In 1868, Senator Waitman Willey, of the newly formed antislavery state of West Virginia, stood on the floor of Congress to argue for the proposed Fourteenth Amendment’s provision disqualifying former Confederate officers from holding office in the recently reunified country. He asserted that the proposal was “a measure of self-defense.” He evidently felt this argument to be so crucial that it required repeated emphasis and explanation. He expanded, “Being a permanent provision of the Constitution, [the provision] is intended to operate as a preventive of treason hereafter by holding out to the people of the United States that such will be the penalty of the offense if they dare to commit it.” He repeated, “It is therefore not a measure of punishment, but a measure of self-defense.”

The proposal passed by a wide margin and eventually became part of the Constitution.

Despite this history, a narrative has developed that defensive democracy—a tradition of passing and enforcing laws to defend democratic institutions from authoritarian threats—does not and cannot exist in America. Defensive democracy’s critics argue that it unavoidably violates our Bill of Rights, because the freedoms of speech and assembly should always include the right to attack any government, whether or not it’s a democracy; your authoritarian is my freedom fighter. In one of the few book-length American treatises on defensive democracy, the Duke University political theorist Alexander Kirshner writes about the “paradox” of defensive democracy: “In avoiding the Scylla of Weimar, it is best not to steer into the Charybdis of McCarthyism.”

But likening defensive democracy to McCarthyism is a dangerous mistake. Although there is much to fear in the abuse of state power against political opponents, the fact is that a viable, valuable American tradition of defensive democracy exists, and we need to revive it today rather than reject wholesale a set of tools the country desperately needs at this crucial moment of democratic fragility.

[Adam Serwer: The Capitol riot was an attack on multiracial democracy]

The idea of defensive democracy goes back to ancient Athens—which passed into law measures, including exiling any demagogue for 10 years, to protect its democracy—and to the fight against fascism across Europe in the 20th century. In 1935, after Weimar Germany crumpled to Nazism, Karl Loewenstein, a Jewish German political scientist teaching in America, wrote two famous articles for the American Political Science Review, in which he proposed a theory of defensive democracy, or wehrhafte demokratie. In Loewenstein’s hands, defensive democracy (also translated as “militant democracy”) comprised laws by which the democratic state defended itself from antidemocratic forces, as in (at the time of the article’s writing) Finland, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland. Finland, for instance, prohibited the formation of private armies within political parties. Belgium passed statutes to prevent the abuse of parliamentary procedures by political extremists—for instance, through frivolous side elections. Switzerland passed a law imposing certain limits on political assemblies to avoid physical clashes between political opponents. Above all, Loewenstein argued that such measures needed to be insulated from partisanship, even suggesting that officials enforcing defensive democracy should not belong to any political party at all.

In the decades since, those ideas have spread around the world. Many democracies, including Germany, Israel, and India, have laws banning violent political speech, parties, or candidates undermining democracy. Germany today maintains an Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which detects and surveils antidemocratic actors and organizations. The leader of the office describes his charge: “We are the early warning system of democracy.”

America’s own defensive-democracy tradition is admittedly narrower than those in some Western European countries that lack our strong free-speech and assembly rights. Yet it is still undeniably robust, including at least three significant safeguards—prohibiting seditionists from serving in office, preventing unpermitted paramilitary activity, and prosecuting insurrection.

Although the Fourteenth Amendment’s provision against insurrectionists holding office has not been often put to use—there have not been many insurrections, mercifully—it is part of the Constitution, available when the need arises. In September 2022, it was employed by a judge in New Mexico, who removed Couy Griffin, a county commissioner in Otero County, from office for his participation in the January 6 insurrection. In his decision, the judge observed the “irony of Mr. Griffin’s” that he should be allowed to “defend his participation in an insurrection by a mob whose goal, by his own admission, was to set aside the results of a free, fair and lawful election.”

As for paramilitary activity, 49 states have laws on the books stating that paramilitary organizations can legally operate only with the permission of the civilian authority. These laws sit on the bedrock of solid federal and state law. In 1886, the Supreme Court held that “military operations and military drill are subjects especially under the control of the government of every country. They cannot be claimed as a right independent of law.” A New York appellate court noted in 1944, “The inherent potential danger of any organized private militia is obvious. Its existence would be sufficient, without more, to prevent a democratic form of government, such as ours, from functioning freely, without coercion.”

These laws were employed by Georgetown’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, and by the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, while I was the city’s mayor. Together, we successfully sued more than 10 paramilitary groups that had invaded Charlottesville during the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally to prevent them from reentering the city. Notably, the militias we blocked were on both the left and the right, ranging from the white-supremacist Atomwaffen group to the far-left antifa group Redneck Revolt.

American laws against seditious conspiracy and against advocating for overthrowing the government are quintessential defensive democracy. The law that makes up this pillar of America’s defensive-democracy tradition was passed by Congress after the Civil War to punish those who “conspire to overthrow, [to] put down, or to destroy by force” the federal government, and anyone who “knowingly or willfully advocates, abets, advises, or teaches the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying” federal or state governments by force, violence, or assassination. These laws are now leading to conviction after conviction (or guilty pleas, in many cases) for those who participated in January 6, including multiple leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.

