but the world order.
Much ink has been spilled over Trump’s challenge to the so-called liberal international order — the systems of global institutions and norms that emerged after World War II — but Goddard and Newman suggest that, to fully understand Trump, we have to go back to an earlier war and an even more fundamental world order. This kind of analysis is having something of a moment. As Vox reported last year, other scholars have proposed “neomedievalism” to describe a world where great powers like the US, Russia, and China no longer seem to have the political power to match their military might.
Scholars often use the term “Westphalian” to describe the modern nation-state system, referring to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 that ended the 30 Years’ War. Under Westphalian sovereignty, a state has exclusive political power within a set of defined borders. While states may differ in their overall military or economic power, they all have an equal right to sovereignty.
Before the 17th century in Europe, nation-state borders were less defined, with power often overlapping. The king of Spain could be the duke of Burgundy. The king of Prussia could be an absolute ruler in his own territory, but also subordinate to the Holy Roman Empire. Alliances were often cemented through marriage.
This kind of politics might seem remote in today’s world of standing national armies and UN Security Council debates. “I think sometimes we have a little bit of historical amnesia,” said Goddard, a professor of political science at Wellesley College. “It’s not that long ago that these actors were dominant, and families like the Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns were still coexisting right along sovereign states up until World War I.”
They never entirely went away. In today’s Persian Gulf, royal families that blur the lines between private business interests and national affairs are still the norm. (Saudi Arabia is a country named after the Saud family that rules it, after all.) So it’s not all that surprising that Trump broke precedent by making the first foreign trip of his term to the Gulf and seems to have such an affinity for the region’s absolutist rulers.
First, the extent to which it’s a family business. Important diplomatic agreements are often negotiated by family members like his son-in-law Jared Kushner or his daughter’s father-in-law Massad Boulos, or longtime business associates like Steve Witkoff with often ill-defined job descriptions.
The neoroyalist framing can shed a little light on the recent confusion over whether the 28-point Ukraine-Russia peace plan, negotiated by Witkoff and Kushner with a prominent Russian businessman but partly disavowed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, was actually a US plan or not. It was not really a Trump administration document — but it was a Trump family one.
Trump has also mixed his family’s business interests and American foreign policy in an unprecedented way, whether it’s Vietnam circumventing its own laws to approve a Trump golf course during trade talks or Trump’s sons’ real estate deals in the Middle East. There was a telling hot mic moment at a Gaza-focused summit in Egypt in October when Indonesia’s president asked Trump for a meeting with his son, Eric. Trump’s suggestion for redeveloping an ethnically cleansed Gaza into a beachfront resort was the most extreme example of this tendency.
Trump also has little regard for the Westphalian notion that all countries have equal sovereignty. In his world, some countries are a little more sovereign than others. According to Newman and Goddard, his talk about purchasing Greenland or making Canada the 51st state is not actually about traditional territorial expansion, spheres of influence or a “Donroe Doctrine.” (There are few benefits to controlling Greenland that the US doesn’t currently enjoy, as well as some new costs.) Rather, Newman said, “it’s about dominance, about saying [to Canada and Denmark], you are not equal to us.”
Foreign leaders seem to be accommodating themselves to the new pecking order (or at least the more explicitly defined pecking order), most explicitly and hilariously when NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte referred to Trump as “daddy” at a meeting last June.
Trump’s preferred all-purpose foreign policy tool, tariffs, also make sense through a neo-royalist view: They are likely attractive to the administration because they reinforce these power dynamics. The “liberation day” tariffs and pledge to negotiate “90 deals in 90 days” created a dynamic where countries had to pony up the cash in the form of investment pledges in the US to negotiate more favorable trade terms. The ruling clique often stands to benefit from these pledges, as in the case of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s sons, who are helping to finance the data center projects in the US that South Korea is building as part of its investment pledge.
Then there are the literal gifts from countries seeking the “king’s” favor. The crown from South Korea, a gold bar and a Rolex from Switzerland, and, most famously, a jet from Qatar. While these lavish gifts have raised ethics concerns, Trump often appears not even to understand why they would be an issue, telling reporters that he would have to be “stupid” to turn down such an expensive plane.
The authors point to some recent precedents for Trump’s neoroyalism, such as how former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi “depended on an exclusive media and financial clique” to solidify political power, rather than traditional power. The factions of friends, business partners, and old security service colleagues that hold (and often compete for) power in Vladimir Putin’s Russia have drawn many comparisons to a czarist court.
