Zora Neale Hurston once observed that America’s most prominent historical narratives prioritize “all these words from the seller, but not one word from the sold.” Much of American life is built on the knowledge and labor of Black people, especially those who were once enslaved. But the origins of, for example, the country’s cuisine or its music are commonly underreported, under-credited, or intentionally obfuscated—whether via the repetition of falsehoods or by keeping books that plainly document America’s past away from children.

I’ve often wondered how we might all actively seek out information about the people and stories that have already been scrubbed from official records. That’s been one of the joys of reading (and contributing to) The Atlantic’s “Inheritance” project. Alongside it, a number of recent books, including one that compiles Hurston’s essays, have taken up the tremendous task of reframing our understanding such that buried figures speak, too. Writers at The Atlantic, such as Adam Harris, Adam Serwer, and Clint Smith, all published nonfiction last year that joins this body of work challenging deeply entrenched national mythologies.

These ventures can require far more research material than existing—or easily accessible—archives can provide. Surfacing certain parts of Black history is a fundamentally investigative pursuit. Taken together, these books present alternative readings of familiar-seeming subjects. They offer not just information, but also new ways of evaluating old truths. What follows is a small compilation of recent literature that endeavors to shift the focus onto those who tend to be absent from the stories many of us have heard.

W. W. Norton and Company

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals, by Saidiya Hartman

Hartman is known for transcending the limits of form in deliciously challenging ways. Like her previous work, Wayward Lives, her most recent release, resists categorization as it chronicles the complexity of Black life. The book melds historical records with fiction to sketch vibrant portraits of young Black women pushed to the margins in the early 20th century. Hartman’s subjects engaged in free love, queer relationships, and sex work in New York and Philadelphia, and their daring transformed society. There are few legible uprisings in Hartman’s retelling; instead, it’s a powerful document of how change is nurtured in intimate spaces not governed by standards of respectability. “Despite the efforts of the state to contain it as pathology and as crime,” she writes, “it proved impossible to stave the tide of desires not bound by law … and the ardent longing to live as one wanted.” That’s rebellion enough.

[Read: Eight books that explain the South]

Roc Lit 101

Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop, by Danyel Smith

Smith’s forthcoming book joins several new releases that critically examine Black women’s contributions to American music, which have frequently been dismissed. Shine Bright pays homage to artists beginning with the enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley, who was “a singer, with all that title conjures.” Smith, a former editor at Billboard and Vibe magazine, conveys the urgency of rectifying sustained cultural erasure. In a chapter about the Sweet Inspirations, the 1960s R&B girl group, Smith points out that Janis Joplin’s characterization of soul music stuck “while women like Mahalia Jackson and Dionne Warwick and Cissy Houston were struggling to get booked in integrated settings, and rarely being asked by mainstream newspapers and magazines to define for fans what they were creating.” Smith weaves her own experiences into her research, resulting in a hybrid memoir that follows her from her “ashy-knees era” as a child in 1970s Oakland, California, to her years editing music magazines in New York. Those interludes help clarify the personal stakes of Shine Bright, making it as much an exercise in communion as a correction to incomplete musical histories.

Clarkson Potter

Jubilee: Recipes From Two Centuries of African American Cooking, by Toni Tipton-Martin          

Jubilee was one of our picks for the best cookbooks of 2019, when Corby Kummer wrote that it “has something most lavish recipe books do not: a backbone of deep scholarship and a field of reference that spans regions and centuries.” Indeed, Jubilee is a stunningly photographed, beautifully written guide to making recipes that include gumbos, rice dishes, meat pies, and sweet potato–mango cake. But it’s also a phenomenal source of knowledge about Black foodways and the people who shaped the American palate—an invitation to learn as you prepare your meals. Tipton-Martin, an accomplished journalist and historian, folds in insights about Black culinary history and social life with a warmth that recalls the specific joy of cooking for those closest to you.

[Read: How art can double as historical corrective]

Liveright

Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, by Marcia Chatelain

I sometimes feel as if I’ve had the McDonald’s “I’m lovin’ it” jingle—the “soulful” version—stuck in my head for decades. In her Pulitzer Prize–winning book, the historian Chatelain tells the story of that little ditty and the conglomerate behind it, but she goes much deeper than the tune. Chatelain traces the outsize role that McDonald’s has played in Black life for decades, focusing in particular on the company’s bid to attract Black franchisees and what that has meant for Black financial power. Her exploration of the uneven dynamics among corporate headquarters, franchises, and the communities that patronize them reveals the limits of depending on the much-touted “Black-owned business” as a vehicle for sustained economic uplift. It’s the most satisfying kind of history: an account that demystifies the forces responsible for the chain’s omnipresence.