[David A. Graham: It was sedition]

In addition to these three methods of American defensive democracy, we should consider an approach similar to federal hate-crime laws: adding a proven attack on democracy—assaulting an elected official, preventing the peaceful transfer of power—as an aggravating factor in the prosecution and sentencing of an existing statutory crime.

American democracy, at its best, innovates within our laws and principles to address the threats of the time. We can respond, just as the nations who resisted fascism in the 1930s did, by embracing defensive democracy. Our history, our ambitions, and our troubling times demand nothing less.

"It's beautiful," said the educator, who was forced to resign after students were shown the masterpiece.

Imagine you’re in the heart of New York City—for example, on the steps of Madison Square Garden. One of the very first things you would notice there, no matter the time of day or the weather, would be the pungent aroma of burning reefer. This would also be the case if you found yourself at the entrance to the Q train at Union Square, or at a chessboard in Washington Square Park, or under some scaffolding erected on any random block in SoHo. Smelling cannabis has become an inescapable feature of living in (or visiting) the city, an emblem of life in New York akin to sipping a crème at a café table in Paris or strolling through Rome eating a gelato. In some parts of Midtown, weed aromas pump through the streets like those bizarre plumes of steam that blow continuously from orange-striped tubes at intersections.

Not so long ago, the United States took a draconian approach to marijuana. As recently as 2017, New York City alone recorded more than 18,000 arrests for weed possession, down from a peak of more than 50,000 in 2011. Some 93 percent of those 2017 arrests were for possession in public view or public consumption. In 2021, New York State approved legislation to legalize recreational marijuana, and adults may now smoke it wherever they can smoke tobacco. By the end of 2022, the grand total of marijuana arrests and summonses—in this city of 8.5 million inhabitants—had fallen to 179. It is an unmistakably good thing that New York, along with much of American society, has abandoned the puritanical War on Drugs absolutism that sought to prevent otherwise law-abiding adults from ever getting high on pain of criminal prosecution. Anti-marijuana laws from a previous, stricter era were not only hypocritical and ineffective—everyone who wanted to smoke weed could still do so; they were enforced to an extremely unequal measure, falling much harder on Black and Latino citizens. The old regime was clearly unsustainable.

[David A. Graham: Biden goes to pot]

But too much of a good thing can pose an entirely new set of problems, and two competing truths often exist simultaneously. The computer scientists Dylan Hadfield-Menell and Simon Zhuang argue that optimizing the pursuit of any given goal will lead to unanticipated consequences, including the achievement of ends that are antithetical to the original objective. In a recent podcast, the physicist Max Tegmark provided a concrete example of this idea. Pretend you’ve programmed a car to drive from Boston to New York City by telling it to go as southward as physically possible. Eventually, it will arrive in Manhattan, but without any further steps to redirect or halt its movement, it will inevitably keep going all the way to Florida. Tegmark says that the principle can be applied to the development of artificial intelligence. It can also help make sense of why I can’t step outside without smelling marijuana.

The desire to correct past wrongs hasn’t just resulted in marijuana smoking becoming permissible in most areas where tobacco smoking is allowed. Because of a larger disinclination toward any punitiveness at all, blunt-smoking can now be observed even where cigarettes are considered inappropriate or offensive. Police aren’t enforcing the law where it still holds. It is progress that people are no longer facing jail time for personal weed possession; it does not follow, however, that Americans should accept a total erosion of the etiquette around public consumption in shared and non-designated spaces. The car has traveled way past New York City and is on a ferry to Patagonia.

Several months ago, coming into New York City from the liberal-arts college in the Hudson Valley where I teach—where, for what it’s worth, I have never seen anyone openly smoking—I complained offhandedly on Twitter about the omnipresent aroma of cannabis. This wasn’t even an original observation. In 2018, as the city was still in the early stages of shifting its drug policy, Ginia Bellafante wrote in The New York Times that marijuana is the “signature olfactory experience of New York.” And last year, the mayor, Eric Adams, joked at a press conference, “The No. 1 thing I smell right now is pot. It’s like everybody’s smoking a joint now.”

I received a huge amount of pushback for my remark (in addition to quite a lot of agreement), much of it premised on the idea that any social response to public weed smell would inevitably result in the warehousing of Black and brown bodies. In fact, I don’t want the police to put public weed-smokers in jail. I simply think New Yorkers should do a better job of policing themselves: a middle ground in which smokers of any color exercise discretion where the law employs restraint.

[Sarah Milov: Marijuana reform should focus on inequality]

The pushback against my complaint is ongoing. Last week, in the libertarian magazine Reason, Liz Wolfe published an article titled “New York City Should Have Always Smelled Like Pot,” in which she opens with a rebuttal of my tweet. Hers is about the most compelling argument I’ve seen in favor of the new normal, and to her credit, she declines to partake in the customary gaslighting that would deny that a change has occurred in the first place. “The smell of weed in the streets,” Wolfe argues, “is a sign of progress and tolerance, not decline.”

