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Democracy is under attack everywhere, and today I want us all to remember that while we’re calmly peeling back the layers of the January 6 conspiracy, people are dying for their right to be free in Ukraine.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The U.S. leaves parents on their own for a reason. This rifle has ruined America. Long COVID could be a “mass deterioration event.” No Letup

The January 6 committee will be back in session tomorrow, when I’ll return to what we’re learning about the fight for democracy in America. (Personally, I’m already enjoying the clip of the White House lawyer Eric Herschmann telling the coup whisperer John Eastman, in effect, to go home and get his shine box.)

In Ukraine, however, another battle for democracy is being fought not with papers and emails and texts, but in blood and ash and fire. All of this is happening because a dictator in the Kremlin has told the Ukrainians to bow in obedience, relinquish their freedom, and become his subjects, and they have refused, some at the cost of their lives.

The Ukrainians are, so far, surviving. The Russians, defeated in the battle for Kyiv, are now fighting a savage war of attrition on Ukraine’s eastern front. Vladimir Putin’s dream of capturing the country is gone, but the short-term operational goal now seems to be to grind down the Ukrainians, soldier by soldier, and capture territory, meter by meter, in the Donbas.

This is why Western strategists are watching the battle for Severodonetsk so closely. The city is wedged in between two major Russian-controlled areas, and capturing it would solve a lot of Moscow’s problems. The city, now “split in half,” is likely to fall. This matters because afterward, it may look like the Russians are pausing or letting up, when they will more likely be consolidating a significant gain across the Ukrainian eastern front that will allow them to launch a major offensive later in the year.

So far, the West is doing the right things—or, most of the free West is, anyway. Still, we need to do everything faster and bigger. In The New York Times yesterday, Bret Stephens referred to a Richard Nixon quote I’d never heard; when told what assistance the Israelis needed to defend themselves during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Nixon ordered his staff to “double it” and then to “get the hell out of here and get the job done.”

This is good advice for the Biden administration, which this afternoon pledged another $1 billion of aid. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was in Brussels today, heading a “contact group” of nearly 50 nations to help get even more assistance for Ukraine and to transition Ukraine from Soviet-era weapons to modern NATO arms.

I want to add a word here about Secretary Austin. When he was nominated, I was uncomfortable. I worked for the Defense Department for a quarter century, and I am rather old-school in my hesitance to appoint senior military officers to Cabinet positions (unless your name is George Marshall). I prefer civilians, who have not acquired the ingrained habit of military obedience to the president, which is why I cautioned about Donald Trump’s fascination with hiring generals into the White House.

And yet, Austin’s appointment turned out to be a lucky break.

In a less dangerous period, it would be great to have a defense intellectual in the Pentagon who can work with the president on a vision for a better and more modern Department of Defense. When Russia launched the largest war in Europe since the Nazis marched east, however, what the United States and NATO needed was a military leader who understands operations on the ground and the kinds of weapons systems that are in play. Austin has plenty of that experience, including as commander of Central Command and from his time in Syria. This isn’t the time for a lot of chin-pulling big-think; this is a time for talking to our friends and allies in very detailed terms about weapons systems and how to get them where they need to be. Austin’s the right man for that.

Moscow’s grab for Ukraine has been defeated. But the war is not over, and we need to shake off romantic notions that the Ukrainians are going to march onward and recapture all the occupied Ukrainian territories. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has often compared his country’s struggle against Russia to World War II, a fight between a free people and a barbaric invader. He’s right, and it won’t be over soon. We need to stay firm in our support.

Further reading:

In Ukraine, youth has ended The war in Ukraine has exposed a critical American vulnerability

Read all of our coverage of the war on Ukraine.

Today’s News The Justice Department charged the Buffalo-supermarket shooting suspect with 26 counts of hate crimes and weapons violations. The  Federal Reserve announced the largest interest-rate increase since 1994, as it attempts to combat rising inflation. The Supreme Court dismissed an appeal from several Republican-led states to defend a Trump-administration immigration policy. Dispatches Deep Shtetl: Yair Rosenberg asked an artificial-intelligence tool to draw a “Hanukkah Monster.” It delivered. Wait, What?: Trump’s failspawns took a turn at the January 6 hearings, and it was embarrassing, Molly Jong-Fast writes. Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf highlights a blunt-force proposal for fixing inflation. Evening Read (Illustration by Oliver Munday. Sources: Gallo Images / Getty; Ed Habershon / BBC)

They Bent to Their Knees and Kissed the Sand

Story by Cullen Murphy

When Olivier Bancoult boarded the ship that was to take him 1,000 miles across the Indian Ocean to the Chagos Archipelago—his childhood home, from which he and his fellow islanders had been expelled 50 years earlier—he carried five wrought-iron crosses.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

How TikTok killed the video star A rabbi explains why her religion makes her pro-abortion. Brexit promised Britons freedom. “Instead, we got little stamps on beer glasses.” Culture Break (Getty)

Read. Afterlife, by Julia Alvarez, is a philosophical novel that also happens to be a page-turner.

Or try another pick from our reading list of books you might’ve missed when the world shut down in 2020.

Watch. Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, released 20 years ago, offers a warning about technology the world is only beginning to heed.

Play our daily crossword.

Speaking of Spielberg (and World War II), every year on Memorial Day, there’s a lot of rewatching of Band of Brothers, the amazing HBO miniseries about a company of U.S. soldiers in Europe. But don’t neglect Michael Kamen’s majestic score the rest of the year, including stirring suites that you didn’t hear in the series.

— Tom

P.S. Our podcast team wants to hear your questions about Dobbs v. Jackson and the future of abortion rights. Please send a voicemail of about a minute or shorter to radioatlantic@theatlantic.com to tell us what’s on your mind about the legal, practical, and other implications of the SCOTUS decision.

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

The video was the very definition of cringe. One day after Donald Trump endorsed her Republican primary opponent, freshman Representative Nancy Mace filmed a two-minute clip of herself outside the shiny black facade of Trump Tower in Manhattan—approximately 800 miles from her South Carolina district—to remind her followers that she was still loyal to the former president. “America was stronger all around the world, and quite frankly freedom and democracy was stronger all around the world” when Trump was in office, she told them.

The move looked desperate because it was. Mace had been extremely critical of Trump after the Capitol attack on January 6, but blowback from the MAGA right, and her fellow Republican lawmakers, had reminded her to tread more carefully. This week, Mace’s caution paid off: She defeated Katie Arrington, her Trump-backed challenger, by eight points in yesterday’s South Carolina Republican primary. For some in her party, Mace’s victory is evidence that GOP lawmakers must be loyal to Trump, but maybe not unfailingly so. It “shows you don’t have to kiss the ring,” Chip Felkel, a state Republican strategist, told me. “She polished the ring—she didn’t kiss it.” That’s likely true. But other factors worked in Mace’s favor too.

Since her election in 2020, Mace has offered a study in Trump-era political shape-shifting. During her campaign, Mace, 44, did not shy away from her devotion to Trump. She had worked on his campaign in 2016, and she promised to be his ally in Congress. Which is why it was so surprising when she emerged as one of the most vocal GOP lawmakers condemning him for his misleading rhetoric ahead of the January 6 insurrection. Here was a Republican with a different kind of story: a divorced mother of two and the first female graduate of the Citadel, South Carolina’s revered military college, who seemed eager to lead the GOP in a new direction. She was on cable news almost constantly in the days after the Capitol siege. Trump’s “entire legacy was wiped out yesterday,” she told CNN. When the Fox News host Neil Cavuto asked her whether she still believed that Trump had a future in the GOP, Mace replied: “I do not.”

