Helium is a rare, nonrenewable gas formed through millions of years of radioactive decay, often accumulating in natural gas reservoirs. It is extracted through a refining process in which natural gas is cooled to a liquid form and leftover helium is siphoned off.

“Unlike ordinary goods and services that can be produced virtually forever, every unit of helium that is produced and consumed today will eventually escape Earth’s atmosphere and become one less unit available for use tomorrow,” experts warned in a 2000 congressional report.

In the early 1900s, the gas was considered to be a much safer alternative to hydrogen, an extremely flammable gas, to float blimps and other dirigibles, which were considered state-of-the-art weaponry at the time. Recognizing its military potential, Congress signed the Helium Act in 1925, which made the federal government the country’s only domestic helium producer and established a stockpile of the gas in an underground reservoir near Amarillo, Texas.

In 1960, Congress relaxed production restrictions and allowed certain companies to begin extracting helium from natural gas and selling it to the government. In the mid-1960s, government officials recognized that a radioactive isotope used in nuclear warheads decays into a rare form of helium named helium-3 and began stockpiling that as well.

The gas has proved to be a crucial resource. Without helium, doctors would not be able to conduct MRI scans; computer chip manufacturers would be unable to make semiconductors fueling much of the current tech innovation; infrared detectors on the James Webb Space Telescope, a NASA telescope orbiting the sun, wouldn’t work; and the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator for groundbreaking physics research, would be inoperable.

“Today, helium fuels the development of national priority technologies in quantum computing, next-generation energy materials, and space applications,” wrote the American Physical Society, the premier advocacy group for physicists, in 2023. “Put simply, there is no replacement for helium, and America’s research enterprise relies on access to a steady, reliable supply.”

But in the 1990s, Congress and the Clinton administration viewed the helium program as an outdated federal project used to fill balloons. Gutting the helium reserve was a part of Gingrich’s and ’90s-era Republicans’ “Contract with America.”

The pro-business, government austerity blueprint was influenced by the Heritage Foundation, the conservative group that would go on to help create the Supreme Court’s current conservative supermajority and write Project 2025, the radical — and now largely successful — plan to dismantle the federal government under a second Trump presidency. In fact, the Heritage Foundation called for the helium program to be cut in 1990, 1992, and 1995.

The Federal Helium Reserve had landed in the political crosshairs because it had accumulated more than $1 billion in debt. In 1992, the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan congressional research office, recommended that Congress cancel the debt “since doing so would not adversely affect the federal budget.”

But lawmakers had other plans.

“Let’s pop the bubble on some of the most blimped-out government waste. Let’s put an end to all the hot air coming out of Washington,” former Rep. Chris Cox (R-CA) said in 1993, later calling the program “the poster child of government waste.”

Politicians of all stripes agreed. In 1996, the Helium Privatization Act, a long-term plan to sell off the government’s helium assets by 2015 to settle the reserve’s debt, passed the House with a simple voice vote and passed the Senate with unanimous consent, meaning no formal vote count was recorded.

Bill Clinton, who had embraced neoliberalists’ deregulatory zeal, welcomed the development.

“Today, over 90 percent of U.S. helium needs are met by private producers and suppliers,” Clinton wrote in a 1996 signing statement. “A government-operated program is no longer needed. The private sector can . . . supply the needs of all users.”

While the great helium sell-off commenced, the Helium Privatization Act built in a fail-safe. The law required the government to study “whether such disposal of helium reserves will have a substantial adverse effect on United States scientific, technical, biomedical, or national security interests.”

In 2000, as a result of those studies, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council found that the bill would “have only a modest impact on producers and users,” that prices “will probably remain stable through at least 2010,” and that selling off the national stockpile “will not have a substantial impact on helium users.”

But those findings conflicted with a 1995 statement from the American Physical Society that found that “the overall demand for helium has been steadily increasing, and there is every reason to believe that this trend will continue.”

Sure enough, the government’s forecasts did not hold true.

In 2006, a global helium shortage disrupted industries relying on the gas. Soon, the same institutions that conducted the 2000 report were criticizing not only the privatization effort but also the 2000 government report, stating in 2010 that price and supply changes “have caused concerns about the availability of helium . . . and raised questions about the previous report’s conclusion that the sale of the helium reserve would not significantly affect helium availability.”

In that 2010 follow-up report, government researchers found “that selling off the helium reserve . . . has adversely affected critical users of helium and is not in the best interest of U.S. taxpayers or the country.”

The scientists cautioned that continuing to sell off the helium reserve could leave domestic interests relying on helium imported from Russia and the Middle East, two volatile regions, “at a time when demand for helium by critical and noncritical users has been significantly increasing.”

Another problem: the 1996 privatization law created a system that allowed a handful of helium refiners to purchase the federal helium below market-rate prices, effectively creating a taxpayer-backed handout available to just four companies.

These issues, plus another global helium shortage in 2013, left lawmakers scrambling to delay the helium reserve’s 2015 closing date. Otherwise, experts warned, US industries would have no choice but to rely on foreign helium imports.

“The failure to enact reforms of the helium program, such as those contained in this legislation, could mean an increased reliance on insecure and irregular helium supplies from Russia, Algeria, Qatar, and other foreign sources,” said former Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), a former physicist.

In response, lawmakers passed the Responsible Helium Administration and Stewardship Act, which allowed the interior secretary to hold annual helium auctions, open to all companies, until the reserve was depleted. The law also required the regulators to establish a twenty-year strategy for “securing access to crude helium” for clients who were previously dependent on the stockpile.

The resulting twenty-year strategy, released in 2015, supported the government’s ongoing efforts to sell off the helium reserves. While scientific and industry groups continued to warn that helium demand was likely to rise, government researchers once again concluded that “federal helium demand is expected to remain relatively flat during the period from 2015 through 2021,” adding that the twenty-year demand for helium is “also flat.”

Still, scientific and industry groups warned that helium demand was likely to rise.

The government’s twenty-year strategy failed to forecast shortages caused by trade blockades, such as Saudi Arabia blockading Qatari shipments in 2017. It also didn’t factor in maintenance shutdowns, which led to another shortage in 2019. A fire at a Russian helium processing facility in October 2021 led to another shortage.

More recently, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has choked off supplies of Russian helium, due to US and European sanctions on the country.

By 2022, the dangers of relying on foreign helium sources were abundantly clear, warned the US International Trade Commission.

“As the future of international relations remains uncertain, current geopolitical affairs will likely stress the global helium market beyond all that has occurred to date,” the commission wrote in an executive briefing. “Ultimately, a prolonged shortage could have wide-ranging effects across multiple sectors.”

In 2023, as the total sell-off of the Federal Helium Reserve neared completion, the Bureau of Land Management, a subset of the Interior Department that oversaw the helium reserve, released a public request for information on if there was an “increasing risk of helium-supply disruption” and if that risk was coming from countries that “may be unwilling or unable to continue to supply the United States.” The public request noted that foreign helium production was “concentrated primarily in Qatar and Algeria.”

The Brookhaven National Laboratory, a federally owned nuclear research facility, responded in a letter that since the federal government stopped supplying the lab with subsidized helium in 2022, prices for the gas had “spiked tremendously,” a “clear sign of the instability of the market.”

Premier, Inc., a major health care logistics company, noted in another letter that helium supply had been unstable for fifteen years, at times causing hospitals to make due with less helium than they planned for.

“Given the instability of the helium supply chain for almost two decades, it is unlikely that the volatility will be fixed on its own, especially if the U.S. proceeds with sale of the Federal Helium System which would further exacerbate shortages and tighten available supply globally,” the company wrote.

These warnings and pleas failed to stop the government from selling off the remainder of its helium in 2024. In fact, the company that bought the remainder of the helium, Messer North America, Inc., wrote in a 2023 comment letter that the government should reconsider selling it.

“We continue to believe that Congress should consider delaying or canceling the sale of the Federal Helium Reserve, which has been a tremendous source of stability for the U.S. marketplace for decades,” the company wrote. “The federal government would be wise to maintain control of this invaluable asset until new global sources of helium have demonstrated their reliability.”

Today the risks outlined by scientists and industries that rely on helium are no longer theoretical.

While the United States remains a major helium supplier due to private sector production, in the globalized economy, many industries rely on helium exported from Qatar, a small, oil-rich country located in the Persian Gulf that provides roughly 30 percent of the global supply.

But thanks to back-and-forth Iran and US blockades in the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial shipping route in the region, that supply has been intermittently cut off. Additionally, the global helium supply relies on roughly 2,000 containers to store liquid helium, many of which are also reportedly stuck in the strait.

The shortage is coming at a precarious time for helium demand. Artificial intelligence has dramatically increased the need for helium, since the gas is essential for making semiconductor computer chips.

“With the AI boom and the data center boom that we just witnessed, the demand for chips and integrated circuits just skyrocketed, and you need helium gas to produce all of this,” said Mani, the supply chain expert from the University of Virginia.

The AI industry is underpinning much of the American stock market’s recent gains, and experts are warning that a helium shortage could result in defective computer chips. A prolonged shortage would also force hospitals and medical facilities to compete with trillion-dollar tech companies for access to the gas.

The current situation is already prompting foreign medical associations to issue warnings on the ramifications of a shortage. On April 14, Russia announced new restrictions on foreign sales of its helium to maintain domestic price stability, which could exacerbate the problem.

As demand for helium continues to grow, a federal stockpile could have eased industry needs. Instead, the federal government now relies on a private sector that has increasingly become concentrated in conflict zones.

“No one expected the semiconductor data center boom to happen a year or two after we removed the Federal [Helium] Reserve,” Mani said. “It’s almost like [industries] are getting it on two sides: One, we don’t have a reserve, which we could have. And two, the demand side just spiked and even though we produce helium, we sell it to an industrial market or exchange . . . where it goes to whoever is the highest bidder.”

Now, the Times shows us “shadow paper” memos proving that a few decades after all that posturing and promising, Roberts built a new shadow docket in order to let him be perhaps the most activist justice in American history.

Indeed, Roberts used this weapon to expeditiously insert himself and the court into a battle between the Obama administration and fossil fuel–backed state politicians trying to block the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from wielding the climate regulatory power that the Supreme Court had already seemed to validate as the EPA’s prerogative.

What’s important here is not just that Roberts was ideologically opposed to Barack Obama’s climate policy nor is it that he supported the petition to hear the Clean Power Plan case. It’s that he pushed the court to intervene immediately, without any meaningful process at all. There was no oral argument. There was no painstaking review of facts. There was just a ruling.

Roberts was apparently angry at one line in an EPA blog post and upset that energy companies would have to reduce their emissions. He wrote that “the EPA’s own models show that the rule will cause immediate shifts in power generation” (the horror!) and asserted that such a shift away from climate-destroying coal would cause “irreparable harm.”

