When Kristina Brecko arrived at Stanford University in the fall of 2012 to start her PhD, she was already scanning the weather forecast—not for rainfall, but for snow. An avid snowboarder, she and her graduate study advisor, , a skier, were eager to get into the mountains.

There would be no great skiing that winter. California was entering what would become one of the most severe droughts in its history.

“I liked to snowboard,” Brecko says. “And so it was very salient that there really wasn’t any good snow that year.”

The drought, , transformed daily life across the state. Cities pleaded with residents to conserve water and let lawns go brown, rip out grass, stop watering altogether. Billboards and public campaigns urged restraint. Many complied. But some of the state’s heaviest water users, often homeowners with sprawling green lawns, did not.

For Brecko, now an assistant professor of marketing at the Ģ����ý’s , the disconnect raised a question that would shape years of research. California was awash in public opinion messaging. Was any of it effective?

“There was a lot of messaging happening, telling people to reduce their water usage,” she recalls. “And I had these question—it’s all marketing, but is it working? What exactly is working and for whom?”

Rather than focusing on the people who had already embraced conservation—those willing to let their lawns die or remove them entirely—Brecko and Hartmann became interested in the holdouts—that is, the households with the highest water consumption. , published in the Journal of Marketing Research, argue that those households should not be shamed or ignored. Instead, they should be targeted.

Harm reduction over abstinence

The study borrows a concept from public health: the idea of harm reduction. Instead of demanding abstinence—no drugs, no cigarettes, no lawns—the approach aims to reduce damage among people unlikely to completely quit a harmful action.

In California’s drought-stricken suburbs, the harm was outdoor irrigation. The tool was a smart irrigation controller, a device that automatically adjusts watering schedules based on weather, soil conditions, and plant needs. The question was whether such a device could significantly reduce water use without undermining more aggressive conservation efforts, like turf removal.

“There’re always going to be people who are just not going to do it,” Brecko says, referring to lawn removal. “Because it goes totally against their preferences.”

Working with Redwood City Public Works, the researchers tested whether offering irrigation controllers (at either steep discounts or for free) could change behavior among residents who wanted to keep their lawns green. Crucially, the study took place toward the end of the drought, after years of aggressive messaging and rebates for turf removal had already circulated.

“By the time we ran our study, people had had the chance to adopt the most effective solution—at least those people who would do it,” Brecko explains.

That timing mattered. Those most committed to conservation had already removed their turf. That meant the researchers could now focus on everyone else.

Field tests in thirsty times

The team ran two large-scale field experiments in Redwood City. In 2016, roughly 7,000 households were offered discounts on smart irrigation controllers, ranging from 10 percent to 80 percent. Some homeowners were also offered free professional installation.

Adoption was slower than expected.

“I think people just weren’t sure,” Brecko says. “The device was relatively new, and even the utility company wasn’t sure what effect it would have on water usage.”

The second experiment, in 2017, scaled up dramatically. Ģ����ý 19,000 households were randomly assigned to receive a free smart irrigation device, available in limited quantities. The process was designed to be as easy as possible: Residents received emails and accessed a dedicated online portal where discounts were applied instantly—no rebates, no paperwork.

The response was swift. Clearly, price and convenience mattered. Messaging alone did not. “Incremental discounts aren’t really going to do the trick,” Brecko notes. “We learned that we needed to overcome some barriers to adoption.”

Who adopted—and who saved

The devices appealed most to people who used the most water, with heavy irrigators adopting the device at the highest rates.

“It allows you to keep the green lawn that you care about.” Brecko says, “But it might allow you to also contribute to that social goal that we care about.”

Once installed, the controllers delivered substantial and lasting savings. Water use dropped by about 26 percent (from a regular irrigation baseline) during shoulder seasons—early spring and fall—when manual systems often overwater because homeowners forget to adjust them. The reductions persisted for nearly four years, the researchers found.

Among the heaviest irrigators, the water savings were large enough to offset the typical $250 cost of the device in roughly six months. The conserved water alone could cover a household’s annual indoor needs. But just as important, the study found no evidence that smart controllers undermined more aggressive conservation.

“We don’t see any difference in turf removal rates,” Brecko says. “And we see no increases in consumption among non-irrigator households.”

In other words, harm reduction did not “cannibalize abstinence,” the duo writes.

