For the last two years, the Trump administration has been governed by a simple mantra: “We can just do things.” On Tuesday, voters replied, “So can we,” and wiped out the GOP. This was not a blue wave. This was not a blue tsunami. This was the breakup of a winning coalition.

Those voters, in breaking up the coalition, treated down-ballot races as proxies for their contempt of Washington, D.C. The race for dog catcher became nationalized because of Republican political malpractice.

In 2024, Donald Trump assembled a multiracial and multiethnic coalition of voters who bristled at the progressivism of the Democrats and the wreckage of the economy. By 2026, Trump and his White House acolytes set that coalition on fire to cater to a group of hyper-online grievance mongers who have confused Twitter with real life.

It was gas prices. And it was the war.

But it was also calling affordability a “hoax.”

And it was also the corruption.

The playing nice with Russia while treating our allies worse than our enemies.

The impression of cruelty.

The overly aggressive deportations.

The accidental arrests of American citizens who were Hispanic.

The aggressive redistricting push.

The threats against enemies.

Gas prices and the war cannot explain a wipeout from top to bottom in Texas or Georgia or losing South Carolina or Ohio or a total coast-to-coast wipeout. Only the simpletons can believe that.

Adam Hamilton won Finney County in Kansas, a Trump +35 county in 2024, and he did it with Hispanic voters. He did not do that just because of war and gas prices.

On Tuesday, voters did not say they wanted open borders. They did signal they didn’t want their neighbors rounded up and deported before the actual criminals — and by criminals, they meant the actual bad guys, not people who just crossed the border illegally and have lived quiet lives. But MAGA knows no distinction.

On Tuesday, voters did not say they want globalism. They did signal that tariffs and economic protectionism have hurt them more than helped them. They signaled that a president randomly starting trade wars is bad. They signaled that a president far more concerned with tearing down parts of the White House than dealing with rising prices is a president they cannot trust. They are also furious with a botched war that raised gas prices, diesel prices, and fertilizer prices while straight-faced Republicans tried to tell them that, actually, the economy is doing great.

Voters are tired of the weirdos in Trump Land who trade on social media memes, latent racist memes, a fixation on winning Twitter, and nonsense over seriousness. Most of all, voters are tired of a GOP that fixates on an unbuilt high-speed rail line in California while ignoring the incompetence in its own midst. That incompetence imposed a random regime of tariffs and started a war without first securing enough missiles to finish the job.

Donald Trump and his political team have done what the pre-Trump GOP never did. They’ve shrunk the map. Pre-Trump, the GOP turned Georgia and Texas red. Post-Trump, they’re now blue. George W. Bush got legislative victories, many of which are still on the books. Trump’s victories are ephemeral and can almost all be wiped out by the next president.

This makes the second term of Donald Trump the most impermanent presidency in American history.

Every big win, except tax cuts, can be undone by a single future president. All we got was Ozymandias, and in the ruin, a lot of other good Republicans got wiped out because they refused to rein in the president’s excesses, turned a blind eye to the corruption, and excused the crude, the rude, the racist, and the antisemite on their own side.

On Tuesday night, God smashed a lot of idols. We are left with the pastors and pundits who insisted Christians needed to vote for evil because it was lesser, and the Christians and mainstream America resoundingly responded with, “No. We don’t.”

More than a “thumping.” That’s what George W. Bush called it when Democrats won majorities in both houses by gaining six Senate and 30 House seats in 2006. In Tuesday’s midterm elections, Democrats won majorities in both houses, gaining seven Senate seats, with chances at two more, and have gained or are ahead in 40 Republican House seats.

Quite a reversal from 2024. As Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini notes, President Donald Trump’s party may end up holding no House seat that voted for Trump by less than 9 points two years ago.

Trump likes to boast that he carried all seven target states in his 50% to 48% popular-vote reelection. This year, all seven — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin — went Democratic.

Much — maybe nearly all — of this is Trump’s doing. His “Liberation Day” tariffs, and the frivolous way he kept adjusting tariffs up and down, clearly kept inflation up and produced no visible positive effect. Like Joe Biden’s belief in Democrats’ historic remedy of pump-priming spending, Trump’s idiosyncratic belief in the power of tariffs proved destructive for his standing and his party’s.

Trump’s insistence on slavish loyalty in selecting candidates has also cost Republicans dearly. His choices in Georgia (2021 and 2022) and Arizona (2020 and 2024), his failure to get candidates who lost by less than 1 percentage point across the finish line in Wisconsin and Michigan in 2024, and his picks this year in North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas have arguably cost the party nine Senate seats heading into 2027.

