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There are few bright spots in the landscape of American inequality. Wages remain stagnant, the racial wealth gap persists, and student loan debt hit a cumulative $1.5 trillion this year. But food insecurity has been on a steady decline. A new USDA report, published on Wednesday, revealed a statistically significant drop last year in rates of both food insecurity and very low food security. “An estimated 11.8 percent of U.S. households were food insecure in 2017, down from 2016 and continuing a decline from a high of 14.9 percent in 2011, while still above the pre-recession (2007) level of 11.1 percent,” researchers wrote. Food insecurity outside metropolitan locations declined sharply, and food insecurity among children remained relatively static, hovering around 8 percent of households with children.

Experts typically associate rates of food insecurity, which the USDA defines as reports of “reduced quality, variety or desirability of diet,” and very low food security, which indicates reduced and disrupted food intake, as markers of economic inequality. On its own, declining food insecurity doesn’t necessarily indicate progress in addressing inequality overall, but it’s a positive sign—for now.

Congress could soon reverse this slow progress. House and Senate officials begin meeting this week to reconcile two different versions of the farm bill, which gets renewed every five years or so. If the compromise bill resembles the version passed by the House, low-income families may find themselves in desperate circumstances. The House farm bill raises the eligibility threshold for households seeking access to the Supplemental Assistance for Needy Families Program—also known as food stamps—and would hike allowable household resources from $2,250 to $7,000 for families without an elderly or disabled member. (The Senate version of the bill omits those hikes.)

Raising eligibility standards in this manner would cut SNAP benefits for two million households, according to an analysis published Thursday by Mathematica Policy Research and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. That’s higher than an earlier estimate by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which found that the bill would cut or reduce assistance for 1 million low-income households. According to Mathematica, 34 percent of the affected households include a senior, 23 percent include children, and 11 percent include a person with a disability.

Mathematica only examined the impact of the House bill’s eligibility hikes. But that isn’t the only way the bill would reduce access to benefits. It also expands work requirements. While the Senate rejected that particular notion of reform in its version of the same legislation, advocates for work requirements find support in other corners. President Donald Trump enthusiastically tweeted on Tuesday that forcing families to work a certain number of hours in order to qualify for food aid would “bolster farmers and get America back to work.”

In fact, work requirements, as the impact of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program shows, amount to welfare cuts. After then-President Bill Clinton signed TANF in 1996, as part of welfare reform, benefits fell steadily over time, leaving low-income families worse off than they had been before TANF came into force; the program requires most adult recipients to work a certain number of hours in order to qualify for assistance. “[Work requirements] end up having a very large number of people who lose benefits and have nothing as a replacement. So our expectation is if we have very large numbers of people subject to those requirements, we will have lots of people who have no resources to put food on the table,” LaDonna Pavetti of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities told Marketplace in April.

Whether Congress cuts SNAP through stricter work requirements, or by raising eligibility standards, or both, the end result likely will be the same. Food insecurity will rise. The conditions are already present. Hunger’s decline is a tenuous one, and for some communities it remains a major problem. As the USDA report showed, food insecurity has yet to drop below pre-recession rates, and both food insecurity and very low food security remain concentrated in black and Hispanic households, mostly in the South. The states of Arizona, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana suffer from the highest rates of food insecurity; at least 17 percent of each state’s population reports having inadequate access to food. According to USDA data from 2015, at least two of those states, Arizona and Arkansas, also had lower rates of SNAP participation than two-thirds of all states.

There’s a correlation here. “SNAP is incredibly effective at reducing food insecurity,” said Melissa Boteach, vice president of the Poverty to Prosperity program at the Center for American Progress. She added, “SNAP keeps millions of people out of poverty. It’s one of the most effective programs in protecting children from experiencing experiencing hunger. We know that it’s associated with better long term health outcomes and education outcomes for kids, and it’s a very important form of support for people.”

Without those programs in place, or with access to those programs suddenly more difficult to obtain, more families will struggle to eat. “Given what we know, which is that SNAP and the school meals program are enormously important for children’s health and education, you would see a rise in food insecurity,” Boteach said.

