On Friday night, Elon Musk’s team gained access to the Department of Treasury’s payments system, which processes the federal spending that makes up more than a fifth of the U.S. economy. Social Security, Medicare, agricultural supports, the National Parks—a large majority of government spending flows through this spigot.

Musk’s team not only has the ability to see every government payment, but can make changes to the system—which could mean having the capacity to turn that spigot off. What Musk appears to be attempting is using the payments system to decide what congressionally approved spending will actually occur. If that happens, it will take our unfolding constitutional crisis to a whole new level.

Normally, the federal payments system is apolitical plumbing managed by nonpartisan bureaucrats. Those bureaucrats simply process funds; they don’t make decisions about whether spending is justified. But they have immense unused power, because controlling the federal spigot means they have the capacity to stop any government payment with the push of a button, even if they have never done so.

With Musk at the reins, that power shifts to an unelected billionaire who intends to use it. Don’t like “woke” research? Turn it off. Hate USAID? Cut off the money. Think payments to Lutheran Family Services are illegal? Shut them down. Giving a single individual, let alone one with no official position, such control over the federal government would be extraordinarily authoritarian.

The courts place limits on the use of such power, but they are only one check. Apolitical employees, whose only obligation is to the law, are another safeguard. We also rely on the technical infrastructure itself to ensure that payments happen without disruption. Mucking about with systems that are built on sixty-year-old code could be deeply disruptive to vital government functions, shutting down the Social Security payments many rely on or cutting off payments to small businesses that depend on government contracts for survival.

Trump has already demonstrated his intent to gut parts of government that threaten him or depart from his political allies’ interests or ideology. He has moved toward purging the FBI of independent voices, tried to prohibit funding for whole fields of study, and temporarily halted congressionally approved spending on clean energy.

The effort is unprecedented, but so far it has met with mixed success for two reasons. First, cutting off funds one agency at a time, in the face of reluctant bureaucrats, is a messy, slow and uneven process. Second, it is generally illegal, since the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 (ICA) requires presidents to spend congressionally authorized funds unless they receive specific congressional approval not to do so.

With Musk in control of the federal spigot, the “messy and slow” problem would be solved. In agencies like the National Science Foundation, the president does have considerable authority to direct spending, even if it has in the past been delegated to scientists and experts. If the president wants to create ideological litmus tests, he probably can. But even so, it takes time to make unenthusiastic employees review each grant for mentions of gender and equity. Centralizing this power would speed things up considerably.

In other spaces, however, statutes—and more generally, the Constitution’s delegation of spending power to Congress—leave little room for such presidential discretion. Here, control of the payment system would give Musk the technical capacity to hit pause, but would then face legal challenges from the states, businesses, and nonprofits who were intended to receive them. Though the initial lawsuits against Trump’s spending freeze were brought for violating the Administrative Procedures Act, not the ICA, they have already temporarily reversed it.

Eventually, however, such legal challenges would make their way to the Supreme Court, which—though experts disagree on how likely this is to happen—might potentially overturn the ICA as unconstitutional. Should that take place, Trump, and Musk, would have a much freer hand to pick and choose which congressionally authorized funds actually get spent.

At that point, having operational control of the spigot would have even broader implications for Trump’s ability to implement his sweeping, but currently stalled, agenda. For example, Trump wants to control how schools teach history, but without a funding lever, his main power is the ability to intimidate them into compliance. But if Trump had greater direct control over federal funding streams, the pressure to comply would increase, even though Congress has specified that the federal government cannot control local curricula.

One can imagine even more dire scenarios, depending on Supreme Court decisions and the administration’s willingness to ignore the law entirely. In an extreme, but far from unimaginable, example, Trump might retaliate against blue states who refuse to take directives from ICE by turning off Social Security payments to their residents until they comply. This is far beyond the bounds of law, but until now it has also been a practical impossibility. Operational control of the federal payments system would, for the first time, make it a technical possibility.

In addition to politicization and ideological control, having power over the spigot would also open up new avenues for corruption. Imagine Musk with the power to simply turn off funding to those who refuse to invest in his projects, or support his business partners. This, too, is illegal, but at least at present is hard to carry out. That practical barrier would disappear with control of the federal payments system, leaving us only with Musk’s questionable integrity to protect government from abuse.

