The law, passed in the state's Republican-led statehouse, prohibits youth from receiving gender-affirming care.

In 1956, something totally unprecedented happened in America: A Black artist topped the Billboard top-albums chart, not just once but for 31 consecutive weeks. That artist was Harry Belafonte, and the album was his third, Calypso. The musician, actor, and civil-rights champion died today at age 96 at his home in the Upper West Side, not far from his birthplace of Harlem. Born to immigrants from Jamaica and Martinique, Belafonte was still in his 20s when he rocketed to superstardom and became a household name. His subsequent life as a film star and champion of progressive causes has tended to draw more attention than his early and important musical accomplishments—not to mention the life-affirming joy that those accomplishments inspired in listeners.

Even the seemingly innocuous, lightweight fun of Calypso opened up fresh territory in the cultural landscape. The album didn’t just establish a new benchmark of artistry and popularity for a Black singer; it was also the first album by any single artist to reach the million-seller mark, thus becoming a fixture in a large percentage of American homes, hearts, and minds. Even more significant, Belafonte’s hybrid of Jamaican music, folk, and pop paved the way for popular music as both the soundtrack to and a tool of the struggle for freedom.

Belafonte’s list of firsts is so staggering, it’s easy to see why his music can get lost in the superlative shuffle. He was credited, among so many other things, as the first African American television producer, and he was the first African American to win an Emmy Award. Although Belafonte’s recorded output slowed a crawl after the ’60s—his final studio album, Paradise in Gazankulu, was released in 1988—music was never an afterthought to him. It was his wellspring. Including breezy, bass-driven gems such as “Jump in the Line (Shake, Señora)” and somber, bluesy ballads such as “Memphis, Tennessee,” his songs provided emotional context to his activism as the latter began to eclipse his musical output in the ’60s. He didn’t have to sing overtly about politics; his very existence as a chart-topping pop artist (and, let’s not forget, a universal sex symbol) who happened to be Black was, at the time, a statement in and of itself.

The idea of equitable Black representation in American pop culture may not have begun with Belafonte, but he certainly pushed that ideal to new heights. He was as much a part of the folk-revival firmament of the ’50s and ’60s as were Pete Seeger, the Kingston Trio, and Odetta (with whom Belafonte dueted in 1960 on an endearing live rendition of the children’s folk song “There’s a Hole in My Bucket”). But he made the transition to television and film so smoothly that it was hard to deny he belonged there, at the top—a casual and charismatic entertainer who never hesitated to risk it all for his vision of a better world.

No one will ever mistake the massive hit singles on Calypso, “Jamaica Farewell” and “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)”—which became Belafonte’s signature tunes and have rendered him musically immortal—for civil-rights anthems such as Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” and Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam.” But Belafonte’s songs were radical for the joy, pride, and inclusiveness they fostered—especially amid so much brutality and injustice. His music may have had an escapist side, but it’s good to remember the origins of that escape: the island states of the Caribbean, the cradle of calypso, where a new wave of independence was rising in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Belafonte’s renewal of traditional African-Caribbean ballads and work songs didn’t just evoke an earthy, homespun past. They broadened Black consciousness and inspired hope for the future. Revolution you could limbo to: That’s Belafonte’s musical legacy, and it was one of his greatest weapons.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

What is a position that you hold––or a question that you have––about any issue related to gender identity, transgender rights, gender medicine, or any of the associated cultural debates? Also welcome: reflections on relevant personal experiences, especially from trans readers.

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com.

Conversations of Note

I’ll go first. Trans people have rights to liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and equality under the law, same as anyone else, and ought to be treated with respect and dignity––and although those baseline convictions would preclude the passage of various laws that some anti-trans bigots favor, they don’t resolve most issues Americans are debating, a debate that is more extreme than it would be if liberal discourse norms prevailed.

Even in the best circumstances, it would be challenging to join in as passionate partisans contest questions like “How ought we to understand sex, gender, and gender identity?”; “What, if anything, should the curricula at public schools say on these subjects?”; “What’s the best way to help a child who is experiencing gender dysphoria?”; “How should sports leagues be organized with respect to sex and gender?” (a subject that is now being taken up in Congress at the behest of Republicans).  

But our circumstances are not the best.

Observing the country’s major divides on gender and transgenderism, I see an issue that is as disorienting for participants and observers as any that our society confronts. Antagonists who inhabit different epistemic universes do battle each week on the internet, and merely understanding the most common perspectives can be burdensome. (If you set aside enough time to listen to this seven-episode podcast series from The Free Press and this nearly two-hour review of it on the ContraPoints YouTube channel, you’ll come away decently informed––not on all trans issues, but on the competing perspectives about how to understand the place of one author, J. K. Rowling, in the larger debate.)

Many Americans who observe the overall tenor of these online conversations are reluctant or even terrified to participate––to ask honest questions, to hazard tentative opinions, to try out arguments––because culture warriors on all sides of the issue police ever-changing taboos. Some are difficult for even the very-online to understand. For example, if a person were to say, “Sex is determined by one’s biology, while gender is a social construct,” would that be consistent with conventional wisdom, or seen as fighting words, or offensive to the left or the right, or somehow, all of the above? To merely ask others to clarify their views is to risk being castigated for “just asking questions”––internet vernacular for accusing others of bad faith that manages to stigmatize curiosity-driven dialogue––if not to be labeled as transphobic from one faction and “a groomer” from another. Little wonder that many decline to talk about the subject at all.

In theory, academic institutions are supposed to excel at truth-seeking by virtue of values and practices that prioritize it, even when the public square is full of venom or passionate intensity. But advocating for the widely held, if controversial, view that biological sex matters in gender-segregated sports recently got a woman mobbed on one California campus. To perform drag is to risk having one’s First Amendment rights violated, as happened at a Texas university last month.