Outside the United States, the consequences of austerity—a reduction in welfare spending, ostensibly to reduce national debt—have demonstrably resulted in increased food insecurity. In the U.K., a 2015 paper published by The BMJ concluded that welfare cuts increased the likelihood of a food bank opening in a community, and that while higher rates of food bank use can be caused by a number of factors, austerity measures did play a role. “Importantly, when controlling for the association with the capacity of food banks to provide food we still observed that greater central government welfare cuts, sanctioning, and unemployment rates were significantly associated with higher rates of food parcel distribution,” researchers concluded. In April 2018, the Trussel Trust, which privately funds the distribution of food aid to low-income families in the U.K., reported that food bank use had reached a new peak, and that low incomes and decreasing benefits had driven the increase.

Food-insecure households need welfare. While it isn’t necessarily false that work could raise a family’s income and therefore reduce insecurity on a number of fronts, the state of the American economy offers little hope that work can consistently lift families out of poverty. “Food insecurity is a symptom of a larger issue, where we have too many low wage and volatile jobs,” Boteach said. “So you might have somebody who is employed, but their income is unstable, or they get their hours cut, or they’re only making minimum wage. The nature of low wage work in America means that there are a lot of people who are struggling, who still need to turn to nutrition assistance to put food on the table.”

In 1944, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People drew up a list of complaints. The Allied powers had met at Dumbarton Oaks to lay a foundation for the creation of the United Nations. But, in the postwar world that the conference-goers envisioned, the imperial powers would continue to rule over their colonial subjects; the end of the war would not bring freedom for these people. W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the NAACP’s diplomatic liaisons to the conference, pointed out that under these terms “the only way to human equality” would be “through the philanthropy of masters.” He saw in the emergent order the roots of an arbitrary, anti-democratic system of states. Despite the universalist rhetoric of the United Nations’ framers, the great powers would only acknowledge the legitimacy of some peoples, foreclosing that same recognition for others.

In his new book, Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood, Joshua Keating traces that disparity through the decades that followed. The book is a global study of contested nationalisms—institutions whose national status is, for various reasons, in a state of flux. The five cases he focuses on are Abkhazia, a war-wearied separatist area of northeastern Georgia; Akwesasne, a Mohawk territory that sits on both sides of the internationally recognized US-Canada border; Somaliland, a semi-autonomous region of northern Somalia; Iraqi Kurdistan, whose national status is a perennial tetherball of recent Middle Eastern proxy wars; and Kiribati, a sinking island nation in the Pacific Ocean. As well as these five cases together, he includes anecdotes about other aspiring states such as the uninhabited Balkan micronation of Liberland—so named for its dogmatic commitment to libertarian governance—that demonstrate the blurry boundaries of modern nationalism.

A staff writer at Slate, Keating is an established student of the idiosyncratic. His old blog at Foreign Policy was a daily record of the odds and ends of international relations: messy soccer disputes, futuristic technological achievements in middle-income economies, dispatches from global street culture. Invisible Countries extends Keating’s thesis that unusual cases can illuminate the major principles in world politics. In justifying his approach, he explains: “I wanted to go to the rare spots on earth where those rules”—of national recognition and territorial integrity—“don’t apply, where the system breaks down.” What these cases show is the contradictions on which the system is built—how, more than seven decades after the UN Charter’s creation, the philanthropy of the masters is as fickle as ever.

The set of criteria for modern statehood has its origins in the 1930s. Keating begins with the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, which, signed by 19 countries in North, Central, and South America in 1933, describes the four features of a state: a population, a territory, a government, and “capacity to enter into relations with the other states.” Most international legal scholars view this secular, legal definition as a step forward from previous religious, dynastic, or imperial justifications for state rule. In contrast to these previous ideas of statehood, the modern state is now the partial product of a rules-based international consensus. In theory—if not necessarily in practice—this consensus guards against the constant, violent competition for territory and status that preceded the twentieth century’s world wars.

But the apparent simplicity of the Convention’s criteria is deceptive. Population, territory, and government are easy categories to define. By contrast, capacity for relations with other states is something of a tautology: In effect, the internationally recognized fact of statehood makes a state. This means that, in order to gain recognition, an aspiring state must get the collective support of the community of states.