There are very good reasons that the federal faucet has always been controlled by apolitical bureaucrats. Having a president—or, even more so, an unelected billionaire—hold direct, granular control of nearly seven trillion dollars is power beyond the Founders’ wildest dreams. And we have seen elsewhere, notably in Hungary, that finding ways to use government to defund the opposition has been an effective opening salvo in the expansion of authoritarian rule.

If the Supreme Court cooperates with Trump’s desire to expand his control of the purse, we may be headed in this direction regardless. But even so, there is a difference between an executive with diffuse bureaucratic control of spending, and one with the fully centralized ability to stop the functioning of any part of government. If the latter becomes a reality, we will have taken another big step toward losing our democracy entirely.

Featured image is Women inspecting printed currency at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, by Waldon Fawcett

I will not beat around the bush: the Trump administration offers many possible paths to catastrophe, but at this very moment, none are more likely nor able to come about more quickly than those delivered by Elon Musk specifically. Anything we can do to strike at him, to drive a wedge between him and Trump, we must do. If state governments can find the political will to seize his assets and destroy the basis of his wealth, they should. If foreign governments can, they should do the same. The systems that Musk is mucking around in could very well destroy the credit of the country and send us into the greatest crisis of the past century, at least.

How did it come to this? For most of the 2024 cycle, we focused on Trump, his authoritarian threats, and Project 2025. Musk joined Trump’s cause quite late in the election—roughly the beginning of October. He quickly became the campaign’s single largest donor. Beyond his money, he invested his time and energy trying to stand up a last minute ground game in crucial swing states, almost certainly breaking multiple serious election laws in the process. After the election, he practically moved into Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago.

At first there was reason to suppose he would be just another in a long string of Trump courtiers who thought they could be the power behind the throne. If the pattern held, at some point the attention that Musk personally received would hurt Trump’s fragile ego and that would be the end of Musk’s insider access to the president.

It even seemed like others close to Trump might have successfully created some distance, quite literally, by ensuring that Musk would not be able to base his operations within the west wing.

It is still early, but these hopes now appear to be optimistic. While the lion’s share of Trump’s executive orders clearly have Project 2025 as their origin, and other moves are quite consistent with what he promised his entire campaign, the more immediately catastrophic decisions have clearly originated from Elon Musk personally. Indeed, with the spending freezes and the buy-out offer emails, the administration is quite clearly following Musk’s playbook in almost the identical manner he implemented it when he acquired Twitter.

Over at CNN, Zachary B. Wolf observed that We do not know what exactly Elon Musk is doing to the federal government. One question among many that was unanswered at the time of writing was “Has he taken an oath, like the federal workers he apparently has plans to fire, to uphold the Constitution?” It now appears that he may have, according to the White House, but the particulars are vague.

Wolf is not alone in wondering what, exactly, Musk’s role is in the administration, or what the practical limits are on his ability to act. The known details are sparse but telling: we know he has an office, with people nominally under his “DOGE” remit, though we do not know if they or he are actually on the federal payroll or have any other formal relationship to the executive branch or federal government in general. More significantly, the Office of Personnel Management has been staffed with people with strong ties to Musk and his allies. Others have been placed at the General Services Administration; there may be more in the future, and there may be more now that have yet to be reported on. These people are employees of the federal government, and definitely do not have a formal reporting relationship to Musk. Nevertheless, the evidence we have indicates they’re following his lead. Many of them have worked at his companies, some even worked specifically on the Twitter takeover.

Shortly after Trump’s victory, I warned that the biggest proximate risk was that he would take our system down the path of personalism. Of course, at the time, I meant the risk that the administration would expand the personal power of Trump specifically. We have seen that, of course, from a number of moves the administration has made. But no one has seen their personal power balloon more than Musk’s appears to have. His lackeys have run rampant throughout the government over the last few days, gaining access to critical tech infrastructure and sensitive information, in some cases locking out the very people who are meant to use it.

The scholar of non-democratic systems Xavier Márquez has pointed out that personalist systems where patronage is the central component “are characterized by high levels of de-institutionalization, where formal authority is no longer a good guide to the location of power.” Far more than Trump himself, this statement describes Musk, whose unparalleled personal wealth, control of multiple companies, and network of personal and financial ties, put him in a unique position even in an administration staffed by multiple billionaires. So long as the lower level clients remain, it’s unclear that even removing Musk himself from his nebulous position in the administration would do much to dampen his influence.

