A classified intelligence report from the Department of Energy assesses with low confidence that the Covid-19 pandemic likely came from a leak in a Chinese laboratory. The Chinese are pushing back. CNN's David Culver visits the labs.

The Department of Energy's low-confidence assessment that Covid-19 most likely originated from a laboratory leak in China is still a minority view within the intelligence community, three sources familiar with the intelligence community's findings tell CNN.

The lab-leak theory lives! Or better put: It never dies. In response to new but unspecified intelligence, the U.S. Department of Energy has changed its assessment of COVID-19’s origins: The agency, which had previously been undecided on the matter, now rates a laboratory mishap ahead of a natural spillover event as the suspected starting point. That conclusion, first reported over the weekend by The Wall Street Journal, matches up with findings from the FBI, and also a Senate Minority report out last fall that called the pandemic, “more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident.”

Then again, the new assessment does not match up with findings from elsewhere in the federal government. In mid-2021, when President Biden asked the U.S. intelligence community for a 90-day review of the pandemic’s origins, the response came back divided: Four agencies, plus the National Intelligence Council, guessed that COVID started (as nearly all pandemics do) with a natural exposure to an infected animal; three agencies couldn’t decide on an answer; and one blamed a laboratory accident. DOE’s revision, revealed this week, means that a single undecided vote has flipped into the lab-leak camp. If you’re keeping count—and, really, what else can one do?—the matter still appears to be decided in favor of a zoonotic origin, by an updated score of 5 to 2. The lab-leak theory remains the outlier position.

Are we done? No, we aren’t done. None of these assessments carries much conviction: Only one, from the FBI, was made with “moderate” confidence; the rest are rated “low,” as in, hmm we’re not so sure. This lack of confidence—as compared with the overbearing certainty of the scientists and journalists who rejected the possibility of a lab leak in 2020—will now be fodder for what could be months of Congressional hearings, as House Republicans pursue evidence of a possible “cover-up.” But for all the Sturm und Drang that’s sure to come, the fundamental state of knowledge on COVID’s origins remains more or less unchanged from where it was a year ago. The story of a market origin matches up with recent history and an array of well-established facts. But the lab-leak theory also fits in certain ways, and—at least for now—it cannot be ruled out. Putting all of this another way: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

That’s not to say that it’s a toss-up. All of the agencies agree, for instance, that SARS-CoV-2 was not devised on purpose, as a weapon. And several bits of evidence have come to light since Biden ordered his review—most notably, a careful plot of early cases from Wuhan, China, that stamps the city’s Huanan market complex as the outbreak’s epicenter. Many scientists with relevant knowledge believe that COVID started in that market—but their certainty can waver. In that sense, the consensus on COVID’s origins feels somewhat different from the one on humans’ role in global warming, though the two have been pointedly compared. Climate experts almost all agree, and they also feel quite sure of their position.

The central ambiguity, such as it is, of COVID’s origin remains intact and perched atop a pair of improbable-seeming coincidences: One concerns the Huanan market, and the other has to do with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where Chinese researchers have specialized in the study of bat coronaviruses. If COVID really started in the lab, one position holds, then it would have to be a pretty amazing coincidence that so many of the earliest infections happened to emerge in and around a venue for the sale of live, wild animals … which happens to be the exact sort of place where the first SARS-coronavirus pandemic may have started 20 years ago. But also: If COVID really started in a live-animal market, then it would have to be a similarly amazing coincidence that the market in question happened to be across the river from the laboratory of the world’s leading bat-coronavirus researcher … who happened to be running experiments that could, in theory, make coronaviruses more dangerous.

[Read: The lab-leak theory meets its perfect match]

One might argue over which of these coincidences is really more surprising; indeed, that’s been the major substance of this debate since 2020, and the source of endless rancor. In theory, further studies and investigations would help resolve some of this uncertainty—but these may never end up happening. A formal inquiry into the pandemic’s origin, set up by the World Health Organization, had intended to revisit its claim from early 2021 that a laboratory source was “extremely unlikely.” Now that project has been shelved in the face of Chinese opposition, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology has long since stopped responding to requests for information from its U.S.-based research partners and the NIH, according to an inspector general’s report from the Department of Health and Human Services.