This creates all manner of problems for aspiring nationalists. As Keating demonstrates, the creation and legitimation of nation-states are subject to the ebb and flow of strategic competition between the world’s strongest states. That is, some national movements just find themselves on the wrong side of the United States, Russia, China, or another Great Power with inviolable global authority. The Republic of Abkhazia, for example, can demonstrate a defined population, territorial integrity, and autonomous governance; however, the US government’s support for the Georgian government makes Abkhazian independence a non-starter. Palestine, the Xinjiang region of western China, and Iraqi Kurdistan each count among the close-shave national movements that follow Abkhazia’s “but for the grace of the powerful” example.

The island nation of Kiribati finds itself bound up in global geopolitics in a different way. Kiribati has been a recognized state since it gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1979. Its national status is threatened, however, by the effects of climate change. As sea levels rise, Kiribati—along with other members of the Alliance of Small Island States, a multilateral coalition of low-lying coastal and island countries—is losing its land mass to the sea. In Keating’s book, former Kiribati president Teburoro Tito compares life on the island to “ants making a home on a leaf floating on a pond.” In response, Kiribati diplomats and other ASIS member states at the United Nations are urging a collective solution to global climate change. But these small nations, which stand to lose most from climate change, have had little success in convincing the world’s largest economies—and carbon emitters—to adopt the climate policies and emission standards on which the future of Kiribati depends.

The power imbalance that Du Bois cautioned against is a defining feature of the community of nations. Whether they are striving for international recognition of their borders, or mobilizing international action to preserve them, the less powerful countries find themselves at the mercy of the international community’s most powerful members and their interests.

Why, despite the relative rigidity of the world’s borders, do national movements still seek recognition from powerful states and their international institutions? For one, the romantic promise of the nation-state is resilient. For the citizens of Iraqi Kurdistan, Palestine, and Catalonia, independence—specifically, internationally-recognized independence—represents partial restitution for a perpetual history of mass violence and political marginalization by leaders other than the nation’s own.

National recognition is a way to level a cosmic imbalance that privileges some communities’ collective identities—and suffering—over others. In 1821, Byron wrote “The Isles of Greece,” an impassioned defense of the Greek nation’s independence claims. He decries the brutality of Greece’s oppressors, past and present: “I dream’d that Greece might still be free; / For standing on the Persians’ grave, / I could not deem myself a slave.” Like Byron, today’s nationalists grant the experience of national unity a metaphysical power.

In his chapter on Akwesasne, for example, Keating asks a Mohawk scholar, Taiaiake Alfred, to describe his vision for modern Mohawk nationalism. Alfred explains, “We already are sovereign in a philosophical sense.” The idea of becoming a state would in some ways mean accepting someone’s else definition of legitimacy, sacrificing a “part of who we are.” The system of international politics that sets borders and defines states has long worked to undermine the rights of indigenous communities like Akwesasne. The claims of bigger, more powerful countries over Akwesasne land is simply the latest phase in a history of violent territorial conquest. On the other hand, internationally-recognized status for the Akwesasne would give them a way to reclaim control over their lands, and prevent future encroachments.

Statehood also brings enormous economic advantages. Full members of the international community of states gain access to a system of relatively unfettered global commerce, as well as privileges like reciprocal visa agreements. Without these, the business of globalization could not function smoothly. In unrecognized countries, even simple transactions can quickly become difficult. Political and commercial leaders in Somaliland, which bills itself as an oasis of stability in the Horn of Africa, face a catch-22: Somaliland needs international investment to make independence from Somalia economically viable, but their status as a semiautonomous region makes it difficult to attract that investment. And in Akwesasne, as Keating describes, uncertainty over which regulatory regimes actually govern the economy both constrains commerce and creates incentives for illicit activities, such as cigarette smuggling, which bring few benefits to the broader Akwesasne society. For many, the promise of statehood lies is the possibility of a viable economic future.

