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In 1971, a British doctor was trying to puzzle out a mystery: How can a child with no signs of external trauma or injury present with bleeding between the skull and brain? That doctor, A. Norman Guthkelch was part of a wave of physicians and researchers newly concerned that an epidemic of severe child abuse had been passing, undetected, beneath doctors’ noses.

As one law-review article recounts, “Prior to the 1960s, medical schools provided little or no training on child abuse, and medical texts were largely silent on the issue.” A turning point was the publication of the 1962 article “The Battered-Child Syndrome,” which urged physicians to consider that severe child abuse may be at play when children came in with injuries such as bone fractures, subdural hematomas, or bruising.

The article goes beyond offering medical advice to prescribing an ethical framework that would take hold: “The bias should be in favor of the child’s safety; everything should be done to prevent repeated trauma, and the physician should not be satisfied to return the child to an environment where even a moderate risk of repetition exists.”

Armed with these new insights, Guthkelch hypothesized that the children showing up to his hospital were being abusively shaken. Although they did not show up with the usual fractures or visible forms of physical trauma, the presence of a subdural hematoma could indicate what would come to be widely known as “shaken baby syndrome.”

Decades later, Guthkelch would publicly worry that his hypothesis had been taken too far. After reviewing the trial record and medical reports from one case in Arizona, NPR reported that he was “troubled” that the conclusion was abusive shaking when there were other potential causes. “I wouldn’t hang a cat on the evidence of shaking, as presented,” Guthkelch quipped.

The narrow claim that shaking a baby abusively can result in certain internal injuries morphed into the claim that if a set of internal injuries were present, then shaking must be the cause. On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with a neuroscientist who found himself personally embroiled in this scientific and legal controversy when a caretaker was accused of shaking his child.

Cyrille Rossant is a researcher and software engineer at the International Brain Laboratory and University College London whose Ph.D. in neuroscience came in handy when he delved into the research behind shaken baby syndrome and published a textbook with Cambridge University Press on the scientific controversy that embroiled his family.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: Many forms of scientific expertise in criminal-justice proceedings have been debunked or come under scrutiny in recent years. Things like bite-mark analysis and blood-spatter analysis used to be commonly understood as rigorous empirical analysis. But these questionable theories often fall apart on closer inspection.

This is how science is supposed to work. Experts observe, they hypothesize, they test, and they revise their previous understandings of the world. And in academia and in scientific journals, that’s all well and good—but what happens when evolving science is brought into the courtroom? In a courtroom, no one is well positioned to rigorously evaluate a scientific debate: not judges, not jurors, and not even the people calling expert witnesses.

[Music]

Demsas: My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper. Today’s episode is about abusive head trauma, but you probably know it by its older name: shaken baby syndrome.

Babies cannot speak for themselves. As a result, when doctors or prosecutors accuse a parent or caregiver of having violently and abusively shaken their baby, they are often relying on something that has come to be known as “the triad.”

The triad refers to three medical findings: subdural hemorrhage, or bleeding in the area between the brain and the skull; retinal hemorrhage, or bleeding in the retina; and brain swelling. If these findings are present, according to shaken-baby-syndrome adherents, that would mean a baby has been abusively shaken. Shaken baby syndrome also indicates that since these symptoms arise rather quickly, the child must have been shaken by the last person he or she was with.

It’s important to understand that for many years, the presence of all three of these medical events was not indicative of child abuse; it was dispositive. In 2015, Kentucky’s former chief medical examiner, who had personally diagnosed SBS, told The Washington Post that “doctors, myself included, have accepted as true an unproven theory about a potential cause of brain injury in children.”

My guest today is Cyrille Rossant. He’s a researcher with a Ph.D. in neuroscience who plunged into the world of SBS when a caregiver was accused of shaking his child, an allegation she denied.

This is a very serious topic, and I want to be clear—child abuse is very real, and our public and private tools for addressing and helping children at risk are distressingly insufficient. But in their zeal to help children, many doctors, prosecutors, and scientists have allowed what one New Jersey appellate court has called “junk science” to tear apart the lives of thousands.

Let’s dive in. Cyrille, welcome to the show.

Cyrille Rossant: Thank you for having me.

Demsas: So you have a very personal connection to this issue. Can you tell us about how you first learned about shaken baby syndrome?

Rossant: Yeah, sure. So I actually lived a situation myself. So nine years ago, I had a baby who was being cared for by a caregiver. And when my baby was, like, five months old, he was sick. He was vomiting, and his head was getting bigger and bigger. So we brought him to the hospital, and they did a CT scan. And they found so-called subdural hematoma, which is blood around the brain.

And from that, they told me that it was shaken baby syndrome. It could be nothing else. So that meant that my baby had been violently shaken. So obviously, it was a very difficult thing to hear, and I was really distressed by the health of my baby. So he was taken care of. He had surgery, and fortunately he was fine after that.

So now he’s a healthy 9-year-old boy. But at the time, it was very hard. And obviously, since it was a situation of suspicion of child abuse, the hospital had to report the case to authorities and to call the police. And that’s how it all started.

Demsas: When that determination was made about your son, they didn’t leave you any doubt. When they saw the subdural hematoma, they said, Without a doubt, this is shaken baby syndrome?

Rossant: Yeah, exactly. So at the time at the hospital, most doctors were really sure that it was shaken baby syndrome, that it could be nothing else. So the thing is that we had a nanny. And my son had symptoms when he was being cared for by the nanny. So she was, like, the prime suspect. But still, it was very hard for us to believe that it was possible at the time.

That being said, there was one doctor who was less certain about the diagnosis. It was actually the only doctor who was a specialist of child neurology. And he was telling us that it could be shaken baby syndrome, but it could also be something else, namely a medical condition where there’s an excess of fluid around the brain. He told us it could be a risk factor for subdural hematoma and that he was not really sure that my son had been violently shaken.

So it was a bit confusing for me, to have, like, most doctors who are really 100 percent sure that it was shaken baby syndrome and another one who is supposed to know more about these issues to be less certain. So I was really confused, and I couldn’t really live with this uncertainty, and I needed to know what had happened to my baby.

Demsas: And what happened with the caregiver? Did they arrest her?

Rossant: So yeah, basically, it took them maybe six months or something. But yeah, after six months, she was put in custody because, in the meantime, there was a medical expert who looked at the case and said, Well, yes. It’s a shaken baby. So it happened when my baby was being cared for by the caregiver, so it had to be her. So she was put under custody. She was interrogated by the police. And then she was being prosecuted for four years.

Demsas: Oh my God.

Rossant: And in this longer legal process, another expert looked at the case, and he did not really agree with the first one.

He said, like the child-neurology specialist at the hospital, that it could be a medical condition and that maybe it was not shaken baby syndrome. So there were two different opinions in terms of medical experts. And on this uncertainty, the judge decided to drop all charges, and the nanny was cleared after four years.

Demsas: This, I think, really underscores how serious of an issue this is. I mean, when a doctor or a scientific expert tells a court or a public-policy official or a policy maker that they’re certain about what something means, it sounds like they’re talking about a natural law or they’re talking about physics. And there’s often not the ability for public-policy makers or lawyers or judges to independently evaluate the research.

So as a result of your experience, you dove headfirst into the research here and have even written a book about the finding of SBS. I’m gonna just refer to it as shaken baby syndrome, even though there’s some controversy about whether it should be called that or abusive head trauma, just because I think most people know the term shaken baby syndrome, but I want to note for listeners that there’s some controversy over the use of that term.

But there are basically three areas of controversy I want us to explore: the mechanism of injury, the diagnostic reliability, and the evidence quality. Let’s start with the mechanism of injury. The fundamental question here is whether shaking your baby is the only way to cause the classic findings of SBS. Can you lay out the scientific debate here over that question?

Rossant: Yeah, so actually, I think you can say there are two different questions here. First is: Can shaking cause the injuries that are typically associated with SBS? And second: Are these medical findings always caused by shaking? So it’s kind of two inverse relationships—the causal link, and is it the only cause? If it’s a cause, is it the only one, right?

Demsas: Yeah. The way I’ve been thinking about it is: Can punching a wall create a hole? Versus: If we find a hole in the wall, does that prove that someone punched it?

Rossant: Yeah, exactly.

Demsas: I think we can start with, like, can punching a wall create a hole? Can shaking a baby lead to the injuries of the classic findings of SBS?