Tolerance is a wonderful value in principle. And as the intolerant have long understood, it is also a value that can be easily exploited. It works best when buttressed by agreed-upon standards and a common investment in informal norms. “Some of today’s stoners do have a bit too much chutzpah,” Wolfe concedes, “like the guy I saw on the G train rolling a joint at 9 a.m. on an especially packed train car.” That experience rings familiar. On a recent Monday morning, I boarded an overflowing L train from Williamsburg into Manhattan, the entire car reeking of freshly puffed ganja. Progress demands that elderly people and small children must also inhale this? Something is perversely unserious about a culture that insists the answer is yes and that you are some kind of “Karen” if you beg to differ.  

“Fellow New Yorkers who have long tolerated cigarette smoke clogging up the public airways,” Wolfe writes, “should offer the same grace to weed.” But cigarette smokers haven’t had their way for two decades now, and anyone who would dare light a Marlboro on the subway today would receive the most withering glare—and possibly risk physical assault—because we now have not only laws but also real taboos around the spreading of secondhand smoke. Which is one reason you barely smell cigarettes at all, even in the streets, parks, and plazas where the scent of weed prevails.

The reflex to dismiss any criticism of violations against communal consideration exemplifies an evolving progressive politics, what the writer Michael Shellenberger has referred to as an ethos of “left-libertarianism.” In ways large and small, it has degraded urban spaces. In the absence of wider unspoken controls, the anything-goes mentality flirts with pandemonium. Turned up to a certain pitch, it produces something much worse than a public nuisance: It encourages self-reinforcing disorder. Look at San Francisco or Portland, Oregon, where tent encampments and open hard-drug use have in some districts made healthy and productive activity all but impossible. New York is by no means at a West Coast level of decline, but such states of decay are not binary. They operate along a dismal continuum, and public spaces forfeit structure by gradation. Broken windows left untended really do tell larger stories.

When is the last time you’ve seen someone pounding shots of vodka on the subway? You haven’t, and for good reason. Drug possession was once a crime as well as a taboo. Now that we’ve optimized the admirable goal of ensuring that it isn’t the former, we need a redirect to preserve the latter.

It’s been a difficult and disorienting four weeks in MAGA world.

On March 30, former President Donald Trump was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury for his alleged role in participating in a scheme to cover up potential sex scandals during the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump is the nation’s first former president to face criminal charges, and more serious charges may well follow.

Last week, Fox News, the highest-rated and most influential cable news network in America, agreed to pay more than three-quarters of a billion dollars to resolve a defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems over the network’s promotion of deranged conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. It was, according to The Washington Post, the largest publicly disclosed monetary settlement ever in an American defamation action. There are more, and potentially more expensive, lawsuits pending.

And on Monday Fox abruptly cut ties with its biggest prime-time star, Tucker Carlson, one of the most mendacious and poisonous figures in the history of American television.

[David A. Graham: Tucker’s successor will be worse]

“I’m shocked. I’m surprised,” Donald Trump told Newsmax’s Greg Kelly. “I think Tucker’s been terrific,” the former president added. “He’s been, especially over the last year or so, he’s been terrific to me.” Other key figures on the MAGA right, like Donald Trump Jr., described the network’s decision as “mind-blowing,” and called Carlson “an actual thought leader in conservatism” and a “once-in-a-generation type talent.”

Republican Senator J. D. Vance, in a text message to The New York Times, said, “Tucker is a giant, and the most powerful voice against idiotic wars and an economy that placed plutocrats over workers. This is a huge loss for a conservative movement that hopes to be worthy of its own voters.” Representative Matt Gaetz, a MAGA star, lavished praise on Carlson during an appearance on Newsmax. And Megyn Kelly, a former Fox News host, said it was a “sad day for Fox News” but a “great day for Tucker,” because he no longer had to “answer to a corporate power.”

What used to rule the day on the American right was “owning the libs.” But now they are owning one another.

Some of us have spent the better part of eight years warning about the incalculable damage that would be done to the United States, to its politics and culture, and to the Christian witness by those who embraced a Trumpian ethic, defined by cruelty, lawlessness, the shattering of norms and traditional boundaries, and an eagerness to annihilate truth and trust in institutions. Those warnings have been validated, those concerns vindicated. What happened on January 6 wasn’t an anomaly; it was an apotheosis.

Now this movement, which has taken such delight in aiming its nihilistic arrows at the Democratic Party and the Republican establishment, at media outlets and scientists, is in the process of devouring itself. A l’exemple de Saturne, la revolution devore ses enfants.

It is a lesson nearly as old as time itself: Those whose passions are inflamed—and Trump supporters are nothing if not perennially inflamed—are drawn to destruction. “Rage and phrenzy will pull down more in a half an hour, than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years,” the 18th-century conservative statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke warned.

Lack of restraint is the essence of the Trump movement. Shattering guardrails is what they find thrilling. But what MAGA adherents forget is that those guardrails exist to protect not only others, but also ourselves from excess, self-indulgence, and self-harm. There’s a reason that temperance—self-mastery, the capacity to moderate inordinate desires, balance that produces internal harmony—is one of the four cardinal virtues.   

The extremism, aggression, and lack of restraint in MAGA world are spreading rather than receding. They are becoming more rather than less indiscriminate. Those who are part of that movement, and certainly those who lead it, act as if they’re invincible, as if the rules don’t apply to them, as if they can say anything and get away with anything. That has certainly been true of Trump, and it is often true of those who have patterned themselves after Trump, which is to say, virtually the entire Republican Party.