But there can also be a cynical side to nationalist aspirations. If the international system of states can often seem more like a club than a community, then premium membership in that club allows a country’s elites to access significant personal, political, and, in many cases, economic and financial benefits. In 2011, the year South Sudan became independent, the country’s government received $435 million from international donors; the following year, that quantity almost tripled. The average South Sudanese citizen sees a negligible quantity of these donor funds; a 2016 report by a Washington-based corruption watchdog demonstrated that, in the half-decade since independence, South Sudan’s factious elites siphoned millions of dollars from the public coffers of the world’s newest country.

Unfortunately, such a disparity in wealth between political elites and citizens is a common feature of new and aspiring states across the world. In Iraqi Kurdistan, anti-government protests have drawn attention to the Kurdish leaders’ distribution of oil revenues to governing patronage networks despite the region’s financial crisis. The rent-seeking of these elites in no way invalidates the moral legitimacy of their movements’ national cause. It does, however, help to explain why nationalist leaders continue to pursue independence despite near-insurmountable political obstacles.

If there is one shortcoming in Keating’s expansive survey, it is that his narrative of modern self-determination gives little voice to the people who have to navigate life in the world’s contested nations. Keating’s interviewees are frequently the most outspoken advocates for his “invisible countries”: nationalist leaders, delegates to international organizations, or prominent movement activists. Yet, within each of communities that Keating discusses, there are groups whose understanding of the would-be nation, its benefits, and its potential shortcomings differs widely.

In Iraqi Kurdistan, for example, members of the Yazidi minority have long struggled to maintain their political and cultural autonomy, as both members of and communities apart from the broader Kurdish nation. For some Yazidis, Kurdish groups such as the peshmerga fighters have been their communities’ first line of defense against violent threats like those the minority group faced from the Islamic State in 2014. Many others in the Yazidi community, however, see little hope for full Yazidi political and cultural rights under an independent Kurdistan. Even as the international aspirations of nationalist movements come into clearer view, Keating could do more to describe the people that new boundaries would exclude, and how.

At its core, Invisible Countries is a book about how the drama of nation-building transforms and is transformed by the politics of the world stage. These disputes touch every aspect of international relations, from interstate conflict to the World Cup. But the drama of what some scholars call “banal nationalism” is no less important to the modern future of nationhood. What and how people eat; how they worship; how they play; whom they love and whom they hate: these, and not the two-thirds vote of the UN General Assembly, are the substance of the modern nation-state. Without these daily expressions of tradition and community, both the would-be and the well-established nations fade into abstraction.

The New Yorker announced this Labor Day that Steve Bannon—the architect of Donald Trump’s ethno-nationalist campaign—would appear as a headline guest at its October festival, to be interviewed by editor David Remnick. Later that day, Remnick rescinded Bannon’s invitation in a memo circulated to staff. Between these announcements a streak of rage burned across Twitter, resulting in the withdrawal of several celebrity guests from the festival.

All this happened in a single day, on the internet, and then it was done. Was this just a flurry of nonsense on a sleepy summer’s holiday, or was this actual lightning hitting the ground? Twitter is a repository for the real opinions of real people, but it is also a virtual space that exists in parallel to reality traditionally conceived. It’s governed by its own strange weather. But in this case the online storm pointed to factors that exist outside the online discourse, including a growing distaste for the media-political bubble in which people like Remnick and Bannon live.

The Twitter outrage centered on the way The New Yorker was elevating Bannon. The director Judd Apatow wrote that the proposed event “normalizes hate.” Remnick represented their arguments well in his memo, writing, “The main argument for not engaging someone like Bannon is that we are giving him a platform and that he will use it, unfiltered, to propel further the ‘ideas’ of white nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism, and illiberalism.”

But an interview does not equal endorsement, he insisted. Bannon has historical significance, since he helped Trump get elected: The New Yorker is “hardly pulling him out of obscurity,” Remnick noted. He compared his proposed interview to Dick Cavett interviewing Lester Maddox and George Wallace, and Oriana Fallaci meeting with Henry Kissinger and Ayatollah Khomeini. Still, he acknowledged that “many of our readers, including some colleagues, have said that the Festival is different, a different kind of forum.” He eventually concluded that a written profile would be a more appropriate treatment for this important, though awful, man.