University of Illinois Press

Laughing to Keep From Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century, by Danielle Fuentes Morgan

In this historical survey, Fuentes Morgan, an English professor at Santa Clara University, offers a sharp analysis of satire as a comedic corollary to the blues. Her book charts African American comedy from minstrel shows to modern sketch series, describing the ways that, like the blues, it offers an “in-group understanding of dynamic Black selfhood,” operating in stealth mode in the presence of those from outside the community. Laughing to Keep From Dying is an academic text, but it emphasizes the revelatory potential of popular culture. That appreciation for all types of performance—whether subtle, uncomfortable, or less “respectable”—makes it a satisfying read for anyone with an interest in how entertainment responds to a shifting social landscape.

The New Press

Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought, edited by Briona Simone Jones

Mouths of Rain compiles the work of Black lesbian writers and thinkers primarily across the 20th and 21st centuries; the result is enlightening and deeply communal. A companion to the 1995 Black feminist anthology Words of Fire, Mouths of Rain explores the love shared between Black women. In its introduction, the editor, Jones, writes that she’s “come to recognize that our love stories have been buried underneath our activism. But our love, too, is both personal and political.” Fittingly, Mouths of Rain is not just a theoretical text; it’s a lush exploration of sensuality, which Audre Lorde called “an assertion of the lifeforce of women” in her 1978 essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” In the anthology, that essay is followed by poems from Pat Parker, Lorde’s close friend and collaborator, a juxtaposition that speaks to the wealth of love in the volume.

Liveright

Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War, by Howard W. French

French’s sweeping but eminently readable narrative rejects one common framing of modernity—the claim that it stemmed from the accomplishments of European figures, including those like Christopher Columbus, whose arrival in the so-called New World supposedly set North America on a course to civilization. Instead, French meticulously documents and sets out to amend ”a centuries-long process of diminishment, trivialization, and erasure of Africans and of people of African descent from the story of the modern world.” French’s essays and reporting at publications such as the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, and The New York Times have long elucidated conflicts in Africa and the Caribbean, often by showing how the history of Western colonialism informs geopolitical shifts. Born in Blackness expands on his prior work by piecing together accounts over hundreds of years and persuasively making the case for pulling those at the margins of history to its center.

[Read: The power of untold slave narratives]

Amistad

You Don’t Know Us Negroes and Other Essays, by Zora Neale Hurston

Literary beefs are among the best historical rabbit holes to fall into. And few have drawn me in as much as the thorny friendship between the Harlem Renaissance titans Hurston and Langston Hughes, who once bitingly called her a “perfect ‘darkie’” in the eyes of her white friends. Hurston often ran afoul of her contemporaries because of her indecorous proclamations. She once wrote, for example, that many Black colleges were “begging joints” designed to enrich their founders, accusing them of extorting well-meaning people who are led to believe that the shuttering of such institutions would lead to “never another Negro girl or boy learning her or his ABC’s.” As The New Yorker’s Lauren Michele Jackson notes, Hurston is a figure far more complex than her reputation suggests—and this posthumous collection “requires letting go of the agonizing business of saving Hurston from her politics.” Edited by Genevieve West and Henry Louis Gates Jr., You Don’t Know Us Negroes and Other Essays showcases the author’s breadth in a thrilling, if also uncomfortable, journey.

​​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Each installment of “The Friendship Files” features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.

This week she talks with a group of stay-at-home dads who met at a local fathers’ group. Their wives and kids have become friends too, and now the five families spend most weekends together, take group vacations, and share the load of parenting the 16 kids they have between them. They discuss the maddeningly low expectations society has for fathers, how their friendship built up their confidence as parents, and the adventures they’ve shared.

The Friends:

Mike Bowling, 45, a stay-at-home dad and videographer who lives in Shawnee, Kansas
Larry Broxterman, 46, a stay-at-home dad and entrepreneur who lives in Bonner Springs, Kansas
Shannon Carpenter, 47, a stay-at-home dad and the author of The Ultimate Stay-at-Home Dad, who lives in Lee’s Summit, Missouri
Mick Freyermuth, 50, a stay-at-home dad who lives in Kansas City, Missouri
Jake Knapitsch, 41, a stay-at-home dad and woodworker who lives in Lenexa, Kansas

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

​​Julie Beck: Tell me how you found each other.