Just as quickly, though, Mace seemed to realize the folly of her commentary, at least by the standards of today’s Republican Party. When the House moved to impeach Trump for his role on January 6, she voted merely to censure him. Soon, she started sounding more like the other Trump-fearing Republicans in her party. I documented Mace’s evolution in a profile last summer—how she started appearing on Fox News weekly to riff on culture-war talking points; began picking Twitter fights with progressive lamwakers; and voted to oust fellow GOP Representative Liz Cheney for continuing to criticize Trump. “To observe Mace these past several months has been to watch in real time as a freshman Republican absorbs a few fundamental truths,” I wrote at the time. “The base loves Trump as much as ever, and his allies are working to unseat anyone who fails to show fealty. There is no post-Trump GOP, not yet.”

[Read: How a rising Trump critic lost her nerve]

That Mace won reelection seems, at least in part, a testament to the course correction she made. (Her campaign did not respond to requests for comment.) Trump fans in her district might have been able to forgive Mace for her early infraction, even if Trump hasn’t. At a rally in March, the former president called her a “terrible person” and a “grandstanding loser.” Last night, he successfully took out his ire on another disloyal South Carolina Republican. Representative Tom Rice, who voted for impeachment after January 6, was walloped by the Trump-endorsed State Representative Russell Fry. Rice had taken a very different approach from Mace: Instead of backing down, he doubled down, calling January 6 Trump’s “inexcusable failure” and voicing his hope that Trump never runs again. For that, Rice paid the ultimate political price.

But Mace’s tightrope walk on Trump isn’t the only reason she was able to hang on to her seat. The first congressional district of South Carolina, which contains Charleston, is relatively moderate—more so than Rice’s district; Charleston County was one of the only two counties in the state that didn’t back Trump in the 2016 primary, and the Democrat Joe Cunningham won the district in 2018. Mace, as the incumbent, also had name-ID and institutional advantages. An even more significant factor, local strategists argue, is that Arrington, a former member of the South Carolina State House, was a weak candidate. Voters had already seen her lose a general election to Cunningham in 2018, and Mace’s campaign had twice as much cash on hand. Had Trump actually invested money in the race, Arrington potentially could have pulled it out, Tyler Jones, a Democratic strategist and an adviser for Cunningham, told me. “If he’d have spent $500,000 on a straight-to-camera ad and said, ‘Look, Katie’s a better candidate. Nancy Mace has let you down,’ that would have been really effective,” Jones said.

So far in the midterm primaries, the former president has failed to punish as many disloyal members of his party as he’d like. Last month, a string of seven Trump-endorsed candidates were defeated in their primaries, according to an Axios analysis, including one who ran against Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who flouted Trump’s request to “find” more votes for him. Governor Brian Kemp, who had angered Trump too, beat his own Trump-backed rival in every single county in Georgia.

While other candidates under threat from Trump have been more consistent in their criticism than Mace, those who have won their primaries have had to strike a careful balance to avoid alienating Trump voters. Last night’s results in South Carolina could be instructive for other Republican incumbents in the months ahead: Emphasizing disdain for Trump won’t help them win their primaries. A careful—if cringe-y—middle ground might.

For the past 18 months, Senate Democrats have been trying to find a climate deal acceptable to all 50 of their members. The main obstacles, so far, have been Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the owner of a coal-trading company, who wants any deal to reduce the federal budget deficit, and Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who refuses to increase tax rates, the easiest way to satisfy Manchin’s deficit-reduction goal. Senators are now back at the negotiating table, trying to work within the rules Manchin has insisted on.

But their timeline is dwindling. Last month, an environmental lobbyist told me that if the talks did not produce a framework deal by Memorial Day, then he didn’t think they would succeed at all. No such deal came together. Now only about 17 working days remain before Congress’s August recess. Reconciliation, the parliamentary procedure that senators use to pass legislation with 51 votes, gobbles up floor time, so even if Manchin does agree to a deal, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer may not be able to get it to a final vote before the clock runs out.

So it seems possible, even probable, that sometime in the next three or four weeks, Schrodinger’s climate deal will turn out to have been dead all along. Democrats may not admit defeat until the last day of September, when this year’s reconciliation resolution expires.

At that point, the record will be clear. Even though President Joe Biden described climate change as one of the country’s “four historic crises” during the campaign, his administration—like the Obama administration before it—will have failed to pass a climate bill. Come November, Democrats will likely lose one or both houses of Congress. And the United States will stumble into a fourth decade without significant legislative climate policy—or even a coherent energy policy.

So for the sake of mental preparation, if nothing else, it’s worth asking: What will happen then? Over the past few days, I’ve asked this question of energy analysts and climate scholars.

Some of them have found it too depressing to contemplate. Others have shrugged. Even setting the legislative uncertainty aside, this year has been one of the most destabilizing moments for energy markets this century. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has inaugurated a new price regime for fossil fuels: Oil is now trading at all-time highs in most major currencies, and America’s liquid-natural-gas exports are helping create a single, global price for the commodity. Even coal prices are soaring. “Who the hell knows,” Danny Cullenward, the policy director at the think tank CarbonPlan, told me. “My crystal ball is cloudier than it’s been in a long time.”  

But we can make some safe bets. If Congress fails to pass climate legislation, the effects won’t be felt immediately outside of a few areas. (They may include fossil-fuel prices, which could stay elevated for longer.) But over the coming decade, the world will wind up a hotter, poorer place. Carbon emissions will remain high, and the basic framework of the Paris Agreement on climate change may start to crumble.

[Read: The Democrats really are that dense about climate change]

The United States, in particular, would be left measurably worse. Although the country has never been a responsible actor on climate change, its peculiar inability to pass any significant legislative climate policy would set back its self-conception, international reputation, and economic mojo. At this point, not having a national energy and climate policy is like not having an internet policy in the 1990s—so strange that it makes the entire system look diseased and antique. While fossil fuels remain essential to today’s economy, the next stage of economic development is unmistakably decarbonized and electrified. Without the kind of robust policy support on offer in Europe or China, America’s climate-friendly companies will not be able to keep up. And so the country will fall behind.

Don’t get me wrong: Even then, the United States will remain rich, well educated, and integrated into the global economy, although intensifying wildfires and other climate disasters will eat away at its housing stock, industrial base, and treasured Pax Americana. But the country will be worse off—less wealthy, less at ease, less free—than it could have been. Oil and gas prices will still dictate the shape of American budgets; climate-driven inflation will intensify. And the American public’s understanding of the future will remain clouded—by a public-policy problem first recognized more than 30 years ago by President George H. W. Bush.

The country, in short, will stagnate. And stagnation is a choice.

The most immediate consequence is straightforward. The country will build less zero-carbon infrastructure than if the climate package had passed. Utilities will erect fewer wind and solar farms, and consumers will buy fewer electric vehicles. Fewer Americans, too, will switch to efficient induction stoves or heat pumps. The bill’s delay has already put hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in clean energy on hold. If the bill fails, some of that spending will be canceled.