The de facto power of the Musk network stands to grow enormously if they successfully consolidate their control over federal systems and information channels. Even if they cannot wield it very skillfully, we ought to be alarmed. In the short term, unskillful meddling in systems that disburse trillions of dollars a year could very well cause damage they are unable to patch up after the fact, even if they fail to permanently establish an authoritarian regime.

More than any other actor right now, more than Trump himself, we need to be focusing on Musk and his agents. Whether it’s the spending freeze, terrorizing federal officials, or seizing control of sensitive systems, the actions that pose the most immediate threat to America and the world all have one source: Elon Musk.

A personalist triumphs when everyone else’s power hinges on their dependency to the personalist. Even if we cannot bankrupt Musk or bring him to justice for his many federal crimes, there are things that can be done to make him more dependent on his GOP backers and on Trump in particular than they are on him. This then leaves him actually vulnerable should Trump choose to abandon him at some point.

Any state government that can be persuaded that they ought to step in where the federal executive government has abandoned its duty and punish Musk for breaking crucial laws should seize any assets he has there. They should ban the sale of Tesla in their states and the trading of its stock on any exchange based there.

As for the rest of us, we need to be calling our representatives, including our state representatives, and demanding they take every available measure to hold Musk accountable. We should support opposition media that have been drawing attention to every step Musk and his lackeys have taken; Wired has been particularly effective at this. And when Musk unilaterally reduces the federal workforce or shuts down an agency—something which appears to be imminent—we must be prepared to take to the streets and demand that he be stopped.

Featured image is Elon Musk, by Haddad Media

Donald Trump is moving our country at breakneck speed towards personalist rule. “Woke Corporate Capitalism” has given way to a “parade of CEOs visiting Trump in Florida.” When in the terrifying hours after the January 6 insurrection, Twitter and Facebook banned Trump and hosting companies banned conservative social media site Parler, today Twitter’s owner is a member of the Trump administration and Facebook’s CEO has kissed the ring. Many media outlets who took a more overtly adversarial tone towards the first Trump administration have taken to normalizing his unprecedented and indefensible behavior, either out of fear of retaliation or a perception that their prior approach will generate as much revenue as it did the first time, or both. Some, like the owner of the LA Times, see a greener pasture in embracing Trumpism. Others, like Politico, have been acquired by Trumpist true believers.

It is imperative that we establish a large voice for oppositional media. Every authoritarian knows the importance of crowding out all dissenting voices, through a mix of magnifying their own and suppressing their critics. One common misconception is that the sole or even the main way they accomplish this is through direct censorship. In fact, the tools can be quite varied. In Alberto Fujimori’s regime in Peru in the 1990s, intelligence officer Vladimiro Montesinos made extensive use of bribes. As the political scientist Xavier Márquez put it in Non-Democratic Politics:

One of the striking findings uncovered by analysis of Montesinos’ careful records was the importance he placed on controlling television; bribes paid to TV stations were more than a hundred times the amount paid to politicians, for the simple reason that information that became public via television was the most powerful means of mobilizing opposition. (page 141)

A mix of strategies is always necessary. For the largest media channels, an authoritarian may nationalize them outright, seek to shutter them and replace them with their state-run equivalent, or use legal and extra-legal threats to make them hesitant to be openly critical. Online platforms require a different strategy entirely; while Venezuela or China cannot nationalize the biggest online platforms, they can “pollute the information commons and monitor potentially dangerous people” (page 141) to render them unsafe spaces for coordinating opposition.

In the case of China and regimes that take similar strategies, since the volume of online posts makes it quite impossible to stop all criticism per se, they focus on suppressing criticism that specifically encourages “collective expression.” In short, the sort of expressions that are likely to lead to actual mobilization are targeted, while expressing frustration in even very blunt and vulgar terms is allowed.

The biggest internet platforms in the world are run by companies incorporated in the United States, and the largest share of their revenue by far comes from users that live here and advertisers that spend here. An American authoritarian government therefore has many more options than even the Chinese government has to apply pressure to these platforms. While Elon Musk’s platform was always the smallest of the top social media sites, Zuckerberg’s rapid moves to show submission to Trump is much more alarming. The two together make for a powerful channel of regime propaganda, and “voluntary” moderation on behalf of the regime. In spite of all the fanfare around Project 2025 and the learning that has occurred between the first and second Trump terms, I do not think anyone in his administration is sophisticated enough to take a Chinese-style approach to censoring social media. I do believe that Meta itself has the institutional knowledge to do so.