Mick Freyermuth: We all met through KC Dads, a Kansas City Metro–wide group for stay-at-home dads. We would go to playgroups together, or go on adventures—to library story hour or a Civil War battlefield.

Our kids became friends, and we became friends. We introduced the wives to each other, and they became friends. So now you’ve got the trifecta. We’ve been friends for over 14 years because of this.

[Read: What Ruth Bader Ginsburg taught me about being a stay-at-home dad]

Shannon Carpenter: I showed up at the first playgroup because I was lonely, man. I was lonely and isolated, and I couldn’t join a moms’ group, and people were giving me weirdo stares on the playground. Before I knew it, Mick was taking care of my youngest child while I went to the bathroom. I come back, and he’s feeding him Cheerios. I was like, “This is bitching. This is what I need.”

Left to right: Shannon Carpenter, Jake Knapitsch, Larry Broxterman, Mick Freyermuth, and Mike Bowling on vacation in Florida (Courtesy of Mick Freyermuth)

Beck: What were the dads’ group meetings like?

Jake Knapitsch: In the beginning, it was a scheduled playdate at someone’s house. You’d go, let your kids play, and chat with the other dads about adulting things.

Shannon: It grew from there. That once-a-week playgroup just wasn’t enough. I enjoyed being around those guys, and I don’t like staying home, even though the term is stay-at-home dad. So I started taking the kids on adventures. Goofy crap—Civil War battlefields and things like that. Then Mick found out and got mad that I didn’t invite him. Then Jake found out, and he got a little cranky. So we started doing Adventure Friday. Sometimes it would just be the library. But a lot of times it’d be things that we wanted to see. We went to the Jesse James bank-robbery museum.

Mick: There’s no rule that says you have to do kid-centric things when you’re parenting your child. Your kids just want to be a part of your life. They want attention. They want to have fun with you. And kids can have a lot of fun on a Civil War battlefield, running around, picking flowers while you’re reading the historical markers and learning something.

Shannon: One of the big first adventures we did was the Missouri State Fair. There were six or seven of us with our strollers and our kids. All of a sudden, I wasn’t getting looked at like I was weird. People were talking to us.

Mike Bowling: It was way more comfortable being in that group. You weren’t just out there by yourself. You had a wall of guys with you, all pushing strollers.

Kids from the five families pull Shannon in a homemade chariot (Courtesy of Shannon Carpenter)

Jake: A bunch of other guys in the group came and went, but the five of us just clicked and continued doing all these things. Our wives also clicked, so we had excuses to have big group get-togethers. The kids have grown up together.

Beck: You’ve made a couple of allusions to people giving you weird looks. Do you feel like you’ve faced assumptions from people because you’re a stay-at-home dad?

Mick: This is such a loaded question for us, as males in the primary-caregiver world. Traditionally, we get a standing ovation if we just can change a diaper.

Jake: You don’t even have to do that. They can be covered in poop. As long as they survive, you get a standing ovation.

Mick: If we show up to the game and look like we’re trying to accomplish something, we get the “Atta boy.” We get the “Look at that dad; he’s doing great.”

Jake: “Giving Mom the day off.”

Shannon: All of us have heard “Are you babysitting today?” Which bugs the shit out of us. And “Are you helping Mom?” We don’t help Mom. We parent.

Mick: We’ve heard all the stereotypes, but we’re the primary caregivers. We’re professional. We made the conscious choice to parent our kids, and we take it seriously. It’s been hard when that has not been acknowledged or accepted, because dads are just as capable of raising kids as moms. We all have our strengths. We all have our weaknesses. We’ve developed the mentality of “We’re going to have fun raising our kids,” so we don’t let it faze us much. But it’s in the background. It’s always there.

Shannon: It is really hard for a dad to go to a playground and not be seen as a threat. Guys in the group have been yelled at just for being there. When I go to a story time, no one sits near me. Alone, you’re either the hero or the predator. When you’re in a group, it’s not like that.

We have each other’s support. That makes a difference in my confidence. There was a time, before I joined the group, where I had no confidence at all.

Larry Broxterman: As you grow as a parent, your own confidence grows with that. Then you help the ones that are just starting out. That’s what the group has done for all of us.

Mike: We’re still leaning on each other now, when half of our kids are teenagers. We’re still learning.

Mick: It’s not just that we have each other’s support. Our wives are 100 percent behind this flip of gender roles. We are our wives’ biggest fans. And our wives are our biggest fans.

