SpaceX, Twitter and electric car maker Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends an event during the Vivatech technology startups and innovation fair at the Porte de Versailles exhibition centre in Paris, on June 16, 2023.
I am not a huge fan of Elon Musk as a political activist or commentator. I think he’s made Twitter — sorry, X — worse. His support for the nationalist right in Europe has been ugly. His tenure leading the Department of Government Efficiency mostly amounted to a missed opportunity and often descended into little more than performative vandalism. His personal life is not exactly consonant with my preference for bourgeois family values. Though, one can hardly accuse him of being a deadbeat dad.
On the other hand, I am a huge fan of his accomplishments in business and engineering. He helped create the foundations of the digital economy with PayPal. At the helm of Tesla, he made the electric car into a viable industry (something climate activists once lionized him for). Starlink, his internet satellite business, has been transformative. And, finally, there’s SpaceX, which went public last week. It’s a testament to human ingenuity, immigrant success and American greatness, on a scale that is hard to describe.
If Musk is successful in his ambitions, he will be more responsible than any other human for making ours an interplanetary species. That would mean that long after nearly every name of every politician and businessman you can think of have been forgotten, people will still remember Elon Musk.
But none of that is very relevant to the explosion of outrage over his status as the world’s first trillionaire. I offer my opinions about Musk only because a remarkable number of people think if you defend the morality or legality of him being so rich you must be on Team Elon. I am not. I am on Team Capitalism.
But the confusion hardly ends there. If you followed the reaction on social media to Musk’s shattering of the trillionaire barrier, you’d think that he now has a trillion dollars in the bank. Indeed, indignant politicians rushed to propose taxes on Musk’s wealth as if it was a suddenly discovered treasure ship (with laughably questionable math). Many people talked about Musk “hoarding” dollars that rightfully belong to the poor, the people or perhaps Social Security beneficiaries.
That trillion dollars doesn’t exist, save as a function of accounting. He owns a large number of shares in SpaceX. Those shares have an estimated book value of about $1.03 trillion — as I write this. The stock price will change daily, and if it dips in the future, as I expect it will, he might not be a trillionaire for very long.
Let’s say, heaven forbid, that SpaceX has a disaster on the launchpad, loses some major NASA contract, and the stock price tumbles. What happens to those dollars he supposedly hoarded? Do they vanish? No, because they never existed in the first place.
A shocking number of people think — or demagogically pretend to — that the economy is a static pie. All of the wealth in the economy exists in the form of a finite number of dollars. This zero-sum fallacy is why people think he’s hoarding wealth. He’s not. He’s creating wealth, and I don’t just mean for all of the SpaceX welders and cafeteria staff who now own more than a million dollars’ worth of stock.
Increased innovation and productivity grow the pie, which means more pie for more people. That’s what economic growth means. In 1969, the year I was born, the U.S. gross domestic product was about $1 trillion, in nominal dollars. (If you adjust for inflation, U.S. GDP was around $1 trillion a century ago.) Does Musk now own all of America’s wealth? Of course not, because the economy has grown massively since then.
Other than dislike for Musk, the main driver of all this outrage is our obsession with income inequality. To some, it’s just not right that anyone be so rich when others are so poor — or feel so poor compared with Musk. This is an aesthetic complaint masquerading as a policy position. In objective terms, no one was made poorer by Musk getting richer. Subjectively, however, we’re all poorer in the sense that the richest person in the world became marginally richer.
That’s a vibes argument.
If your neighbor wins the lottery, you will be poorer in comparison. But your ability to clothe, feed and house yourself and your family will not have changed.
If I cure cancer tomorrow, I will get very rich. Where’s the injustice? The world gets a cure for cancer, the economy saves countless billions fighting cancer, and I get to buy a bunch of cool stuff. Everyone, except maybe some drug companies and oncologists, comes out a winner.
I’ll never cure cancer. But capitalism probably will, eventually. Which is just one of a trillion reasons why I am on Team Capitalism.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
In May, the JAMA Network released a study showing that doctor visits for children’s anxiety rose by more than 250 percent over 10 years. If we only respond with more clinical visits and prescriptions, we miss the chance to invest in the everyday conditions that help prevent anxiety in the first place—unstructured social time, accessible extracurriculars, walkable neighborhoods, and teen-friendly public spaces—the “wellbeing infrastructure” we should fund in proportion to the benefits it provides.
Good health and well-being–both mental and physical–do not happen by accident. They do not happen only by stepping in when a young person is in a major mental health emergency (although such services are essential). For youth to truly flourish, we need to focus on conditions that lead to thriving mental health and a commitment to building youth wellbeing infrastructure: the physical environments, social systems, and policies that promote long-term physical, mental, and emotional health.
