Rebeca Ibarra | Vox

What RFK Jr. gets wrong — and right — according to a public health expert

2025-09-10T19:19:55-04:00

US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made challenging the public health establishment the center of his agenda. | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is at war with the nation’s public health establishment. He’s overseen mass layoffs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; canceled $500 million in federal funding for mRNA vaccine development; and promised to end the bias against “alternative medicine.”

The country’s leading scientists and physicians have started pushing back against the Trump administration’s agenda, with some physician groups releasing their own Covid vaccine recommendations after Kennedy unilaterally changed the federal guidance this summer. Doctors say they’re looking to protect the most vulnerable as the government turns against the long-standing public health consensus.

“I think we all actually have a duty to try to improve the country no matter who’s in power,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist and a medical ethicist who works at the University of Pennsylvania.

Emanuel was a senior health care adviser in the Obama administration and informally counseled President Donald Trump’s first administration on prescription drug prices and the early Covid-19 response. He said public health does need to be bipartisan — but Kennedy’s agenda risks further dividing Americans. The health crises facing Americans are real, and we need real solutions — but Kennedy is not proposing them.

Below is an excerpt of Emanuel’s conversation with Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram, edited for length and clarity. Listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

When you heard that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would be in charge of the US health department, what were your thoughts?

I do not think he’s qualified in any shape or form. He has been against vaccines, and that is very bad. Vaccines are probably the single biggest benefit to people in the 20th century in terms of total lives saved from 1974 to today. Those are huge achievements, and now, we’re trying to roll them back.

The thing about Kennedy that I actually supported is his emphasis on nutrition, his emphasis on chronic diseases, and trying to address them. The problem is, so far, the big success we’ve gotten is removing dyes. That’s not going to really save any lives.

We need to address the whole food chain and nutrition subsidies that we have in this country — whether it’s SNAP [food stamps] or the food subsidies to corn, soybeans, and wheat that help us get more cheap ultra-processed foods in the food system — and those haven’t been addressed. If you really want to address chronic disease in America, that is a critical step.

And yet, I don’t see him really leaning into it. Yes, it’s a challenge, but it’s really important.

Last week, at a Senate hearing, Kennedy defended his shakeup at the CDC by saying, “We are the sickest country in the world. That’s why we have to fire people at the CDC. They did not do their job. This was their job to keep us healthy.” Are we the sickest country in the world?

Well, I wouldn’t say the sickest country in the world. But, in terms of high income countries, we aren’t doing that well. We’ve fallen off the growth curve, as they say, in terms of the increase in life expectancy and the decrease in the number of disability-adjusted life years. Our health span is actually getting shorter, and that’s been happening since roughly 1980.

There are lots of hypotheses about that; I’ll give you two that I think are really important. Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz really leaned into the production of industrial commodity crops — with heavy subsidies for corn, soybean, rice, wheat — that made the components of ultra-processed foods cheap. It really promoted big industrial farms. He often said, “Get big or get out of farming.” So, that was one element. The other element was Ronald Reagan taking over and the resulting cutbacks in the social safety net: housing, food stamps, and other programs.

That combination — spending more to get cheaper components for ultra-processed foods and reducing the social safety net — are probably two of the biggest components of the obesity epidemic we’ve had, which has really fueled chronic diseases. You see this in the increase in diabetes, the increase in lots of illnesses. I think if we really want to get a health care system, we have to focus on those two elements.

Do you think there are areas for improvement at the CDC?

Yes, I do think we can improve the CDC. But, let’s be honest: If you’re going to improve the CDC, the first place to start is not cutting its workforce, cutting its budget by billions of dollars. We’re eliminating programs like the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, the National Center for Environmental Health, our ability to forecast and monitor adverse health outcomes, the Public Health Preparedness and Response Center, the Global Health Center. The idea that we need to cut in order to actually improve, I think, is false.

What do you think the effects are thus far of RFK’s actions at the CDC and in public health more broadly?

Here’s the thing about public health: You invest today for the benefits tomorrow. So, it will take a while to actually see the effects. But we’re already seeing real harms in several ways. The first way is clearly the measles outbreak in Texas — two kids dead, lots of hospitalizations. It’s not just Texas now; it’s spread across parts of the country. You’re getting increasing vaccine skepticism in parents who are uncertain, who don’t study the issue, who just are trying to go about their lives and can’t really study these various issues.