But it goes even beyond this. MAGA world directs its ridicule at those who exercise temperance, who embrace restraint, and who ask themselves what they should do rather than what they can get away with. Those who reject the ethic of Thrasymachus—the cynical Sophist in Plato’s Republic who believes might makes right and injustice is better than justice—are dismissed as weak and delicate. The denizens of MAGA world not only relish discarding guardrails; they scorn those who abide by them.

The priority for those who love our country is to contain the wreckage and defeat the MAGA movement. We’re still in mid-drama, so that day is a ways off. But it will come. Because in the end, those who live without limits are destroyed by them.

By almost any historic yardstick, President Joe Biden is beginning the reelection campaign he formally announced today in a vulnerable position.

His job-approval rating has consistently come in at 45 percent or less; in several recent high-quality national polls, it has dipped closer to 40 percent. In surveys, three-fourths or more of Americans routinely express dissatisfaction with the economy. And a majority of adults have repeatedly said that they do not want him to seek a second term; that figure rose to 70 percent (including just more than half of Democrats) in a national NBC poll released last weekend.

Those are the sort of numbers that have spelled doom for many an incumbent president. “Compared to other presidents, Biden’s approval is pretty low [about] a year and a half from Election Day,” says Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University, in Atlanta. “It’s not where you want to be, for sure.”

[David A. Graham: Biden’s in]

And yet despite Biden’s persistently subpar public reviews, there’s no sense of panic in the Democratic Party about his prospects. No serious candidate has emerged to challenge him for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination. No elected leaders have called on him to step aside. And though some top Democratic operatives have privately expressed concern about Biden’s weak standing in polls, almost every party strategist I spoke with leading up to his announcement said they consider him the favorite for reelection.

There are many reasons for this gap between the dominant views about Biden’s immediate position and his eventual prospects in the 2024 race. But the most important reason is encapsulated in the saying from Biden’s father that he often quotes in speeches: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty; compare me to the alternative.” Most Democrats remain cautiously optimistic that whatever concerns Americans might hold about the state of the economy and Biden’s performance or his age, a majority of voters will refuse to entrust the White House to Donald Trump or another Republican nominee in his image, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

“I think there’s no question that neither Trump nor Biden are where they want to be, but … if you project forward, it’s just easier to see a path for victory for Biden than for Trump or DeSantis,” says the Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, who was one of the few analysts in either party to question the projections of a sweeping red wave last November.

Rosenberg is quick to caution that in a country as closely split as the U.S. is now, any advantage for Biden is hardly insurmountable. Not many states qualify as true swing states within reach for both sides next year. And those states themselves are so closely balanced that minuscule shifts in preferences or turnout among almost any constituency could determine the outcome.

The result is that control over the direction for a nation of 330 million people could literally come down to a handful of neighborhoods in a tiny number of states—white-collar suburbs of Detroit, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Atlanta; faded factory towns in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania; working-class Latino neighborhoods in Las Vegas; and small-town communities across Georgia’s Black Belt. “Never have so few people had such a big impact in deciding the future of American politics,” Doug Sosnik, the chief White House political adviser for Bill Clinton, told me.

On an evenly matched battlefield, neither side can rest too comfortably about its prospects in the 2024 election. But after Trump’s upset victory in 2016, Republicans have mostly faced disappointing results in the elections of 2018, 2020, and 2022. Across those campaigns, a powerful coalition of voters—particularly young people, college-educated white voters, those who don’t identify with any organized religion, and people of color, mostly located in large metropolitan centers—have poured out in huge numbers to oppose the conservative cultural and social vision animating the Trump-era Republican Party. Many of those voters may be unenthusiastic about Biden, but they have demonstrated that they are passionate about keeping Trump and other Republicans from controlling the White House and potentially imposing their restrictive agenda nationwide. Biden previewed how he will try to stir those passions in his announcement video Tuesday: Far more than most of his speeches, which typically emphasize kitchen-table economics, the video centers on portraying “MAGA extremists” as a threat to democracy and “bedrock freedoms” through restrictions on abortion, book bans, and rollbacks of LGBTQ rights.

“The fear of MAGA has been the most powerful force in American politics since 2018, and it remains the most powerful force,” Rosenberg told me. “It’s why Democrats did so much better than the fundamentals [of public attitudes about Biden and the economy] in 2022, and that will be the case again this time.”

After the Democrats’ unexpectedly competitive showing in the midterm election, Biden’s approval rating ticked up. But in national polls it has sagged again. Recent surveys by The Wall Street Journal, NBC, and CNBC each put Biden’s approval rating at 42 percent or less.

Sosnik said the pivotal period for Biden is coming this fall. Historically, he told me, voter assessments of an incumbent president’s performance have hardened between the fall of their third year in office and the late spring of their fourth. The key, he said, is not a president’s absolute level of approval in that period but its trajectory: Approval ratings for Ronald Reagan, Clinton, and Barack Obama, each of whom won reelection, were all clearly rising by early in their fourth year. By contrast, the approval ratings over that period fell for George H. W. Bush and remained stagnant for Trump. Each lost their reelection bid. Economists and pollsters say voters tend to finalize their views about the economy over roughly the same period and once again tend to put less weight on the absolute level of conditions such as inflation and unemployment than on whether those conditions are improving or deteriorating.