An opposition must oppose. We must protect media spaces with large audiences where no-holds-barred criticism of the Trump regime is shouted from the rooftops. Here at Liberal Currents, we will continue to do just that. We are joined by a wide variety of niche publications who are just as committed in their adversarial stance. The problem is precisely that we are niche. Montesinos would not have paid a penny for any of us; he didn’t even bother with the newspapers of his day, focusing mainly on television. Those of us willing to take this stance must grow larger, much larger, seizing the market opportunity abandoned by the now-timid larger institutions of media. 

But we must also exert pressure on larger institutions than our own, and on politicians. The way that this is accomplished is twofold. First, though we may be smaller than a New York Times, or a CNN, if our audience includes people who work at those companies, we may be able to persuade them to change what they are covering and how. Second, small publications since at least the days of the original blogosphere have formed a kind of farm system for stories that potentially get picked up by larger outlets. This can be either because some people employed by the latter keep an eye on the minor publications to see if anything worth covering has shown up there, but it can also be because a story from niche publications has gone viral among a large audience, making it too salient for most big outlets to ignore.

To that end, sympathetic spaces such as Bluesky are crucial. Bluesky as it currently exists is vulnerable at the level of governance, so we can’t assume it will remain useful forever. But it is useful today and we must use what we can today. Beyond that, we need to encourage the users there to continue to keep channels of communication open with people who do not use that; to send articles written by opposition media to friends, family, and colleagues over email, group messaging, or whatever channel you might use. Keeping opposition voices accessible among at least a third of the voting age population is critical to avoiding the typical competitive authoritarian scenario.

We will continue to do our part, here at Liberal Currents. If you would like to participate in that, please pitch us at writers@liberalcurrents.com, or support us. Beyond the Liberal Currents community, support others like us, start your own, reach out to your elected officials regularly and build relationships with journalists at big news organizations. All of us must do what we can.

Below is a non-exhaustive list of publications that, at the time of this writing, have remained adversarial in their stance:

• ProPublica
• Mother Jones
• The Philadelphia Inquirer
• Rolling Stone
• HuffPost
• The New Republic
• The American Prospect
• Talking Points Memo
• Dissent
• The Nation
• The UnPopulist
• The Bulwark
• The Contrarian
• 404 Media
• More Perfect Union
• Techdirt
• The Appeal
• Lawfare
• The Handbasket
• Teen Vogue

Featured image is Censorship Board

Over at The Boston Globe, Yascha Mounk tells us that “a return of total resistance would be a bad strategy.” After reviewing the range of tactics employed by the resistance during the first Trump term, he concludes that "none of these attempts to oppose Trump was particularly effective.”

Never one to wait long to take an opportunity to kick liberals while they are down, Samuel Moyn wrote a New York Times column back in November arguing that “The Legal Battle Against Trump Was a Miserable Failure.” Moyn expressed his disappointment that “for decades, liberals have made the mistake of prioritizing legal victories over popular ones.” Moyn is even convinced, despite offering no evidence, that “legalistic tactics contributed to Mr. Trump’s victory, helping to produce the popular vote win he could not boast before.”

And being more straightforwardly defeatist, Shadi Hamid at the Washington Post wonders whether “demobilization is for the best. Four more years of civil unrest would probably have little effect on someone like Trump and might even trigger him to invoke the Insurrection Act to quell protests, as he has already threatened to do.” This sounds more like the rationalization of a battered spouse keeping their head down than of a political opposition considering a strategy.

Mounk, Moyn, and Hamid are wrong on all counts. The tactics employed to resist Trump’s first term had varying degrees of success. Sweeping claims like Mounk and Moyn’s can only be made by pundits and legal scholars for whom victory is always a concrete, either-or affair. You either win in court or you lose; you either remove the president in the Senate or you do not. But in political reality, simply buying time has enormous value. Policies take time to implement. Legislation takes time to pass, especially in our legislature. The more successfully Trump’s opposition delays any one policy, any one bill from passing, the fewer policies and bills Trump will implement and pass. In two years, Democrats will have a chance to take at least one chamber of Congress back; two years is a very short amount of time to implement much in our system. Delaying is one of the most tried and true tactics in our system and it was quite successfully employed in the first Trump term. More subtly, a political cost was paid by Trump for being impeached, just as one was paid by Clinton, even if this is harder to quantify in terms of time or votes lost.