Alex Byrne, a philosophy professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, laments obstacles to publishing scholarship on gender, recounting his own experience probing and positing precise definitions of women; rather than seeing the importance of viewpoint diversity for truth-seeking, he argues, some in the field aggressively chill free inquiry. Underscoring his point about ascendant taboos, a Quillette article—an attempt to set forth competing gender paradigms—was published pseudonymously by the professor who authored it. And Jesse Singal––whose work I’ve found to be consistently humane, rigorous, and unjustly maligned, even after carefully reviewing the complaints of critics who lambast him and his journalism, and who may dismiss my viewpoint merely because of our divergent evaluations of his work––ably documents troubling flaws in youth gender-medicine research. It is hard to make sense of the world when our centers of sensemaking are compromised.

Red-State Gender Politics

In a recent segment, the MSNBC host Chris Hayes characterized recent legislative pushes this way:

In March of 2023, in the last few weeks, Kentucky, Idaho, Georgia, Utah, Tennessee, Wyoming, have all passed, signed and enacted laws that outlaw drag performance, that restrict bathroom access, that restrict youth participation in athletics for trans folks, trans health care.

I mean, this has been the number one priority, I think it’s fair to say. Republican state legislators around the country, keep in mind these Republican legislators, you know, their sessions started let’s say in January. So the first thing they did more or less in a lot of these states, we’re three months in, is go after trans youth sports participation; the bathrooms that trans folks can and can’t use; drag performance; and, most crucially, trans health care.

This is a four-alarm fire. It is a complete crisis. And I think it’s an outrage, and it’s despicable. And it’s an insult to the full dignity that equal citizens in our great nation are entitled to. Whatever their lives are; whatever their gender status is … it’s an offense against the basic pluralistic values that I hold dear, and I hope we all hold dear.

He spoke with Chase Strangio, the deputy director for transgender justice with ACLU's LGBT and HIV Project, who added:

I litigate cases on behalf of trans litigants. I lobby in-state legislatures over the anti-trans bills that we’re seeing around the country. And then I live as a trans person with communities of trans people. So on every level, I feel like I’m sort of taking in the realities of what’s happening to trans communities at this moment.

I would say that in the legislative context, we are at a catastrophic point in terms [of] what we’re seeing: the volume of bills attacking the community, the subject of the bills attacking the community, and the pace at which [they’re] moving through state legislatures and being enacted into law.

A New York Times article about the same legislative push characterized it as follows: “Defeated on same-sex marriage, the religious right went searching for an issue that would re-energize supporters and donors. The campaign that followed has stunned political leaders across the spectrum.” In National Review, Madeleine Kearns counters that progressives initiated this front in the culture war, while The Economist editorializes that “the evidence to support medicalised gender transitions in adolescents is worryingly weak.” Citing that article, Judson Berger argues in National Review that conservatives can justly claim to be protecting trans kids by restricting such care, even as many LGBTQ activists insist that this same course will lead to harms including trans suicides. Like I said: the debate unfolds among participants who inhabit different epistemic universes.

Much Ado About Beer Cans

Then there’s a catastrophizing impulse among people who seem to have lost all sense of perspective. Did you hear Kid Rock was shooting his gun at Bud Light cans? At Vox, Emily Stewart explains how that improbably relates to the culture war over transgenderism:

In early April, Bud Light sent an influencer named Dylan Mulvaney a handful of beers. Mulvaney, in turn, posted a video of herself dressed like Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, using said beers to celebrate both March Madness and her first year of womanhood. One of the cans featured her image. It was part of a paid sponsorship deal and promotion for some sort of sweepstakes challenge where people can win $15,000 from Bud Light by sending in videos of themselves carrying a lot of beers.

This made some people very mad, and not because Holly Golightly wasn’t really a beer gal (her preference was the White Angel, a boozy mix of vodka and gin, which, whew). Instead, they were upset because Mulvaney is transgender.

Trans issues are currently front and center in America’s culture war. Anti-trans sentiment is sweeping many corners of the right, targeting children, drag shows, driver’s licenses, and health care, among other areas. It’s showing up in conservative media and conservative legislation and even working itself into the mainstream.

Now, Bud Light has found itself in the eye of the anti-trans storm. Kid Rock is shooting cans of the beer, and Travis Tritt says he’s banning the brand from his tour. Many on the right are calling for a boycott of the bestselling beer in the country. If this all sounds ludicrous, it’s because it kind of is.

One can find more sympathetic appraisals of the anti-Budweiser backlash. In National Review, Charles C. W. Cooke argues that when brands like Bud Light say they’re aiming to be more inclusive, as a marketing VP did in an interview that went viral during the backlash to the Mulvaney can, they aren’t using that word as most people understand it. In his telling, they’re actually using it in a way that includes only groups that are coded as culturally progressive, never groups that are coded as culturally conservative.

He writes:

I am not a habitual drinker of Bud Light, but, from my limited experience with the product, I can tell you that “uninclusive” is among the last terms that I would have used to describe it. Bud Light is the Amazon Basics of bad beer. I have drunk it on hunting trips with friends who have Second Amendment tattoos, and on the beach with friends who are gay. I’ve drunk it with Protestants and Catholics and Jews and Hindus. I’ve drunk it at football games, at baseball games, at NASCAR, and at concerts. I’ve drunk it with black friends, with Hispanic friends, and with white friends of both sexes. When Heinerscheid says that she wants Bud Light to be more “inclusive,” I must ask what that actually means? Putting the pope on Bud Light cans would be “inclusive.” Putting homeschooling parents on the cans would be “inclusive.” Putting feminists who find Dylan Mulvaney’s act infuriating on the cans would be “inclusive.” Hell, putting Old Order Amish people on the cans would be “inclusive.”