Rossant: So the short answer for this is: We don’t know. We cannot shake babies for science, right? It’s not working like that. So we don’t know today. I really looked a lot for that question in the literature, and I could not find good, reliable scientific evidence linking shaking without impact—and that’s important—to the medical findings associated with SBS: so typically, subdural hemorrhage, retinal hemorrhage, and brain swelling.

What’s for sure is that babies are shaken. It exists. There’s no doubt about it. We know that many babies who are shaken—they are shaken not in the most violent possible way. There’s a whole spectrum in the degree of violence you can inflict to a baby. And when it’s not so much violence, it’s still child abuse, obviously, but it might not be enough for the baby to be injured. Okay?

So we have some interesting data from a lot of countries who asked a lot of parents and caregivers, Well, do you shake your baby? Do you hit your baby? Do you slap your baby? A lot of types of child abuse. And so it’s really just, like, self-admitted abuse, right? And parents actually say yes. And a proportion of them admit doing these kinds of things to their babies, including shaking.

So it’s something that exists. And still, we can think that 2 percent is not that much, but it’s still, like, 100 times more than the number of shaken baby syndrome diagnoses. So it means that we miss most babies who are really shaken, but maybe they are not shaken that violently, because they don’t appear to be injured. They don’t go to the hospital, and they are not detected. That being said, sometimes the babies are shaken so violently that they are being injured, and it’s hard to imagine how a baby could be shaken in the most violent possible way without the brain being injured.

Now, the exact type of injury you are going to find around the brain, etcetera, we don’t really know. We don’t know. We can imagine that it’s going to harm the brain, but we don’t know how, exactly. There is some data that was obtained on animals. So there’s a whole literature on animal studies, like mice, rats, piglets, lambs, who are shaken for science—it’s horrific when you think about it, but these are things that are done by researchers. So animals are shaken, and they are injured. And we find some injuries in the brain, but they do not really look like what you find in shaken baby syndrome. It’s not exactly the same kind of findings. It doesn’t really match.

Demsas: What’s the difference?

Rossant: It’s really technical, but you will find some injuries in the brain itself, like traumatic lesions to the neurons and to the cables between the neurons. You might find some bleeding, but again, it’s not the type of bleeding you find in shaken baby syndrome, which is really specific.

Same for the retinal hemorrhage—you will find very severe retinal hemorrhaging in shaken baby syndrome. And this is not typically what you find in animals who are shaken. It doesn’t really match. So the way researchers are interpreting this typically is to say, Well, these animals are not good animal models for human babies, and human babies seem to have specificities for the kind of injuries we find. So far, we are not able to prove the causal link between violent shaking and the classic medical findings of shaken baby syndrome.

Demsas: So models have failed to show that shaking can generate enough force to cause those injuries, and studies that are on animals haven’t been able to reproduce the classic findings through shaking alone. But there’s still a lot of uncertainty, right? So it’s still possible that shaking your baby could result in the classic presentation of shaken baby syndrome. But it’s also possible that it might be something else.

So we’ve talked about, can punching a wall create a hole? Now I want to ask you about, if you find a hole in the wall, does that prove someone punched it? Because I think one of the core parts of this controversy is that it’s not just that when a baby presents with these injuries that doctors will say, It’s possible this baby was abused. There’s been a training of doctors to indicate certainty, that if you find this—it’s often called “the triad”—if you find this triad of injuries, then you should presume that the baby was shaken and that the baby was shaken abusively by the last person who was with the child when it began presenting with those symptoms. So why was that the medical consensus? Why did that training happen?

Rossant: Yeah. I think you’re right to say that it’s not just a cause; it’s the only cause. That’s the theory, right? Shaking is a possible explanation for the findings. It’s the only possible explanation, and it occurred just before the baby showed symptoms. So it’s a really, really strong theory that has been taught to doctors. Now, why has that been the case? I don’t know.

What I know is that historically, and you really need to dig down into the history of shaken baby syndrome to understand how it was born—it was born in the ’70s with this hypothesis that maybe shaking was one of the possible causes of subdural hematoma, but at the time it was just a hypothesis. And today it’s still a hypothesis. And that was in the beginning of the ’70s. And a few years later, doctors in the U.S. started to presume abuse whenever they found subdural and retinal hemorrhage in infants. Why that has been the case, why this mere hypothesis, Maybe it’s shaking, was transformed into, It is shaking, and we need to call the police, that I don’t know. But by the ’80s, you start to see prosecutions based on this theory.

So somehow—I don’t know—some doctors in the U.S. started to do this. It’s important, also, to say that there was the context of reporting any suspicion of child abuse to authorities. That started in the ’60s. There was a big subject here in pediatrics at the time, because before the ’60s, it was not really obvious for doctors to think about abuse. They didn’t really think about it. And it suddenly changed in the ’60s. And they really realized that it was important for the medical community, and especially pediatricians, who see children all the time, to think about abuse whenever they find suspicious findings, like fractures, bruises, and subdural hematoma. That came in the ’70s.

So there was this big push for doctors to really report as many children as possible to the authorities whenever they have the slightest doubt on abuse. And since there was this hypothesis that maybe subdural hematoma is one of the signs that should make doctors suspicious of abuse, well, they started to call the police and to report these cases to authorities.

That being said, I think there’s a difference between being just aware that maybe children are abused and calling the police, and going to court and saying, This is abuse, and this is nothing else, and this is certain. This is a big difference to me. And this is really what I don’t understand, because, to me, doctors should treat patients and report possible child-abuse cases to authorities. But going beyond that and saying to the courts, I’m a doctor, and I know that this child was abused, even though there’s no other piece of evidence apart from the medical findings, this is the thing that is going too far for me.

Demsas: What other things can happen that can cause these symptoms to present in babies? Are there other potential explanations that you found when researching this?

Rossant: Yeah. So actually, now we know a lot of possible causes of subdural and retinal hemorrhage. First, there’s everything involving accidental trauma, like short falls and domestic accidents. Whenever there’s an impact to the head, even what appears to be a small impact, it can really cause severe injuries, including what we see in shaken baby syndrome. There’s also biomechanical data about this. Impact is really dangerous for the skull and for the brain in a child.

Then you have many rare diseases, like a genetic, metabolic, neurological conditions that can all cause subdural hematoma or be a risk factor for the development of subdural hematoma after a minor impact, which really happens in most babies. Once they start to sit down, they can fall, and when they try to get up, to stand up, they can also fall. So it’s really, really common for babies to hit their head. Most of the time, it’s not going to cause anything, but if there is a medical condition, if there is a risk factor, then it might cause the findings of shaken baby syndrome.

There are infections that can cause blood-clotting disorders. There’s really a lot of things. It’s really complicated. It’s really not possible to say that only shaking is the only cause of the SBS findings. There are also risk factors—again, it can be medical conditions.

But it can be just a prematurity. It’s a big risk factor. These babies are much more fragile. Babies who have a low birth weight, babies who have a large head—there are many little things like this that can increase the risk of a subdural retinal hemorrhage after minor impact. So yeah, it’s really complicated.

Demsas: I want to talk about some of the pushback that people like you have received from other scientists who stand by the shaken-baby-syndrome diagnosis and say that it is perfectly reasonable for doctors to presume, and for the courts to presume, that when these injuries present in babies, that we should assume a caregiver has shaken the child. What they often point to is the fact that numerous perpetrators have confessed and admitted to shaking their babies, and that the confessions often will provide detailed accounts that match the medical findings of shaken baby syndromes, and that they have these consistent patterns.

Why is that not convincing to you that, perhaps, maybe it’s the case that science hasn’t figured out exactly how shaking will cause these symptoms, but if people are admitting to having shaken their baby and then their baby is presenting with these symptoms, that’s a reasonable cause and effect to presume?

Rossant: Yeah, it’s true that confessions—today, it’s the main piece of evidence for shaken baby syndrome. The question is not whether confessions exist or not; it’s how reliable they are, and what you can learn from the confessions. So confessions do exist. And I also want to stress that, obviously, some of these confessions are true, and that some parents do abuse the babies, and they end up confessing when they are being interrogated by the police.

So yeah, you cannot possibly say that all confessions are false. It’s not working like this. That being said, I’ve studied this question a lot in the scientific literature, and it’s true to say that they are really unreliable scientifically. They are not scientific evidence. And it’s not obvious to realize that, because when you don’t know the subject, you think, Well, if the person admits something that horrible, it must be true. There’s no reason for an innocent person to say they did it if they did not.