A middle road for climate behavior

For policymakers, the findings challenge the all-or-nothing approach that often dominates environmental messaging. The most effective solution—to simply rip out the lawn—will never appeal to everyone.

“My initial inclination is to say everyone should do the thing that’s most powerful,” Brecko says. “But the thing is, we all have really different preferences.”

While some people care deeply about conservation, others may have competing priorities and care more about their yard’s aesthetics, their kids’ being able to play on grass, or the curb appeal of their home. Stigmatizing the latter group or ignoring their strong preferences, can leave them unnecessarily out of conservation efforts.

“Not that those high users don’t care about conservation, it’s just that they might care about something else more,” says Brecko. “If you don’t engage them, they might do nothing.”

The lesson, she argues, is not to abandon high-impact solutions, but to sequence and supplement them. If you want people who use the most water to conserve, you may have to let them keep what they love, while reducing the shared costs of doing so.

“They get the thing that they care about,” Brecko says. “And you, as the conservation-oriented person, get the conservation, too.”

Sales of gun kits, also referred to as “ghost guns,” have surged in recent years—rising from 1,600 in 2017 to more than 19,000 in 2021—a nearly twelvefold increase, according to data cited by the Supreme Court of the United States. Because these kits were hard to trace, they made it possible for convicted felons, minors, and those with restraining orders—all of whom are prohibited from purchasing guns—to get their hands on working firearms.

That’s why in 2022, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) began to treat these kits just like readily assembled guns, the latter of which are regulated by the . The act requires those who import, manufacture, or deal with guns to keep sales records, conduct background checks, and mark their products with serial numbers.

But gun kit manufacturers pushed back against the ATF, arguing instead that parts do not necessarily make a whole. The case ultimately reached the US Supreme Court, where the justices sided with the ATF in its March ruling in . That decision also carried a surprising and direct link to the Ģ����ý.

The justices used a 2017 paper by Scott Grimm, an associate professor of , and Beth Levin, his former PhD advisor at Stanford University, to conclude that gun kits are intended to be used as guns and as such fall under the rule applied by the ATF.

The case hinged on the idea of so-called artifact nouns. In the court’s ruling, Justice Neil Gorsuch—writing for the majority—cites the linguists’ work: “The term weapon is an artifact noun—a word for a thing created by humans. Artifact nouns are typically ‘characterized by an intended function,’ rather than by some ineffable ‘natural essence.’”

Grimm was initially stunned.

“This came as a massive surprise that our work, which really engages with linguistic and cognitive questions, ended up being so relevant and something so practical and far-reaching,” he says.

Q&A with Scott Grimm

What is an artifact noun?

Grimm: It’s a basic distinction between types of things in the world. On one hand you have all the natural kind entities, like water, or tiger, or rock. And then on the other hand you have artifacts. An artifact is anything that is man-made, designed, or refashioned in some way. It boils down to this basic metaphysical distinction. As linguists, we are interested in how these differences are reflected in language, and, in fact, nouns that encode artifacts behave very differently from nouns that encode natural kinds.

Does an artifact require a specific function?

Grimm: It’s been a long-standing observation that an artifact has a function, like a hammer that wasn’t invented without reason: A hammer exists to perform the function of hammering a nail or various other things, and so without a function, typically, objects don’t qualify as an artifact of that type. But that distinction can be very slippery, because there are some objects, which are designed to fulfill a specific function, like a door stop for instance. But you can also use a box of books as a doorstop. In those cases, anything that is immediately fulfilling the function also qualifies as one of those artifacts.

By the way, what exactly does a linguist do?

Grimm: Well, people often ask me how many languages I speak. [Grimm chuckles] But that’s not it. We try to understand the structure of human language, from the types of sounds produced in speech to the types of meaning categories convey—and see how these structures vary across the 7,000 languages spoken in the world. One challenge is that language is so familiar to us we take it for granted. It’s at the center of human interaction and is the vehicle for thought.

How did you find out the Supreme Court had used your research?

Grimm: There was an amicus brief, supporting the ATF, written by several linguists from Georgetown, Brandeis, and Stanford. One of the coauthors of the amicus brief notified us as the Supreme Court decision came out. That was the very first I heard of it.

What was your initial reaction?