To me, regardless of the merits, getting excited or upset by the Bud Light marketing department is a fool’s errand, but in 2023 public discourse, there’s even a backlash to the backlash.

In The Advocate, John Casey writes:

Rather than come to the defense of a transgender woman, rather than defend a noble campaign that sought to reflect acceptance, and rather than let the campaign with Mulvaney speak for itself, Budweiser poured alcohol all over an extremist’s fire, and that will continue to singe our community.

Maybe the worst thing Budweiser did was leave Mulvaney all alone, twisting in the wind, abandoning any kind of defense of her. That is an utterly repugnant reflection of the brand.

Anheuser-Busch, weakly, did not stand up against hate. And while boycotts don’t work, they do make a statement. It’s not Kid Rock and Ted Nugent that should be boycotting Budweiser—it should be us.

Unless Bud has changed its formula, even pouring it over a fire would be of no great consequence.  

Plastics

In The Nation, Nanjala Nyabola inveighs against the material and the economic system that produced it:

Plastics are some of the most useful materials ever invented, and they are killing the planet.

Plastic is everywhere, and it perfectly encapsulates the notion that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Whether you are reading this on your phone or on your computer, you are handling the material. If you brushed your teeth this morning, odds are both your toothbrush and toothpaste contained plastic. Almost all artificial fabrics are made from plastic or its derivatives, including those presented as ethical alternatives like many kinds of vegan leather. If you are a person who menstruates, it is probably in the materials that you are using to manage that. That durability and malleability at relatively low prices is precisely what makes it dangerous to the natural environment. We consume it unthinkingly and in absurd volumes because the cost of accessing it is so low—yet it can last in the environment for hundreds of years.

The problem of plastic encapsulates everything that is wrong with whatever international order exists today. We miscalculate its balance sheet of utility because we don’t account properly for harms that cannot be easily measured in money. Decisions that look cheap on the surface look a lot different if we used a longer time horizon or stopped assuming that the planet has an infinite capacity to absorb human excess. Regions that are the most responsible for causing the problem are working hard to reallocate its consequences to other parts of the world. There would perhaps be greater cooperation if there weren’t deliberate choices taken to keep people oblivious to the scale of the problem. Companies happily brand materials like single-use water bottles as recyclable, knowing that even the most efficient recycling system cannot keep up with the rate at which they are consumed.

Although I share the author’s concerns about plastic in particular, and our general ability to consider all the negative externalities of our actions, I do not believe those problems are unique to capitalism––a point most persuasively illustrated by reading up on similar problems in noncapitalist systems.

Art, Morality, and Beauty

At The Atlantic, Judith Shulevitz argues that it’s okay to like complicated art by problematic artists:

We’re at the point when we could use a little more of the art-for-art’s-sake spirit; could let ourselves luxuriate in sensuality, beauty, and form; should offer more resistance to the pressure to find and deliver socially useful messages. I look back with a certain chagrin at how, as a young critic, I delighted in bucking my high-minded education by hunting down traces of a writer’s mixed motives, bad faith, petty and not so petty obfuscations in his writing. I took hubristic pride in my gotcha criticism and my eagle eye. But what used to feel subversive now feels like an imperative: Either scan the text for signs of immorality or be suspected of reactionary tendencies. You were hoping for aesthetic transport? Back to the consciousness-raising session with you!

She concludes with a warning from Oscar Wilde about the consequences of a world where morality somehow triumphs over art: “Art will become sterile, and Beauty will pass away from the land.”

Provocation of the Week

Gerard Baker, editor at large of The Wall Street Journal, praises anti-discrimination while denouncing a new aristocracy of elite progressive manners that he perceives as newly ascendant:

The past 50 years have been marked by the genuine eradication of barriers to opportunity for the underprivileged regardless of ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation or anything else. This is how we were genuinely starting to fulfill the promise of equality. But the cultural revolution that began in the past decade is re-erecting those barriers and creating new elite power structures, elevated not by talent or hard work, but, curiously, by membership of the self-approved class, signaled by the right luxury beliefs and articulated by the right “inclusive” language.

Adrian Wooldridge, who has written a book on the rise of meritocracy, frames this in a recent article in the Spectator. The left, he says, is “creating a new social order based on virtue, rather than ability.”

Bear with me because I am going to extrapolate from these baneful developments to a much larger worry about the geopolitical conditions we confront. As we survey the competition between global civilizations in the multipolar world we now inhabit, we see that the West is challenged as it hasn’t been in centuries. It’s axiomatic that a rising China and perhaps other powers look like formidable contenders for global leadership—with implications for our own security and prosperity.

But if we are losing that struggle, it isn’t because of the superiority of authoritarian, communist or autocratic systems. We know that liberal capitalism has done more for human prosperity, health and freedom than any other economic or political system.

If we are losing, it is because we are losing our soul, our sense of purpose as a society, our identity as a civilization. We in the West are in the grip of an ideology that disowns our genius, denounces our success, disdains merit, elevates victimhood, embraces societal self-loathing and enforces it all in a web of exclusionary and authoritarian rules, large and small.

That’s all for this week––see you on Monday.

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The true test of a civilization may be the answer to a basic question: Can it keep its children alive?

For most of recorded history, the answer everywhere was plainly no. Roughly half of all people—tens of billions of us—died before finishing puberty until about the 1700s, when breakthroughs in medicine and hygiene led to tremendous advances in longevity. In Central Europe, for example, the mortality rate for children fell from roughly 50 percent in 1750 to 0.3 percent in 2020. You will not find more unambiguous evidence of human progress.