Trump did win the popular vote this time, and because that exceeded people’s expectations, people are acting as though he has some sort of broad mandate. But the truth is that he had the smallest popular vote margin since Gore’s in 2000; smaller even than Clinton’s in 2016. Control of the House is even thinner than it was after 2016; indeed it is the barest majority in nearly a century.

Trump does not have a mandate, and we do not have an obligation to be compliant. The greatest risk of all right now is that Trump will successfully grow his personal power beyond what any president has previously achieved and take us down the road to authoritarianism. The signs are already there: all but one of his nominees are pure loyalists with no qualification for office, a Republican House committee chair has been removed purely on Trump’s say-so, and a spending bill was killed on the whim of Trump’s number one billionaire backer. Meanwhile, corporate America is lining up to swear fealty to Trump, most prominently Mark Zuckerberg, who has installed a Trump loyalist on Meta’s board, among other measures to appease Trump and his cronies.

The first steps taken by any authoritarian are to subsume the mass media to the regime and silence opposition press. Until now, however, authoritarians could only take measures to mitigate access to and the impact of major Internet platforms in their countries. America, however, can very much do to those platforms what the typical authoritarian does to locally operated news outlets. Zuckerberg and Musk’s relationships with the current Trump administration paint a dark picture of where these next four years may take us.

We must resist the Trump administration. The stakes are simply too high. We have the tools, if only we can find the political will. We must not shrink from using them at every opportunity.

Featured image is Women's March on Washington, by Mobilus in Mobili

The fundamental things apply / As time goes by
Woman needs man / And man must have his mate / That no one can deny
It's still the same old story / A fight for love and glory / A case of do or die
The world will always welcome lovers / As time goes by
Oh yes, the world will always welcome lovers / As time goes by
"As Time Goes By," 1931

There's a lot of gender happening lately, isn't there? Men and women are increasingly politically polarized;  in the most recent election young women voted Democrat by a 12-point margin compared to men. Abortion rights and trans rights are everywhere on the ballot. MeToo ripped the veil of silence off an epidemic of rape and sexual harassment across elite society. Every once in a while an angry boy buys an assault rifle and murders a crowd of people; afterwards he is found ranting about "Beckys" and "Stacys,” "Chads" and "the black pill."  Meanwhile thinkpiece after thinkpiece is generated on the "epidemic of male loneliness;" meanwhile the number of never-married women has increased from under 25% to over 30% since 1990. The world's richest man, who has recently spent a quarter of a billion dollars to buy himself a seat in the next presidential administration, stays up all night posting about how boobs in video games are too small these days.

And then of course there's the birthrates thing. They're going down (you may have heard). This phenomenon in particular is an obsession across the right. Of course one gets the sense that any conservative who starts going on about birthrates is about .05 blood alcohol content away from screaming out the fourteen words: "we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children." They view declining birthrates not as an economic or a civilizational problem but a racial one: their "race" is dying out.

This has made the topic of birthrates a bit taboo in liberal circles: no one wants to go near that dumpster fire. And yet. Consider South Korea, where the birth rate is at .8 per woman and falling. In other words, South Korea is a nation that is going to halve in size each generation. Doesn't that strike you as a bit... odd? Like maybe this is a symptom of some deeper problem?

It is the contention of this essay that it is. The problems just reviewed are not many crises, but one: a crisis in gender relations. The problem is real, and it has a material cause—but not a material solution. We can start by talking about the birthrates thing, for unlike social media outrage it is measurable.

The birthrates thing

For most of human history, the population was relatively stable. Birthrates were enormously high—the average premodern woman would spend most of her adult life nursing or pregnant—but death rates were equally high, especially among children. This was the age of the Malthusian trap, in which any living standard gains from increases in productivity would rapidly be eaten up by new mouths.

Around two hundred and fifty years ago, give or take, we escaped the trap. Productivity per worker began skyrocketing. Modern abundance—and especially modern science in the form of sewerage, clean water, public sanitation, vaccines—caused death rates to plummet. As a result the population exploded: between 1800 and 2000, Europe went from 195 million to 727 million, Africa from 81 million to 809 million. This was the world that prompted Paul Ehrlich's notorious "population bomb" theory, in which ever-increasing human numbers would soon bankrupt the planet's carrying capacity.