That cancellation won’t dent only the growth of hippie-dippie renewables. The reconciliation bill’s tax credits had an innovative design, subsidizing all sources of zero-carbon electricity production, not just wind and solar. This design was a large part of why economists at the University of Chicago and the Rhodium Group, an energy-research firm, projected that the tax credits could produce as much as $1.5 trillion of economic surplus by 2050. In their absence, all zero-carbon power would suffer: Existing nuclear-power plants may shut down earlier than they otherwise would, and some new nuclear and geothermal power plants will never get built.

That lack of capital turnover will ripple across the economy. Because fewer Americans will switch to zero-carbon technologies, they will need more fossil fuels, keeping energy prices elevated for longer. Every electric-vehicle driver, after all, is one less buyer of gasoline; every heat-pump owner is one less buyer of natural gas.

That means that the United States will release more carbon pollution than it would otherwise, accelerating global warming and ocean acidification. Don’t get me wrong: The country will not immediately become a cartoonish, smoggy wasteland like in The Lorax, with smokestacks coughing untold amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. (At least, it won’t soon become any more of a climate villain than it is today.) But as its chronic carbon addiction runs its course, its environment and economic fundamentals will get worse.

[Read: There’s no scenario in which 2050 is “normal”]

It’s worth diving into the numbers to get a sense of what that could mean. Last year, America dumped 5.4 billion tons of carbon pollution into the atmosphere, about 17 percent below 2005’s all-time high. With no further policy, the country’s emissions are projected to flatline or modestly fall from that level. The U.S. could still make its first Paris Agreement goal of cutting climate pollution 26 percent below the all-time high by 2025, almost entirely as a consequence of the effects of inflation and the Ukraine war. “Because of high fossil-fuel prices, the 2025 target is within the range of uncertainty,” John Larsen, the lead U.S. climate analyst at the Rhodium Group, told me.

But to avert the worst impacts of climate change—that is, to avoid more than 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit of global warming by the end of the century—the country would have to slash its carbon pollution to half of its all-time high level by 2030. That’s what the Biden administration pledged on Earth Day last year, and it will prove much harder than the 2025 goal. Leah Stokes, a political-science professor at UC Santa Barbara, told me that she did not think the country could reach the target without a reconciliation deal. “Most of the models say you need these investments to really hit these ambitious targets that President Biden put forward,” she said.

Even beyond the climatic consequences, the failure to pass a climate bill will make people sicker and hurt the local environment. Because fossil-fuel-burning cars, factories, and power plants also produce conventionally toxic forms of pollution, America’s air will carry more particulate matter, tiny shards of ash that can poison the heart, lungs, and brain. By 2030, some 25,000 more Americans will die than if the bill had passed, according to Princeton’s energy-policy analysis project.

Those are the direct and most straightforward consequences of the climate deal’s failure, the ones that suggest themselves just by extending current trends into the future. But as the disease of stagnation progresses, other, more dire symptoms will begin to appear. In the coming days, the Supreme Court will rule on a landmark case that could gut the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse-gas pollution under the Clean Air Act. Without a reconciliation deal, the Court’s ruling will determine whether there’s any hope of making the 2030 goal. If the Court preserves most, or even part, of the agency’s power, then the Biden administration can still attempt ambitious climate regulation over the next two years, requiring utilities, carmakers, and perhaps even industrial facilities to cut their climate pollution. And because fossil fuels are so expensive right now, and renewables are so cheap, the agency could justify deep cuts to carbon pollution when conducting a cost-benefit analysis.

Would that be enough to meet the 2030 targets? Gina McCarthy, the White House’s climate czar, has claimed that even with no additional legislation, the government can still hit them. But energy experts are skeptical. “It’s just hard to see all of that happening,” Larsen, the Rhodium Group analyst, told me. “I agree with Gina McCarthy when she says that the federal government has all the tools it needs. But without hundreds of billions of [federal] investment, it makes it 10 times harder to use all the tools in a way that makes it likely the targets would be reached by 2030.” State governments would also have to step up, he said, passing far more sweeping clean-energy rules than even California or New York have on the books today.

[Read: The 1.5 degree goal is all but dead]

And that’s the good outcome. If the Court’s entrenched conservative majority kneecaps the EPA, then the White House will be out of options, and American climate activism will likely take a grim turn. Progressives will have watched the collapse of their legislative and regulatory routes to cut carbon pollution, and the ongoing Republican backlash to corporate activism will foreclose their ability to green even their workplaces. Just as President Donald Trump’s win electrified campus activists, a resounding defeat for climate action could empower those climate campaigners who are already eager to blow up pipelines.

What happens if the United States misses that 2030 goal—or even if it appears likely to miss that goal for much of the 2020s? The effects could ripple across geopolitics. The world has moved on from the bromides of the mid-aughts: Every major polluter has now committed on paper to zeroing out its emissions between 2050 and 2070. America’s failure to hit its pledge under the Paris Agreement—an international treaty shaped to satisfy the peculiar requirements of the U.S. government—could destroy that consensus. Other countries could back out of their own Paris pledges, locking the world into warming by more than 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, a level that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said could produce famines, droughts, and more deadly heat waves within a decade or two.

Or the world could simply leave the United States and its kludgy economy behind. Gregory Nemet, a public-affairs professor at the University of Wisconsin and the author of How Solar Energy Became Cheap, argues that the world is now on track to transition no matter what the United States does. “There’s so much momentum right now in this clean-energy transition. It will still happen, but it will happen more slowly” if no bill passes, he told me.

[Read: Biden’s climate goals rest on a 71-year-old defense law]

Another probable outcome is that the next generation of clean-energy technologies won’t get scaled up in the United States; the expertise to produce them will be created elsewhere in the world. I’ve written before about how American labs and companies invented solar photovoltaic technology in the 1950s, only to squander their competitive advantage and allow other countries to reap the benefits of mass production. Without a climate bill, that could happen again for the next round of decarbonization technology, such as hydrogen produced by renewables, direct air carbon capture, and sustainable-aviation-fuel production. China, meanwhile, has thrown its weight behind renewables manufacturing, encouraging companies to scale up domestically and investors to support them.

By contrast, if the tax credits pass, “you start to see a world where with some of these emerging technologies, like [direct air capture] or hydrogen, the U.S. has a competitive head start and has the potential to get into a dominant position,” Larsen said.

The most likely outcome might be a mix of these scenarios. Some new climate-tech start-ups may build their first facility here, because last year’s bipartisan infrastructure law authorized more than $11.5 billion for demonstration direct-air-capture and hydrogen projects. But that money can’t necessarily help build a company’s third, fourth, or fifth facility, and when it comes time to scale up, those same firms may go abroad. “Nobody’s going to build a scale-up business on a fingers-crossed hope that there’s a tax credit at the end of the decade,” Larsen said.

“We’re talking about $1 [trillion] to $4 trillion a year in investments due to energy transition,” Nemet added. “If that spending happens elsewhere, or U.S. firms don’t do that hiring, that’s a lost opportunity.” It could also be a national-security blunder. Look at the role that batteries and other climate tech have played in the war in Ukraine, where soldiers have used small drones to drop grenades on Russian trenches and fired anti-tank rockets from e-bikes. In a future conflict, having the industrial capacity and engineering know-how to mass-manufacture such gadgets could prove decisive.  