Fortunately, we’re not starting from scratch. Young people already know what helps them thrive—we just need to support it more creatively and consistently. In a recent youth voice poll by my organization, Hopelab, and the Center for Data Progress, which surveyed over 1,200 young people ages 13–24, respondents were clear about what helps their mental health “a lot” or “quite a bit”: face-to-face time with friends (67 percent), time outdoors (61 percent), and being creative (54 percent).
What would it look like to support infrastructure that provides young people face-to-face time, creativity, and access to the outdoors? It might look like the West Suburban YMCA in Massachusetts, which runs a dedicated teen center open seven days a week and explicitly framed as “the perfect spot to hang out after school or on the weekends.” Teens can drop in to relax, play ping pong, air hockey, and console games, watch TV, or do homework, with staff present to support positive relationships rather than run a therapy program.
Well-being infrastructure for young people might also look like innovative green spaces that coax everyone to spend more time there while interacting with others. More and more research shows that simply being outside, exposed to nature, improves our well-being. So projects that encourage social interaction outdoors would do double duty, providing both restorative and social environments. One example: Washington, D.C.’s 11th Street Bridge Park, a new elevated public park project on an old freeway bridge over the Anacostia River. The project is intentionally designed to promote health and wellbeing, with outdoor performance spaces, playgrounds, and urban agriculture education meant to foster long-term social connection, alongside affordable housing and small businesses that weave outdoor access together with community needs.
Well-being infrastructure also looks like well-funded opportunities to engage in the arts and in activities that bring young people joy, perspective, and connection to each other and the world around them. LA County’s Creative Wellbeing initiative, for example, uses healing-informed arts education—creative writing, dance, music, theater, visual and media arts—to support young people, including children who experience foster care, and youth affected by the juvenile justice system.
A society that truly values youth mental health would fund an abundant number of these programs, indoors and outdoors, for all ages. It would increase funding in schools, libraries, parks, and community centers for the kinds of experiences young people themselves say support their well-being.
To be sure, many communities already invest as best they can in beautiful parks and community programs, but too often these are seen as “nice to have,” not essential infrastructure for our health and our future. Meanwhile, proximity and access to these spaces and experiences remain deeply unequal across the country.
At a time when our youth are deeply at risk, we should listen to them when they tell us what works and what we’re doing right. From ballot measures that increase funding for libraries, parks, and schools to visionary projects like the 11th Street Bridge Park, our kids need support from the infrastructure—and the world—we build around them to thrive.
Julie Tinker is a Principal at Hopelab, a nonprofit focused on improving the mental health and well-being of young people. She is a Public Voices Fellow on Youth Well-Being and Power of The OpEd Project and Hopelab.
The Fulcrum is joining forces with Independent Voter News (IVN) and the Latino News Network (LNN) in a new collaboration designed to strengthen voter‑first journalism at a moment when trust in institutions continues to erode. The partnership brings together three organizations committed to elevating civic engagement, expanding access to reliable information, and ensuring that communities — particularly those historically marginalized or underserved — have the tools they need to participate fully in our democracy.
David Nevins, Publisher of The Fulcrum, said the alliance reflects a shared commitment to centering people rather than parties in the national conversation. “Our democracy depends on journalism that informs rather than divides, and that treats every voter as someone whose voice matters. By partnering with IVN and LNN, we’re expanding our collective ability to deliver the kind of nonpartisan, voter‑first reporting the country urgently needs.”
The collaboration also builds on the long‑standing mission of the Latino News Network to serve multilingual and multicultural audiences with community‑rooted reporting. Hugo Balta — Executive Editor of The Fulcrum and Publisher of LNN — will play a central role in identifying intersections between the three publications to maximize shared opportunities, strengthen coverage, and deepen reporting that reflects the lived experiences of diverse communities. Balta has emphasized that "democracy is strongest when every community is informed, engaged, and empowered," and this partnership expands that mission at a critical moment for the nation.
IVN echoed the shared purpose behind the alliance, underscoring that the work is fundamentally about strengthening the public square and ensuring voters can access information free from partisan framing. Together, the three organizations will collaborate on shared reporting, cross‑platform publishing, civic‑education initiatives, and expanded coverage of underrepresented voters, including Latino, independent, and other communities often overlooked in traditional political reporting. The partnership will deepen reporting on voting access, disinformation, election administration, and reforms such as nonpartisan primaries — issues central to the health of the democratic process.