Shannon: We also get the question “Is it emasculating?” We ignore it. I mean, we can build a deck or bake you a cake. It doesn’t matter, it’s not gender-based.

Beck: Do you have standout memories of milestones or parenting challenges where this group really helped you?

Mick: Because we’re comfortable with each other, our kids are always comfortable with these other guys as role models and authority figures. Sometimes these guys can say things to my kids that I can’t, or teach them something that I can’t. Larry taught my son to ride a bicycle, because it wasn’t clicking when I did it.

Mike: Nobody has any problem with yelling at somebody else’s kids, to say, “Stop hitting so and so,” or “Stop screwing around.” The kids are used to it.

Shannon: This is the best example of having support: I got my book deal on a Friday. And on Saturday, my brother-in-law died. He happened to be one of my best friends. On Monday I decided we should go on a Dads’ Trip. We do it every year, just the five of us and all the kids. We pick a direction and go. I needed to be around my dads because I didn’t know how to deal with everything coming at me. I can’t have the highest high and lowest low at the same time. It was too much.

We ended up in Iowa during the great migration of butterflies. We were rolling through fields of butterflies. My kids were freaking out, laughing.

Then we stopped at a gas station because my van started smoking. It just overwhelmed me; I broke down, I started laughing hysterically. I didn’t even have to ask, and Jake’s already got the hood open, and Larry’s messing with the battery. And Mick’s taking care of my kids. These four guys took care of me without me asking.

[Read: These two generations of best friends live like family]

Beck: I’m going to throw a deep one at you: What are your thoughts on the nuclear family? It seems like you guys are really raising your kids in a broader community.

Mick: I don’t even know what a nuclear family is anymore. We’re constantly sending videos or pictures to Grandma and Grandpa, to the cousins. My kids have got their school friends and their playgroup friends. I don’t have a nuclear family. I’ve got a community.

Shannon: Family is what you make of it. The traditional model of mom, dad, 2.5 kids is outdated. I moved from Texas to Kansas City, so I have no family up here. Mick is the emergency contact for most of my kids. No matter what your family is made up of, the most important job is to offer love and a supporting environment. However that looks.

The dads on a Dads’ Trip. Front: Shannon; Back: Mick, Jake, Mike and Larry. (Courtesy of Mick Freyermuth)

Larry: We mostly deal with discipline within our core nuclear family. But we raise our kids with the community. Shoot, in the last two months, we’ve spent what? Five or six weekends together. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Beck: Can you tell me about the origin of Dads’ Trip and where you guys have traveled?

Shannon: I used to get asked what do I do all day? Once, as a joke, I said, “Oh, we go to see the world’s biggest ball of twine.” And the person I was talking to said, “Oh, you go to Cawker City? That’s a real thing; it’s three hours away.” I was like, “Oh my God, I have to see this.”

[Read: Twisted: The battle to be the world’s largest ball of twine]

My daughter was about to start kindergarten. I panicked a little bit and thought, Maybe I didn’t get enough time with her. So me and another dad packed up a van, drove three hours, and saw the world’s biggest ball of twine. That started it. The next year, we went and saw a huge coal shovel called Big Brutus, which is in south Kansas.

Beck: Is the destination always a large object?

Mick: Definitely roadside attractions.

Jake: We’ve done museums, and we’ve seen Abraham Lincoln’s childhood home. But it is kitschy, roadside stuff.

Mick: We try to have a destination, a turnaround point. And then we fill in whatever neat stuff we can find along the way. We have the running joke that if it is the world’s biggest anything, we’ll go see it.

Shannon: We played baseball on the Field of Dreams with our kids. On the actual goddamn field. I started inviting anybody who came that day to play with us. Two ladies told me they were sisters, and I said, “Who’s older?” And they said, “No, we’re nuns. We’re those kind of sisters.” So we played baseball on the Field of Dreams with nuns.

Mike: Obviously we eat out on the road. We show up to restaurants with 21 of us. We usually call ahead to make sure they’ve got space for us. Sometimes we will show up unannounced, and the host’s eyes will be like Holy crap, because they see 16 kids. But we’ve got it down to a science. The kids text us what they want. Then when the food comes out, I tell the waiter, “Just come to me; I will tell you where to go.”

Beck: What have you learned from your friendship?

Larry: Everything. I mean, seriously, everything.

Shannon: That I am not alone. If I have a problem, no matter what it is—kids, personal life, whatever— I’m not alone. There’s power in that.