Grimm: I was certainly surprised. And then, of course, I was happy to see this as one of those cases—people working on basic science have few expectations that their work will be applied to a completely different area of society, but it happens, and it happens more frequently than we think and certainly more than we publicize.

How does your work on artifact nouns apply to this case?

Grimm: The law allows the government to regulate firearms. The question the court was trying to decide was whether these ghost guns fall under firearms. Part of the question is: What qualifies as a weapon? That is where our work on artifact nouns is relevant.

I should also mention that, of course, our work didn’t happen in a vacuum. There were several other linguists who had thought about artifact nouns and written about them. I think the key was that we were more explicitly talking about an artifact noun’s intended function, rather than just noting that there was a function. In the paper, we made the link to the intended function and gave a very explicit analysis of how that worked.

Why? Because usually things are designed with a function in mind, even if it’s not serving that function at every moment. For instance, a chair is designed to be sat in, but someone doesn’t need to be sitting in it the whole time. It’s the intended function, which is important. Likewise, if you are special ordering a ghost gun kit, the intended function of that object, once you assemble it rather easily, is to function as a weapon.

Justice Clarence Thomas dissented while still referring to your work. How so?

Grimm: I think Clarence Thomas’s point is that the majority opinion is referring to ordinary language use in how to interpret the law. He explicitly says that in statutory drafting we’re not considering colloquial language usage. I think he’s saying we should interpret the words “frame” and “receiver” with respect to the statutory history, rather than with a more ordinary language approach.

However, I think it’s the kind of distinctions that are being drawn here that cut directly to the heart of how people understand our terms for things in the world. These are the meanings we traffic in, whether it’s in statutory law or ordinary conversation. I think his approach is trying to relegate the linguistic work to be only about ordinary conversation, which, of course, it applies to, but is not limited to. In fact, linguistic work can help us greatly in contexts of high precision, such as legal contexts.

Based on your work, did the justices get the ruling right?

Grimm: I would say in adopting this distinction, yes. I think they understood and applied what we were arguing for in a straightforward fashion. But I don’t think it’s proper for me to say whether it’s correct or not. I simply don’t have the expertise to pass judgment on the judges.

Meet the expert

Scott Grimm is an associate professor with the Ģ����ý’s Department of Linguistics and the director of the Quantitative Semantics Lab. His research interests range from semantics and linguistic fieldwork to lexicography and African languages, such as Gur languages—a major branch of the Niger-Congo language family in West Africa. Among other publications, he is the coauthor of a Dagaare-English dictionary in the African Language Grammar and Dictionary Series (Language Science Press, Berlin, 2021).

Socially responsible investors (SRIs) often see themselves as agents of social or environmental progress. They buy into polluting or “dirty” companies believing that their capital can nudge a business toward a cleaner path. Their intention is straightforward: to invest in the bad to make it good.

But a by finance professors at the URochester, Johns Hopkins University, and the Stockholm School of Economics argues that this logic can backfire. Instead of accelerating environmental reforms, SRIs may unintentionally create incentives for firms to postpone them.

“It’s surprising at first,” agrees study coauthor , an assistant professor of finance at Ģ����ý’s , “but when you think about this from the correct angle, it makes sense.”

Waiting for the good guys

The researchers model a scenario that companies may face in real life: Imagine you own a polluting but profitable factory. You could invest now to make it greener, or you could hold off, knowing that an SRI—someone who is explicitly looking for a company to improve—might come along later and pay a premium precisely because the company is “dirty.”

And that, according to Kopytov, is the crux of the problem. Well-intentioned investors “just do not want to invest in a green firm that already has achieved everything it can,” he says. “Instead, they really want to make an impact with their money.”

Managers at such polluting companies are aware of this motivation to do good.

“I might think, ‘Well, why would I invest in this project on my own? I can allocate my money somewhere else and wait until those socially responsible investors come along and give me their money because they care about making the world a greener place,’” Kopytov says.

That’s how green reforms get stalled. In other words, the very presence of investors seeking to do good can create an incentive for firms to delay doing good themselves.

Traditional investors may add further delays

The effect is magnified by traditional investors who care predominantly about financial gains. Because SRIs will pay less if a company is already inclined to go green, a purely financially motivated owner becomes a tougher negotiator. If you’re a polluting firm, that’s valuable.

