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Atlantic

17 Atlantic Covers From Different Presidential Elections

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2024 › 10 › presidential-elections-atlantic-covers › 680460

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present, surface delightful treasures, and examine the American idea.

This year’s presidential election is the 60th in the history of the United States. The Atlantic has for 42 of those election cycles published stories examining the fitness of candidates to serve, the inclinations of the voting public to vote, and the sturdiness of our democratic institutions to carry on. Our magazine’s covers in October and November of presidential-election years offer windows into the unique—or uniquely persistent—national anxieties of each electoral era.

One cover story from our archives imagined a hypothetical Inauguration Day on which, “for the first time in history, the Inaugural stand has been built on the West Front of the Capitol,” but by noon in D.C., “there is no new President—none of the candidates carried a majority of the electoral vote on November 4.” That was Laurence H. Tribe and Thomas M. Rollins writing in The Atlantic in October 1980, in a story titled “Deadlock” (to be clear, on the actual 1981 Inauguration Day, Ronald Reagan was sworn in, having defeated the incumbent Jimmy Carter in a landslide the previous November).

Voters on the margins have been a regular subject of study in The Atlantic. “Between campaigns Smith is open-minded on all matters affecting the body politic,” Meredith Nicholson wrote in an October 1920 essay outlining debates he, a Democrat, had been having with his friend Smith, a Republican, about whom to vote for in the upcoming presidential election. But “party loyalty is one of the most powerful factors in the operation of our democracy,” Nicholson noted. “If Smith, in his new mood of independence, votes for Mr. Cox, and I, not a little bitter that my party in these eight years has failed to meet my hopes for it, vote for Mr. Harding, which of us, I wonder, will best serve America?”

Politics is a consistent presence, but not all of our fall covers from those years exclusively concerned the election. November 1976, for instance, led with the culture critic Benjamin DeMott’s spirited exploration of the state of the American family. November 1964 contained a special supplement on … the country of Canada; the month before, however, The Atlantic made its second-ever presidential endorsement. These days, the months surrounding an election pose a particular challenge for our print team: The November issue of the magazine appears on newsstands after the election, but goes to the printers before it takes place.

In many election years, including the present one, we sought lessons from American history. Our November 1988 issue mounted a robust defense for the teaching of American history—history, not just civics lessons, or facts about American government. “The chances for democratic principles to survive such crises depend upon the number of citizens who remember how free societies have responded to crises in the past, how free societies have acted to defend themselves in, and emerge from, the bad times. Why have some societies fallen and others stood fast?” the historian Paul Gagnon wrote, in a cover story titled “Why Study History?”

So spend a moment today with history: Below is a selection of 17 Atlantic covers from election years spanning two centuries. If you’d like to read more, you can browse our entire collection of issues online here, dating back to November 1857.

November 2024November 2020November 2016October 2012November 2004October 2004November 2000November 1992November 1988October 1980November 1976November 1968November 1964October 1964November 1940October 1920October 1860

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Is Journalism Ready for a Second Trump Administration?

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › podcasts › archive › 2024 › 10 › is-journalism-ready-for-a-second-trump-administration › 680467

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On the campaign trail, Donald Trump has been very clear about the shape of his revenge against the mainstream media. He’s mused, a few times, about throwing reporters in jail if they refuse to leak their sources. He’s talked about taking away broadcast licenses of networks he’s deemed unfriendly. He’s made it clear that he will notice if any member of the press gets too free with their critiques and do his best to get in their way. These last couple of weeks, we’ve gotten a signal that maybe his threats are having an impact. Both The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times had prepared endorsements of Kamala Harris, and their owners asked them at the last minute not to run them. Media reporters floated the obvious question of whether the owners backed off to appease Trump.

In this episode, we talk to Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic. This year, The Atlantic made the decision, rare in its history but consistent during the Trump years, to endorse a presidential candidate. (You can read the magazine’s endorsement of Kamala Harris here.) Goldberg talks about navigating both pressures from owners and threats from the administration. And we discuss the urgent question of whether the media, pummeled and discredited for years by Trump, is ready for a second Trump administration.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Journalists who have covered Donald Trump’s rallies—and I am one—know that it’s an uncomfortable situation. He’ll be giving a speech and mention the “fake media” or talk about reporters as the “enemy of the American people,” and then the crowd will all turn towards the press area and start pointing and booing.

Trump has said he would jail reporters who don’t reveal sources or take away broadcast licenses for outlets he doesn’t like. So there’s been a longtime standoff between the free press and a possible future president—which, in these last few days leading up to the election, has gotten a lot more real.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Recently, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, at the 11th hour, decided not to endorse a political candidate, because their owners asked them not to. Both of these papers were going to endorse Kamala Harris, so the last-second decision certainly makes it look like they were backing off to appease Trump.

Motives aside, though, this moment raises an urgent question: Can The Washington Post; the L.A. Times; us, The Atlantic; all of American journalism stand up to a second Trump administration? Today, days before the election, we have with us our own editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to talk about what’s at stake in this endorsement story.

Here’s our conversation.

[Music]

Rosin: As you know, the L.A. Times and The Washington Post made news for announcing they would not be endorsing in this presidential race. What was your reaction to that news?

Jeffrey Goldberg: My reaction was that they are not masters of excellent timing. If they had decided that, which is a perfectly fine position to take—and in retrospect, I kind of, sort of wish we took that position in 2016.

Rosin: You do?

Goldberg: Kind of. I just said, “kind of, sort of.” That, I think, connotes ambivalence. Look—I see both sides of the issue, but that’s not the issue right now with the L.A. Times or The Washington Post.

If you’re going to decide that, decide it deliberately. Decide it, well, I would say, any time except two weeks before the most contentious and possibly closest election in American history.

The timing was exquisitely bad. I mean, you could not have chosen a worse time to make these decisions, and it’s mind-boggling.

Rosin: So what you’re saying is: It’s perfectly legitimate for us to have a debate and for newspapers, internally, to have a debate about whether endorsements or not are appropriate. Because, you know, Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, gave reasons in his op-ed for why he didn’t think endorsements were appropriate. So that’s a totally legitimate debate. It’s just that the timing of it is not right.

Goldberg: Yeah. The timing was awful in that it created mistrust, anger, anxiety. It’s way too late to make that decision. I mean, there’s a separate issue. I do believe that it’s the owner’s prerogative to decide if a newspaper should endorse X person or Y person.

Put aside the practical arguments, which, you know—does it really change anybody’s mind? Does it really do anything? I think it’s a perfectly legitimate thing to say that no journalism organization should speak in that kind of declarative voice.

You have a bunch of columnists. You have opinion writers. You have all kinds of people, podcasters. They should talk about what they think is going on in the election. They could talk about who they think is better and who is worse. I get all the sides of it. It’s just—it’s a little late in the process to announce that you’re not going to endorse.

Rosin: The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos—he did defend the decision in his op-ed, saying, Americans don’t trust the news media, and this is a move to restore that trust. Setting the timing aside for a minute, what do you think of that defense?

Goldberg: Horseshit. I think it’s horseshit. I thought the whole first three, four paragraphs of that were horseshit, blaming the victim. I mean, it’s true. It’s true. The media is very, very low in polls of trustworthiness, lower than even Congress at this point, but there’s a reason for that. And a very large reason is that there’s a concerted, multiyear, billion-dollar campaign to undermine public trust in traditional modes of American journalism.

I mean, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are just two of the people who are organizing a campaign to make sure that Americans don’t trust fact-based journalism. Fact-based journalism doesn’t work for them, and so they are literally killing the messenger. And so for Jeff Bezos to write that we, in the press, have a problem and that no one trusts us, without alerting people to one of the huge reasons why, strikes me as ridiculous.

Rosin: I see. So it’s horseshit because (A) it doesn’t apply to The Washington Post—The Washington Post is not part of the problem—and (B) he didn’t elaborate in any even remotely brave way about what he meant.

Goldberg: There’s a war going on against the quote-unquote mainstream media. People who do not want to be investigated by mainstream journalists, by investigative reporters who are professionally trained to uncover things that powerful people don’t want uncovered—the powerful people have organized themselves in a way to make sure that no citizen trusts The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, the networks, the Associated Press, Reuters, plus a whole bevy of other investigative outfits.

They want to destroy our ability to communicate to people that we’re trying—I mean, look: I’m not saying that we always get things right. We don’t always get things right. But they have a vested interest in making sure that people don’t trust those outlets, because those outlets are investigating them. And for Jeff Bezos—who is part of the oligarchic class, obviously—for Jeff Bezos to write this op-ed or have it written for him without acknowledging this fundamental fact seemed to be absurd.

Rosin: So readers, as we know, reacted by canceling their subscriptions, 250,000 so far. And I have—

Goldberg: Which is crazy.

Rosin: Crazy. I have many friends who work on the Post. It’s adding up to what? Is it a tenth or an eighth of their subscription base?

Goldberg: I think it’s 10 percent of their subscription base.

Rosin: Which has already been waning over the last many years.

Goldberg: Well, I mean, it did grow. I mean, it grew in the Trump era. A lot of people believed them, as they should have, when they said that Trump was a threat to the democratic order and to the American idea. They made their motto literally “Democracy dies in darkness.”

A large number of people who were opposed to Trumpism became subscribers. What do they think is going to happen to those subscribers? The feeling of betrayal. I mean, I’ve talked to so many people who canceled or were thinking of canceling. The feeling of betrayal was deep in ways that I was even surprised. And here was an example of Jeff Bezos not understanding the consequences of his decision making.

Rosin: One obvious conclusion—or even mild conclusion—is that Jeff Bezos is concerned about what Trump thinks, which leads me to think that if Trump wins, lots of newspapers might have to account for that in their decision making and thinking. Like, it feels like that’s how a chilling effect comes to be, is that you have to take into account what Trump thinks, even if it’s minor. Like, I’ll lose some customers, or I won’t get this contract or another contract, that you have to be thinking about that, and that becomes part of the decision making.

Goldberg: Yeah. Look: no reason to disbelieve Bezos when he says that the meeting between Trump, Trump’s people, and the Blue Origin—his space company—the CEO of that space company that happened that same day was coincidental. He didn’t even know. He runs a very large organization. That’s completely plausible that he had no idea that the timing was just terribly bad for him.

The larger point is: If you have multifarious business dealings with the federal government, and you’re worried about a revenge-minded president with authoritarian predilections, it’s asking a lot of a CEO not to take the threat that that president poses into account when you make decisions, which suggests to me that he’s not equipped to be the owner of a newspaper.

The owner of a newspaper should place him or herself in a structurally oppositional frame of mind, which is: You have to be counter-opportunistic. Oh, the government’s gonna cut my $3 billion contract. Screw them. I’m going to do what’s right, and I’m going to stand up for the newspaper.

If you’re not equipped to own a publication, you really shouldn’t. You just really shouldn’t. And, you know, the shame of this is that, from everything I could see and everything that we all could see, he was pretty good at owning The Washington Post for a while.

Rosin: Well, that makes me wonder if the industry, as a whole, is ready for a possible second Trump administration. I mean, what you just described sounds like a kind of steeling and bravery that you have to be prepared for. And if Jeff Bezos, who has a huge amount of power, you know—like, if he loses a chunk, what does it matter?

If he can’t do it, doesn’t that make you worry about the industry in general?

Goldberg: Well, it depends, person to person. I mean, Patrick Soon-Shiong, who is the owner of the Los Angeles Times, is in a different category. He and his family, apparently, just believe in meddling. I mean, they believe that—look: Let me take one step back and note that ownership in the American system—ownership of a publication or a quality publication or a putatively quality publication in the American system—is very complicated and counterintuitive.

You buy a thing. As a rich person, you buy a publication, a business, and then you have to promise not to interfere with the running of the business. That’s the way it’s worked, traditionally. You have to—literally, there’s no other business that I could think of where, you know, you go out and buy a bakery, and the first thing the bakery manager tells you is, Do not tell us what kind of bread to make, and if you do, all your employees are going to excoriate you publicly. You’d kind of be like, Well, I thought the fun part of owning a bakery is getting them to make bread I like, you know. And that’s what journalism is, and this is my relationship with our owner at The Atlantic.

You know, she turns over to me decision making on all editorial matters. We have a relationship of trust, and we communicate, and I use her as a sounding board all the time, and it’s a healthy relationship. But she accepts the line that our culture has devised and that a healthy democratic culture devises so that ownership is separate from editorial.

Rosin: Right. Okay. Earlier this month, The Atlantic endorsed Kamala Harris, which is the fifth time that the magazine has made an endorsement: Lincoln, LBJ, and then three times in the last three elections, all while Trump was the candidate and while you’ve been editor in chief.