But, Newman and Gannett stay, what makes the Trump clique distinctive is that because of the economic and military power of the country it governs, it has the power to shape the international order in its own image, and that the changes might be hard to roll back.
Consider how, under Trump, the US has taken a partial ownership stake in Intel and is taking a cut of NVIDIA’s sales of AI chips to China. Trump now regularly travels the world with a retinue of tech CEOs like Elon Musk and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang in tow, intermingling US geopolitical power and business interests in a way that will be hard to roll back.
“It starts as a series of practices, you know, people might not even take it very seriously,” said Goddard. “But over time, it becomes not only the norm, but you get infrastructures that are built up over this. You know, you can’t easily move the data centers from Saudi Arabia. You can’t get the F-35s back, right? The chips are already in the UAE, right? These types of things are much stickier.”
If this isn’t rolled back, where is it headed? Newman said to Vox that “in these types of orders, succession is always a point of incredible instability. Some people may think [when Trump leaves] then it will just be over, but our bet is that it will not be over. It will be a moment of international crisis.”
All of which suggests it may be time for all of us to brush up on our Machiavelli.
2025-12-06 03:50:00
2025年5月，奥尔加·乌尔比娜和她的儿子亚雷斯·韦伯斯特在美最高法院外举行抗议活动，反对特朗普总统试图终结出生公民权。此前，最高法院曾审理过与特朗普行政命令相关的案件。去年1月，由里根任命的法官约翰·科亨诺尔成为首位阻止特朗普攻击出生公民权的联邦法官，他直言不讳地表示：“我在法庭上工作了四十余年，我无法回忆起有哪一案件的问题像现在这样明确。”科亨诺尔是第一个得出这一结论的法官，但绝不是最后一个。在过去11个月里，许多法官都得出相同的结论：特朗普没有权力剥夺在美国出生的美国人的公民身份。
尽管最高法院在决定是否受理此案时有所拖延，但最终于周五宣布将听取特朗普诉芭芭拉案，该案询问宪法是否允许特朗普单方面剥夺在美国出生的美国人的国籍。如果大法官们能保持非党派立场，特朗普将以9比0的比分败诉。
特朗普在第二个任期的第一天发布了一项行政命令，声称要剥夺一些美国新生儿的国籍。该命令名为《保护美国公民身份的含义和价值》，声称要剥夺两类美国人的国籍：第一类是出生时母亲为无证移民，且父亲不是美国公民或合法永久居民的儿童；第二类是出生时父亲具有类似移民身份，而母亲当时合法但临时居留在美国的儿童。
在美国法律中，很少有比“在美国出生的婴儿是否是美国公民”这一问题更明确的了。美国内战后不久，美国通过了第十四修正案，其中第一句话规定：“所有在美国出生或归化的人，且受美国司法管辖者，均为美国公民及其居住州的公民。”“所有的人”包括那些母亲无证或父母移民身份不符合特朗普喜好的人。
第十四修正案有一个例外条款：只有“受美国司法管辖”的人在出生时才能享有出生公民权。所谓“受美国司法管辖”是指受美国法律约束。因此，如果最高法院认定特朗普所反对的美国人不受美国司法管辖，那么他们将无法被驱逐，因为这些人不受联邦移民法约束。
不过，这一例外条款并非完全空洞。正如最高法院在1898年的“美国诉温戈金·阿克案”中所解释的，这是一个狭窄但真实的例外，适用于特定群体。1868年通过第十四修正案时，被排除在公民权之外的主要群体是“直接效忠于各自部落的印第安人后裔”。当时，美国与原住民部落的关系常常紧张，甚至发生军事冲突，如小大角河战役发生在修正案通过后八年。因此，当时不给予这些人公民身份是合理的，尽管美国在100多年前已改变了对部落公民的政策。
1924年的《印第安人公民权法案》赋予了“所有在美国领土范围内出生的非公民印第安人”公民身份。此外，温戈金·阿克案还指出了一些其他不被视为受美国司法管辖的儿童群体，包括“外国君主或其外交官的子女、出生在外国政府船只上的儿童，以及在敌对占领期间出生的敌方儿童”。
其中，第一个豁免情况至今仍有现实意义。例如，去年8月，一家联邦上诉法院裁定，一名出生在纽约市的男子，其父亲当时是享有美国法律豁免权的尼加拉瓜外交官，因此他不具备美国公民身份。但宪法明确规定，所有在美国出生且不受其法律豁免的人都是美国公民。特朗普的律师们只能通过曲解宪法文本来绕过这一事实。例如，在请求最高法院审理出生公民权案件的请愿书中，特朗普的法律团队声称，第十四修正案仅适用于“完全受美国政治管辖”的儿童，即他们对国家有“直接和即时的效忠”并可享受其保护。然而，这些“完全”和“政治”等词并未出现在修正案的原文中。特朗普的论点实际上是在宪法中添加不存在的词语。如果大法官们具备任何诚信或对法治的忠诚，他们都将拒绝这一荒谬的论点。
Last January, when Reagan-appointed Judge John Coughenour became the first federal judge to block President Donald Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship, he did not mince words. “I’ve been on the bench for over four decades,” Coughenour said. “I can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one is.”