Mick: Life is hard as it is. Don’t make it harder by thinking that you have to navigate it by yourself, or just with a spouse, if you’re lucky enough to have one. Open your lives to other people.

If you or someone you know should be featured on “The Friendship Files,” get in touch at friendshipfiles@theatlantic.com and tell us a bit about what makes the friendship unique.

Russian President Vladimir Putin pines for the old Russian empire and takes Ukraine’s independence as a personal affront. But the invasion of Ukraine is not a limited regional dispute between neighbors. Putin is also motivated by a deep opposition to democracy more broadly. That is why he has waged a long-running shadow war to destabilize free societies and discredit democratic institutions in the United States and around the world. Ukraine is one flash point in a larger global struggle between democracy and autocracy—one that stretches from the steppes of Eastern Europe to the waters of the Indo-Pacific to the halls of the U.S. Capitol.

The scope of that wider struggle was on vivid display on February 4. In Beijing, the world’s two most powerful autocrats—Putin and China’s Xi Jinping—cemented their deepening alliance. In the United States, where American leaders should have been unified in championing democracy against these aggressive adversaries, the opposite happened: The Republican National Committee formally declared the violent insurrection of January 6, 2021, to be “legitimate political discourse.”

Much has been said about the assault on American democracy by a radicalized Republican Party, but its international consequences have not gotten the attention they deserve. Republican leaders are abandoning core tenets of American democracy even as the stakes in the global contest between democracy and autocracy are clearer and higher than at any time since the end of the Cold War. They are defending coup-plotters and curbing voting rights while Russia tries to crush Ukraine’s fragile democracy and China menaces not only Taiwan but democracies everywhere, from Australia to Lithuania.

Putin is not just a garden-variety nationalist; he is a paranoid, chronically underestimated, implacable enemy of democracy. And while Russia poses an immediate threat to peace in Europe and to the integrity of our elections at home, it is Xi’s China that represents the greatest long-term challenge to the future of democracy. The United States faces a serious and sustained competition with China that may shape the rest of the 21st century as profoundly as our Cold War with the Soviet Union defined the latter part of the 20th century. The world is very different than it was during the Cold War, and China is bigger, richer, and more integrated into the global economy than the Soviet Union ever was. But the competition with China is a similarly multidimensional struggle that is economic, cultural, technological, diplomatic, military, and ideological all at the same time. That means the U.S. will have to invest and compete across all these dimensions—while bolstering democracy at home and abroad.

[Anne Applebaum: Calamity again]

Deterring Russia and competing with China are different challenges, and each requires its own strategy, but strengthening American democracy is crucial to both missions. Putin and Xi understand that the promise of democracy—freedom, rule of law, human rights, self-determination—remains powerful enough to capture the imaginations of people everywhere and poses a threat to their regimes’ global ambitions as well as their grip on power at home. That’s why they are determined to discredit or co-opt the idea of democracy, including by promoting divisions and dysfunction in democratic societies like the United States, and by bragging about the ability of their autocracies to deliver better results. America and our allies should be working just as hard to prove them wrong. We need a strong democracy in the United States to win the global argument with autocracy. A strong democracy is also a precondition to mobilizing the resources necessary to deter aggression and compete economically and militarily. By contrast, a weak and fractured democracy at home will only embolden our adversaries and invite further aggression.

For all these reasons, the Republican Party is playing right into Putin’s and Xi’s hands. Trump has always had a personal attachment to Putin, which we don’t need to belabor here, and a long-standing admiration for dictators and disdain for democracy—going all the way back to his admiration for the brutal Chinese crackdown in Tiananmen Square decades ago. It was dismaying but not surprising that Trump praised Putin’s move to recognize and occupy separatist enclaves in Ukraine as “genius” and “savvy.” That’s what we have come to expect from Trump. But even Republican leaders who still take a Reaganesque view of America’s role in the world and talk a good game about deterring Russia and competing with China are undercutting those goals by aiding and abetting Trump’s attacks on America’s democratic institutions.

This is not just another political dispute; it’s a five-alarm national-security crisis. The hard truth is that if Republicans won’t stand up to Trump, they can’t stand up to Putin or Xi.

The failure by Republican leaders to defend American democracy is all the more tragic because many of them know better. Some may be genuinely attracted to authoritarianism and disdainful of pluralism and equality. Many others are making a Faustian bargain to preserve their own power at the expense of fundamental democratic norms and institutions—a move as cynical as it is short-sighted.