Goldberg: Well, the first time, actually, was becoming editor, but I wasn’t yet editor. I had a lot to do with the editorial, but just technically speaking.

Rosin: Okay, so why did you break the mold here?

Goldberg: The Atlantic promises its readers that it’s going to be of no party or clique. That’s written to the founding manifesto of The Atlantic, written in 1857 and signed by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Harriet Beecher Stowe and Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne and all the rest. And, you know, I do not want to screw with those guys, right? (Clears throat.)

I just don’t want their ghosts haunting me. So we try very, very hard to be of no party or clique. But to me, the issue of Donald Trump is not an issue of party. I believe, and I think The Atlantic has expressed this belief in its journalism for 160-plus years: We believe that a strong conservative party, a strong conservative strain in American thinking, and a strong liberal strain—that makes a democracy healthy.

Let these ideas battle it out, and let the people decide who has the better idea. So we are a big tent, where we try to have differing opinions, but we don’t support a particular party. And if Hillary Clinton in 2016 were running against Mitt Romney, John McCain, Marco Rubio, you know, Jeb Bush—name the list—we would have felt no urge whatsoever to endorse.

But I looked back, and others looked back at the 1964 endorsement of Lyndon Johnson to try to understand what that was about. And it was not about Barry Goldwater’s positions on taxation or about privatization of government resources or even, in a way, foreign policy. It was about his demeanor. It was about his character. It was about his extremism.

And so the endorsement of LBJ was less an endorsement of LBJ than a warning about Barry Goldwater’s characterological defects. So when the subject of Trump comes up, we’re not looking at what he thinks we should do about the taxation of tips, or even his position on NATO, as ridiculous as I personally find it.

It’s about his honesty. It’s about his mental fitness. It’s about his moral fitness. It’s about his racism. It’s about his expressed misogyny. It’s about all those things. So it’s not about party. It’s not about ideas. It’s about behavior and disposition and the threat that he poses.

And so in 2016, and then again, for reasons of consistency, if nothing else, in 2020 and now in 2024, we felt a need to endorse—again, not because he’s a conservative, because he’s not actually a conservative.

Rosin: Now, in any of these times, did you ever have doubts—like, real, serious doubts that you should do it?

Goldberg: No. Again, in retrospect, getting into it, I understand where, you know, if Bezos had announced a year ago, You know what? We just don’t want to do this anymore—I totally understand the arguments for not doing it. We did it with Hillary. And remember: We were also, like everybody, in shock, in a kind of shock.

People who cover politics and know American politics—we were shocked that the Republican Party chose this person to be its standard-bearer four years after it picked Mitt Romney and eight years after it picked John McCain. How is this even possible?

So in that shock, in disbelief, I think we are more predisposed to say, You know what? This is so abnormal that we must say something. Then once you say it in 2016 and you see what he’s done over four years, then in 2020, how is it not possible to do the same thing? And then after January 6, 2021, it seemed pretty obvious to me that we would have to keep going with these anti-endorsements.

Rosin: And in your mind, does that shift the magazine’s position to less of an observer-critic and more of a participant in the election?

Goldberg: The magazine is a participant in the election in that members of the writers collective of The Atlantic are pretty clear, in many different ways, about how they feel about Donald Trump, what they think about Donald Trump.

And by the way, we’re not a resistance magazine, and I’ve said this over and over again. If we could run pro-Trump material that could pass through our fact-checking process, I would print it. Our goal is to say things that are true, right?

And so we do have pieces, from time to time, that come in that do argue that “X Trump policy is smart.” We ran a piece recently by H. R. McMaster, his former national security advisor, who said, You know what? Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Some of the things that he’s done may be for the wrong reasons. Maybe he executed them stupidly. But these ideas are good ideas.

So we’ll run pieces like that. Again, it just has to get through fact-checking. So yes—it’s a definitively different kind of decision when you speak in an institutional voice, no byline, and say, The Atlantic believes that X person should be president and not Y person.

And yes, you can create an image out in the world that you are now aligned with a party. That’s why I’m so sensitive on this question of being of no party or clique, because this is not about Republican—

If, in the next election, the Republicans nominate, God knows, near anybody, I don’t feel, you know—as long as they adhere to basic notions of rule of law, as long as they exercise self-restraint in their behavior and speech, as long as they haven’t been proven to try to have overthrown the government.

I mean, I was down there on January 6. I saw, I heard his speech. And then I walked down to the Capitol. I know what he did. You know, there’s two candidates in the race right now. One tried to overthrow the government; the other didn’t. It’s not that hard to say, as an institution, We’re against overthrowing the government.

And so yeah, there are consequences to all these decisions, but I’m comfortable with the decision. As I said, there’s a part of me that wishes that we hadn’t gotten involved in that, but I’m also proud of the fact that we took these stands.

Rosin: In what?

Goldberg: In institutional endorsement.

Rosin: Like, if you could avoid it, you would?

Goldberg: Well, look: The Atlantic. I mean, one of the lessons of looking back at The Atlantic, you know, one of the great mysteries, by the way—I haven’t been able to figure this out: 1860, The Atlantic endorses Lincoln for president. 1864, no endorsement. It’s like, What does a guy have to do?

Rosin: (Laughs.) Right.

Goldberg: You know, jeez louise. I don’t know. I mean, I would love to find the papers, if there are papers, that communicate why they didn’t run an endorsement. (Laughs.) But anyway, you go from 1860 to 1964. You jump 104 years into the future before they endorse again. You know, as the editor in the Trump presidency, in the Trump era, I’ve got to say, Hmm, for 105, 104 years, they managed not to endorse. That means something. And so, you know, obviously, there’s going to be ambivalence in my thinking.

Rosin: Okay. Time to leave Lincoln and enter the future. After the break, we talk about what a second Trump era might look like.

[Break]

Rosin: All right. So you’ve touched on some of the stakes. Let’s contemplate an actual Trump era. Like, we’re living in a Trump era. You yourself have faced specific—well, I’ll take that back. The Atlantic has faced specific threats—

Goldberg: No. You could say me. It’s true.

Rosin: —from Trump. And, specifically, in response to your reporting. So in 2020, you reported that Trump called veterans and fallen soldiers “suckers” and “losers,” which has clearly remained on Trump’s mind. Your recent reporting that he wished he had “the kind of generals Hitler had” also struck a chord. He’s not a fan. He’s interested in settling scores. Do you actually run through scenarios about the actual things that the magazine could face under a Trump presidency?

Goldberg: Sure. I don’t want to go into specifics, but there are, obviously—and again, I’m not trying to be dramatic here. I don’t expect storm troopers to come and try to padlock the doors of The Atlantic on January 20 if Trump should win or Trump should seize power in some manner or form.

But there are, obviously, ways that someone bent on revenge could take his revenge, not just on The Atlantic but a lot of the press and other institutions in American life. So of course we think about it. But you know, there’s exactly zero choice here. If you find out something that’s true, and it’s relevant for your readers, you just gotta—I don’t mean to sound self-righteous or anything, but that’s literally the job. So you’ve got to do it, regardless of what the threat may be.

Rosin: I mean, I actually do think about what it looks like, because this is a relatively new situation for Americans, for American journalists. I do have trouble imagining what it would look like to operate in that kind of atmosphere. Like, how does a president get in the way of American journalism?

Goldberg: Right. I mean, look: There are—I’m not talking about us, specifically, now—but there have been discussions broadly across journalism. Obviously, one thing that Trump has talked about again and again is changing the libel laws, right? And this would require the Supreme Court to overturn a decision made in the 1960s about what constitutes libel.

But it wouldn’t surprise me if they—and people who are supportive of Trump fund efforts to make it harder for journalists to do their jobs vis-à-vis, you know, nuisance lawsuits and trying to get legislation changed and trying to get the Supreme Court behind this legislation that would make it much easier to win libel suits against journalism organizations.

So there’s that. That’s a threat. There are other things that can happen, obviously. Something that’s been talked about a lot is the use of the IRS against enemies. I mean, obviously, in normal-behaving administrations, you’re not allowed to politicize the tax-auditing process, but I don’t put that past them, obviously.

There are a bunch of things that you can do that don’t involve, you know, frog-marching journalists to jail. I go back to this point: They’re helping to create an atmosphere that’s comprehensively hostile to work that previous American presidents—I’m going all the way back to Thomas Jefferson now—previous American presidents understood was indispensable to the smooth functioning of democracy. Which is to say: have a robust, independent press that could not be punished, jailed, silenced by a government.

Rosin: So that’s the thing that I most worry about, is the shifting understanding of facts and truth. In your conversation with Barack Obama a couple of years ago, it was very interesting. He talked about how, in his campaign, he used to be able to show up in places, say swing-voter places, and convince people to change their minds about him.

And then he told you that he doesn’t really think that that would be true anymore, because there’s a world where new information, a new fact, a truth—it doesn’t really move people. And I wonder if you think journalism is in a similar position. Like, we used to be able to show up and give people new information, new facts, and we would hope that those things would move them. And now it seems to work less that way.

Goldberg: Well, yeah. I’ll give you an example from my own work to buttress your point. So four years ago, I published a story based on sources that Donald Trump has repeatedly used the terms suckers and losers to describe American war dead and American war wounded.

Obviously, a very damaging story. And the criticism from the White House—Donald Trump’s White House at the time—was, Well, you don’t have any evidence. You don’t have any people on the record or using their names, so it’s all made up. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that became the discourse. Right?

Last year, John Kelly came out—John Kelly, former chief of staff, former Marine general, chief of staff to Donald Trump in his White House—came out and said, on the record with his name: Oh yeah. That’s true. He used to say “suckers” and “losers” all the time. He’s confirmed it to any number of publications. He confirmed it on the record to me. And so what I get, even today, are people saying, Well, you never proved it.

And I said, Well, actually, John Kelly’s now said that he’s heard Donald Trump. They say, You’ve never had any sources on the record. Well, John Kelly says it happened. Well, John Kelly’s a liar.

And it’s like, Okay, it doesn’t matter. My point is: It seems not to matter when you present people with what you consider to be evidence or what, in traditional journalism modes, is considered evidence. It doesn’t matter anymore. People are impervious to new information if it doesn’t conform to what they would like to believe.

And so we see that writ large, where, you know, the bubble around a certain group of people in America—let’s say the hardcore Trump voters—the bubble is impermeable, right? There’s no way of penetrating and saying, No. You said you wanted more evidence. Here’s evidence.

Nope. That evidence—that’s a deep fake. That evidence—nope. The person who says it to you is lying.

Rosin: Yes, Jeff, but that’s our tool. Like, that’s what we got. That’s what we do. Like, what we do is evidence, facts. We present those evidence and facts, and if those just drop dead to the ground, then what’s our role? Like, what are we doing?

Goldberg: Well, first of all, I never give up, because why would you give up trying to convince people (A)?

(B) and look: I do think this is a unique proposition of The Atlantic at this moment. I understand 30 percent of the people in America are really not going to believe, or say they don’t believe, The Atlantic at this moment. So we’re writing for the 70 percent, but I also think we’re writing for the 30 percent.

I think just because you’re banging your head against the wall doesn’t mean that wall is not eventually gonna crack. And we have to find new ways of communicating, new ways of buttressing our reporting.

I also believe that people change all the time. And just because this is the pattern, and this is the path we’re on, doesn’t mean that it’s going to be this way forever. I mean, I guess I’m optimistic in the sense that I think, you know, we’re in a fever period right now and that the fever will break.

You know, my colleague—our colleague—Caitlin Flanagan, always says that “the truth bats last.” And I hope she’s right. It’s just harder and harder.

I mean, this calls back to a little bit of the Jeff Bezos piece in which he doesn’t acknowledge that the reason the press is mistrusted is because powerful people are trying to get ordinary citizens to mistrust the press—for their own selfish business reasons or political reasons. So we just have to keep going.

I have a lot of criticism of publications—let’s call them elite publications—that are written for, let’s say, the 20 percent most liberal portion of America and don’t even try to get to other people anymore. Like, maybe it’s a great business model. And fine. You know, everybody should do their thing. Whatever.

But I don’t feel like The Atlantic is that. I think we have to try to build a bridge between, let’s say, these two bubbles: You know, the bubble in which quote-unquote mainstream media lives and the bubble in which the hardcore Trump supporters live. It’s a frustrating question because I don’t know the answer. I haven’t heard anybody come up with a formula for this, but we’re just gonna have to keep trying because the alternative, giving up, is pure nihilism to me.

Rosin: Yeah. Well, we are days before the election. We’ve lived through a Trump presidency. People are talking about this Trump presidency returning without the guardrails of the last one. So how do you see our role, your role in that kind of administration?

Goldberg: I imagine that a coming theoretical second Trump administration is going to be somewhat to very different from the first one in that—I mean, you’ve heard all these clichés before: There will be no grown-ups. Trump and his people know how to manipulate the workings of government better. The velociraptors have learned how to turn the door handles.