When you get fewer and fewer people vaccinated, you are going to get disease outbreaks — whether today, tomorrow, or in a long time, we can’t exactly predict.

I also think if chronic disease is our big problem, which RFK Jr. clearly agrees with, cutting back on our chronic disease programs, our prevention programs, our response programs, our health promotion programs — that’s not a good idea. Maybe we need to do them differently, but cutting is certainly not in the cards for all those chronic diseases. If you want to control health care costs, you’ve got to address chronic disease better. Cutting back the CDC’s role is not better.

My colleague, Dylan Scott, reported on RFK Jr. and the Trump administration burying a study about alcohol’s links to cancer, and there’s no clear explanation for why they’d not want this information to be in the hands of the public. Where do you think people, everyday Americans, should be turning to for health information if they feel like they can’t trust the government anymore?

The problem with undermining the CDC is you undermine the single source of information where the goal is public health. Now, it’s going to put more burden on people to get their information from a variety of sources. On vaccines, maybe my good friend Michael Osterholm’s Vaccine Integrity Project, if you want to look it up online. In other areas like alcohol, you’ll have to look at the old Surgeon General’s report and try to get a copy of that. That reported on alcohol’s problems, especially related to cancer, but not exclusively. Alcohol is a global issue, so there are a lot of global resources available, whether England or Australia or the Cochrane Collaborative.

But that requires a lot more effort, and that’s one of the problems. Everyone’s short on time. Spending a lot of time running around and looking for individual programs rather than being able to go to one site and readily access an objective answer is a major, major problem.

I think that is part of the plan for this administration: make it very difficult to get this kind of information.

And it’s working.

Unfortunately.

The paradox of Trump’s deportation push

2025-09-05T11:30:49-04:00

Kilmar Abrego Garcia enters a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office on August 25, 2025, in Baltimore, Maryland. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

President Donald Trump has vowed to deport 1 million undocumented immigrants out of the United States every year. So far, he’s falling well short of that goal, with estimates in the neighborhood of 200,000 as of August.

Still, the Trump administration carries on with its deportation campaign. Driven by publicly anti-immigrant officials like Stephen Miller, the White House has ramped up funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to record levels, deployed masked agents across cities and towns tasked with fulfilling arrest quotas, and is pursuing new deals with countries like South Sudan for so-called third-country deportations.

The unwitting face of Trump’s crackdown has become Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father and Salvadoran citizen who was mistakenly deported to a megaprison in El Salvador in March. Abrego Garcia is back in the country and is now fighting off federal smuggling charges on top of a deportation order to Uganda. The chaotic case against Abrego Garcia and the Trump administration’s tactics are becoming emblematic of a larger war on immigrants that could lead to a smaller, poorer United States.

According to Derek Thompson, writer, podcaster, and co-author of Abundance, this crackdown could contribute to a “massive” change in the US population and economy. And Trump’s “unjust” tactics could backfire in the next elections.

Below is an excerpt of Thompson’s conversation with Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

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Derek, you recently wrote on your Substack that the United States is at the precipice of a “historic, if dubious, achievement,” which of course sounds quite ominous. Tell us what that achievement is.

Well, for the entirety of American history, the US has only known population growth. The US grew through the Civil War, we grew through the Spanish Flu. We grew through both World Wars, we grew through Covid, even despite the deaths of a million people. But President Donald Trump is on the precipice of a truly historic and, as you said, dubious achievement in 2025.

It is absolutely possible that the US population shrinks for the first time on record. And the math here is straightforward. There’s only two ways for a population to grow. There’s something called natural increase, which is births minus deaths, and there’s net immigration, which is migrants who arrive minus migrants who leave.

Last year, births outnumbered deaths by about 500,000 people. And that means that if net immigration declines by more than 500,000, the US could shrink for the first time in history. And several demographers are forecasting that net immigration could be negative 500,000 or in excess of that. And that would mean that the US would, for the first time ever, be a shrinking nation.

Is the reason that this isn’t above-the-fold breaking news because we don’t actually know if this is for sure going to happen?