With that crucial window approaching, Biden will benefit if inflation continues to moderate as it has over the past several months. He also could profit from more time for voters to feel the effects of the massive wave of public and private investment triggered by his trio of major legislative accomplishments: the bipartisan infrastructure and semiconductor bills, and the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act.

[Read: Biden’s blue-collar jobs bet]

But Biden also faces the risk that the economy could tip into recession later this year, which some forecasters, such as Larry Summers, the former Clinton Treasury Secretary who predicted the inflationary surge, still consider likely.

If a recession does come, the best scenario for Biden is that it’s short and shallow and further tamps down inflation before giving way to an economic recovery early in 2024. But even that relatively benign outcome would make it difficult for him to attract more supporters in the period through next spring when voters traditionally have solidified their verdicts on a president’s performance.

That means that, to win reelection, Biden likely will need to win an unusually large share of voters who are at least somewhat unhappy over conditions in the country and ambivalent or worse about giving him another term. Historically that hasn’t been easy for presidents.

For those who think Biden can break that pattern, last November’s midterm election offers the proof of concept. Exit polls at the time showed that a solid 55 percent majority of voters nationwide disapproved of Biden’s job performance and that three-fourths of voters considered the economy in only fair or poor shape. Traditionally such attitudes have meant disaster for the party holding the White House. And yet, Democrats minimized the GOP gains in the House, maintained control of the Senate, and won governorships in most of the key swing states on the ballot.

In 2022, the exit polls showed that Democrats, as the party holding the White House, were routed among voters with intensely negative views about conditions. That was typical for midterm elections. But Democrats defused the expected “red wave” by winning a large number of voters who were more mildly disappointed in Biden’s performance and/or the economy.

For instance, with Trump in the White House during the 2018 midterms, Republicans won only about one in six voters in House elections who described the economy as “not so good,” according to exit polls; in 2020, Trump, as the incumbent president, carried only a little more than one-fifth of them. But in 2022, Democrats won more than three-fifths of voters who expressed that mildly negative view of the economy.

Similarly, in the 2010 midterm elections, according to exit polls, two-thirds of voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Obama’s performance as president voted against Democrats running for the House; almost two-thirds of the voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Trump likewise voted against Republicans in 2018. But in 2022, the exit polls found that Democrats surprisingly carried almost half of the voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Biden.

The same pattern persisted across many of the key swing states likely to decide the 2024 presidential race: Democrats won the governors’ contests in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and Senate races in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, even though the exit polls found a majority of voters in each state said they disapproved of Biden’s performance. Winning Democratic gubernatorial candidates such as Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, and Katie Hobbs in Arizona each carried at least 70 percent of voters who described the economy as “not so good.”

Why did Democrats so exceed the usual performance among voters dissatisfied with the country’s direction? The answer is that many of those voters rejected the Republican Party that Trump has reshaped in his image. The exit polls found that Trump was viewed even more unfavorably than Biden in several of the swing states, including Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. And nationally, more than two-fifths of voters who expressed negative views about the economy also said they considered the GOP “too extreme.” Particularly on social issues such as abortion rights and gun control, the 2022 results demonstrated that “Trump and these other Republicans have painted themselves into a corner in order to appeal to their base,” Abramowitz told me.

Biden may expand his support by next year, especially in the battleground states, if economic conditions improve or simply because he may soon start spending heavily on television advertising touting his achievements, such as new plant openings. But more important than changing minds may be his ability to replicate the Democrats’ success in 2022 at winning voters who aren’t wild about him but dislike Trump and the GOP even more. “While there are not an overwhelming number of people who are tremendously favorable to Biden, I just don’t think there is an overwhelming number of persuadable people who hate him,” says Tad Devine, a long-time Democratic strategist. “They hate the other guy.”

Lynn Vavreck, a political scientist at UCLA, told me that dynamic would likely prove powerful for many voters. Even Democratic-leaning voters who say they don’t want Biden to run again, she predicted, are highly likely to line up behind him once the alternative is a Republican nominee whose values clash with their own. “The bottom line is that on Election Day, that Democratic nominee, even the one they didn’t want to run again, is going to be closer to most people’s vision of the world they want to live in than the Republican alternative,” she said.

In both parties, many analysts agree that in a Biden-Trump rematch, the election would probably revolve less around assessments of Biden’s performance than the stark question of whether voters are willing to return Trump to power after the January 6 insurrection and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. “President Biden by every conventional standard is a remarkably weak candidate for reelection,” the longtime Republican pollster Bill McInturff told me in an email. But “Biden’s greatest strength,” McInturff continued, may be the chance to run again against Trump, who “is so terrific at sucking up all the political oxygen, he becomes the issue on which the election gets framed, not the terrible economy or the level of Americans’ dissatisfaction with the direction of the country.”