You’ve heard all of the lines about it. So we can have more drama and more threats to the constitutional order and more threats to what we used to think of as normative political behavior. But I don’t see our role changing, in the sense that we’re just gonna write about it every day. And we’re gonna cover it.

And, you know, I’ve said this to the staff before: The point of journalism—or the satisfaction of journalism—is not necessarily in changing the world for the better. If you change the world through your journalism to bring more light and truth and justice into the world, great. But you can’t wake up every day assuming that’s what’s going to happen, because most of it is frustrating, just like any job in the world is going to be frustrating. And progress, however you define it, is going to be incremental, and you’re not going to see it for a while, and so on.

But I think to myself, Look—we’re in a democratic emergency. I want to be able to tell myself, as an old man, that I did everything that I could do to try to bring the country back to some kind of normalcy, to hold people who are behaving abnormally accountable.

And I want, especially, the younger people at The Atlantic to think to themselves that, 40 years from now, 50 years from now, when their grandchildren say, What did you do in that antidemocratic era? I want them to be able to say, I did everything that I could do. And that’s important to me. I held my own standards up. I held the standards of my magazine up. And I invested, in a non-nihilistic way, in the future of this country, in the future of the ideas that animate it.

And, you know, that’s enough. All you can do is try using your journalism techniques, using the techniques of journalism to bring more illumination to the things that, in this case, a Donald Trump might do.

So all we can do is go to work and write about what they’re doing and cover what they’re doing and hold it up to the light and let people judge for themselves if what they’re doing is good or bad. So, you know, it’s anticlimactic in a way. It’s not overly dramatic. The thing that we can do is go to work and do our jobs, the jobs that we were trained to do.

We were not expecting, people my age, your age, whatever—we’ve been in journalism for a while, never really expecting a presidency like the first Trump presidency and certainly what could be a second Trump presidency. Never really expecting anything like this, but here we are.

So just cover the hell out of it, and make sure that you have put into the public record truth and reality and evidence, and, you know, tell truth to power. You know, you can’t do anything more than that. And so all we’re going to do is just do what we do.

Rosin: I really appreciate that. I feel exactly the same way. There are words out there like anxious, afraid, apathetic. I don’t feel any of those things. I feel alert.

Goldberg: Alertness is great. We have the tools to alert people to these changes. We don’t have to sit there just passively or impotently. So work as hard as you can to bring as much information and analysis to people who need it. That’s great—great to have a job, great to have a role.

Rosin: Thank you for being inspirational, Jeff.

Goldberg: You want me to sing outtakes from Sound of Music?

Rosin: I wouldn’t mind if you could stand on the desk while doing it. It would be even better.

Goldberg: “Climb Every Mountain?” I’ll sing “The Battle Hymn of the”—look: If we have another Trump presidency, we’re gonna get the staff every morning on Zoom to sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” together.

Rosin: Sounds good. I’ll practice.

Goldberg: Yeah. I’m sure people are gonna really enjoy that.

Rosin: Sounds good. (Laughs.) All right, Jeff. Thank you so much for joining us.

Goldberg: Thank you.

Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin.

Happy Halloween. Get lots of candy. And don’t forget to vote. Thank you for listening.

The Orwell Exception

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › culture › archive › 2024 › 10 › orwell-exception-clear-language-donald-trump › 680464

1984 ends not with a bang, but with a grammar lesson. Readers of George Orwell’s novel—still reeling, likely, from the brutal dystopia they’ve spent the previous 300-odd pages living in—are subjected to a lengthy explanation of Newspeak, the novel’s uncanny form of English. The appendix explains the language that has been created to curtail independent thought: the culled vocabulary; the sterilized syntax; the regime’s hope that, before long, all the vestiges of Oldspeak—English in its familiar form, the English of Shakespeare and Milton and many of Orwell’s readers—will be translated into the new vernacular. The old language, and all it carried with it, will die away.

With its dizzying details and technical prose, “The Principles of Newspeak” makes for a supremely strange ending. It is, in today’s parlance, a choice. But it is a fitting one. Language, in 1984, is violence by another means, an adjunct of the totalitarian strategies inflicted by the regime. Orwell’s most famous novel, in that sense, is the fictionalized version of his most famous essay. “Politics and the English Language,” published in 1946, is a writing manual, primarily—a guide to making language that says what it means, and means what it says. It is also an argument. Clear language, Orwell suggests, is a semantic necessity as well as a moral one. Newspeak, in 1984, destroys with the same ferocious efficiency that tanks and bombs do. It is born of the essay’s most elemental insight: “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

The essay, over the years, has enjoyed the same backhanded success that Orwell himself has. Its barbs have softened into conventional wisdom. Its enduring relevance has consigned it, in some degree, to cliché. Who would argue against clarity?

But the essay, today, can read less as a rousing defense of the English language than as a prescient concession of defeat. “Use clear language” cannot be our guide when clarity itself can be so elusive. Our words have not been honed into oblivion—on the contrary, new ones spring to life with giddy regularity—but they fail, all too often, in the same ways Newspeak does: They limit political possibilities, rather than expand them. They cede to cynicism. They saturate us in uncertainty. The words might mean what they say. They might not. They might describe shared truths; they might manipulate them. Language, the connective tissue of the body politic—that space where the collective “we” matters so much—is losing its ability to fulfill its most basic duty: to communicate. To correlate. To connect us to the world, and to one another.

And semantic problems, as Orwell knew, have a way of turning into real ones. Violence descends; threats take shape; emergencies come; we may try to warn one another—we may scream the warnings—but we have trouble conveying the danger. We have so much to say. In another way, though, we have no words.

Earlier this month, Donald Trump mused aloud about the violence Americans might anticipate on November 5. If Election Day brings havoc, he told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo, the crisis would come not from outside actors but instead from “the enemy from within”: “some very bad people,” he clarified, “some sick people”—the “radical-left lunatics.”

The former president further mused about a solution to the problem. “I think it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the National Guard,” he said, “or, if really necessary, by the military.”

A presidential candidate who may well retake the White House is threatening to use the military against American citizens: The news here is straightforward. The language that makes the news, though, is not. The words twist and tease, issuing their threats in the conditional tense: It should be. If necessary. Trump’s words often do this; they imply very much while saying very little. They are schooled, like the man himself, in the dark art of plausible deniability. In them, Orwell’s doublespeak—that jargon of purposeful obscurity—gets one more layer of insulating irony: The former president says whatever he wants, and reserves the right not to mean it.

Do we take him at his word? The answer to this question, on which so much else depends, can only ever be “maybe.” When he describes “the enemy from within”—or when he muses about police forces fighting back against criminals for “one real rough, nasty day,” or when he announces his intention to spend the first day of a second term acting as “a dictator”you could read each as a direct threat. You could assume that he’s lying, embellishing, teasing, trolling. You could say that the line, like Trump’s others, should be taken seriously, but not literally. You could try your best, knowing all that is at stake, to parse the grammar of his delusion.

But the fact that you need to translate him at all is already a concession. The constant uncertainty—about the gravest of matters—is one of the ways that Trump keeps people in his thrall. Clear language is a basic form of kindness: It considers the other person. It wants to be understood. Trump’s argot, though, is self-centered. It treats shared reality as an endless negotiation.

The words cannot bear the weight of all this irony. Democracy is, at its core, a task of information management. To do its work, people need to be able to trust that the information they’re processing is, in the most fundamental way, accurate. Trump’s illegibility makes everything else less legible, too.

[Read: Do you speak Fox?]

Orwell published “Politics” at the end of a conflict that had, in its widespread use of propaganda, also been a war of words. In the essay, he wrestles with the fact that language—as a bomb with a near-limitless blast radius—could double as a weapon of mass destruction. This is why clarity matters. This is why words are ethical tools as well as semantic ones. The defense of language that Orwell offered in “Politics” was derived from his love of hard facts. “So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information,” he confessed in his 1946 essay “Why I Write.” His was an elegant dogma. Words matter because facts matter—because truth matters. Freedom, in 1984, is many things, but they all spring from the same source: the ability to say that 2 + 2 = 4.

One October surprise of 2024 took an aptly Orwellian turn: The scandal, this time around, was a matter of language. Earlier this month, John Kelly, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, escalated his warnings that his former boss is unfit for office. Kelly told The Atlantic that Trump had expressed a desire for generals like the ones “that Hitler had.” Then, in an interview published by The New York Times, Kelly described Trump’s dictatorial approach to leadership, his drive to suppress opposition, his insatiable appetite for power. He concluded that Trump fits the definition of fascist.

Kelly’s claim was echoed, more mildly, by Trump’s former secretary of defense—he “certainly has those inclinations,” Mark Esper said—and, less mildly, by Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Trump is “the most dangerous person to this country,” Milley warned in Bob Woodward’s latest book, its publication timed to coincide with the election. He is also, Milley added, “fascist to the core.” (Trump denied the men’s claims: “I am the opposite of a Nazi,” he said.) Late last week, 13 others who had served in high-level positions in the Trump administration signed an open letter: “Everyone,” they wrote, “should heed General Kelly’s warning.”

The comments made headlines because of the people who expressed them: Each had worked directly with Trump. The former officials made history, though, because of the word they deployed in their warnings. Fascist is a claim of last resort. It is a term of emergency. Because of that, its validity, as a description for Trump’s seething strain of populism, has been the subject of a long-standing debate among scholars, journalists, and members of the public—one made even more complicated by the fact that, as the historian Ian Kershaw has observed, “Trying to define ‘fascism’ is like trying to nail jelly to the wall.”

But one need not be a scholar of fascism to see the plain reality. Trump lost an election. He refused to accept the result. In a second term, he has suggested, he will “terminate” the Constitution; use the American judicial system to take revenge on those who have angered him; and perform sweeping immigration raids, expelling millions of people from the country. Trump, in addition to praising Hitler’s generals, regularly uses language that echoes Hitler’s hatreds. He has described immigrants, whatever their legal status, as a formless “invasion,” and the press as “the enemy of the people.” He has dismissed those who are insufficiently loyal to him as “human scum” and “vermin.”

[Read: This is Trump’s message]

Fascism—that call to history, that careful description, that five-alarm piece of language—is the right word. But it may turn out, at the same time, to be the wrong one. It might, in our cynical moment, provoke exhaustion rather than alarm.

In “Politics,” Orwell reserves particular vitriol for political language that hides its intentions in euphemism and wan metaphor. Wording that resorts to ambiguity can disguise atrocities (as when, in one of the examples Orwell offers, the bombing of villages and their defenseless people is referred to merely as “pacification”). Orwell’s problem was language that gives writers permission not to think. Ours, however, is language that gives readers permission not to care. Even the clearest, most precise language can come to read, in our restless age, as cliché. “The first man who compared woman to a rose was a poet,” the old line goes; “the second, an imbecile.” On the internet, anyone can become that imbecile. For language in general, this is not an issue: When on fleek goes off in an instant or cheugy plummets from coinage to cringe, more words will arrive in their place.

When the restlessness comes for political language, though—for the words we rely on to do the shared work of self-government—the impatience itself becomes Orwellian. Urgent words can feel tired. Crises can come, but no words suffice to rouse us. Americans face an election that our democracy—hard-fought, hard-won, ever fragile—may not survive; “defend democracy,” though, can read less as a call to arms than as a call to yawn. Trump himself is insulated by all the ennui. Nearly every word you might apply to him fits the picture that was already there. His depravity has become tautological: It’s just Trump being Trump. It’s shocking, not surprising.

The word fascism can fail that way, too. And it can be further defanged by the biggest cliché of all: thoughtlessly partisan politics. Some audiences, seeing the word deployed as a description, will dismiss it as simply more evidence of the media’s (or John Kelly’s) alleged bias against Trump. Others, assuming that fascism and Nazism are the same thing—assuming that fascism cannot be present until troops are goose-stepping in the streets—will see the term as evidence of hysteria.

But fascism can come whether the language acknowledges it or not. It marches toward us, restricted right by restricted right, book ban by book ban. It can happen here. The question is whether we’ll be able to talk about it—and whether people will care. An ABC News/Ipsos poll released last week asked registered voters across the country whether Trump was a “fascist” (defined as “a political extremist who seeks to act as a dictator, disregards individual rights and threatens or uses force against their opponents”). Nearly half of respondents, 49 percent, said he was—roughly the same percentage of people who, in recent national polls, say that they plan to vote for him.

The philosopher Emilio Uranga observed, in Mexican political life of the mid-20th century, a gnawing sense of uncertainty—a “mode of being,” he wrote, “that incessantly oscillates between two possibilities, between two affects, without knowing which one of those to depend on.” The unsteadiness, he suggested, amounts to pain. In it, “the soul suffers.” It “feels torn and wounded.” Uranga gave the condition a name: zozobra.