Yeah. We don’t know if this is going to happen. I spoke to William Frey, who’s a really renowned demographer and a senior fellow at Brookings Institution, and I said, “Do you think it’s possible the US shrinks this year?” And he said, “It’s certainly possible. My bet at the beginning of 2025 was that growth would be positive but very slow. But, it’s certainly possible that the population could shrink this year.”

So, one possibility is that I’m wrong, and the US doesn’t shrink this year. I do think population growth will be very low. But I think most simply the reason why we aren’t talking about this is that I don’t think enough people have put together the basic math here. Number one, natural increase, births minus deaths, is very low. US fertility is low. I write a lot about that. And number two, net immigration is low because of all these deportations and all the migrants that the Trump administration is scaring away from even trying to enter the US in the first place.

You think a lot about shrinking birth rates. How does something like the story of Kilmar Abrego Garcia tie into what might be happening right now with the country’s population?

Well, immigration politics clearly has swung in a pendulum over the last few years. Donald Trump’s first term had some very cruel policies. And then, Joe Biden responded to those cruel policies by liberalizing immigration and liberalizing asylum law. And that created some years of the highest immigration in American history. I think in 2023 and 2024, we had an excess of 2.3 to 2.5 million immigrants coming into the US. That’s extraordinary. And there was a backlash against that migrant surge. And that backlash is partly responsible for Trump being the president now. Trump has swung the pendulum all the way back to not only shutting down the border, but also to these extra legal deportations. These — in many cases illegal — deportations scare migrants from coming over in the first place, sending ICE into all these cities and rounding up people that they think don’t look like Americans.

But what’s really historic is that the fertility rate is low enough that, without consistent immigration, the US is going to shrink very, very soon. Most demographers thought the US wasn’t going to shrink until the 2070s or 2080s. Donald Trump’s immigration policies might pull forward that moment of American shrinkage by 60 years.

And you wrote on your Substack about how this is going to affect three essential sectors of American life: food, housing, health care. Please, indulge us.

Well, little in life is more fundamental than the right to food, shelter, and medicine. So, it’s pretty important that immigrants play a disproportionate role in each. I’m going to start with farming. Two-thirds of agricultural workers are immigrants. In the absence of new migrant arrivals, farms are going to struggle in a number of ways. They can struggle to find replacements, and then wages go up for people working in agriculture. That can be really good for folks working in agriculture, but it means higher prices for people who are buying produce, milk, or meat at the grocery store. And we’re already dealing with years of higher inflation.

“Many Americans clearly did not like the era of record-high mass immigration under Joe Biden, but I think they might hate the era of record deportations even more.”

Housing: Immigrants account for about 50 percent to 60 percent of roofers, painters, drywall, installers, and plasterers. We need immigrants to build houses. In fact, if you look across the country, 30 percent to 40 percent of the construction labor force is foreign born. Almost all of the largest housing markets — Florida, Georgia, Texas, Nevada, California, and New York — are incredibly dependent on foreign labor.

So, sometimes I say, “America’s going to shrink this year.” And people say, “Oh, thank god. Everywhere’s too crowded. Immigrants are competing for houses, they’re competing for jobs. This is going to be fantastic for the country.” Well, guess what happens if you don’t have enough people to build houses? You don’t have enough houses. What happens to housing prices? They don’t go down. They go up, because there’s a housing shortage.

And then, finally: health care.

We’re an aging nation. We need more clinicians, and we need more caregivers. And in a world with low immigration, we’re going to have fewer clinicians and fewer caregivers.

This was one of the things that really surprised me most in my reporting: just how immigrant heavy the American medical labor force is. Foreign-born people account for up to 25 percent to 27 percent of America’s physicians and surgeons; one in six people working across the health care sector are foreign-born. And so, if you have an aging country, and you have fewer people to care for them, then once again, you could have higher prices and longer lines at hospitals, and fewer people to be that home health aide for your sick parent, your grandparent, your uncle. Once again, I see major, major problems coming in a world where we have fewer immigrants.

Do you see the Trump administration trying to counter their immigration policies with the effects they may have on the economy with other policies? Are they aware of these pain points?

There are definitely folks in the Trump administration that want an America with fewer people and certainly want an America with fewer nonwhite people. I mean, that’s clear. I’m more interested in how Donald Trump will use immigration policy as a weapon.

