Britain's Katie Boulter sees off the challenge of Japan's Aoi Ito in her opening match at the Hong Kong Open.

The British citizen and pro-democracy activist is facing trial in Hong Kong for sedition.

“Cancer,” Susan Sontag observed in Illness as Metaphor, “is a rare and still scandalous subject for poetry; and it seems unimaginable to aestheticize the disease.” Though she wrote this in the late 1970s, her point still stands. When it comes to descriptions of cancer, in real life or in books, many people struggle to stretch beyond the limited range of accepted, often military metaphors. You’re supposed to “battle” cancer, not prettify it. To veer away from this register runs the risk of sounding flippant, even cruel.

But the French writer Annie Ernaux has never been afraid of breaking taboos. Over the course of her 50-year career, Ernaux—the winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in literature—has portrayed an illegal abortion (Happening), the complexities of working-class life (A Man’s Place; A Woman’s Story), and the highs and humiliations of sexual obsession (Simple Passion). The Use of Photography, published in 2005 and newly translated into English by Alison L. Strayer, approaches Ernaux’s experience of breast cancer in the early 2000s with a similar fearlessness, emphasizing sensuality in the face of death. It is a radical gesture to treat the sick body, a body threatened by its own demise, as one that is also capable of performing that most generative of acts: sexual intercourse. In doing so, Ernaux takes control of, and breathes life into, the narrative of illness and death.

The Use of Photography is a collaboration, in which Ernaux’s writing alternates with that of the book’s co-author, the photographer and journalist Marc Marie. The book also includes 14 photos taken by them both, each of which features piles of discarded clothing scattered by Ernaux and Marie across the floors of various rooms over the course of their brief love affair. Looking at each image, it is easy to imagine these garments—the tangled straps of a lace bra procured specially for the occasion, the creased leather of a man’s boots—to still be warm from their owners’ skin. But as the text reveals, Ernaux was undergoing chemotherapy when these photos were being taken. In this context, the shapeless clothes take on a mournful air, the appearance of a funeral shroud.

[Read: An abortion film that’s both topical and timeless]

Sex and death, Eros and Thanatos, have been paired in the popular imagination since Freud theorized about their relationship in his 1920 essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” In Ernaux’s book, the frenetic, self-destructive drive and heated sexual passion of her earlier work has subsided into something more elegiac. This is a cold book: It is winter in many of the most memorable photos, even Christmas morning in two of them (“I have no memories of happy Christmases,” writes Marie). The first time they sleep together is on a January evening. When contemplating death, Ernaux briefly imagines “the physical form of a corpse, its icy cold and silence.” The book is slim, its pages filled with white space, and the photos themselves take on the feeling of a mausoleum’s statuary. The clothes, pictured without living bodies inside them, are beautiful and unmoving.

[Read: The indignity of grocery shopping]

But even amid this chill, Ernaux’s precise rendering of both sex and cancer animates the book. “There is something extraordinary about the first appearance of the other’s sex,” she writes near the beginning, detailing the night she and Marie first slept together. She later likens the viewing of his penis as a counterpart to Courbet’s fixation on a woman’s vulva in The Origin of the World. Later, the “catheter like a growth protruding from my chest” becomes a “supernumerary bone”; the plastic tubing running into the bag holding her medication makes Ernaux look “like an extraterrestrial.”

Cancer depersonalizes the body, turning it foreign. As it undergoes chemotherapy, Ernaux’s takes on an otherworldliness. Her face, without eyebrows or eyelashes, offers “the eerie gaze of a wax-faced doll,” while her limbs, similarly hairless, are turned under Marie’s watchful eyes into those of a “mermaid-woman.” Her physical form now unfamiliar, Ernaux views her treatment from a remove, observing it as if it were a performance: “For months,” she writes, “my body was a theater of violent operations … I performed my task of cancer patient with diligence and viewed as an experience everything that happened to my body.” The notion that being a patient involves acting out one’s assigned role appears in other accounts of breast cancer, too. In her semi-autobiographical 1992 novel, Mourning a Breast, the Hong Kong writer Xi Xi likens the radiation unit to “a film set,” each patient quietly playing their respective parts.

Photograph by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie

Certain qualities have traditionally been expected from the sick person, especially if she is a woman. There exists a long history of the dying muse, beautiful, feverish, and doomed: In 1852, the artist’s model Elizabeth Siddal posed as Hamlet’s Ophelia for the pre-Raphaelites, her languid sickliness attributed to tuberculosis by her peers. It was indeed that disease that solidified this archetype, and Ernaux thinks to herself at one point that cancer “should become as romantic a disease as tuberculosis used to be.” In the 19th and early 20th centuries, tuberculosis appeared in or inspired works as wide-ranging as Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” Puccini’s La Boheme, and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Cancer, conversely, is far less glamorized. For the healthy Marie, though, Ernaux’s body, even as it undergoes chemotherapy, is still sexual; at one point, Marie incorrectly assumes that the cancer is in Ernaux’s left breast—the one less swollen. “He could probably not imagine,” Ernaux writes, “that the prettier of the two was the one with cancer.”