For his part, Bannon has explained that he accepted the invitation because he “would be facing one of the most fearless journalists of his generation.” He later called Remnick “gutless” for cowing to the “howling online mob.”

However, this framing of the Festival obscures certain stakes at play. First up, the money. Events are a great way for magazines to make money, especially in an era of declining ad sales. Lots of publications hold charity-style benefit dinners and forums where guests bat around “ideas.” An evening with Jack Antonoff at the New Yorker Festival, including a live concert and interview, will set you back $177. A Haruki Murakami event with fiction editor Deborah Treisman costs the same. In a 2014 article on the Festival at the business site BizBash, Rhonda Sherman, the magazine’s director of editorial promotion, said, “The New Yorker simply would not put on the New Yorker Festival if it were not profitable.”

Fundraising is a necessary part of the magazine publishing machine, and nobody could blame The New Yorker for wanting to generate cash. But it also means that the invitation to Bannon didn’t come from a place of editorial purity—from a desire simply to interrogate him. This is not to say that Remnick solicited Bannon with the cynical intention of extracting cash from curious punters. But it does mean that the reverberations of Bannon’s appearance would have been felt in the magazine’s coffers.

The second factor obscured by the cloud of indignation concerns cultural, rather than literal, capital. David Remnick and Steve Bannon are captains of two different elites. Remnick heads The New Yorker, which nestles atop the American pyramid of intellectual prestige. Bannon helped to turn Donald Trump—denizen of reality television, the dark mirror to journalistic high-mindedness—into the most powerful man in the world. They are like prefects of different boarding school houses. Each derives part of his power by opposing the other.

Last year, Digiday reported that The New Yorker’s opposition to Trump led to a boom in subscriptions. Subscribing to the magazine, which often features caricatures of Trump on its cover, represents to some readers an act of resistance. The New Yorker’s unabashed intellectualism, commitment to deep inquiry, and skepticism of conservative politics is the kind of bandwagon decent liberals want to get on.

For his part, Bannon referred to the media as “the opposition party” at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference. The press are, Bannon said, “corporatist globalist media that are adamantly opposed to a economic nationalist agenda like Donald Trump has.” In the months since that CPAC appearance, Trump has sculpted his hatred for the media into an ideological issue that pits his supporters against all those who speak with journalistic authority. Bannon lies at the origin of this bit of propaganda.

The proposed meeting between Remnick and Bannon thus represented much more than the political conundrum about “platforming” odious people. It would have seen two public figures at the pinnacle of their respective clans, coming together to create a spectacle that would generate money for Remnick’s magazine and a mixture of prestige and notoriety for Bannon. The merit of the event’s content (whatever it would have been—we’ll never know) need barely come into it. The interview was compromised from the start.

If there’s a third issue hidden in the Twitter outrage cycle over the invitation, it’s the uncanny way that Remnick and Bannon have come to be on the same side in this drama. Seeing their names together in so many headlines was reminiscent of John McCain’s recent funeral. That event was lauded as a glorious bipartisan rebuke of Trump. Present at that funeral were people whom various factions of the American public respectively loathe: Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Henry Kissinger. And yet the sheer spectacle of power seemed to subdue the newspapers into respect. “It was a meeting of the Resistance, under vaulted ceilings and stained-glass windows,” Susan Glasser wrote in, yes, The New Yorker. Welcome to the Resistance, Dick Cheney.

Whether the spectacle made an impression on Republicans—only 40 percent of whom had a favorable opinion of McCain—is doubtful. Many on the left were similarly dismayed by the praise showered on Cheney, Kissinger, Bush, and even McCain himself. It was almost as if the funeral, including the media coverage, was designed to represent everything that angry voters resent about the country’s elite.

On Tuesday, Bret Stephens of The New York Times condemned Remnick for cowing to the Twitter mob. In so doing, a complicated interaction between elites from the political left and the right was once again reduced to some shallow pageant. It’s easier for Stephens to blame the ugly online public than to examine how Remnick and Bannon, of all people, came together in the first place. Remnick may have withdrawn his invitation, but not without sparking the kind of lightning that both burns things and illuminates them at the same time.