“Instead of selling directly to socially responsible investors at a relatively low price, I can actually sell it to a financial investor who then will sell it to socially responsible investors at a higher price,” Kopytov explains. This dynamic creates a resale chain that rewards waiting (to enact environmental change) rather than acting.

A possible fix

The researchers examined how investment mandates might counteract this delay. Many funds already use policies that exclude polluters or reward cleaner firms. But exclusion alone isn’t enough.

A more effective approach, Kopytov says, is for SRIs to publicly commit to paying a premium for firms that have already cleaned up their act. “If they can commit to such a mandate,” he says, “managers would reform earlier in order to earn that premium.”

The key challenge here is credibility. If the reform has already been done, some investors may ask, why pay now? To overcome the temptation not to pay the premium, investment funds may need public, enforceable commitments that would penalize them if they broke the promise of paying a premium for already enacted green reforms. Signing binding principles of responsible investing, Kopytov says, would create a reputational cost for those SRIs who deviate from the agreed-upon premium rule.

Rethinking impact investing

Ultimately, the study seeks to reframe what “impact investing” really means. Investors often measure progress after a deal is made but the authors argue that if mandates are structured correctly, all the measurable impact happens before the acquisition rather than afterward.

“It’s really important how you invest your money responsibly if you care that the money is making an impact—because that can slow down the speed at which firms are being reformed by their current owners,” Kopytov cautions.

In other words, good intentions may not be enough. Real change depends not just on desiring impact but on designing incentives that make acting sooner, not later, the best financial choice.

Why do the world’s most prestigious firms—such as McKinsey, Goldman Sachs and other elite consulting giants, investment banks, and law practices—hire the brightest talents, train them intensively, and then, after a few years, send many of them packing? A in the American Economic Review concludes that so-called adverse selection is not a flaw but rather a sign that the system is working precisely as intended.

Two financial economists, from the Ģ����ý and the University of Wisconsin–Madison respectively, created a model that explains how reputation, information, and retention interact in professions where skill is essential and performance is both visible and attributable to a specific person, particularly in fields such as law, consulting, fund asset management, auditing, and architecture. They argue that much of the professional services world operates through “intermediaries”—firms that both hire employees (also referred to as “agents” or “managers”) and market their expertise to clients—because clients can’t themselves easily judge a worker’s ability from the outset.

“Identifying skilled professionals is critical yet presents a major challenge for clients,” the researchers write. “Some of the firm’s employees are high-quality managers,” says coauthor , the Jay S. and Jeanne P. Benet Professor of Finance at the University’s , “but the firm is paying them less than their actual quality, because initially the employees don’t have a credible way of convincing the outside world that they are high-quality.”

‘Churning’ to boost reputation

At the start of an employee’s career, the firm has an advantage, Kaniel and his coauthor Dmitry Orlov contend, because the firm (“the mediator”) can assess an employee’s talent more accurately than outside clients can. During what the authors call “quiet periods,” the firm keeps those who perform adequately and pays them standard wages.

Over time, however, an employee’s public performance—measured by successful cases, profitable investments, or well-executed projects—reduces the firm’s informational advantage. As the informational gap shrinks, the firm needs to pay some employees more because clients are now able to observe an employee’s good performance and hence update their beliefs about the employee’s skills.

“At some point, the informational advantage becomes fairly small,” says Kaniel, “and the firm says, ‘Well, I will basically start to churn. I will let go of some employees, and by doing that, I can actually extract more from the remaining ones.’”

Ironically, to the client these churned—or strategically fired—employees look just as good as the ones whom the firm kept. Churning happens not because these employees have failed but because they may be just somewhat lower-skilled than their peers. Subsequently, churning heightens both the reputation of the firm and of the employees who remain.

A paradoxical equilibrium

Somewhat counterintuitively, the researchers show that churning can benefit both sides. Workers who stay on with an elite firm accept lower pay in the short run as the tradeoff for building a stronger reputation for themselves. When these workers eventually leave the elite firms, they can command higher fees directly from clients.

As a result of the churning, the informational gap between firm and client keeps shrinking because the client catches up to what the firm knows about its workers and which ones it values most. At first glance, the duo argues, the firm’s reduced informational advantage should now cause a further drop in profits. But here comes the strategic twist: The firm starts to underpay those better workers who kept their jobs, akin to making them pay for being “chosen.” Consequently, profits do not decline and may even increase.