The wound he describes, that plague of doubleness, has settled into American political language. In her 2023 book, Doppelganger, Naomi Klein describes the “mirror world” in right-wing politics—a place where every reality has a rhetorical double. She focuses on the rhetoric of Steve Bannon, the former Trump-administration strategist. As Democrats and journalists discussed the Big Lie—Donald Trump’s claim that he won the 2020 presidential election—Bannon began discussing the Big Steal: the idea that Joe Biden, against all evidence, stole the presidency.

The tactic is common. Trump regularly fantasizes before his cheering crowds about the violence that might befall his opponents. Journalists describe him as engaging in “extreme” and “inflammatory” rhetoric. Republicans in Trump’s camp, soon enough, began accusing Democrats of, as one of his surrogates put it, “irresponsible rhetoric” that “is causing people to get hurt.” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham’s response to the former military leaders’ warnings about Trump took a similar tack: Their rhetoric is “dangerous,” he said this weekend. On Monday, Trump gave John Kelly’s comments about him a predictably zozobric twist. Kamala Harris, he said, is a fascist.

“In the mirror world,” Klein writes, “there is a copycat story, and an answer for everything, often with very similar key words.” The attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, has commonly been described as an insurrection; Republican power brokers have begun describing peaceful political protests as “insurrections.” We must save American democracy, the stark slogan that gained new currency in response to the Big Lie, is now a common refrain on the right. (Elon Musk, at a recent Trump rally, argued that the former president “must win to preserve democracy in America.”)

Mirroring, as propaganda, is extremely effective. It addles the mind. It applies a choose-your-own-adventure approach to meaning itself. Mirroring does, in that way, precisely what Orwell feared: It gives up on the very possibility of common language. It robs political terms of their ability to clarify, to unite, to warn. In a world that is endlessly doubling itself, 2 + 2 = 4 may be a liberating truth. Or it may be a narrative imposed on you by a smug and elitist regime. Freedom, soon enough, becomes the ability to say that the sum of 2 + 2 is whatever you want it to be.

[Read: Why are we humoring them?]

The words fly, flagrant and fast; the definitions that might ground them trail, meekly, in their wake. But when the words are mere slogans—shibboleths and signifiers, narrowcast to one’s tribe—dictionary definitions miss the point. Slogans are rhetoric. They are advertising. They are vibes. They can function, in that way, as what the author Robert Jay Lifton called “thought-terminating clichés”: words or phrases that effectively curtail debate—and, with it, critical thought itself. Last year, an author who wrote a book decrying the “woke indoctrination” of children struggled to define what woke actually means. In 2022, the New York Times editorial board effectively declared lexicographic defeat: “However you define cancel culture,” it wrote, “Americans know it exists and feel its burden.” On Tuesday, Musk—who has been spreading his Trump-friendly brand of groupthink on his social-media platform, X—shared an image: a man, his face obscured, wearing a green cap. Stitched onto the hat, in large, all-caps letters, was MAKE ORWELL FICTION AGAIN.

In 1990, a conservative Republican group headed by Newt Gingrich sent a pamphlet to Republican candidates running in state elections across the country. The document amounted to a dictionary: 133 words that operatives might use to elevate themselves (family, freedom, pride) and vilify their competitors (decay, corruption, pathetic, traitors). The pamphlet was titled, unironically, “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” Many in the media, nodding to the Orwell of it all, came to know it as “Newtspeak.”

The 1990s were years when politicians were translating the insights of postmodern discourse (the power of “framing” and the like) into the everyday practice of politics. But Gingrich’s memo turned spin into a plot twist. Every word of its grim new language represented an argument: that Democrats were not merely opponents, but enemies; that the differences between the two sides were not merely political, but moral. It recast American politics not as an ongoing debate among equals, but as an epic battle between good and evil. The core aim of propaganda, Aldous Huxley observed, is to make one group of people forget that another group is human; the pamphlet, cheerfully promising aspiring politicians that they could learn to speak like Newt, wove that logic, word by word, into Americans’ political habits.

The language in the pamphlet is stark. It is evocative. It is so very, very clear. It also takes the advice Orwell gave to preserve the thing he most loved and puts it in service of the thing he most feared.

Orwell watched the rise of communism. He fought the rise of fascism. He observed, from a distance and, at times, from intimately close range, the blunt-force power of words. He saw how quickly a common language could be transformed into a divisive one—and how readily, in the tumult, new hatreds and fears could settle into the syntax of everyday life. And he knew that history, so rarely consigned to the past, would repeat—that the battles of the 20th century would very likely be refought, in some form, in the future.

He knew all that, but he could not know it all. And there are moments in “Politics and the English Language” that can read, today, as nearly naive, with its faith in facts and its hope that clarity could be our salvation. Orwell was a satirist, too—1984, he believed, was an example of the genre—but he did not account for the ways that irony could come for language itself. He did not imagine propaganda that does its work through winks and shrugs rather than shouts. He did not sense how possible it would become for people in the future, seeking his wisdom, to wonder whether use clear language offers any counsel at all.

This is not Orwell’s failing, necessarily. And it need not be our own. If we look to him for refuge and find none, that means simply that we will have to use the words we have to create new advice, new axioms, new ways forward. We can take the insight that drove him—that words can expand the world, or limit it; that they can connect us to one another, or cleave us—and seek new means of clarity. We can treat language not just as a tool, but as a duty. We can keep remembering, and reminding one another, that 2 + 2 = 4.

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How Trump Is Baiting Harris

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2024 › 10 › how-trump-is-baiting-harris › 680466

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

This is the time for closing arguments from Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. But Trump’s closing argument is not a closing argument at all: It’s an invitation. He and his campaign are acting in hopes of provoking Harris, pushing her to muddle her final message.

The statements and sentiments on display from the Trump campaign this past week, and particularly at Sunday night’s rally at Madison Square Garden, have been racist, xenophobic, and violent. To note a few: The comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, invited by the Trump campaign, called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” The radio personality Sid Rosenberg described the Democratic Party as “a bunch of degenerates, lowlifes,” and “Jew-haters.” The private-equity fund manager Grant Cardone said that Harris has “pimp handlers.” And the Trump adviser Stephen Miller declared that “America is for Americans and Americans only.”

This incendiary language is not only a crude attempt to bait critics; it’s part of a pattern of hate from Trump and his closest allies, and a type of rhetoric that Trump has made clear he intends to incorporate into his plans as president. But in continuing to push the lines of decency in American politics, Trump is also attempting to goad the opposition. His campaign is ramping up a familiar and often effective cycle: He says or encourages something inflammatory, then goes on to blame his opponents or members of the media for overreacting, sometimes attempting to rewrite his own statements in the process. After he told the Fox News anchor Sean Hannity that he wouldn’t be a dictator “except for day one,” he later said that he was just joking, in an effort to cast those who took him seriously as dramatic. It’s an example of what my colleague Megan Garber recently called the trolligarchy: “A troll reserves the right, always, to be kidding,” she wrote. “Even about matters of life and death.”

A strong reaction from Democrats or from journalists is strategically useful to Trump, and he knows it. As Trump said at Sunday’s rally: “When I say ‘the enemy from within’”—referring to the phrase he often uses to describe anyone who is not part of MAGA world—“the other side goes crazy.” Kamala Harris herself has usually avoided taking the bait, although in recent days she has gone on the attack, referring to Trump as a fascist for the first time after The New York Times published remarks from former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly in which he said that Trump met the definition of the word. But she has returned consistently to a message of unity. Speaking to reporters today, she said, “When elected president, I’m going to represent all Americans, including those who don’t vote for me.”

Others on her campaign, however, haven’t been as careful. At an event earlier this week, Tim Walz said of the MSG rally, “There’s a direct parallel to a big rally that happened in the mid-1930s at Madison Square Garden,” in apparent reference to a 1939 pro-Nazi rally that took place in the same arena. And on a call with a Latino voting group last night, President Joe Biden remarked, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters—his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.” Though Biden later claimed that he said “supporter’s,” referencing Hinchcliffe’s quote about Puerto Rico, and Harris quickly distanced herself from the gaffe, the damage was done. Biden’s blunder is reminiscent of the disparaging “basket of deplorables” comment that Hillary Clinton made about Trump supporters during her 2016 campaign, a comparison that Trumpworld has been quick to make. MAGA allies soon began campaigning off of Biden’s comment, and Trump’s campaign has even fundraised off it.

By provoking and then taking apparent pleasure in dramatic reactions from their critics, Trump and his team encourage his supporters’ feelings of vitriol toward fellow Americans—feelings Trump has spent years feeding by referring to his political opponents as enemies, “vermin,” “lunatics,” and “thugs.” Harris and her team will make a much stronger closing statement if they refuse to give Trump the satisfaction of being their campaign’s main subject. But it’s also up to the American voting public to resist being baited by the outrage that Trump stokes, and to refuse the path of vengeance that he represents.

Related:

This is Trump’s message. Trump wants you to accept all of this as normal.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump pays the price for insulting Puerto Rico. Why Kamala Harris is targeting deep-red counties Elon Musk wants you to think this election’s being stolen. The worst of crypto is yet to come.

Today’s News

A divided Supreme Court allowed Virginia to continue its program targeting suspected noncitizen voters, which could result in the purge of more than 1,600 voter registrations. At least 95 people were killed after torrential rain caused dangerous levels of flash flooding in Spain’s Valencia region. An 18-year-old man was arrested near an early-voting site in Florida after he brandished a machete at two people who support Vice President Kamala Harris. A video shows him holding the machete while his companions wave Trump flags, according to The New York Times.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Throw out your black plastic spatula, Zoë Schlanger writes. It’s probably leaching chemicals into your cooking oil.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Ok McCausland / The New York Times / Redux

Tobacco Companies May Have Found a Way to Make Vapes More Addictive

By Nicholas Florko

When a friend pulled out her vape at a playoff-baseball watch party earlier this month, it immediately caught my eye. I had grown accustomed to marveling at the different disposable vapes she’d purchase each time her last one ran out of nicotine—the strange flavors, the seemingly endless number of brands—but this product was different. It had a screen. While she vaped, the device played a silly little animation that reminded me of a rudimentary version of Pac-Man.

In the name of journalism, I went to my local smoke shop this week, and sure enough, vapes with screens were ubiquitous.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

An overlooked path to a financial fresh start How Israel could be changing Iran’s nuclear calculus Muslim American support for Trump is an act of self-sabotage, Hussein Ibish argues.

Culture Break

Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Sources: B Bennett / Getty; Bettmann / Getty; Harry How / Getty; Steve Crandall / Getty.

Investigate. Why are baseball players always eating? Kaitlyn Tiffany examines why America’s pastime is a game of snacks.

Watch. In Conclave (out now in theaters), the cardinals get catty when the pope dies, Shirley Li writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Hannah Dreier Wins 2024 Michael Kelly Award for New York Times Investigation

The Atlantic

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Hannah Dreier is the winner of the 21st annual Michael Kelly Award for her series “Alone and Exploited,” published by The New York Times in 2023. Dreier’s sweeping and groundbreaking investigation into migrant child labor in the United States brought a “new economy of exploitation” to national attention.

In their commendation, the judges describe Dreier’s reporting as tenacious and impactful, and note her “sheer doggedness in uncovering this scandal.” Dreier is a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter for the Times, as well as a two-time Michael Kelly Award finalist. She will be awarded a prize of $25,000.

Given annually by The Atlantic, the Michael Kelly Award honors journalists whose work exemplifies “the fearless pursuit and expression of truth,” qualities that defined Michael Kelly’s own life and career. Kelly was the first journalist killed while covering the Iraq War, in 2003. He served as editor of The Atlantic and National Journal when both magazines were publications of Atlantic Media, chaired by David G. Bradley. Bradley created the award in Kelly’s honor.

Journalists from three other news organizations were recognized as finalists, and each will receive a $3,000 award: Georgea Kovanis and Mandi Wright, at the Detroit Free Press, for their intimate portrait of a heroin and fentanyl addict amid the opioid crisis; Philip Obaji Jr., at the Daily Beast, for his reporting on the Wagner Group’s shady operations in the Central African Republic; and a team of more than 75 journalists at The Washington Post, for their deep dive into the rise of the AR-15.

Five judges selected the winner and the finalists: Jenisha Watts, a senior editor at The Atlantic; Toby Lester, a senior editor at Harvard Business Review; James Warren, the executive editor of NewsGuard; Ena Alvarado, a writer and former assistant editor at The Atlantic; and Cullen Murphy, the editor at large of The Atlantic.