He then prejudged the entire case without any process (“I also believe that there is a fair prospect for reversal”) and then pressed the court to instantly barge in to decide the case.

Maybe you agree with Roberts’s action on the legal merits. Maybe you don’t. But it’s inarguable that he was an activist. And not just any judicial activist — he was acting as an aggressive, enthusiastic activist.

He ignored Justice Elena Kagan’s argument to go through the normal judicial process because he was an activist focused on a predetermined outcome. He was so focused, in fact, that he demanded the court intervene immediately. He wielded massive judicial power on an impulse and, in the blink of an eye, did so with a powerful weapon of judicial activism — the shadow docket.

In short, on a set of policies affecting the livable ecosystem that supports all life on the planet, Roberts was the activist judge he righteously derided as a young lawyer and promised never to be when lawmakers were reviewing his Supreme Court nomination.

I remember that nomination clearly — because I was one of the few left-of-center people in politics at the time desperately trying to sound the alarm about Roberts. I told the Chicago Tribune that “his major experience has been representing large corporations.” I suggested to NPR that a vote for Roberts would end up being a black mark on any Democratic senator’s record. I was frantic and yet hopeful that exposing his record and agenda would prompt some real opposition.

I was naive and wrong. His nomination sailed through on an overwhelming vote — seventy-nine senators backed him, including many Democrats. Adding insult to injury, then-Senator Barack Obama — who laudably voted against Roberts — used his platform to defend Roberts-supporting Democrats from criticism about their vote for a justice whose activism would end up crushing Obama’s very own signature environmental initiative.

I note all this not as an “I told you so” or to depict the younger version of myself as some prescient visionary. Back then, you had to be willfully blind to avoid seeing who Roberts actually was and what he represented, and in the 2000s, many Democrats in Congress were willfully blind (as many remain today).

No, I bring this all up in hopes that we never again repeat that kind of history. It’s the same hope I have in surfacing all these forgotten Roberts memos from the Reagan era (and in separately reminding readers about the betrayal of alleged “moderate swing vote,” Anthony Kennedy).

I want there to be a documented history of who created this dystopia and how they betrayed what they purported to stand for and were touted as, so that nobody can ever purport to be fooled again.

John Roberts was the bogeyman John Roberts warned of — and we will all now pay a terrible price in the form of more pollution and an out-of-control climate crisis.

The next time around — if there is a next time — we must remember this cautionary tale.

While Leo may have chosen to take an unusually direct approach in his rebukes of the Trump administration’s immigration policies and wars, his positions themselves should surprise no one. While Hegseth and any number of younger, far-right executive branch staffers may love talking about holy war and appropriating to themselves the imagery of the medieval crusades, the Catholic Church in recent centuries has tended to reject this martial ideal.

Even the ancient tradition of “just war” theory, first articulated by St Augustine under the declining Western Roman Empire and refined throughout the Middle Ages, is best understood not as a justification for war but as the imposition of strict conditions and limits on the involvement of Christians in war.

While Christian societies have habitually fallen short of this commitment to peace, it has never been displaced from the Catholic church’s intellectual tradition. Paul VI’s slogan “Never again war!”, John Paul II’s call for the abolition of nuclear weapons, and Francis’s view that the conditions for a “just war” are impossible to meet in the modern world are not, as some reactionaries imagine, the infiltration of some secular political ideology into papal statements but natural developments of the church’s ancient teachings against war.

Less well known, but equally important for Pope Leo’s engagement with American politics, is the Catholic church’s tradition of advocacy for immigrants. Ever since the modern phenomena of mass migration began in the nineteenth century, the popes have been eager to promote the welfare of immigrants and to condemn their legal mistreatment. While some of this may have arisen from sectarian interest — Catholics have always been well-represented among immigrant communities — the popes have always insisted that it has a theological basis as well.

In response to the ongoing problem of refugees in Europe after World War II, Pius XII produced the church’s most forceful articulation of its teaching about migrants. Invoking the Gospel account of the infant Christ’s flight into Egypt from the wrath of Herod, he commanded Catholics everywhere to welcome and care for migrants in their midst.

In light of these teachings of his predecessors, it is not at all innovative or “progressive” that Leo XIV should condemn the brutal tactics used by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or call for a “universal authority” to rein in countries’ pursuit of their own interests. But to many US observers, these comments seem to have come out of nowhere — to the pleasant surprise of some and to the dismay of an administration that has been caught off guard.

The main reason for this surprise lies in the highly selective way Catholic thinking about politics has been represented for US audiences — by political pundits and even by the US bishops themselves. The public reception of Catholicism, for Catholics and non-Catholics alike, is largely shaped by Catholic bishops, nonprofits, and media figures, all of whom decide which elements of the ancient traditions of Christianity they will focus on and how they will portray them.

This is inevitable: ordinary Catholics (and other people interested in understanding the church’s doctrine) generally don’t have the time to pore over thousands of pages of historical theology or even to study the official statements put out by the Holy See. But the choices that have been made in the United States about the public presentation of the church’s political stances have not just simplified or popularized but also distorted — and sometimes actively misrepresented — what the popes have taught in an official capacity.

Perhaps the most egregious example of this US phenomenon is the idea, widely promoted by Catholic political groups, of the “five nonnegotiables” that supposedly constrain Catholics’ political choices. Created as a kind of voters’ guide for the 2016 election by the right-wing apologetics group Catholic Answers, this idea found wide acceptance among Catholic groups and has continued to appear in church bulletins, homilies, and Catholic journalism ever since.

According to this framing, politicians with an incorrect view on the supposedly “nonnegotiable” issues — abortion, euthanasia, stem-cell research, cloning, and gay marriage — must be opposed by all Catholics, who cannot vote for them without falling into sin (for the 2024 election, a “nonnegotiable” anti-trans stance was often added to the list). And it is usually presented with the strong implication that all other issues on which the church may have a stance — war and peace, public health, economic justice, environmentalism — are merely “prudential” questions that may have better or worse answers but are always trumped by the “nonnegotiables.”

This narrowing of politics to culture war is hard to justify theologically, and it never quite won the formal endorsement of the US conference of Catholic bishops. Nonetheless, their repeated statements about the “preeminent priority” of abortion as a political issue have been widely — and perhaps correctly — understood as an implicit endorsement of this framing.

The choice of US Catholic leaders and institutions to prioritize a politics of culture war broadly aligned with the Republican Party has been consistent in recent years, but it should be understood as an American and not a Catholic phenomenon. The Catholic church in other countries also maintains a moral objection to abortion, for example, but there is almost never any suggestion of an absolute ban on voting for or collaborating with pro-choice politicians.

 While they have been prepared to brook no compromise on these questions of culture war, the public intellectuals of US Catholicism have shown themselves extremely flexible in reconciling other priorities of the Republican Party with Catholic teaching. Despite John Paul II’s unequivocal opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the bishops mostly kept quiet, and influential US Catholic neoconservatives like Michael Novak, Richard John Neuhaus, and Robert George had no compunction about respectfully rejecting the pope’s judgment.

After Benedict XVI published a long and thoughtful encyclical letter defending redistributive economic policies, George Weigel took a break from his duties on the advisory council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation to explain why he rejected the encyclical’s thinking, going so far as to insist that the Supreme Pontiff had been constrained by his advisors to include left-wing ideas he certainly didn’t really believe. John Paul and Benedict, of course, were no men of the Left — John Paul was fiercely anti-communist, and in his earlier career, Benedict had led the inquisitorial campaign against liberation theology. But for the US interpreters of these conservative popes, it seemed that any deviation from the Republican Party platform was one too many.

Even in these latter days, Robert Barron — bishop of a small see in rural Minnesota, celebrity preacher on YouTube, and proud member of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission — has taken the implausible position that Pope Leo’s recent statements have no bearing on the US-Israeli war on Iran but were simply an abstract meditation on the possibility of an unjust war. In his defense of the Trump administration, Barron has even claimed that “it is not the role of the Church to evaluate whether a particular war is just or unjust,” though this is not because he is shy of bringing Catholic theology to bear on other particular policy questions: he has been industrious in offering up arguments on why Catholics must reject the specter of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s municipal socialism.

In 2026, not many Catholics in the United States are prepared to join in Bishop Barron’s intellectual contortions. Unlike in 2003, the pope’s antiwar statements have been amplified by US Catholic institutions at the highest levels. The bishops’ conference has not limited itself to generic prayers for peace but has issued repeated statements endorsing Leo’s criticisms of the war. Three American cardinals — perhaps the most senior figures in the US church — did a joint interview on 60 Minutes defending the pope, denouncing the war, and criticizing ICE.

In an astonishing breach of protocol, the archbishop responsible for Catholic chaplains in the US Armed Forces stated publicly that the war on Iran is unjust. And this apparent consensus among the bishops is reflected among Catholic intellectuals as well — beyond the walls of the White House or the Pentagon, there are very few Catholic voices, even on the political right, that are willing to take Trump and Vance’s side over Leo’s.

After so many years of concerted efforts to yoke the authority of the Catholic church to the Republican Party’s politics (or at least to minimize any awkward differences), the US church and the Trump administration are suddenly in open conflict. What has caused this change? And why now? Without discounting the possibility of genuine moral awakening among US Catholics, we can identify factors both in Washington and Rome that have made the contradictions undeniable.

The first, and most important, is the shameless cruelty of the Trump administration — for the Catholic church, the shamelessness is more important than the cruelty. Wars of choice, attacks on civilians, and mistreatment of immigrants are not new phenomena in American history, but there have generally been efforts to provide an ideological fig leaf to cover for them.

In Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, it may have been implausible to say that we were fighting for the sake of democracy and a future peaceful coexistence. Yet the government nevertheless understood the importance of saying it, and many elements of American society believed it — or pretended to. However tenuous and transparent those ideological fig leaves may have been, they provided a pretext for US Catholic leaders and intellectuals to assume the good faith of the government and to avoid open confrontation.

But the present administration has torn those fig leaves away. The Department of Homeland Security and the rechristened “Department of War” constantly put forth statements and images celebrating state violence and even dwelling with pleasure on the suffering of victims. Even if defending these actions as a regrettable necessity once involved a degree of bad faith, celebrating them as a positive good is now far harder to justify.

Catholic moral theology has evolved an elaborate system of casuistry that can allow one to contemplate “collateral damage” with equanimity — but that system cannot be stretched far enough to justify threats to destroy a civilization. The constant deployment of explicitly Christian language and imagery by Hegseth and others in the administration further heightens the contradictions for Catholics. While Hegseth’s own theological influences are far from Rome, his constant invocation of the name of Christ in connection with military operations invites an answer from the church in a way a purely secular justification of the same policies would not.