On both sides, there’s greater uncertainty about whether DeSantis could more effectively exploit voters’ hesitation about Biden. Many Democrats and even some Republicans believe that DeSantis has leaned so hard into emulating, and even exceeding, Trump’s culture-war agenda that the Florida governor has left himself little chance of recapturing the white-collar suburban voters who have keyed the Democratic recovery since 2018. But others believe that DeSantis could get a second look from those voters if he wins the nomination, because he would be introduced to them largely by beating Trump. Although Devine told me, “I do not see a path to the presidency in the general election for Donald Trump,” he said that “if DeSantis were to be able to get rid of Trump and get the credit for getting rid of Trump…I think it’s fundamentally different.”

One thing unlikely to change, whomever Republicans nominate, is how few states, or voters, will effectively decide the outcome. Twenty-five states voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020, and the strategists planning the Biden campaign see a realistic chance to contest only North Carolina among them. Republicans hope to contest more of the 25 states that voted for Biden, but after the decisive Democratic victories in Michigan and Pennsylvania in 2022, it’s unclear whether either is within reach for the GOP next year. The states entirely up for grabs might be limited to just four that Biden carried last time: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin. And as the decisive liberal win in the recent state-supreme-court election in Wisconsin showed, winning even that state, like Michigan and Pennsylvania, may be an uphill battle for any Republican presidential nominee viewed as a threat to abortion rights.

[Read: The first electoral test of Trump’s indictment]

In their recent book, The Bitter End, Vavreck and her co-authors, John Sides and Chris Tausanovitch, describe hardening loyalties and a shrinking battlefield as a form of electoral “calcification.” That process has left the country divided almost in half between two durable but divergent coalitions with antithetical visions of America’s future. “We are fighting at the margins again,” Vavreck told me. “The 2020 election was nearly a replica of 2016, and I think that largely this 2024 election is going to be a repeat of 2020 and 2016.” Whatever judgment voters ultimately reach about Biden’s effectiveness, or his capacity to handle the job in his 80s, this sorting process virtually guarantees another polarized and precarious election next year that turns on a small number of voters in a small number of states.

Tucker Carlson’s rise to become the defining conservative-media personality of the Donald Trump period was a surprise. His abrupt departure from Fox News, announced this morning, is even more shocking.

“FOX News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways,” the company said in a terse statement. “We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor.”

Carlson transformed himself from a bow-tie-clad smart aleck playing the role of liberals’ favorite conservative into a MAGA hero, able to channel the grievances of the Trump coalition despite his patrician upbringing and reputation—or perhaps, like Trump, because of it. In the process he became Fox’s biggest star, talked about as a potential presidential candidate. Carlson was a font of dangerous rhetoric and preposterous lies, and Fox’s viewers absolutely loved it.

[David A. Graham: Fox News lost the lawsuit but won the war]

The reasons for Carlson’s departure are still emerging, and the steps he might take next are still unclear. But Fox will probably be fine without Carlson, and anyone who hopes that his disappearance from the air will improve the political discourse in this country is too optimistic. When prior bogeymen for the left—people such as Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck—have been pushed out of Fox, the network has always found a new figure to replace them, while the hosts themselves have struggled to match their past success. There will be a new Tucker Carlson, and it’s a good bet he or she will be even worse.

The exit comes at a time of flux for Fox. Its founder, Rupert Murdoch, is 92 and has faced recent health struggles. Fox just settled a lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems over election-related lies for almost $800 million, and faces several more. The discovery process that led up to the settlement was embarrassing for Fox and for Carlson. Internal messages showed that Carlson and his colleagues knew that many of the claims they made about election fraud after the 2020 election were nonsense. They also showed Carlson furious over Fox journalists accurately reporting facts, which he worried would hurt ratings, and saying that he hated Trump. (This revelation didn’t prevent him from conducting an obsequious interview with the former president earlier this month.)

[David A. Graham: Tucker Carlson, unmasked]

When the settlement was announced last week, I argued that no matter the hefty bill, it was just the cost of doing business for Fox. The network settled the suit, but airing the lies achieved its goal of vanquishing smaller, upstart conservative rivals. Fox is and remains larger than even its most important figures.

Carlson will not go away, but recent history suggests that he’ll have a hard time maintaining his current profile. Before Carlson, there was Bill O’Reilly, who was the leading conservative figure of his era and equally reviled by progressives. When O’Reilly was finally forced out of Fox in 2017 over sexual-misconduct claims, many critics hoped it would improve the state of the country and the press. Instead, it cleared the way for Carlson. O’Reilly has kept writing best-selling books but has become a more marginal figure in politics.

This pattern has repeated itself over the years. After O’Reilly, the long-time star Sean Hannity became Fox’s marquee name. His influence was such that he was sometimes referred to as Trump’s real chief of staff. But Hannity was unable to sustain his success, and though he remains at Fox, he was eventually eclipsed by Carlson.

[David A. Graham: Tucker Carlson and the new narrative of January 6]

A second-tier Fox star of the Obama years was Glenn Beck, a shouty and excitable host whose rise seemed to threaten O’Reilly’s seat on the throne. He was pushed out in 2011, and though Beck’s career has continued since, his plan to challenge Fox’s supremacy with The Blaze came up short, and he’s never matched the relevance he had on Fox.