In the meantime, the smattering of facts that have been introduced into the lab-leak debates over the past two years, have been, at times, maddeningly opaque—like the unnamed, “new intelligence” that swayed the Department of Energy. (For the record, The New York Times reports that each of the agencies investigating the pandemic’s origin had access to this same intelligence; only DOE changed its assessment to favor the lab-leak explanation as a result.) We’re only told that certain fresh and classified information has changed the minds of some (but only some) unnamed analysts who now believe (with limited assurance) that a laboratory origin is most likely. Well, great, I guess that settles it.

[Read: Bird flu leaves the world with an existential choice]

When more specific information does crop up, it tends to vary in the telling over time; or else it’s promptly pulverized by its partisan opponents. The Journal’s reporting, for instance, mentions a finding by U.S. intelligence that three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became ill in November 2019, in what could have been the initial cluster of infection. But how much is really known about those sickened scientists? The specifics vary with the source. In one telling, a researcher’s wife was sickened, too, and died from the infection. Another adds the seemingly important fact that the researchers were “connected with gain-of-function research on coronaviruses.” But the unnamed current and former U.S. officials who pass along this sort of information can’t even seem to settle on its credibility.

Or consider the reporting, published last October by ProPublica and Vanity Fair, on a flurry of Chinese Community Party communications from the fall of 2019. These were interpreted by Senate researcher Toy Reid to mean that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had undergone a major biosafety crisis that November—just when the COVID outbreak would have been emerging. Critics ridiculed the story, calling it a “train wreck” premised on a bad translation. In response ProPublica asked three more translators to verify Reid’s reading, and claimed they “all agreed that his version was a plausible way to represent the passage,” and that the wording was ambiguous.   

Maybe this is just what happens when you’re trapped inside an information vacuum: Any scrap of data that happens to float by will push you off in new directions.   

Chinese territory hopes the relaxation of its last coronavirus measures will lure back visitors and boost business.

Nicholas Burns' comments came after reports emerged that the U.S. Energy Department concluded the pandemic likely arose from a Chinese laboratory leak.

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American intelligence officials are concerned that China is considering sending lethal aid to Russia. The West must increase the speed and scale of aid to Ukraine, to remind Beijing that it should stay out of a war Moscow is going to lose.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Judy Blume goes all the way. The case for a primary challenge to Joe Biden Dear Therapist: My daughter’s stepbrother is actually her father.

More Than Warnings

Since the beginning of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war against an innocent neighbor, Chinese President Xi Jinping and his diplomats have said many of the right things, warning against escalation in Ukraine, including the use of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, and reaffirming the principle of state sovereignty in international affairs. But China has also, of course, tried to provide support for a fellow authoritarian regime by continuing trade with Russia, criticizing Western sanctions, and in general pretending that Putin’s war of aggression—including his many crimes against humanity—is just another routine spat in the international community.

Now Beijing might be pondering a more aggressive move. CIA Director Bill Burns said over the weekend that China may be considering sending lethal aid (that is, artillery shells and the like rather than military gear or supplies) to Russia to help Putin’s forces, who are still floundering about in a bloodbath of their own making. Providing shells without more launchers might not help Russia very much in the short term, but it would be a provocative move meant to signal to the West that the authoritarians can and will support each other in attacks against their neighbors—an issue important to Beijing as it continues to covet Taiwan.

Burns indicated that the Chinese had not yet made a decision, and that the U.S. was discussing the possibility in public as a way of trying to warn them off. The Biden administration has been extremely savvy about releasing intelligence, and this seems to be yet another strategic leak.

We know what you’re thinking, the Americans are saying to China. Don’t do it.

It is time, however, for more than warnings.

A year ago, I was one of the more cautious supporters of aid to Ukraine. In those first chaotic weeks, I was heartened to see Ukrainian forces repel the invaders, but I knew that Russia had significant reserves. I was in favor of sending weapons, but I was mindful of the dangers of escalation, and especially the possibility that advanced Western weapons flooding into Ukraine would help Putin recast the conflict as a war between Russia and NATO. I worried, too, that Putin’s evident emotional state, characterized by delusions and rage, would lead him to take stupid and reckless measures whose consequences he himself would later be unable to control.