[Read: Seven books that actually capture what sickness is like]

Though Marie’s sections are, unsurprisingly, less interesting than Ernaux’s (it’s tough to go head-to-head with a Nobel laureate), their appearance in the book—unmarked, without a chapter heading or a visual symbol to differentiate them—creates an egalitarian dynamic. Both Ernaux and Marie assume the roles of creator and muse. A fundamentally different power structure is at play here than the one of vital artist and feeble subject that dominated the tubercular age: Though cancer saps Ernaux of her life force, it is also for her an unexpected source of inspiration.

For Ernaux, this dynamic is political. At the time of her writing, she notes, 11 percent of French women “have had, or currently suffer from breast cancer.” Recording her own experiences publicly identifies her as one of them, her cancerous breast as one of “three million … stitched, scanned, marked with red-and-blue drawings … hidden under blouses and T-shirts, invisible.” She writes that “we must dare to show them one day. (Writing about mine is part of this unveiling.)” Appearing as it does in an organ so closely identified with female sexuality, breast cancer is unique; it is both a focal point of cancer awareness (at one point, Ernaux remarks dryly that, upon reading in an issue of Marie Claire that it is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, “I was keeping up with fashion”) and also a disease that has been hidden away, its disfigurements commonly concealed by cosmetic surgery. There is an echo, in Ernaux’s “unveiling,” of Audre Lorde’s rallying cry on the first page of The Cancer Journals, her 1980 account of her own experience of breast cancer and subsequent mastectomy: “I am a post-mastectomy woman who believes our feelings need voice in order to be recognized, respected, and of use.”

In this lineage of women writing about breast cancer, Ernaux’s focus on eroticism reminds the reader that the cancer patient still has wants and desires; that is, she is still a human being. Discussing cancer will always reveal the paucity of language—what it can and cannot say for the person suspended between life and death. By the book’s end, Ernaux has reached her own conclusion: “I can no longer abide novels or films,” she writes, “with fictional characters suffering from cancer … how do they dare to invent these kinds of stories? Everything about them seems fake.” With its aim to transmit into words and images what is so often left unsaid about breast cancer, The Use of Photography is the opposite: the real thing.

Hong Kong's oldest zoo park seals off section following death of nine monkeys.

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Freedom in the United States is a word that has had more than one meaning. It has meant freedom for some people and the repression of others. In a democracy, freedom also means the right to take part in politics. So how can that freedom best be secured?

This is the fifth episode of Autocracy in America, a five-part series about authoritarian tactics already at work in the United States and where to look for them.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Anne Applebaum: Peter, there is a word that we are hearing an awful lot in discussions of democracy. The word is freedom. Protecting freedom, for example:

Donald Trump: Never forget our enemies want to take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedom.

Applebaum: Striving for freedom.

Kamala Harris: But us—we choose something different. We choose freedom.

Applebaum: Sometimes people use the word freedom aggressively, as Michael Flynn did here when he appeared on Infowars last December.

Michael Flynn: We’re moving towards the sound of the guns here, folks. And the sound of the guns is freedom.

Applebaum: Sometimes freedom is meant to be energizing, like when Oprah Winfrey addressed the DNC this summer.

Oprah Winfrey: The women and men who are battling to keep us from going back to a time of desperation and shame and stone-cold fear—they are the new freedom fighters.

Applebaum: But it’s unavoidable as an idea.

Peter Pomerantsev: Freedom seems to be a word that is embraced across America. I’ve seen polling research that shows that, even in this very polarized country, it’s one thing that people across the political spectrum care about. Even though we’re making a series about democratic decline, I have to say, I’m comforted by the fact that Americans love freedom. It means that autocracy is unlikely to get very far.

[Music]

Applebaum: That’s where you’re wrong, Peter. Freedom can be used against democracy. It’s happened before in American history, and it can happen again.

I’m Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Pomerantsev: I’m Peter Pomerantsev, a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

Applebaum: This is Autocracy in America.

Pomerantsev: This isn’t a show about the future of America. There are authoritarian tactics already at work, and we’re showing you where. There’s the rise of conspiracy theories, widening public apathy—

Applebaum: Yeah, and there are more and more politicized investigations, plans for the takeover of the state. And in this episode: the rhetoric of freedom.

Pomerantsev: Anne, the common conception—the one that I have, anyway—is that freedom is meant to be a good thing. Freedom is meant to be the same thing as democracy. Those two words—I hear them used interchangeably. Freedom means the Bill of Rights, the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly, the freedom to choose who rules you.