The original mastermind of Fox News was Roger Ailes, the veteran TV executive and former Richard Nixon aide who recognized the market for an avowedly right-wing channel. When Ailes was forced out in 2016 (also related to sexual misconduct), many liberals hoped that it would doom the channel. But Fox is still Fox—the leader in ratings and the center of conservatism.

More details about why Carlson is leaving will surely emerge soon. Though he was connected to the Dominion lawsuit, as well as to other defamation cases against the company, a more serious offender was Maria Bartiromo, who remains at Fox (at least for now). Carlson is also implicated in a lawsuit by Abby Grossberg, a former Fox producer who has claimed that she experienced an appalling work environment while working on Carlson’s show. The Washington Post reported that Carlson’s messages criticizing Fox’s top leadership “played a role in his departure,” and his political ambitions and his penchant for dishing to reporters could easily have created tensions with bosses.

Any rising conservative TV star would love to grab for the crown Carlson has doffed, or that’s been taken from him. The audience, influence, and money involved make it irresistible, but his career arc illustrates the hazards. To remain on top at Fox, hosts have to be ready to continually ratchet up their rhetoric, because the network’s business model depends on continual audience outrage. But audiences eventually become inured and require new and more extreme input. Providing that is a challenging and soul-leaching job—and someone will be delighted to have it.

In late January, when authorities in Memphis charged several police officers in the death of Tyre Nichols and released footage of the incident, Chief C. J. Davis promised that the Memphis Police Department would change while still keeping residents safe.

The early results are not encouraging. In March, Memphis saw 40 murders, likely the city’s highest tally ever, according to a review of public data by the indispensable data analyst Jeff Asher. That’s a big jump over figures of 20 and 22 in January and February, respectively. Something has indeed changed, but it’s that Memphians are less safe.

[David A. Graham: The murders in Memphis aren’t stopping]

The spike in murder is ghastly but should not come as a total surprise. It fits the pattern established around the country after highly publicized killings by police officers. Seeing it recur in Memphis, where officers were swiftly fired and charged with crimes, suggests that though leaders are getting better at their immediate response to such incidents, they have not yet solved the larger challenges posed by them.

The spike is especially heartbreaking in Memphis, where, as I wrote last year, residents have long experienced the painful combination of both over-policing and under-policing: People, especially Black ones, feel harassed by police for minor offenses, yet they don’t feel safe in their neighborhoods. Now, in the aftermath of Tyre Nichols’s killing, a particularly egregious instance of over-policing, police are even less effective at preventing violence in the community.

A surge in violence frequently follows a highly publicized instance of police violence. After long-running demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri, following the 2015 killing of Michael Brown, murder ticked up nationwide. Homicide rates rose in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray and in Chicago after the release of videos showing police fatally shooting Laquan McDonald. And many criminologists have pointed to the massive nationwide protests over the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in summer 2020 as an inflection point. Soon after, violent crime and murder went up nationwide, and although they seem to have turned back down, levels are still well above pre-2020 levels.

[David A. Graham: How did it come to this?]

But experts haven’t been able to establish a clear answer for the reasons this happens. Some theories focus on the public: Perhaps people are less likely to trust the police, and therefore opt to settle disputes on their own or don’t report crimes. Others focus on the police: In the immediate aftermath, especially when mass protests erupt, officers are absorbed with managing demonstrations. Then over time, they simply police less. Perhaps this is because they believe they are responding to the community’s desires, as expressed by protest; perhaps it’s an attempt to teach the public a lesson (You want less policing? See what you think when you actually get it); or perhaps it’s because officers are wary of getting in trouble (what the conservative scholar Heather Mac Donald has called the “Ferguson effect”).

Whatever the motivations, some evidence suggests that police have pulled back recently in Memphis. When I visited the city in January, the weekend that footage of Nichols’s fatal beating was released, some activists told me they sensed that officers were making themselves scarce. Data compiled by Just City, a criminal-justice nonprofit, show that the population of the Shelby County Jail has steadily dropped this year, from 2,686 on January 1 to 2,325 on April 1. Long-term jailings have stayed roughly flat, which suggests that the drop comes from police simply arresting fewer people. (The Memphis Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

In my reporting on law enforcement in the city over the past few years, I heard from many Memphians who were critical of the police department, which they perceived to be prickly, disrespectful, focused on petty crimes, and sometimes violent, but they didn’t want to abolish or defund the police. They want safe streets, and they see officers as essential to that. For example, a longtime resident named Mary Wainwright told me she welcomed police officers in her sometimes-dangerous neighborhood, but was frustrated when she saw cops writing speeding tickets while suspected gang members walked the streets by day and bullets flew by night.

[David A. Graham: Murders are spiking in America]

Last Friday evening, after an activist group obtained a draft presentation, the department announced a “juvenile-crime abatement program” in a video. The presentation said a team of officers would “professionally approach” any unaccompanied underage people in downtown Memphis engaged in “illegal activities, to include but not limited to, solicitation of candy or food, handing out flyers for donations, playing loud music, inappropriately dressed, dancing in the street, and any other activity deem [sic] inappropriate or actions that disrupts the harmony of the Downtown community.” By Monday morning, following backlash to the idea, the city said the program was on pause. MPD is still struggling to strike the right balance between harassment and actual safety.