I think these were (and are) reasonable concerns, but Russia has escalated the violence despite the West’s measured approach. Putin remains as stubbornly delusional as ever, and he is sending thousands more troops into battles that have already killed or wounded some 200,000 men. A year of pretenses is over: The Russians themselves now know—as does the world—that this is Putin’s personal war and not, as he has tried to frame it, a campaign against neo-Nazis or shadowy globalists or militant trans activists. The West, meanwhile, has fully embraced its role as “the arsenal of democracy,” as it did against the actual Nazis, and Western arms, powered by Ukrainian courage and nimble Ukrainian strategy, are defeating Putin’s armies of hapless conscripts, corrupt officers, and mercenary criminals.

Now it’s time for the West to escalate its assistance to Ukraine, in ways that will deter China and defeat Russia. For example, the U.S. and NATO do not yet have to send advanced fighter jets to Ukraine—but they can start training Ukrainian pilots to fly them. To Russia, such a policy would say that things are about to get much worse for Putin’s forces in the field; to China, it would say that our commitment to Ukraine and to preserving the international order we helped create is greater than Beijing’s commitment to Moscow. As the Washington Post writer Max Boot noted last month, the Chinese president has an interest in helping a fellow autocrat, but he is also “an unsentimental practitioner of realpolitik” who “does not want to wind up on what could be the losing side.”

Putin thinks he can wear down the Ukrainians (and the West) through a protracted campaign of mass murder. The Biden administration has ably calibrated the Western response, and NATO has ruled out—as it should—any direct involvement of Western forces in this war. But if Putin remains unmoved and unwilling to stop, then the only answer is to increase the costs of his madness by sending more tanks, more artillery, more money, more aid of every kind. (We could also reopen the issue of whether we should provide longer-range systems, including the Army’s tactical missile system, the ATACMs.)

China must be warned away from assisting Russia, because so much more than the freedom of Ukraine is at stake in this war. Chinese aid would be yet another sign that the authoritarians intend to rewrite the rules—or at least the few left—that govern the international system of diplomacy, trade, and cooperation constructed while the wreckage of World War II was still smoldering. Many Europeans, who are closer to the misery Russia is inflicting on Ukraine, understand this better than Americans do.

Americans, for their part, need to think very hard about what happens if Russia wins—especially with an assist from the Chinese. They will be living in a North American redoubt, while more and more of the world around them will learn to accommodate new rules coming from Beijing and Moscow. The freedom of movement Americans take for granted—of goods, people, money, and even ideas—would shrink, limited by the growing power of the world’s two large dictatorial regimes and their minor satraps.

Some Americans may wonder why we should risk even more tension with Russia. The fact of the matter is that we no longer have a relationship with Russia worth preserving. We do have a common interest—as we did with the Soviet Union during the Cold War—in avoiding a nuclear conflict. We managed to agree on that interest while contesting hot spots around the globe for a half century, and we can do it again.

Americans who ask “What does any of this mean to me?” will find out just how much it means to them when things they want—or need—are provided only through the largesse and with the permission of their enemies. We knew this during the Cold War, and we must learn it again. We should ignore the pusillanimous Putinistas among the right-wing media. Instead, the United States and its allies must make the case, every day, for Ukrainian victory—and send the Ukrainians what they need to get the job done.

Related:

How China is using Vladimir Putin The war in Ukraine is the end of a world.

Today’s News

Britain and the European Union agreed to a deal that would end the dispute over post-Brexit trade rules for Northern Ireland. Severe thunderstorms in the central U.S. caused tornadoes and extreme winds in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, injuring more than a dozen residents and leaving thousands without power. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill that gives him control over Disney World’s self-governing district.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Derek Thompson shares the seven questions about AI that he can’t stop asking himself. The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal examines what air travel reveals about humans.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Arsh Raziuddin / The Atlantic. Source: Getty

A Chatbot Is Secretly Doing My Job

By Ryan Bradley

I have a part-time job that is quite good, except for one task I must do—not even very often, just every other week—that I actively loathe. The task isn’t difficult, and it doesn’t take more than 30 minutes: I scan a long list of short paragraphs about different people and papers from my organization that have been quoted or cited in various publications and broadcasts, pick three or four of these items, and turn them into a new, stand-alone paragraph, which I am told is distributed to a small handful of people (mostly board members) to highlight the most “important” press coverage from that week.