Applebaum: Not quite. There’s another equally old American version of freedom, which is freedom to defy the federal government—you know, the freedom to go out into the Wild West and make up your own rules.

Jefferson Cowie: One of the great sort of struggles throughout American history is: Where does freedom rest? The biggest fight over that was, of course, the Civil War. But I think the entire American history can be seen as a tension between local versus federal realms of authority, with regard to this slippery idea of freedom.

Applebaum: Jefferson Cowie is a historian. He teaches at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville. In his book Freedom’s Dominion, he writes about a place called Barbour County, in Alabama, where the two different forms of freedom have come crashing into one another for two centuries now. He describes how white settlers in the 1830s refused to abide by treaties that the federal government had signed with Native Americans and, instead, would repeatedly steal their land.

Cowie: And so you have this really explosive moment where white settlers were promised, in some broad sense, access to land. They were denied it. And they took their claims of freedom against the federal government that was denying them the ability to take the land of other people—their freedom to steal land, basically.

[Music]

Applebaum: And then, after the Civil War, during Reconstruction, Barbour County also revolted against the federal government’s demand that freed slaves be allowed to vote. They staged this revolt in the name of freedom—their freedom to run their county the way they wanted to. Eventually, they unleashed terrible, horrific violence.

Cowie: And then on Election Day, 1874, as Black people came in from the countryside to vote, white people just pulled guns out of every nook and cranny of downtown Eufaula, Alabama—from sheds, from windows, from underneath porches—and opened fire on Black voters that were lined up to vote and shot them in the streets.

At least 80 were shot. Some say as many as 150. It’s a difficult number to come up with, but 80 confirmed, at least. And that ended Reconstruction violently, in what was essentially a coup d’état in the name of white freedom.

Applebaum: Then in the 1950s and 1960s, this version of freedom, the freedom to defy the federal government, emerges again.

George Wallace: And I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.

Applebaum: George Wallace, born in Barbour County, became governor of Alabama during the fraught civil-rights era.

Cowie: So the irony or the tension in that is: That’s the most iconic speech of George Wallace’s life. He only mentioned segregation one other time, for a total of four, but he invokes freedom or liberty two dozen times.

The more I dug into the local history and how local and state powers saw themselves in opposition to federal power and saw that their freedom was a local ability to control, to dominate, a freedom to dominate others—the land, the political power of others—then you realize, Oh, what Wallace is talking about is a very specific kind of freedom.

We allow the word freedom to work in the political discourse because it appears to be a kind of liberal value, but underneath it is actually a very powerful ideology of domination. And that’s what he’s really talking about there, because it’s at that moment that the federal government is coming in to take away their freedom to control the political power of Black people.

[Music]

Applebaum: Wallace advertised himself as a man of the people. He would say, I’m going to do stuff to help people: build hospitals, build schools, just like Huey Long a generation earlier. But at the same time, Wallace understood that the people in his part of the world also wanted to preserve segregation.

Cowie: He resists federal power in the late 1950s and eventually rides that to the governor’s mansion.

Applebaum: Jefferson Cowie explains Wallace’s style as a kind of neo-Confederate approach to freedom, and he didn’t use it only to appeal to people in Alabama or the American South.

Cowie: He talked about the flaming pioneer spirit of the West and the rock-ribbed patriotic freedom of New England, and he was casting a national vision, that this kind of anti-federal-government idea was a national agenda, and he could run for president, which he did many times.

Applebaum: This careful use of the term freedom did bring more people into the fold.

Cowie: Because if you’re running as a snarling racist, you only get so far, he realized. But if you’re running against the federal government, as freedom from the federal tyranny, now you have yourself a coalition, right? Now you have the anti-taxers. You have people who don’t want to deal with integrated housing. You have people who don’t, you know, want the federal government meddling in their lives. And now that’s a broader group that you can bring together.

Pomerantsev: So this is not what we traditionally think of as freedom—you know, the freedom to vote, to choose your representatives, the freedom to engage in politics. This is something much darker.

Applebaum: Yes—the freedom to dominate and to control in defiance of the law.

Cowie: What happened in Barbour County: The idea of civil rights and the idea of political participation were mobilized effectively in pursuit of the freedom to dominate.

Applebaum: Cowie worries that this idea of freedom can be used to break down democratic institutions.

Cowie: That’s the model that I’m afraid of for the future.

Applebaum: So what you’re saying is: We could elect somebody who would alter the political system.

Cowie: Oh yeah.

Applebaum: So it wouldn’t be that, you know, a dictator comes to power by driving tanks down the street and shooting up the White House but is, rather, elected with the consent of the voters.

Cowie: Right.

Applebaum: So does that mean that freedom to dominate could become a federal idea?