How’s the U.S. doing on the civilization test? When graded on a curve against its peer nations, it is failing. The U.S. mortality rate is much higher, at almost every age, than that of most of Europe, Japan, and Australia. That is, compared with the citizens of these nations, American infants are less likely to turn 5, American teenagers are less likely to turn 30, and American 30-somethings are less likely to survive to retirement.

Last year, I called the U.S. the rich death trap of the modern world. The “rich” part is important to observe and hard to overstate. The typical American spends almost 50 percent more each year than the typical Brit, and a trucker in Oklahoma earns more than a doctor in Portugal.

This extra cash ought to buy us more years of living. For most countries, higher incomes translate automatically into longer lives. But not for today’s Americans. A new analysis by John Burn-Murdoch, a data journalist at the Financial Times, shows that the typical American is 100 percent more likely to die than the typical Western European at almost every age from birth until retirement.

What if I offered you a pill and told you that taking this mystery medication would have two effects? First, it would increase your disposable income by almost half. Second, it would double your odds of dying in the next 365 days. To be an average American is to fill a lifetime prescription of that medication and take the pill nightly.

According to data collected by Burn-Murdoch, a typical American baby is about 1.8 times more likely to die in her first year than the average infant from a group of similarly rich countries: Australia, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, France, the U.K., Japan, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Let’s think of this 1.8 figure as “the U.S. death ratio”—the annual mortality rate in the U.S., as a multiple of similarly rich countries.

By the time an American turns 18, the U.S. death ratio surges to 2.8. By 29, the U.S. death ratio rockets to its peak of 4.22, meaning that the typical American is more than four times more likely to die than the average resident in our basket of high-income nations. In direct country-to-country comparisons, the ratio is even higher. The average American my age, in his mid-to-late 30s, is roughly six times more likely to die in the next year than his counterpart in Switzerland.

[INSERT CHART HERE]

The average U.S. death ratio stays higher than three for practically the entire period between ages 30 and 50, meaning that the typical middle-aged American is roughly three times more likely to die within the year than his counterpart in Western Europe or Australia. Only in our late 80s and 90s are Americans statistically on par, or even slightly better off, than residents of other rich nations.

“One in 25 American five-year-olds today will not make it to their 40th birthday,” Burn-Murdoch observed. On average, a representative U.S. kindergarten class will lose one member before their fifth decade of life.

What is going on here? The first logical suspect might be guns. According to a recent Pew analysis of CDC data, gun deaths among U.S. children and teens have doubled in the past 10 years, reaching the highest level of gun violence against children recorded this century. In March, a 20-something shooter fired 152 rounds at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, killing three children and three adults, before being killed by police. In April, a 20-something shooter killed six people at a Louisville, Kentucky, bank, before he, too, was killed by police.

People everywhere suffer from mental-health problems, rage, and fear. But Americans have more guns to channel those all-too-human emotions into a bullet fired at another person. One could tell a similar story about drug overdoses and car deaths. In all of these cases, America suffers not from a monopoly on despair and aggression, but from an oversupply of instruments of death. We have more drug-overdose deaths than any other high-income country because we have so much more fentanyl, even per capita. Americans drive more than other countries, leading to our higher-than-average death rate from road accidents. Even on a per-miles-driven basis, our death rate is extraordinary.

When I reached out to Burn-Murdoch, I expected that these three culprits—guns, drugs, and cars—would explain most of our death ratio. However, on my podcast, Plain English, he argued that Americans’ health (and access to health care) seems to be the most important factor. America’s prevalence of cardiovascular and metabolic disease is so high that it accounts for more of our early mortality than guns, drugs, and cars combined.

Disentangling America’s health issues is complicated, but I can offer three data points. First, American obesity is unusually high, which likely leads to a larger number of early and middle-aged deaths. Second, Americans are unusually sedentary. We take at least 30 percent fewer steps a day than people do in Australia, Switzerland, and Japan. Finally, U.S. access to care is unusually unequal—and our health-care outcomes are unusually tied to income. As the Northwestern University economist Hannes Schwandt found, Black teens in the poorest U.S. areas are roughly twice as likely to die before they turn 20 as teenagers in the richest counties. This outcome is logically downstream of America’s paucity of universal care and our shortage of physicians, especially in low-income areas.

There is no single meta-explanation for America’s death ratio that’s capacious enough to account for our higher rates of death from guns, drugs, cars, infant mortality, diet, exercise, and unequal access to care. I’ll try to offer one anyway—only to immediately contradict it.

Let’s start with the idea, however simplistic, that voters and politicians in the U.S. care so much about freedom in that old-fashioned ’Merica-lovin’ kind of way that we’re unwilling to promote public safety if those rules constrict individual choice. That’s how you get a country with infamously laissez-faire firearms laws, more guns than people, lax and poorly enforced driving laws, and a conservative movement that has repeatedly tried to block, overturn, or limit the expansion of universal health insurance on the grounds that it impedes consumer choice. Among the rich, this hyper-individualistic mindset can manifest as a smash-and-grab attitude toward life, with surprising consequences for the less fortunate. For example, childhood obesity is on the rise at the same time that youth-sports participation is in decline among low-income kids. What seems to be happening at the national level is that rich families, seeking to burnish their child’s résumé for college, are pulling their kids out of local leagues so that they can participate in prestigious pay-to-play travel teams. At scale, these decisions devastate the local youth-sports leagues for the benefit of increasing by half a percentage point the odds of a wealthy kid getting into an Ivy League school.