That’s the difference between a Democratic Senate with 54 or 55 seats and a Republican Senate with the same majority. Between a Senate that confirms Republican Supreme Court nominees and one that invokes the Mitch McConnell precedent to refuse even to consider them. Between a Senate that might seriously consider convicting and removing an impeached president and one that would reject the effort outright.

As always, small numbers can make big differences in a 100-member Senate. Odds tend to prevail in elections for all 435 House members. And overall, the numbers in the public polls have held up pretty well this year, as pollsters have been making reasonable adjustments to lower response rates from Republicans — a subject on which I may comment later, and many others will soon.

And the messages from comparisons between the 2026 exit poll and 2024 exit poll stack up pretty well with the county election reports pouring in over the last 24 hours.

Republican percentages this year seem to be about 6 percentage points lower than Trump’s 2024 percentages among the most watched demographic groups — whites, men and women, white college graduates and non-graduates, and various income groups.

In the county returns, we see central-city counties post overwhelming Democratic percentages, suggesting a sweep of almost every precinct. We see Republican majorities in suburban and exurban counties atrophying in the Southeast and disappearing in Texas. We see Republican percentages holding up only in the most un-metropolitan rural counties.

We see some interesting regional patterns. In far northern states, Republican candidates for senator and governor did not lag as far behind Trump’s 2024 levels, perhaps for local reasons: Sen. Susan Collins’s (R-Maine) personal popularity, Democratic scandals in Minnesota, and Abdul El-Sayed’s divisiveness in Michigan kept Democrats from running more than 1, 3 and 4 points ahead of Kamala Harris.

In contrast, Democratic Senate candidates ran 11 points ahead of Harris in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia and 7 points ahead in Florida. We see here that the slow and steady movement of Northeasterners down I-95 and I-85 over the years has made the South Atlantic states, at least this year, the scene of close partisan battles, just as the once-Republican states in the Northeast became in the wake of the New Deal three generations ago. The biggest surprise was the Democratic victories in South Carolina, which had the nation’s fastest percentage population growth in 2025 to 2026.

Tuesday’s election wasn’t a blue wave or even a blue tsunami: It was a blue apocalypse.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), who leads the one notable bright spot on the map, referred to the wipeout as “close to an extinction-level event” for the GOP. It was the worst midterm defeat for one party in over a half-century.

Much of the postmortem conversation has focused on why this massacre happened. Was it the Iran war? Was it the tariffs? Was it corruption? Was it the “Epstein files” mess?

The answer is both simpler and more sweeping: The MAGA movement, which has defined the GOP during the Trump era, has forgotten what populism means in practice and requires in governance.

When Donald Trump rode down the Trump Tower escalator in 2015, he launched a populist revolution. His message was simple: An elite ruling class has sold out the country, and the MAGA movement is here to finally listen to the people.

Trump largely delivered during his first term.

Trump cut taxes, tamed inflation, and oversaw a booming job market and a surging stock market. He became the first president since Richard Nixon to begin to reset our relationship with Communist China.

In exile during the Joe Biden interregnum, Trump promised to return and close the border, get inflation under control, and bring back general sanity and stability.

To be sure, Trump’s second term has had its successes.

The southern border is airtight. Violent crime has fallen to the lowest rate in 125 years. Prescription drug prices are the lowest since the 1960s. The Justice Department’s fights with the Ivy League yielded real concessions. The raid to extract Nicolas Maduro from Caracas was bold and masterful.

But somewhere along the way, the MAGA movement forgot what it was.

Some in and around the administration have engaged in the most brazen corruption — pardons, access, illicit cryptocurrency enrichment, real estate side deals — in a century or more of Washington life.

When Americans see “special envoys” Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner negotiate with wealthy Arab states while padding their bank accounts from those same states, they understand what’s going on.

There’s nothing more anti-populist than such elite self-dealing.

On economic policy, the administration dramatically expanded its tariffs, including its “universal tariff” policy. Strategic, focused tariffs can work. But this was something else entirely.

Fact is, Joe and Jane in flyover country didn’t vote for a trade war with Canada.

Even more to the point: Why did Trump’s economists assume tariffing everything that moves is “populist” in the first place?

Reshoring supply chains is important. But the tradeoff between production and lowering prices is real. Higher tariffs and more supply-chain reshoring means higher prices.