[Music]

Cowie: Absolutely. But my nightmare is that fascism comes to America, but it’s marching under the banner of freedom.

Pomerantsev: When he says, “the banner of freedom,” I have the image of the January 6 protesters, motivated by the Big Lie that the election was somehow stolen from Donald Trump, distorting that word.

Applebaum: Exactly. This was the way the word freedom was being used during the insurrection in 2021. Listen to how Michael Flynn addressed a crowd the night before the attack on the Capitol, in a speech at a place called “Freedom Plaza” near the White House.

Michael Flynn: One of the great things about being an American is our culture. In our DNA, we feel freedom! We bleed freedom! And we will sacrifice for freedom!

[Cheering]

Flynn: It is not something that can be taken for granted.

Applebaum: Cowie sees January 6 as yet another clash between different ideas of freedom.

But this time, the people who want freedom from the federal government are seeking control of the federal government, and they have the endorsement of the former president.

Cowie: The difference now is they’re beginning to capture federal authority, right? So these people who’ve been anti federal government are now tasting federal power. And this is something that people like John C. Calhoun from South Carolina and George Wallace from Alabama actually envisioned, that they could actually eventually take over the federal government, make it their own, and transform federal power into their own vision.

[Music]

Applebaum: “Transform federal power into their own vision”—that sounds like some of the things we’ve been talking about throughout this series. Tom Nichols reminded us of how easy it would be to subvert the military. We’ve seen how a congressional committee can be used to harass its chairman’s enemies, and, of course, the Justice Department could be used in the same way. We know how weak some parts of our system are; there is not a guarantee that the rest of it is stable.

Pomerantsev: This is not about the quirks of this or that presidential candidate. As Cowie makes clear, there’s an American autocratic tradition which has always been present, and it could easily come to dominate the federal government. Yet even as these forms of freedom seem to be winning public support, there is also another way of thinking of freedom in America.

That’s coming after the break.

[Break]

Pomerantsev: In the present day, we often hear about this idea of freedom as being synonymous with freedom from government—or, to be more precise, from democratic government, from checks and balances, from elected officials—that if Americans are just left alone, they’ll be free and achieve their best.

Timothy Snyder: The basic way that this argument about freedom is now run is that people say, The less government you have, the more free you are, which is fundamentally not true. If you have very poor government, the people are not free. People are then subject to arbitrariness and violence. They’re subject to the rule of the wealthy. Just taking away government and imagining people are free is a kind of magical thinking.

[Music]

Pomerantsev: Anne, you know Timothy Snyder. He’s a professor at Yale, and he’s written a new book, called On Freedom. He lays out a different way of thinking about the word.

Snyder: Freedom has been an axe, right? It’s been a blade which has been used to cut through things. And I’m trying to suggest that freedom should be more like a plow. Freedom should be a tool which allows us to cultivate things. Freedom should be something which justifies action.

Applebaum: So Snyder means that you are free to do something, not just free from something.

Pomerantsev: Yes. You live in a society that makes it possible to do things—to become educated, to be creative, to found a company, to be healthy—and that, not the absence of government, makes you free.

Snyder: I really think an argument for a lot of the things that people on the left want, in my view, correctly is freedom. But the argument is usually made in terms of justice or fairness or equality, and those are all good things. But both politically and, I think, morally, just in terms of the correct description, freedom is often very much more central.

Pomerantsev: But this year, Anne, freedom is more front and center. It’s being blasted out of loudspeakers at Harris-Walz campaign rallies.

[Beyoncé’s “Freedom”]

Applebaum: Yeah. At a campaign event earlier this year, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro used the word precisely 30 times in one speech.

Josh Shapiro: We believe in real freedom.

The task of defending our fundamental freedoms—it now falls to all of you.

It’s not freedom to tell women what they’re allowed to do with their bodies.

To do this hard work, to fight for our freedom—

—to freedom-loving Americans all across this great country.

[Music]

Applebaum: So now what you have is these competing ideas of freedom being put in front of voters in this election. Pete Buttigieg put it this way in an interview with MSNBC.

Pete Buttigieg: Yes. It’s important to make sure that people are free from overbearing government. But also, government is not the only thing that can make you unfree, and good government helps make sure you’re free from other threats to your well-being. Trump’s Republican Party has walked away from freedom.

Pomerantsev: I have to say, Anne, I really worry about this—about freedom becoming partisan. It means one party can try to claim a positive vision of freedom for themselves, and it also means the followers of the other party might oppose it reflexively, just for partisan reasons.

Applebaum: There is a similar argument to be made about the word democracy. A recent poll shows that word becoming partisan too, and that’s very dangerous.