One of the things I’m most interested in is Donald Trump’s sort of theory of economic power. As far as I can tell, he has a three-step formula for everything that he does. Step one: Create pain. Step two: Offer to remove pain. Step three: Demand tribute. How can you use immigration policy in this way? Well, immigration policy that’s restrictive is painful for cities, and states, and companies, and industries that rely on immigrants.

I think he’s going to ask certain cities, and states, and chief executives to pay him tribute in some kind of way in exchange for a guest worker program that he specifically targets for whoever just bent the knee. So, you can imagine some hospital or city that’s struggling with population growth in 2026 or 2027 going to Donald Trump and saying, “Can you please change your immigration policy?” And maybe he’ll change immigration policy — only if they offer him something in return. The politics of American stagnation could be quite interesting.

Do you think, if this goes badly in the coming years, if people attribute a negative economic circumstance to these policies, that we could have another shift and reverse some of what’s happened in the past six months?

I absolutely do. Many Americans clearly did not like the era of record-high mass immigration under Joe Biden, but I think they might hate the era of record deportations even more. It’s hard to really take the temperature of the median voter when it comes to immigration policy. But if I had to do my best, I would say that the median American voter wants positive immigration that feels orderly.

The jobs report is a big deal. Trump’s response is an even bigger one.

2025-08-07T09:02:19-04:00

President Donald Trump told officials to fire Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, hours after a report showed US job growth cooled sharply over the last three months. | Aaron Schwartz/CNP/Bloomberg via Getty Images

On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a jobs report that upended the narrative pundits, journalists, government officials, and the White House had been repeating for months: The economy is doing just fine.

The numbers showed that the US economy added a modest 73,000 jobs in July, several thousand under what economists had forecasted. But the real surprise came in the revisions to data from May and June, which found the country added 258,000 fewer jobs than initially reported.

President Donald Trump was outraged by the revisions, calling the data “a scam.” And he directed his anger towards BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer.

“We need accurate Jobs Numbers,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes.”

But Trump wasn’t the only one who appeared to be stunned by the latest jobs report.

Kimberly Adams, senior Washington correspondent for Marketplace and the host of the Marketplace podcast Make Me Smart, told Vox that everyone in her business is getting whiplash.

“We were doing all of these stories about why is the economy so resilient? Why isn’t anybody reacting to tariffs?” Adams said. “And then this week we’re all talking about, my gosh, are we heading into stagflation and recession?”

Adams explained that the reason it seems like experts got it wrong is because a lot of the economic data in the United States relies on lagging indicators like the unemployment rate.

Below is an excerpt of Adams’s conversation with Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Why did the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics make up the statistics?

The head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not make up the labor statistics. It’s literally shooting the messenger. The president of the United States was complaining on Truth Social and elsewhere that the reason for firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics has to do with the number and the scale of revisions.

The jobs numbers came in lower than expected last week, and they indicate that there’s not the same kind of robust labor market that we thought we’d had over the last couple of months. But what drew even more attention were the revisions to the numbers from previous months. And they were pretty drastic revisions that shocked a lot of people.

These revisions tell us that the labor market we thought we had the last few months — that seemed to be pretty resilient against the tariffs and other changes President Trump and his administration were making in the economy — it wasn’t actually as resilient as we thought.

I should say: Labor market numbers get revised all the time. GDP numbers get revised all the time to pick whatever economic indicator you want. But these revisions in particular were, a) really large, and b) just fundamentally changed the story of what the labor market looked like over the last couple of months.

So not only did the numbers tell us that there was less hiring than we thought there was, it also told us that the labor market itself shrank, that there was a lower labor force participation rate. A lot of people are blaming that on the crackdown on immigration. The report also told us that if it weren’t for job growth in the tariff-resilient health care sector, we would have had almost no job growth at all.

But now that Donald Trump has fired the commissioner in charge of these job report numbers, the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it’ll all be okay again by the next jobs report in September? We all win?

I imagine that may be what the president wants to believe, that the numbers will be a bit more appealing. Almost all of the economists I talk to say that there’s no reason whatsoever to believe that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is manipulating the numbers or that the numbers are rigged, as the president said.

There’s been a huge backlash to this firing from the community of people that follow this stuff very closely. And putting in someone who might be a little bit more amenable to the president’s narrative around economic data has the potential to undermine economic data in the United States and make it less trustworthy — both for businesses here in the US, as well as in the global economy.

