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For years, the conservative partisan playbook to win working-class votes was to ignore economic inequality and demagogue the culture war. The journalist Thomas Frank published a bestselling book about this in 2004. “The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off,” Frank wrote in What’s the Matter With Kansas.“Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes.”It may be aging now. Public approval of labor unions, which bottomed out during the Great Recession of 2007–2009 at 48 percent, has been rising ever since, according to Gallup, and lately it’s around 70 percent, which is higher than at any time since the salad days of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Although support stands highest (90 percent) among registered Democrats, in 2022 a 56 percent majority of Republicans also approved of unions. That’s fallen since to 41 percent, but it’s still a significant minority for a party that for nearly four decades included right-to-work boilerplate in every quadrennial platform. It took a few years, but a significant minority of congressional Republicans is now beginning to catch up to GOP voters. The 2024 Republican Party platform was the first since 1980 not to include a right-to-work plank, and, as I noted last week (“How to Get a Labor Rights Bill Through a GOP House”), two labor rights bills successfully bypassed Republican Speaker Mike Johnson in recent months via discharge petition and passed with support from 20 Republicans. Meanwhile, Democrats are fielding, to challenge red-state Republicans, candidates who appeal to the working-class voters they long neglected. Even the problematic oyster farmer Graham Platner has a good shot at unseating Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine.Given that the culture war no longer serves to distract voters reliably from labor rights, the new conservative strategy is to redefine labor rights as culture war. On Monday, The Wall Street Journal published an editorial  (“A GOP Gift to the Cultural Left”) that’s a sort of trial balloon.The editorial addressed House passage of the second labor rights bill to sneak past Speaker Johnson, the Faster Labor Contracts Act (text; summary), which time-limits management dithering after a union election. I fully expected the Journal edit page’s usual tirade about greedy union bosses extinguishing capitalism’s animal spirits. That was the gist of the Journal’s previous editorial about the bill in May, when the discharge petition acquired the necessary 218 signatures. But the thrust of the new editorial was quite different. Unions, it said, only seem like they’re about improving your working conditions; really, they’re just a front for sex-changers and baby-killers. “We wonder if Republicans know what they’ve voted for,” opined the Journal. “Unions, allied with Democrats, have long supported a progressive agenda that includes collective bargaining for abortion coverage and transgender healthcare.” Those 20 Republicans who voted for the Fair Labor Contracts Act, the Journal said, are “selling out their constituents to the progressive left.” The Journal’s Exhibit A was an “Abortion Model Collective Bargaining Agreement Language” recommended by the AFL-CIO. This document does indeed propose “comprehensive sexual and reproductive health care services, including contraceptives, abortion services (procedural and pharmaceutical) and gender-affirming care.” But the AFL-CIO is not a labor union—it’s a federation of labor unions that plays no role in negotiating union contracts. That’s typically the work of a union local. “Unions are democratic institutions,” Steve Rosenthal, former political director of the AFL-CIO explained to me, with officials at all levels elected by members and conventions. “They take positions accordingly, based on where the members are.” If a contract includes health coverage for gender-affirming care or mifepristone, that’s because members want these things. Any member of Congress who actively opposes such language is interfering with the terms of a private contract, which is something conservatives are supposed to hate.The Journal editorial didn’t identify any union members who object to their health plan covering abortion and gender reassignment. (My guess is such people are hard to find.) Instead, the Journal complained that “many businesses have objected to those provisions on religious grounds.” Oh, please. If I may be permitted a conservative complaint: I never even imagined I’d hear such an argument before 2014, when the Supreme Court decided, outrageously, that businesses enjoy the same First Amendment right to religious freedom as individuals. Bring back the good old days when they didn’t! Fourteen years after that high court ruling, I’ve still never seen a corporation take communion or read from the Torah.The culture-war argument is being test-driven not only by the Journal editorial page but also, according to Gabrielle M. Etzel of the Washington Examiner, by Thomas Beck of the union-busting law firm Littler Mendelson. “It’s going to be easy for the arbitrator to say, OK, employer, I’m not going to make you pay the high wages that the union is demanding,” Beck told Etzel, “but what I am going to make you do is … make you give generous health benefits and give very generous access to abortion on demand and give very, very generous access to so-called gender-affirming care.” But in truth, that will be easy for the arbitrator to say only if the union local, which is accountable to rank-and-file workers, truly does care more about abortion and gender-affirming coverage than about a wage hike. The arbitrator has no reason to prefer one over the other. Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, who introduced the Senate version of the Faster Labor Contracts Act, was confronted by the Examiner with Beck’s and the Journal’s moronic argument. Rather than present any of the logical arguments I make here, Hawley, who is a social conservative, accepted a culture-war framing but performed a sort of jujitsu, identifying the woke enemy to be not unions but corporations. Or rather, his spokesman did. “Giant corporations are desperate to kill legislation that would help American workers,” the spokesman said, “while they invest billions in DEI insanity.… Senator Hawley is fighting for the American worker, rather than the same Big Business who stands with the radical left to push woke, transgender ideology.” But Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and therefore will decide the fate of Hawley’s bill, sides with Beck and the Journal. In reality, I’d guess Cassidy opposes the bill not because it gives aid and comfort to the trans and abortion lobbies but, more straightforwardly, because Cassidy is anti-labor, with a lifetime AFL-CIO score of 13 percent. (Hawley’s, it should be noted, is only two percentage points higher, so don’t call him a working-class hero just yet.) But rather than tell the Examiner, “Look, I don’t want to give organized labor more power,” Cassidy said piously: “I’m all for finding solutions to strengthen workers’ rights and make collective bargaining more efficient, but a policy forcing Louisiana workers and small businesses to potentially fund abortions and sex-change operations is not the answer.”So that’s one Republican legislator willing to embrace the new dogma.  Then again, Cassidy, an actual physician, allowed himself to be conned by Robert Kennedy Jr., when the health and human services secretary promised at his confirmation hearing to leave vaccines alone. And anyway, Cassidy will be gone from the place in six months. It remains to be seen whether anybody else will recite this new catechism.