Even if the U.S. forgoes that investment, Nemet’s largest fear is that the transition will happen too slowly. Even the most conservative assessments say that the world will need to use technology to remove one to three gigatons of carbon every year by the middle of the century. That implies an almost unimaginable level of technological growth given what exists today. “For direct air capture to reach one gigaton a year in 2050, it would have to grow at 40 percent a year, every year, from now to 2050,” he said. Solar deployment, by contrast, has grown 30 percent a year for 40 years, according to Nemet’s research. “And solar’s been kind of miraculous that way, so we’d have to go a little faster,” he said. Even cellphones grew only 15 percent per year at their peak. “If we’re talking about taking our foot off the gas a little bit in the U.S., that’s gonna make it harder” to meet those targets, Nemet told me.

Democrats might get another few chances to pass some climate policy in the coming decade, even if this effort fails. Historically, the party has found more success by tacking energy policy onto other legislative vehicles—such as a must-pass defense or budget bill—rather than separating it out. That could prove true again now. The first opportunity might come after the midterm elections this year, when a lame-duck Congress could pass a bipartisan “tax extenders” package that pushes each party’s cherished tax policies forward. Even if that passes, though, it will likely cover only another year or two, and it won’t restore the tax credits to their highest historical levels, as a reconciliation deal could. It also won’t make the existing set of tax credits, which favor wind or solar specifically, more technology-neutral.

Two milestones stand out after that. The first will arrive next year, when Congress will review agricultural policy and pass a new version of the Farm Bill. The last draft of the Build Back Better proposal included $27 billion to encourage soil-based carbon-capture techniques; that money could be slotted into the Farm Bill. After that, the next opportunity won’t arise until 2025, when most of the major provisions in the Trump tax credits will expire and Congress will debate whether to renew them. Democrats could propose to extend certain Trump-era reforms in exchange for some clean-energy tax credits. But taking advantage of that moment will require Democrats to hold on to some shred of power at the federal level.

And even then, climate policy will matter less than it does now. Companies are deciding where to locate their manufacturing plants now, not in 2025. One of Manchin’s favored policies in the package, a tax credit that encourages firms to build new factories, could shift their decision about where to locate their facilities, but it has to come in the next few years, before those decisions are locked in.

Perhaps one of the biggest risks is that the country’s energy system remains stuck for years to come. Public markets are trapped in a moment of Hamlet-like indecision about energy: Investors can forecast the end of global oil-demand growth, which makes them unwilling to fund efforts to increase oil supply, but they also can’t fund the rapid scale-up of renewables and other clean-energy technology without public support. (High interest rates will make such a build-out even harder.) Consumers are stuck in the resulting gap, facing higher energy prices across the board as money dawdles between fossil fuels and clean energy. Without clear, muscular policy that makes a zero-carbon energy system all but inevitable, industrial firms could just sit around for years, waiting for a better investment signal.  

More widely, the failure will speak to the sclerosis of American governance. If Congress cannot bring itself to pass a climate bill, this will be the second time in a row that Democrats have controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress and failed to get a climate deal done: In 2010, President Barack Obama could not coax a bipartisan climate bill through the Senate. Arguably, this is the third time that the Senate will have killed climate legislation: Bill Clinton’s Btu tax, which died in 1993, would have amounted to a kind of approximate carbon tax. But this will not just be a Democratic problem: Barring the intercession of the courts, neither party has been able to accomplish many of its governance objectives lately.

Of course, this history is not yet written: Senate Democrats could still hustle a deal together in the next week or two. But the outlook is not good. In retrospect, what might amaze our descendants is that there were so many ways to tackle climate change through policy. The problem was amenable to progressive and conservative values; whether you believed in conquering nature or mothering it, you could find a plausible remedy to the carbon problem. But our politicians chose none of them. They opted for perhaps the worst possible path of all—they bickered while the world burned.

There are moments when one can dive into the sustained dream of a book and stay there for hours. The spring of 2020 was not one of those times. If you weren’t actively battling COVID-19 or grieving a loved one, your life was likely all of a sudden relentlessly logistical: the sudden evaporation of childcare, the Tetris of fitting multiple working adults inside one tiny apartment, the paranoid wiping down of groceries. Reading often felt impossible, even for those of us who love to read. How could anyone focus long enough, amid all the chaos and grief, to absorb complex ideas? Instead, I found myself flicking through the latest headlines and my multiple email inboxes, or obsessively checking COVID-19 case statistics in my area. The world was on fire, and it was hard to tear my eyes away.

It wasn’t just bad for readers. Early 2020 was simply a very bad time to publish—and publicize—a book. First-time author and Atlantic staff writer Olga Khazan, whose book Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World came out on April 7, reflected on the experience of releasing a book into “a giant dumpster fire” on Twitter a year later: “I realized I felt guilty for feeling so robbed, and honestly just acknowledging the guilt and frustration was a good step forward.” The publishing industry mostly moved online, and suddenly publicists couldn’t easily send out physical review copies, whether because of supply-chain issues or because the books were trapped in offices that were now inaccessible. Libraries and physical bookstores closed, launch events were canceled, and publishers hadn’t quite figured out Zoom yet.

Still, once I was finally able to focus, sometime in the fall, I found that among the galleys and not-so-new releases I had packed into boxes were titles that I immediately longed to talk to someone about. The nine works below, a selection of excellent books released between March and June 2020, include some of those gems. Each illuminates some underappreciated aspect of contemporary life or allows us to see the greater context beyond our own circumstances—perspective that the early days of the pandemic swept away.

Feminist Press

Fiebre Tropical, by Julián Delgado Lopera (March 4, 2020)

What makes this novel is the swaggering, vulnerable, bilingual voice of Francisca, the 15-year-old narrator newly arrived in Miami, much to her chagrin. “This wasn’t a Choose Your Own Migration multiple-choice adventure with (a), (b), and (c) laid out at the end of each page and you could simply choose (b) Stay in Bogotá, you idiot. Cachaco, please,” she thinks. She’d rather wear all black and listen to the Cure than get involved in the youth group at the evangelical church that forms her relatives’ social and emotional world. That is, until she catches the interest of Carmen, the pastor’s charismatic daughter. As the two become more intimate, Francisca can’t tell whether she’s feeling Jesus or falling desperately, confusedly in love. There are gorgeous interludes depicting her mother and grandmother at around Francisca’s age, in 1970s Bogotá and 1950s Cartagena, filled with the same yearning and stubbornness. It’s a coming-of-age story in triplicate, where dreams don’t quite pan out in messy reality—including the glamorous vision of the U.S. that draws the family there in the first place. But the longing that suffuses the writing has its own beauty.

Pantheon

Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA, by Neil Shubin (March 17, 2020)

Evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin wants us to know that feathers didn’t in fact develop specifically to help animals fly, nor did lungs or legs appear to help animals walk on land. This absorbing book traces how monumental evolutionary changes actually happen, and Shubin’s answers are illuminating even to people who think they know how evolution works. Life as we know it, the reader learns, was actually formed by a grand process of bricolage, where body parts like feathers and lungs appeared, then eventually conferred advantages on their owners to serve different purposes than what they initially arose to do. (Evolution, in other words, is kind of like MacGyver.) Our own genomes are littered with randomly duplicate genes and the viruses that once infected our ancestors; we now use that DNA to make proteins crucial for pregnancy and the formation of memories. Through the stories of scientists like Susumu Ohno, who used cardboard cutouts to theorize about gene duplication, and Barbara McClintock, who won a Nobel Prize for discovering that certain genes move around within a genome, one gets a sense of how quickly our understanding of genetics has progressed—and how human the scientific endeavor is.