Pomerantsev: I think one way to keep democracy is to make sure we use that word a little more carefully than we do now. I hear a lot of Americans say, Democracy is not working. And I know what they mean. We’ve been covering it throughout this series—a political culture of lies that makes people feel facts don’t matter, that you can’t tell fact from fiction, a justice system that people feel isn’t fair.

But that’s not democracy—that’s autocracy at work. Autocratic tendencies are to blame for this sense that democracy is not working. Even the word democracy is becoming so tainted for so many people that you have to almost avoid the term and really show how the growth of autocracy makes life worse for people every day.

At the local level in America, at the state level, you already have places where the outcome of elections are completely predictable. The districts have been so thoroughly gerrymandered that the same party wins ad infinitum. And that means the ruling party is no longer making decisions that matter for you, the voter.

Applebaum: Right. In many places across the U.S., these districts are so manipulated—they fail to reflect the voters so dramatically—that there are politicians who don’t have anyone bothering to run against them in races for state representative or state senate. So race after race is just uncontested.

David Pepper: In some states, like Texas, they literally call it a canceled election. It doesn’t happen.

Applebaum: Peter, I spoke with David Pepper, who’s written several books about how America is becoming less and less democratic. In a recent evaluation of elections in Texas, nearly 70 percent of races were uncontested, and in Georgia, it was about the same.

Pepper: It really changes the entire dynamic of those in power. I mean, think about the incentive system. If you’re in a kind of a competitive race, your incentive system in that kind of system is: You know you can be held accountable by the voters. You better deliver good public results, right? The public outcomes better be good, or you won’t get reelected. You have an incentive to be mainstream because if you were extreme, you’d lose.

Well, in these systems where you literally, for the most part, don’t face an election ever, or a competitive election ever, every incentive in that world is upside down.

[Music]

Applebaum: So autocrats and their enablers craft a dysfunctional system, the dysfunctionality, understandably, makes people disgusted or apathetic, and then they start clamoring for something different, something less democratic, because democracy seems so impossible, so incompetent.

Pomerantsev: When people choose not to engage—not to run for office or vote or participate—that’s actually just the beginning, because apathy, cynicism, and nihilism grow. And as they do, the appetites of those who want to degrade democracy and seize more power grow, too.

I’ve seen it in country after country. I saw it in Russia and Ukraine and Hungary. It’s no accident that Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident killed, would call his struggle “the final battle between good and neutrality.” He knew that apathy was the enemy.

Applebaum: I have been in rooms with activists from all over the world—from Venezuela, Hong Kong, Burma, Zimbabwe, Russia, Iran—and this is what they talk about: how to inspire people, how to bring them together, and how to persuade them to care.

I’ve also been in crowds of demonstrators in Poland, as recently as a few years ago, surrounded by previously apolitical people who suddenly felt moved to carry signs in protest against the politicization of the judiciary. And I’ve watched a few people from those crowds go on to create organizations, to file lawsuits in international courts, to join political parties, and to help out in campaigns just because they thought this issue mattered, and they had to do something about it.

[Music]

Pomerantsev: But, Anne, these achievements—they don’t happen in a vacuum. People don’t just spontaneously go out and protest, and then great things happen. Movements take planning. You need to create coalitions—this is where a lot of people mess up. Ukrainians brought together urban liberals and rural conservatives in a common cause around fighting corruption, for example. America has had success with coalition building in its history. The suffragettes, for example, weren’t just radical women fighting for the right to vote—they found ways to embrace and engage conservative women and get them to join the movement too.

Applebaum: That’s right. At the time, there were large groups of conservative women—religious women—who disapproved of alcohol, who wanted the right to vote in order to push for local and then national prohibition. And even though the women who came together may not have all felt the same way about prohibition (and, of course, although prohibition ultimately failed), at the time they focused on what they did have in common: the goal to gain access to the ballot box. And partly thanks to that decision, women ultimately won the right to vote.

Pomerantsev: The answer to the authoritarian urge is not a democratic savior. The answer is going to be: lots and lots of people-powered movements working together, because that already is the essence of democracy and central to taking back—truly taking back—control.

Applebaum: That’s how you save democracy.

[Music]

Pomerantsev: When Alexis de Tocqueville came to America in 1831, he was motivated by more than just curiosity. In his native France, a revolution that had been launched, like the American Revolution, with high ideals about equality and democracy had ended badly. Tocqueville’s own parents had nearly been guillotined in the chaos and violence. By contrast, American democracy worked, and he traveled across the country in order to understand why.

Applebaum: Peter, it’s one of the reasons I recently started rereading Tocqueville. Like us and like George Washington putting on his Cato play at Valley Forge or Madison or Hamilton, he was trying to understand how you prevent the decline of institutions, how you prevent the rise of a demagogue. And he found some answers in the traditions of local democracy, in what he called township institutions.