We escaped that trap too, through the "demographic transition." The death rate stayed low, but the birth rate started falling across the developed world. This appears to have both economic and cultural causes, and is increasingly a universal human phenomenon. In 1979 the Communist Party of China, under the influence of the ideas of Ehrlich and the Club of Rome, instituted the one child policy; in 2015 they revoked it, and today they are working desperately to increase the birth rate.

The decline in birthrates is often attributed to the cost of raising children. In the premodern world children went to work as early as six or eight, and thus constituted an economic benefit to the family; in the modern world they don't start working until they're teenagers, later if they attend college, constituting a huge upfront cost without much return for decades, if ever. "Surely this explains why birthrates are decreasing." It does not. Various countries have experimented with various degrees of income support for parenthood: paid maternity/paternity leave, childcare subsidies, direct cash payments. The effect on the birthrate of all these programs appears to be approximately zero.

What is relevant to the birthrate is how many children women want to have—shocking, I know. In countries where women want to have more children, women have more children. America and South Korea make good contrast cases. In America women want to have 2.7 children, and have 1.7. In South Korea women want to have 1.4-1.8 children, and have .8. Neither American nor Korean women have as many children as they say they want—but still, the number of children desired does seem to affect the number of children produced.

These are all facts. What remains a question is whether declining birthrates are a problem. Conservatives view declining birthrates as a civilizational—which is to say, a racial—crisis. This is the wellspring of "great replacement" conspiracy theories, the reason the fourteen words are central to white nationalist ideology. They believe their race is dying out, or at least being outcompeted by "inferior" races. As noted above, the stink of this idea has left liberals unwilling to admit that declining birthrates could be any kind of problem at all.

But they are. South Korea provides a useful case study. As noted earlier, each subsequent generation of South Koreans will be half the size of the previous. This will generate serious social problems. An ever-shrinking workforce will be required to support an always-larger population of retirees; as larger amounts of economic production are devoted in this direction, economic growth will slow. The prospects of the new generation will be just that much dimmer than their parents'. On top of this, South Korea shares a land border with a bellicose neighbor that even now proposes to conquer and subjugate it. Decreasing populations means decreasing military capacity, and in an era of declining population every casualty in war is irreplaceable. (It is for this very reason that Ukraine's military conscription begins at 25—and this after being lowered in 2024.)

In America it is easy to ignore these problems. We are bordered by two peaceful neighbors and two vast oceans and possess history's most preeminent military. The idea that war might ever touch the homeland is unimaginable. Americans have more children, and in addition to the domestic birthrate, America has proven unusually good at attracting and integrating immigrants, at least as compared to peers or competitors like China or Europe. America is not facing a material crisis of birthrates—but other countries are.

And yet. There is something more, isn't there? This niggling feeling that there's something wrong. Something more than the material problems I've outlined. So let me be clear: there is something wrong with a social form that cannot reproduce itself. It suggests that, on balance, the people of that society don't think their way of life is worth continuing. (And likewise there is something wrong with a social form that can only reproduce itself given the existence of poor, high-birthrate neighbors to supply a continual stream of human clay.) This is not a point about this or that race or people, because frankly "races" don't exist in any biological sense. This is a problem endemic to the developed world: it reflects something about the societies we have made.

So what has gone wrong in the modern world?

The patriarchal bargain

To talk about today we must talk about the past. If our social form does not any longer reproduce itself, we must ask: how did it formerly reproduce itself? And why has that mode of reproduction broken down? The answer to the former question is simple: our society once reproduced itself according to the patriarchal bargain.

In the simplest terms, the bargain works like this: women provide reproductive labor in exchange for security. Reproductive labor includes childbearing, but also childrearing, and also—this part is important—guarantees of paternity. Security includes economic security as well as physical security. The bargain has a variety of interesting conundrums—the goods are exchanged not once but continuously; once it is made the woman has little ability to alter its terms. In other words, she puts herself into the power of a man in the hope that he holds up his end of the deal. Needless to say, it is not a great bargain to make—but in many societies, it has nevertheless been a woman's best option.