At a time when polarization continues to shape national discourse, the partnership is rooted in a simple but powerful belief: voters deserve journalism that puts them first. The Fulcrum, IVN, and LNN will work together to expand coverage that informs rather than inflames, empowers rather than divides, and strengthens the civic fabric that binds communities across the country.
While en route to surrender his Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee rode past Appomattox Courthouse in rural Virginia.
In previous essays, I argued that the United States should seriously consider a new governing structure — an “American Union” — in which red and blue America peacefully separate into two sovereign nations while preserving a common military alliance, shared currency, and freedom of movement, with each new nation having its own constitution reflecting its own political consensus.
Simply put, the United States is too politically, culturally, and geographically divided to function effectively under the existing highly centralized, winner-take-all system in which every election determines how more than 330 million people must live.
What is largely unspoken — but in many ways still underlies the country’s long-standing divisions — is that the United States never truly reconciled the conflicts that led to the Civil War.
While the North won militarily, the country settled for legal reunification without genuine cultural or political resolution. More than 160 years after Appomattox, many of America’s deepest divisions still follow the fault lines that led to that bloody conflict.
The result is a politically divided nation in which many in red America feel ruled by distant institutions that neither understand nor respect them, while many in blue America still view the South primarily through the lens of slavery, segregation, and rebellion. Both sides increasingly believe the other threatens the American experiment itself, and our current federal structure gives neither side room to step back.
Every presidential election feels existential. Every Supreme Court decision feels apocalyptic. Every cultural disagreement becomes a national political war.
Somewhat counterintuitively, an American Union could finally allow the United States to heal from the Civil War itself — by creating conditions of genuine self-government that permit the American people to move beyond it.
Historians widely recognize that the postwar South developed a “Lost Cause” narrative — an interpretation of the Civil War that downplayed slavery, romanticized the Confederacy, and reframed the war primarily as a defense of Southern identity and self-government.
The Lost Cause developed because defeat without reconciliation demanded a soothing story. Rather than helping the South honestly confront slavery, absorb defeat, and recover dignity within a repaired national community, postwar America left white Southerners to build their own mythology.
That mythology transformed military defeat into grievance, recast slavery as secondary, and became deeply embedded in Southern political culture through monuments, education, commemorations, and regional identity.
But while many focus on the moral failures of the Lost Cause narrative, few acknowledge the broader psychological and sociological reality beneath it: societies rarely process total defeat gracefully.
Political research on humiliation narratives suggests that populations experiencing defeat, humiliation, or prolonged cultural subordination may develop myths of grievance, victimhood, and historical resentment.
Germany’s post-World War I “stab-in-the-back” myth is one well-known example. That story turned military defeat into a narrative of betrayal and humiliation, feeding resentment against democratic institutions and political enemies rather than allowing Germans to confront defeat honestly.
The end of slavery was a moral imperative. So was the later destruction of Jim Crow. No serious account of American history can treat human bondage or legally enforced segregation as anything other than profound injustices that had to be ended.
But moral necessity and national healing are not the same thing.
America did what justice required. But it never found a healthy way for the South to confront that history without retreating into grievance — or for the North to move beyond victory, judgment, and disdain.
While Reconstruction imposed a new political order, it did not produce reconciliation. Then, just over a decade later, the federal government largely abandoned Reconstruction, leaving the South to rebuild its identity without anything resembling a genuine national process of truth, accountability, forgiveness, and cultural repair.
The union was preserved legally, but not psychologically or sociologically repaired. The South was defeated, but not reintegrated. Black Americans were emancipated, but soon abandoned to Jim Crow. The result was a nation formally united but emotionally divided — its moral and social growth stunted by a conflict it never learned how to resolve.
Social psychology research suggests that when criticism feels like a threat to group identity, people become more defensive and less open to change. When that threat is reduced, they become more capable of hearing criticism and considering reform.
That matters in a South whose political identity has long been shaped both by slavery and segregation and by a deeply rooted memory of defeat and outside judgment. The result has been tribalism, which has come with a heavy price.
A country perpetually fighting a cold Civil War cannot fully attend to its future. Other advanced democracies have, in many cases, outpaced the United States in life expectancy, mathematics performance, and social mobility, while comparative data also show serious challenges in civic trust and democratic confidence in the United States.
The conflict has also trapped both sides in mutual caricature. The South too often sees the North as arrogant, secular, elitist, and contemptuous of tradition. The North too often sees the South as ignorant, intolerant, and trapped in the past.
In many respects, American politicians in both parties avoid confronting this uncomfortable reality. In his famous 2008 election night victory speech, Barack Obama declared: “We remain more than a collection of red States and blue States. We are and forever will be the United States of America.”