Four years on from the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, we are still making sense of that loss. Amy Littlefield, the abortion rights correspondent at The Nation, has for more than a decade reported on the people and players responsible. In her new book, Killers of Roe: My Investigation Into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights, Littlefield traces how they did it and who their accomplices were along the way. “Studying their playbook showed me they hadn’t done anything special,” she writes of anti-abortion movement figures. As it turns out, there was no unique genius behind the long campaign to end abortion rights but rather a strange, shifting constellation of power players and little-known true believers. What distinguishes Roe’s killers is their willingness to go all in on ideas far outside even their own side’s mainstream, as Littlefield argues, and their skill in exploiting their foes’ vulnerabilities.Littlefield and I spoke in May about how Roe became so vulnerable in the first place, what we can learn from its demise, and the cost of people accepting, as Littlefield told me, “that there’s one set of rights for folks who are low income, for people of color, for folks who are on the margins, and then there’s another set of laws and policies for the rest of us.”Melissa Gira Grant: There are still people who think that it’s completely shocking that we lost Roe. What do you think led people to feel as if Dobbs came out of nowhere, when in fact we had been losing Roe for decades?Amy Littlefield: What most stood in the way of people’s ability to recognize the incremental death of abortion rights—and the fact that Roe v. Wade itself was going to fall—is a lack of awareness within mainstream media, and also mainstream progressive and pro-choice organizations, of just how profoundly race and class and geography shaped people’s lives, including their ability to access an abortion.The Hyde Amendment was first passed in 1976, and in a way, a huge part of the fight was over right then, because this meant that low-income people for the most part were going to have to fundraise hundreds if not thousands of dollars out of pocket for an abortion. The fact that an estimated more than one million people have been unable to do so and have given birth as a result should be at the center of our abortion politics. Roe v. Wade was extremely meaningful for people who had access to wealth and privilege, more than it was for people who were poor, or who were Black, or who lived many hundreds of miles from the nearest abortion clinic and couldn’t get there.Melissa: It also seems like very quickly after Roe there was a desire to claim that victory, and to not push further. You mention the incoming NARAL executive director in 1975 being told “the job would be a cinch,” that “it didn’t seem like it would have too much left to do.”Amy: What could possibly happen next? (laughs)NARAL started out as an effort to repeal anti-abortion laws in the states. There was this initial sense that the job should be a cinch now because we have Roe v. Wade and that the fight was over. I think that sense faded very quickly because of the Hyde Amendment. I do think that there was immediately this sort of complacency. But I think pretty quickly after that it became clear, “Oh, Roe v. Wade is under attack, and the opposition is better organized.”Melissa: You also write that at that time, some people regarded issues of abortion funding as obscure or complicated, compared to whether abortion was legal. It looked like they were then choosing to shift focus toward threats they assumed more people would care about, like a national ban. Do you think some people benefited from that simpler story? Amy: One of the most fascinating interviews I did for the book was with a man named Roger Craver—I call him the father of the nonprofit industrial complex. He’s the guy who helped nonprofits figure out how to raise money from small donors. His equivalent on the right, who he managed to have a friendly relationship with, was Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail mastermind of the conservative movement. The two of them were doing same thing. Fifty-odd years ago—that was like the hot new controversial technology. What I really took away from Craver is that you do need a pretty simple, straightforward, but compelling story that has a very clear enemy. And when the devil is winning—in his terms—and you can point to something like the threat of a nationwide constitutional ban on abortion that’s looming, then you generate a sense of urgency that will lead people to sit down at their kitchen table after a long day of work and write a check. Another thing that I learned from him is that people’s attention spans are pretty limited. We think of this as being a function of our era, but it was maybe always the case: that the story needed to be changing. You couldn’t just be like, “Poor people lost their right to access an abortion when the Hyde Amendment passed in 1976, and now, they still don’t have it.” You had to constantly convince people that there was this urgency. I hadn’t really understood the degree to which the story that is written by nonprofits when they are trying to raise money determines the way that their donors—who are their most supportive base, the people who are writing checks to NARAL and Planned Parenthood—those folks learn the story of what’s important in part through these mailings, through the stories told to them by the folks who are trying to get them to donate. So there is this simplification of the story, and this way in which incremental, more subtle changes, and the changes that affect low-income people, Black people, people who are not the donor class, get obscured as part of that process. Melissa: Do you think that that dynamic is still with us—the competing demands, the fact that you need to reach people with a simple story? And are we repeating a story that didn’t work? Amy: My fear around storytelling, and one of the themes of the book, is: Why aren’t stories enough? Why aren’t the stories of women like Rosie Jimenez and Becky Bell and Portia Ngumezi, who have died from abortion bans in their respective eras, from the ’70s to the ’80s to today, why are their deaths not enough? Why is it not enough when we know that a 4-year-old girl in McAllen, Texas, lost her mom, Rosie Jimenez, to the Hyde Amendment? Why is it not enough that we know that Porsha Ngumezi’s son chases after women who look like her on the street, shouting out to Mommy, because she died when she didn’t get care in time for a miscarriage in Texas? Why, why are those stories not enough to change the outcome of our elections? Part of what I’ve been grappling with in our current moment is that I don’t think stories are enough if you haven’t built the organizing infrastructure that it takes to change the political landscape, to repeal these policies, to mobilize the very real outrage and sadness that many people feel when they hear those stories into a channel that will actually create political change. That requires massive amounts of grassroots organizing and mobilization. It doesn’t just require a text message being sent to your phone with someone’s story and then you make a donation and then it’s over. One of the enduring legacies of the Hyde Amendment that I really wanted to highlight in the book is that it directed a lot of the energy of the most radical, intersectionally minded activists in the abortion rights space into mutual aid work. Because it took