The problem with the Freedom and Individualism Theory of Everything is that, in many cases, America’s problem isn’t freedom-worship, but actually something quite like its opposite: overregulation. In medicine, excessive regulation and risk aversion on the part of the FDA and Institutional Review Boards have very likely slowed the development and adoption of new lifesaving treatments. This has created what the economist Alex Tabarrok calls an “invisible graveyard” of people killed by regulators preventing access to therapies that would have saved their life. Consider, in the same vein, the problem of diet and exercise. Are Americans unusually sedentary because they love freedom so very much? It’s possible, I guess. But the more likely explanation is that restrictive housing policies have made it too hard for middle- and low-income families to live near downtown business districts, which forces many of them to drive more than they would like, thus reducing everyday walking and exercise.

America is caught in a lurch between oversight and overkill, sometimes promoting individual freedom, with luridly fatal consequences, and sometimes blocking policies and products, with subtly fatal consequences. That’s not straightforward, and it’s damn hard to solve. But mortality rates are the final test of civilization. Who said that test should be easy?

From Wisconsin and Tennessee to Delaware and New York, Trump and his allies are losing. Americans are standing up.

Rarely have the tectonic plates of American politics collided as visibly and explosively as they did earlier this month in Tennessee.

In 1932, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis applauded the role of experimentation within the states, calling them “laboratories of democracy” that could inspire reforms at the national level. Today, that dynamic is inverted, as some red states have become laboratories of authoritarianism, experimenting with the autocratic playbook in ways that could filter up to the federal government. American states are now splintering, not just on partisan lines, but on their commitment to the principles of liberal democracy.

Democracy requires more than just holding elections. But at a bare minimum, two qualities are nonnegotiable. True democracies must allow voters to determine who governs through elections, and must respect the outcome of those elections. Many Republicans at the state level are undercutting those principles.

Democratic deterioration is not a new problem in red states. Jacob Grumbach, a political-science professor at the University of Washington and the author of Laboratories Against Democracy, measured the democratic quality of American states from 2000 to 2018. He used 51 indicators, including gerrymandering, whether politicians were responsive to public opinion, long wait times to vote, and the availability of postelection audits to verify that the count was accurate. States that had been dominated by Republicans over the previous two decades, Grumbach found, became substantially less democratic. States dominated by Democrats and those with a divided government saw no such drop-off.

Since Grumbach published his findings, Republican attacks on the mechanisms of democracy have accelerated. When Democrats win at the ballot box, Republicans may attempt to neutralize their power. In Arizona, an elected Republican proposed allowing the state legislature the power to overturn the results of presidential elections. In Mississippi, white Republicans in the state House of Representatives established a parallel court system to cater to white neighborhoods in Jackson, usurping the elected judges put in office by the broader population, which is 80 percent Black.

[Read: A troubling sign for 2024]

Recently, the Tennessee House expelled two Black Democratic representatives who led anti-gun protests in the statehouse. The protests they led were disruptive, but the expulsions were wildly disproportionate and likely motivated by race: Republicans voted to expel the two young Black men, but not the older white woman who’d also participated. The attempt backfired, as both were swiftly reinstated, but that doesn’t change the fact that Republicans tried to undo the will of the voters over a minor transgression.

The botched effort in Tennessee is just one example of Republicans trying to invalidate elections by getting rid of Democrats who end up in power. In Georgia, Republican lawmakers recently passed a bill that would give them the power to remove elected prosecutors. And in Florida, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis boasted about firing a Democratic prosecutor using a flimsy pretext. A judge who reviewed the firing concluded that DeSantis’s goal had been “to amass information that could help bring down [the prosecutor], not to find out how [he] actually runs the office.”

These tactics are layered on top of long-standing antidemocratic practices. Gerrymandering is a form of legalized election rigging done at the state level in which electoral districts are drawn to ensure that politicians choose their voters rather than having voters choose their politicians. Democrats are certainly guilty of drawing district lines in their favor in some states (Illinois, for example), but Republicans are substantially more guilty. According to the nonpartisan electoral forecaster Dave Wasserman, 152 congressional districts were drawn to help Republicans in the 2022 midterms, compared with 49 districts drawn to help Democrats.

When gerrymandering is extreme, most elections become foregone conclusions, extinguishing the foundational principle of democracy: competition. Five years ago, in Wisconsin, Republicans won just 44.7 percent of the vote in races for control of the state legislature. Yet Republicans won 64.6 percent of the seats. In North Carolina, state Republicans drew such skewed districts in the 2018 congressional elections that the GOP won 10 out of the state’s 13 districts, even though the party’s candidates earned just 50.3 percent of the statewide vote. In Georgia, a state that voted for Joe Biden and has two Democratic U.S. senators, the newly drawn district lines mean that 57 percent of State Senate and 52 percent of state House seats can be considered “safe Republican” seats. Barring a major political shift, Republicans will continue to easily control the legislature in a competitive state trending toward Democrats.

When such blatant electoral manipulation takes place in other countries, the U.S. State Department denounces it. Here, it’s just a legalized part of the American system.

[Aristides N. Hatzis: My country used to look up to America’s democracy]

Even where elections are competitive, Republican legislators are trying to make voting more difficult. Disparities in ballot access are long-standing and present in both red and blue states. Researchers who analyzed anonymous cellphone-location data have found that, on average, residents of Black neighborhoods wait “29% longer to vote and were 74% more likely to spend more than 30 minutes at their polling place.” These “time taxes” have a knock-on effect, because voters who face long lines become less likely to vote in subsequent elections. But overall wait times are worse in states controlled by Republicans; the worst performers in the 2020 election were South Carolina and Georgia.

Now Republicans are parroting Trump’s lies about voter fraud as a pretext to make voting even harder, in ways that disproportionately disenfranchise poor and nonwhite voters. Study after study has found voter fraud to be an infinitesimal problem. Republicans have nonetheless introduced 51 state-level bills that would put up obstacles to ballot access..