Harper Perennial

The Everlasting, by Katy Simpson Smith (March 24, 2020)

This time-skipping novel tells the stories of four characters living in Rome at vastly different historical moments: an aquatic biologist named Tom in 2015; Giulia de’ Medici, self-conscious of her African heritage, in 1559; Felix, a closeted monk in 896; and Prisca, a 12-year-old girl who becomes a Christian martyr in 165. All come to Rome from elsewhere, all are haunted by unattainable love, and all are desperately lonely. A metal fishhook performs a decisive role in each arc. And Satan himself interjects throughout, responding to the characters’ rhetorical questions with snark and affection—he can relate to their romantic anguish; he's never gotten over his breakup with God. The Everlasting meditates on faith, contingency, and human longing through a wealth of period detail in each setting: Who knew that spending time in a putridarium, a room beneath monasteries where the corpses of monks were seated on toilets to rot, could be so riveting? From seeing what changes and what stays the same in these glimpses of the Eternal City, an intimate sense of history arises.

[Read: The exquisite pain of reading in quarantine]

Algonquin Books

Afterlife, by Julia Alvarez (April 7, 2020)

Alvarez’s first book for adults in 14 years is a quiet, philosophical novel, fraught with questions of what we owe to others and to ourselves. It also happens to be a page-turner. Antonia is a recently retired English professor whose beloved husband died nine months ago, and all of her instincts are to practice self-care and hold herself apart from others—which, throughout the story, can seem necessary, selfish, or both. That slippage is the central point of the novel. Antonia is always piously lecturing her three sisters about personal responsibility: “Take care of yourself so you don’t become a burden on others,” she says, and they set their phones to play the sound of church bells when she calls. But then her erratic sister Izzy goes missing and a pregnant 17-year-old undocumented Mexican immigrant named Estela takes shelter in Antonia’s garage, and Antonia is caught between her own inclinations and the memory of her husband, Sam, who would likely help others in need even at a cost to himself. “A bleak world of self-protections,” she thinks close to the end. “Did she really want to live in it?” Antonia’s constant self-questioning anchors this deft work, showing readers the thoughts of a woman who decides to do the right thing despite herself.

St. Martin’s Publishing Group

The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power, by Deirdre Mask (April 14, 2020)

Addresses are sort of like flush toilets, I concluded after reading this wide-ranging exploration of the subject: an assumed part of modern life you only really see once you go somewhere without them. Mask traces the origins of addressing systems beginning in Enlightenment-era Europe, when burgeoning nation-states were eager to collect more detailed information about its citizens in order to provide them with services, but also to tax, conscript, and surveil them. Today, simply giving someone an address—a resident of a Kolkatan slum,  or a homeless person in the U.S.—could help lift them out of poverty by allowing them to open bank accounts and apply for jobs. Charming historical facts abound, including a chapter describing the way ancient Romans likely navigated a city largely without street names. But the book’s most striking point is how passionately people throughout history have felt about the names of their streets, from reunified Berlin to Tehran, South Africa, and Hollywood, Florida. They invite such heated debate, Mask writes, because “they are about power—the power to name, the power to shape history, the power to decide who counts, who doesn’t, and why.”

Grove

Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose, by Kay Ryan (April 14, 2020)

In 1976, when she was 30, Kay Ryan bicycled across the United States in order to decide, once and for all, whether to become a poet. Today she’s about as decorated as a poet can be—a Pulitzer Prize winner, two-term U.S. poet laureate, and a MacArthur fellow. Synthesizing Gravity is the first collection of her prose, written over three decades; it includes an essay that tells the story of that cross-country bike ride, as well as ones that dissect her favorite poets: Philip Larkin, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Stevie Smith. It’s a little ironic that I have so many quotes from this book dutifully recorded, considering that one essay elaborates the danger of notebooks. (“Almost everything is supposed to get away from us,” she argues.) Even her criticism inspires envy and an urge to jot down everything she writes: “Nobel Prize–winning poet Joseph Brodsky was born to be posthumous,” she tells us, and Annie Dillard “could get high C out of a potato.” What she advocates for is a life of simplicity, repetition, and solitude, and her insights are so bracing that the collection feels like a palate cleanser for everything that’s overwhelming about our world.

[Read: You won’t remember the pandemic the way you think you will]

Coffee House Press

Sansei and Sensibility, by Karen Tei Yamashita (May 5, 2020)

In this collection, Yamashita’s characters are all growing up as sansei, the relatively pampered children of a generation of Japanese Americans who had been sent to internment camps during World War II. They’re grappling with the weight of a history their parents never talk about. One protagonist considers what it means to apply the KonMari method to artifacts from the camps; a woman locked in her dead aunt’s apartment becomes interested in the Japanese antiques and old groceries she left behind. Throughout, there’s a pleasingly casual sense of intimacy. One of the “stories” is in fact a timeline of important events in Los Angeles’ Japanese American community, while another incorporates recipes from Yamashita’s friends and family, with directions like “Toss, and serve with sake and beer. Play cards.” Oh, and the book’s latter half consists of extremely witty sendups of all of Jane Austen’s completed novels—yes, even Lady Susan—set in the Southern California of Yamashita’s childhood. Eligible teens attend prom instead of fancy balls and Emma is now Emi, afire with plans to “start the Japanese American revolution.” The transplanted stories are fun (who doesn’t love an Austen adaptation?) and also revealing, as this particular milieu is rife with unspoken expectations about what station in life the young protagonists are meant to attain.

W.W. Norton and Company

One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965, by Jia Lynn Yang (May 19, 2020)

“For most of this country’s past,” Yang points out, “it had been firmly established that being an American was inextricably tied to European ancestry.” Her book charts the long, agonizing fight to recast the U.S. as “a nation of immigrants,” in which lawmakers and activists created a story about the country’s core values that became popular more recently than one might expect. This history is bookended by two laws: the Immigration Act of 1924, which barred nearly all new Asian immigrants and established national quotas based on eugenics and white nationalism, and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which eliminated these quotas and banned discrimination against immigrants based on race or ethnicity. It’s a fascinating and often sobering picture of how immigration in America has been shaped by a host of factors—foreign affairs, political expediency, anti-Communist hysteria, and principled, determined lawmakers—and valuable context for the still-roiling battles over what it means to be an American. In the end, Yang argues, those of us who believe in multiculturalism as one of our country’s fundamental values have “unfinished work” if we’re to create a vision that recognizes and actively embraces our country's unprecedented diversity.

[Read: How I came to love my epic quarantine reading project]

Graywolf

The Dragons, the Giant, the Women, by Wayétu Moore (June 2, 2020)

It feels nearly impossible to write about one’s experiences as a 5-year-old with the clarity and narrative surety of a novelist, and yet that’s exactly what Moore does in this memoir, which chronicles her family’s escape from Liberia to the United States after civil war breaks out in 1989. The hardship itself commands attention—the family, including three children, walks for weeks, passing through checkpoints surrounded by volatile soldiers and dead bodies. But Moore’s storytelling abilities and structural ingenuity are what made this one of my favorite books of 2020; after reading it I felt, despite everything that was going on, mildly outraged that people weren’t gushing about it on every platform. As Moore’s family flees, we feel her father’s and grandmother’s terror and, simultaneously, the confusion of a child who weaves her own mythology of princes and dragons to make sense of the chaos. And, at a crucial juncture in their escape, the memoir leaps in time to Moore as a young woman in America, adjusting to racism and her identity as a West African immigrant, not to mention the buried trauma of her childhood. Her search for the female soldier who helped smuggle them out of the country brings her back to Liberia and a conclusion that moved me to tears.