And above all, in what he called associations—the many organizations that we now call civil society—he believed that democracy could succeed not only because of the grand ideals expressed on public monuments or even in the language of the Constitution but also because Americans practiced democracy.

Pomerantsev: Right. They ran local government. They knew their elected officials, maybe attended council meetings and school-administration discussions. They voted.

Applebaum: Right. Because of this practice, this participation, this engagement, they preserved American freedom, not just for the most powerful but for everyone.

Pomerantsev: And of course, Tocqueville’s book had the title Democracy in America.

Applebaum: Autocracy in America is hosted by Peter Pomerantsev and me, Anne Applebaum. It’s produced by Natalie Brennan and Jocelyn Frank, edited by Dave Shaw, mixed by Rob Smierciak, fact-checked by Yvonne Kim. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Pomerantsev: Autocracy in America is a podcast from The Atlantic. It’s made possible with support from the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, an academic and public forum dedicated to strengthening global democracy through powerful civic engagement and informed, inclusive dialogue.

About half an hour into last night’s vice-presidential debate, the CBS anchor Margaret Brennan turned to Tim Walz and asked a question that the Minnesota governor had to have known would come. “You said you were in Hong Kong during the deadly Tiananmen Square protests in the spring of 1989,” she said, noting that new reporting suggests Walz didn’t go to Asia until months later. “Can you explain that discrepancy?”

“Look,” Walz began, “I grew up in small, rural Nebraska, a town of 400, a town that you rode your bike with your buddies ’til the street lights come on.” He went on to explain how, as a teacher, he’d taken young people on educational visits to China. “I have poured my heart into my community. I’ve tried to do the best I can, but I’ve not been perfect, and I’m a knucklehead at times.”

Kamala Harris chose Walz, most observers have agreed, for his Everyman aesthetic and fluency in retail politics. And so far, the affable former high-school football coach and hype man for Menards has mostly received glowing reviews. He is much more adept than his Republican counterpart, J. D. Vance, at engaging with voters as a regular guy.

Which is why he should have had a better answer last night. And Walz’s failure to provide a coherent, succinct correction for an entirely predictable inquiry about one of his flubs suggests ill-preparedness for a spotlight that is only going to get brighter—and harsher—in the weeks to come.

Vance delivered a slick debate performance, though it would be a mistake to call it a “win” when he engaged in so much sinister revisionist history. In what would turn out to be the most striking moment of the night, Vance refused to admit that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. The senator from Ohio also mischaracterized Trump’s attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and Vance claimed, falsely, that he’s never supported a national abortion ban.

Walz, for his part, deployed a few effective jabs. “That’s a damning nonanswer,” he said simply, after Vance’s election-denial tap dancing. Another time, in an exchange about gun-violence prevention and mental-health care, Walz looked right at the camera and said, “Sometimes it just is the guns. It’s just the guns.”

But when you’re running a campaign against liars and bloviators, it becomes all the more important not to lie or bloviate. And the Walz fumble on China was sloppy enough—and early enough in the proceedings—to feel significant. After his first answer, CBS’s Brennan gave him another chance to clarify. “All I said on this was, I got there that summer—and misspoke on this,” Walz said, before taking a long pause. “So I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protests, and from that, I learned a lot of what needed to be in governance.”

The bungled response made the moment worse than it needed to be. And calling himself a “knucklehead” came off more cringeworthy than charming. But it wasn’t the first time Walz has been ensnared by his own nonanswers. In August, a video surfaced on social media in which Walz referred to weapons “that I carried in war” to explain his support for an assault-weapons ban. Walz served in the Army National Guard for 24 years, but was never deployed to a combat zone. Asked about it in a sit-down interview, Walz had an exchange with CNN’s Dana Bash that followed a now-familiar pattern.

“You said that you carried weapons in war, but you have never deployed, actually, in a war zone. A campaign official said that you misspoke. Did you?” Bash asked.

“I speak candidly. I wear my emotions on my sleeves, and I speak especially passionately about our children being shot in schools and around guns. So I think people know me. They know who I am,” Walz said.

Bash pressed. “Did you misspeak, as the campaign has said?”

“I said we were talking about—in this case, this was after a school shooting—the ideas of carrying these weapons of war,” Walz replied, “and my wife, the English teacher, told me my grammar is not always correct.”

Some Democrats dismiss these fumbles. “So he had a bad answer to something that happened 35 years ago. Next!” the political strategist James Carville told me. That’s right in the sense that Walz’s remarks seem more slippery than nefarious. He isn’t obfuscating, as Vance is, about the results of the 2020 election.

Still, Walz’s sloppiness highlights a bigger problem with media accessibility and versatility for the Harris campaign. Both Democratic principals have been reticent, seemingly reluctant to engage with the press; lately, Walz especially has been tightly bubble-wrapped. Unlike the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Walz does not regularly appear on cable-news programs or spar with reporters at campaign events. He is out of practice, and it shows.