Beyond attacking elections, or trying to interfere with their results, Republicans are testing out different ways to wield power against democracy. In Florida, DeSantis is using his power to punish a private company that dared to criticize him. In Idaho, Republican lawmakers have made it illegal to help minors cross state lines to obtain an abortion, using government power to restrict freedom of movement. In Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott has said he “looks forward” to pardoning a man convicted of murdering a Black Lives Matter protester; the murderer had previously texted a friend to complain about the protests and said that he “might have to kill a few people on my way to work.” The composition of Republican rising stars is worrying, too. In Oregon, members of the violent, far-right Proud Boys have secured leadership positions in local GOP bodies, making national-level extremists like Marjorie Taylor Greene look moderate by comparison.

Democracy isn’t all or nothing; it can be measured on a spectrum. But if voters face “time taxes” to vote in uncompetitive, gerrymandered elections that entrench minority rule, and then have their elected officials removed from office or usurped by a new body created by Republicans—well, that’s not democracy. If states combine these tactics, they won’t be worthy of the democratic label.

On the political right, many have suggested that concerns about American democracy are alarmist. Previous attempts to capture the erosion of American democracy at the state level have been criticized for hyperbole. One effort to measure the quality of state-level elections resulted in several U.S. states scoring below Rwanda, an autocracy in which the dictator, Paul Kagame, was reelected in 2017 with 98.8 percent of the vote. That’s absurd.

North Carolina is certainly not North Korea. But millions living in red states have become guinea pigs, the subjects of Republicans experimenting with autocracy.

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The people who live and work in Appalachian coal country tend to be viewed as climate-change villains rather than victims. But the deadly floods that swept a pocket of eastern Kentucky last summer challenge common preconceptions about which Americans are vulnerable to environmental disasters, and what—or who—is to blame.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The myth of the broke Millennial ChatGPT will change housework. We’re in denial about our dogs. The violent fantasy behind the Texas governor’s pardon demand The Weight of the Rain

To understand how a freak summer rainstorm could kill 44 Appalachian residents and leave thousands more displaced across eastern Kentucky, you could consider the moment in the early morning hours of July 28, 2022, when the floodwaters that swelled from local creeks darkened from muddy brown to charcoal gray, rising high enough to loosen mobile homes, trucks, and trees from their perches and hurl them through the valleys like missiles. You could recall how the weight of the rain forced families to seek shelter in the hills and watch as their communities washed away down the hollows.

Or you could read an Atlantic article from April 1962. Written by a Kentucky lawyer named Harry Caudill, “The Rape of the Appalachians” was a broadside against a relatively new method of coal extraction—strip mining—and it managed to predict precisely the environmental catastrophe that befell eastern Kentucky this past summer.

“By a process which produces huge and immediate profits for a few industrialists, the southern Appalachians are literally being ripped to shreds,” Caudill wrote. “Eventually every taxpayer from Maine to Hawaii will have to pay the cost of flood control and soil reclamation.”

Traditional mines had been dug downward in the search for coal deposits, then outward along their seams, allowing a team of miners to descend into mountains, chip away at the fuel, and cart it up to the surface. Strip-mining operations, by contrast, deploy bulldozers to clear timber from a ridge’s surface in horizontal streaks, then blast into the mountain’s side with explosives, exposing a seam to the open air. This allows for more efficient extraction of coal but eliminates the forests that help drain and slow runoff from rainstorms. So when the thunderstorms began in late July 2022, water rushed down the mountains unabated, destroying a Breathitt County community called Lost Creek, a small collection of homes gathered down the mountain from a strip mine.

Ned Pillersdorf, a lawyer in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, put it in simpler terms. “If you pour a gallon of milk on a table, it will run off all at once,” he told me. “If you put some towels down, it drips off.” By blasting away soil and timber, strip mining has the effect of ripping towels from the table. As a result, strip mines, he explained, are “time bombs.” When the storms came, water flooded the screened porch where Pillersdorf watches baseball, but he and his family were otherwise unaffected. In Lost Creek, though, nearly every single home was destroyed, Pillersdorf said. Two residents died. “On July 28,” he continued, “one of the time bombs went off.”

Today, Pillersdorf is leading a class-action lawsuit on behalf of many of the residents of Lost Creek against Blackhawk Mining, the company that operates the strip mine, and a subsidiary of Blackhawk, Pine Branch Mining. In an argument not unlike Caudill’s, he alleges that the company’s failure to “reclaim” the mine, by reforesting the area and maintaining silt ponds to prevent excessive runoff, aggravated the flooding. (In a response to his legal complaint, lawyers for Blackhawk and Pine Branch denied all of Pillersdorf’s allegations; the flood, they claimed, was an act of God.)

“I’m not a person that hates the coal industry or anything like that,” Gregory Chase Hays, one of Pillersdorf’s plaintiffs, told me. Like many people in the area, Hays has benefited from coal extraction at various points throughout his life; his grandfather and stepfather were both employed in the coal industry. But he’s come to question how the industry treats the communities around mines: Not long after midnight on July 28, Hays watched as his neighbor’s home floated through his yard. That night, he and one of his sons carried his mother-in-law to higher ground through waist-deep floodwaters. When they were at last able to return to their home, Hays found a notice from one of the local coal companies announcing that it intended to continue blasting away in the mountains nearby. It was posted on the bottom of their door; their stoop had been swept away.

The July floods displaced thousands of people. Some lived in tents for months. Hays, whose HVAC system was destroyed, had his air-conditioning fixed only this past Wednesday.