Four weeks ago, I began using AI to write this paragraph. The first week, it took about 40 minutes, but now I’ve got it down to about five. Only one colleague knows I’ve been doing this; we used to switch off writing this blurb, but since it’s become so quick and easy and, frankly, interesting, I’ve taken over doing it every week.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

I’ll be leaving you with my Atlantic colleagues here at the Daily for the rest of the week while I do some traveling. One of the places I am headed is Salem, Massachusetts, where I’ll be giving a talk. I have a sentimental attachment to the city because my Uncle Steve, whom I wrote about here, ran a diner there, Dot and Ray’s, that was a local institution for decades. (I think Dot and Ray were the previous owners.) For me, not only was Salem in the 1960s and ’70s a cool town with an amusement park; it meant all the fried chicken and clams and hamburgers and ice cream I could eat. To visit Uncle Steve and Aunt Virginia was always an epic outing, especially because they got all the Boston TV stations with stuff like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits on them.

But if you’re visiting New England and looking for places outside of the usual Boston tourist spots, you should visit the Witch City (not that there’s anything wrong with walking the Freedom Trail in Boston, which every American should do if the chance arises). Yes, the Salem Witch Trials kitsch can be a bit much, but the trials were an important part of American history, and the house where they took place is still there, along with a museum. There’s much more to Salem, however, including a fine maritime and cultural museum and a seaport. (And don’t forget the clams.)

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

When the Chinese regime’s information controls intersect with artificial intelligence, they can distort the global information landscape.

Missing Chinese CEO Bao Fan is cooperating in an investigation by "certain authorities in the People's Republic of China," his company said in a statement Sunday.

Jenny Slate tends to attract the same kinds of adjectives again and again: relatable, quirky, authentic. It’s the kind of fondly diminutive language so often applied to women in the public eye who talk a lot about their feelings and make jokes about body hair and gastrointestinal issues. But Slate’s emotional openness is clearly more than a shtick. Her work takes on themes that might seem like surprising fodder for comedy—loneliness, kindness, loss. “I do feel very vulnerable and very fragile,” she told me. “It’s just who I am.”

She started out doing stand-up and then got cast on Saturday Night Live in 2009, where she made headlines after accidentally cursing on air. She was fired after one season because, she’s said, she and the show simply “didn’t click.” It was in the weird, uneasy period of her life after SNL that she first came up with Marcel the Shell. She and her then-boyfriend, Dean Fleischer Camp, were packed into a hotel room with a group of friends during a trip, and she started channeling her discomfort into a tiny, crackly voice. She named this creation Marcel; Fleisher Camp assigned him a shell for a body, a single eyeball, and a pair of plastic doll shoes. (One discarded prototype, Slate told me, involved a miniature boom box instead of a shell.) She and Fleischer Camp ended up making a trio of stop-motion animated short films about Marcel, and the shell became a YouTube sensation.

More than a decade later, Slate and Fleischer Camp have been married and divorced, Slate is remarried and mother to a 2-year-old daughter, and Marcel is the star of the Oscar-nominated feature Marcel the Shell With Shoes On. A mockumentary-style portrait of the relationship between Marcel, his grandmother, and a filmmaker played by Fleischer Camp, Marcel is both sweetly funny and a moving depiction of grief. It’s one of two films Slate worked on that are nominated for Oscars this year; she also plays a tacky laundromat customer in Everything Everywhere All at Once. I spoke with Slate about the genesis of Marcel, the pressures built into the “relatable” label, and the way motherhood has shaped her work.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Laura Bennett: Your first Marcel the Shell video short was released in 2010. Why do you think Marcel has aged so well as a viral star?

Jenny Slate: I think he—much like me, because a lot of him is born from my psyche—is doing something to people where he’s implicitly asking them to relate and not be destructive.

Dean [Fleischer Camp] created the way Marcel looks. I think part of the appeal is what a little weirdo that guy is, but that he speaks so flatly, as if it’s completely normal for him to be interviewed. It’s magnetic to watch someone who is clearly so “other” act as if they aren’t “other” at all.

Bennett: Marcel talks about his feelings in such a plain, sweetly declarative way. As ridiculous as this thought experiment might seem, I found myself wondering how his tenderness and guileless sentimentality might land if he were a female talking shell with shoes on. I know you’ve given a lot of thought to female vulnerability and the public navigation of feelings as a woman in this business. Why did you decide to make Marcel a boy?