This morning, perhaps as an attempt at post-debate cleanup, the Harris campaign announced that Walz is expanding his schedule. The governor will travel to several swing states in the next few weeks, and do a lot more media appearances, including a podcast, a late-night-TV hit, and two national-TV interviews. That will surely help Walz get in some badly needed reps. Perhaps he’s kicking himself that he didn’t before last night.

Here’s what you could have had: That’s what I kept thinking throughout the vice-presidential debate. The head-to-head between Tim Walz and J. D. Vance was a vision of what American politics could be without the distorting gravitational field generated by Donald Trump—a political interlude beamed to you from Planet Normal.

How soon will that day come? The most surprising moment of the debate arrived right at the end, when it became clear that the outwardly subservient Vance is already plotting his post-Trump future. Don’t tell the mad old king, but his most loyal baron is looking at the crown and wondering how well it would fit his head.

More on that later, but first let’s enjoy the climate on Planet Normal. Onstage in New York were two people with regular attention spans and an above-average ability to remember names and details. Vance, the Republican, offered slick, coherent, and blessedly short answers to the CBS moderators’ questions. (The Bulwark compared him to a “smoother, 2016-vintage Marco Rubio.”) Tim Walz, the Democrat, started nervously, quickly discovering that being folksy in an empty room is hard—although he certainly didn’t go down in Dan Quayle–style flames. The debate was cordial—too cordial for many Democrats, who wondered why Walz was not delivering the smackdowns they longed to see.

Both candidates committed political sins well within the expected range: Vance freely ignored the first question on Iran, and instead recapped his appealing backstory for any viewers unfamiliar with Hillbilly Elegy. Walz dodged and weaved around a question about his inflated biography, before eventually conceding that he “misspoke” when he claimed to have been in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. The two men also managed to have several substantive exchanges on policy, arguing over what we can learn from Finland’s approach to gun crime, and to what extent mental-health issues interact with mass shootings. All of that was a reminder of what American political debates used to be like in the distant past of, oh, the early 2010s.

The pundits have largely called this debate for Vance, who successfully downplayed his unpopular positions on abortion and health care, and took several opportunities to push his key ideological theme of protectionism. America needs to become more self-sufficient, and not just in heavy industry, he said, because “the pharmaceuticals that we put in the bodies of our children are manufactured by nations that hate us.” That line sounded less paranoid than it once might have, after former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson revealed last week that, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, he had flirted with sending a commando team to recover vaccines held by the European Union.

The audience polls were closer, however. Walz recovered from his shaky start to deliver several punchy lines. On gun violence, he talked about his own teenage son witnessing a shooting, drawing an empathetic response from Vance, as well as his meeting with the parents of the pupils killed at Sandy Hook—realizing that he had a picture of his own child on the office wall, when the people in front of him had lost their own children. Asked to explain why he changed his mind and now supported a ban on assault weapons, Walz said simply: “I sat in that office with those Sandy Hook parents.”

All very civil, sane, normal. Very demure. Every so often, though, an alternate reality began to bleed into the CBS studio. Or rather—our reality began to bleed in. The one where Donald Trump is the Republican candidate. The clearest signal was Vance’s frequent tic of referring to his running mate: Donald Trump’s energy policy, Donald Trump’s border policy, Donald Trump’s wisdom and courage. By contrast, Walz mentioned Kamala Harris more rarely.

You and I both know why Vance name-dropped with the zest of an out-of-work actor. Trump is one of those people who picks up a political memoir and flicks to the index to see how often he is mentioned. Over the past eight years, the entire Republican Party has reshaped itself around his giant ego, and it is filled with many men much smarter than Trump—men like J. D. Vance, in fact—who believe they can manipulate him through flattery. The former president won’t have been paying attention to the finer details of Finnish policy, but instead listening for his name. Throughout the debate, the Trump campaign’s rapid-response team blasted out “fact-checks,” but the candidate’s own TruthSocial feed rambled through his usual obsessions: the CBS anchors’ low ratings; paeans to his own greatness and sagacity—“America was GREAT when I was President,” “I SAVED our Country from the China Virus,” “EVERYONE KNOWS I WOULD NOT SUPPORT A FEDERAL ABORTION BAN”—and praise for “a great defense of me” by Vance.

The big mystery of this moment in American politics is that Trump’s flaws—his self-obsession, his lack of self-control, his casual lies—are so obvious. And yet all attempts to replace him with a lab-grown alternative, with those flaws removed, have failed. (Had Vance run in the Republican primary, I suspect he would have done about as well as Ron DeSantis.) The Republican base loves the chaos and the drama and the darkness that Trump offers, and resists all attempts to replace those qualities with boring competence.