Secondly, Pope Leo’s identity as an American makes his criticisms of US policy harder to ignore. As he himself has observed, critics of earlier popes have often argued that their views of the United States were poorly informed. Leo’s own politics have been shaped by his decades of service in Peru, but he was born and educated in the United States and delivers his critiques of US policy in Midwestern-accented English. And unlike some of his counterparts in the United States, Leo has declined to take the bite out of his criticism by speaking in terms of abstract principles: his criticism is of the Iran war, ICE, and Trump. It is far harder for US Catholics to minimize this criticism or to paper it over with vague theological abstractions when it’s delivered so directly by one of their own.

A third factor that has made conflict unavoidable is that many Trump administration officials’ and staffers’ own religious attitudes make it impossible for them to accept that Rome may not be on their side. Despite the president’s assertion that he’s “all about the Gospel,” he has never shown much interest in the actual content of Christianity. Whether or not he meant his briefly posted — and deleted — self-depiction of himself as Christ to intervene in his dispute with Pope Leo, the flirtation with blasphemy risks seriously offending even Christians who share his politics. And Trump’s claim that Leo XIV advocates for a nuclear Iran is not just baseless — it also ignores the Holy See’s long history of advocacy against nuclear proliferation. The popes’ opposition to the development of nuclear weapons dates back to 1943, when the atom bomb was still just a scientific theory.

If Trump himself is indifferent to the details of Catholic teaching, plenty of others in his administration do care about it — or at least are anxious to be seen as defenders of the faith. Within a few weeks of his inauguration, Vice President Vance — who converted to Catholicism during the first Trump administration — responded to critics of his inhumane immigration policies with stale talking points about “national security” and crime. But he also argued that mass deportations were consistent with the moral theology of St Augustine. Vance’s theological defense of ICE raids has been poorly rated by most actual scholars of St Augustine — including the Augustinian friar Robert Prevost, who was to be elected as Pope Leo XIV a few months later.

However, even if the argument was a bad one, the choice to rely explicitly on a theological argument in defense of his policies reflects the priorities not of a politician but of an aspiring Catholic intellectual. The 2024 Trump campaign had not made the case for its deportation policy in religious terms, and neither popular nor elite discourse in the United States is much concerned with the writings of fifth-century African bishops. Vance was fresh from an electoral victory, and the church had no practical ability to stop the Trump administration from putting its programs into effect.

For Vance and others at the heart of the Trump administration, the invocation of religious authority is not really about making an appeal to the believing public. It’s about persuading themselves that they have a divine mandate for their actions, that the authority of the ancient Christian tradition is on their side. This impulse to claim religious authority can sometimes take strange, even superstitious forms. Implausible though it may sound, Gladden Pappin, Vance’s friend and liaison to Hungary, seems sincerely to have believed that Pope Francis would endorse Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and anoint Trump’s wife Melania as Catholic queen of the Americas.

In January, Elbridge Colby, Hegseth’s undersecretary of defense for policy and another Catholic friend of Vance’s, made an unprecedented demand that the papal nuncio appear at the Pentagon. According to reports, the nuncio was confronted with demands that the Vatican align with Trump’s foreign policy agenda. These included a menacing reference to the Avignon Papacy of the fourteenth century, when, after the suspicious death of Benedict XI, a series of seven popes were obliged to live in France under the control of the French king. Pappin’s and Colby’s fantasies may have little basis in twenty-first-century political reality, but their need to believe their actions have the approval of the church — or will secure it — is sincere. Quite apart from domestic considerations about the “Catholic vote,” these figures in Trump’s administration are unwilling to dismiss or ignore criticisms from the Apostolic See.

Any effect of this papal disputation on the “Catholic vote” is likely to be limited. Catholics in the United States do not vote as a bloc, and while Trump won a majority of Catholics in 2024, this is better explained by the racial and class demographics of US Catholics than by any specific religious effect on voting. Despite the eagerness of so many Catholic intellectuals and religious leaders to align their faith with the GOP platform, the Catholic vote tipped in favor of Joe Biden in 2020.

As the Trump administration’s popularity plummets, it’s fair to assume that Catholics are turning against it as well for reasons unrelated to any politician’s criticisms of Pope Leo. But on the margins, these attacks certainly don’t help the administration. The first pope from the United States is widely admired in the country of his birth, and not just among Catholics. It’s unlikely that anyone but a hardcore segment of Trump supporters and right-wing media figures will turn on him for condemning an unpopular war.

But within the US Catholic church, Leo’s interventions may decisively undercut those who have argued for a “seamless garment” of Catholic faith and MAGA politics, leaving them in the unenviable position of having to prove that they are more Catholic than the pope. And for the many Americans who are embarrassed by the conduct of their government, and the many Catholics who are embarrassed by the political allegiances of their religious leaders and public intellectuals, Pope Leo’s testimony has shown that there is another way to be an American — and an American Catholic.

Despite his criticisms of ICE and of the Iran war, one can assume that Leo XIV also has many differences with the Democratic Party, and with the Left — though not necessarily the same ones. But in an age when the brutality, xenophobia, aggression, and cruelty of American politics have been amplified to new levels, we can perhaps all be glad that the Successor of Peter has shown a willingness to contribute to a popular front.

Ibrahim Traoré and his “Patriotic Movement for Safeguard and Restoration” (MPSR 2) seized power through a coup d’état on September 30, 2022. Traoré overthrew the previous military government of Lieutenant Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, which had itself only come to power in January 2022 through a coup. Damiba’s junta called itself MPSR.

Neither Damiba nor Traoré came to power with a worked-out political-ideological agenda. They both justified their coups by pointing to the previous government’s failure to cope with the security crisis. Attacks by jihadist groups had increased massively since the late 2010s, resulting in several thousand deaths annually, closures of schools and medical facilities, and the internal displacement of over two million people.

Given that his main and only agenda was the “fight against terror,” at the end of 2022, no one would have predicted that Traoré would implement political reforms, some of which were far-reaching, in the space of just three years. Already in January 2023, he called on France to withdraw its remaining troops, consisting of four hundred special forces soldiers who were supposed to fight the jihadist groups.

The withdrawal of French troops was popular with many people in the region, and in Burkina Faso in particular. Radical social movement organizations have been mobilizing against French neocolonial dominance for many years. At the end of the 2010s, however, such mobilization spread widely beyond the circles of radical activists.

This broadening was related to the rapidly deteriorating security situation and the perception that the highly equipped French special forces were clearly unable — or unwilling — to push back the jihadist groups. “It’s not for our beautiful eyes that France is here,” one activist remarked in December 2020. Traoré has taken up the anti-French sentiment, which had increased since 2019, and used it to generate support for his government.

Along with the rapid change in relations with France since 2022, there has also been a shift when it comes to neighboring Benin and Côte d’Ivoire as well as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). ECOWAS suspended Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger as members after the respective military coups in those countries.

After the coup in Niger in July 2023, ECOWAS and France put pressure on the junta in Niger to reinstate the previous president, Mohamed Bazoum. Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, and Senegal signaled their willingness to send troops to Niger. It was obvious for the military governments in Mali and Burkina Faso that they should fear a similar intervention.

They declared their solidarity with Niger and their intention to support it militarily, if that proved necessary. In a move that was hardly surprising, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger announced their withdrawal from ECOWAS in January 2024. The end of their status as members was formally confirmed one year later.

The adoption of the Liptako-Gourma Charter by the three countries in September 2023 laid the foundations for the establishment of the Confederation of Sahel States (AES) in July 2024. It was primarily a response to external pressure, created as a mutual defence pact following the crisis of July–August 2023, although it has continued to develop beyond that point of origin. A joint TV channel (AES TV) and an investment and development bank were established in 2025.

Defense and security policy still remain at the center of the alliance. In December 2025, the five-thousand-strong AES Unified Force was launched. The AES does not represent a new Pan-African movement so much as a new geopolitical bloc that reflects the recent regional and global geopolitical shifts. “Like a marriage of reason,” as AES TV’s director, Salif Sanogo, put it.

The Traoré government has also implemented a number of reforms in domestic and economic policy. A new mining law was adopted in July 2024 that promotes local processing of minerals and formalization of artisanal mining and grants the state the right to purchase shares of mining projects. The mandatory state share in a mine increased from 10 to 15 percent.

In August 2024, the government acquired two gold mines (out of twelve in the country, all operated by multinational mining companies) for US$90 million. It transferred them to the state-owned Société de Participation Minière du Burkina (SOPAMIB).

Prominent projects aimed at boosting the local economy include two tomato processing plants, which were largely financed by the state and inaugurated by Traoré in September and December 2024. Strengthening value creation in the country and increasing state participation in the mining sector have long been demands of social movements and radical civil society groups. Ironically, those demands are now being addressed by a government that has also proven to be repressive toward such movements and activists.

In fact, the military government has been able to implement its projects in part because there is effectively no institutional room for opposition and the scope for criticism by the media, social movements, and organized civil society is significantly limited. The civilian government under Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, who was ousted by Damiba’s coup in January 2020, had already restricted freedoms of assembly, expression, and the press, citing the terrorist threat, during Kaboré’s first term of as president (2015–19).

The activities of political parties have been suspended since October 2022. In February 2026, political parties and groups were formally dissolved. The Burkinabé Journalists’ Association was also dissolved in March 2025, and its president and vice president, as well as a number of other journalists, were forcibly detained. Some of the detained journalists later appeared in a video wearing military uniforms, having been conscripted to fight terrorism.

Control over the media is strong. The country’s most important independent radio station, Radio Oméga, was suspended in August–September 2023 when it broadcast an interview with a representative of a civil society organization on the coup in Niger. It was suspended again for three months in August 2025 after referring to the government as a “junta” — a term that the authorities deemed “inappropriate” as well as “prejudicial and offensive.”

Social media in particular plays a key — and problematic — role. While the possibilities for media coverage are limited, social media is heavily used to generate support for Traoré and his government. Traoré has become a star in this field within a very short time.

A significant part of the images and videos circulating on social media are AI-generated: praise for Traoré from Beyoncé, Justin Bieber, and Rihanna, for example, or a message from the pope. It is virtually impossible to trace how these videos came to be made.

The hype on social media has combined with a lack of alternative information and the strong desire, especially among the younger generation, for substantial change in political and economic structures, namely an end to neocolonial and imperialist exploitation and domination. This has led to Ibrahim Traoré being stylized as a Pan-Africanist revolutionary.

References to Thomas Sankara, with whom Traoré has been compared frequently, form part of this image. Sankara, who served as president from 1983 to 1987, was also an ambitious young military officer who came to power through a coup. He is an icon of Pan-Africanism, referred to as “Africa’s Ché.”

In terms of political-ideological content, the comparison between the two men is only valid to a limited extent. But it has a real impact on public discourse, and Traoré himself knows how to use allusions to Sankara as a way to gain legitimacy.