A day before Fox News agreed to a $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems over the right-wing network’s promotion of election conspiracy theories, the New Republic editor Michael Tomasky urged Dominion not to settle. Writing that “Rupert’s Reign of Terror can be ended,” Tomasky argued that the lawsuit might finally persuade cable providers to stop carrying the network, or other news organizations to stop treating it like a peer. Elsewhere, the media critic Margaret Sullivan argued, “If Dominion prevails, Fox News may be forced to become less reckless.”

Those who are disappointed that Dominion decided to settle, hoping that its lawsuit might have led to the end of Fox, should know that was never going to happen. Beyond the fact that the case would never have emptied Rupert Murdoch’s deep pockets, among the lawsuit’s grimmest revelations was that the network lies to its audience because its audience wants to be lied to. Fox News amplified its promotion of Donald Trump’s falsehoods in part because it was losing its audience to other right-wing propaganda outlets more willing to affirm those falsehoods. Even if the suit had managed to bankrupt Fox News, something similar would have risen in its place. The willing audience for reactionary agitprop, and the web of right-wing billionaires eager to finance it, would have remained. Indeed, Fox News’s ratings were undiminished by the disclosures. The only thing that would drive away Fox News’s viewers, we now know, would be if it started telling them the truth.  

“For years, some liberals had believed that if Fox simply told the truth, its viewers would change their minds,” my colleague David Graham wrote. “Instead, they changed the channel.”

[David A. Graham: Fox News lost the lawsuit but won the war]

This does not diminish the significance of the suit’s revelations. The evidence showed Fox News to be a propaganda machine that punishes those who provide its audience with inconvenient facts and elevates those who keep its viewers’ eyes glued to the screen, whether or not what they are saying is correct. It was willing to abet a conspiracy against constitutional government to improve its ratings. At issue here were not errors of fact, framing, or even ideological blind spots—flaws that can afflict any well-intentioned journalist or media organization. The lawsuit shows these were conscious decisions to mislead, made for self-interested and partisan reasons. The Dominion disclosures proved that much, even if the network’s core viewers refuse to believe it.

Successfully suing a news network for defamation is extraordinarily hard, because litigants have to prove that the organization behaved with “actual malice,” knowingly lying or acting with reckless disregard for the truth. Fox News settled because it knew, even under the appropriately high standard for defamation of public figures in American law, that it was likely to lose. No doubt many conservatives who echoed Donald Trump’s call to “open up the libel laws” in order to attack the media will now lament that Fox News was not able to lie with impunity.

Along with the outcome in the Sandy Hook case, there is ample evidence that malicious liars can be held to account under the actual-malice standard. Conservative hand-wringing over both verdicts indicates that critics of the standard are less concerned with punishing liars than with intimidating outlets they perceive as too liberal.

[Adam Serwer: The martyrdom of Alex Jones]

Right-wing judges have been eager to overturn that standard, in order to make it easier for the wealthy and connected to silence those who dare to challenge them. Had Fox News lost and appealed to the Supreme Court, the case would have come before at least two justices—Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch—who have openly suggested that the actual-malice standard should be overturned. Their behavior at oral argument and their written opinions suggest the justices consume a tremendous amount of right-wing media, but that does not mean they’d necessarily side with the network, even though some attorneys at Fox News reportedly believed that the six-justice conservative majority would rule in their favor. Indeed, a case like this might have been the ideal vehicle to overturn the standard, because adhering to the ideological principle of wanting to punish the press and protect the wealthy from criticism would have come with the added benefit of making the Court appear above partisanship.

The Dominion settlement means the justices will not get that opportunity, at least not yet. The Politico media critic Jack Shafer argued that the settlement represents yet another victory for Murdoch, who is happy to shell out cash for lawsuits without changing a thing about how his outlets do business. This is similarly overstated. Fox News has been revealed as a propaganda factory that would rather misinform its viewers than level with them. Its most prominent faces and leaders have been revealed as cowards and bullies who will turn on their own colleagues for doing their jobs properly. Destroying Fox News—or Murdoch, for that matter—was never really on the table.

A trial might have produced more uncomfortable and revealing moments for the rich frauds Fox News puts on television every night. That’s not nothing, but it’s also not necessary to prove what everyone whose brain isn’t completely rinsed now knows. Fox News faces a second lawsuit from another voting-machine company, Smartmatic, which may yet offer more insight into how the network functions. But there was no ending here where conservatives were going to cease to exist or to demand media coverage that reflects their sensibilities.

For that reason, the Smartmatic lawsuit won’t save America from Fox News either, or from whatever succeeds it. No lawsuit, no investigation, no state intervention can prevent people from believing falsehoods they want to be true. The only real solution is to prevent those operating under such delusions, or the politicians beholden to them, from wielding power. And that is not the work of the courts, or of corporations like Dominion. That, unfortunately, is the work of politics. And in a democracy, it is work that never ends.

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There has been a rebound in weddings the last two years after the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic. But it hasn't been enough for David's Bridal, the largest bridal retailer in the United States. The company said Monday it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.