All the way through, the times Vance really seemed in trouble were when he had to defend Trump’s behavior, and his own switch from critic to sycophant. He gave an outrageous—but superficially convincing—explanation for how he went from thinking Trump was “America’s Hitler” to its last and only hope. “I was wrong, first of all, because I believed some of the media stories that turned out to be dishonest fabrications of his record,” he said. In the same way, the only real flash of the dislikable “childless cat ladies” version of Vance—familiar to me from edgy podcasts and cozy Fox News interviews—came when he had to defend Trump’s lie about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. When the moderators noted that the Haitians in question were in America legally, Vance replied: “The rules were that you weren’t going to fact-check.” Not exactly the response of a man confident that he is telling the truth.

Right at the end, Vance was asked whether he would challenge the election results in ways that violated the law and the Constitution. “I think that we’re focused on the future,” he said, before jazz-hands-ing into standard Republican talking points about the threat of Big Tech censorship. (The two flagship cases of this in right-wing lore involve Hunter Biden’s laptop and COVID discussions on Facebook and Spotify.) Harris, Vance said, would “like to censor people who engage in misinformation. I think that is a much bigger threat to democracy than anything that we’ve seen in this country in the last four years, in the last 40 years.”

At this, Walz found a new gear. The Folksy Midwestern Dad was now not angry, but disappointed in his wayward son, who had returned long after curfew, smelling suspiciously of weed. Vance, Walz’s demeanor implied, had let himself down. “I’ve enjoyed tonight’s debate, and I think there was a lot of commonality here,” he began, before mounting a devastating attack of Trump’s actions on January 6, 2021. “He lost this election, and he said he didn’t. One hundred and forty police officers were beaten at the Capitol that day, some with the American flag. Several later died.” As Walz moved into a riff about being a football coach, telling his team that playing fair was more important than winning at any cost, Vance reflexively began to nod slightly.  

In his response, Vance tried his best—pointing out that Hillary Clinton had raised the possibility of Russian interference in the 2016 election. But Walz shot back: “January 6 was not Facebook ads.” (We might also note that, whatever her misgivings about the election, Clinton attended Trump’s inauguration, explicitly acknowledging the peaceful transfer of power to an opponent. By contrast, Trump did not stay in Washington, D.C., to watch Joe Biden get sworn in as president, but instead flew off to Florida in a huff.)

Walz then asked Vance flat out whether Trump lost the 2020 election. Again, the Republican could only offer a cop-out—“Tim, I’m focused on the future”—and a pivot back to Big Tech censorship, which allowed Walz to go in for the kill. “This is not a debate,” he said. “It’s not anything anywhere other than in Donald Trump’s world, because, look, when Mike Pence made that decision to certify that election, that’s why Mike Pence isn’t on this stage.”

The extraordinary part of Vance’s waffle here isn’t that he refused to tell the truth—to say the 2020 election was valid. The really remarkable thing is that the Republican vice-presidential nominee can’t bring himself to agree with his boss and say that the 2020 election was stolen. In the past four years, the Trump campaign has filed multiple lawsuits to challenge the results, the candidate himself encouraged the crowds on January 6 to protest them—culminating in threats of violence to Congress and then–Vice President Pence—and his stump speeches regularly feature riffs about the issue. This year, he has suggested that he will lose only if the Democrats “cheat like hell.”

Vance did not echo this language, nor did he repeat his previous suggestion that he would not have done what Pence did in January 2021, which was to certify the results. On the most fundamental issue of this year’s contest—whether America is still a functioning democracy with free and fair elections—the Republican ticket is not entirely in sync.

Now, I’m beyond being surprised that Vance wouldn’t tell the truth. But I am intrigued that, when given the biggest platform of his career to date, he couldn’t bring himself to lie, either. After so many humiliating concessions, this is the point when Vance decided, to adapt the famous phrase of the poet E. E. Cummings, “There is some shit I will not eat.” He switched so deftly to his talking points about misinformation that much of the instant punditry missed his sleight of hand.

Why not agree with his boss about what happened in 2020? The inevitable conclusion must be that J. D. Vance—smart, ambitious, and only 40 years old—is already contemplating the post-Trump future. Once the former president is out of the picture, what will be the point of harping on his personal bitterness about being rejected by the American people? The voters of 2028 or 2032 will undoubtedly care more about gas prices and housing costs than an old man’s grievance. You might as well keep doing Trump’s crazy material about sharks and Hannibal Lecter.

By any measure, Vance did quite well last night. But I wonder if Trump noticed that, amid all the name-drops and the flattery, his running mate is “focused on the future”—a future that doesn’t include him.

When questioned about saying he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre, Walz says he "misspoke".

Commemorations were also held in the former UK colony of Hong Kong and Portugal’s former territory of Macao, both of which returned to Chinese sovereignty in the late 1990s.