Trump’s secretary of state Mike Pompeo declared in a major speech about China in July 2020 that “free nations have to work to defend freedom.” Yet a week after Joe Biden’s victory in a free and fair election that November, Pompeo said, “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.” Whether or not he believed that statement doesn’t matter. Coming from the secretary of state standing at the State Department podium, it was a performance of authoritarian mendacity that would have made North Korean propagandists blush.

[Read: Why Hillary Clinton fears the GOP’s next moves]

Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri rails often against China and has said the United States should “lead the free world” to confront a Chinese Communist Party that is “a menace to all free peoples.” Yet Hawley led the effort in Congress to overturn the 2020 election, and the image of his raised fist saluting insurrectionists on January 6 is an indelible memory of that dark day for American democracy. His reelection campaign is now selling coffee mugs with the photo for $20.

Senator Marco Rubio, the ranking GOP member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, urged his colleagues to stand up to China and “prove our democracy can work again, our system of government can function. That it can solve big problems in big ways.” Yet he helped lead a filibuster to defeat the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would have strengthened a cornerstone of American democracy, and also blocked a bipartisan commission from investigating the January 6 insurrection.

Some members of the GOP are still capable of courage. Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois are braving the ire of their party to serve on the House committee investigating January 6. Bipartisan efforts are under way to reform the Electoral Count Act and make overturning future elections, the way Trump tried to do in 2020, more difficult. Republican senators are also working with Democrats to prepare crippling sanctions in response to Putin’s aggression in Ukraine. Some Republicans have even woken up to the fact that competing with China requires moving past the conservative economic orthodoxy that for decades starved the United States of needed public investments in innovation, infrastructure, and industrial capacity. Nearly 20 Senate Republicans supported both the $1.2 trillion infrastructure legislation that Biden signed into law in November and the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, which would help America compete with China by investing billions in research, innovation, and advanced manufacturing, including the semiconductors that are in such short supply. (The House is now focused on passing its own version of this legislation, and the president is eager to sign a bill.)

Getty; Paul Spella / The Atlantic

But these bright spots are the exceptions that prove the rule. A solid majority of Republicans in both houses of Congress rejected the infrastructure legislation, and the party remains in lockstep opposition to important economic measures that would help America compete with China, including on clean energy and education. Those Republican leaders promising tough sanctions on Putin’s economy and inner circle seem helpless to tamp down the pro-Russian sentiment in their party ignited by Trump, fanned on a daily basis by Tucker Carlson on Fox News, and now embraced by a growing number of GOP members and candidates—as well as the continuing right-wing love affair with Hungary’s would-be autocrat, Viktor Orbán.

Cheney and Kinzinger notwithstanding, Republicans are largely going along with the Trump-led attack on American democratic institutions and legitimacy at precisely the time when we need to set an example for the world. Recall that on January 6, nearly 150 Republican members of Congress voted to overturn the presidential election just hours after the sacking of the Capitol.

One of the ringleaders of the effort to challenge the election results, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, later said what was obvious to everyone who watched the assault on the Capitol that day: It was a “violent terrorist attack.” That was enough to make him an apostate in Trump’s Republican Party, and Cruz had to beat an embarrassing on-air retreat on Fox. To regain his standing, he started pushing a bizarre and baseless conspiracy theory that the insurrection may have actually been a “false flag” operation planned by the FBI. It was not.

[Conor Friedersdorf: The contested significance of January 6]

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell may still be willing to call January 6 a violent insurrection, but he blocked a bipartisan 9/11-style commission to investigate it. More broadly, McConnell and his allies have pushed power politics to the breaking point in a way that has shredded the norms and trust that democracies need to function—most infamously with their abuse of the filibuster and preventing President Obama from filling a Supreme Court vacancy. Under McConnell’s leadership, every single Republican in the Senate—every one—continues to block legislation to restore the Voting Rights Act, while Republican-led states pass ever more draconian restrictions on voting that disproportionately affect people of color and poor people. Political scientists say that while these legislative tactics may lack the dramatic images of an insurrection or a coup, their effect on democracy can be devastating. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote in these pages last summer, “When contemporary democracies die, they usually do so via constitutional hardball.”

Levistsky and Ziblatt, the authors of the influential book How Democracies Die, say things have gotten much worse for American democracy in just the past few years. Whereas they previously saw the Republican Party as “abdicating its role as democratic gatekeeper” but “did not consider the GOP to be an antidemocratic party,” now they see “the bulk of the Republican Party is behaving in an antidemocratic manner,” including rejecting basic principles such as unambiguously accepting electoral defeat and condemning violence and extremist groups. Levitsky and Ziblatt conclude, “Unless and until the GOP recommits itself to playing by democratic rules of the game, American democracy will remain at risk.” For Putin and Xi, it’s a dream come true.