A list of the past winners and finalists, as well as remembrances of Kelly from friends and colleagues, can be found at www.michaelkellyaward.com.

Press Contact:
Anna Bross | The Atlantic
press@theatlantic.com

The Battle for Countrypolitan America

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2024 › 10 › countrypolitan-counties-north-carolina › 680440

Photographs by Mike Belleme

Gaston County, North Carolina, is not an obvious place to look for Democrats. Just a few miles east is Charlotte, one of the state’s Democratic strongholds, but suburban Gaston hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1976, when the South threw its weight behind Jimmy Carter. In recent years, the high-water mark is Barack Obama’s 37 percent vote share in his first election. In 2020, it was one of President Donald Trump’s last campaign stops as he worked to juice turnout. Gastonia, the county seat, has a Republican mayor, a majority-GOP city council, and a statue of the Ten Commandments outside city hall.

And yet, on a Friday morning this month, a few dozen supporters and volunteers were gathered outside a Democratic field office in Gastonia, dancing to Aretha Franklin and revved up to hear from Harry Dunn and Aquilino Gonell, two former officers who defended the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear. The setting wasn’t dazzling—like many campaign offices, it’s in a dingy old building available for a short-term lease—but it’s one of 29 field offices for Kamala Harris’s campaign across the state, and its existence is a sign of a new Democratic strategy: the idea that by pouring energy into red counties, they can turn out a previously untapped vein of Democratic voters, and win the Old North State for the first time in 16 years.

[Read: The surreal experience of being a Republican at the DNC]

This requires a certain amount of optimism. Being a Democrat in Gaston County is “tough,” county party chair David Wilson Brown told me. He’d know: He ran two quixotic campaigns for U.S. House in the area. “We were thrilled when we found out that they wanted to base here,” he said of the national and state parties. “I’m thrilled that they’re paying attention here.”

North Carolina is sometimes discussed as a state split along urban (Democratic) and rural (Republican) lines, but that’s too crude a division. Places like Gaston represent a crucial third category. Mac McCorkle, a professor at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy and a Democratic strategist unaffiliated with the Harris campaign, has identified 28 counties that he calls “countrypolitan,” borrowing a term from 1970s country music. (I teach journalism as an adjunct at Duke.) Sometimes called exurban, these places are technically defined as metropolitan, but their heritage is rural. “People have memories and nostalgia. They still want to think they’re in a small town,” McCorkle told me. “That’s why they don’t live in Charlotte. They want the values to be that way.”

Volunteers making calls at the Gaston County Democratic Party headquarters, in Gastonia (Mike Belleme for The Atlantic)

In the 2020 election, Joe Biden won North Carolina’s 10 biggest counties decisively, while Trump won rural counties easily. But Trump’s victory in the state—by 1.34 percent, or fewer than 75,000 votes—was decided in the countrypolitan counties, where he captured 63 percent of the vote. Democrats have no hope of winning these counties, but they need to lose them by less to take the state overall. It’s here, not in rural areas, where North Carolina will be won and lost.

For years, Democrats in North Carolina and elsewhere have tried to win by running up the score in cities. That strategy helped deliver Georgia to Biden in 2020, but it has limits. Even when it works—and it has sputtered in Charlotte, as Politico’s Michael Kruse writes—it offers a single, narrow path to victory. It also all but relinquishes many more local races, helping Republicans win a supermajority in the state legislature, despite a Democratic governor. “The idea that we can keep squeezing more and more votes out of Raleigh and Charlotte—I wanted to squeeze the turnip as much as you can, but I’m just worried that that doesn’t get” enough votes, McCorkle told me.

So why now? Countrypolitan counties aren’t what they used to be. North Carolina’s population is becoming more racially diverse, and about half of the adult population was born out of state. Many of those newcomers have landed in places like Gaston, Cabarrus, and Union Counties, all countrypolitan counties outside Charlotte. Movement within the state is important too. As cities like Charlotte grow and sprawl outward, younger, more liberal people are moving with them.

(One telltale sign of young liberals’ arrival: luxury loft apartments in a refurbished Gastonia textile mill, the site of labor strife in 1929 that led to the deaths of a labor organizer and the local police chief. Perhaps the only thing the mill’s old and new denizens share is a likelihood of voting Democratic.)

Four years ago, I wrote about Union County and its county seat, Monroe, hometown of the late Senator Jesse Helms. The epicenter of change in Union County might be East Frank Superette, a hipster deli and bottle shop I visited at the time. More recently, the restaurant has been embroiled in a legal fight stemming from drag shows it hosted. Speaking on the way to an Obama rally for Harris last week, Carley Englander, one of East Frank’s owners, attributed that to cultural backlash.

“We created a place that people were able to come and just see that it’s not just white, cis humans living in this town,” Englander told me. “It was a party at the store when Harris stepped up to run. When Biden won, when Trump got indicted, when all these things happened, all of a sudden people gather at the store and they kind of party, because they’re in a safe place where they can celebrate something that they’re happy about.”

Back in 2020, the process of change was already apparent, and walking through downtown Monroe this month, I saw signs that it had accelerated. I passed a cat café, an upscale head shop, and a hip coffee shop—exposed brick, subway tile, Kendrick Lamar–themed artwork—that had all opened in the past year and a half. But nearly as soon as I passed the Monroe city limits, the landscape changed to small farms, many with Trump yard signs.

Not everyone who is moving to these counties is liberal, though. North Carolina has also attracted people from northern states drawn by economic opportunities, better weather, lower taxes, and, yes, a more conservative lifestyle. They don’t want to live in rural areas, but they’re also not interested in living in deep-blue cities, so they land in countrypolitan counties. They fit in with existing residents who are neither wealthy country-club Republicans nor, for the most part, evangelicals, but who are conservatives.

Even so, some of these more conservative voters—generally white, college-educated, and better off—could swing Democrat, or at least that’s what the Democrats hope. In every election since Trump’s victory in 2016, Democrats have made gains among traditionally Republican residents of suburbs—sometimes offsetting the GOP’s advances among working-class voters. Now the Harris campaign is making a push for them too or, failing that, hoping they stay home and don’t vote for Trump.

“There are a wide range of voters in North Carolina who maybe aren’t dyed-in-the-wool liberals but do not want—and in many cases reject—the kind of extreme politics Donald Trump represents,” Dan Kanninen, Harris’s battleground-state director, told me.

The Republican primary fueled Democratic hopes of winning these voters. Although Trump won the nomination, Nikki Haley won a substantial portion of the vote in presidential primaries, even after dropping out of the race. In North Carolina, she won nearly a quarter of the GOP primary vote, including 25.2 percent in Union County, 24.1 percent in Cabarrus County, and 21.1 percent in Gaston County. If only a small portion of North Carolina Haley voters defect to Harris, it could swing the race.

A polling place in downtown Gastonia (Mike Belleme for The Atlantic)

Michael Tucker, who lives in Gastonia, is at the top of that list. A former member of the county GOP board in Charlotte’s Mecklenburg County, he moved farther out seeking affordable housing. His politics have moved too. He’d supported Trump in the past but backed Haley in the 2024 primary. Now he’s a leader of Republicans for Harris.

[Read: Trump’s fate rests on countrypolitan counties]

“Seeing his treatment of Nikki Haley, the treatment of those of us who voted for Nikki Haley, it really just sends a resounding You are not welcome in the Republican Party,” he told me. “There’s a lot of Republican women who are appalled by the felonies, by the adultery, by the misogyny, by his lack of compassion towards women and women’s issues,” he said, adding that “soccer dads” were edging away from Trump for the same reasons.

Some polls suggest a wider pattern of what Tucker has seen up close. A national survey released earlier this month by the Democratic firm Blueprint found that only 45 percent of Haley voters were committed to backing Trump, while 36 percent backed Harris.

Potential voters are not the same as actual voters, though, which is why Andy Beshear was in town to encourage canvassers to knock on doors. Brown, the Gaston County Democratic Party chair, told me he hoped Democrats might be able to hit 41 or 42 percent of the vote there this year, which would be the highest level since Jimmy Carter in 1980. If Harris can do that, she’ll probably be inaugurated on January 20, but it won’t be easy. A few days after I visited, a Harris sign outside the field office was ripped down—for the second time. Gaston County is still a tough place to be a Democrat.

The Worst of Crypto Is Yet to Come

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2024 › 10 › crypto-lobbying-trump-harris › 680445

Cryptocurrency has been declared dead so many times that its supposed demise is a running joke within the industry. According to the website 99Bitcoins, the obituary of crypto’s flagship token has been written at least 477 times since 2010. A round of eulogies occurred last year, after several crypto-trading giants, including FTX, collapsed, and the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a barrage of lawsuits against major blockchain companies. “Crypto is dead in America,” said the tech investor Chamath Palihapitiya on the All-In podcast in April 2023. Publications including The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic wondered if the technology was, once again, kaput.

So we shouldn’t be surprised that crypto is back. What’s shocking is just how back it is. The total market capitalization of crypto assets this year has been within striking distance of its all-time highs in 2021. The crypto sector has been the biggest political donor in the current election cycle, surpassing even the fossil-fuel industry, with contributions flowing to candidates from both parties. In May, the House of Representatives passed a bill that included many of the policy demands of crypto lobbyists, while the Senate rolled back guidelines by the SEC designed to protect consumers of cryptocurrencies. And both presidential candidates have flirted with crypto enough that, no matter who wins in November, the market could be on the brink of a deregulation-fueled bonanza.

How did crypto bounce back so fast? Part of the answer is pure smashmouth politics: The industry started spending gobs of money—at least $130 million to date—to elbow its way into this year’s congressional races. It has also refined its sales pitch. Since the FTX meltdown, the industry has been making efforts to distance itself from the Sam Bankman-Fried school of charm. Gone are the mussed hair and grandiose talk of altruism and saving humanity. In are the MBAs and lawyers, the Ivy Leaguers who know how to speak the language of Washington persuasion. The industry’s message now: Make crypto normal. Regulate us, please. All we want is to know the rules of the road. They highlight the most mundane, inoffensive applications of crypto, while condemning the scammers who tarnish the industry’s reputation and avoiding mention of the “degens,” or degenerate gamblers, who represent much of crypto’s actual demand.

[Annie Lowrey: When the Bitcoin scammers came for me]

But the truth is that the scammers are only getting bolder, finding new creative ways to rip off retail investors. Should the crypto lobby get its way, the new regulatory regime will clear a path not just for the industry’s “respectable” wing but also for the wildcatters and criminals. If you thought crypto was a problem before, you should be alarmed. The worst is likely yet to come.

The crypto industry insists that its goal—the reason it’s spending ungodly sums of money to sway elections—is to be boring. Nothing to see here. Crypto companies say they merely seek “regulatory clarity.”

This phrase is, to be generous, a sleight of hand. Companies don’t just want clarity; they want a particular set of rules. Currently, crypto exists in a state of regulatory limbo. The SEC says that most crypto assets are securities, defined as an “investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others.” The paradigmatic case is a share of stock in a publicly traded company. Securities are subject to a lot of rules: You can only trade them through a registered exchange, and issuers have to disclose a bunch of information about the underlying companies. That way, investors can make informed decisions about which securities to buy and which to avoid.

If digital assets are indeed securities—a position that some federal judges have accepted, at least one judge has questioned, and is currently being tested in a number of ongoing enforcement cases—then crypto operations would have to behave like other Wall Street institutions. Companies like Coinbase, for example, would need to separate their brokerage services—that is, helping their customers buy and sell tokens—from their exchange services. (This is one aspect of the SEC’s pending lawsuit against Coinbase.) Plus, crypto operations could no longer launch overnight—not legally, at least. They’d have to register with the SEC and issue thorough disclosure documents before allowing the public to invest, a burdensome and costly process that would weed out a huge share of dodgy crypto schemes with no sound business model.

The main plank of crypto’s bid for normalcy is that tokens should be considered commodities, not securities. What could be more boring than a commodity? Wheat, orange juice, coffee beans, livestock: Commodities are interchangeable, and you can trade them with other people directly. The crypto lobby says tokens are clearly commodities, since they’re fungible like bags of corn and do more than just go up and down in price. For example, users can spend tokens as “gas” to interact with a blockchain or participate in the governance and upkeep of the blockchain; they don’t merely rely on “the efforts of others.” (The SEC agrees that bitcoin is a commodity, since unlike almost every other crypto asset it has no central issuer.)

Classifying cryptocurrencies as commodities would bring them under the purview of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, rather than the SEC. The CFTC has been friendlier to crypto, going so far as to advocate for controversial deregulatory measures pushed by FTX. It’s also much smaller, with roughly one-sixth the budget and staff. With the CFTC in charge, the SEC’s long list of pending cases would disappear, and we’d probably see a lot fewer prosecutions of crypto companies.