That is because the patriarchal bargain is sustained by a broader social context. This context can be expressed simply in terms of North, Wallis, and Weingast's rents-exclusion dynamic. Women are excluded from social participation, especially economic participation. This is not to say that women do not engage in production—they almost always do, especially household production—but without the ability to engage in public social participation, they have little ability to set the terms of that labor. The bank account belongs to the husband, so to speak.

As a result of women's exclusion, rents accrue to men. In order to acquire a share of those rents, women are forced into an unequal bargain. If women want material prosperity and physical security, they have no choice but to make the patriarchal bargain and put themselves into the power of a husband.

The root causes of women's exclusion are various. The plough appears to be a major cause of patriarchy, insofar as it gives men a substantial economic advantage over women as compared to hoe-based agriculture. In other cases, such as purdah, the root of the exclusion appears to be purely cultural. Regardless, economic and cultural exclusions feed back into one another.

So far, so bleak. Here's the thing: the material basis of the patriarchal bargain is breaking down, and it has been for about two centuries. This was obvious in 1988, when Kandiyoti coined the term "patriarchal bargain," and that breakdown has not abated a whit in the intervening decades. The root cause of the breakdown is simple: we call it the modern world. The condition of modernity is continually increasing worker productivity as a result of technological progress—sustained long run per capita economic growth.

What this has meant for women is a society in which they have options outside the patriarchal bargain. Simply working for a wage is enough to provide the security that once husbands exclusively controlled. Or, to put it more intuitively: the rise of two-income households isn't a result of economic hardship. It's a result of economic growth. You could live on one income—if you were willing to accept substantially less material goods. But you want the stuff. The returns to paid labor outside the home far exceed the returns to domestic production. Success in life is less and less defined by your ability to drive a plough or swing a sword and more and more by your ability to produce in a technologically and industrially advanced economy.

It is unlikely, in other words, that the patriarchal bargain can ever be reconstructed. The condition that drives women's liberation is the condition of modernity itself: the technological and productive progress that is the source of modern material abundance—and the power modern abundance brings. No one is willing to give that up, though the tension may vex reactionaries.

The stories we tell

So much for the patriarchy—right? Hardly. The patriarchy had a material basis and that material basis is eroding, but that material basis had a cultural symbiote, and the symbiote endures. By which I mean: patriarchy is not just an economic structure. It is a story we tell ourselves about women and men—about what they are for, who they are to each other, what makes a good woman and a good man—and that story has staying power independently of patriarchy's material basis.

Where to start on this? I'm a sucker for the classics. So let's start there: The Big Sleep, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, 1946. The plot is... convoluted. But the archetypes are familiar. Bogart is Philip Marlowe, the coolest, toughest, canniest private eye you ever met. Bacall is Vivian Rutledge, rich and beautiful—and the coolest, toughest, canniest dame you ever met. As the trailer puts it, "That man—Bogart! And that woman—Bacall! Are that way again!"

But here's the thing: being strong isn't enough to make Marlowe a good man. Eddie Mars, gangster and antagonist of the film, is strong and tough and smart—but he's not good. Marlowe's a good man because while he might be a disrespectful wiseass, he's decent when he doesn't need to be.

And here's the other thing: being beautiful isn't enough to make Vivian a good woman. Carmen, her sister, is beautiful as anything, but faithless and wild and kind of a mess. What makes Vivian the real deal is how she sticks to her word no matter what—indeed, Marlowe compliments her on sticking to her word to Mars, even well past when it was in her interest.

In the dry terms of social science we call this "costly signaling."  It's easy to make promises on a sunny day—easy to keep them too. What you do in the dark when no one's watching and every interest says "break it," that shows your real character. A good man, he's gotta be good and he's gotta be strong and it's gotta be both. A good woman, she's gotta be beautiful and she's gotta be faithful and it's gotta be both. The drama of these stories is always women and men dealing with the tension between their two desired attributes. But the reason it's those two specifically, for men and women specifically, falls out of the nature of the patriarchal bargain.

A woman needs a man who is strong enough to provide material and physical security, but she also needs one who is decent enough to keep providing that after she's signed on the dotted line and doesn't have any recourse. A man needs a woman who is beautiful enough to bear beautiful children, but he also needs one who is faithful enough so he can be sure those are his kids he's raising. Kind of a tawdry analysis behind a beautiful movie, but there it is. (Maybe, somewhere in the interstices of all that tawdry bargaining, we might find—love. But that's a tough flame to catch, and keep alive. More on this later.)