His government declared the anniversary of Sankara’s assassination, October 15, to be a national holiday for the first time in 2023. It honored Sankara with the title “hero of the nation” and renamed one of the central roads in Ouagadougou, Boulevard Charles de Gaulle, as Boulevard Thomas Sankara.

In fact, Sankara had already been rehabilitated and designated a national hero in 2000 under the rule of Blaise Compaoré, the man who overthrew him. Traoré opened the Thomas Sankara Memorial in Ouagadougou in 2025, although the planning for the memorial and the commission granted to the Burkinabe-German star architect Francis Kéré date back to 2017, during the first term of Roch’s government.

The conditions for movements and activists have changed significantly in recent years. Human rights organizations, youth groups, and labor unions that had been active in the country for decades had already been struggling with the security crisis since the late 2010s. This made large-scale activities across the country difficult.

Restrictions on civil rights under the state of emergency further limited their scope for action. Under the 2023 policy of “general mobilization,” the transitional government empowered itself to requisition people and goods for the “fight against terror.” It has applied the decree to conscript journalists and representatives of civil society organizations and trade unions to participate in counterterrorism operations across the country.

While the organizations that mobilized the popular insurrection of 2014 have been pushed into the background, a number of new groups and social media activists have emerged in recent years. They are less concerned with their own political and ideological agendas than with supporting the current government.

The most visible are the “Wayiyan,” groups of mostly young men in cities who gather at roundabouts and other central locations to observe the “smooth running of the transition.” According to Rahmane Idrissa, to ensure that the transition can “run smoothly,” they threatened to attack anyone who organized a ceremony to mark the 2014 insurrection’s anniversary. It is difficult to understand why a progressive popular revolution, as the Burkinabe president proclaimed it to be on April 2, 2025, would need to restrict the action of movements and media that have long been campaigning for policies such as resource sovereignty.

Traoré cultivates his image as a revolutionary, as Sankara once did, and the association with Sankara plays an important role in this image. Those who discuss the politics of Sankara often refer to his philosophy as a form of pragmatic socialism. Traoré’s outlook is rather more pragmatic than socialist.

This approach may be strategically astute, as it appeals not only to the younger generation but also to powerful religious and traditional elites. Sankara’s experience showed how difficult it is to overcome those elites. He tried anyway.

It is important to note that the conditions under which Traoré and Sankara operated are quite different. In particular, Sankara did not face the threat from terrorist groups that currently dominates the situation in Burkina Faso. However, the main problem with the comparison of the two men is that the link to Sankara is used as a source of legitimacy for Traoré, giving rise to a personality cult that hinders rather than promotes critical debate on political strategies and visions.

Citrini Research, a New York–based investment research firm founded in 2023 by James van Geelen and known for its “guerrilla” thematic and macro research work, took a stab at answering this question last February. The result was a thought experiment, “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis,” written as a fictional postmortem from June 2028. It details a systemic economic collapse triggered by the sudden unwinding of the scarcity of human intelligence. What this means is AI eviscerates service industries, causing mass white-collar job losses and crushing consumer demand.

Innumerable economists leaped to AI’s defense, all more or less saying the same thing — even if jobs were destroyed, even in currently high-paying roles, capitalism would create others just as it always had. Citrini’s provocation, while scary, was unlikely to come to pass.  

I don’t want to debate the finer points of the thought experiment. What I do want to do is set out how Citrini opens up three specific critiques of any AI “success,” and how any such win for AI capitalists would be a loss for capitalism, ultimately further eroding the foundations of the Global North’s economies.

To understand how everything going right would ultimately mean everything going wrong, it’s important to see AI as an answer to an economic question: how to solve the problem of secular stagnation.

Secular stagnation is a concept that describes the persistently low rates of productivity and demand growth throughout the Global North. There are a range of both orthodox and heterodox theories that account for it, but as the economic historian Aaron Benanav contends, it has become more or less the consensus view across the political spectrum.

Within this context, AI represents hope: it is a frontier industry promising the revival of economic growth.

Frontier industries are industries that are not yet “mature,” meaning there are both economic and technological gains to be made, promising high returns to business as well as innovative advances from intellectual property to new monopolies to productivity gains to high share prices. Frontier industries include all of the green industries and those in the so-called fourth industrial revolution — AI, biotech, automation, as well as other cutting-edge fields.

The bet on frontier technologies is they will enable new growth — new markets, more productive labor, and new sites of investment.

Citrini’s provocation is that AI will in fact worsen the problem of stagnation even if it delivers on productivity gains and investment returns (initially).

While Citrini stays relatively close to mainstream economics, we can read across its fictional postmortem. In doing so, we find three primary drivers of AI’s destructive future history that map onto specific theories of secular stagnation and economic decline that deserve further scrutiny: the impact of the shift to service-dominated economies on productivity; the rise of services overcapacity; and the impacts on rentierism and intermediation (generating income from the ownership and control of assets and the business of mediating economic activities, such as accounting or digital platforms, respectively) within the neoliberal economy.

Much of the orthodox response to Citrini focused on the question of job destruction — that AI would not augment jobs but replace them. But in that debate the nuance of what was being posed was lost.

Citrini claims AI will enable a rapid expansion of digital Taylorism into service work. Services have been historically hard to industrialize, as they tend to be limited not only by the speed at which people can work but by being more variable and “social.” But already with chatbots and AI agents we are seeing an erosion of the “humanness” of services. This may lead to two things — job destruction and a surge in productivity.

This won’t be an even process. What will likely occur is a bifurcation of services into high-productivity, highly automated service sectors and low-productivity sectors, with the workforce similarly splitting between a small, high-waged workforce and mass of low-waged service workers.

This is a version of what the economist William Baumol called the “cost disease.” Baumol and economist William G. Bowen developed the thesis when commissioned to study the economic performance of the performing arts. They found that the labor output of performing arts is generally fixed — it takes the same amount of time to perform a Shakespearean play today as it did hundreds of years ago. Conversely, workers in industry had increased their productivity many times over. While a factory worker could produce ten times more car parts because of the introduction of machines, a violinist could not “speed up” their performance without ruining the product. The thesis has since been applied to the divide between capital-intensive and labor-intensive sectors — manufacturing and services, broadly speaking.

The divide between labor-intensive services and increasingly capital-intensive manufacture creates a specific economic problem — the costs of services increase relatively while dragging down the growth rate of a broader economy. This happens as in the manufacturing sector, technological innovation drives high productivity, allowing wages to rise while the relative cost of goods falls. Conversely, in labor-dependent services, wages rise despite flat productivity, causing the relative cost of these services to climb. The cost climbs as wages in labor-intensive sectors like health care and education rise to keep pace with the rest of the economy, despite these sectors lacking the productivity gains seen in manufacturing.

The impact of this is that while goods get cheaper thanks to technological innovation, services get more expensive. Additionally, manufacturing sheds jobs as productivity increases, shifting employment to the lower-productivity services sector, exacerbating the problem.

Baumol’s cost disease leads to a low-growth economy where essential services such as health care become unaffordable while TVs get cheaper every year.

Citrini’s argument is that AI enables the automation of some (eventually most) services, recreating Baumol’s cost disease within the service sector. Services that can be broken down into discreet tasks (“Taylorized”) and can make use of an increasingly data rich environment, such as call center work, basic accounting, legal discovery, graphic design, much sales work, or routine diagnostics and coding, will be automated, reducing the total labor force employed and increasing productivity. At the same time, there will remain a labor-intensive service subsector with low productivity growth. This labor-intensive subsector will itself be under immense pressure as AI and robotics advance.

This bifurcation recreates Baumol’s cost disease within the service sector, destroying many of the well-paid positions that have retained some degree of workplace autonomy in the process. The result of this transformation in work would be the emergence of an economy shaped by very few highly paid service workers, and an army of low-skill, low-paid workers. All of this would take place against the backdrop of a collapse in the total mass of service employment due to productivity gains.

The lesson from technological innovation in the manufacturing sector is that increased productivity means that firms require fewer workers. While new markets may develop along with new services, these new services will not escape the division between a small number of well-paid workers and a dwindling mass of their low-paid peers. The worst-case scenario would be one in which even this low-waged work disappears thanks to service automation.

Finally, the remaining low-productivity services like education would also face pressure because of their rising cost. The effect of this downward pressure would be felt more severely by public services than private companies, as an economy increasingly dominated by secular stagnation will impose ever stricter budgetary constraints on governments.

Part of the dynamic Citrini describes involves AI leading to a vast excess of service capacity as competition leads to companies locking in rather than exiting the market.

This is the dynamic that the economist Robert Brenner argues was the structural cause of the global economic crisis of the late 1960s and early 1970s — a global overcapacity in manufacturing. The global post–World War II build-out of manufacturing capacity squeezed profit margins for all manufacturing businesses. Growing global competition in turn drove down margins, and, in response, industry looked to raise productivity to increase revenues rather than exiting the sectors in which they had already made investments, ultimately worsening the profit crisis.

Classical economics would suggest that, in this situation, what would occur is a “clearing out” of the lower performing businesses. Investment would move into other sectors where there is growth to be found, while underperforming companies would close down or sell up to competitors.

In contrast to a “healthy” capitalist dynamic, where poorly performing companies give way to high-performing ones, what Brenner tracks is how, when challenged by more productive rivals, companies refused to give way and abandon fixed assets. Instead, they doubled down on chasing market share, creating a persistent tendency toward excess manufacturing capacity, reducing overall profit rates and capacity utilization.

What Brenner doesn’t consider is the role of nation-states in maintaining manufacturing overcapacity — something already underway within AI. Specific industries have long enjoyed political support, either for military purposes or for far more explicitly political ends, be it to ensure voter support or just as an aspect of the everyday corruption of political elites.

The Citrini narrative suggests both aspects of overcapacity will come into play. Rather than compelling firms to pack up and move into some other sector of the economy, Citrini suggests that AI will engender a similar escalatory dynamic, where competition drives adoption while at the same time pushing companies to “stay and fight” for market share.

As competition intensifies, the drive to industrialize service work and to adopt labor-replacing AI will further reduce workforces while making services paradoxically less attractive as investments (due to falling margins and lower growth prospects). At the same time, governments, caught in a vision of international relations preoccupied with great power competition, will be unwilling to cede AI dominance to their rivals and will instead shore up national AI companies and infrastructure, worsening global AI and service-sector overcapacity.

Ultimately this will lead to a persistent tendency toward overcapacity in services, mirroring the tendency within manufacturing, eroding profit margins and tempering the appetite for investment in additional businesses or even entire market sectors.

Rentierism is not an aberration, but a central aspect of the economies of the Global North. The most complete accounting of this aspect of contemporary capitalism has been undertaken by the economist Brett Christophers. Christophers brings two accounts of rent together in his work. The first is income due to the ownership and control of scarce resources, while the second is due to monopoly or oligopoly power. In both, rentierism constitutes the ability to generate revenue above “average or expected” normal returns through the ability to limit or prevent economic competition.