Consumer advocates argue that exempting crypto from securities laws would make it easier for Americans to buy risky digital assets: Not only would exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken be likely to offer fringier coins—they’d be harmless commodities, after all—institutional investors like pension funds might see the new rules as a stamp of approval to dive into crypto. Hilary J. Allen, a law professor at American University who studies financial regulation, told me that designating cryptocurrencies as commodities would create a loophole that non-crypto companies could exploit. “Slap a blockchain on it,” she said, “and you too can be free from securities regulation.” Dennis Kelleher, the CEO of the nonprofit Better Markets, told me the real reason the crypto industry doesn’t want tokens to be classified as securities is that disclosure rules would expose them as financially dangerous. “If you had to fully and truthfully disclose the risks associated with crypto, the people who would engage in crypto would be near none,” he said.   

The industry deflects such arguments by downplaying its chaotic history and focusing on its more mundane use cases: stablecoins, for example, which are designed to maintain a fixed value and can be used for instantaneous peer-to-peer transactions, particularly cross-border remittances, and as a hedge against inflation. (Argentina has seen growing adoption lately.) Or, even more boring, “decentralized physical infrastructure networks,” or DePIN, which employ blockchain technology to reward users for providing public resources such as data storage or Wi-Fi.

But the rules the industry is pushing would also juice some of crypto’s most degenerate schemes. The breakout hits of 2024 are fundamentally just new ways to gamble. Polymarket, the platform where wagers are made exclusively with crypto, has taken off this year thanks to interest in betting on the election. “Tap-to-earn” games such as Hamster Kombat have surged in popularity, luring users with rewards in the form of tokens. The apotheosis of speculative crypto insanity, though, is the website Pump.fun. On Pump.fun, anyone can create a memecoin instantly—all you need to do is select a name and an image—and the site creates a market where people can buy and sell it. One recent top token was named after the internet-famous baby hippo Moo Deng. Inevitably, creators are going to absurd lengths to promote their tokens: One guy posted a photo of himself apparently using meth. Another suffered burns after shooting fireworks at himself during a livestream.

The industry doesn’t foreground these casino-like use cases, but it implicitly blesses them. Speculation is normal, advocates say. In fact, it’s what drives innovation in the first place. “Speculation, taking risks—that’s what fuels the economy,” Kristin Smith, CEO of the Blockchain Association, told me. Sheila Warren, CEO of the Crypto Council for Innovation, says that allowing people to buy and sell tokens isn’t about whether crypto is good or bad. “I don’t necessarily know that it’s net positive or negative,” she told me. “I think it’s about the ability of people to determine what they want to do with their own money.”

The biggest degen of all is on the ballot. Donald Trump clearly has no idea what a blockchain is, but he understands that it’s related to money, which seems to be enough. He has declared himself “the crypto president.” In July, speaking at a bitcoin conference in Nashville, he pledged to make the United States “the crypto capital of the planet” and called crypto “the steel industry of a hundred years ago.” In September, he stopped by a bitcoin-themed bar in New York City and spent $950 worth of bitcoin on a round of burgers and Diet Cokes. Trump has also announced his involvement in a new crypto platform called World Liberty Financial. While the details of the project are hazy, it would apparently offer a stablecoin. (The project’s launch last week saw low demand and extended outages.)

[Read: The Trump sons really love crypto]

The industry is salivating at the prospect of a Trump win. Trump has said he would fire SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, create a “strategic national bitcoin stockpile,” and free the American cybercriminal and crypto hero Ross Ulbricht from prison. Any Trump-affiliated crypto project, such as World Liberty Financial, would operate in a legal gray area unless Congress passed the new regulatory regime the industry is asking for. In other words, he has skin in the game. “It’s clear Trump would be very positive for crypto,” Smith, the Blockchain Association CEO, said.

How a Kamala Harris administration would regulate the technology is less clear, but her recent statements have given crypto fans hope. In September, she promised to help grow “innovative technologies” including “digital assets.” Then she announced that she would support regulations that enable “Black men who hold digital assets to benefit from financial innovation” while keeping those investors “protected”—a strange and careful framing that implicitly acknowledged how many Black men have lost money on crypto. These comments could just be campaign rhetoric meant to fend off attacks by the crypto lobby. But they show that Harris is listening to the industry’s arguments, particularly those couched in the language of opportunity and equity. Harris is, if nothing else, sensitive to the direction of political winds. If a newly crypto-friendly Congress were to pass the industry’s desired legislation in a bipartisan way, a President Harris might feel great pressure to sign it.

And even if Trump and Harris do nothing to help crypto, the technology has by now proved its indestructibility. As if to drive home the point, 99Bitcoin’s obituary tracker seems to have dropped off this year. The last entry is from April. I messaged the site’s owner to ask if he was still updating it. He didn’t respond.

What Election Integrity Really Means

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2024 › 10 › election-integrity-denial-efforts › 680454

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

The phrase election integrity sounds noble on its face. But in recent years, election deniers have used it to lay the groundwork for challenging the results of the 2024 election.

A few months after Donald Trump took office in 2017, he signed an executive order establishing the “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.” The Brennan Center for Justice wrote at the time that “there is strong reason to suspect this Commission is not a legitimate attempt to study elections, but is rather a tool for justifying discredited claims of widespread voter fraud and promoting vote suppression legislation.” That proved prescient. Although there is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2016 or 2020 elections—or in any other recent elections, for that matter—Trump and his allies have fomented the narrative that such interference is a real problem in America, employing it in the illegal attempt to overturn the 2020 election and their reported plans to claim that the 2024 race is rigged.

As part of this strategy, right-wing activists and lawyers have organized initiatives under the auspices of election integrity, warping the meaning of those words to sow distrust. Through her Election Integrity Network, the right-wing activist Cleta Mitchell has been recruiting people—including election deniers who will likely continue to promote disinformation and conspiracy theories—to become poll workers and monitors, in an effort that was reportedly coordinated with members of the Republican National Committee. Poll watching in itself is a timeworn American practice, although it has been misused in the past; now, however, election-denial groups are sending participants to polling places under the presumption that fraud is taking place.

More recently, Elon Musk—in addition to his own brazen efforts to get Trump reelected—has invited X users to report activity they see as suspicious through an “Election Integrity Community” feed, an effort almost certain to trigger a flood of misinformation on the platform. In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Election Integrity Unit has gone to great lengths to seek evidence of fraud; in one case, nine armed officers reportedly appeared with a search warrant at the door of a woman who had been working with a Latino civil-rights organization to help veterans and seniors register to vote.

The RNC, especially under the influence of its co-chair Lara Trump, has taken up “election integrity” as an explicit priority: As she said at a GOP event over the summer, “we are pulling out all the stops, and we are so laser-focused on election integrity.” Her team created an election-integrity program earlier this year and hired Christina Bobb, who was later indicted for efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Arizona (she has denied wrongdoing), as its lead election-integrity lawyer. As The New Yorker reported earlier this month, the RNC plans to staff a “war room” with attorneys operating an “election-integrity hotline” on Election Day. Such initiatives have helped inject doubt into a legitimate process. Despite the clear lack of evidence to suggest fraud is likely in this election, nearly 60 percent of Americans already say they’re concerned or very concerned about it, according to a recent NPR/PBS News/Marist poll; 88 percent of Trump supporters said they were concerned about fraud (compared with about 30 percent of Kamala Harris supporters).

The “consistent, disciplined, repetitive use” of the term election integrity in this new context is “designed to confuse the public,” Alice Clapman, a senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights Program, told me. A sad irony, she added, is that those who use this framing have done so to push for restrictions that actually suppress voting, including strict voter-ID laws and limitations on early ballots, or to threaten the existence of initiatives to ensure fair voting. Many of the same activists promoting “election integrity,” including Cleta Mitchell, organized a misinformation campaign to undermine a bipartisan state-led initiative called the Electronic Registration Information Center, which was created in 2012 to ensure that voter rolls were accurate. Multiple states eventually left the compact.

The term election integrity isn’t entirely new—Google Trends data suggest that its usage has bubbled up around election years in recent decades. But its prominence has exploded since 2020, and the strong associations with election denial in recent years means that other groups have backed away from it. “Like so much charged language in American politics, when one side really seizes on a term and uses it in a loaded way,” it becomes “a partisan term,” Clapman told me. Now groups unaffiliated with the right are turning to more neutral language such as voter protection and voter security to refer to their efforts to ensure free elections.

Election deniers are chipping away at Americans’ shared understanding of reality. And as my colleague Ali Breland wrote yesterday, violent rhetoric and even political violence in connection with the election have already begun. This month so far, a man has punched a poll worker after being asked to remove his MAGA hat, and hundreds of ballots have been destroyed in fires on the West Coast. Election officials are bracing for targeted attacks in the coming days—and some have already received threats. If Trump loses, the right will be poised—under the guise of “election integrity”—to interfere further with the norms of American democracy.

Related:

The swing states are in good hands. The next “Stop the Steal” movement is here.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Vann R. Newkirk II on solidarity and Gaza The closing case against Trump How the Trump resistance gave up

Today’s News

Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser, was released from federal prison after completing his four-month sentence for being found in contempt of Congress. Vice President Kamala Harris's speech tonight—which she says will be her campaign’s closing argument—will be delivered from the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., the same location where Trump spoke on January 6, 2021. Israel’s Parliament passed two laws yesterday that include provisions banning UNRWA, a UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees, from operating in the country. Israel has accused several members of UNRWA, which distributes the majority of aid in Gaza, of participating in the Hamas attack on October 7.

More From The Atlantic

The end of Francis Fukuyama “Dear James”: My colleague repeats herself constantly. Revenge voting is a mistake, Gal Beckerman argues. The people who don’t read political news Under the spell of the crowd

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Michael Laughlin / AP

The Worst Statue in the History of Sports

By Ross Andersen

Earlier this year, the Lakers unveiled a Kobe Bryant statue with oddly stretched proportions and a too-angular face. It made Bryant look like a second-rate Terminator villain, and to add insult to injury, the inscription at its base was marred by misspellings. In 2017, fans of Cristiano Ronaldo were so aghast at a sculptor’s cartoonish bust of the legendary footballer that they hounded him into making a new one.

It gives me no pleasure—and, in fact, considerable pain—to report that Dwyane Wade’s statue may be the worst of them all.

Read the full article.

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Matthieu Rondel / AFP / Getty

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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My Colleague Repeats Herself Constantly

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › culture › archive › 2024 › 10 › dear-james-my-colleague-repeats-herself-constantly › 680431

Editor’s Note: Every Tuesday, James Parker tackles a reader’s existential worry. He wants to hear about what’s ailing, torturing, or nagging you. Submit your lifelong or in-the-moment problems to dearjames@theatlantic.com.

Don’t want to miss a single column? Sign up to get “Dear James” in your inbox.

Dear James,

I find myself growing irritable at one thing in my life, and one thing alone.

I work with an older woman who repeats herself constantly. She has the same three jokes and says them daily, and expects us all to laugh and/or respond as if we haven’t heard them before. I notice my younger colleagues nodding and smiling. I am less genteel. In fact, I seethe at my desk, rolling my eyes so far back in my head, I fear they may get stuck. It creates a rage in me that is truly inexplicable.

I’d like to think a younger me would just ignore it and laugh on cue, but current me has considered quitting this great job over not being able to handle something so insanely trivial.

I’m sure you're thinking, “Well, if that’s the worst thing in your life, you’re doing okay.” But I do have real things to worry about; they don’t seem to affect me like this. It’s just this one stupid thing.

Does the irritability of minor annoyances worsen with age? I thought that with age came wisdom. One would think I would be wise enough to not let this rattle me to my core so much. I’ve truly considered that I might be going insane.

Dear Reader,

Oooooh—I feel it. The dreadful imposition of another’s sensibility; the silent rancor of the oppressed; the sensation, as you listen to this poor lady and her jokes, that your time, your life, your essence is being not just wasted but forced slowly backwards through your veins. I say “poor lady,” but she’s also kind of an unwitting tyrant, isn’t she? A helpless autocrat in the workplace. Her attempts at humor, horribly renewed each morning, have become a reign of terror.

As for age bringing wisdom, I dunno. Age brings little rashes in awkward places. Age brings the end of patience. I’m going to quote an expert in this field: myself. “Patience, one discovers, is not a virtue but a quantity. Like oil in the car or milk in the fridge. Not limitless and oceanic, but quite finite. I ran out years ago. All I have now is stamina. I can endure. Radiant with suppressed exasperation, I can hang in there.”

But—clearly—you have hung in there too long. You have endured enough. It’s time to sort this out, before you scream, quit, or brain this person with a stapler.