Sometimes it seems as if Liz Cheney is the only prominent Republican able to connect the dots between these domestic challenges and our international standing. “Attacks against our democratic process and the rule of law empower our adversaries and feed communist propaganda that American democracy is a failure,” she noted in a speech last year.

This is not a new insight. During the Cold War, prominent anti-communists supported the civil-rights movement because, as Harry Truman’s secretary of state Dean Acheson put it, discrimination and segregation threatened “the effective maintenance of our moral leadership of the free and democratic nations of the world.” The Justice Department’s amicus brief in Brown v. Board of Education argued that “racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills.” And Chief Justice Earl Warren said, “Our American system, like all others, is on trial both at home and abroad … The extent to which we maintain the spirit of our Constitution, with its Bill of Rights, will in the long run do more to make it both secure and the object of adulation than the number of hydrogen bombs we stockpile.”

It’s still true today. Chinese and Russian propagandists jump at every opportunity to denigrate American-style democracy as leading not to freedom and opportunity but to gridlock, instability, and ultimately national decline. By contrast, they claim that their authoritarian systems—which they describe as the “true” democracies—produce better results. For example, to counter Biden’s Summit for Democracy in December, the Chinese Foreign Ministry put out a report that promised to “expose the deficiencies and abuse of democracy in the US,” and specifically highlighted the January 6 insurrection. “The refusal of some US politicians to recognize the election results and their supporters’ subsequent violent storming of the Capitol building have severely undercut the credibility of democracy in the US,” it crowed. The Foreign Ministry also published a white paper titled “China: Democracy That Works.” And the Chinese and Russian ambassadors published a joint op-ed assuring the world, “There is no need to worry about democracy in Russia and China,” while warning that “certain foreign governments better think about themselves and what is going on in their homes.”

[Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt: The biggest threat to democracy is the GOP stealing the next election]

The autocrats know we are in a global debate about competing systems of governance. People and leaders around the world are watching to see if democracy can still deliver peace and prosperity or even function, or if authoritarianism does indeed produce better results. This is more than a popularity contest. It’s a debate that could well determine whether Ukrainians, Poles, and Hungarians save their fragile democracies or slip into an authoritarian sphere of influence dominated by the Kremlin. It could lead countries across Asia and Africa to reject China’s financial coercion and maintain control of their resources and destiny. Or it could result in Beijing remaking the global order to its own design, writing rules of the road that suit its ambitions for new technologies like artificial intelligence and erasing universal human rights long enshrined in international law.

These are the stakes of the argument between democracy and autocracy. And when Republicans undermine American democratic institutions and trash our democratic norms, they make it harder to win that argument. They make it harder for the United States to encourage other countries to respect the rule of law, political pluralism, and the peaceful transfer of power. Those values should be among America’s most potent assets, inspiring people all over the world and offering a stark contrast with authoritarians whose power depends on squashing dissent and denying human rights. Instead, America has shown the world the ugly sneers of the insurrectionist and the conspiracy theorist.

On a practical level, a strong democracy at home is also necessary for us to mobilize the resources and sense of national mission needed to compete with a rival that’s bigger and richer than any we’ve ever faced. Xi doesn’t need to painstakingly cobble together legislative coalitions to make investments in infrastructure and innovation, or to reorient his military around new weapons systems—he just does it by fiat. Biden’s job as the leader of a raucous, restless democracy is much harder. But the United States must find a way to shake off its paralysis and make those investments. We can’t afford for our political system to be hopelessly polarized, poisoned by conspiracy theories, weakened by disinformation, or left open to interference from foreign rivals.

Only with a healthier politics, strong democratic institutions, and some measure of national unity will we be able to deliver the results we need to compete. That’s the only way we’ll be able to meaningfully reduce the inequality that saps our cohesion or build the resiliency to withstand the effects of climate change or future pandemics. A well-functioning democracy that can balance interests and make hard choices is necessary to do the work of refocusing our military budget and posture away from the global War on Terror to the very different contests unfolding in the seas and skies of the Indo-Pacific, and in outer space and cyberspace. To stay strong in the world, the United States must be able to negotiate—and ratify—treaties, either to cement new alliances or defuse threats like the Iranian nuclear program. Right now, with one major party devoted to division, not unity, more focused on stoking the culture war than strengthening national security, none of this looks likely anytime soon.