But it’s much more complicated than that. The topic of false confessions in general—not just for a shaken baby, but for any type of crime—has been known for decades. You know the Innocence Project that was able to exonerate a lot of people based on DNA evidence? Well, it turns out that between 25 and 30 percent of all the DNA exonerations had falsely confessed, and they were factually innocent, because that was proved by DNA, which could point to someone else. So it’s something that exists.

Now, you wonder why innocent people confess. So there are many reasons. There’s even a classification that was done by a psychologist and scientist. There’s a psychologist called Saul Kassin, who is an expert of this, and he has devised a classification of false confessions.

So for example, one of the reasons is just plea deals. So they plead guilty, and they might not go to jail, and they can walk free, but they have to say they did it. But even without that, even in the police interrogation room, innocent people can be led to confess what they did not do, in this context.

For example, the police can say, Well, if you confess, the child, who is in foster care, can go back to you. You can get back your child if you confess. Or maybe, If you confess, your child can go back to the other parent. There are many incentives that are given by the police to the persons to confess. And the reason for that is that the police are being taught, like medical doctors, that shaking is the only possible cause and that it has to be that last person with the baby at the time of the collapse, right?

There’s also the whole thing of internalized false confessions. It’s really mysterious. It’s really a psychological effect that can lead innocent people who deny having harmed their child while being interrogated to slowly, in the course of hours or even days of interrogation in a very stressful context, to believe that maybe they did something that they did not think was harmful but was actually harmful, or at least that’s what they are led to believe. And it really happens a lot in this particular type of case. The police can make a lot of scenarios: Okay, maybe you didn’t want to harm your child, but you took the child from the bed a bit quickly, or maybe the head hit something, or you were not careful enough.

There’s a lot of scenarios that are being fed to the suspect. And in this specific stressful context, innocent parents who are really—they have this guilt of maybe they think they did not do everything they could to save their children. Maybe they tried to resuscitate their child with cardiac massage or something, or maybe they tried to slowly shake the baby, but it’s a very mild type of shaking. It’s really not a violent shaking. So you can always find something.

And this really happens, and I’ve seen it a lot, and it’s been documented on videotaped police interrogation. You can see it in some transcripts. So when you really dig into the details of what has been confessed exactly and how it has been confessed, and when you look at all the context of the interrogation, you realize that it’s really not, Okay. Well, okay. I admit it. I just lost my nerves and violently shook my baby. This is very rare. This is not the type of confession you see in shaken baby syndrome. It’s: Oh my God. Okay. Maybe I did it. I didn’t realize my baby was collapsing. And yeah, I tried to revive my child. And maybe in the process, I harmed my child, and I—oh my God.

It’s a really complex phenomenon. But it’s been documented, and I think it happens a lot. So you cannot just say, Okay, confessions exist, so it must be true, right? That being said, most confessions are obtained after the diagnosis—so typically, after the police have been called, and it’s most often in the police interrogation room, right?

So there’s this big contamination, and it’s more than that. It’s really a pressure, because the police think they know that the baby was shaken and that this person is guilty, so there’s a whole bias, right? What would be interesting would be to see if confessions can be obtained before—before the police interrogation and even before the medical exam that will show the medical findings that are associated with SBS. Because if it’s obtained before, then there’s no way the diagnosis could influence the confession. Obviously, this kind of confession is very rare, but there is at least one study that was able to find something like 36 cases where the confessions were obtained before any kind of medical exam.

So there’s a lot of reason to believe that these kinds of confessions are genuine, true, right? And what’s interesting is that, in those cases, you are not going to find the medical findings of SBS. So yeah, there are many reasons to be skeptical of this theory.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: Shaken baby syndrome goes by a different name now, but the same problems persist.

[Break]

Demsas: I’m hoping you can explain why the term shaken baby syndrome has fallen out of use. Now we’re more likely to hear the term abusive head trauma, and I’d assumed that was due to the criticisms levied by folks like you who’ve become skeptical of the SBS diagnosis. But in a policy statement about the diagnosis, the American Academy of Pediatrics said that the name change to abusive head trauma “was misinterpreted by some in the legal and medical communities as an indication of some doubt in or invalidation of the diagnosis and the mechanism of shaking as a cause of injury.” And then they say that the AAP, “continues to embrace the ‘shaken baby syndrome’ diagnosis as a valid subset of the AHT diagnosis.”

So what’s your interpretation of what’s going on there?

Rossant: Yeah, so it’s true that in 2009, the AAP published a position paper stating that from now on, “abusive head trauma” should be used instead of “shaken baby syndrome.” And the way they justify this was because it was to encompass a broader source of abuse inflicted to babies—not just shaking, but also impact to the head. That’s the justification.

And there was one big study in ’87 by [A. C.] Duhaime and a few biomechanicians who really showed, first, that there were very often signs of impact, which was not really compatible with the idea that these babies were just shaken, right? And also, they did a biomechanical study to show that the forces involved with shaking are much lower than when there’s any kind of impact to the head. So impact to the head is really, really severe and implies very big forces to the head and big deformation and big energy. So it’s much more dangerous.

And there was some controversy in scientific articles about this that partly led to, I think, this decision to change the name from shaken baby syndrome to abusive head trauma, because it was not just shaking very frequently; there’s also impact.

Now, it’s true that before 2009, especially since the Louise Woodward trial in Boston in 1997, there was a lot of controversy in the media and the scientific articles on specifically shaken baby syndrome, the hypothesis that you could infer abuse just with the triad, without any sign of impact. And yeah, some people believe that this change of name is a consequence of this controversy. Obviously, the AAP, the medical institutions do not really acknowledge this, because their position has always been to say that there is no controversy at all, right?

So here we are. I mean, we have this change of name that has been more or less accepted by everyone, even though the term shaken baby syndrome is still quite widely known in the public.

There’s something else that should be pointed out. It’s that the term shaken baby syndrome was criticized—the very term—in particular by Norman Guthkelch, who first identified shaken baby syndrome, or at least the link between shaking and subdural hematoma, in 1971. He criticized the fact that the same term is used to describe both an act—shaking—and a set of injuries. So it conflates a unique hypothetical cause to objective findings. And it’s a real problem because you can’t talk about what you see without accepting that there might be other causes than shaking.

So that’s why he recommended to use another term, which was, I think, retinal-dural hemorrhage of infancy. That really just describes the fact that you find subdural and retinal hemorrhage in an infant without presuming anything about the cause. Unfortunately, that was not the choice that was made, and now we have abusive head trauma, which is also problematic because it also implies that, well, it’s abuse. So it’s a medical diagnosis that comes after you discover specific medical findings in an infant, and you give the term abusive head trauma, which implies that it was caused by abuse.

So there’s this whole thing of intent that is really not the job of medicine. It’s for the police and the justice to determine what happened and what the intent was. So the previous term was a problem with this respect, and the new one is still problematic in this respect.

Demsas: Yeah. It was really interesting when I was reading about the controversy with Norman Guthkelch, who you just mentioned. I mean, he’s called, like, the father of shaken baby syndrome because of his 1971 paper. NPR reported that he reviewed a case in Arizona, and they wrote that “he was troubled to see that the medical examiner’s autopsy had concluded that the baby died of shaken baby syndrome while discounting other possible causes.”

So, you know, given that, why do you think it’s been difficult for the medical community to become more agnostic about whether these injuries that show up in children are necessarily the result of abuse or of some other thing going on? Like, why is the AAP still saying this? I mean, I know you can’t speak about them specifically, but why do you think there’s just been such reticence from the medical community?

Rossant: Oh, that’s a very good question, and I am wondering this. I mean, it’s been almost 10 years that I ask myself this very question, and I don’t really know.

I think there’s—I mean, it’s more general than that. It’s, you know, in the human psychology, the fact that it’s very hard to recognize that you were wrong before. It’s very hard to change one’s own mind, especially when doctors have made a lot of diagnoses with very severe consequences: with removal, going into foster care, and, you know, criminal prosecutions, etcetera.

It’s very hard to accept that, as a doctor, you were wrong and you maybe did some misanalysis and you were responsible for, you know, miscarriages of justice, etcetera. I think it’s really the No. 1 thing that is blocking everything, this psychological aspects of doctors, who are humans, like everyone else.

Some doctors do change their minds with the new science, the new articles, new data, their new experience, new cases. They realize that maybe it was not as easy as we thought before, and they start to change their minds. They start to work for the defense, and then they are being targeted and bullied, attacked, especially by the establishments, and it’s always the same. So yeah, it’s really in human nature.