First stop: the heart. Your heart. Which can be reached, in this case, via the imagination. Make an imaginative effort with this woman. To me, she sounds lonely, or stuck. What in her life, and in her inner life, has so drastically narrowed her awareness? How did she get stranded with this routine, with these three terrible jokes? We never know—unless we know—what other people are going through, what it costs them to just keep showing up, in however reduced a form. I try to keep in mind these lines from Franz Wright: “Someone in Hell is sitting beside you on the train. / Somebody burning unnoticed walks past in the street.”

Second: confrontation. Nothing succeeds like direct action. I don’t mean yelling, or a terrible scene. I mean something like (said with as much gentleness and good humor as you can muster—and you’ll have to dig deep): “You know what? I’ve heard that one, Gloria.” You may be amazed at the result. Think of it as a service to you both: a double emancipation.

Within earshot of the chimes of freedom,
James

Dear James,

I’ve had insomnia my whole life. Sleep and I are in an abusive relationship. I’ve had all the tests: EEGs tell me I have too much REM. I’ve done all the things: CBT-I, Ambien, benzos, Benadryl, melatonin, in various combinations. I sometimes fall asleep well and then wake up sweating, feeling sick about dreams about babies hatching from eggs in a creek behind a retired paint factory, or pulling dozens of mummified rats out of my floorboards and getting arrested for mailing them to Donald Trump, or driving a flying school bus full of children through the Bermuda Triangle. Other times, I feel like I’m almost asleep all night but not quite. A lot of the time while I’m awake in the night, I’m having existential dread. It doesn’t help that I studied existentialism and sleep disorders between undergrad and grad school. I feel like no one has told me anything new; I know all the things, and I know I’m doomed. Sometimes I try to imagine myself happy, like, This is good for me, or I’m better at this than anyone else, so ha! Joke’s on you, but how long can I delude myself? Anyway, if you have anything new for me that I haven’t tried yet, I’d love to hear it.

Dear Reader,

The worst thing about insomnia, for me, is the sense of overexposure to my own brain. I even wrote half a poem about it:

Prone, alone, dry as a bone,
scratching around for the sleep hormone,
condemned to my own society—
too much of me, too much of me!
My Self, deprived of oblivion’s dose,
is the bloke on the bus who sits too close,
who breathes too loud, who is too warm,
who fills his neighbor with thoughts of harm.

But your brain is much more interesting than mine. Look at all this imagery! I’m actually rather jealous of your visions and reveries and between-states. Not for you, the tedious binary of being awake/being asleep. You’re also a vivid writer, so I recommend plunging into the half realm, the hypnagogia, and making it your own. Write it up! For an idea of how to proceed, read Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater: De Quincey was very good on the teemingness and fathomlessness of the drifting mind. And listen to Aphex Twin. (Selected Ambient Works, Volume II would be the place to start.)

Sweet dreams,
James

By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it in part or in full, and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.

Why Many Black Americans Feel Solidarity With Palestinians

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2024 › 10 › black-americans-solidarity-gaza › 680433

This story seems to be about:

In April 1952, W. E. B. Du Bois stepped onto the stage of the ballroom of the Hotel Diplomat in Midtown Manhattan. His beard was grizzled and he was still working out how to lecture through new dentures. In a word, he was old. During his long life, he’d witnessed the dawn of Jim Crow and the glow of the first atom bombs; the slaughter of the Comanche and the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States. Wars had broken and reshaped Du Bois’s world, and he had recently been one of the most prominent victims of the Red Scare, ordered to surrender his passport because of his Communist organizing. Yet here he was, preparing to deliver new insight and optimism to the audience before him.

“I have seen something of human upheaval in this world,” he told the crowd, recalling “the scream and shots of a race riot in Atlanta” and “the marching of the Ku Klux Klan.” But his recent travels had taken him to a place that had shaken him: the Warsaw Ghetto. The Nazis had razed the ghetto in 1943, slaughtering more than 50,000 people on the night before Passover to crush a rebellion by the Polish Jews being held captive there. When Du Bois got there, in 1949, the city was still being rebuilt. Speaking at the behest of Jewish Life magazine—now Jewish Currents—Du Bois said the visit had helped him reconceive the “Negro problem” as part of a larger constellation of global struggles against oppression. He had been cured of a “certain social provincialism” and sought a way for “both these groups and others to reassess and reformulate the problems of our day, whose solution belongs to no one group.” For Du Bois, the path forward was simple: solidarity.

Du Bois’s vision has been deeply influential in the decades since he delivered his “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto” speech. Similar sentiments moved Jewish students to take buses to the Mississippi Delta in the summer of 1964, and brought both Martin Luther King Jr. and Muhammad Ali to oppose the Vietnam War. Solidarity spurred students and people of color to call for American divestment from apartheid South Africa in the 1980s, and has more recently brought Black activists to Standing Rock. The notion of global minorities and underclasses sharing common cause was provocative in 1952, but is now a constant in progressive circles, and has a special force among mainstream Black American institutions and politics, regardless of ideology.

But the past year has thrown Du Bois’s prescription into crisis. Most Americans expressed horror and sympathy for the Israeli victims of Hamas’s terrorist attack on October 7, the deadliest assault on Jews since the Holocaust. Since then, Israel’s counterassault against Hamas in Gaza has killed thousands of civilians and caused a dire humanitarian crisis, all with the backing of the United States. As about 100 hostages still languish in captivity, the horror and sympathy remain. But the continued violence in Gaza has strengthened, among many, and especially among many Black observers, another feeling: solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Many of the resulting protests against Israel’s conduct, and statements of empathy for Palestinians, have been met with censorship by universities and state governments, and with derision and dismissal by the media. This has been particularly true for expressions of solidarity that are based on the Black experience in America, which have often been disparaged as unsophisticated and inauthentic. “The identification of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with America’s race problem was hardly made in America,” the historian Gil Troy argued in Tablet magazine. “It is a recent foreign import,” air-dropped onto a gullible populace.

Of course, the American South is not the Middle East, and there are limits to every comparison. But it is not simplistic or facile to, while acknowledging differences, also see structural similarities over time and space, or to believe that, in a world connected by language, finance, and technology, our systems and ways of being are related. The Black experience has been usefully analogized to the Jewish struggle over the years, and we have clear documentary evidence of the ways that systems of anti-Black and anti-Semitic oppression have been borrowed and translated from one to the other. To claim kinship between Black and Palestinian peoples is merely to apply the same logic. Solidarity means recognizing the parallels and shared humanity among the three groups, and working to create a world that does so as well.

But efforts to create that world are now in danger of being snuffed out. The dehumanization and marginalization of Palestinians in American discourse and media, as well as denunciations of the use of concepts such as “intersectionality” and “decolonization” in relation to Israel, among even liberal commentators, have dovetailed neatly with the ongoing conservative backlash against “wokeness” and Black history. All the while, anti-Semitism is worsening in America and beyond. The fate of multiracial organizing and democracy in America is inextricably bound up with the fates of people halfway around the world.

Can solidarity survive the onslaught in Gaza?

Left: A draft of W. E. B. Du Bois’s speech “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto” from April 1952. Right: Du Bois (Special Collections and University Archives / University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture).

First, some words about that onslaught. Israel responded to Hamas’s brutal incursion, in which assailants killed more than 1,200 Israeli citizens and captured hundreds as hostages, with an offensive that has killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, an estimate from the Gaza Health Ministry. (Hamas runs the ministry, but the World Health Organization and the United Nations consider its numbers generally reliable.) As of April, nearly 23,000 of those fatalities were identifiable by names and identification numbers issued by Israel. According to some experts, if people who die from disease or injury, as well as those found buried in rubble, are included, the true toll could be much higher. War is war, and the great, unavoidable tragedy of war is civilian death. But unavoidable is not synonymous with purposeful.

The Israeli campaign has, as a matter of strategy, regularly and knowingly subjected Palestinian civilians to violence. The Israel Defense Forces have targeted Gazan health-care facilities as civilians were being treated and sheltering there, claiming that militants use the facilities and that hostages were held in them (an explanation that the U.S. State Department has backed up as credible). Israeli air strikes have devastated Palestinian refugee camps, including a strike in Rafah in May that killed dozens of civilians along with two top Hamas commanders.

The UN and the U.S. Agency for International Development have both concluded that Israel blocked shipments of food aid to Gaza, a finding that under both U.S. and international law should make continued weapons shipments to Israel illegal. (The Biden administration rejected the finding, but has since written a letter demanding that Israeli officials improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza within 30 days.) The IDF has struck the same UN-backed school building five times, saying it was targeting militants. According to the nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 129 Palestinian and Lebanese journalists and media workers have been killed, making this the deadliest period for journalists since the group began keeping records in 1992. Last month, Israel shipped 88 unidentified Palestinian bodies back to Gaza in the back of a truck. And earlier this month, the United States launched an investigation of allegations of widespread sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees, months after video depicting an alleged sexual assault at the Sde Teiman detention camp leaked on social media.

Those who survive are facing the depths of deprivation. Almost 2 million people in Gaza are hungry or starving. For pregnant women, stress and terror are contributing to a spike in preterm births, and doctors describe seeing stillbirths, newborn deaths, and malnourished infants. Deteriorating public-health conditions have resulted in a wave of contagious skin diseases among children, and what the UN calls a “frightening increase” in Hepatitis A infections. The WHO is rushing to vaccinate Palestinians against polio after Gaza’s first confirmed case in a quarter century. This is a human catastrophe, documented and verified over the past year by the United States and other countries, the international diplomatic and legal community, nongovernmental organizations, reputable news outlets, and, not least, Palestinians themselves.

A recent poll by The Economist and YouGov shows a steady drop in American sympathy toward Israel, and a corresponding rise in sympathy toward Palestinians; earlier polls have shown that a majority of Americans disapprove of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, and want America to send humanitarian aid to Gaza in lieu of more weapons to Israel. Yet one demographic group that broke early in this direction was Black Americans. In a New York Times/Siena College poll taken in December 2023, Black respondents already overwhelmingly supported an immediate cease-fire, and were much less likely than white respondents to endorse any action that endangered more civilians. Altogether, Black respondents were more likely to sympathize with Palestinians than with Israel, and more likely than not to believe that Israel was not “seriously interested in a peaceful solution.” In a June CBS News poll, nearly half of Black respondents said they wanted the U.S. to encourage Israel to completely stop its military actions in Gaza, while only 34 percent of white respondents did.

These sentiments aren’t limited to young activists and leftists. Even moderate and legacy Black institutions have expressed them. In June, the NAACP called on the Biden administration to stop shipping weapons to Israel, arguing that the president “must be willing to pull the levers of power when appropriate to advance liberation for all.” In February, the Council of Bishops, the leadership branch of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, called for an end to American support for Israel and an immediate cease-fire. Noting both the connection of Black folks to Palestinians and the historical linkages between the Black and Jewish plights—and the deep theological affinity of Black-liberation thought with the story of the ancient Jews—the AME statement said that “the cycle of violence between historically wounded peoples will not be dissolved by the creation of more wounds or through weapons of war.” The statement also accused the United States of “supporting this mass genocide.”

In January, more than a thousand Black pastors—representing congregations totaling hundreds of thousands of mostly working-class Black people—urged President Joe Biden to push for a cease-fire. The leaders made a pragmatic case: They feared that Black voters, typically reliable backers of the Democratic Party (and Biden in particular), might not show up to the polls in November if the deaths in Gaza continued. But they also made a moral argument based in solidarity: “We see them as a part of us,” the Reverend Cynthia Hale of Ray of Hope Christian Church in Decatur, Georgia, told The New York Times. “They are oppressed people. We are oppressed people.”

This sympathy toward Palestinians is shared widely across Black communities—by Black activists, commentators, clergy, and white- and blue-collar professionals of all age groups. Identification with the Palestinian cause stretches back well before the current conflict, showing up in polls as early as the 1970s. This solidarity is based on a number of factors, but the main one is obvious: Black people see what is happening to Palestinians, and many feel the tug of the familiar in their heart.

Attempts like Hale’s to analogize the experiences of Black people with those of Palestinians have often been met with a simple insistence that they are wrong; that they have confused things; that relations between Palestinians and Israelis are too complex to allow any comparison. In 1979, at the United Nations, the chief Israeli delegate, Yehuda Blum, chided leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil-rights organization founded by Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph David Abernathy, for calling for a Palestinian homeland. “Understandably, they are less knowledgeable about the Middle East conflict than other parties,” Blum said.

In 2020, during the height of America’s purported “racial reckoning,” the Haaretz commentator Nave Dromi wrote that there were simply no commonalities between the struggles of Black Americans and Palestinians, claiming that Palestinians “don’t want genuine peace, in contrast to blacks in the United States, who do seek to live in peace with their American compatriots.” In 2021, in the pages of this magazine, the writer Susie Linfield said that the concept of “intersectionality” had been improperly applied to analogizing the Black and Palestinian struggles, in a way that can “occlude complex realities, negate history, prevent critical thinking, and foster juvenile simplifications.”