“Firms now essentially can threaten the remaining employees: ‘Look, I can let you go, and everybody’s going to think that you’re the worst in the pool. If you want me not to let you go, you need to accept below market wages,’” says Kaniel.

The result is a paradoxical but stable equilibrium. Workers accept being underpaid temporarily because remaining at a top firm serves as a signal to the market about their elite status. It also helps explain why prestigious employers can attract ambitious newcomers despite grueling hours and relatively modest starting pay.

Meanwhile, those who are let go aren’t failures—rather, their exit is part of a system that signals who’s truly top-tier, the researchers argue. In fact, fired workers often find success on their own because potential clients interpret a person’s prior affiliation with a top firm as proof of the worker’s strong ability and qualifications.

In short, the “up-or-out” path of professional life may not just be a cultural phenomenon among top professional service firms but also an efficient response to how reputation is maintained and information flows. What looks like a ruthless system of constant turnover, the researchers argue, is in reality a finely tuned mechanism that helps the market discover and reward true talent.

When the social media platform invited users to flag false or misleading posts, critics initially scoffed. How could the same public that spreads misinformation be trusted to correct it? But a by researchers from the Ģ����ý, the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, and the University of Virginia finds that “crowdchecking” (X’s collaborative fact-checking experiment known as Community Notes) actually works.

The paper, published in the journal Information Systems Research, shows that when a community note about a post’s potential inaccuracy appears beneath a tweet, its author is far more likely to retract that tweet.

“Trying to define objectively what is misinformation and then removing that content is controversial and may even backfire,” notes coauthor , the Xerox Professor of Information Systems and Technology at Ģ����ý’s . “In the long run, I think a better way for misleading posts to disappear is for the authors themselves to remove those posts.”

Using a causal inference method called regression discontinuity and a vast dataset of X posts (previously known as tweets), the researchers find that public, peer-generated corrections can do something experts and algorithms have struggled to achieve. Showing some notes or corrective content alongside potentially misleading information, Rui says, can indeed “nudge the author to remove that content.”

Community Notes on X: An experiment in public correction

Community Notes operates on a threshold mechanism. For a corrective note to appear publicly, it must earn a “helpfulness” score of at least 0.4. (A proposed note is first shown to contributors for evaluation. The bridging algorithm used by Community Notes prioritizes ratings from a diverse range of users—specifically, from people who have disagreed in their past ratings—to prevent partisan group voting that could otherwise manipulating a note’s visibility.) Conversely, notes that fall just below that threshold stay hidden to the public. That design allows for a natural experiment as the researchers were able to compare X posts with notes just above and below the cutoff (i.e., visible to the public versus visible only to Community Notes contributors )—thereby enabling them to measure the causal effect of public exposure.

In total, the researchers analyzed 264,600 posts on X that received at least one community note during two separate time intervals—the first before a US presidential election, which is a time when misinformation typically surges (June–August 2024), and the second two months after the election (January–February 2025).

The results were striking: X posts with public correction notes were 32 percent more likely to be deleted by the authors than those with just private notes, demonstrating the power of voluntary retraction as an alternative to forcible removal of content. The effect persisted across both study periods.

The reputation effect

An author’s decision to retract or delete, the team discovered, is primarily driven by social concerns. “You worry,” says Rui, “that it’s going to hurt your online reputation if others find your information misleading.”

Publicly displayed Community Notes (highlighting factual inaccuracies) function as a signal to the online audience that “the content—and, by extension, its author—is untrustworthy,” the researchers note.

In the social media ecosystem, reputation is important—especially for users with influence—and speed matters greatly, as misinformation tends to spread faster and farther than corrections.

The researchers found that public notes not only increased the likelihood of tweet deletions but also accelerated the process: among retracted X posts, the faster notes are publicly displayed, the sooner the noted posts are retracted.

Those whose posts attract substantial visibility and engagement or who have large follower bases, face heightened reputational risks. As a result, verified X users (those marked by a blue check mark) were particularly quick to delete their posts when they garnered public Community Notes, exhibiting a greater concern for maintaining their credibility.

The overall pattern suggests that social media’s own dynamics, such as status, visibility, and peer feedback, can improve online accuracy.

A democratic defense against misinformation?

Crowdchecking, the team concludes, “strikes a balance between protecting First Amendment rights and the urgent need to curb misinformation.” It relies not on censorship but on collective judgment and public correction. The algorithm employed by Community Notes emphasizes diversity and views that are supported by both sides.