I think it’s also the scale. I think it’s not just a few errors here and there. It’s really, really massive. I think there are many, many cases which are misdiagnosed and that the so-called shaken babies were not really shaken. I mean, obviously, it exists, and there are many cases where the diagnosis was true, but many where it was not the case. So that’s also why it’s so hard to accept one’s own mistakes, because it's a really massive mistake that was done.

Demsas: Something you just said about how much they react to public censure here: There was a quote from this Milwaukee prosecutor. I believe this is from a ProPublica article, but he’s a deputy district attorney in Milwaukee, and he said it was, “providing reasonable doubt for sale.”

Essentially, there’s some criticisms of people who will provide reasonable doubt or arguments that provide reasonable doubt to accused criminals, whether it’s forensic evidence, like fingerprint analysis or DNA analysis or things like the SBS. But there’s been a real backlash from within the law-enforcement community to scientific evidence being muddled in courtrooms. And I wonder: Have you come across people who react to your work and believe you’re giving cover to child abusers? What do you say to them?

Rossant: Yeah, I think I kind of understand because there’s always this tension between, you know, being too safe on the safe side—I mean, is it better to put an innocent person in jail, or to let a guilty person walk free and potentially harm children, right?

And personally as someone who believes in democracy and, you know, les lumières, which is a really French thing. I think it’s really important not to harm innocent people. So it’s really kind of philosophical attitude, I think. But yeah, I can understand why some people believe that it’s not possible to take this risk of letting potentially dangerous people walk free.

But you know, in the end, I think we should all try to do our best and try to be as accurate and scientific as possible. Try to look at all the evidence on the one side or the other side, and then let the criminal-justice system do its work. And that’s why we have this notion of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” you know, the burden of proof, all of these things. They were designed precisely to avoid, as much as possible, putting innocents behind bars, which is a very terrible thing to do as a democracy, I think.

Demsas: Do you have thoughts on how you would’ve preferred to have things play out in your case? When a doctor is concerned about SBS with your child, what do you wish had happened?

Rossant: I think most parents, most families would accept something, some kind of measure that is not removing the child. So, you know, a follow-up with the psychologists, social workers, people that go to your place and that look at the room, how you handle your child, that follow you from a few months, maybe one year, I don’t know. It depends on the situation, but that is fine.

And we actually had that. Even though the nanny was being prosecuted after the first month, we did have a follow-up with a psychologist and social workers for, like, two years, I think. It was very light. It could have been, you know, more intrusive, and it would’ve been fine. I mean, there’s no problem as long as you have the freedom to have your child with you, right?

It’s really the fact that to remove a child from its environment, it’s a really big cost, so that should really be done in the most extreme cases. And typically, some judges do say that it only happens in the most extreme cases, and that they tried to do their best not to go that far and to find all possible solutions before resorting, as a last solution, to foster care.

But in practice, in the cases I know—and especially in the abusive-head-trauma cases—for very, very small children, babies who don’t speak, it’s very often removal into a foster family in a nursery. And that’s really, really hard for the child, and for the parents to know that the child is suffering from being suddenly put into a different place and without parents, without siblings, without the teddy bears and, you know.

Demsas: Yeah, I guess it depends on where you are and how the authorities function. But, you know, I could imagine that most parents would be okay with having an interview with Child Protective Services if, you know, it was respectful and there’s a clear protocol for what was being followed.

And I think there are a lot of civil servants who take their jobs seriously and want to make families better. But I think it’s very variable, especially in the United States, where this is not a federalized system. There’s very many different administrations of child protective services. And where you are can vary very differently, how you’re treated and how you interact with and how the state interacts with you.

And so, I agree—we would want to create a system where parents felt fine and open and welcome to that kind of surveillance and interaction, but I worry that we don’t actually have that in the entire world.

Rossant: Yeah. And it’s actually the same in France. Today there’s no centralized child-protection system. It’s each department, each region of France that has its own system. So there are great disparities between the different regions, and we do see very, very different treatments of similar situations, depending on where you are in the same country. So yeah, it’s a very difficult problem, and some families do not understand why it’s worse in their own case compared to other families.

Demsas: This was obviously a very serious episode, but I always like to end on a question that draws people to think about and reflect on a time when they themselves have believed something that didn’t turn out to be true. So in your life, is there a time where you believed something that ended up being only good on paper?

Rossant: Wow. Good question. I really never thought about this. But maybe I can say that initially—and sorry; it’s still about shaken baby syndrome, but initially—I believed that shaken baby syndrome was a thing.

Why? Because my own father was a pediatrician and an expert in court, and he told me many times about shaken baby syndrome, and he did testify for the prosecution in shaken-baby cases. So I knew it.

Demsas: Wow.

Rossant: Yeah, it’s really a crazy coincidence, right? Sadly, he passed away one month before the symptoms of my child. So just before that. He could have been very helpful, obviously. But that’s why I had this bias at the beginning, when I was starting to look into the literature. I was sure that shaken baby syndrome was entirely legitimate, and I thought there was no controversy.

So when I started looking into it, I really didn’t think that I would change my mind, but I actually changed my mind. It was really hard for me to do it, because I was so convinced that the scientific consensus was right. And even my own father was testifying in court that this theory was correct. So it was not easy for me to change my mind, but I had to, because that’s what the evidence was telling me.

Demsas: Well, that’s a model for what we’re trying to do on this show. Cyrille, thank you so much for coming on.

Rossant: Thank you. Thank you a lot.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw and fact-checked by Ena Alvarado. Erica Huang and Rob Smierciak engineered this episode. Rob Smierciak also composed our theme music. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

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.

In 2000, the CDC declared that measles had been eliminated from the United States. But now America is at risk of losing that status: A measles outbreak has sickened more than 150 people in Texas and New Mexico since late January. An unvaccinated school-aged child recently died from measles in Texas—the first known death from measles in America in about a decade, and the first child to die from the disease since 2003. I spoke with my colleague Katherine J. Wu, who covers science and health, about why vaccination is the only way to prevent the spread, and how a surge in illnesses that had previously faded from American life could reshape childhoods.

Lora Kelley: Why is measles so reliant on vaccines to prevent its spread?

Katherine J. Wu: Measles is arguably the most contagious infectious disease that scientists know about. Researchers have estimated that, in a population where there’s zero immunity to measles, one infected person is going to infect roughly 12 to 18 other people. That is extremely high. In most cases, it is a respiratory infection that’s going to cause fever, cough, and rash, but it can also restrict breathing, cause complications such as pneumonia, and be deadly.

This is a disease that requires really, really high levels of vaccination to keep it out of a community, because it’s so contagious. Researchers have estimated that you want to see vaccination rates in the 95 percent range to protect a community. If you start to dip just a bit below that threshold, like even 92 percent or 90 percent, you start to get into trouble. Lower uptake creates an opening for the virus to start spreading. And the more unvaccinated people there are, the faster the virus will spread, and the more people will get seriously sick.

Lora: Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said last week that this recent outbreak is “not unusual” and pointed to past measles outbreaks. How do you view this current outbreak relative to other times when cases spiked, such as the 2019 outbreak in New York?

Katherine: The current outbreak actually is not as big as the 2019 New York one yet. And we almost lost our elimination status for measles then. But there are ways in which I would argue that this one is worse than the 2019 outbreak. An unvaccinated kid has died. We haven’t had a reported measles death in this country in about a decade. If the situation worsens, that death might only be the first.

Lora: Could people who are vaccinated be affected by a measles outbreak?

Katherine: The MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps, and rubella, generally provides immunity from measles for decades. But there are kids who are not old enough to be fully vaccinated against measles (kids get one shot at 12 to 15 months and then again at 4 to 6 years old). And it’s rare, but some people, including immunocompromised people, might not respond well to vaccination and may not be protected by it. Also, as people get further from their vaccination date, they may be more vulnerable to the disease. The more measles is around, the more vulnerable even the vaccinated population will be.

Lora: Measles hasn’t been a big issue in this country for a long time. What tools does America have to fight this disease if it resurges in a big way?

Katherine: Because this disease spreads so quickly, the main tool we’ve used to fight it is vaccination. And if people are letting that go, we’re in trouble. There are no antivirals for measles. Doctors generally just have to do what they can to manage the symptoms. Plus, health-care workers aren’t used to diagnosing or dealing with measles cases anymore, which makes it easier for outbreaks to get out of control.