Slate: You know, he just came out that way. My grandmother’s brother was named Marcel, and that name was floating around in my mind a bit. But female cuteness is just—we put so much fragility on it. There was one review in The New York Times that said—and I’m paraphrasing, but—“Marcel’s voice is really annoying.” I just thought, What a brutal thing, to call attention to me as a woman in this way. And if this character were a girl, this review would be even worse.

Bennett: When you were first starting out in comedy, where would you have imagined yourself 10, 20 years down the line? Was there some particular hole in the comedy landscape you hoped to fill?

Slate: When I started my stand-up career, there were five years before I was ever granted any on-screen work. I wanted to be on Saturday Night Live, but I wasn’t driving at it in any way. It was a similar feeling to when I was 15 years old and in love with Leonardo DiCaprio: “Of course I’m in love with him, but certainly I’ll never meet him or, you know, touch him.”

At the time, I really wanted to be on an HBO show, to have a part where you could say swears and wear your underpants and maybe do sexy things. I did not have any aims to be on that—what was that show about all the dorks? The Big Bang Theory.

Bennett: I once read an interview where you memorably said, “[In Hollywood,] I’m considered some sort of alternative option, even though I know I’m a majorly vibrant sexual being.”

Slate: I think things are changing a lot now. But when I was starting out in 2007, 2008, 2009, I didn’t see a lot of leading ladies that looked like they were a half-Sephardic, half-Ashkenazi Jew. And if I saw that, they were playing a funny person, or they were playing a lawyer.

Bennett: Did your role in Everything Everywhere All at Once, originally credited as “Big Nose,” give you pause at all for that reason?

Slate: No, because [the film’s co-director] Daniel Kwan explained to me right away that in the Chinese community, calling someone a “Big Nose” can be sort of a general insult, and I honestly didn’t care.

When I think about my appearance now, I think about it in the context of—I’m about to be 41. I don’t get any, like, Botox or fillers or anything. Sometimes I go into a new job and I’m like, Are these people disgusted by the natural life progression that is on my face?

[Read: Everything Everywhere All at Once is a mind-bending multiverse fantasy]

Bennett: I’ve seen your “brand,” if you will, described as a “radical kind of honesty.” Is “radical honesty” something that has felt important to you as a performer from the beginning?

Slate: It was something that I did out of instinct, like an emergency reflex. You’re onstage, what are you going to do? I didn’t see myself, especially as someone who was very dorky in school, as someone who would be asked to join a performance because of her beauty. When I was a teenager, the hot people in the movies I watched were, like, Tara Reid and Jennifer Love Hewitt. I wasn’t seeing anything that I related to, and I felt rejected by that. I also really wanted to be alluring, and I wanted attention. I wanted to be marked as sexual. I also had a lot of internalized misogyny. My reaction to all of that was to talk about what was happening for me, even if I was only saying it to a seven-person audience—to make myself the headline, and what was happening to my body the news.

Bennett: Perhaps because of that candor, you sometimes get described as your fans’ “imaginary best friend.” It’s a very specific phenomenon, the actress as imaginary best friend. Someone like Jennifer Lawrence plays that cultural role too, if in a slightly different way. What goes through your head when you read a headline like that?

Slate: The way I am with my actual best friend—it’s like being in love with someone. And obviously I can’t be everyone’s best friend, because I don’t have the time.

Bennett: That is very practical. What sort of pressure does it put on you to have a world of people with that particular kind of parasocial attachment to you?

Slate: You know, there’s a part at the very end of the Marcel movie that I improvised—the monologue where he says, “I truly enjoy the sound of myself connected to everything.” I like being connected to people. I need to be connected to everything. But I also need space. I find that particularly challenging these days, when, no matter what I do, I feel like I’m falling short with my daughter. It really hurts me to not be with her all day long. And I think it’s very dissonant to be positioned as somebody who’s, like—well, what if she gets older and she’s resentful of the times when I haven’t been able to be there? And people are like, Oh, I love your mom. She must be so fun to be around. And what my daughter thinks of is the person who is exhausted—when I come home from a long day, and I don’t feel interesting, and I feel flat. I just think it’s dangerous for everyone to act like you’re always 100 percent available.

Bennett: Are there certain words that get recurringly used to describe you that frustrate you?