Much of what constitutes the service economy could be described as rentierism, including most digital services and platform businesses that generate revenue from their occupation of critical nodes mediating economic exchange.

Citrini describes this intermediary work as “friction” — it adds to the costs business customers and consumers pay for a service. It also adds to the internal costs of business operations insofar as some specific operations, such as legal compliance or accounting, rely on hiring either certified staff or consultants. Much of the white-collar work threatened by AI is precisely this kind of intermediary work. As AI automates it, it puts not only specific roles at risk but huge swaths of the service economy as well. And while rentierism may theoretically constitute a parasitic form of accumulation, one that adds “friction” to economic processes and higher costs to consumers, it is also a huge source of employment and site of investment.

The key vehicles for rentierism are investment funds such as Blackrock and Blackstone, making rentier capitalism a system run by and through asset managers. If we bring these institutional asset managers together with those businesses that are rentiers, such as Google and Microsoft, the vast bulk of the US stock market is owned by, and dependent on, rentierism as a foundation. And while we could clearly say around one-third of the US economy comprises rentierist businesses at a minimum, including those businesses and jobs that are fictive in Citrini’s reading would lead to a much higher percentage.

We can understand rents and the drive to rentierism as a response to secular stagnation — as a means of securing certain and well-defined future revenues and of escaping the destructive effects of market competition. To eradicate rents would be to destroy a primary site of capitalist investment, alongside whole subsectors of the economy and millions of jobs. It would also fatally undermine stock market investments, based as they are on perpetual rents.

While the talk of eradicating friction or even rents suggests a “freeing up” of capital for more productive investment, given services would follow manufacturing into a realm of hyperproductive overcapacity, there would seem to be no upside to the euthanasia of the rentier in this instance.

Rather than “free up” business, this development would destroy it. Capital may well be a parasite, but in the absence of revolutionary pressure it is still work-producing. Our jobs might be bullsh-t, but without them there is only unemployment and (even more) poverty.

Not all frontiers lead to expansion or growth. Exhaustion is just as much a possibility.

There is much to doubt about the utility and sustainability (economic and environmental) of AI. We are also increasingly seeing labor and social conflict over the new technology, from the relentless build-out of water-hungry data centers to the labor process itself.

Yet while we should organize against the further industrialization of our labor and exploitation of our sociality and natural world, we should also be clear-eyed as to the possibility that AI capitalists will manage to push ahead with their agenda.

Should they do so, it may well be a moment of singularity, just not the one Sam Altman and company have in mind. As Citrini suggests, it could very well lead to a vast collapse of business and consumer demand, while making whole aspects of the contemporary economy unviable. A profound deepening of stagnation, not its overcoming, would result. The tepid plans for universal basic incomes pushed by Silicon Valley tech bros would be laughably inadequate when faced with such an event.

The three aspects outlined above do not even constitute the totality of the challenge AI could pose to economic growth. What made the Citrini think piece so provocative was not its AI doomerism, but its recognition of the threat posed by the technology’s success.

Tracking those intellectual exchanges, Wood provides a portrait of a radical left consumed with the “entangled relationships” of race, nation, class, and citizenship, where the ultimate stakes of those exchanges were the liberation of the subaltern populations of the Americas. Moreover, those same debates extended beyond the interwar period, establishing a repertoire of ideas, discourses, and actions that were taken up by left-wing groups in the Cold War era and beyond.

Leading those discussions, radical leftists “called into question not only the external borders of existing nation-states, but also internal divisions between social classes, ethnic groups, and categories of citizen.” In doing so, they expanded the notion of citizenship — transcending political rights with a more robust vision of social justice — and of sovereignty, understood as a shield against imperialism and as a vehicle for local autonomy, freedom, and democratic self-governance.

The concept of self-determination is central to Wood’s analysis — so central that one might quibble that the author focuses on the Russian tradition to the neglect of the Mexican case. In Mexico, it was at the heart of the revolutionary struggle and helped consolidate the postrevolutionary state, both domestically and internationally. Domestically, Emiliano Zapata’s famous phrase “La tierra es de quien la trabaja” (“The land belongs to those who work it”) encapsulated the peasant’s right to self-determination as a founding principle of the ambitious redistributive land regime of the revolutionary 1917 Constitution. It also guided the agrarian policies pushed by the postrevolutionary government after 1920. Likewise, from the administration of Venustiano Carranza (1917–1920) onward, Mexico became a global leader calling for “the unrestricted respect of sovereignty, non-intervention, and the right of all peoples to self-determination” as central principles of interstate relations.

Wood primarily understands self-determination as defined by the Russian case. Specifically, in the early twentieth century, Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg clashed over whether socialists should support the right of national self-determination. Lenin argued that backing oppressed nations’ right to secede from empires was a basic democratic principle and a strategic necessity: without it, workers in dominant nations would reproduce chauvinism, and genuine international solidarity would be impossible.

Luxemburg was more skeptical. She believed that “the nation” was not a unified democratic actor but a cross-class formation led by bourgeois elites. Luxemburg worried that nationalist movements would distract workers from class struggle and strengthen new capitalist states rather than advance socialism. At stake was a question that Wood pursues in Latin America across the interwar years: Does supporting national independence advance working-class emancipation, or does it risk subordinating it to nationalism?

During the interwar period, left-wing Latin American intellectuals — many militants and “fellow-travelers” of the Communist Party, others associated with the Mexican Revolution — revived these questions and wrestled with the concept of self-determination. Though the concept had different meanings for different groups, they shared “a common principle: that people should have the right to determine their own destinies.” In that same vein, Wood argues that self-determination was a radically democratic concept: “the true core of the idea [was] to extend the right to self-rule to groups long marginalized and denied that right.”

Focusing on interwar Communist and Communist-adjacent groups, Wood draws upon a vast corpus of archival materials, examining sources from dozens of repositories situated in Cuba, Mexico, Peru, Russia, and the United States. Wood unveils a web of transnational connections that shaped radical leftists’ thinking on race, sovereignty, and anti-imperial struggle. Radical Sovereignty not only advances a novel argument about the centrality of race but also bucks the nation-centric histories of the Latin American left: debates over self-determination, class, and race were always transnational in nature. Exchanges among leftist thinkers and activists across Latin America were the driving force of radical political action in the region.

Wood argues that this transnational web of Communist-adjacent thought and action was far more complex than traditional accounts have suggested. The Comintern (or Communist International) was the coordinating body of global Communist parties, dominated by the Soviet Communist Party. It was the organ through which Moscow oriented the political thinking and action of allied parties worldwide. Several historical accounts have viewed the Comintern, especially under Joseph Stalin, as an instrument through which the Kremlin imposed policies on Communist parties abroad — those local parties either followed the Moscow line completely or were ostracized from the organization.

Wood, however, shows that the Soviet line was contested, negotiated, and adapted by Latin American radicals. Their ideas on racial equality, nationalities, self-determination, and anti-imperialism, although indebted to the Soviets, were also shaped by widespread indigenous movements, Pan-African currents, and black thinkers, whose unique analyses of capitalist exploitation were informed by the historical experience of US domination and the triumph of the Mexican Revolution.

Wood argues that the Mexican Revolution, particularly in the 1920s, loomed almost as large as the Russian Revolution with the Latin American left. Little surprise, then, that Mexico City, as the capital of postrevolutionary Mexico, became a hub for leftist political imagination, discussion, and activism. Exiles and radical thinkers from across Latin America gathered there to analyze — and try to export — Mexico’s revolutionary political program, which included nationalizations, land redistribution, labor rights, and a fierce anti-imperialist rhetoric.

These transnational connections, Wood argues, were reciprocal: on the one hand, they shaped Mexico’s “political and cultural ferment,” contributing to the implementation of ambitious progressive policies under the postrevolutionary Mexican state (especially the political empowerment of peasants). On the other hand, transnational encounters in Mexico City influenced ideas about revolutionary movements, anti-imperialist struggles, and racial liberation that the exiles themselves nurtured and brought back to their own countries.

Mexico City, Wood shows, was a transnational hub where conversations about race, anti-imperialism, and sovereignty took on hemispheric proportions: Mexican peasant leagues (particularly their main leader, Úrsulo Galván) coordinated joint political action with Peruvian exiles of the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA, especially its leader, Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre), the Mexican Communist Party (PCM), the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas (LADLA), and the Hands Off Nicaragua Committee (which supported Augusto Sandino’s struggle).

As Wood writes, “All [these movements] were rooted in a shared conviction that the national and the international realms were permeable; all shared the hope that faraway agencies might help reshape local fates, and the actions taken here and now might play their part in making the wider world anew.” Yet different strands of that radical leftism assigned divergent roles to the state. For instance, while APRA cadres argued that the nation-state should be strengthened to combat imperialism, the Communists thought the state — which responded to artificial frontiers — could and should be remade in the name of racial equality.

Internal differences were exacerbated as the external climate grew hostile. Mexican domestic politics, specifically, experienced a “conservative turn” in the late 1920s. Facing external and internal threats and crises, the postrevolutionary government looked to stabilize domestic political life, and transnational enclaves concentrated in Mexico City became an easy target. This included deporting several foreign-born Communists, such as the Cuban labor leader Sandalio Junco and the Italian photographer Tina Modotti. At the same time, fractures within the Left intensified. If, during the early 1920s, diverse leftist currents could air their differences in creative debate, by the turn of the decade rivalries were becoming insurmountable.

Part II of Radical Sovereignty delves deeper into one of the book’s core revelations: debates within the Communist movement on black and indigenous self-determination were much more nuanced than is often credited. In this section, Wood shifts his attention to different sites — Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Moscow, Lima, and Havana — where discussions on race and sovereignty were foremost among the concerns of radicals.

Here, Radical Sovereignty challenges the existing consensus about the Latin American left’s alleged blind obedience to the Comintern’s ideological line. During the 1930s, the Comintern adopted a more confrontational approach known as “class against class” or the Third Period, which precluded Communists from forming alliances with social democrats and nationalists and instead advocated for more direct action to radicalize the working class against the “bourgeois state.”

As Wood notes, “while the Third Period brought a narrowing of ideological horizons, it paradoxically created some openings.” Those openings included more ambitious discussions on how to address racial injustice, as well as heated debates over the political significance of the category of race itself. In other words, the added emphasis on class politics precipitated an expanded conception of class-belonging and, with it, an exploration of how class was implicated in racial and national oppression.

Participants in those debates responded to national politics and social realities in their own countries, but they were heavily influenced by transnational connections. For instance, Harry Haywood’s famous “Black Belt Thesis,” presented during the Sixth World Congress of the Comintern in 1928, may very well have influenced ideas about self-determination in Latin American communist movements. The Black Belt Thesis stated that the dense concentration of people of African descent in the rural Deep South presented the demographic, social, and cultural foundations for that population to achieve self-determination and to be recognized as a sovereign political entity.