Initially, Rui admits, he was surprised by the team’s strong findings.

“For people to be willing to retract, it’s like admitting their mistakes or wrongdoing, which is difficult for anyone, especially in today’s super polarized environment with all its echo chambers,” he says.

At the outset of the study, the team had wondered if the correcting mechanisms might even backfire. In other words, could a public display note really induce people to retract their problematic posts or would it make them dig in their heels?

Now they know it works.

“Ultimately,” Rui says, “the voluntary removal of misleading or false information is a more civic and possibly more sustainable way to resolve problems.”

I didn’t come from an academic family. I didn’t really know what the job description for a professor of political science entailed. What I did know was that I loved reading and thinking about the world.

When I got to Berkeley in the late 1980s, things were shifting politically on a global scale. It was an optimistic period: The Berlin Wall came down, apartheid was ending, and Latin America’s military dictatorships were collapsing. The “third wave” of democratization was really a triumph of liberal democracy, and I wanted to understand why, why now, and how long could it last?

I really didn’t have a grand plan to become a professor. I just wanted to keep asking questions, keep reading, and keep learning about how to study politics. It wasn’t obvious to me how any of these things worked professionally, but, luckily, I had great mentors. Being guided at the right moment can change the entire trajectory of a life.

The book that really shaped me as a graduate student was by Adam Przeworski. I still assign it in almost every class I teach. At Berkeley, where I started as a graduate student, the training had leaned more toward history, typologies, conceptualizing, path dependence, and critical junctures (the idea that past events and historical processes create conditions that set countries on certain paths and make certain outcomes more or less likely).

The professors at the University of Chicago, where I transferred in my second year of graduate school, showed me another way of thinking about how to study politics—to focus on how institutions shape individuals’ incentives and the ways in which people interact strategically. That was exactly the approach that had originally been pioneered at Ģ����ý in the 1960s. By the ’90s, it was being used by these phenomenal people who studied comparative politics at Chicago, including my mentor, Susan Stokes, who is this year’s president-elect. The approach she and others taught was much more intuitive to me, and I felt I could really build on that.

If I could redesign one US political institution, it would be the Electoral College, hands down. We’re the only country in the world that still has one, and there’s really no rhyme or reason for it. It can distort the popular vote, it’s vulnerable to manipulation, and it gives the presidency—an office that over the last few decades has already seen a tremendous concentration of power because of Congress’s dysfunction—a shaky democratic foundation. It’s rare that you have an institution that is so bad that there’s no downside to reforming it. But this is definitely one of them. I’d replace it with a system where the candidate who wins the most votes nationally becomes president. That principle is really important for rebuilding trust in our democracy.

What keeps me passionate about my work is the chance to draw connections between ideas. I love taking a theoretical framework from one context and seeing how it can illuminate a completely different problem. Or noticing when something everyone assumes about politics has a neglected but important flip side. That kind of intellectual puzzle is deeply satisfying.

As I got older and became a , I found that it’s equally satisfying to teach that approach. Watching students light up when they see how these tools or models can unlock a political puzzle—that never gets old.

And then there’s the other piece: balance. Academic life requires solitude and focus, but it also demands interaction and engagement. The trick is to have both. Fellowships and my work with and the are all attempts at balancing my inward, isolated academic work with the outward responsibility of sharing ideas beyond academic journals.

I feel lucky. Lucky to have had mentors who nudged me in the right direction. Lucky to be in a field where the questions never stop coming. And lucky that the things I loved as a child—reading, writing, asking why—are all part of my job description today.

Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and Ģ����ý alumnus Steven Hahn ’73 has spent years chronicling the political experiences of ordinary people, particularly those at the margins, such as white farmers and enslaved people. In his latest book, (W. W. Norton, 2025), he traces the enduring themes of exclusion, repression, and antidemocratic politics in the United States across centuries.

“Illiberalism is not a backlash,” Hahn insists. “Backlash is one of the most misleading words in the American political vocabulary, because it suggests that a political phenomenon only expresses ignorance and rage and nothing more than that.” Instead, he argues, illiberalism is a coherent political culture with “deep historical roots.”

What is “illiberalism”?