Let's take another example. By the time Die Hard is released in 1988, the story is changing. Die Hard is a story about cops and robbers, gunfights and explosions, but before the first terrorist walks onto screen the movie makes its stakes clear: will the hero get the girl? In this case, the girl is Holly Gennaro, who has moved to Los Angeles to take a high-paying job. It's made clear she no longer needs her husband for material security—the Rolex she's earned as a bonus is the symbol of that—as is the fact that she no longer uses his name.

But then: terrorists, gunfights, the inimitable Alan Rickman's Hans Gruber. Holly might not need John McClane for economic security, but she sure as hell needs him for physical security. And at the climax of the movie, John takes that Rolex off her wrist, sending Gruber plummeting to his death—and she takes his name again, introducing herself to the TV cameras as Holly McClane.

These days the story is getting even more strained at the seams. Patriarchy-as-narrative is plainly visible in manosphere culture. Andrew Tate, Romanian sex trafficking kingpin, is selling a vision of patriarchy to young men—a vision of male power and female dependence. A young man posts on Instagram "She doubled her body count, so I doubled my body weight." This is not just classic patriarchy, but a reaction to its breakdown, doubling down on its worst aspects—raw power and domination without love. This is what MacKinnon called the sexual fetishization of female submission; in the manosphere even actual love and sex become secondary to the act of power.

The story endures even as the story stops making sense.

A new archetype

These are all stories about what makes for a good man. They are adapted to a certain material reality—the world of the patriarchal bargain. A world where women need men for economic or physical security. But mostly, we are not being taken hostage by elite European terrorists. We live in a safe world; indeed, the modern world has some of the lowest rates of violence (murder, assault, rape) ever recorded. More and more, women don't need men. And men haven't figured out how to adapt to that.

Declining fertility is precisely a symptom of this breakdown. As Alice Evans documents, the rise of singlehood among young people is not a result of women not wanting marriage or children—but rather women finding the bargain on offer not particularly attractive. Men think they are happier and wealthier married—and they're right. Women think they are happier and wealthier alone—and they're right. The bargain is not good for women, and more and more we are declining to make it.

We need new stories. We need a new archetype. You gotta be worth choosing, not because she needs you, but because she wants you. The trick of gender is the trick of the modern world: learning to live together as free and equal citizens. Which is to say: telling a story in which we can be free and equal together despite our differences. A story about how men are useless and don't have worth and aren't worth wanting isn't really going to cut it, not as long as men remain half the human population.

To return to the rents/exclusion analysis, Francis Fukuyama argues that most successful reforms of such systems involve not the destruction but the extension of elite privileges to the masses. The aristocrat doesn't lose; the commoner gains. England did not abolish its royal courts; it allowed more and more people to use them, and an aristocratic privilege was transformed into a common right. You might think what I am saying is "just coddle men more." But what Fukuyama's analysis also suggests is that this process also involves elites consciously accepting equality, rather than digging in their heels and refusing to let go of their relative status. Our ability to build new narratives depends, in the end, on those narratives being embraced by both men and women. 

What happens when the fundamental things no longer apply? What is a man to a girl who can buy herself flowers?

The knight saves the princess from the orc. That's a story about cool sword fights and glimmering dragons, but it's also a story about men and women and what they are to each other. A good man is a knight and not an orc; a good woman is a princess and repulsed by the orc's advances.

But what happens when the girl picks up the sword and kills the orc herself? What happens when she goes ahead and rules the kingdom without a man at her side? The knight has spent his life training for that moment—waiting for the moment he might prove his worth in the act of killing an orc. A dream evaporates—and now what does his worth consist in? Can he find a way to be something worth wanting for his own sake—a man who is wanted even despite not being needed? Until we figure out how to tell that story, the crisis of gender relations will not abate.

Or, you know, maybe we'll just take another step down the reproductive technology tech tree and solve the problem in another way. These days who even knows.

I can buy myself flowers
Write my name in the sand 
Talk to myself for hours 
Say things you don’t understand 
I can take myself dancing 
And I can hold my own hand 
Yeah I can love me better than you can
"Flowers," 2023

Featured image is The Hireling Shepherd, by William Holman Hunt