an enormous amount of energy to raise the tens of millions of dollars, in recent years, that it takes to actually pay for people’s abortions, and to pay for the practical support they need in order to get that care. Meanwhile, I think the organizations that were more geared toward political organizing—chiefly, Planned Parenthood was very focused on providing health care. It’s a health care safety net provider. But I think we can see in retrospect that having an organization that is reliant on federal funding to provide those non-abortion health care services that are lifesaving to millions, and so they couldn’t risk losing them, having that organization steer the political direction of the movement was a mistake. There was a reliance on the courts to protect a right that had been given through the courts. The larger white-led groups within the abortion rights space had trusted, for almost 50 years, that the Supreme Court was going to protect the legal right it had bestowed in 1973. And I think there was an inability to absorb the possibility that that backstop was finally going to fail. Melissa: It makes me think of something you mentioned early on in the book, the millions of dollars that are fundraised for people’s abortions—what if the folks doing that work had been able to do something different, and what if those resources had been able to be marshaled in a different way? Amy: Exactly. What if they’d been running for city council? Or whatever! There’s such a tremendous amount of energy that went into getting people the abortions they needed—from the people who worked in clinics, from people who worked in fundraising, people whose work is basically invisible. And when they succeed, what happens is the crisis is ameliorated somewhat. There are fewer people being forced to carry pregnancies to term, even now in the post-Dobbs moment, precisely because we have these brave clinicians operating under shield laws and mailing medication abortion to states like Texas, because we have abortion funds that are still raising millions of dollars to help people who still need to travel. I think it also makes it harder to do what Roger Craver and his contemporaries were trying to do, which is to tell people, “There’s an emergency, the devil’s winning, we have to get out there,” because the number of abortions is up, because a lot of the energy of the movement has been directed into providing the abortions and paying for the abortions. Melissa: There are so many characters in the book—like Craver, like Viguerie—that aren’t the bold-faced names that people have heard of. What drew you to these particular players?Amy: I loved finding these people, precisely because I had never heard of them even though I’ve been reporting on abortion for many years. I want to believe in a version of history where crucial events are driven by folks who are not famous, who are behind the scenes. Their motives were really different from the motives that were on the minds of the presidents and the political figures. These were folks who were the keepers of the flame, right? They truly believed that they were doing God’s work. Some of them believed God was speaking to them directly. They believed that they were going to earn their place in heaven for the work that they were doing chipping away at abortion access. That taught me a lot about the relationship between the true believers that power social movements and that come up with long-shot ideas, and how they drive our politics in ways that are less visible. It’s only through dogged organizing that long-shot ideas become thinkable, right? And we can see that on the right and the left. That’s why one of my favorite stories is the story of All* Above All, the initially long-shot campaign to repeal the Hyde Amendment and how it changed the way that we talk about that policy today, and made this unthinkable idea that we would ever try to repeal this policy that by then was so taken for granted, even by Democrats. They forced a lot of Democrats to change the way that they talked about that policy. They didn’t repeal it, because those changes don’t happen overnight. But they did have some incremental wins at the state and local level. I hope people take away from this an understanding of how the smaller players, the true believers, the behind-the-scenes figures played a role in the death of Roe v. Wade; that it wasn’t just Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society working with the Alliance Defending Freedom to bring the perfect case to the perfect Supreme Court justices; that it was much more incremental than that, that a lot of the fight was in state legislatures and city councils and at the local level. And I think a big part of how the anti-abortion movement won was by building power in the states that progressives did not have.

What if you had the chance to kill Adolf Hitler as a baby—would you take it? For The New Republic’s editor, Michael Tomasky, the famous thought experiment offered the starting point for his debut novel, Killing Baby Hitler, an eccentric journey through history, counter-histories, and a dark future that bears an unsettling resemblance to our present. In the world of the book, the climate has dramatically worsened; humans rely on (and sometimes have sex with) robot companions called filos; and in place of the countries we know today are spheres ruled by billionaires (Trump One, for instance, or Thiel Two). A pair of scientists time-travel to 1889 Austria to find the baby who would grow up to perpetrate the most horrific crimes of the twentieth century. Their mission sets in motion an alternate past whose various likenesses and unlikenesses to what really happened underpin an abundance of jokes, allusions, and unnerving comparisons. In this conversation with Tomasky, three colleagues—Emily Cooke, Kirsten Denker, and Alex Shephard—explore his research process, his influences, and his reaction to some of the book’s most prescient elements.Alex Shephard: I’ve always wanted to say that our guest needs no introduction, but I have never been able to do so, because it has never been true. But now it is. Our guest is Michael Tomasky, the editor of The New Republic. Michael has written a funny, biting new novel, Killing Baby Hitler, that is more or less about just that, although it is a little more complicated. Set in a dystopian 2141, the world in the future looks a lot like ours, just worse; divided into spheres of political influence and ravaged by climate change. A group of scientists discover time travel, and they go back to late nineteenth-century Austria to try to set their worlds right by killing baby Hitler. What follows is a sharp and sometimes scathing satire, and a novel that hopscotches between genres— speculative sci-fi, thriller. It’s also just a fun and funny novel. I’m joined by my colleagues Emily Cooke and Kirsten Denker, and also Michael Tomasky. Welcome.Michael Tomasky: Hey, that was great, thanks.Alex: I was wondering if we can start just by talking about the genesis for the novel itself. When did you get this idea, and when did you start to work through it? Michael: I seem to remember that I got the idea in late 2022 and I don’t remember exactly how. It just popped into my head one morning, I think, while I was exercising. The question obviously isn’t original to me. I did go and immediately Google to see if anybody had written a book about it. I didn’t turn up who anyone had, although I have subsequently been told that none other than Stephen Fry wrote a novel that was