Slate: One thing that I find troublesome is that there has been this over-branding of “vulnerability” or “authenticity.” Unfortunately, I do feel very vulnerable and very fragile. I’m not trying to milk those things; it’s just who I am. And I don’t like how words like authentic suggest a link between me and a narcissist on Instagram writing a way-too-long post about their life. I feel like “authenticity” and “vulnerability” have mud-slid their way into narcissism.

Bennett: You’ve said you first started doing the Marcel the Shell voice while you were crammed in a hotel room with a bunch of friends and feeling claustrophobic.

Slate: That’s right. I was joking around and working with a set of feelings I had at the time. After SNL, I wondered if I would ever be able to do comedy again. I wondered if people would think I was a loser after this.

[Read: Marcel the Shell is the hero the world needs]

Bennett: Was there a moment when you realized those fears were unfounded?

Slate: I actually don’t think I’ve ever felt that.

Bennett: Do you ever have nightmares about Lorne Michaels?

Slate: I have a recurring dream where I, at this point in my career, have been offered to be a cast member again on SNL, and I’ve said yes. And I get there and I’m like, Why did you do this? You’re not good at this community. I didn’t like having to chase writers down in the hall. I felt humiliated and stressed out by that. I just really want to work with kindness. I think kindness can be so funny.

Bennett: You’ve talked about wanting to write a studio comedy for yourself that’s outside the mode of women “acting like the guys,” which was culturally dominant for a long time. What’s the Jenny Slate studio comedy, in your imagination?

Slate: I want to make a movie where I play twins, and the twins are two halves of my psyche. One is a happy, optimistic fool, a big lovebug. The other is strict, afraid to let loose, so tightly wound that she is about to explode. She needs somebody to spring her loose.

Bennett: Your work has dealt a lot with loneliness. It’s the central theme of Marcel; it’s a frequent subject of your book Little Weirds and of your Netflix special. You’ve been open about your divorce and the high-profile breakup that followed. How does it feel different to make creative work now that you’re married and a mom to a 2-year-old?

Slate: My daughter is proof of unconditional love. I’ve never felt that before, ever. But now I almost feel like there’s less for me to push against. In my work, it’s always felt like I’m pushing against loneliness, pushing against not feeling accepted, pushing against feeling like I’m not the one. Now I have this daughter and it’s like, I am the one. I’m the center of love. In some ways, it makes it hard to do my creative work, because everything I have to say feels so sappy.

Bennett: What would you say is the funniest part of motherhood?

Slate: I think it’s really funny when my daughter finds out how to do jokes. The other day, she took a baby doll and sat on it. It made me laugh so hard. Of course, it’s also funny to hear a baby fart into their diaper, that sort of muffled sound. A baby farting into a clean, dry diaper—one of the sweetest, funniest sounds.

In early December, I received an electricity bill for 1,400 British pounds ($1,700). It was an absurd overcharge for six months of energy I hadn’t used, in a house I moved out of two years ago, from a company that was no longer my supplier. “Oh well,” I said to myself, “it’s just an obvious clerical error.” I assumed the problem would be resolved in an hour, tops.

I was wrong. I called the company seven times. I contacted its WhatsApp support line six times. I sent emails. Each time, someone new responded, restarting the entire process. At one point, I got a text from a subsidiary debt-collection agency threatening my credit rating. Finally, I was notified last week that the mistaken bill had been withdrawn. I had spent more than 20 hours of my life across two months fixing the company’s mistake. The company faced no penalty.

[Annie Lowrey: The time tax]

Although my example is drawn from my life in the U.K., I’m from the U.S. originally and I know that virtually all Americans will experience a version of this story. And plenty of them won’t know their rights, or won’t be able to spare 20 hours on hold, and they’ll take on huge debts as a result. Many people won’t just waste time on hold with private companies but with the government as they try to navigate the maddening labyrinth of benefits programs.

We tend to simply accept such experiences as a feature of modern life. But we shouldn’t. Good governments should make fixing these everyday failures a priority—and they just might help bolster the case for democracy if they do.

For the past several years, I and other scholars have been observing the erosion of American democracy. As a political scientist, I’ve studied authoritarianism and interviewed dissidents and despots across the globe to understand how and why democracies collapse. In the United States, all of the warning signs are blinking red. According to a recent New York Times poll, 71 percent of Americans say that “democracy is currently under threat.”