Maybe that tradeoff is worth it. Maybe it isn’t. But the American people have spoken, and they want lower prices over anything else. So populism means winding the tariffs down.

The story on the Iran war is similar.

Many isolationists complain that Trump reneged on his promise not to start any new Middle East wars. That’s not quite fair. Trump already proved himself an Iran hawk when he withdrew from Barack Obama’s calamitous nuclear deal, and the U.S. and Iran have technically been at war since 1979.

But the administration never actually made the case for the war to the American people. At times, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth alluded to war aims. But the people never heard the case from the commander in chief himself.

Populism means governing of, by and for the people. How could a purportedly populist president not even bother to try to sell the war to the public?

It was astonishing political malpractice.

Finally, a true populist movement needs to focus on real-world concerns, not the conspiratorial rabbit holes of social media.

The obsession with the “Epstein files” was always bogus and lame. And when White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles reportedly told the terminally online Vice President JD Vance to take a break from the internet, she was onto something.

Real populism means boosting wages and lowering inflation — not staying up to the wee hours of the night trying to crack the Charlie Kirk murder case (news flash: it was Tyler Robinson) or blaming the Jews for stabbing the GOP in the back.

The good news is that most of the necessary changes are easy.

End the corruption. Wind down the global tariffs. Save face in Iran. Stop indulging brain-rotted conspiracists. Stop with the asinine lake name-change gimmicks. And get working quickly to lower gas and food prices.

Above all, make life easier, not harder, for ordinary Americans.

If this happens, the GOP will have a chance in 2028.

The MAGA movement died on Tuesday. But Trump’s final two White House years should still reflect the original MAGA spirit: governance for the people.

My staff and I have been pouring over exit polls looking for any insights into the electoral disaster that just hit our country. It’s obvious from the data what happened. Less obvious is why. The exit polls show how dramatically America’s political landscape shifted over the past two years. The most devastating change was the turnout among Bible-believing Christians. White evangelicals, a core conservative voting bloc, consistently make up about 25% of the electorate in presidential or midterm elections. This year, however, they accounted for only 17% of the electorate. That’s a third fewer conservative Christians showing up to vote. If you run the numbers, it means we lost 8 to 10 million conservative votes. That’s huge! And it absolutely made the difference in dozens of close races, including the Mississippi Senate race where the incumbent Republican senator is trailing by 1,100 votes. Or a North Carolina House race where the incumbent Republican is trailing by less than 100 votes. When hostile political forces — literal Marxists and Islamists — are openly threatening our freedom, it is immoral for Christians living in a free nation to abandon our civic duty. Not voting in the face of such dangers, I believe, is a sin. I can’t help thinking of the famous saying, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.” Too many good people didn’t vote this year. Our faith, our families and our freedom will suffer as a result. But evangelicals weren’t the only Christians who stayed home Tuesday. Protestants & Parents Take A Pass Too Two years ago, Protestant voters made up approximately 43% of the electorate. This year, that fell to just 38%. Not only did fewer Protestant Christians vote, their support for Republicans and conservative candidates fell four points between 2024 and 2026. While turnout among Catholic voters was relatively stable, their support for Republican candidates was not. It dropped 10 points from 59% in 2024 to 49% this year. So, a slim majority of Catholic voters backed Democrats and put in power the party of abortion on demand. Go figure. Meanwhile, turnout among those with no religious affiliation and people who don’t believe in God increased over 2024, and they voted overwhelmingly for pro-Marxist, pro-Islamist, anti-Israel candidates. And it wasn’t just faith-based voters who didn’t show up. Parents with children under 18 in the home made up 27% of the electorate two years ago, and they voted Republican by eight points. This year, parents with children — the people with the greatest amount at stake in the future of our country — were just 22% of the electorate, and they backed Marxist/Islamist/pro-trans Democrats by 11 points. Elections Have Consequences The consequences of this election continue to pile up and will be felt for years to come. I don’t want to wallow in this loss. We have only two choices. Either we run up the white flag and hide in our churches hoping no one notices us or we pick ourselves up off the ground and start putting our 2028 plan together. That’s an easy choice for me — I’m fighting back! But to fully appreciate just how bad this is, look at Texas. Democrats swept all major statewide races, including governor, attorney general and four state Supreme Court seats. That means Texas, for all practical purposes, is now a sanctuary state. At least when Joe Biden occupied the Oval Office, Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton fought back as hard as they could, often successfully. But if we lose the White House in 2028, “President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” will just call up Democrat Governor Gina Hinojosa and say, “Open the border!” There won’t be an Abbott or Paxton to fight back. By the way, Tuesday’s big win for the Democrats is already inspiring more Latin American migrant caravans to start marching north toward our border. Texas has always been with us in major lawsuits . Now, they will be against us, actively fighting President Trump’s efforts to secure the border and fighting the efforts of other conservative states to defend our values. “Gayest Congress In American History” Now, there’s a headline I never thought I’d see. It comes to us courtesy of the Congressional Equality Caucus. Celebrating Tuesday’s “Blue tsunami,” the Equality Caucus issued a statement declaring, “The American people have made their voices heard. The 120th Congress will officially be the GAYEST Congress in history! (that we know of). Let’s get to work.” If you’re looking for an investment opportunity, go buy LGBTQ pride flags. The demand is obviously going to be incredible. (That’s sarcasm, folks.) One LGBTQ media outlet predicted that the first order of business for the new “Gayest Congress ever” will be changing the rules to allow men to invade women’s bathrooms on Capitol Hill. I wonder how many voters had that at the top of their “affordability” agenda. The LGBTQ crowd also made gains at the state level. A suburb of Huntsville, Alabama, just elected the first transgender legislator in the state’s history in a district President Trump won by five points in 2024. In Texas, Democrat Maggie Ellis made history when she defeated the incumbent Republican in the race for chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court. Not only will Ellis be the first woman to lead the court, she is the first open lesbian elected to statewide office in Texas. About That Affordability Issue. . . The economy, the cost of living and affordability were the dominant issues in the campaign.