built around this idea back in 1996. I looked it up: It’s true, Michiko Kakutani absolutely savaged it in The New York Times. I haven’t even bothered to read it, because I’m just going to live with the idea that mine might actually be funnier than Stephen Fry’s. So anyway, I had the idea late 2022; it was my New Year’s resolution to sit down on New Year’s Day and just start writing and see what came out and see what happened. I was immediately confronted by the reality, which I hadn’t thought of, I admit, that if I’m going to write a novel about time travel, it probably needs to be set in the future when time travel might theoretically be plausible. So I just kind of picked 2141 randomly out of the air, and that’s when it’s set.Then I realized I have to build this world of 2141. You referenced how dystopian it is, although the idea, for example, that men like Peter Thiel or his heirs literally own countries, which is the case in my novel—that seemed a lot more far-fetched in early 2023, when I was writing that bit, than it seems now. So anyway, I created this world of 2141, and then the characters travel back to 1889 Austria, or at least two of them do, so I had to create that world. I actually did a lot of reading and research about that world. It’s a novel, so I make a lot of stuff up, but a lot of it is grounded in reality, too. Then of course there’s the question of whether they succeed and so on, but we’re not going to give that away.Emily Cooke: I’m curious—it’s essentially a comic novel. I found it really funny, but of course it describes all these very disturbing developments, not least the division of the world into these horrifying spheres owned by the mega-rich. Of course, it’s fiction, and also tonally it’s quite different from the sort of thing that you’re doing every day as the editor of this magazine and as a writer. I was wondering, was that difference part of the motivation to write it? Did you want a relief from the work that you normally do, or was there some way that engaging with this different form that performed that function for you? Michael: Yeah, it’s a really good question. In some ways it was a release from what I do, and from thinking about Donald Trump for 14 hours a day, and it was fun. I wrote it in this chair where I’m sitting, and I would come down here on Saturday morning at 7 o’clock before other people in my house were awake and start pounding it out, and I had a lot of fun writing it and letting my imagination run in that way. At the same time, it wasn’t that different from the work I and we do at TNR. It’s still a pretty political novel, as we’ve already established, and it deals in a lot of the stuff that we all have to think about, the way the world is turning very dark on us very fast. I wrote an exaggerated version of that, and it was fun to write, but it’s also sort of frightening to think about the fact that the world that I conjure up in 2141 (and there’s another section that’s in the 2060s) is also really bad. My own daughter will still be alive then, presumably, so it was kind of unsettling in some ways too. Kirsten Denker: You were saying how between your writing it and it being published, some things are actually seemingly a little bit less absurd than they were when you wrote them. I copyedited this book, but I also gave it another little read to sort of refresh my mind on the details before this session, and the thing that jumped out at me was this moment where you wrote about the Republicans’ decision to raze the Lincoln Memorial and build the Nathan Bedford Forrest mixed martial arts arena, and I think when I copyedited it just in October, that was a funny joke. Now it’s not so funny, actually. It’s a little like, Gosh, we’re living this now. Were you expecting that when you wrote it? Michael: Not in the least, Kirsten, and that’s pretty on the nose, all right. I’m kind of proud of having come up with that. Based on where it is in the book, I must have written that in the first half of 2023. This is describing an American Republican Party in the late 2040s. Nathan Bedford Forrest, of course, was a Confederate general, so they tear down the Lincoln Memorial, they decide to build something that they name after a Confederate general, and it’s a mixed martial arts arena. Of course at that point I had no idea that Donald Trump was going to be president again, let alone have the kind of celebration that he had the weekend of his birthday and building an MMA octagon on the White House grounds. So yeah, I nailed that one. Alex: I gotta say, he was also the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. I don’t want to shift gears too much away from the politics, but there are a lot of funny cultural references. One of the things that stood out to me is you have a riff about the Beatles not existing in the post-world. I was wondering how you came across those. Were there just things that your own personal cultural interests would make you say, Would Paul McCartney exist in this alternate version of the 1960s? How did you come up with them? Michael: That was one of the most fun things about the book. I’ll give this much away. The people who go back to kill the infant Hitler botch the job and don’t succeed. However, he does not become the Adolf Hitler we all came to know and hate in history. His life takes a very different course, and he indeed becomes somebody else, so there being no Hitler, history changes a lot, and so I have some sections toward the end of the novel that talk about those changes, and that was probably the most fun part of it to write. I don’t want to give away too much of what happens and doesn’t happen, but there is no World War II, there is no Holocaust. Interestingly, in Stephen Fry’s novel, the Nazi Party found somebody who was even more diabolical and powerful and intoxicating than Hitler, so it became worse. In my version, the Hitler-less Nazi party is nothing, and Joseph Goebbels is a history professor and a writer of novels—he did, in fact, write novels in his life—and Goering ran a flying circus—he was still a World War I hero, as he was in real life, he’s still a World War I hero in the non-Hitler reality—but never became a Nazi. The Nazi Party existed but was a minor thing. So I had a lot of fun with stuff like that, and then, to get the Beatles in this reality, John Lennon and Paul McCartney didn’t meet on the fateful day, they met in July of 1957, they both separately formed bands. They met later as competing leaders of two local Liverpool bands, and they hated each other because they sensed prodigious talent in each other. So the Beatles never happened, and that had reverberations for Bob Dylan and for the rest of the culture, and it was just a ton of fun to write that stuff.Kirsten: I especially like the bit about—was it Paul McCartney’s brother being in the loo too long?Michael: Yeah, those kinds of details were just really fun to write. I’ll just add that there was a President Roosevelt in this non-Hitler reality, but he was a two-term president. Another American political figure becomes the dominant figure of the mid-twentieth century, and he was, in real life, in our reality, a senator, but somebody that very few people today have even heard of. I had fun with that too. Kirsten: I feel as though you had fun throwing in a lot of cultural references that are just your favorite things, like there’s a Casablanca moment.Michael: It’s just sort of unapologetically stuff that I like and I’m interested in and things like that, but there are also a number of