Lora: How might the recent layoffs at federal agencies focused on public health and disease affect America’s ability to respond to outbreaks?

Katherine: I do worry that a lot of the public-health workforce is slowly getting hollowed out, including at the CDC. We’re going to lose our ability to prevent and stop epidemics—we saw resources that researchers rely on to track outbreaks temporarily disappear from the CDC website in January and February, for example. If people’s attitudes keep shifting away from childhood vaccination, a whole other host of diseases could creep in. In refusing the MMR vaccine, you are by definition also refusing protection against the mumps and rubella.

And RFK Jr. has made rampant speculations about the MMR vaccine being more dangerous than the disease itself, which is completely untrue. This week, he published an op-ed on the Fox News website acknowledging the importance of vaccinating against measles but also framing vaccination as a “personal” choice, and described nutrition as “a best defense against most chronic and infectious illnesses.” I can promise that no multivitamin will work against measles as well as the MMR vaccine, which has been proved safe and effective at protecting people from disease. Measles, meanwhile, can kill.

Lora: What would more frequent outbreaks mean for America’s kids and their childhood?

Katherine: In the world kids live in now, when they get sick with a disease they catch from other children, it’s not that big of a deal most of the time. Measles outbreaks are just so different from the colds picked up from day care or the stomach bugs you catch at Disneyland. If we choose to let measles and other vaccine-preventable diseases come back, there will be more childhood mortality. Kids might get pneumonia more often. They might be hospitalized more often. Some might grow up with permanent brain damage. Childhood will not only be about whether a kid is going to get a good education or make enough friends. It will once more be about whether a kid can survive the first few years of their life.

Related:

RFK Jr. is America’s leading advocate for getting measles, Benjamin Mazer writes. The return of measles

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

​Trump’s tariffs are his most inexplicable decision yet. The nicest swamp on the internet Good on Paper: You may miss wokeness.

Today’s News

The Trump administration imposed 25 percent tariffs on most imports from Canada and Mexico, and doubled tariffs for China. In response, Canada put 25 percent tariffs on billions of dollars of American goods, Mexico will announce retaliatory tariffs on Sunday, and China will add tariffs on some American imports on March 10. Donald Trump will deliver a speech to a joint session of Congress tonight at 9 p.m. ET, in which he is expected to lay out his vision for his second term. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote that last week’s Oval Office meeting was “regrettable” and proposed a partial cease-fire with Russia to resume peace negotiations.

Evening Read

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Sources: Bettmann / Getty; Harold M. Lambert / Getty.

When America Persecutes Its Teachers

By Clay Risen

Several states, most notably Florida, have ordered schools and colleges to restrict or eliminate courses on gender, while groups such as Moms for Liberty have rallied parents to police curricula and ban books from school libraries. Ideological battles over education may be proxies for larger conflicts—Communism in the ’40s and ’50s; diversity, equity, and inclusion today. But such fights are particularly fierce because of how important schools are in shaping American values. To control the country’s education system is, in no uncertain terms, to control the country’s future.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Trump has a funny way of protecting women’s sports. The Trump voters who are losing patience One potential benefit of RFK Jr.’s crusade against outside influence DEI has lost all meaning, Conor Friedersdorf writes. The key mismatch between Zelensky and Trump

Culture Break

Focus Features

Watch. Even the most mundane moments are riveting in the new deep-sea drama Last Breath (out in theaters), David Sims writes.

Listen. A hugely popular podcast tries to prove that nonspeaking people with autism have supernatural powers—but it misses something more compelling, Dan Engber writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Progressive ideas around race, gender, and immigration are under scrutiny by both the Republican-controlled federal government and Democrats chastened by the loss of the 2024 election. In this modern context, it’s easy to forget how persuasive these ideas once were. In 1995, just 25 percent of Democrats identified as liberal, while 46 called themselves moderate. Twenty years later, a sea change in public opinion had happened: In 2015, 45 percent of Democrats called themselves liberals.

Two political scientists and a researcher found that from 2011 to 2020 the attitudes of Democrats and independents became notably more liberal on racial inequality and immigration. But even looking after the period of anti-“woke” backlash that has characterized much of the past few years, attitudes among all Americans (including Republicans) are noticeably more liberal than they were in 2011, according to their research.

That’s not to say that every part of what has been called “wokeness” was popular or even persuasive to the most liberal of poll respondents. But I think in the next few months and years, we’ll come to see the anti-woke glee that has permeated through the first month of the Trump administration to be out of step with public opinion.

Today’s episode is a conversation I had last August with The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg about a column she wrote, “Wokeness Is Dying. We Might Miss It.” The words she wrote then ring truer even now:

“There are aspects of the New Progressivism—its clunky neologisms and disdain for free speech—that I’ll be glad to see go. But however overwrought the politics of 2020 were, they also represented a rare moment when there was suddenly enormous societal energy to tackle long-festering inequalities.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: A few weeks ago, Darren Beattie was appointed to a senior role at the State Department—acting Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy.

Beattie is a known quantity. He was fired by the last Trump administration after it came out that he’d attended and spoken at a conference with white nationalists.

But this experience doesn’t seem to have rattled him, in the following years he made many controversial remarks on twitter including that “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.”

Just watching the first few weeks of the new President’s term indicates that curbing wokeness and cultural liberalism is top of mind for the administration. It’s remarkable to look back on polling that shows that the economy, not the war on wokeness, was the top issue for Trump voters.

But from directing removal of trans Americans in the military to rolling back DEI initiatives throughout the government, the Trump administration has made anti-wokeness a core focus.

[Music]

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas, I’m a staff writer at the Atlantic and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. These past few weeks have had me thinking back to a conversation I had with New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg last year about whether Americans would miss wokeness when it was gone.

No one, including myself, will defend every part of a movement’s form. There were many ridiculous DEI trainings, offensive instances of language policing, and stupid and counterproductive overreactions. But, as Goldberg wrote last year: “however overwrought the politics of 2020 were, they also represented a rare moment when there was suddenly enormous societal energy to tackle long-festering inequalities.”

I’m excited to revisit this episode with you all today.

Michelle, welcome to the show.

Michelle Goldberg: Thanks for having me.

Demsas: I read an article you wrote a few months ago, and it was called, “Wokeness is Dying. We Might Miss It.” And it’s been something I’ve been reflecting on myself because I think that there’s a conventional wisdom that’s been built up in traditional media—and then just a lot of our public discourse—that the backlash of the progressive tilt of the 2010s is a good thing, and that we’re seeing a good correction of a time period that went too far. And I thought that your article was a really interesting take on that idea.

But before we get into all that, I wanted to ground us in what we’re even talking about. When we talk about wokeness, what are we talking about when you use that term?

Goldberg: Well, it’s a hard term to define. I actually rarely use it except in quote marks because it’s one of those terms that was—obviously started out in Black vernacular and then was appropriated by people who are really hostile to it.

Basically, any time someone uses woke, you assume that they’re using it as an insult. Very few people actually identify their own politics that way. But how I often describe it, even if it’s a little clunky, is like a style of social-justice politics that is extremely focused on changing the world by changing the way we talk about the world.

Demsas: It’s funny because as I was preparing for this episode, I was just looking back at before the 2010s, and it feels like we had a version of this before then. People would complain about political correctness all the time. And I wonder how you distinguish the two eras. Is this just a piece that has always been in our politics—it just changes forms and maybe the specific issues it cares about?

Or is it actually something completely separate and different?

Goldberg: No. I think it’s basically a replay of the political correctness and the political-correctness backlash of the 1990s, which also came about at a time when you were seeing a lot more ethnic-studies, women’s-studies, area-studies programs in universities; some academic language starting to filter out into everyday life, a lot of people feeling really annoyed and alienated by that; and then a right-wing backlash, which was out of proportion and was so much more damaging to progressive politics than any gains that they might have made through the evolution and language that people were pushing at the time.

Demsas: So when you chart the beginning of this—I think it’s hard because it’s fuzzy. I was looking back to see when people really started talking about this. Matt Yglesias has this piece in 2019 in Vox where he coined the term the Great Awokening, and he charts it then as beginning with the 2014 protests in Ferguson after Michael Brown was shot by a police officer. He looks at the increase that you see in polls in concern for racial inequality and discrimination and the simultaneous divergence of the Democratic Party, where you see racially conservative Democrats leave the party.

And his story is very focused on race and immigration there. I think there are other people who would go even earlier, and then others who think it really takes off with Hillary Clinton. What time period are you really thinking about?