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On so many measures of family hardship, young children and their parents in the U.S. suffer more than their counterparts in other high-income nations. Babies are more likely to die and children are more likely to grow up in poverty. The U.S. is the only rich country in the world without national paid family leave. And while other wealthy countries spend an average of $14,000 each year per child on early-childhood care, the U.S. spends a miserly $500. Underlying each of these bleak truths appears to be the same, misguided belief: that government support for parents is at odds with parents being responsible for their kids.

Once you start looking for it, this idea is everywhere. It has been used to argue that open strollers should not be accommodated on New York City bus ramps (“Just stop being lazy; just fold the damn stroller!” admonished one person at a transit-authority meeting in March); to justify the lifting of mask mandates before a vaccine for the youngest children was available (parents should protect small children, said a D.C. health official); to explain why the government should not make child care affordable (“I’ve never really felt it was society’s responsibility to take care of other people’s children,” mused Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin).

This purported dichotomy between public support for kids and responsible parenting is an utterly false one: Helping parents is not the same as parenting, and support does not replace real-life parents. Stroller-friendly transportation, a space at work to pump milk, and available, high-quality child care all enable families to be more independent, not less.

In most other wealthy countries, paid family leave, subsidized child care, and family cash allowances function not as crutches for specific parents but as early-childhood infrastructure available to all. That translates into fewer hungry kids and fewer frazzled workers. Free child-care programs have dramatically boosted mothers’ workforce participation in countries such as Israel, Chile, and Germany. In Norway, paid parental leave has been linked with improved physical and mental health among mothers and higher rates of high-school graduation and better wages for their children, especially among workers who can’t afford to take unpaid time off.

In the United States, the void of government support has sprouted two parallel but separate worlds of early-childhood parenting where no family wins. In one, middle- and upper-class parents are expected to go it alone. For the former group especially, this can be stressful if not financially untenable. They might take unpaid leave to bond with newborns and heal from childbirth, and they might depend on a sink-or-swim child-care market where landing a spot in a day-care infant room feels like winning the lottery yet can cost more annually than in-state tuition at a public, four-year university.

[Derek Thompson: Why child care is so ridiculously expensive]

Then there is the world for low-income families. When certain lawmakers tacitly believe that only irresponsible caregivers require help, American parents who need help are viewed with suspicion. Even during the crucial, vulnerable early years of family life, the limited assistance available to them comes with demands to prioritize paid work over parenting, no matter how erratic the hours or dismal the pay. This does not benefit children, parents, or society at large.

About 50 years ago, we could have charted a different course. Women were flooding the workforce and the country hovered one presidential signature away from green-lighting a plan for a universal, publicly funded national child-care system. But at the eleventh hour, President Richard Nixon reckoned that this would lead to “family weakening.” He vetoed the plan.

Decades later, this argument is still commonly used to deny families support. Some people and politicians might sincerely believe that not helping families is a kind of tough-love motivator for parents. But sexism, classism, and, as the sociologist and legal scholar Dorothy Roberts writes in Torn Apart, racism have long played an outsize role in the U.S.’s reluctance to help parents. Our country’s first cash-assistance program for single parents—the so-called mothers’ pensions of the early 1900s—was designed for white widows and abandoned mothers to care for their children. Black and other nonwhite women were almost entirely excluded from the program—their neighborhoods were sometimes avoided by the program’s administrators, or their individual cases were rejected arbitrarily, Roberts writes. Mothers’ pensions gave way, in the 1930s, to the New Deal’s Aid to Dependent Children, which also provided cash grants to poor mothers. Yet Black women continued to frequently be denied the money, often on the grounds that they could work.

In the 1960s, civil-rights activists fought to open welfare to more parents, but this turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory, according to Roberts. “As more and more Black families began receiving benefits, the image of welfare recipients began to transmute from the worthy white widow to the immoral unwed Black mother,” she writes. Crucial to this shift was an influential government report linking poverty and struggle in Black urban communities not to redlining, or to underfunded schools and neighborhoods, but to Black single motherhood. This tapped into “a widespread desire to believe that blacks had been done in by their own behavior rather than by white racism,” the historian Patricia O’Toole writes in Money & Morals in America.

This stereotype of the Black single mom cemented a new approach to family assistance. Before the 1960s, cash assistance for mothers had recognized the economic and societal value of child-rearing, sometimes expecting recipients to limit paid work to care for kids. As more nonwhite women accessed these benefits and more white women entered the workforce, mothers receiving funds needed to prove their commitment to eventually becoming independent of government support through means such as marriage and, especially, employment.

[Read: The devaluation of care work is by design]

Today, public assistance, stringent work requirements, and family policing go hand in hand. Researchers estimate that more than one in three children and more than half of all Black children will be part of an invasive child-protective investigation before age 18. Though only about one in six result in a child-maltreatment finding, parents say that the investigation itself—where child welfare authorities potentially question families’ neighbors and examine kids’ bodies for bruises—can be terrifying and shaming. As the sociologist Kelley Fong has documented, in poor neighborhoods saturated with these investigations, mothers often hide family struggles from doctors, teachers, and other service providers for fear of “catching” a child-welfare case.

In the early months of the pandemic, some lawyers who defend poor parents in family court felt hopeful that this dynamic was finally shifting. Christine Gottlieb, a co-director of the NYU School of Law’s Family Defense Clinic, told me that the country’s approach to families and poverty was moving away from “a punitive one” and toward an “impulse to offer aid.” To help families weather the pandemic, the federal government began distributing no-strings-attached monthly cash transfers in the form of a tax credit to nearly all families. Meanwhile, Congress introduced the Build Back Better bill, which offered the type of early-childhood infrastructure common in other wealthy countries, including affordable child care and paid parental leave. But even though researchers found that the child tax credit’s cash allowance kept millions of children out of poverty and reduced child hunger, lawmakers, after the usual hemming and hawing, allowed it to expire.

Central to the plan’s demise was Senator Joe Manchin, who wanted parents to work to receive the credit. “Don’t you think, if we’re going to help the children, that the people should make some effort?” he asked. Essentially he was repeating a long-standing assumption in American society: that responsible parents don’t need government support, and that government support turns responsible parents irresponsible. It is the same contradictory logic that has shortchanged families for decades.

Less than 20 years ago, when I was a rising executive at an up-and-coming gun company, most people in the firearms industry regarded the AR-15 rifle as distasteful and dangerous, and they chose not to promote it at events. Trade shows did not allow the display or advertisement of tactical gear like that worn by the Uvalde and Buffalo shooters, who both used AR-15-type rifles to carry out those atrocities.

Up until about 2006, only a handful of companies were making AR-15s. They were outliers, producing rifles mainly for law enforcement and the military, and in the domestic commercial market AR-15s accounted for just a fraction of total gun sales, which averaged from 6 million to 8 million guns a year. The social norms that governed gun ownership and the firearms industry were clear: Assault rifles and tactical gear were a creepy, fringe interest that had no place in a complex democratic society.

The unwritten rules of decency were enforced by firearm-industry leaders—the executives, publishers, and journalists who functioned like risk managers, warding off threats to the reputation of the whole enterprise. I witnessed how this worked many times, including one occasion when a young writer brought his own AR-15 to a hunting event I was hosting in 2004. The senior figures there responded immediately. “That’s not the kind of thing we want to be promoting,” they said. The newcomer was shamed into locking the gun up for the rest of the event.