jokes in there for people who know their history. You don’t even have to know that much history, you just have to know the basics of twentieth-century European history to get these jokes. There’s a point when my two time travelers encounter a police officer in 1889 Austria in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and they finish their conversation, and one of my two protagonists stops and turns around and says, I want you to remember a name, and the officer says yes, and he goes, The name is Princip, Gavrilo Princip, and if you’re still wearing that badge in 1914 you want to find an excuse to arrest him. I thought that was really funny, and I drop all kinds of things like that in there. Emily: In the profusion of references like these, but also for a lot of other things—the sprawling cast, the the madcap jaunts through history—I thought of Thomas Pynchon; Alex mentioned H.G. Wells, Kurt Vonnegut. Would you think of the book as being in conversation with particular writers? Who are your influences? Michael: Those are apt, and I’m obviously quite flattered by them. H.G. Wells, for obvious reasons, is a point of comparison. I had a friend who said it’s very Pynchonesque in the way that it brings in all these different things. Alex: The name Darius Shrike is also very Pynchonesque.Michael: Yeah, I guess it is. Well, that’s cool. I’m glad to hear that. But yeah, the thing I’ve heard most often is Vonnegut. Kurt Andersen gave me a nice blurb, and he compared it to Vonnegut, and I have a friend who says he’s a big Vonnegut fan and told me that Killing Baby Hitler is as good as any Vonnegut, which I’ll take from him. That’s obviously really flattering. I read Vonnegut in high school and college, but it’s literally been that long, which is decades. I should go back and read Breakfast of Champions or something and see. I read three or four of his novels in those days, loved them. Was I conscious of Vonnegut while I was writing this? Not very. I thought it was kind of Vonnegutesque, but it’s been so long since I’ve read him that I really didn’t know. Alex: You mentioned reading Vonnegut in high school, and it also made me think that one of the things that jumped out to the book as well is that there are various personal moments, or not-quite-autobiographical ones. Like the sections in Morgantown, West Virginia, where you grew up, are very lovingly written. I was wondering if that was something that was conscious, were you just looking for settings that you were familiar with, or are there other bits of Tomasky autobiography sprinkled throughout for those who know? Michael: I think that’s the only bit that’s autobiographical. They say write what you know, and 90 percent of this novel is not that—I’m not German, I’ve never been to Munich, I wasn’t alive in 1889. I think I do a pretty serviceable job of evoking the smells and sounds of the nineteenth century, which are a lot grosser than you think, but obviously I wasn’t there, so I decided to, for those few pages, write what I know and put in something about a place that I know. Another protagonist is from Pittsburgh, which is just up the road from where I’m from. I’ve been to Pittsburgh a lot and I know Pittsburgh pretty well, but the rest of it is imagination. There are a lot of great novels where people write what they know, but I’m always a little bit more impressed as a reader when people write what they don’t know. It feels more adventurous to me. Alex: You mentioned the research. I was wondering what that was like, actually. I understood a lot of the World War II references, but then I was like, Oh, you’re not writing World War II. You’re writing nineteenth-century Austria, a place about which I know nothing. So what did you go through to flesh that out? Michael: Some Hitler biographies that talked about his youth and his upbringing, some books about the Habsburg Empire, and little specific things. There’s one thing in there involving a female character, Ulrike, who turns out to be an extremely important character in the book. When she’s introduced to readers, she’s sitting in a tavern reading a short tract by Nietzsche about Wagner. The casual reader of that paragraph could think I just made that all up, but I actually researched that. I was thrilled to find out that this pamphlet or short book that Nietzsche wrote was indeed published, I think, two years before the action in my novel is set. It’s entirely probable that this intellectual, bohemian, lefty young woman would be reading this book, in which Nietzsche denounces and announces his break from Wagner. It was indeed written just a year before Nietzsche went mad, so all that stuff’s true. I researched that, and I even read this book, which was really passionate and fascinating. I didn’t need to just to write this paragraph, but it was great. Kirsten: You’ve created a world that’s dystopian, that is extremely dark at times, and I was struck by your tone as a writer. You have a fluid tone, and you’re able to say things in a very casual way that are actually horrific. A lot of this world you describe, it’s described in a very offhand way. I particularly noticed that when you’re weaving climate change into this dystopia you’ve imagined, it really figures in a large way, in terms of shaping how society works, and in its effects on characters. At one point you make a joke in the Jaipur section about a well-loved cricketer who’s struck down by heat stroke and dies in the middle of a speech or something. It’s a funny line, but it’s also dark, and it reflects the reality we’re all staring down the barrel of: the way we’ve had to accept discussing these things in a very quotidian way. This is now the reality we have to tell our kids about. That’s all normal. How would you say that your awareness of climate change and maybe even the coverage we do at The New Republic has fed into this? Michael: I think we—led by Kate Aronoff, but a whole lot of other people too—do a really first-rate job on that topic, and I read our stuff, and I think about it, and it just struck me. I said, Well, if I’m creating a future world, I can’t ignore this, and it’s probably likely to be pretty bad, so let’s not sugarcoat it. But you’re right, I do try to present heavy things in a jokey way, just for the sake of the tone that I’m going for. I also try to do it not in terms of big pronouncements, but just little examples that make a reader go oh Christ. There’s one point where I say that alligators have migrated as far north as southern Illinois and grown to 30 feet. That’s like, Whoa, and another way of saying climate change has really had a massive impact on the world.Emily: There are so many ways that the book is so prescient, but one of them is in these robot companions that many of the characters have. Again, when you were writing this, people were not keeping AI girlfriends and boyfriends, as far as I know, but what do you make of how well you envisioned what was about to soon happen? Michael: I don’t know. I guess by the time 2141 actually rolls around—if it rolls around—things will be a lot freakier than I managed to portray in this novel, because it sounds like it’s all coming faster. One thing I ducked is this question of AI and how many people would be out of work. I did have one passage in there that said only about 30 percent—I forget the number, but only about 30 percent of the people had jobs anymore. But yeah, the robot assistants that people have—I don’t know, I was just trying to think of something science fiction-y, and I was thinking also