And why does that matter? I mean, for people who don’t pay attention to these numbers, why does trustworthy data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics matter to this country and to the world?

Because lots of different businesses and countries and even individuals use this data to make decisions about how they’re going to manage their money, how they’re going to manage their businesses, and how they’re going to plan for the future.

So, for example, if you know that the unemployment rate is 4.2 percent, which is what the numbers came in at last week, you can say that’s a pretty low unemployment rate. And that means that most of the people out there who want jobs have jobs. And if we’re going to hire, we’re going to need to position ourselves well in the market to compete with the relatively few workers who are out there looking for a job.

This gets into one of the main reasons that this is on the agenda for a lot of folks, which is the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve has two mandates: full employment and stable prices. Full employment basically means as near as you can get to it, low unemployment rates. Stable prices equates to a more or less 2 percent inflation rate. We are still trending a little bit above 2 percent inflation, but when the Fed met last week, which was before these jobs numbers came out, the unemployment situation looked pretty good. So they didn’t have much of an incentive to do anything about interest rates, because inflation was still running a bit high. Unemployment looked fine, so no big deal. So let’s leave interest rates until inflation cools down a bit more.

If the Fed had the information on Wednesday that they ended up getting on Friday, would that have changed their decision? Maybe.

The last time you were on this show, you were here to talk about the Fed. It has sounded for weeks now like Trump has been itching to fire Jerome Powell, the head of the Fed.

Who he hired!

Who he hired, thank you. He didn’t end up firing Powell, but then he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Are the economists you’re talking to afraid that this might not be the end of Trump getting rid of people who seem to disagree with his imaginary vision of what the numbers should be?

You’re absolutely right. This is definitely creating an environment where folks are worried that even if people at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (or any other federal statistical agencies) are still putting their heads down, doing the work, and churning out the data without fear or favor — if they release a report that the president doesn’t like, they might lose their job.

Even if they still do the work, other people and other entities might look at it and say, well, can it really be true?

Look at a country like China, which releases economic data about the performance of its economy all the time. And you’ll always hear folks say, take it with a grain of salt because the Chinese Communist Party likes to mess with the numbers. That means lots of folks have to jump through all of these additional hoops to try to figure out what’s actually going on in the Chinese economy.

China is one of the biggest economies in the world. What happens if we end up in the same boat?

Superman is a socialist

2025-07-21T13:44:31-04:00

People cross the street near billboards advertising the new Superman film in Times Square on July 9, 2025. in New York City. | Craig T. Fruchtman/Getty Images

In a recent interview with The Times, Superman director James Gunn said that his new blockbuster tells the story of “an immigrant.” He also explained it was a story about “basic human kindness.” But that first comment — about Superman’s foreign origins — is the one that set off some pundits on the right.

Fox News commentator Jesse Watters joked on air: “You know what it says on his cape? MS-13.” Ben Shapiro blasted Gunn and the Hollywood left for being out of touch with everyday American audiences: “The reality [is] that Hollywood is so far to the left that they cannot take a core piece of Americana and just say it’s about America.”

But, Grant Morrison — author of the seminal comic book series All-Star Superman — said the conservative backlash ignores the leftist origins of the world’s most famous superhero.

Not only was Superman created by the sons of Jewish immigrants, but those very first comics portrayed their character as a “socialist figure.”

In one comic published in 1939, Superman is seen shielding young thieves from police because he figured the kids were victims of poverty, then tearing down slums and forcing authorities to build low-rent housing. Before becoming the “Man of Steel,” Superman was “The Champion of the Oppressed.”

Gunn has said that All-Star Superman was a big influence on his new film. Morrison sat down with Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram to talk about where Superman came from, how the character has evolved, and why he will endure.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

How did you get into Superman? What did this character mean to you?

I grew up on the west coast of Scotland next to an American naval and nuclear base. My parents were anti-nuclear activists. My father was a World War II soldier who became a peacenik. So, my big fear in the world was the atom bomb, and I associated it with the Americans, but the Americans also brought the comics.

Then I discovered Superman. And although I knew no real Superman was coming to save me from an actual atom bomb, metaphorically he really solved a lot of problems for my head when I was a little kid.