Goldberg: It’s interesting that Matt Yglesias says that. I felt that was also maybe the year that this style of politics became really dominant in certain circles, if not in the culture at large. And I wouldn’t just limit it to the debate about race and policing, because I think some of it comes out of Tumblr culture and just the perverse incentives of social media, the perverse incentives of left-wing politics.

I wrote a piece in 2014 for The Nation, where I was a writer at the time, called, “Feminism’s Toxic Twitter Wars.” And it wasn’t about quote, unquote, “wokeness.” I don’t remember if people were actually using that word at the time. But it was about this really destructive style of competitive self-righteousness. And one of the texts that helped me make sense of what was going on was an essay by a feminist writer named Jo Freeman from the ’70s called, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” that was about how—when you have ostensibly horizontal, leaderless organizations—people do, in fact, fight for power and leaders emerge, but they do it through passive-aggressive and emotionally manipulative means. And so, this has always been an issue on the left; it’s just that social media supercharged it.

Demsas: Yeah. I’ve been thinking about how much of this is a story about technology, right? Social media, as you say—to unpack a bit, there’s obviously an incentive to move to the extremes. People often only think about this in terms of talking about politics, in terms of, Oh, people are saying radical things.

But if you scroll through TikTok or anything—and I’m sure you’ve seen this stuff, too—you see pretty shocking content in general: people doing weird things with food, really bizarre things with different toys and things in order to just get the viewer confused and really fixated. (Laughs.)

Goldberg: (Laughs.) Right. Social media does two things: On the one hand, it just incentivizes extremism because you need to catch people’s attention. And extremism can also serve as a form of novelty. But it also—and I’ve written about this, as well—there used to be this idea that the problem with social media was that it kept people siloed in quote, unquote, “filter bubbles,” and I don’t think that’s the problem. I think the problem is that it exposes you to some of the most obnoxious examples on the other side, so it ends up furthering this negative polarization.

Demsas: Let’s turn to the piece that you wrote. You titled it, “Wokeness Is Dying. We Might Miss It.” Why is wokeness dying, and why do you miss it?

Goldberg: Obviously, I don’t miss all of it. As I write in the piece, there was tons of it that I have always found—I’m kind of a cranky Gen-X person. I didn’t like these clunky neologisms. I find some of the language, like the people-first language—I’m trying to think of even—

Demsas: Like saying person without housing, or saying unhoused instead of homeless?

Goldberg: Right. I do understand some of it. And that’s the problem, that all of this you can understand in certain instincts. I do understand that there’s certain language that can be really stigmatizing, and that there’s reason for language to evolve. I’m watching—my kids are super into 30 Rock right now, and they’re constantly saying things on 30 Rock that my kids are like, Oh, my God. You can’t say that!

Demsas: (Laughs.)

Goldberg: And that show—I don’t remember at the time feeling particularly provocative. And so the natural evolution of language is often a good thing. The forced evolution of language in a way that feels like it comes down from some really sanctimonious, prissy commissar is not a good thing. Although I just said that, we have to remember that there actually was no commissar.

People, I think—in reaction to stuff that really annoyed them, the kind of people who made their identity around opposition to wokeness—they almost had to inflate its danger to match the scale of their annoyance. Rather than something that, like, really bugged them or really seemed obnoxious, it had to be totalitarian. It had to be something that was remaking all of the systems of our society, which I just don’t think was ever really true.

But anyway, there was this very laudable attempt to correct systemic injustices in our society, systemic injustices that were really thrown into high relief for a lot of people by the election of Donald Trump. And one of the reasons I don’t like this approach to politics is that changing the way you talk about things is one of the easiest things to do, as opposed to making concrete, material change.

But nevertheless, it’s a step. It was a good thing that people felt less comfortable using certain kind of slurs. Let me put it this way: It was a good thing that when J. D. Vance was writing to one of his left-wing classmates, who I believe he had described as a lesbian, but they were trans, and wrote (these emails have now leaked) this sensitive email that, you know, I love you. I’m sorry if I misgendered you. I hope you know it was coming from a place of respect—I think it was good that conservative men, or all sorts of people, felt the need to be a little bit more thoughtful and sensitive.

Obviously, there was plenty of places where it veered into self-parody, and those places were exaggerated and amplified by a social-media panic, which has now led to a really ugly right-wing backlash.

Demsas: The definition you gave for wokeness, too—it really speaks to the idea that it’s about language and discourse policing in a way. And I wonder—because it seems almost like a definition that has been won by the opponents of it, right? Because I would imagine the people in the 2010s who are really parts of these movements—whether they’re part of #MeToo movement or they’re part of racial-justice movements—there were very specific policy ideas and things that they were upset about.

And many of them were very popular. Police brutality becomes—even amongst independents and, in some polls, even with Republicans, you see support for measures that would rein back police. Of course, the prosecution of people like Harvey Weinstein was very popular. And then, of course, something like abortion, which is seen as now the best issue for Democrats, is something that’s obviously an issue about women’s rights and feminism.

But there’s a way in which we’ve bifurcated these two things that I’m not really sure how to think about. Because, at one point, I totally agree with you: There is clearly an increased focus on what types of things people are saying, but that seems it was at least intended by some people to be a way to get people on board with a policy agenda.

But those two things seem difficult to also separate. If you’re looking for who your allies are and you’re like, Who’s misgendering trans people? That tells you who’s part of your political movement. And I wonder how you think about how we’ve bifurcated the policy goals of these movements from the discourse policing, and were those two things really necessary to be together?

Goldberg: It’s a complicated question. But I would agree with you that the intention of a lot of people was to make real-world change, not just to change the way people talk about things. Do you remember, at a certain point on the internet, there was this taboo against quote, unquote, “tone policing?”

Demsas: Yeah.

Goldberg: Which meant, in turn, that it was almost impossible for the left to either make or listen to any kind of critique of its rhetoric or the way it approached people who might be partially on board but not fully on board. And it ended up really alienating a lot of people outright and then creating this rumbling, subterranean resentment that was then able to be harnessed by really sinister forces. And I think it’s easy to say, Well, if you were attracted to fascism because you don’t like being told what to say or because you’re angry about some new terminology, then that’s on you. And that shows that you always had these inclinations.

But people have lots of different inclinations. And it’s the job of a social movement to, I think, meet people where they are and draw out the parts of them that you want to encourage.

Demsas: Well, it seems in your piece that you’re skeptical about the framing that wokeness has won in any way. And I wonder why you think that, because, from my perspective, I mean, it’s obviously hard. People can point to different areas in which different movements have been successful or not.

But when you look at attitudes amongst the general public on many progressive issues, they’ve shifted dramatically to the left. And, of course, a lot of that is being driven from people moving really far left within the Democratic Party. But even independents on these issues—they’ve moved people left on these things.

And I think there’s also material gains that have happened. People don’t talk about these a lot, but in the year after the murder of George Floyd, for instance, half of U.S. states passed legislation in at least one of the following categories: use of force; duty for officers to intervene, report, or render medical aid in instances of police misconduct; or policies relating to law-enforcement misconduct reporting.

Goldberg: Well, can I just say—I don’t think we should tar all. Again, I feel like this category of wokeness is so unstable and amorphous. But I definitely would not want to put criminal-justice reform under that auspice, right? When I’m saying that I think this style of politics is dead, I certainly don’t mean all left-wing politics, and I don’t mean all criminal-justice reform.

What’s dead is—not only is the Democratic Party trying to memory-hole calls to defund the police, but there was a social pressure to get on board with that language that is completely gone. And so I’m talking about something a little bit more hard to pin down, but something that a lot of people felt and responded to.

The reason I say it’s dead—and I wrote this piece in response to a book by Nellie Bowles called the Morning After the Revolution. It was sort of satirical, but it was also so exaggerated that it was kind of ridiculous. Like at one point she says, I heard people saying that roads were racist. And that didn’t come from some asshole teenager; that came from Robert Caro writing about Robert Moses. But I think that, in part, just to either justify her project or to inflate its importance, she said, This movement hasn’t calmed down because it lost; it’s calmed down because it won.

And I think that for some people that means they have to go to various HR workshops or whatever. But let’s just look at the evidence: You see company after company dismantling their DEI initiatives, states banning DEI in colleges. One of the examples I gave in that column was a school named after a Confederate general that had changed its name and then decided to change it back.