in cinematic terms, and I could picture a person’s personal assistant—the word I came up with is filo. I don’t even remember why, but there’s some Greek root there that I forget, and you could picture people’s filos materializing and dematerializing and answering their questions, and being at their beck and call, and even in the case of at least one having intercourse with them. Alex: There’s another similar element as well, with one of the things is very prescient in the book: its conception of a far right that is globalized, which was a trend when you were starting to work on it; but especially as we’re talking this week, it’s like, Elon Musk encourages what are essentially pogroms in Belfast and in parts of the U.K. It’s one of the parts of the book that scared me the most. As I say this, also, it’s 99 degrees in New York, so climate change would be one of those things as well, but that was something that I was wondering—if this was a means for you to think through some of the ways that you’re thinking about politics right now. Michael: There’s a section—it’s not that long, maybe 12 pages or so—that discusses the breakup of the United States over the course of the mid-twenty-first century, and that’s something I’ve kind of thought a lot about. It seems to me like there’s decent odds that that’s going to happen. I’ve thought about how it might happen, and on what timetable, and what compromises people might have to make. To make a long story short, it doesn’t happen the way it happened in the 1860s, by these states going here and those states going there. It’s not geographically that simple in 2060 as it was in 1860. I’d like people to read it to see the details. The things that I describe the Republican Party of that period coming up with are pretty extreme, but also pretty plausible, and I’d also point out—in case any conservatives are actually watching this—that I don’t hold the left entirely blameless in what happens. There’s some, there’s some liberal shortsightedness in this story as well. Emily: Well, we have a final question for you, a very important final question: Michael, would you kill baby Hitler? Michael: I might do what my character did and chicken out, but I would certainly find a way to get him out of Braunau am Inn, which was his little hometown in Austria, right along the German border, and lead him to a to a different and better life. I just—I’m not sure I could. I thought about this a lot while I was writing it, and I might ask the three of you. I’m not sure I could kill an infant, even if I knew it was that infant.Alex: I would do it.Kirsten: You have a joke at one point about babies, which did make me laugh, where I think Harry’s trying to decide whether he wants to be involved in bringing up baby Hitler, and he says, I don’t think I want to. Not because it’s Hitler, but just because it’s a baby. Anyone who’s brought up babies can understand that. Alex: Well, thanks very much. Michael: Yeah. I’m really grateful to all of you. Not just for this—everyone should know that I asked a handful of friends and colleagues to read this in advance to see if there was anything that struck them as weird and that I needed to be careful about, and I’m grateful to all three for doing this, and Kirsten copyedited it into the bargain, and knows German, which really came in handy here. So thank you all a whole lot.

If you were on the verge of becoming the first trillionaire in human history, with the press breathlessly reporting on your every move, that would probably be your focus. Yet in the days before SpaceX’s initial public offering vaulted Musk into the 13-digit wealth club, the tech mogul’s mind was elsewhere—a white man in Belfast had been viciously stabbed by a Sudanese immigrant, and it provided Musk an opening.In numerous social media postings, Musk highlighted the crime in starkly racist terms. Several nights of violent anti-immigrant pogroms orchestrated by fascist mobs followed. It was a telling confluence of events: Musk’s extraordinary wealth is fueled by investors’ bedazzlement at his techno-utopian schemes. But the Belfast conflagration revealed the other side of his future vision: his belief that the white populations of the world must violently subjugate the nonwhite enemy in what he sees as a multicontinental, Armageddon-like Total War for global racial supremacy.As the bedlam raged in Belfast after the stabbing—resulting in far-right rioters torching cars, buses, and even the homes of immigrants—Musk egged it on. Using X—the platform he acquired precisely for moments like these—he posted locations for groups of rioters to congregate. He elevated vile, overtly fascist and white-supremacist exhortations. When one far-right British politician called for the prosecution of officials who “placed dangerous third world savages in our communities,” Musk replied: “This is the way.”These developments graphically illustrate the future that Musk truly envisions. They also demonstrate that Musk will use his stratospheric wealth and influence to incite untold levels of global fascist violence going forward. Which leads to an unavoidable conclusion: At some point, friends of liberal democracy throughout the advanced democracies—including future liberal governments—will simply have to come together in a concerted and deliberate way to constrain Musk and all he’s unleashing. Whenever Democrats take back power in the United States, this must be squarely on the agenda.In a very real sense, the fires in Belfast illuminate the emerging outlines of that coming struggle. Musk’s involvement in British politics has tracked with his growing fantasies about global race war. Last fall, he compared nonwhite immigrants in the U.K. to orcs—the dangerous, inhuman monsters from Lord of the Rings—and enthusiastically endorsed a tweet claiming: “If White men become a minority, we will be slaughtered.” As Musk has watched the anti-immigrant far right grow in the U.K., he has gravitated toward extreme versions of “great replacement theory,” ones that posit a far-reaching plot to violently eliminate whites or breed them out of existence entirely.A coming-out moment for Musk came last September, when he spoke via video link to a “Unite the Kingdom” rally—a gathering of far-right and anti-immigrant groups organized by Tommy Robinson, a British white nationalist with a long history of thuggery. Musk promoted the event on X. He addressed a crowd of more than 100,000 people, warning of the dangers of multiculturalism and “uncontrolled migration.”“Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you,” Musk warned. “You either fight back, or you die.”In the United States, Musk had already been experimenting with a consistent trope in fascist rhetoric: seizing on a crime committed by an individual member of a minority group and claiming that it shows the innate murderous tendencies of the group as a whole. The real claim here is that these isolated horrific acts “reveal” the whole minority group’s disguised genocidal intent toward white peoples—and suggest that this is why the group has deviously infiltrated white countries and communities.Musk zealously adapted this to the U.K. context. In one case he suggested that “the gentlefolk of the English shires”—that is, the descendants of the imagined, unsullied Anglo-Saxon island existence mythologized by white nationalists everywhere—will be “brutally murdered” if the “tide of illegal immigration is not turned.”With the Belfast stabbing, Musk hit paydirt. After a Sudanese man who’d legally sought asylum brutally mauled a white man, video of the attack rapidly circulated online, amplified by Musk. The perpetrator was swiftly arrested and charged, but that didn’t stop loud demands for “justice,” which actually meant collective retribution against all nonwhite and foreign-born residents. Rioters clashed with police and threw bricks. Hooded masked men roamed in large gangs, setting up roadblocks to check cars for immigrants. The Police Federation of Northern Ireland, hardly an overly woke institution, explicitly described the rioters as “fascist.”Even as his trillion-dollar payday came together, Musk promoted a pamphlet calling for action against this supposed “invader attack on our people.” He amplified far-right politicians demanding retribution against “third world savages.” He posted a reminder of his September exhortation that “you either fight back, or you die.”These were violent, fascist ethnic purges—or pogroms. As an Indian man who’s lived in the U.K. for 25 years told the BBC: “It was horrible. It was like a war zone. Everything was burning.” The man added: “I pay my taxes. I am British.” Yet he’s preparing to leave: Across Belfast, others are finding themselves forced to make similar decisions.It’s instructive that amid the violence, Musk endorsed a call for “Reconquista,” an allusion to Christian military campaigns to retake the Iberian peninsula from Islamic forces. (Modern-day keyboard fascists have long rather pathetically imagined themselves to be akin to Charles Martel, who turned back the Muslims at Tours in 732.) And Musk boosted a call for the removal of millions from the U.K.The turmoil has now subsided, and soon after, thousands demonstrated in Belfast against the pogroms. But nonetheless, Musk’s influence on events there must be reckoned with. While what transpired is not all about Musk—political violence in the region has deep roots, and many homegrown demagogues in the U.K. have demonized immigrants there—the riots demonstrated a real-world manifestation of the racial apocalypse Musk wants and may increasingly be in a position to summon into being.By endorsing Reconquista, Musk is amplifying one of the clarion calls of the European far right and, increasingly, the American right, as well: “remigration.” This is the idea that saving Western civilization (as Musk imagines it) requires the forced expulsion of huge numbers of immigrants, especially Muslims, and even untold numbers of their descendants. In response to a missive about white people potentially becoming a minority in New Zealand, Musk posted recently: “The doom of Western Civilization must be averted!”In other words, nonwhite immigrants are by definition invaders who threaten “Western civilization” wherever they infiltrate, from New Zealand to Belfast to Minneapolis, where Musk called for a military crackdown on pro-immigrant protesters. True, Musk employs high-skilled immigrant tech workers and has defended the need for them. But this does not constitute a general tolerance of immigration or a desire to see immigrants integrate at scale within the embattled outposts of Western civilization. Indeed, in some respects, Musk’s vision is a classically fascist one: He appears to believe that race and culture are inseparable. Fascism is a set of interconnected values and yearnings that center the state, the nation, violence, masculinity, and the rebirth of a mythic, heroic past. It’s an ideology of palingenetic ultranationalism: Though the nation is a broadly contested concept, to the fascist, the nation is defined, in an almost transcendent spiritual sense, by culture and race. These are inexorably linked: Only certain races are capable of producing certain cultures.Thus it is that Musk is also obsessed with white fertility—he has done his part to save civilization by siring over a dozen children by multiple women. There is no doubt that this is deeply entangled with his belief that nonwhite immigration threatens the West. One of the greatest challenges in combating fascism, both in the early-to-mid-twentieth century and today, is getting comfortable, middle-class, politically moderate people to understand that its adherents actually mean what they are saying. Musk’s favorite politician in Britain—Rupert Lowe of the far-right Restore Britain Party—has called for the deportation of almost every immigrant in the U.K., which Musk too has endorsed.*Such large-scale mass expulsions of legal residents are rare. The closest modern analogue is Idi Amin’s expulsion of Uganda’s Asian population. The famously insane tyrant forced out 80,000 legal residents in the 1970s. Britain has a foreign-born population of around 13 million. So if we take Musk’s calls for remigration at his word, he’s envisaging an act of ethnic cleansing over 100 times as large. He apparently hopes to see this in all majority-white countries with large immigrant populations. There is nothing in the modern era that compares.In their great book Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff take an exhaustive look at just about everything Musk has said on these and other topics. As they observe, we know Musk’s preoccupation with declining birth rates is linked to his embrace of remigration because he’s far more preoccupied with declining birth rates in some parts of the world than others. As Slobodian and Tarnoff conclude: “Musk’s demographic panic is bound up with his concern for the survival of white civilization.”Here’s the idea, put simply: Nonwhite immigration and reproduction threaten “white civilization.” By definition, that threatens the survival of Western civilization (remember, to the fascist, race and culture are inseparable). The only hope for humanity’s future is the West, which can only be preserved by halting and reversing declining white birth rates and migration to majority-white nations. In short, saving whitness—via remigration and white reproduction—is essential to saving humanity.What does Musk envision for those who are not privileged inheritors of Western civilization? On the one hand, he sometimes gives voice to the hope—albeit vaguely—that his companies’ breakneck development of AI and robotics will unlock a future of widespread, drudgery-free abundance. He has flirted with progressive ideas like universal basic income to spread the fruits of technological advancement.But it’s difficult to take all that seriously in light of Musk’s emergent fascist politics. Musk—whose contributions to combating global warming are unquestioned—knows what the models show: Under plausible climate scenarios, large additional swaths of the earth will be rendered uninhabitable. That could mean much more human misery and/or dramatically scaled-up mass migrations in the future.Here’s where Musk’s well-known fondness for terms like empathy gene and suicidal empathy enters the chat. As Slobodian and Tarnoff document, Musk’s pronouncements amount to suggesting that “civilization” is committing “suicide” when Western countries allow migration while showing too much “empathy.” Musk insists this constitutes allowing “the Rape of Europe” by nonwhite immigrants. He has absurdly claimed that hordes of thousands are invading “lovely towns” of 500 people throughout the U.K. and “raping the kids.” The idea of nonwhite predation on Aryan women is, of course, a core historical fascist narrative.But the real intent behind Musk’s indictment of “suicidal empathy” appears to be future-focused too. In an interview, Tarnoff points out that Musk’s imagined future of humanoid robots and AI can be squared with his hatred of mass migration. “You reduce your reliance on immigration as a labor source if you automate more labor,” Tarnoff tells us, noting that in this scenario, AI and robots might then be pressed into service to “restrict immigration.” In this context, we believe it’s not an accident that Musk explicitly denigrated “civilizational suicidal empathy” while his Department of Government Efficiency decimated the budget of USAID, which helped produce hundreds of thousands of deaths abroad. That was a test run: If Musk’s robot-and-AI utopia fails to produce mass abundance for the global poor, and global warming spurs more suffering and more migrations, saving human “civilization” will require dispensing with the empathy gene: It will give us the fortitude to cut loose all that third-world civilizational dead weight.