Those are the primal roots for me, and they’re quite deep. So yeah, getting a chance to do that character, sitting here overlooking that same stretch of water where we did the protests…to write All-Star Superman kind of defies the forces of entropy. If anything survives in my career, it will be that one book.

Who was the Superman that you created in that series?

We went for an older Superman. The basic idea was: What if Superman was dying and he had a year to live? Basically, it’s a part of Lex Luthor’s scheme to send Superman to the sun, and the solar radiation overcharges Superman’s cells, so they begin to decay and die. Basically, Superman’s dying of cancer. What would this man do in the last 12 months of his life to leave the Earth a better place than he found it?

Were you surprised to find out that James Gunn wanted to relaunch this character and relaunch an entire cinematic universe with your story about a dying Superman?

James didn’t necessarily take the dying part. His is a younger Superman. But I think he certainly took the character as we decided to define it, and he saw something that he could work with. Instead of Superman having flaws, let’s present a fictional character who doesn’t have flaws. You know, he has problems of his own. He still can’t get the girl. He still works for a boss in an office, but he’s Superman. He’s a kind of everyman whose life happens at a much higher scale. He’s got an unruly dog, but his unruly dog can laser his own dinner and cook a steak. His unruly dog can fly through buildings, but he’s still dealing with an unruly dog.

In previous attempts people have asked: What would Superman be like if he was in the real world? Which to me is an absurd question. The only existence Superman has in the real world is as a comic book or movie character, and that’s where he is most useful and most functional, as far as I’m concerned. He’s a metaphor. He is an allegory. He stands for everything that is good in us.

It sounds like there have been at least some iterations of this character throughout his near-century of existence — from your dying version to this ideal version, to this all-powerful version. But I believe Superman even started as a bit of a tough guy, a headbasher, and maybe even a left-wing revolutionary. Can you tell us about the non-Kryptonian origins of this character, and how he came to be on Earth?

Well, he arrived in Cleveland, Ohio. He was created by two teenagers, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who’d met at school. Jerry was the writer and Joe was the artist. They wanted to work for newspapers. Newspaper syndication was the place to go for cartoons back then. They were working on this notion called “The Superman.” The original version was an evil bald guy who eventually became Lex Luthor in the Superman story. But after a few tries, they hit on this fabulous notion of: Let’s give him a wrestling costume with a cape so that we can track his movement across the panels, and make him very colorful so that he’s memorable.

The greatest addition to the design was to put his monogram on his chest so that the character’s entire identity was summed up in this very simple advertising motif that people can remember and people can also wear and partake in being Superman. It was created by two young kids who were the sons of immigrants — European immigrants, Jewish boys — and this was their vision.

Superman was a do-gooder. He was here to help people. He’d come from a distant world, but thought the only use for power and strength was to help the downtrodden and the oppressed. Early issues of Action Comics depict a Superman who’s very much an outlaw. He goes after corrupt union bosses. He goes after mine owners. He goes after politicians who are corrupt.

Superman later was seen as a messianic figure of hope, which I don’t really like, because I think he’s a fighter, he’s a scrapper. He gets into fights on behalf of the little guy. He gets bloodied up and he gets up again. You shoot him [with] a tank shell, and he gets up again.

Through the years, that changed quite radically. The socialist figure of the early years hit 1942 and suddenly it was war, and Superman became incredibly patriotic, and that’s where the “Truth, justice, and the American way” thing first appears.

Then, in the 1950s, Superman changes again completely. You’re dealing with guys coming home from the war, domestication, and living in suburbia. So Superman becomes a family drama, but on a titanic scale. He has friends from the future who visit and cause trouble. He has a cousin who survived the destruction of Krypton, he has a dog, and he has a monkey. So Superman then, to me, was probably at his peak, but he was representative of post-war masculinity trying to adjust to a world of relatives and not being married. Those stories were obsessed with the relationship with Lois [Lane].

In the 1960s, he becomes a cosmic seeker. He almost goes back to his roots, and we have stories where he is fighting for Native American land rights, he’s up against polluters, and very much back to the activist Superman. And so it goes. In the 1980s, he’s a yuppie. In the 1990s, they kill him in order to make it interesting, then bring it back as a soap opera set around the fictional newspaper, the Daily Planet. And into the 2000s, you get the work that I did.