On October 17, 2026, roughly 550,000 people marched across France to protest the high cost of living. By nightfall, cars were burning in Paris, the town hall in Limoges had been set on fire, and hundreds of people had been arrested. It was the country’s worst unrest in years, and it followed weeks of high school blockades that had already turned violent . The education minister reported that 24 schools had been burned or ransacked and more than 100 severely damaged .

Let’s face it, the French are no strangers to rioting in the streets. From the bloody revolution in the late 18th century to the Paris Commune of 1871 to the student uprising of May 1968, and more recently the suburban riots of 2005 and the Yellow Vest protests of 2018–19, one could almost call rioting one of the French national pastimes.

But all facetiousness aside, the recent riots in France may not be simply run-of-the-mill. They may portend darker things to come. That French students and young people are burning down buildings and looting stores because they are unhappy or opportunistic is true but doesn’t explain much. The proximate cause appears to be proposed austerity.

The government of Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu proposed a 2027 budget with a €54 billion fiscal adjustment, giving credible notice that it intends to cut, not expand, government spending. The plan freezes most ministries’ budgets, public-sector pay scales, family allowances and housing aid, and it would freeze pensions above €1,260 a month. And many people are incensed (and incendiary) as a result.

Why would the French government propose such anathema as cutting national spending? It’s because they have a debt problem; or to be more precise, a borrowing problem. Long-term interest rates on sovereign debt have been rising across the world over the past few years from near 0 percent to 3, 4, or even 5 percent. While that may not strike you as a big increase, in relative terms that constitutes an increase of 1000 percent or even more. No country has escaped unscathed.

But in the past few months, France’s borrowing situation has become acute and threatens to grow altogether untenable. In October, the yield on France’s 10-year bonds topped 5 percent for the first time since 2002. What’s also interesting is the spread change in national sovereign debt rates. In February 2026, the French government only paid about 0.6 percent (60 basis points) more to borrow than Germany did. As of the end of October 2026, it was paying close to 160 basis points more.

Such an increase in rates means heavily indebted governments must pay rapidly increasing debt service costs. The basic logic is simple. The French government sells bonds to investors willing to purchase them. Investors demand compensation (interest) for a combination of the opportunity cost of capital (what they could receive by lending their money somewhere else) and a risk premium (compensation for the risk that the French government won’t pay them back). Rising interest rates across the world show that the opportunity cost of capital has risen. But the widening spread between France and Germany stems from investors’ perception of its stability and risk of default.

The more euros that France wants to borrow, the more difficult it will be to pay them back with interest in the future. And, as perception of France’s inability to pay future debt obligations increases, the more expensive it will be for them to borrow. Instead of paying about 3.3 percent in February 2026, they now need to pay nearly 5 percent as of October 26th, 2026. As their financial position worsens, investors perceive a greater risk of default and demand higher rates, making it even more expensive to borrow. You can see why France (and other countries) may have a problem.

When Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire (albeit briefly ), many people objected . They argued that no one should have that much money when others have so much less. As Musk leveraged that fortune in an attempt to shape electoral outcomes, some despaired . Tuesday’s results indicate that was a poor investment, but it’s his half a billion to waste.

Why not? After all, inequality isn’t the same thing as poverty. Consider that there’s a huge salary gap between NFL quarterbacks and NFL punters: quarterbacks earn tens of millions of dollars a year, whereas punters usually earn a few million. But I haven’t seen protests outside of NFL stadiums demanding less money for the “quarterback class” and more for the “punter class.” Punters aren’t poor. That quarterbacks live in even larger mansions isn’t a moral problem.

Maybe you’re thinking the moral problem isn’t simply that someone is richer than others; the problem is that someone is richer because others are poorer. But this thought assumes wealth is a fixed pie. In a market economy, though, it usually isn’t. If an entrepreneur figures out how to manufacture dishwashers for $100 less, millions of people might buy one and make the entrepreneur extraordinarily wealthy. But she only became so by making others better off. Before, customers would only receive a dishwasher in the transaction. Now they have a dishwasher and an extra hundred dollars to buy something else. The entrepreneur got rich by baking more pie, not taking a larger slice for herself.

An increasingly popular argument made by critics of economic inequality focuses on political power rather than consumption . The problem isn’t that the rich can buy a mansion but that they can buy elections. And this does seem worrisome.

One issue with this objection is that it underestimates the importance of organizational advantages in politics relative to economic advantages. Mancur Olson famously argued that small groups enjoy a leg up in political competitions because of incentives, regardless of wealth. Political inequalities will arise even in conditions of perfect economic equality. Even if everyone had exactly the same income and exactly the same wealth, political influence wouldn’t be equally distributed.

Take the case of free trade. Suppose that some domestic producers are unhappy because they dislike the competition from overseas. But consumers stand to benefit from cheaper goods. Notice, though, that the producers have a much stronger incentive to organize than the consumers. They’ll donate to campaigns, hire lobbyists, and call legislators because each of them could lose their livelihoods. But each consumer stands to lose only a few dollars a month if trade is restricted. Even learning about the legislation probably isn’t worth their time, let alone organizing to fight it. The cost of becoming informed and politically active is greater than the benefit, so they don’t do it. Because the producers organize and consumers don’t, we should expect the restrictions to pass.

In this example, nobody was richer than anybody else, yet political power still ended up concentrated in the hands of a relatively small group. And this isn’t some far-out thought experiment. Small groups with concentrated interests routinely outcompete large groups with dispersed interests. This is one of the central lessons of public choice economics . Equalizing wealth doesn’t eliminate the problem because organization is a major source of political power.

Now you might reply that wealth still matters for political influence even if it’s not the only thing that matters. Running a competitive campaign takes money. But this is a different claim than saying that “money buys elections.” Campaign Finance Institute researchers Michael Malbin and Brendan Glavin write, “Money is never a sufficient condition for winning. If the voters do not like what they are hearing, telling them more of the same will not change their opinion.” Indeed, economist Steven Levitt studied repeat candidates for the US House and found that “campaign spending has an extremely small impact on election outcomes, regardless of who does the spending.” Two recent Senate primaries reinforce the point. Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic primary in Michigan despite a nearly 10-to-1 advertising disadvantage . A couple of weeks later in Florida, Angie Nixon won the Democratic primary even though her opponent, Alex Vindman, outraised her 16-to-1 .

A Daily Economy essay by Joakim Book walks back the author's earlier progress-optimism. After years writing for HumanProgress.org and citing Matt Ridley and Hans Rosling, he now argues those sunny charts rested on decades-old information and missed a stall in real living standards for much of the rich world.

He was nudged by Chelsea Follett's The Grim Old Days and by Adam Omary's Progress Conference write-up asking why people "fear progress." Book's blunt answer: most people have not felt much progress lately. University of Michigan consumer sentiment has been near record lows even amid headline growth and huge AI investment. When the map and the territory disagree, he says, take the territory seriously instead of calling consumers irrational.

Interest costs are a big part of that lived experience. New 30-year mortgage rates sit near a generation high, so existing owners will not sell and trade a cheap mortgage for a dear one; household formation and mobility freeze. Karl-Friedrich Israel's Daily Economy work on CPI adjustments and Alchian-Klein asset-price insights point to flat or shrinking real wages for many Americans once you stop treating official indexes as gospel.