For Latin American radicals, the Black Belt Thesis raised pressing questions: Did it also apply to their region? Did Latin American people of African descent suffer the same kind of oppression as their US counterparts? And what about indigenous peoples — was their oppression similar to that faced by African Americans? If so, should Communists fight for the self-determination of indigenous and people of African descent? And did that self-determination mean the creation of new states, or could it be guaranteed within the framework of already existing ones?

The Black Belt Thesis, originally informed by Pan-Africanism, global anti-colonialism, and Soviet thinking about nations and nationalities, also shaped Communists’ thinking about race in the Americas. Here Wood sheds new light on the neglected links between global black liberation movements and the struggles of the indigenous and people of African descent in Latin America.

Through it all, Wood does not lose sight of the fact that self-determination and race were also stumbling blocks. In two important gatherings of Latin American Communists in 1929, hosted in Uruguay and Argentina, the Comintern’s doctrine of self-determination for black and indigenous people produced serious tensions. The Comintern viewed Latin American nations as political fictions that could be redrawn at will to secure the self-determination of black and indigenous populations. Latin American attendees, understandably, pushed back, arguing that existing states were vehicles for resisting imperial domination. Latin American thinkers held heated, often subtly critical, debates over the applicability of Stalin’s theory of nationality and the Black Belt Thesis.

For instance, renowned Peruvian intellectual José Carlos Mariátegui recognized discrimination against indigenous peoples in Latin America but argued that giving self-determination to these populations would only empower indigenous elites rather than landless peasants, creating new bourgeois states instead of liberating the oppressed masses. Afro-Cuban labor activist Sandalio Junco argued that people of African descent suffered multiple forms of racial oppression in the region but pushed back against self-determination. He promoted instead a “proletarian conception” of the “problem of race,” the solution being to demonstrate to working people of African descent that “their place is alongside the continental and world proletariat,” while promoting complete equality among the different races that formed the working class.

Often those debates went unresolved, and tensions around race and self-determination persisted within the Left. But they also had direct implications for public policy and political action across Latin America. In the short term, some countries developed policies to better incorporate indigenous peoples into their nation-building projects, while Communist parties recognized the oppression of black workers and actively sought to recruit them. Later, those ideas shaped the political action of leftist groups during the Cold War and informed the legal codification of nondiscrimination and indigenous rights in the twentieth century.

Such a granular reconstruction of intellectual history is one of the strongest features of Radical Sovereignty. Nonetheless, by focusing on the Latin American softening of Moscow’s line, the author glosses over the Comintern envoys’ attitude to their Latin American counterparts, which was essentially paternalistic and condescending. Based on Wood’s citations and references, they regarded their Latin American comrades’ ideas on race and sovereignty as erroneous and rudimentary.

If, as Wood shows, the Latin Americans did not blindly follow the Soviet line, the question remains whether Latin American ideas influenced the Comintern’s views of race in the region. With the exception of the Black Belt Thesis, Comintern leaders did not seriously consider the discussions of Latin American intellectuals. In other words, did Latin American radicals merely negotiate and adapt Comintern policies at the local level, or did they reshape them at their roots? And to what extent did the Comintern rethink its policies and ideas on race, nation, and sovereignty in response to Latin American debates and adaptations?

Part III of Radical Sovereignty follows the path of self-determination as it moved from intellectual to policy circles in Cuba and Mexico. During the 1930s, the Cuban Communist Party embraced a more resolute position against racial oppression and, with it, reformulated its self-determination policy. This led to a significant growth in Afro-Cuban militancy in the party, both in the rank and file and in leadership positions.

The Cuban Communist Party initially promoted complete racial equality and self-determination for the black population in the region of Oriente. By the 1930s, it had refined the concept of self-determination: rather than thinking of the heavily Afro-Cuban region of Oriente as a separate political unit, it should instead form part of the Cuban national community, albeit with a high degree of autonomy and self-governance. Meanwhile, that autonomy should advance the cause of racial equality throughout the whole island. Wood demonstrates that Afro-Cuban intellectuals and activists were at the helm of a significant policy shift and were pivotal in reconceptualizing race as one of the leading national problems in the fight against imperialism.

Having redefined self-determination, the Cuban Communist Party felt emboldened to lead the charge for racial inclusion, helping to pass laws against racial discrimination in the island’s 1940 constitutional assembly. Their proposals triumphed and formed part of the new constitution — one of several concrete victories in which debates on self-determination and race translated into progressive policies and laws.

Race and self-determination also shaped Mexican public policy during the late 1930s. By that time, a dominant current of thought and policymaking had cohered around indigenismo, an ideological movement that celebrated indigenous populations as key historical actors and a foundational piece of “national consciousness.” However, concrete indigenista policies also sought to assimilate indigenous peoples into a Mexican nation understood as mestizo (mixed race), Spanish-speaking, and modern.

Wood maintains that radical ideas about self-determination infiltrated official indigenismo, moderating the dominant assimilationist approach while promoting a more pluralistic view of education and culture (for example, including indigenous language in primary instruction) and a more materialist vision of the “indigenous question” (for example, pushing for indigenous-led economic development programs).

Considering the contributions of labor leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano and scholar Jorge Vivó to this “radical pluralist” version of indigenismo, Wood neglects to ask why indigenous intellectuals, activists, and leaders themselves did not participate in the formulation of policies. This would have been a welcome reflection, especially after the author shows that black intellectuals participated so prominently in Communist-led policies on race and self-determination in Latin America.

In the epilogue, Wood argues that interwar debates on self-determination and race informed discussions about anti-imperialism during the Cold War and beyond, even influencing the ideas of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) in the 1990s. Moreover, century-old ideas of self-determination reappeared in twenty-first century struggles for indigenous autonomy in Bolivia and Mexico.

In an age of renewed American imperialism, it is more necessary than ever to think about how national and transnational collectivities can offer a common resistance. Likewise, as the international order trembles, the Left must rebuild spaces for ambitious political imagination — like the ones Wood evokes — and tackle forms of social injustice and exploitation, both new and old, at the global level.

Nithya Raman’s 2020 victory marked a breakthrough, and in the years since, DSA-backed candidates have steadily expanded their presence. Today multiple members or allies of the organization sit on the fifteen-member city council, and the chapter has built a reputation for running serious, field-heavy campaigns rooted in tenant organizing and alliances with labor unions.

In the current cycle, DSA-LA has endorsed the Shake Up City Hall slate of six candidates. DSA-LA’s 2026 slate includes both incumbents and challengers, with councilmembers Eunisses Hernandez, a Highland Park organizer advancing tenant rights and advocating for improving public safety through better social service and mental health provision, and Hugo Soto-Martínez, a former hotel worker and union organizer who has delivered legislative wins for renters, immigrants, and labor.

The challengers include Estuardo Mazariegos, a South LA organizer running on social housing, tenant power, and a Green New Deal, and Faizah Malik, a tenants’ rights attorney focused on housing affordability and land use reform on the Westside.

Beyond council races, school board member Rocío Rivas is seeking reelection as a defender of public education against privatization. And Marissa Roy is mounting an insurgent bid for city attorney to reorient the office toward civil rights and corporate accountability.

That last race represents something new. The office of city attorney has historically been low-profile, technocratic, and largely insulated from ideological contestation. Roy’s campaign, by contrast, seeks to transform it into a site of democratic accountability, raising questions about prosecution priorities, tenant rights, and the legal architecture of inequality in Los Angeles.

“The city attorney is one of the most powerful and least understood offices in LA, and the current city attorney is using the office to obstruct the pro-tenant, pro-worker agenda our DSA electeds are trying to implement in city council,” said Sydney Ghazarian, cochair of DSA’s Marissa Roy Working Group and a former DSA National Political Committee leader. “We’ve learned the hard way that the policies we pass don’t matter if the city attorney refuses to enforce them. ”

Roy’s candidacy is not just another race. It is a test of whether democratic socialists can expand their project beyond legislative bodies into the legal machinery of the city itself. It’s one thing to pass legislation; it’s another thing to enforce it and have the city devote its legal might to supporting tenants and workers.

“Right now, we have a city attorney who wastes the office’s resources defending indefensible LAPD misconduct instead of prosecuting slumlords, bad bosses, and polluting corporations,” added Ghazarian. “Marissa will use the power of the office to defend tenants, workers, and millions of working-class Angelenos, not just the powerful few.”

The debate over the mayor’s race sits uneasily alongside this strategy. Before Zohran Mamdani’s election as New York City mayor last November, the question of intervening in the race wasn’t on the minds of many LA chapter members. But that upset election rippled out in energizing waves across the country.

On one side were those who saw a mayoral endorsement as a natural next step. With DSA-backed candidates now holding multiple council seats and with the deep polling weakness of LA’s current mayor, Karen Bass, the prospect of a democratic socialist mayor no longer feels entirely out of reach. A mayoral campaign, in their eyes, would bring visibility, attract new members, and potentially consolidate the gains of the past decade.

“I want our chapter to be able to seize this moment and demonstrate to thousands of working-class Angelenos that DSA-LA is an organization worth joining, and I want a movement that understands 2028 is not just about returning to corporate Democratic policies but rather reshaping the fabric of American society,” said chapter cochair Leslie Chang, who supported a Nithya endorsement. “Supporting Nithya for mayor is our chance to build a movement here in Los Angeles that is ready to support a democratic socialist for president in 2028.”

On the other side were those who view such a move as premature or even counterproductive. The chapter’s strength has been its disciplined allocation of resources, particularly volunteer labor for phonebanking and canvassing. A citywide race could absorb enormous capacity, potentially weakening the campaigns where DSA has its clearest path to victory.

There are also political considerations. Raman, despite her history with DSA and her strong record on tenant protections and advocacy for the homeless, has at times diverged from the organization on key issues, including Palestine, housing policy, policing budgets, and the implementation of the city’s “mansion tax.” Raman has drawn heavy fire at times from DSA members nationally for being accommodating to local pro-Israeli groups. For instance, she was censured by the chapter in 2024 for accepting the endorsement of Democrats for Israel–Los Angeles. At the recent chapter debate, some members active in housing fights raised concerns about her being an inconsistent ally to the housing left in the city and criticized her efforts to rewrite Measure ULA, the city tax on top-tier property sales that flows directly into the city’s affordable housing programs, to exempt apartments, condos, and mixed-use housing. Raman contends that it is a tactical move to keep lobbying groups opposed to the measure from gutting the law with a statewide ballot initiative..