The industry’s restraint came from a sense of responsibility and was voluntary. Contrary to common belief, AR-15s have never been completely outlawed. This was true even during the 10-year assault-weapons ban that a Republican-controlled Congress under President Bush allowed to sunset in 2004. Many AR-15s were not covered by that law unless they were fitted with particular features, such as high-capacity magazines, flash suppressors, or folding stocks that pushed them into the “assault weapon” category. Millions of AR-15s might have been sold perfectly legally during the ban, but industry conduct and social stigma inhibited that. The ban both reinforced and reflected this voluntary code.

The few AR-15s manufactured between 1994 and 2004 became known in the industry as “post-ban” rifles. The shooter who killed 10 people in Buffalo used one of those guns, a Bushmaster XM-15 made during that period; all the teenager who bought it had to do to turn it into an even deadlier weapon of war was outfit it with a modern high-capacity magazine.

[Read: How bipartisan gun-control talks actually succeeded]

For much of my career I fought to hold the industry to its own rules of responsibility. When other manufacturers condemned Dick’s Sporting Goods for refusing to sell AR-15s, I insisted that my company maintain a relationship with the national retailer despite pressures to join a boycott. I tried to counter the movement to embrace everything tactical, no matter how dangerous the equipment concerned. But I lost that battle. Today, I am a critic fighting from the outside. The industry now comprises as many as 500 companies making AR-15 variants, along with hundreds of tactical-gear makers. Gone are the old norms; the “tactical lifestyle” now dominates trade shows. We see campaigns for guns like the Urban Super Sniper, and potential buyers can consider their “man card reissued” if they pick a particular AR-15.

At least 20 million guns are sold every year in the U.S., about 4 million of which are AR-15 rifles. By all accounts, at least 20 million AR-15s are now out there, among the more than 400 million guns in circulation. The gun industry is arming civilians with weapons of war in that same complex democracy it once knew to protect. Some companies even market to children, such as Wee1 Tactical, a rifle maker that advertises its miniaturized AR-15s with pink and green cartoon characters. This “JR-15” is not a toy; it’s a real semiautomatic rifle, sized for a kid to use.

The astounding transition from an era of self-restraint to where we are now began in 1999, after the murders at Columbine High School. The National Rifle Association’s convention was scheduled to take place just a few days after that school mass shooting, and only a few miles away, in Denver. Although much of the convention was canceled, the NRA leadership held closed-door business meetings in which they discussed strategy options, as we know from secret recordings of those meetings recently uncovered by National Public Radio. The choice before the NRA, as leaders saw it, was either conciliation and engagement with lawmakers to help draft improved policies or aggressive resistance with the aim of frightening its members into believing lawmakers would come after their guns. The NRA chose to enter the culture-war business, and so did the gun industry.

The Bush administration helped that along by allowing the assault-weapons ban to end in 2004, and, more important, by signing in 2005 the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which shielded the gun industry from liability no matter what kind of irresponsible marketing it used to promote firearms. The new law removed any incentive for the gun industry to hold on to its former self-imposed restraint.

Perhaps Bush’s biggest gifts to AR-15 makers, though, were the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nothing normalized the “black rifle” like the evening-news segments featuring U.S. soldiers on combat missions. Later, as returning veterans, they would go on to form a ready-made customer base for civilian versions of the rifle. For many of those ex-service members, owning and shooting the rifle became a way to stay connected to the people they had served with in “the sandbox.”

I watched all of these ingredients—the NRA’s fear, the Bush-era laws, the returning soldiers, and the glorification of war—coalesce into a frightening, self-perpetuating vortex. A handful of others in the industry also quit or lost their jobs for speaking out, but we were too few, too late.  

Barack Obama’s win in the 2008 presidential election provided the firearms industry with a culture-war boost, as the NRA took to promoting conspiracy-theory-minded fears. Before Obama took office, U.S. gun consumers had never purchased more than 10 million guns in a single year; by the time he left, they would be buying more than 16 million a year, and at least 2 million of those were AR-15s. The industry came to call Obama “The Greatest Gun Salesman in America.”

Following its post-Columbine strategy, the NRA also learned how to harness the predictable calls for legislation after mass shootings to drive gun buyers into a fearful frenzy. The gun group made maximum use of events like Sandy Hook and the shooting of Gabby Giffords in Tucson. Sales boomed after every shooting, especially sales of AR-15s.

[Read: Why the AR-15 is so lethal]

After his 2016 election win, President Donald Trump’s dog-whistling dalliance with racism and conspiracy theory—components of the NRA playbook that I had witnessed for years—accelerated the feedback loop of profit and fear even more, eventually producing sales of nearly 23 million guns in 2020, a 44 percent increase over even the highest totals of the Obama years. The rifle of war, once relegated to the back halls of the shooting industry, was now its star performer.

The NRA helped convert the black rifle into a political symbol, too. Bumper stickers and ball caps bearing its distinctive outline became emblematic of a new brand of identity politics. By 2015, devotion to the gun and what it stood for had become central to extremist groups like the Oath Keepers. Sadly, it came as no surprise for me to see Black Rifle Coffee gear and Come and Take It AR-15 flags everywhere among the January 6 insurrectionists. As the rioters were breaking into the Capitol and threatening lawmakers that day in 2021, I took a call from an old friend, another former gun-industry executive, who remarked, “Well, at least now everyone knows what it’s like to be at an NRA convention.”

So here we are, at the apex of the NRA’s high-pressure culture war, with more than 20 million AR-15s in circulation and a deeply polarized political culture. What are we to do with this mess?  

One place to start would be an effort to reestablish the same social norms the industry itself once insisted on. The measures outlined in the policy framework that a bipartisan group of senators is now negotiating would offer some of the marginal improvements that can help with that goal, including funding to support states’ red-flag laws.

But to denormalize AR-15s, we need to go further—by decoupling their regulation from that applied to other, less dangerous firearms. No one under the age of 21 should be able to buy these rifles. This will not be easy to achieve with politicians still at the behest of a gun industry that wants to pretend AR-15s are just like target shotguns or hunting rifles, firearms long ruled appropriate for a minimum purchase age of 18 years (unlike handguns, for which a buyer must be 21). Senate Republicans have refused to consider any move to introduce a higher age limit for purchasing and owning an AR-15. But the GOP and the industry are wrong: These guns are different from most others. If they were not so uniquely deadly, why would they almost invariably be mass shooters’ weapon of choice?

[Read: What I saw treating the victims from Parkland should change the debate on guns]

Lastly, we must consider national legislation to rein in the gun industry’s deeply irresponsible marketing of the AR-15-led “tactical lifestyle.” Not so long ago, the U.S. restricted the tobacco industry’s use of misleading advertising to glamorize smoking. We did not ban the freedom to smoke cigarettes, but we did make the situation better, saved some lives, and began to cut the costs of smoking-related disease. Smoking still kills too many Americans, but thanks to action, a century-long growth in the death toll is slowly being reversed. We can make the same improvements for guns without impinging on people’s personal choice and civil liberties.

The legislative proposals now emerging on gun reform may seem tentative, too weak to repair what is broken, but even modest changes in the law can be an important social signal. The first moves to restrict tobacco products started that way: Back in 1987, Congress banned smoking on domestic flights, though only those of less than two hours’ duration; it took decades more for most states to pass comprehensive smoke-free laws. But this is our path to reversing the erosion of norms and restoring the sense of responsibility and decency on which our democracy depends.