It is true that analogy has its limits for any political situation, and that, especially among journalists, nuance and context are crucial components of the arsenal of understanding. But often, regard for “complexity” in this particular conflict means treating its history as one hermetically sealed off from the rest of human experience, which in turn short-circuits any attempt to make common cause with Palestinians.

The short-circuiting has only accelerated since October 7. Shortly after Hamas’s attack, Rabbi Mark H. Levin wrote in The Kansas City Star that the argument that Black Americans and Palestinians have parallel experiences is “a popular but false analogy.” According to Alexis Grenell in The Nation, “When outsiders collapse the Palestinian cause into, say, the struggle for Black Lives or LGBTQ rights—while framing that position as virtuous because it’s ‘simple’—it’s not only wrong but counterproductive.”

Behind these objections is, perhaps, the very real fear of anti-Semitism—of Jews facing a unique scrutiny born not of compassion, but of hate. And it is indisputably the case that such singling-out does animate odious worldviews, that Hamas has justified its actions with anti-Semitism, and that the group has committed brutal and unspeakable acts. But instead of isolating Jews, solidarity actually situates the state of Israel within a much larger story, one in which brutality is all too common. And standing with oppressed people—including Palestinians, many of whom dream of a future without Hamas—does not require them to be universally righteous; this would in itself be a unique scrutiny.

Still, the fear of anti-Semitism has empowered those who would quell expressions of solidarity, and who were hostile to the idea long before October 7. In the past year, the insistence on Palestinian-Israeli relations as an inscrutable cipher, and the rejection of attempts to analogize the Black and Palestinian situations, have contributed to a broader aversion to multiracial organizing. In November 2023, the Free Press’s Bari Weiss made this argument explicit in an essay about college campuses: DEI efforts, she argued, were tantamount to “arrogating power to a movement that threatens not just Jews—but America itself.”

Since the 1960s, student protesters have often borrowed from the logic and language of Black protest, and many left-wing organizers on campuses have compared the Black and Palestinian experiences. During the invasion of Gaza, as universities became the locus of pro-Palestinian protest, many on both the left and the right saw the activism as proof that students’ minds had been warped by left-wing orthodoxy. Universities targeted their own protesting students with police crackdowns, canceled commencement addresses, and conspicuously revised speech and conduct codes, while politicians sought to pass laws that would ban forms of free expression, including an executive order from Texas Governor Greg Abbott that requires universities to adopt a definition of anti-Semitism that could reasonably see students expelled for criticizing Israel. Many ostensibly stalwart defenders of the First Amendment have found themselves tongue-tied.

This environment has invigorated people who were already calling for crackdowns on “wokeness.” The right-wing activist Chris Rufo used the backlash against student protests to try to oust administrators at elite universities who were too friendly toward diversity and other presumably leftist causes. Many other commentators have assailed DEI, decolonization, and critical race theory, often without taking care to define or assess how much currency in our discourse these terms actually have. The Black intellectuals who helped spin solidarity into real practice are often summoned, solely for the purpose of exorcism. All of these names and theories have been stripped of meaning and context and stewed down to a mush. The objective is not understanding or coherence, but convenience, turning solidarity into a Black bogeyman to destroy.

It should be noted that W. E. B. Du Bois was an early contributor to The Atlantic, and in 1901 risked his fledgling academic credibility to write a story for the magazine defending Reconstruction—when the magazine’s editorial leadership decried the era as a mistake. That essay became the cornerstone of Du Bois’s most famous work, The Souls of Black Folk, in which he first elucidated the concept of the “color line,” which animated his 1952 address in the Hotel Diplomat. It should also be noted that, like many other Black scholars, he saw a mirror of the Black experience under that color line in the historical plight of Europe’s Jews, and explicit links between Nazi policies and Jim Crow. As Hitler began to build the machinery of industrialized genocide, and much of Europe and white America refused Jewish refugees from Germany, historically Black colleges and universities continued to sponsor visa applications. The Black press, early and without equivocation, saw the brewing catastrophe for what it was.

In the years leading up to the Warsaw Ghetto speech, Du Bois had been an ardent Zionist who believed that the creation of a Jewish state would lend legitimacy to Pan-African projects like Liberia, which had been founded as a colonial “promised land” for formerly enslaved Black Americans. But the Liberian project did not provide the promised liberation—indeed, it subjected local people to enslavement, subjugation, and war instead, all at the hands of a colonial elite and foreign companies—and Du Bois’s reluctance to acknowledge that failure was one of his great hypocrisies.

But in his later years, Du Bois followed his own logic to a more ecumenical approach, one that viewed all subjugated peoples as part of a connected global movement. This expansive view of solidarity, as embraced by many in the Black diaspora, did not require that groups have identical struggles or historical contexts in order to create common cause. Rather, it was based on the shared experiences of oppression, dehumanization, and lack of self-determination, especially at the hands of the American empire.

In this context, many Black observers witnessed years of Palestinian suffering, subsidized by American tax dollars and arms shipments—even as Black neighborhoods and schools were deprived of investment—and concluded that something familiar was going on. Many Black intellectuals criticized Israel for its role in conflicts with its Arab neighbors in the 1950s and ’60s, and for allying with apartheid South Africa. For those who were not scholars in foreign policy, there was a constant stream of news images showing meager conditions in Palestinian refugee camps, and forced or restricted movement. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote of his own trip to the region in 2002: “I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us Black people in South Africa.”

Arguments that the conflict is too complex to compare with other global systems—to the Black experience in particular—have always rung hollow, especially given that both Jim Crow and South African apartheid were often characterized by their defenders as too singular for outsiders to comprehend. In the 1960s, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, an agency devoted to maintaining white supremacy, sent speakers across the country to deliver a set of talking points called “The Message From Mississippi.” In those remarks, the speaker would complain that “the North seemed to know all the answers to our problems without having and knowing the problem,” before explaining patiently that Jim Crow was necessary and right. But this kind of time-wasting and complexification did not stop the northerners who heeded the call to participate in Freedom Summer. They did not need advanced degrees in segregation to know that what they saw on the news was wrong.

One effect of the prominence of the war in Gaza in American media over the past year has been a belated demystification. The deluge of images of flattened buildings, dismembered bodies, and grieving families does not present a conflict that is singular or arcane, but one that is frustratingly, appallingly familiar. After the May air strike on Rafah, the videos and photos that emerged were horrific—and not the least bit “complicated.” The victims were not “human beasts,” as the Israeli general responsible for overseeing Gazan aid described Hamas militants and the Palestinian civilians who celebrated on October 7, but mothers and children, dazed and broken. They deserve the same empathy and protection as any other people, and have been denied it by a constant stream of dehumanization, including decades of rhetoric painting Palestinians as backwards, uncivilized, and incompatible with “Western” values. This is a tactic Black folks know all too well.

In November 2023, Israel’s deputy speaker of the Knesset, Nissim Vaturi, a member of the governing Likud party, shared on social media his belief that the campaign had been “too humane,” and demanded that Israel “burn Gaza now no less!” Last winter, two members of far-fight ultranationalist parties—Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is a vocal proponent of illegal settlement and annexation in the West Bank, and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a leader in the Jewish-supremacist movement—called for the expulsion of all of the residents of Gaza. Shortly after the Rafah strike, Nikki Haley, the former Republican candidate for president, visited an artillery post in Israel and wrote Finish Them on an artillery shell. Instigated by extremist leaders and unfettered by the law, Israeli settlers in the West Bank have engaged in a campaign of ruthless violence and dispossession against Palestinian residents, even as the Israeli military has ramped up operations there that have killed hundreds of Palestinians.

Given all this, when Black folks who were raised on stories of lynchings and the threat of obliteration—stories of the Tulsa Massacre, of the quelling of Nat Turner’s Rebellion, of the Red Summer—look at Gaza, how could they not see something they recognize?

Rafah, May 5, 2024 (Hatem Khaled / Reuters)

When Du Bois gave his 1952 speech, Israel was a new state with an uncertain future. The Holocaust was not yet a matter of memory but a matter of present urgency, and across Europe, Jewish refugees still made temporary homes in displaced-persons camps. Du Bois had wept for victims of lynchings in the United States, and his grief was naturally extended to Jews who had lost family members, and who feared mightily about their ability to exist on this Earth as a people.

The Holocaust is more distant in time now, but not much more distant than Jim Crow, which is to say that it is living history, and that the staggering pain of genocide—and the attendant anxiety about future erasure—remains an essential part of how those of us seeking to build a global moral community should understand the world. That requires understanding the shock and profound loss of the global Jewish community on October 7. Solidarity demands that right-minded global citizens reckon with the stubborn persistence of anti-Semitism in the world, and its resurgence in the past few decades.

Solidarity does not demand, however, that they endorse another massacre, or the continued subjugation of another people. In fact, it demands the opposite. “A truly intersectional approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Susie Linfield wrote, “would, of necessity, incorporate the Jewish people’s torturous history of expulsion, pariahdom, statelessness, and genocide.” This is undeniably true, and would then logically make an imperative of standing in solidarity with any group facing such circumstances.

The widespread backlash against that imperative is perhaps the chill in the air preceding the storm of the next four years, auguring a world of warring tribes, of us versus them. Trumpism, the ideology that backs the most authoritarian crackdowns on student protests and free speech, is hostile to Jews and Palestinians, and positions solidarity as the main enemy to a state built purely on the pursuit of self-interest. Already, this is a world where Palestinians are marginalized in the media and in policy, and one where neo-Nazis are emboldened and anti-Semitism continues to rise. Americans have always believed themselves to be at the moral center of the world, and here they have a case. The militarism and dehumanization endorsed by so many Americans are important exports, as are the American armaments that have killed thousands of Palestinian children before they could experience the wonder of learning to ride a bicycle.

This may all sound like an anti-war argument in general, and it is. Reeling from the horrors of the World Wars and the atomic age, Du Bois grew preoccupied with finding a solution to war itself. He came to understand that domestic systems of oppression and global wars shared a common root of systematized dehumanization, manufactured by the global color line. For Du Bois, true peace was the only way forward, and it required “extend[ing] the democratic ideal to the yellow, brown, and black peoples” across the world.

Several other Black leaders reached similar conclusions in their intellectual lives, ultimately linking global pacifism to the project of racial egalitarianism. In the years before his death, King, operating from his framework of the “three evils” of poverty, militarism, and racism, came out to oppose the Vietnam War. “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government,” King said in his best-known denunciation of the war. He spoke specifically of Black empathy with the Vietnamese. “They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met,” he said. “They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.”

What would Du Bois have said about the tragedy in Gaza? Over his long career, he worked to build a coherent philosophy on the basic principle of seeing all humanity as worth saving. He contradicted himself, made grievous errors, and often fell short of his own ethics in this quest. By the time he found himself speaking in the Hotel Diplomat, he’d amassed enough conflicting views to be his own best interlocutor. But he always professed, as found in his “Credo,” a belief “in Liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms and their souls; the right to breathe and the right to vote, the freedom to choose their friends, enjoy the sunshine and ride on the railroads, uncursed by color; thinking, dreaming, working as they will in a kingdom of beauty and love.”

Du Bois’s guiding principle was not so different from the founding ethos of the abolitionist magazine that had helped catapult him to fame. In 1892, Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the founders of The Atlantic, gave an unambiguous definition of the American idea that his magazine contemplated: “emancipation.”

Emerson’s view was forged at a time when abolitionist arguments were censored in some institutions, abolitionists could be lynched if they journeyed to the wrong corner of America, and the supposed savagery and bloodthirst of the American Negro was the predominant moral argument for keeping him in chains. Emerson made a choice that was then bold and unusual among the white literati: to view Black people as humans, and to rebuild his philosophy around that conclusion. Emerson chose solidarity, and wrote against the scourge of slavery. He did so because emancipation, that American idea, demanded it.

Today, emancipation still demands much of us. It requires that we create a world in which the Holocaust could never happen again, which by definition means a world in which a holocaust could never happen again. It would also necessarily be one in which there would be no mass killings in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, no famine in Sudan, no children held in cages at the American border, no steady procession of migrants drowning in the Mediterranean, no killing of thousands of children in Gaza.

America is clearly failing miserably in that work. The ascendant political ideology gripping both parties views solidarity with suspicion, a suspicion that colors our global realpolitik. The United States remains committed to providing the bombs that kill children, even while—somehow—calling for a cease-fire.

“Where are we going—whither are we drifting?” asked Du Bois in 1952. On the one hand, we have solidarity. On the other, ruin.