“Musk’s vision of the world is extremely anti-humanitarian,” Tarnoff tells us. “Empathy enables human beings to relate to one another across differences. And that is very threatening to Musk’s vision.” In Musk’s future, Tarnoff continues, “the vast majority of humanity is expelled from the productive process.” In a sense, Tarnoff says, Musk’s logic is ultimately “eliminationist.”Musk often speaks about his goal to save the “light” of human “consciousness.” It’s a tellingly cold formulation. It doesn’t entail a concern for actual human beings. It just requires preserving the select and their descendants—perhaps through mind merges with digitally superintelligent machines, or behind the walls of vast Muskian compounds guarded by humanoid robots, or on faraway planets.“Whatever happens, we have got the spaceships, and they do not,” Musk posted recently. As chronicled in Muskism, that alludes to a quote from a nineteenth-century colonialist celebrating the machine gun’s power to put down colonial subjects. If the global race war doesn’t accomplish Musk’s objectives, there’s always interplanetary escape—or perhaps the extermination of the brutes left behind on land with the spaceships’ lasers. Those who call themselves inheritors of “Western civilization,” then, are making a coded declaration of privilege: We get to be on the spaceships. The savages do not.Understood this way, it all looks like some supercharged Muskian version of the “reactionary modernism” that John Ganz frequently discusses. Technology will be used to fortify and harden global hierarchies and protect those chosen to carry humanity forward from the disposable hordes. Hypermilitarized borders and violent pogroms will grow even more necessary as human labor is replaced and climate-fueled global suffering produces more desperate migrations. Perhaps the robots—who have no empathy gene—will carry it all out.We don’t mean to oversell Musk’s influence. He’s not unstoppable. He often fails, is thwarted, or just doesn’t follow through. He’s also clearly not the only, or even primary, reason for the global reemergence of fascism. But he wields immense power. Political theorist Stephen Lukes famously divided power into three dimensions: decision-making power (should we do A or B?), agenda-setting power (is it a choice between A and B, or B and C?), and ideological power (how do people perceive and understand A, B, and C?).People who question Musk’s influence note that his decision-making power is limited, as his DOGE fiasco revealed. But Musk has tremendous agenda-setting power. His white-nationalized Twitter—now X—is somewhat diminished by backlash but still helps shape how many journalists in developed countries interpret the world while enabling him to launder fascism for the mainstream. His deep embeddedness within the machinery of Western governments through immensely lucrative contracts in everything from space travel to national security means he has incredible power to derail the projects of modern states.What about ideological power? It is bad, very bad, that a fascist controls an information conduit that still shapes a fair amount of how many politicians and the press understand global events. Ideology is not just how we label ourselves, or what policies we endorse. It’s also how we see the world. Because of Musk, more and more people have in their heads a fascist conception of the nation—that of an inexorable fusion of race and culture, under unrelenting racial siege.Ultimately, Musk is playing a crucial role in the global fascist resurgence. He represents at once one of its loudest megaphones, the organizing space for its paramilitary wings, a fifth column of sorts inside the apparatus of many states, and the movement’s bank.It’s hard to know what dealing with this should look like. Obviously it includes moving to break the power of the oligarchs in a broader sense. This must start with higher taxes on billionaires—and trillionaires. It requires stringent limits on the ability of people like Musk to singlehandedly spend immense sums on our elections, such as the extraordinary $290 million he plowed into the 2024 contest. It should go without saying that breaking the power of the tech oligarchy—Democratic proposals along these lines would rupture tech monopolies, curb market dominance, and empower labor—is also essential, as is far-reaching AI regulation.Another big question is whether liberal democratic governments should remain on Musk’s disinformation platform. “X is now the mechanism through which white nationalist groups have organized violent riots three years in a row,” Ian Dunt, a prominent U.K. commentator, tells us. “There’s no good reason for the British government to remain on X. Its continued presence keeps journalists on the site, allowing Musk to mainstream far-right rhetoric.” A future Democratic administration will have to weigh similar dangers.Then there’s what a future Democratic Congress can do. The Musk problem will have to be on its agenda in a serious and meaningful way. Claire Finkelstein, a professor of national security law at the University of Pennsylvania, points out a core problem here: His many government contracts, and his access to privileged information, pose a “national security threat,” even as Space X itself is in many ways a “national security asset.” We need to know a lot more about what Musk’s contracts actually translate into in terms of his personal influence inside the government. “Congress has to do rigorous oversight of Musk’s government contracts as well as his entire financial empire,” Finkelstein tells us.Other ideas abound. Brian Beutler has urged the next Democratic administration to closely scrutinize the murky circumstances of Musk’s own immigration to the United States. Beyond such things, we’ll need a coordinated effort across liberal democracies. Appropriately, the targeting of apartheid in Musk’s native South Africa provides a model. We need an international consensus that recognizes the threat Musk poses and works against it with boycotts, with the withdrawal of support and funding, and with whatever creative tools are available. Politicians and publics alike need to think internationally. The world’s richest man is participating in a transnational terror campaign. Ultimately, what’s really needed in response is a new mindset: We are now fighting a global battle against resurgent fascism. The fight is across nations and at every level of society. The response must be international, as well. Any path to a free international order, unthreatened by fascism, must run in part through breaking Musk’s power.* This article originally misidentified Lowe’s party affiliation.

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