A February report from the Ohio River Valley Institute and Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center estimates that it will cost $450 million to $950 million to rebuild the approximately 9,000 homes damaged by flooding. As of early March, FEMA has provided just more than $100 million. In keeping with Caudill’s grim prediction that mining would enrich only a few industrialists, the counties most exposed to the potential hazards of strip mining are also among the most impoverished in the United States: Without significant assistance, many families won’t be able to rebuild.

And as global temperatures continue to rise, storms like those that flooded eastern Kentucky and devastated the community of Lost Creek are likely to become more and more frequent. Across Appalachia, each has the potential to unleash a similar catastrophe.

Related:

The photographer undoing the myth of Appalachia Henry Caudill on the destruction of the Appalachians (from 1962) Today’s News Violence in Sudan has continued for a third day as rival generals fight for control of the northeast African country. Millions of residents are hiding in their homes, and the toll of civilian deaths and injuries continues to rise. A grand jury in Summit County, Ohio, decided not to charge police officers in the death of 25-year-old Jayland Walker, a Black man shot by police in 2022 after an attempted traffic stop. Two Kenyan runners were champions in today’s Boston Marathon—Evans Chebet for a second consecutive year in the men’s race and Hellen Obiri in the women’s race. Dispatches Up for Debate: Readers weigh in on what they believe is the best cuisine on earth.

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Evening Read Illustration by The Atlantic

Why Does Contact Say So Much About God?

By Jaime Green

“As I imagine it,” Carl Sagan once said, “there will be a multilayered message. First there is a beacon, an announcement signal, something that says, Pay attention. This is not some natural astronomical phenomenon. This is a signal from intelligent beings … Then, the next layer is one that says, This message is directed specifically to you guys on Earth. It isn’t directed to anybody else. And the third part of the message is the real content, which is a very complex set of data in a new language, which is also explained.”

He was describing his novel, Contact, a 370-or-so-page answer, literally or in spirit, to every question we can ask about how finding alien intelligence might go. Yes, there’s conflict and strife—acts of terrorism, government obstruction, frustration and loss and death—but at its core the story promises an inviting cosmos. A door opening to a galactic community. We’re not only not alone but also welcomed. This hope is central to the idealistic origins of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), to Sagan’s motivations as a scientist and communicator. It also makes it especially weird that the novel ends with its heroine finding proof that God is real, but we’ll get to that.

Read the full article.

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Read. “Argument With a Child,” a poem by Katie Peterson.

“Plant your eyes on that place mat of the world / you love and don’t / move them until it stops hurting.”

Watch. Aftersun, available to rent on multiple platforms, is a film to watch—and to weep over—alone.

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P.S.

I’ve been fascinated by Harry Caudill since I first reported on his life and legacy for a photo essay featuring the work of the documentary photographer Stacy Kranitz. The success of “The Rape of the Appalachians” gave the lawyer a national platform, and in a series of follow-up articles and books, Caudill became a spokesperson of sorts for Appalachia and its plight. Today, his book Night Comes to the Cumberlands is credited in part with spurring the War on Poverty. But a dark undercurrent ran through much of his work: Caudill blamed Appalachians themselves—his neighbors—for their misfortune, and had little faith that they could change their circumstances. His writing brought billions of dollars of aid to the region but also engrained an enduring stereotype of Appalachia as a poverty-stricken backwater. Later in life, he embraced the theories of the Nobel Prize–winning physicist turned eugenics advocate William Shockley and attempted to establish a program to offer cash bonuses to Appalachians who volunteered to be sterilized. (It never took off.)

If you’re interested in learning more about Harry Caudill’s meteoric rise and rapid fall from grace, I highly recommend the Lexington Herald Leader’s excellent five-part series by John Cheves and Bill Estep, published for the 50th anniversary of Night Comes to the Cumberlands. I also encourage you to spend some time with Stacy’s striking photography; in addition to her work subverting Caudill’s stereotypes of Appalachia, her images have appeared alongside reporting on Tennessee’s abortion ban and the state’s efforts to expel Justin Pearson and Justin Jones from its legislature.

— Andrew

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Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

A Tennessee Air National Guardsman is facing charges after applying to be a hitman on a spoof "rent-a-hitman" website, according to the Department of Justice.

On April 6, the Tennessee House of Representatives voted to expel two Democratic lawmakers for disrupting the chamber to protest gun violence. It was an exercise of raw political muscle, a move by Republicans to punish two young Black men for refusing to abide by rules of decorum, and to send a message.

On Monday, the Nashville Metropolitan Council voted to appoint Justin Jones to fill his newly open seat. On Wednesday, Shelby County commissioners followed suit and reappointed Justin Pearson too. These are sharp replies from two progressive bodies to the legislature.

Conflict between different levels of government is nothing new, but the eagerness by both sides to thumb their nose at opponents is emblematic of what we might call total politics. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, nations pioneered “total war,” in which every element of society was mobilized and became fair game for military operations—the goal was simply to win. Total politics applies the same approach to partisan conflicts. Those in power use every legal tool at their disposal to gain advantage, with little regard for the long-term downsides. Total politics dismisses both the existence and value of neutral institutions;, it (mostly) respects rules but not norms. All that matters is what’s possible, not what’s prudent.