It’s funny to hear you lay out this history in which Superman at one point is something of a socialist warrior, because all of these pundits who are mad about James Gunn saying that Superman’s an immigrant, if they really knew the history here, there’s so much more they could be mad about.

Absolutely. As you say, if anyone had bothered to look at the history of Superman, they’d see that he was always an immigrant created by immigrants. He represented that experience, but he was assimilated. I mean, he was an American. He’d been raised by American parents. So that was very important as well. And I think the combination of these two qualities is what maybe drives people mad, because they want it to be either one thing or another, but Superman’s trying to embody everyone.

It’s funny, a thing that we talk about the first half of the show is that depending on how tuned into the news you are, you can see a lot of what’s going on in the world today in this movie. But of course, this movie wasn’t made this week. It was made a year ago.

Yeah.

The meetings about this movie probably started five years ago. Do you think there’s something about the nature of Superman that makes him timeless?

I definitely believe that. I mean, we are talking about the history of Superman, which goes back to 1938. Superman has outlived his creators. He’s also outlived the people who took over from his creators, and the next generation of the people who took over from his creators.

Superman is more real than I am. He’s more real than most of us. He will outlive us all, and he’ll still have meaning to people in the future. People have even forgotten that his look was based on early 20th-century circus strongmen and wrestling outfits. So now it’s the template for the ideal superhero. And because he was the first, he’s got the best name, the most primal name. I absolutely think Superman will persist beyond even the next few generations. As long as the world stays together and there’s such a thing as culture, I think there’ll still be a Superman.

What it would take to escape the two-party system

2025-07-23T09:33:36-04:00

Elon Musk looks on during a news conference with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on May 30, 2025. | Allison Robbert/AFP via Getty Images

Earlier this month, Elon Musk said he wanted to form a new political party. He’d been teasing the idea ever since clashing with President Donald Trump over his “big, beautiful bill,” which Musk accused of exploding the deficit. In June, Musk ran a poll on X asking users whether it was “time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?” More than 5 million people responded, and 80 percent voted yes. Then, on July 5, Musk announced he was forming the American Party in hopes of giving voters their “back [their] freedom.”

Those who follow Musk closely, like Bloomberg Businessweek national correspondent Joshua Green, have said Musk’s latest project is in line with his pursuit of political power and attention.

“I think he thought he’d essentially bought that by backing Donald Trump to the tune of $300 million in the last election,” Green said previously on Today, Explained. “And Trump turned on him, ousted him, took away his EV tax credits, didn’t cut the deficit, trashed him on social media. And now I think Elon is humiliated and looking for a way to respond and hit back.”

Trump has called Musk’s third-party proposal “ridiculous.” And the billionaire appeared to have moved from his third obsession by mid-July — at least on X — posting instead about Europe’s fertility rate and running damage control for the antisemitic rants of his AI platform Grok.

But regardless of whether he follows through on the “America Party,” Musk appears to have hit a chord with an American electorate disillusioned by the two-party system.

On Today, Explained, co-host Noel King dove into voters’ desires, the history of third parties, and possible solutions to the two-party stranglehold with Lee Drutman, senior fellow at the New America think tank and author of Breaking the Two Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

You are not a big fan of the two-party system.

You know, I think it’s outlived its usefulness. I think America is a pretty big, diverse country these days, you may have noticed. And to fit everybody into just two parties seems like kind of insanity, and it’s clearly not working. Also, it has divided this country into two teams — the red and the blue team — that have learned to absolutely hate each other. It’s created these artificial divisions around this zero-sum, winner-take-all electoral politics that is just really breaking down the foundations of democracy in this country. So, I think there was a time when it worked reasonably well for certain reasons, but that time is in the past.

You will know that Elon Musk agrees with you. He says he wants to start a third party. He ran one of his polls [on X], and the question was: “Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?” I’m looking at that poll now. Eighty percent of people said yes, 20 percent said no. How does that match up with reality in the US?

Well, there are two parts to that question. One is: How many people want a third party? And then two is: How many people want that party to be somewhere in the middle?

Now, the first part: How many people want a third party? That 80 percent is a little bit high. There might be some selection bias there, but it is close to polls that I’ve seen. Generally, about 60 to 70 percent of Americans say there ought to be more than two parties when polled. So, overwhelmingly, Americans say they want more than two parties.