Huang, by contrast, is seen by some members as more closely aligned with socialist principles but faces questions about electability and citywide recognition. “She’s not on the Shake Up City Hall slate, but she’s here to shake up city hall,” says Gabbie Metheny, a DSA-LA chapter member and volunteer community manager for the campaign.

These are not superficial disagreements. They reflect a deeper tension within democratic socialist strategy: whether to prioritize ideological clarity or electoral viability, and how to balance the two in a political environment still largely hostile to socialists.

What stands out, however, is not the existence of disagreement but the form it takes. The debate inside DSA-LA is structured, participatory, and transparent. Petitions circulate. Members argue openly. Votes are taken, and decisions are respected even when the margins are narrow or the outcome frustrating. The result is messy, sometimes slow, and occasionally anticlimactic.

Members also sometimes vote with their feet in a mass organization where democratic socialism spills out into a broader movement not always contained by DSA. Formal endorsement or no, over 120 DSA-LA, Long Beach, and Orange County members (mostly new recruits) are volunteering for Huang’s campaign (out of 1,110 volunteers total), taking up organizing roles in canvassing, digital outreach, policy, and more. Many DSA members active in the United Auto Workers have been pillars of support for the Nithya campaign. But messy or not, DSA-LA’s internal debates provide a rare example of large-scale democratic practice in an era when most political organizations operate through top-down decision-making or informal influence networks.

The stakes extend beyond Los Angeles. As democratic socialism becomes an ever more powerful force in American politics, questions of strategy, scale, and internal democracy will only become more pressing. DSA-LA offers one possible model: a mass-membership organization capable of contesting elections, organizing in social movements, and still arguing, in full view of its own members, about how best to proceed.

Dance marathons evolved from an earlier, more stripped-down version of the spectacle. At these events, a single participant, typically a woman, would attempt to continually dance without rest for longer than anyone else on record. Of all the women to attempt this test of endurance, history most clearly remembers Alma Cummings, a dance instructor who, in 1923, swayed away with six different men for twenty-seven consecutive hours at the Audubon Ballroom, a vaudeville house in Washington Heights, New York.

One photographer snapped Cummings in the aftermath — her feet soaking in a bowl, a weary but genuine smile etched across her face — holding up a pair of shoes with gaping holes in the soles like two moon craters. The image inspired numerous other hopefuls to try and beat the record. Attempts became so common in the following weeks that a new record holder would often still be resting from their exertions when the news came through that their time had already been eclipsed.

Dance marathons, such as the 1928 Madison Square Garden derby, were a higher level of pageantry. These were more directly competitive contests — participants were not facing off against the clock but against each other. And while spectators had been in attendance to bear witness to the achievement of Cummings five years earlier, the pomp and spectacle of dance marathons was more tailored to sell tickets, entertain a crowd, and, ultimately, make a profit.

Chief promoter of the Madison Square Garden event was Milton D. Crandall, a shrewd organizer determined to build a sense of occasion around his latest endeavor. The arena was decorated with the flags of various nations, as if to lend an Olympian legitimacy to proceedings.

Coats of arms adorned some of the red-and-white-striped canvas tents that were set up around the arena for contestants, as well as staff such as doctors, masseuses, and beauticians. A rostrum was constructed in the center of the arena to station an orchestra; potted palms were installed to decorate the dance area. There was a certain level of professionalism to the handling of contestants too. All had passed a medical exam to allow them to compete; team numbers were assigned to those who were successful.

It fell on Andrew Jackson Gillis, the mayor of Newburyport, Massachusetts, described as “the world’s championship endurance mayor,” to fire the starter pistol. With three squeezes of the trigger, as many as one hundred and thirty-four couples began their long dance.

To allow for so many entrants, makeshift beds were jammed into dressing rooms, with some even spilling out into corridors. But a lack of space was a temporary problem. During the first two days of the competition, thirty-five couples were eliminated; thirty-three more went on day three. By the fifth day, just twenty-nine couples remained.

There was no rule that stated contestants were required to dance in time to the music, so some duos shuffled as slowly as possible to conserve energy. Still, the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) estimated that contestants covered the equivalent of about forty miles a day.

Among the competitors were Jimmy Scott and Olga Christensen, team number 83, former colleagues at a dance school who felt confident they could stay on their feet for an entire week — enough, they deduced, to scoop the grand price. But the contest stretched into a second week. And then a third. By the fifteenth day, nine couples still remained. To allow each other to sleep as they danced, Scott and Christensen developed techniques to remain in motion while taking their partner’s weight.

Despite these inventive methods, contestants began to hallucinate due to fatigue. At one point, Scott found Christensen attempting to pull away from him. When he asked what was wrong, she replied, “To the waiting room.” “What for?” the bemused Scott inquired. “To wait for the train.” “What train?” “The train for Long Island.”

At first, the event attracted only a small number of spectators. Yet as the days fell off the calendar, and the ability of participants to remain vertical became ever more improbable, interest in this strange novelty grew. By the time the marathon had been whittled down to nine remaining couples, it was estimated that 21,000 spectators were entering the arena every twenty-four hours.

The price of admission rose accordingly from $1.50 to $3.30. The New York Times printed daily updates; Time would later publish a lengthy report. Esteemed guests included former heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey and screen star Mae West.

As the attention mushroomed, so did the furor. Rumors swirled of a contestant at a dance marathon in Wilkes-Barre, Pensylvania, who had suffered an internal hemorrhage a week after he left the dance floor, panicking New York officials.

The person with ultimate authority was the city’s Health Commissioner Louis I. Harris, who entered the job with the stated ambition of adding ten years to the life of the average New Yorker. Facing mounting pressure, Harris issued the order: Crandall had to shut it down.

The scene at the Garden became ridiculous. With half an hour to go before the imposed shutdown deadline, Crandall mounted the rostrum to announce he was moving the entire event to a more accommodating state. “In this land of the free and home of the brave,” he shouted, “no one ever got stomach ulcers from dancing. . . .  Every participant except the male member of team Number 7 has agreed to follow me to New Jersey tonight.”

This was news to the male member of team Number 7 — or Edward J. Leonard, to give him his proper name. He rushed at Crandall, threatening to punch his lights out for the suggestion he was ready to quit. The crowd cheered Leonard on; Crandall was booed, hissed, and pelted with fruit.

Despite the chaos, it was announced minutes later that an injunction had been secured that would allow the marathon to continue twenty-two hours longer. Couple Number 7 was permitted to remain on the floor.

Health Commissioner Harris finally closed the show on June 30, its twentieth day. With no outright winner, the prize money was distributed evenly to the eight remaining couples at a party in honor of their achievement three days later.

Despite the truncated and chaotic ending, the Madison Square Garden event was considered a success. Controversial, for sure, but a good ol’ time nonetheless. Feeling he was onto a good thing, Crandall continued to promote dance marathons until the mid-1930s, when he was shot and killed by Chicago gangsters outside one of his own events. One could read the grizzly scene as the reflection of a horrible truth: any sense of innocence around dance marathons had by this point been shattered.

The year after the drama and jubilee of Madison Square Garden, the Great Depression swept across America like a typhoon of misery. Unemployment swelled, poverty was rampant, the nation’s social fabric began to fray and tear.

In these conditions, dance marathons thrived. While the most prominent early participants tended to be professional dancers or people who saw themselves as specialists in endurance, the economic collapse created a new, much larger base of contestants: the downtrodden, the dispossessed, and the desperate.

Dance marathons did make it to parts of Europe, but they remained most popular in the United States, part of a curious interest the American public were taking in endurance tests. Poll sitting, marathon swimming, and cave sitting all experienced surges of popularity. As the contestants became more deprived, the contests got longer.

When a dance marathon came to town, the wannabe participants lined up, not because they held out much hope of winning the grand prize — although the money certainly would have been welcome. No, it was a much more basic need: as long as they could hang on in a dance marathon, they would have shelter and food. In fact, promoters began to fear what they called “hotel dancers”: people who’d enter for just a night or two before moving on.

To combat this, some introduced rules such as a minimum threshold of time on the floor. If contestants fell short, they risked forfeiting their personal belongings. In They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, a 1969 film starring Jane Fonda that codified the idea of the Depression-era dance marathon for a new generation, one character leaves the contest for the simple reason that he’s been offered an interview for a fortnight of work elsewhere. For these lowly survivors, there was no passion for the pageantry of the event.

Townspeople were often reluctant to have a dance marathon in the area. Religious groups and conservative leaders denounced them as scandalous — a symptom of the total collapse of morality, another form of popular entertainment degrading America’s youth. Movie theater owners did not want the competition and wielded the loyalty of their patrons to help their protests.

In the face of such opposition, promoters had to be transient, sweeping into towns like Monorail magnate Lyle Lanley of Simpsons fame, hosting their events, and moving on quickly. Despite opposition, there was always an audience of interested locals ready to pay at the door.

In Chicago, a camera crew was on hand to capture the rack and revelry. In the footage, an on-screen reporter reveals that 126 couples began their long dance on August 30, 1930. A calendar attached to the back of one male contestant reveals the date of filming: January 28 — 151 days of continuous dancing.

And what most couples are doing does indeed look like “dancing.” Slow and unenergetic, but dancing. Except for Frankie and Betty. No, what Frankie is doing is shuffling with his partner collapsed in his arms, dead to the world, as though she’d just been hauled up from a crypt.

“I feel pretty tired,” says Frankie, clutching the woman awkwardly. “After going five months, we all feel tired, but we hope to win.”

“How’s Betty?,” asks the reporter, gesturing toward the woman being dragged around like an army sack. Frankie tries to wake his partner up so she can speak for herself. Some shaking and shouting finally jolts Betty into life. “Hey, what month is this?” she yells.

After some frazzled mumbling, Betty sets up her partner for a triumphant declaration. “You think we can stick it out, Frankie?” asks Betty. “Oh, you betcha,” he says. “We’re going to anyway, until the end.”

Some promoters dreamed of the dance marathon becoming a great American pastime, located in its own niche somewhere between theater and sport. But unlike boxing, which since the 1860s has been molded by the wide acceptance of the Queensbury Rules, dance marathons had no governing bodies or settled standards — indeed, organizers would often change the rules depending on what they thought the contest needed or audience desired. If a shutdown was imminent, promoters could simply reduce or remove rest periods to bring a swift end to the show. Then it was on to the next town, to do it all over again.

Still, the outline of your common dance marathon typically went as follows: for forty-five (sometimes fifty) minutes out of every hour, contestants had to be in constant motion. So miserable would these movements become that some organizers took to replacing the name “dance marathons” with “walkathons” (which also helped circumnavigate the protestations of religious groups that felt dancing was heresy). This was for twenty-four hours a day.

Showers had to be squeezed into the short breaks. Some men shaved while still dancing by propping a mirror on their partner’s shoulder. Meals were served on large tables set up in the middle of the dancefloor; contestants could still not stop moving as they ate. Typically, a couple was eliminated when one of their knees touched the ground.