[Read: The Tennessee expulsions are just the beginning]

Total politics is everywhere you look. In just the past week or two it’s popped up in Austin, Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott has announced his intention to request a pardon for a man convicted of murdering a Black Lives Matter protester, even before proceedings are complete. Elsewhere in the state, in Amarillo, conservatives sought to put an incendiary abortion case into the hands of a federal judge they correctly believed would grant them the decision they wanted. Total politics is in Manhattan, where District Attorney Alvin Bragg brought 34 felony counts in a vague case against former President Donald Trump. It’s in Wisconsin, where a progressive candidate defeated a conservative incumbent to claim a nonpartisan judicial seat, in a race featuring unusually partisan campaigns fueled by outside money, and where Republicans in the state legislature responded by threatening to impeach her even before she’s heard a single case. It’s in Montana, where GOP lawmakers want to rewrite election laws for one cycle and one race only, to make it easier to defeat incumbent Democratic Senator Jon Tester. It’s in Washington, where some House Republicans are pushing to reinstate a rule that would allow them to target specific federal employees by reducing their salaries.

This kind of behavior is often called “constitutional hardball,” but that term is flawed. Not only is it reminiscent of the former MSNBC host Chris Matthews, but also (somewhat in contrast to that association) it sounds like a good thing: Who wouldn’t want their representatives to play hardball? Calling it “total politics” better reflects how these maneuvers enlist every aspect of government, including ostensibly neutral, nonpartisan elements, into a ruthless battle. The essential characteristic of total politics is that it uses real powers that exist under the law— although its practitioners sometimes also use other means—but pushes them to their limits.

The recent boom in total politics likely stems from a rising sense that politics is life-and-death and every election represents an existential threat to the country as one or the other party conceives of it. If you view each election and each battle as apocalyptic, then the sensible choice is to use any means available, no matter the long-term consequences: After all, if you lose (the thinking goes), the long-term consequences are irrelevant.

This tendency is particularly pronounced on the right, where Trump has argued that he is the only force that can save America as conservatives know and love it, and his acolytes have compared elections to Flight 93. That might explain why so many of the examples of total politics here come from Republicans, though Democrats are not immune. In recent years, some Democrats have explicitly called for progressives to adopt the tactics (though not the policies) of more extreme right-wing factions like the House Freedom Caucus.

Tennessee provides a vivid example of how total politics draws on existing powers but produces novel and negative consequences. The House has a mechanism for expelling members, and it exercised it. The law also provides for home-county commissions to fill the seats, though the framers probably didn’t intend for expelled lawmakers to be sent right back. The question is what’s appropriate and politically wise. The House has used its expulsion power only twice since the 1800s. The recent instance displayed racist dynamics at work, given that members declined to expel a third lawmaker, a white woman, who had protested alongside the two who were expelled. As my colleague David Frum tweeted, “The Tennessee Republicans are now represented as bigots and Ku Kluxers. Maybe they deserve it. If not, then they’re idiots.” The expulsions were both an abuse of power and totally legal.

Tennessee is, as my colleague Ron Brownstein writes, more an omen than an outlier. One reason the legislature feels safe moving so truculently is that Republicans enjoy a gerrymandered majority that is all but immune to challenge. This is itself a product of total politics: In states across the country, partisans (especially in the GOP) have pursued the most aggressive gerrymanders they can sustain under the law.

Similarly, it’s legal for plaintiffs to game the federal-court system to try to draw a favorable judge. For example, anti-abortion activists who sued the federal government over approval of mifepristone, a drug used in abortions, knew that by filing suit in the Amarillo division, their case would almost certainly be assigned to Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee with strong anti-abortion views. They got Kacsmaryk, and they got the ruling they wanted—a decision saying that the FDA’s decision was improper. Judge shopping, as this is known, is a loophole that exists in the system and is used by plaintiffs of many political views from time to time, though conservatives have in recent years employed it with particular effectiveness. But it also plainly makes a mockery of the hope that judges will rule impartially and that justice is roughly equal in any federal court anywhere in the United States, and it thus delegitimizes the judiciary.

[Mary Ziegler: The Texas abortion-pill ruling signals pro-lifers’ next push]

Identifying what is total politics and what’s a reasonable reaction to a new situation is naturally somewhat in the eye of the beholder. For example, some Republicans claimed that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe and the first impeachment of Donald Trump were both this sort of legal-but-abusive tactic. (Never mind that Mueller was appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, a Republican Trump appointee.) Proportionality is a good test: Trump was impeached for trying to extort Ukraine for his own political gain; the Tennessee lawmakers used a bullhorn on the floor of the legislature. Which of these seems to merit a very rare sanction?

Donald Trump’s bid to stay in power following the 2020 election is a good example for understanding the boundaries of total politics. In attempting to subvert the election, Trump and his allies employed some tools of total politics, including an aggressive suite of lawsuits and explorations of how state legislatures could set aside popular votes using existing laws. As they were quick to point out, some of these steps echoed measures that Democrats had contemplated or employed in the past. But committed to the pursuit of victory, Trump went a step further, not just pushing rules to their limits but actively violating them. The campaign sought to seize voting machines, pressured election officials to tamper with results, and ascribed invented powers to the vice president.

Total politics is enticing because it dangles the prospect of crushing opponents without having to bend or break any rules. In practice, however, it not only undermines the legitimacy of the system and the results it produces—see the widespread criticism of Kacsmaryk’s decision—but it encourages a cycle of escalation. By sending the two legislators back to Nashville, the councils in Tennessee are escalating an existing conflict, where in the past they might have sought to smooth things over with the state government. To be fair, the Nashville Metro Council already has some bad blood with the state legislature—thanks to an ongoing total-politics attempt to shrink the council in retaliation for blocking the 2024 Republican National Convention from coming to Music City.

The combination of this alarmist approach and the recursive nature of total politics, encouraging the same from its targets, means that it is only likely to become even more ubiquitous. The limits of decorum and precedent will continue to loosen, and the valorization—some might say pretense—of impartial court systems and law enforcement will be less and less regarded. It’s hard to imagine anything breaking the cycle of total politics other than some sort of crisis—and a crisis is just what this cycle may bring.