Now, is the party that they want a party in the center? That’s less clear. I think people’s perception of the political center depends on themselves. [Most] people think that they’re more reasonable and they’re more moderate. But in reality, when you look at the viewpoints of the American electorate, as I’ve done repeatedly, you see that the support for a genuine center party is limited to maybe 10 to 15 percent. But there is a lot of interest in parties that are maybe not as traditional.

Third-party candidates do run for office all the time in the United States, they very rarely win. If so many voters want more options, why don’t we have more people in elected office from third parties?

Here you’re hitting on the core problem, which is that we have a single-winner system of elections. So in a single-winner election, third parties become spoilers and wasted votes, because one of the two major parties is going to win every election. So, voting for a third party is just basically a protest vote, or maybe it could spoil the election. And as a result, most people don’t want to do that because they think, well, I want to vote for somebody who at least has a chance of winning. And, more importantly, people who have ambition in politics say, well, I’m not going to waste my time with one of these fringe parties. I want to actually win. So you get minor parties that are mostly cranks and weirdos and people say, well, I’d like to vote for another party, but not that third party.

What’s the recent history of third-party candidates? Serious third-party candidates at a national level? I have a vague memory of Ross Perot, but I couldn’t give you many details. It was the nineties. How serious have third-party candidates been over time?

Well, Ross Perot is the most recent third-party candidate to actually get a pretty decent share of the electorate. He got almost 20 percent of the electorate, although he didn’t win a single state. A lot of people remember Ralph Nader in 2000, who only got about 3 percent of the vote, but it was a very well placed 3 percent because his votes were more than the difference between Bush and Gore in Florida and a few other states.

Before that, you had George Wallace running in 1968 on the American Independent Party as sort of a “preserve segregation” platform. And then 1912, you have Teddy Roosevelt running as a Bull Moose third-party candidate. [He] was the most successful third-party candidate. Of course, he had already been president. So you’ve periodically had third-party challenges at a presidential level. At a House and Senate level, you have a few people who run as independents. But people tend to go right for the presidency because that creates a level of visibility if you’re trying to build a party.

If one thinks that the two-party system is a problem, let’s talk about solutions. You advocate for something called proportional representation. Explain what that is and why you think it might be a solution here.

Well, proportional representation is the most common system of voting, and it basically, at its simplest level, it means that parties get shares of seats in proportion to what percent of the vote they get. So if a party gets 30 percent of the vote, it gets 30 percent of the seats in the legislature. If it gets 10 percent, it gets 10 percent. Now, there are varieties of proportional representation that we could spend an hour going in the weeds.

Tell me the one you like the best. What would work in the US?

What I think would work in the US is probably the most commonly used version, which is called open list proportional representation with multi-member districts — which is this idea that rather than having a single district with a single representative, you have a single district with five representatives. The district is larger, and then the parties put forward lists of candidates. You choose the candidate from the party that you like, all the votes for each party get tallied up, and then the seats get allocated in proportion. So if a party gets 40 percent of the votes in that five member district, its top two candidates go to represent the district. If a party gets 20 percent, its top candidate [goes]. So, in theory, you could have five parties representing the same district.

“We’ve never had this level of dissatisfaction with the two-party system as far back as we’ve seen polling.”

We talk a lot about gerrymandering as a huge problem, and it is. But [if] you move to five member proportional districts, gerrymandering becomes irrelevant. It doesn’t matter because votes are going to be allocated proportionally no matter what. So, everybody gets to cast a meaningful vote because every seat matters. Every seat is competitive. Every vote matters. Electoral reform is the most powerful tool we have.

So, at the end of the day, has Elon Musk done something admirable here [by] making this a topic of conversation in a kind of real way?

Yeah. So, I think by raising the issue of the need for a third party, it certainly opens up a conversation about what it would take. I’m not sure Elon’s approach is going to be successful. On the other hand, if he’s strategic and wants to spoil a few races that will determine control of the House and the Senate by running a spoiler candidate, then, historically, that’s actually what has led to a wider conversation about electoral reform. And that’s one of the reasons that a lot of countries moved to electoral reform.

We’ve never had this level of dissatisfaction with the two-party system as far back as we’ve seen polling. So, there is a real understanding that what we’re doing in our electoral system is just not working.