Early dance marathons were relatively wholesome, just people testing themselves for personal achievement. But as they began to stretch into obscene amounts of time, the public became invested not just in spectacle of endurance but in storylines. Love stories and other narratives were often manufactured by organizers.

Weddings became part of the show, sometimes legally binding and sometimes not. It suited contestants who were more likely to receive money and gifts from onlookers if they could raise interest in their own story. Some were invited to sing — a useful platform for those dreaming of a career in a more glamorous side of show business.

Undeniably, though, the arenas were packed with spectators who just wanted to watch people suffer; exhaustion was the spectacle. The dance halls became Roman coliseums of bedraggled gladiators, forced into combat through economic circumstances, for the tossed pennies of the more fortunate onlookers. To maintain interest, contests within the contest were also formulated. The most notorious were the races that saw couples, sometimes tied together or even blindfolded, compete to stay in the marathon by running laps around the dance floor.

By the late 1930s, the popularity of dance marathons was on the wane. The craze had never quite shed its controversial reputation enough to invade the popular consciousness. Mainstream acceptance could have been attainable if the top organizers had managed to unite, but all attempts to settle on common goals or rules flatlined. As the Depression petered out, so did the marathons.

As the years past, dance marathons became universally acknowledged as exploitative. This was a judgement advanced by the play Marathon ’33, which opened in 1963, and the movie They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, based on a novel by Horace McCoy, who had himself worked as a bouncer at the events on the Santa Monica Pier in California. In the film, the desperate contestants include an elderly sailor and pregnant woman, while the marathon is run by a promoter who exploits his position for sexual favors.

For the finale, the titular mystery that the movie has been teasing is revealed when Fonda’s character asks her dance partner to shoot her so she can escape the cruel absurdity of America. It echoed the story of Seattle woman Gladys Lenz, who in 1928 attempted suicide shortly after competing in a marathon. “The world was aflame, and we made this movie about capitalism and greed and people being destroyed by it,” reflected Fonda years later.

Everything is fated to return in new, often more cursed, forms. While dance marathons were never again popular, they do have an offspring: reality TV. Once the concept of contrived but formally unscripted television starring ordinary members of the public began to take off in the 1990s, some producers hit on a winning formula: humiliation.

Not all reality TV is cheaply exploitative — at its best, it can echo the culture and society of its era in enlightening ways. But exploitation has too often been a core feature. As long as there have been haves and have-nots, the haves have sought to leverage their wealth to encourage others to humiliate themselves for amusement; a grim reality of poverty is that dignity is hard kept.

Shows that were nominally singing contests demanded constant fresh meat to ridicule and stigmatize. Even a seasoned parliamentarian like George Galloway succumbed, astonishing viewers of Celebrity Big Brother in 2006 by getting down on all fours and pretending to be a cat. The word “meltdown” is now more associated with reality TV contestants than with nuclear reactors. All for prime-time entertainment.

The same impulses that drove the popularity of dance marathons come through in modern media. Love Island has proved a busy gateway to minor celebrity status, calling to mind the entrants who saw the competitions as a way into the entertainment industry. Married at First Sight, a show that follows strangers who “get married,” is a direct descendent of the weddings that would take place on dance marathon floors for the public’s voyeuristic delight.

The biggest YouTube channel in the world also adheres to the same core principles. MrBeast offers huge sums of cash for people at the bottom of the capitalist crush. The drama is derived from how life-changing the money can be — a reminder that for many people, all other avenues to attain such comfort can feel blocked off.

Today we mostly remember dance marathons as a funny curio, an interesting peculiarity of their time. But while forms of entertainment can go out of style, the impulses that lend them their power can stretch across generations. If there’s one key lesson to take a century later, it is that wherever there is an opportunity to exploit desperate people, someone from a layer above them will take advantage of it.

Geese formed in 2016 while its members were still teenagers. While they had planned to dissolve after graduation, they postponed college as interest in their music began to grow.

After signing a joint deal with PIAS and Partisan Records, the band released two records and started to win positive press. In 2021, Rolling Stone called the up-and-comers “indie-rock prodigies” — but they remained largely in the wheelhouse of hipsters and insiders.

The band’s fortunes began to shift at the end of 2024, when singer and guitarist Cameron Winter released his solo album Heavy Metal. And they launched into overdrive the following year when the band released their fourth album, Getting Killed — provoking a critical firestorm and transforming them into the most talked-about band of the year. Many rave reviews ran with headlines like “Finally, a New Idea in Rock and Roll” and “How Geese Took Flight to Become ‘Gen Z’s First Great American Band.”

Geese strongly appealed to nostalgia for an era when rock felt like a stronger presence in the musical zeitgeist. However weird the band is, their sound explicitly hearkens back to the past, capturing the exuberant caterwauling of the Stones, the raw power of early 1970s garage rock, and the carefully uncurated cool of 2000s indie sleaze.

Given that listeners are increasingly turning toward the past, Geese’s retro appeal makes sense. There is a pervasive feeling that the 2020s have been one of the worst musical decades in nearly a century. For several years, Luminate’s Year End Music Report has chronicled a declining interest in current music. In fact, Spotify’s trendy Wrapped feature Listening Age was actually inspired by how Gen Z and Alpha listeners are more likely to listen to music from older decades than other generations.

Geese clearly appeals to a crowd who wants music to matter again. Winter’s Carnegie Hall performance last December capped off the band’s big year, inspiring the kind of scene-report-style commentary that was once the hallmark of rock reporting. Commentators couldn’t help but remark on all the luminaries in the crowd, like REM’s Michael Stipe and Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, and the fact that directors Paul Thomas Anderson and Benny Safdie were both there filming earned headlines in its own right.

The band’s irreverent media presence also evokes rock’s glory days, particularly Winter’s coy evasiveness during interviews. That spirit was perfectly captured by drummer Max Bassin, who exemplified an old-school punk ethos with a curt BRIT Award acceptance speech: “I just want to say, free Palestine, fuck ICE, RIP Mani, let’s go Geese.”

For many, the band’s success made it clear: rock was so back.

The problem with becoming rock’s great hope in 2026 is that not everyone thinks it deserves one.

Geese began to attract heat as soon as they started to blow up. Plenty of people simply took issue with the band’s sound, which they found cacophonous or confusing. Others zeroed in on Winter’s eccentric singing.

Many also didn’t love the euphoric headlines and savior rhetoric, either because they felt rock didn’t need saving or Geese wasn’t the band to do it.

Even so, several comments implied there was something not just wrong but troubling about cheering on Geese.

More than one commentator evoked the supposed white masculinity of the band (confusing, since one member of the band isn’t white, and another is a woman). The theme was expressed in a friendlier way by linking the band to the resurgence of “white boy garage music,” while less playful commentary has focused on the band’s “performative masculinity” and the “near-manosphere politics” of their fans.

The band’s class background has also been a target for the haters. Geese’s members attended Brooklyn Friends School and Little Red School House, and two of their families have industry roots: Bassin’s father was a marketing executive for Alternative Distribution Alliance, and guitarist Emily Green’s dad is a sound designer who worked with John Cale.

Quibbling about authenticity and backgrounds is as old as rock itself. Millennial readers will no doubt remember similar debates around the Strokes as they were heating up a quarter-century ago. But the fact is that “relatively affluent art school kid” is hardly rare when it comes to rock pedigree. David Crosby’s father worked on Wall Street before becoming an Oscar-winning cinematographer. Gram Parsons was a prep school kid and the grandson of a fruit magnate. Joe Strummer’s father was a diplomat. Radiohead itself formed at the elite Abingdon School in Oxfordshire.

But recent discourse has dragged out a more vulgar kind of sociologism endemic to our era. As one Substacker wrote, the band’s popularity reflects the “domination of the privately educated” over music. Additionally, Geese “come from a boring, moneyed place and the success of their white male rock star type in this form is actually a perfect symbol for this age of Trump and Conservative success.”

Geese, as it turns out, isn’t just bad — they’re Trumpy. Somehow.

But Geese detractors finally hit the motherlode this month when it came out that the band had used an online strategy firm in order to generate attention and boost engagement.

Their success, which seemed to occur overnight to those not paying attention, had already provoked accusations that they were industry plants. But at the end of March, Eliza McLamb — a stellar Brooklyn musician in her own right — wrote a Substack post that threw more fuel on the fire.

McLamb called attention to Chaotic Good Studios, a brand strategy firm that helped create “narrative campaigns” for companies and artists. She detailed her shock at discovering that the company had not only boosted Winter’s song-of-the-year contender “Love Takes Miles” as well as Geese’s record Getting Killed but had been working with other artists she admired like Wet Leg, Jane Remover, and Dijon.

Far from a hit piece, McLamb’s essay was really just a great work of industry analysis, explaining Chaotic Good’s off-putting hype machine, which involved posting relentlessly about clients from burner accounts. As the founders put it, after an artist’s team lands the coveted Saturday Night Live performance, they really get to work: “the second SNL drops at midnight, you should post a hundred times saying that was the best performance of the year.”

The situation looked even shadier when a day after McLamb’s essay went online, Chaotic Good pulled the names of Geese and several other clients from their site.

But McLamb wasn’t writing a Geese teardown. After all, the industry has a longer, dirtier history that predates this practice, and she even admitted a service like this might advance her own career.

In mid-April, Wired reshared McLamb’s scoop with a sensationalist headline calling the band “a psyop.” While the article added all kinds of caveats, “maybes” and “perhapses,” the headline does all the work the internet needs.

The Wired essay has already attracted a series of measured responses, including an A.V. Club piece that proclaimed, “Congratulations, You Discovered Digital Marketing.”

But it’s too late. The discourse cycle has begun once again, with yet another weapon for online denizens who are eager to prove the band was as unlikable as they already wanted them to be.

Spirited debate about music is a great thing. It’s especially interesting to see discussions about a band’s influences and quality, as well as where the industry should be going.

In an era where alternative music is surging back into public consciousness, it’s a great time to reignite conversations about the role of rock music (and other genres) in the current musical landscape.

We also should be critical of the models that dominate our industry and the broader place of music in culture, including the ills of streaming, industry consolidation, AI-generated music, and incursions on artistic speech.

The problem is that circular debates about influence and authenticity collide with attempts to moralize liking or not liking bands. These are attempts to reassert the pseudo-political commentary that for far too long cast a shadow on music, film, and other art forms, particularly during the 2010s.

We need something that moves beyond hype and hate: a perspective that takes for granted we can just dislike a band and move on if their vibe feels off, we don’t like the singer’s voice, or the wrong person told us they are going to save the world.

Once we get there, we can have those more interesting conversations about what music is doing right now and what it ought to do instead. If Geese isn’t quite a psyop or a savior, perhaps there’s someone else out there who can show us a way forward.