While laudable and well-intentioned, that aspiration is no substitute for reality. When politicians insist Americans are one united people while citizens experience contempt, distrust, and cultural hostility all around them, the result is not unity. It is disillusionment.
The first step toward genuine reconciliation is honesty: honesty about the scale of America’s cultural divide, honesty about the lingering psychological legacy of the Civil War, and honesty that forcing increasingly incompatible political cultures into a single centralized system does not heal division — it perpetuates it.
Real healing requires something harder than rhetoric or national mythology. It requires building a political structure that allows Americans with profoundly different identities, histories, and moral visions to coexist peacefully and develop in a healthy manner without feeling compelled to dominate one another.
Under an American Union framework, red and blue America would remain joined by free trade, freedom of movement, shared currency, and mutual defense, while pursuing different political and cultural futures without trying to govern one another through a single federal system.
The South’s own evolution could accelerate because it would no longer unfold under the shadow of Northern disdain. When cultural change feels like capitulation to people who hold you in contempt, communities often resist reforms they might otherwise embrace. But when change arises from within — from local pride, local leadership, and local democratic choice — it can become a source of dignity rather than humiliation.
Blue America, too, might change once relieved of the perceived need to police, defeat, or morally manage the South. Permanent conflict has distorted blue America as well. It has encouraged many progressives to see conservatism not as a competing democratic tradition, but as a pathology to be corrected.
Freed from the fear that red America might impose its values nationally, blue America could become less punitive, less absolutist, and less vulnerable to its own fringe progressive excesses — including rigid identity politics, speech policing, moral conformity, and the tendency to treat disagreement as harm.
It could also become more open to forms of wisdom it too often dismisses: faith, family, local attachment, patriotism, religion, military service, and skepticism of concentrated power.
Some critics will argue that allowing red America to govern itself would simply unleash the worst instincts of the old South. That fear greatly underestimates how much the South and broader red America have changed.
The modern South is not the South of Bull Connor or George Wallace. Interracial marriage, once illegal across much of the South, is now part of ordinary American life. In 2010, Pew found that 14 percent of new marriages in the South were interracial or interethnic — slightly above the Northeast and Midwest.
The South also remains the fastest-growing region in the country, adding more people than all other regions combined from 2023 to 2024. And minority leadership is increasingly visible: Raphael Warnock and Tim Scott, both African Americans, represent Georgia and South Carolina, respectively, in the U.S. Senate. Ted Cruz — the son of a Cuban immigrant — represents Texas. Jon Ossoff is Georgia’s first Jewish member of the U.S. Senate, and North Carolina recently elected Gov. Josh Stein as its first Jewish chief executive.
Red America is a complex, changing, multiracial society in which minorities increasingly exercise political, economic, and civic leadership.
The current structure of American politics also tends to amplify fringe voices. In an intensely polarized winner-take-all national system, highly engaged and ideologically intense voters can gain disproportionate influence, especially through party primaries. That dynamic empowers ideological absolutists, racial demagogues, conspiracy theorists, and grievance-driven movements that would likely remain marginal in a healthier political environment.
Research on U.S. polarization has found that political fear, anger, dehumanizing rhetoric, and threat perceptions can normalize hostility and increase the risk of political violence. Yet America too often treats its loudest factions as though they represent entire populations. They do not. Most Americans reject political violence, value democratic government, and reject explicitly white supremacist or neo-Nazi views.
In that sense, peaceful separation would likely strengthen moderation and stability — not by eliminating disagreement, but by lowering the stakes that give fringe voices outsized influence far beyond their numbers.
History offers a useful analogy. France and Germany spent many generations in rivalry, war, occupation, and mutual suspicion. Over time, economic integration, mutual respect, self-government, and shared institutions helped turn former enemies into close partners at the core of the European Union.
Military victory alone rarely produces lasting reconciliation. Genuine reconciliation becomes possible only when alienated populations recover dignity, self-government, and a future that no longer depends on permanent cultural defiance.
In an American Union, red America would no longer need to organize itself around resistance to blue America, and blue America might very well finally see the South more clearly — recognizing its complexity, evolution, and capacity for growth. That could create something America has not achieved since the Civil War: genuine mutual moral curiosity.
Perhaps the deeper lesson of the last 160 years is that forcing two increasingly incompatible political cultures into a single centralized national system has prolonged the very conflict the Civil War was supposed to resolve.
And perhaps the next stage of American history is two American nations learning, finally, how to coexist peacefully within a common Union — and perhaps, with less fear and less resentment, gradually truly discovering one another.
The Civil War Never Really Ended, But an American Union Could Finally Help America Truly Heal was originally published by The Western Journal and is republished with permission.