No law under consideration will solve everything, but we can work to restore a safer culture of responsible gun ownership. Even the gun industry once believed in that value. I know because I was there.

When the British government announced its latest “Brexit dividend” at the start of the year—a return to stamping a tiny crown onto our beer glasses—I was surprised. Mostly because I had not noticed that we’d stopped. Clearly I gave up pretending to like beer sometime before 2006, when the rules supposedly changed.

Except they didn’t. A close reading of the government press release revealed that in 2006, the European Union began to ask manufacturers to apply a common mark—“CE,” referring to the French acronym for “European conformity”—to certify that their glasses held a full pint. There was no requirement to drop the existing crown stamp. And now, in the glorious post-Brexit land of freedom, the government was merely “providing this guidance on how manufacturers can apply a crown symbol to beer glasses as a decorative mark on a voluntary basis.”

[Read: Why Britain’s Brexit mayhem was worth it]

So the EU never forced us to remove the crown mark, and the government is only suggesting we reinstate it. Freedom! But what’s this? The guidance also notes that any manufacturer who wants to keep supplying glasses to the EU, that huge single market on our doorstep, must continue to use the “CE” mark on them. So must anyone trading in Northern Ireland, too, because of its fluid trade border with the Republic—an issue Boris Johnson failed to sort out in his Brexit deal and is now desperately trying to renegotiate.

The saga of the crown mark is the perfect metaphor for Brexit: invested with enormous symbolism, fiendishly complicated and faintly absurd in its implementation, and, above all, a complete waste of everyone’s time.

Yet no one should be surprised that this is what Brexit has amounted to. Notoriously, before Johnson was a politician, he built a career in journalism on the back of stories like the crown mark. As a correspondent for The Telegraph in the 1990s, he sent regular dispatches about the alleged evils of Brussels bureaucrats and their petty rules against bendy bananas and insufficiently large condoms. (The man in charge of the condom standards, the improbably named Willy Hélin, was still annoyed nearly three decades later about how Johnson had misrepresented his work: “We had had requests from medical institutions across Europe to check on the safety of condoms,” he told The Guardian in 2019. “That has nothing to do with the size of dicks.”) These stories created a potent mythology of the British bulldog muzzled by gray-faced bureaucrats.

And so it shouldn’t shock anyone that Johnson’s government still indulges his most florid op-ed writer’s impulses when trying to advertise the benefits of Brexit. Leaving the European Union does have tangible consequences, but they are not ones that his government would like to boast about: For example, Britain might have “taken back control” of our borders, but immigration has remained high, while it has also become harder for British musicians to tour abroad and European students to study here. This country has made billions of pounds’ worth of new trade deals—which largely replicated the old trade deals.

The British government has also “taken back control” of our laws. But as the 14 paragraphs about the regulation of beer glasses in that press release makes clear, Britain doesn’t need Brussels to impose meddling fine print on us. We can do that all by ourselves. Our Parliament rolled the Measuring Instruments Regulations 2016 into English law, and there is very little appetite now to unpick it clause by clause. (If you polled a thousand Britons on how they felt about “red tape,” they would be against it, but the answer would be very different if you asked: “Would you like to make it easier for pub owners to cheat you out of beer that you have paid for?”) One of Johnson’s predecessors as prime minister, David Cameron, once hired an alleged blue-sky thinker named Steve Hilton to cut through the alleged swaths of bureaucracy holding back Britain. Hilton’s campaign faltered when officials gently told him there was a very good reason to ensure that sofas weren’t flammable. “He did not so much collide with reality as arrive late to meetings with it, shout at it, question what makes it tick and then storm off, appalled at reality’s obstinacy,” wrote one former colleague.  

Rather than fight reality, Johnson ignores it, hoping it will eventually give up and go home. More than anyone, he knows the value of being the leader who “got Brexit done,” even if no one is quite sure what that means. Brexit, like the crown mark, is more about symbolism than reality.

[Read: Boris Johnson has only delayed the inevitable]

Recently, I attempted to come up with ways that my life had visibly, materially changed since Britain left the European Union in January 2020. No catastrophic food shortages have occurred, although there have been sporadic supply-chain problems, particularly in Northern Ireland. Friends tell me that shopping for anyone with food allergies is harder now, because specialty products free from gluten or nuts come and go. Last year, I could not get the chicken pasty I wanted at a roadside caf​​é, but I don’t think the United Nations food program needs to become involved. We did not have an immediate recession, despite what George Osborne, the former chancellor of the exchequer, predicted. And while the British economy is now sluggish and afflicted with high inflation, the economic effects of Brexit are impossible to separate from those of the coronavirus pandemic, which arrived two months later. (One economist recently suggested that 80 percent of British inflation was caused by Brexit, but Johnson’s government can gesture across the Atlantic to America’s similar problems, which makes his critics’ argument more difficult.) Small businesses have borne the brunt of Brexit, because of the increase in customs paperwork required to move goods between Britain and the EU. In other words, Brexit created its own red tape. But to most Britons, such problems feel abstract, rather than obviously unjust. The occasional Amazon package arrives late, or with extra packaging. So what?

Most of the concrete effects of Brexit on my life—the ones I can connect to our relationship with Europe with absolute confidence—are minor. When I renew my passport, it will be blue-black rather than burgundy. The more vindictive European countries now make me stand in a longer queue at immigration.

[Anne Applebaum: Brexit reveals a whole new set of political wounds]

The very worst effects of Brexit are felt by a small enough number of people that even my most ardently Remainer friends have bowed to the inevitable: Britain is not rejoining the EU anytime soon, and there is no political appetite to keep fighting that battle. You can even see the loss of Remainer enthusiasm online. Many of those who built a Twitter identity on being pro-European switched their political focus in the spring of 2020 to calling for strict coronavirus lockdowns.

Even so, Johnson and like-minded politicians can’t give up the specter of the meddling Brussels bureaucrat, a figure that has served them well for decades. What was the prime minister’s big Platinum Jubilee policy announcement? “Forging ahead to remove the ban on selling [goods measured] in pounds and ounces.” Not doing it—no, that would be too much like hard work—but “forging ahead” in its general direction, presumably as measured in furlongs or yards or barleycorns. For too long has proud Britannia chafed under the unjust yoke of the overly comprehensible metric system, which operates in base 10 and can therefore be easily explained to schoolchildren. (In Britain, the only people who still think in ounces are Boomers and weed dealers.) Why not go further, and undo the decimalization of our money? Maybe the cost-of-living crisis won’t feel so painful if we have to pay for fuel in shillings and guineas.

An honest analysis of Brexit would reveal that it has been neither as catastrophic as its fiercest critics predicted nor as utopian as its champions claimed. What it did do was clog up Parliament for three solid years—an opportunity cost that is hard to fathom and even harder to forgive. I can live with the blue-black passport and the crown mark. I’ll even learn, if I must, how many meters are in a furlong. My greatest disappointment is having to accept that the cultural side of Brexit—the forever war against the banana regulators and condom checkers—has not ended, and will never end, because it is simply too politically useful. As the former Cabinet minister David Gauke commented on the potential return of pounds and ounces: “The announcement of the return of imperial measurements is an important recent tradition which we should all celebrate. I’m already looking forward to the next time this is announced.”

We discuss the political divide on guns and what it will take to enact stricter laws.