Target, for example, responding to these right-wing backlashes, taking Pride merchandise out of a lot of its stores—there was a sense, at one point, that corporate America wanted to ride the social-justice train. And it might have been hypocritical, but it also suggested that they saw these views as ascendant and something that they wanted to latch onto for their own purposes. I don’t think they see things like that anymore.

[Music]

Demsas: All right. We’re going to take a quick break. More with Michelle when we get back.

[Break]

Demsas: I just want to run my theory for you why there was such a focus on discourse policing and on language versus these policies. I think that often—and I found that it felt a little disingenuous sometimes—you’d ask people, Hey, it seems like your organization’s really focused on these language things. Why are you policing whether someone says they’re Latino or Latinx, or something like that. And they would say, Well, we’re actually focused on all of these issues that impact people on the material level. And it’s like, Yeah, but what are you tweeting about? What is it that you’re actually talking about in public constantly? What is your driving ethos?

And so, when I see this, I don’t think of it as disingenuous. I think a lot of people have read this as sort of a disingenuous thing, that people don’t actually care about changing the material reality of people that they’re working for. But I think it’s actually just that the structures of movement organizations have changed so dramatically, such that movement building is now both really easy and really hard.

Any individual person can put up a flyer or an Instagram graphic and say, Hey, we’re gonna do a protest here. And that doesn’t require an organizational capacity to really get someone out and be a part of a group. And that means that people are just showing up for something—or not showing up for something—and it’s completely unrelated to whether they’re being drawn into a broader group.

In the past, you had an NAACP that could speak credibly and say, We actually have organized the groups and the individuals who care a lot about racial justice in this country. And if you don’t vote X or Y way on a bill, that means that we’re going to turn up and we’re going to protest you. But now they can’t credibly say, No one will protest you if you do X or Y, because anyone can do it. And in many ways, that’s great.

Goldberg: Did you read this book—a great book by my colleague Zeynep Tufekci—called, Twitter and Tear Gas?

Demsas: I have not, but I’ve heard it’s a great book.

Goldberg: That’s what the book is about.

Demsas: Can you tell us about it?

Goldberg: So the book—I mean, she could obviously speak to it better than I could, but the book is basically about how before social media, your ability to muster a large protest was an outward sign of your organizational capacity, right?

It meant that you had members. It meant that you had people working on all the stuff that it takes to get people out, and that you were building relationships. And you also had to build an internal structure just in order to get this stuff done, and that structure would be there after the march was over.

Now you have these protests that come together very quickly and virally. But there’s nothing to buttress them. And then the issues that I mentioned earlier, with “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” come up. Because, especially in left-wing spaces, there’s often an aversion to hierarchy, which makes sense to a point, but you need some lines of organization in order to keep something going. When you don’t have that, you do still have people emerge as leaders, but the way that they emerge as leaders is either about cultivating celebrity or shivving other people for not being radical or committed enough.

Demsas: Yeah. I think the horizontal nature of a lot of social movements now, it leads to the point where it becomes actually quite difficult to be a credible partner to or credible bargaining-table member with politicians. Because if they say, We’ll do what you’re asking us, but that means you have to mobilize your people in support of it, and if you can’t credibly do that, then it becomes politically disadvantageous for any politician to work with you.

And that doesn’t mean I agree with that. I think they should just do what they think is right. But at the same time, what ends up happening then is the places where you can see a lot of pressure is just around virality and around these issues where you don’t actually need to work through the formal systems of political power or electoral power. You can work discursively.

Goldberg: I also should say: Somebody who’s deep into progressive organizing once told me that they saw this also as just a form of work avoidance. And maybe people don’t mean this, but it’s just the path of least resistance. The easiest thing to do is to complain about the word somebody is using.

Demsas: But the most cynical argument that I think has been advanced by, especially, a lot of people who are on the right or in the center is that a lot of the movement on liberalization on these views has come from white Democrats, a lot of whom are materially advantaged already. So you have, for instance, people who are maybe homeowners in, or live in, really high cost-of-living cities, and they make a lot of money. And maybe they don’t want to see material changes happen, because that would actually affect their lives.

For instance, I do a lot of reporting on the housing crisis. And it’s clear that a lot of people who consider themselves progressives, who fight for a lot of these causes and seem very genuine and caring about that sort of thing, often will revolt if you say, I think that you should allow for affordable housing to exist in your community.

And I think that there’s some people who take that dynamic and attribute it largely and say, Yeah, the reason they’re focusing on whether you’re saying the right words is because they don’t want to focus on the sorts of material changes that would require something actually being taken from them.

Goldberg: I don’t think it’s that intentional. I find it very hard to imagine that somebody is saying, I don’t want zoning reform in my suburban neighborhood, so I’m going to distract people with a fight over whether it’s ableist to say that we’re standing up for ourselves. I just don’t think that’s how people work.

I do think that people who both went to elite colleges, where these concepts are really prevalent, and are highly verbal and work in fields where communication is a central part of the work they do—it’s not that surprising that they default to questions of communication when they’re involved in politics. And so I think that people have blind spots.

But, again, I think the right-wing version of this is often that it’s a conspiracy to deflect from real challenges to the material privilege of rich, white liberals. And I don’t think it’s a conspiracy.

Demsas: Yeah. I think your previous frame is more likely correct—that it is more a path-of-least-resistance argument. But that also, I think, still implicates people in this, Why is it the path of least resistance for you not to want to allow people who make less money than you to live in your neighborhood? Why is that so difficult to mobilize people around? And maybe it’s not intentional, but that is just a harder thing to do.

And so you see organizers at the local level—they’re often like, Well, we can get people to sign onto an agreement to get the city to raise a Pride flag, but we can’t get people to change the school-boundary lines near them to make it more inclusive to lower-income kids where they go to school. So there is a reason why I think progressive activists get pushed in a direction. And I do think that there’s probably some truth to the idea that the material changes would be much less politically popular.

But I want to turn a little bit because a lot of your writing is about feminism that I’ve followed for years now. And you wrote an article called, “The Future Isn’t Female Anymore,” and that’s very much in line with what we’re talking about today, so I’m hoping you talk a little bit about that piece. In it, you cite a poll from the Southern Poverty Law Center that asks respondents whether they agree that “feminism has done more harm than good.” And you write that while only four percent of Democratic men over 50 thought feminism was harmful, 46 percent of Democratic men under 50 did. And nearly a quarter of Democratic women under 50 agreed that feminism has done more harm than good.

And so you see this split here, where you have older Democrats still towing the familiar line that feminism is, of course, on net, beneficial, and then younger folks increasingly feel that their feminism has done more harm than good.

And that’s among Democrats. What’s happening there, and why is this space really polarizing people?

Goldberg: I don’t think it’s younger folks. I mean, yeah, there is a section of women, but, in general, I think it’s younger men. I remember when I quoted that poll, a lot of people were suspicious of it, and you can always have one poll that’s an outlier, but there’s been a few polls since then that show that young men, specifically, are moving to the right. And there’s a growing political chasm between young women and young men that was really showing up a lot in the polling around the upcoming election. And I also just think there was a broader backlash.

It’ll be interesting because we’re at a different inflection point now. When I wrote that, there was a backlash to the idea of the girl boss. It had suddenly become really embarrassing to a lot of people, which, on the one hand—a backlash against unfettered ambition and burnout-inducing devotion to your career—I get that. But it came along with the rise of tradwives and stay-at-home girlfriends and these old forms of female subservience in hip, new clothing.

And you see this again and again in the history of feminism, right? Because it’s hard to work. It’s hard to work and be a parent and fulfill all the expectations of ideal womanhood. People will look at being a kept woman of various guises and think that that’s an out. You saw this with Susan Faludi’s Backlash, and then you saw it with a whole bunch of articles about women stepping back from the workplace.

Demsas: And who is Susan Faludi?

Goldberg: Susan Faludi wrote one of the classics of modern feminism in a book called Backlash, which came out in the early 1990s and was about basically a decade of backlash propaganda telling women that feminism had made them miserable and that women wanted to return to cocooning and wanted to return to domesticity.

And what you see when you actually look at the people who are pushing this message is either that they’re not doing it themselves—you know, Martha Stewart was certainly never a homemaker, but neither was Phyllis Schlafly, right? These are professional women with high-powered careers. Or else you see women who do do that and then find themselves in really precarious situations if it falls apart. And so, again, there was this moment where, We don’t need girl-boss feminism. We want a soft life. You know, don’t we all? (Laughs.)

Demsas: (Laughs.)