Coughenour was the first judge to reach this conclusion, but he was hardly the last. In the last 11 months, numerous judges have reached the only conclusion that the Constitution’s text permits: Donald Trump does not have the power to strip Americans who are born in this country of their citizenship.
The Supreme Court took its sweet time before deciding to take up this issue, but, on Friday, the Court finally announced that it would hear Trump v. Barbara, a case asking whether the Constitution permits Trump to unilaterally denationalize Americans born in the United States. If the justices are capable of behaving in a nonpartisan manner, Trump will lose this case 9-0.
On the first day of his second term, Trump issued an executive order purporting to strip citizenship from some newborn Americans. The order, entitled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” claimed to remove citizenship from two classes of Americans. The first is children born to undocumented mothers whose fathers are not citizens or lawful permanent residents of the United States. The second is children with fathers who have similar immigration status and whose mothers were lawfully but temporarily present in the US at the time of birth.
There are few questions in US law that are more settled than the question of whether babies born in the United States are citizens of this country. In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the nation ratified the Fourteenth Amendment. Its first line is, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
“All persons” means all persons. That includes people with undocumented mothers or whose parents otherwise have an immigration status that Donald Trump does not like.
The Fourteenth Amendment’s text contains one exception to this general rule: Only people “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States at the time of their birth may claim birthright citizenship. Someone is subject to US jurisdiction if they are bound by US law. So, if the Supreme Court were to conclude that Trump’s disfavored Americans are not subject to US jurisdiction, that would mean that he would be unable to deport them, because they are immune from federal immigration law.
Which isn’t to say that this “subject to the jurisdiction” exception is completely empty. As the Supreme Court explained more than a century ago in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), it is a narrow-but-real exception that applies to limited groups of people.
When the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, the most significant group that was excluded from citizenship was “children of members of the Indian tribes owing direct allegiance to their several tribes.” At the time, US relations with indigenous tribal nations were often tense and even resulted in military conflict; the Battle of Little Bighorn took place eight years after the amendment was ratified.
So, it made sense not to give citizenship to people who may be hostile to the US in 1868, although the United States changed its policy on tribal citizens more than 100 years ago. The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 bestowed citizenship on “all noncitizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States.”
Additionally, Wong Kim Ark identified a few other groups of children born in the United States who are not subject to its laws: “children of foreign sovereigns or their ministers, or born on foreign public ships, or of enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory.” The first of these exemptions is still occasionally relevant today. Last August, for example, a federal appeals court concluded that a man born in New York City, whose father was a Nicaraguan diplomat with diplomatic immunity from US law at the time, is not a citizen of the United States.
But, the Constitution’s text is clear that everyone born in the US who is not immune from its laws is a citizen. And Trump’s lawyers can only get around this fact by pretending that the Fourteenth Amendment says something else. In their petition asking the justices to hear the birthright citizenship cases, for example, Trump’s legal team claims that the Fourteenth Amendment only “extends to children who are ‘completely subject’ to the ‘political jurisdiction’ of the United States, meaning that they owe ‘direct and immediate allegiance’ to the Nation and may claim its protection.”
This might be a plausible argument if the words “completely” and “political” actually appeared in the Fourteenth Amendment’s text. But, they do not. Trump’s argument literally rests on an attempt to add nonexistent words to the Constitution.
If the justices have any integrity at all, or any loyalty to the rule of law, they will reject this frivolous argument.