Classic progress metrics have plateaued. Child mortality's heroic century-long fall leaves little room left in rich countries; Nordic rates have barely moved in twenty years. Declines in working hours in places like South Korea and Germany often reflect stagnation, green-energy cost shocks, and exit into disability benefits rather than Keynesian leisure chosen from abundance. Follett's own charts show most working-hours gains came from the 1960s–80s, not the last two decades. Even Superabundance co-author Gale Pooley's oil time-price story looks less impressive once you notice oil was cheaper in time terms in the 1980s–90s than recently.

Compared with subsistence ancestors, modernity is a miracle; compared with parents' generation, peers often have the same appliances but can afford less housing and face worse fiscal governance. Eric Weinstein's jab — strip fashion and screens and ask whether you are in 1973 — lands hard. Adoption curves for refrigerators, washers, and running water already saturated. Meanwhile fiscal deficits, wartime-level tax takes in Britain, and America's roughly $40 trillion debt path look like regression. Almost all recent "progress" is digital gadgets and social media, with mental-health and polarization bills still coming due.

Book is not rejecting the past gains Follett documents. He is rejecting the habit of treating postwar compounding as a permanent default while Silicon Valley chants AI salvation. Progress is contingent on institutions, energy abundance, and median living standards — not stock indexes or lab demos. Re-run the Gapminder homework with today's data; do not gaslight voters who notice the stall.

The tone is a confession, not a manifesto for degrowth. Book still praises the fall in child mortality and the leap from Nordic subsistence farming to modern comfort. What he rejects is the Progress Conference habit of treating dissent as fear or cult resistance while France burns, fertility collapses, and wartime deficits accompany soft living standards. If AI delivers a new wave of broad prosperity, update the charts then — do not lecture people living the stall that their eyes deceive them.

In January 2018, Patrick Deneen published Why Liberalism Failed . That summer, Barack Obama put it on his reading list, writing that while he disagreed with most of its conclusions, it offered “cogent insights into the loss of meaning and community that many in the West feel.” Deneen, in that book, argued that liberal democracy was at fault for the loss of meaning and community because it had to “re-train” people “to think of themselves as individuals separate from nature and one another.” But while Deneen is a man of the right, similar arguments appear on the left. In a 2023 essay for the Socialist Project, Michael Lebowitz, a Marxist economist, wrote that “capital, in short, constantly drives to crowd out all traces of the system of community.”

In principle, this argument also seems to follow. As Murray Rothbard explained in his 1962 treatise Man, Economy, and State , there is little need to conjure a mystic force to explain the origins of society, which very much appear to stem from the relationships that develop through voluntary exchange.

In a nationwide field experiment, sociologist Delia Baldassarri scattered nearly 6,000 “lost letters” across 188 Italian communities and found that strangers returned them more frequently at places where market exchange was most developed. A 2023 study, drawing on survey data from more than 30 countries, determined that people in regions with more market activity were less willing to excuse cheating on taxes or claiming benefits they weren’t owed. To that end, the authors concluded there is no empirical evidence that markets undermine civic morality.

It’s unclear, however, how accurate this story of the relationship between declining community and capitalism is. In fact, research tends to indicate that increased market exposure predicts greater prosociality and trust.

Despite some surface-level differences, their diagnoses (and these sorts of arguments generally) remain similar — capitalism leads to a diminished civil society and less social interaction. But discussions of the decrease of community are not limited to ideological extremes. Indeed, concerns about the decline of community in America, for example, have been commonplace for decades now. Perhaps the most famous example of this is Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone , which explored the growing isolation of individuals in America amid the collapse of civic organizations.

Markets have taught people to trust and cooperate with strangers to an extent our tribal instincts never could have managed alone. The societies that suppressed markets did not preserve community; they hollowed it out. The forces actually emptying America’s public squares are less likely to be commerce than the ever-expanding state.

Figures like Deneen or Lebowitz have blamed markets for weakening social bonds, concluding that we should further empower the state with more control over social life. But the evidence suggests that restricting markets may do little to restore those relationships — and could undermine some of the institutions that sustain them.

There are real problems with the decline of community, both in America and broadly across liberal democracies. But the claim that capitalism is a major, let alone the primary, cause of the decline of community is unsupported both by logic and the relevant empirical evidence.

Accordingly, restoring community requires more freedom, from building a corner café in a residential area to forming a mutual aid society in place of the welfare state. Far from being the enemy of community, the market may be one of its most underrated allies.