However, when voters in the 2022 midterms were asked to identify their top concern, only 7 percent identified democracy as the motivating factor for their vote. What explains that disconnect?

Democracy requires two forms of legitimacy to survive: input legitimacy and output legitimacy. Input refers to processes and procedures. Was the rule of law upheld? Did the election get certified properly? Are democratic norms being followed? Output refers to government effectiveness.

Most of the “save democracy” discourse during the Donald Trump years rightly focused on the input side of the equation, because the president posed an existential threat to the systems that differentiate democracy from authoritarianism. But commentators sometimes overlooked why so many people were willing to accept Trump’s attacks against the inputs. One reason may be that they felt the output side had already deteriorated.

Democracy usually isn’t under threat where it delivers. Conversely, people are less likely to rally to defend democracy if they believe the system is failing them. An international survey by Pew Research has found that only 41 percent of Americans are “satisfied” that democracy is working well, compared with 65 percent in Germany, 66 percent in Canada, 76 percent in New Zealand, and 79 percent in Sweden. And American output legitimacy is falling. Twenty years ago, about 60 percent of Americans had faith in the U.S. government to solve domestic problems. Today, that’s down to an abysmal 39 percent.

Think income inequality, an extortionate health-care system, and rural decay. Think, too, about the senses many people have that the sources of power—both public and private—are far away and unresponsive, and that when something goes wrong, they’re on their own. Katherine Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has argued that this anger breeds a “politics of resentment.”

Democracy’s ideal is built on a foundation of accountability. In the past, many, if not most, of the decisions that mattered to our lives were taken by people and businesses that felt close to us. That’s not the case anymore. Now all roads seem to lead to bad hold music.

[Read: Why airlines can get away with bad customer service]

Whenever we encounter a problem we didn’t create—like my outrageous electricity charge, or vacations ruined by an incompetent airline, or hospital-billing errors, or a mix-up at the IRS—all we can really do is go online for a customer-service number and cross our fingers that, by some miracle, the call won’t consume the entire day, or worse. When a person coping with cancer treatment spends hours on the phone with her insurance company or Medicaid, she may wonder why her society is so cruel, or so incompetent, or both. And she may start to see the appeal of a demagogue who promises to deliver simple solutions: the “I alone can fix it” candidate.

Experiences with distant power centers may also lead to conspiratorial thinking—to paranoid notions about who’s “really” pulling the levers. Two in five Americans now agree that it is definitely or probably true that “regardless of who is officially in charge of the government and other organizations, there is a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together.” Belief in that conspiracy theory is nine percentage points higher than it was last year.

Not for nothing, authoritarian populist messages usually take aim at a faraway, unresponsive, and faceless elite. For much of the population, that is the experience of power. Granted, authoritarian governments are objectively far worse at helping citizens deal with routine problems. Good luck trying to complain to the Chinese Communist Party or to the Kremlin. But for democracy to be saved from proto-authoritarian political movements, such as Trumpism, democracy can’t be viewed, as Winston Churchill put it, as only “the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” People in power need to proactively make the case for democracy through good governance at the level of everyday life.

That’s why President Joe Biden’s recent focus in the State of the Union address on “junk fees” was wise. This kind of policy sends a much-needed message: You should have democracy’s back, because it has yours. Routine dysfunction matters. Companies that engage in predatory billing, like the power company that wrongly charged me 1,400 pounds, should face serious fines. Corporations that steal your time through their own mistakes should be forced to compensate you for that time. Similarly, regulators should ensure that it is as easy to cancel a service as it is to sign up for it.

[Read: America’s most powerful medical debt collector]

In the European Union, if an airline causes a flight delay of more than three hours, it has to pay you 250 to 600 euros, depending on the length of the flight. In the U.K., when a train is more than 15 minutes late, I can go to a website and, in a few minutes, demand financial compensation.

For the most part in America, when you screw up, you pay, but when corporations or governments screw up, nobody pays. Even when protections do exist, they’re difficult to navigate, or are unknown to most citizens. Other democracies have made clear it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s not rocket science to solve such maddening everyday problems, and American democracy would be better off if the government devoted more effort to it.

Dangerous would-be autocrats across the globe have attacked democratic norms, procedures, and institutions. More people will join the fight for democracy when they feel that democracy delivers for them. But for many people right now, their lived experience of democracy feels a lot like being stuck on hold.