Goldberg: But there was a refusal to see the traps that generations of feminists have identified in that life. Now we’re at a different moment because you’re starting to see women get really, really excited about the prospect of a female president again and getting really, really angry about patriarchy. Obviously, the Dobbs decision that ended Roe v. Wade was a big turning point for that. The Kamala Harris campaign is a big turning point.

It was interesting because when Hillary Clinton ran for president, there was always a dearth of organic enthusiasm compared to, say, Barack Obama. But there were people who were really, really excited about Hillary Clinton and were really, really excited about having a woman president. But a lot of them felt really embarrassed and afraid to admit that publicly.

I remember going to some of the places after Donald Trump was elected, going to some of the suburban communities where these women who hadn’t been very political before had suddenly gotten really political because they were so outraged and disgusted. And often they were like, I didn’t even realize there were other Democrats on my street. And so there was this sheepishness. And now that sheepishness is totally gone. It’s pretty new, but this is the first female campaign for president that is being really carried aloft on a tide of very vocal popular excitement.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, when I think about the wokeness message, the presidential candidate that tried to do this the most was Ron DeSantis, and it didn’t really work out for him. He obviously is not the presidential nominee for the Republican Party, but he also flamed out in a way that I think people were not expecting.

There was a ton of enthusiasm after he won his race by around 20 electoral points in Florida, when he ran for re-election for governor. And he was very clear on the national, at the local, at the state level that he was fighting a war on woke. But then you saw this message falter. You saw it falter in the Republican Party. People were much less interested in polls for voting for someone who’s fighting wokeness than they were for people who were following traditional economic messaging. And obviously he himself did not do well there.

Goldberg: Although, let’s remember—let’s look at who the Republicans chose as their vice president. J. D. Vance—he gave a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in 2021 that was called, “The Universities Are the Enemy,” and it was all about—I don’t know how much he used the word wokeness, but that’s basically what it was about. And he is obsessed with this stuff. It’s part of what makes him weird.

Demsas: I agree with you. I think it’s interesting because it seemed like, at the end, Trump was between the North Dakota governor, Doug Burgum, who’s a much more traditional Republican, and he ends up picking J. D. Vance, who I think is part of this wing of the party that’s defined themselves by wokeness.

During the Olympics, Imane Khelif, who is an Algerian boxer, beat an Italian boxer Angela Carini at the Paris Olympics, and it sparks this conservative outcry. Khelif is a cis woman; she was assigned female at birth and continues to identify as such. But people have really turned on her as being a man. J. D. Vance literally tweeted that Khelif was “a grown man pummeling a woman.” He called it “disgusting” and blamed Kamala Harris’s ideas about gender.

This is obviously a very small vignette in a bunch of different areas in which you’ve seen the right radicalize in this space. But, to me, while of course Trump did pick Vance, it doesn’t seem like this is actually a message that’s a winning message for voters. I think a lot of people feel that this is actually going in the same way that maybe wokeness harmed the Democratic Party in some ways—that this version is actually not palatable to even Republican voters, but definitely not to independents or swing voters.

There’s polling—this is when Biden was the presumptive nominee, from May—by Data for Progress that asked 1,200 voters whether they think Joe Biden’s woke. And 21 percent said they didn’t know what that meant. Twenty-seven percent said they didn’t care. And 22 percent were the only people that said he was woke and that was a bad thing. So how much of this is just a fight that’s really happening but is not actually electorally relevant or even electorally desirable?

Goldberg: Well, I don’t think it’s super electorally relevant in that, yes, vanishingly few people, if you ask them, What are the issues that are important to you? are going to say any version of wokeness. Where I think it’s relevant is around the edges.

I think that people really underestimate just how much of politics is about emotion and how much of it is about how candidates make you feel. And so whether the language that candidates use resonates with you or is alienating to you really matters. Again, this is where I say that a lot of these linguistic changes, I feel like, are irritating and alienating, but that’s very different from saying that they’re part of some totalitarian conspiracy, which is often how the anti-woke side comes off. And so I think it’s why even voters, again, to the extent that they’re even aware of these arguments over linguistic conventions—and I think they are in a vague way.

Demsas: Especially at the office, if you have DEI training or something like that.

Goldberg: Right, or even just when I would go to Trump rallies, the thing I would hear over and over again—I remember in 2016, I would try to draw them out. You know, Did a factory close around here? Are you having trouble getting a job? But mostly it was like, No. But you just can’t say anything anymore. There was just so much anger. And then sometimes you would ask them what they wanted to say, and you’d be like, Oh yeah. You definitely can’t say that. (Laughs.) And you shouldn’t be able to say that. But I do think that it grates on people. But there’s a difference between it grating on people and it being an all-consuming fixation.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, how do we then understand the nascent Kamala Harris campaign? Because you’ve been doing some reporting about her campaign. And her candidacy, as you said, it’s a historic candidacy. She’s the first Black woman and South Asian woman presumptive nominee for a major party ticket. She will be only the second woman to achieve that, after Clinton.

One thing I think that’s interesting is Clinton really leaned into her identity as a woman. And there’s some reporting that indicates she was trying to follow the mold of Obama, who clearly made that a part of his historic rise and tapped into that “first” energy to build momentum.

Harris seems to be tackling that quite differently. I know you said that you’re seeing this energy finally out in the open, of women getting to be excited publicly for the first female potential president. But, at the same time, it seems like there’s not as much attempt on the part of her and her team—at least so far—to really lean into that. Are you seeing that?

Goldberg: Right. And she doesn’t need to. Well, no, she doesn’t need to. And I don’t see any reason why she should. The people who are excited about it are getting excited about it.

Demsas: But why not? Why not lean into it?

Goldberg: First of all, because most people I think who are really, really excited to vote for the first woman candidate for president, the first Black woman candidate for president, the first Asian American woman candidate for president—those people are mostly voting for Harris. She doesn’t really need to remind them of the historic nature of her candidacy.

And she does in some ways, right? She speaks to the AKAs, the other members of her Black sorority. But I just think that, for the people that she needs to win over, she needs to convince them that she’s going to make their lives better in some tangible, material way, rather than achieving a symbolic victory for certain identity groups.

Look, obviously the identity component is there. You see people self-organizing these huge Zoom calls. But I guess the difference is that it would have been a big mistake for the Harris campaign to take the lead on doing that kind of stuff. People want to do it themselves. You can see that that’s really powerful.

Demsas: I also think that because she avoided a primary, it was much less important to base mobilization that that rhetoric would sometimes be used. You’d encourage it in that case, right? I think Warren and Harris both leaned into this during the 2020 presidential primaries—their historic nature of their candidacy. There were lots of references to Shirley Chisholm in Harris’s 2020 primary.

Goldberg: Oh, yeah. And I saw people wearing Shirley Chisholm shirts at the Harris rally in Atlanta. People are obviously really aware of it. I think you’re right about the primary. She didn’t need to distinguish herself in that way in a primary.

And the fact that there was (a) no primary and (b) that so many Democrats feel like they were saved from near-certain doom means that the fissures that are usually left over after a really bruising primary just aren’t there.

Demsas: Well, thank you so much, Michelle. I’ve been reading your work for years, and I’m so glad to have you come on the show.

Goldberg: Oh, thanks for having me.

Demsas: I want to ask you our last question, which is: What’s an idea that seemed good at the time but ended up being only good on paper?

Goldberg: I’m going to say communism.

Demsas: Oh, okay. Tell me more.

Goldberg: I mean, I’m honestly surprised that anybody answers anything else. (Laughs.) It just seems so obvious—it just seems obvious to me that, at a time when industrial capitalism was so brutal and exploitative, along comes this utopian theory promising human equality, gender equality, the brotherhood of man, the end of poverty, right? I don’t know if you have kids, but my kids—and I think a lot of people have this experience—when they first learn about communism, they’re like, Yeah, that sounds great. It does sound great. It just has not worked.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, that is the most one-word-only-needed “good on paper” we’ve heard so far. (Laughs.)

Goldberg: (Laughs.)

Demsas: Usually it does require a lot more explanation. Communism—good on paper. Thank you again for coming on the show. We’re so excited to have you on and continue following your work as you write about this issue on the campaign trail.

[Music]

Goldberg: Thank you so much.

Demsas: This episode of Good on Paper was produced by Jinae West and Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw and fact-checked by Ena Alvarado. Erica Huang and Rob Smierciak engineered this episode. Rob Smerciak also composed our theme music. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.