Over the years, Republicans have often invoked Ronald Reagan’s Cold War dictum “Weakness only invites aggression”—usually to argue for less diplomacy, bigger defense budgets, and more military intervention. Yet they seem blind to how their attacks on American democracy make our country look to our adversaries.

Getty; Paul Spella / The Atlantic

Whether Putin continues testing NATO’s resolve, and whether the trajectory of our competition with China veers toward conflict, will in part be driven by Russian and Chinese perceptions of America’s decline or resilience. When our democracy looks weak, our country looks weak, and as Reagan said, that only invites aggression.

At the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, Chinese leaders watched carefully as the financial crisis devastated the U.S. economy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drained American resources and resolve. For decades, Chinese foreign policy had been constrained by Deng Xiaoping’s direction to “hide capabilities and bide time,” waiting for the “international balance of power” to shift toward China and away from the United States. With America on its heels, President Hu Jintao announced in 2009 that China was no longer content to hide and bide but now would aim to “actively accomplish” its goals. It started making more aggressive moves in the region, testing how hard it could push—accelerating a naval buildup and asserting claims to wide swaths of water, islands, and energy reserves in the South and East China Seas. At a 2010 regional summit in Vietnam that I attended as secretary of state, we organized many of China’s neighbors to stand up to Beijing and insist on freedom of navigation in the contested waterways. The Chinese foreign minister was livid and warned his counterparts: “China is a big country. Bigger than any other countries here.” At the time, it seemed like the foreign minister was venting the frustration of an aspiring regional hegemon that had underestimated the staying power of the United States and pushed too far too fast. Today, the minister’s warning reads as a precursor of the “wolf-warrior diplomacy” that China now uses to intimidate its neighbors.

[Anne Applebaum: The bad guys are winning]

China’s belligerence in the region and beyond has accelerated greatly under Xi, along with a lurch toward tighter authoritarian control and persecution at home. Xi’s aggression not only reflects his personal ambition, but also stems from a perception of accelerating U.S. decline. Rush Doshi, a scholar who has closely studied decades’ worth of Chinese Communist Party documents and pronouncements and now serves on Biden’s National Security Council, has observed that the combination of Brexit, Trump, and the coronavirus pandemic convinced Chinese leaders that the time was right to challenge the U.S.-led international order like never before. Doshi argues in his book, The Long Game, that the January 6 insurrection helped convince Xi that, as he put it shortly afterward, “time and momentum are on our side.” The sack of the Capitol, and the democratic disarray it represented, reinforced the notion of a “period of historical opportunity” for China to seize the mantle of global leadership.

After the election, when Trump was whipping up his followers to reject the results and oppose the peaceful transfer of power, a senior Republican official explained to The Washington Post why party leaders were doing nothing to stop him: “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” With the United States competing against a powerful adversary adept at playing the long game, Americans cannot afford to be so painfully short-sighted.

Vigorous debates and hard-fought campaigns are healthy, but building a new bipartisan consensus around protecting our democracy is a national-security imperative. We must put patriotism before politics. When I was secretary of state, people around the world asked me how I could serve with President Obama after the long, difficult campaign we had waged against each other for the 2008 Democratic nomination. People were especially surprised in countries where losing an election might lead to exile or prison, not a seat in the Cabinet. My answer was simple: The good of our democracy comes first.

Republican leaders who care about democracy and are serious about competing with China and deterring Russia must stand up to Trump, stop promoting the Big Lie about the 2020 election, and embrace efforts to provide accountability for January 6. They should start taking domestic white-nationalist terrorism as seriously as they do international violent extremism, abandon their war on voting rights, and pass crucial reforms they have so far opposed, such as the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. State and local Republican officeholders responsible for administering elections, from secretaries of state to members of county canvassing boards, will have to steel themselves against the mounting pressure they are already facing from Trump and his allies. Republican donors who don’t want to live in a banana republic should put their mouth where their money is and declare that they’ll only contribute to candidates who support democracy.

Ultimately, it’s voters—all of us, really—who must be democracy’s last line of defense. This isn’t just about the next presidential election. Democracy will be on the ballot this year as well, in state, local, and congressional races across the country. If Americans fail to rise to this challenge, and our democracy continues to come apart at the seams, the consequences will be felt far beyond our own borders. We must come together to strengthen our institutions, protect our elections from foreign interference, and defend civil rights for all. That will send a powerful message that will resonate not just in Washington but in Moscow and Beijing.