Hahn starts with a definition: “Illiberalism is not just one thing; it’s a collection of ideas and practices,” he explains. A fundamental characteristic of illiberalism is the belief in people’s inequality (as opposed to equality)—whether it’s social, political, or civil—and the belief in inherent or assigned hierarchies of race, gender, or nationality, he argues. Other hallmarks include a desire for cultural or religious homogeneity, the “marking of internal and external enemies,” accepting violence as a means of attaining and maintaining power, and privileging the “will of the community” over the rule of law.

Examples of illiberal moments in US history

Rather than spotlight only the most notorious examples, Hahn points to episodes often celebrated as triumphs of liberalism. Here are some examples:

In the 1830s, as voting rights expanded for white men, free Black people were disfranchised and Native Americans, Mormons, Catholics, and abolitionists faced expulsion. “Abraham Lincoln worried about mob rule,” Hahn notes, describing the murder of an abolitionist in Illinois and a lynching in St. Louis.

The Progressive Era (1900–1920), commonly referred to as the birth of modern liberalism, also saw “an almost across-the-board embrace of eugenics” along with widespread Jim Crow racism. Segregation, Hahn notes, appealed to progressives as “a modern way” of dealing with racial conflict: “Instead of watching a tsunami of lynchings, you could choreograph racial interactions.” He points out that disfranchising people politically—through literacy tests, residency requirements, and new registration laws—all of which were intended to make it difficult for certain groups of people to vote. Such efforts targeted not only Black people but also European immigrants.

Meanwhile, eugenics, the pseudoscientific attempt to improve the human race through selective breeding (and to counter the reproduction of those who were seen as defective) was very much in vogue. Birth control activist and sex educator Margaret Sanger was a proponent, as were Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and —the latter (as New Jersey governor) even signed the bill for mandatory sterilizations. “Eugenics imagined marrying science and the state to create a better social order,” says Hahn. “But that meant literally trying to breed a better society.”

The 1960s saw important civil rights victories, yet the political far right was “reconstituting itself,” Hahn says. Figures like segregationist George Wallace, a former Alabama governor, honed a language of grievance “about federal overreach” and “state rights,” winning significant support outside the South. Additionally, he says, the decade ushered in a “war on crime” that foreshadowed later mass incarceration.

What drives illiberal politics?

Racial conflict is central but it’s not the only reason for the rise of broad illiberal sentiment. “It’s a confluence of things,” Hahn says, noting that demographic instability certainly plays a role—knowing that by the middle of the 21st century white people will become a minority in the United States. Additionally, economic anxiety can stoke fear.

“Large sections of the American middle class and working class have not seen their real incomes rise since the 1970s,” Hahn acknowledges. But he points out that illiberal ideas also flourished when the American economy was expanding as it did in the 1950s and 60s.

Ultimately, he says illiberal beliefs predate the founding of America. “What I’m talking about really precedes the emergence of liberalism,” Hahn emphasizes. “These ideas have their origins in a feudal and early modern world.”

“Illiberalism is always close to the surface,” he cautions. Not cyclical but a constant, ready to erupt when crises occur and political opportunists fan its flames. His perspective directly challenges the notion of an enduring American liberal tradition. Instead, Hahn argues that this liberal tradition was largely “an invention of the 1940s and 1950s”—based on a societal Cold War consensus. He hopes readers will recognize that illiberalism “has political coherence” and “popular appeal,” shaping the nation from its earliest days. His message is sobering—illiberalism is not an aberration but a defining feature of the American story.

Ģ����ý set the course

Hahn’s own political awakening began at the URochester, where he majored in history after becoming involved in the anti–Vietnam War movement. “I was arrested at least once,” he recalls of his student years.

Originally, he’d been interested in pursuing an engineering degree. But by the time he got to Rochester, “it was pretty clear that astronautical engineering was not going to work for me,” he recalls with a chuckle.

Influential Ģ����ý history professors, among them Christopher Lasch, Eugene Genovese, and nurtured his intellectual curiosity. In 2004, Hahn won both the Pulitzer Prize in History and the Bancroft Prize for his book (Harvard University Press, 2005).

After stints at the University of Delaware; the University of California, San Diego; Northwestern University; and the University of Pennsylvania, Hahn is now a , where he continues to probe some of the country’s most uncomfortable truths.

“There’s no doubt in my mind,” he says, “if I hadn’t gone to Rochester, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now.”