Four hooded figures seemed to float down the stage, through the soft exhalations of a fog machine. On their shoulders, they carried a body clothed in black. Rain and lightning flashed a clean white on the screen behind them. When the man was finally laid on the ground, what followed looked like a resurrection: The spotlights found him, screams rose, and at last he stirred. Then he raised a microphone to his mouth.

This rock-star Lazarus was Min Yoongi, better known as the rapper and songwriter Suga of the Grammy-nominated, chart-topping South Korean group BTS. But none of his bandmates were onstage that night at UBS Arena, on Long Island, New York, because it was the first date of his solo world tour. Since last summer, the members have been focusing on individual projects as each prepares to complete his mandatory military service. The first in BTS to do a solo tour, Suga was also performing as Agust D, the name he adopted in 2016 for making music that was darker, more raw, and more personal than his group work. Last month, he released his studio album D-Day, the powerful conclusion to his trilogy of Agust D records, which delivered social critique and meditations on trauma, fame, mental illness, alienation, and forgiveness.

Suga’s ongoing tour, also titled D-Day, is the first real showcase of his oeuvre, and, on the sold-out U.S. leg of his tour, it felt like a declaration of artistic individuality more than a decade in the making. His concerts exploded with frontman energy and auteurist flourishes. But his most striking achievement was embracing pop music’s empathy-fueling potential while resisting its dehumanizing effects.

All 11 of his U.S. tour dates, which wrapped Wednesday night in Oakland, California, began with a short film that ended with Suga lying on a road in a thunderstorm. This was a reference to when he was hit by a car while working in Seoul part-time as a delivery boy to support himself while training to debut with BTS. The crash left him with a painful shoulder injury that continued to dog him even as BTS went on to achieve international fame. The segue from the video to the real-life Suga being carried onstage, seemingly lifeless, was smooth yet jarring—a reminder of the human vulnerability of a pop star whose fans camp outside concert venues for days.

When I saw Suga on that first night, at UBS Arena, as well as the final U.S. night, at Oakland Arena, his show challenged expectations of what a pop concert can do. On one level it was a dynamic hip-hop show, put on by a technically proficient rapper who as a kid would sample the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto’s music to make his own beats. Suga set the tone for the evening with “Haegeum,” whose title refers both to a Korean string instrument and to the notion of lifting a ban on something that was forbidden. “Endless influx of information prohibits freedom of imagination / And seeks conformity of thought,” Suga rapped in Korean. “Slaves to capitalism, slaves to money, slaves to hatred and prejudice / Slaves to YouTube, slaves to flexin’.” The haegeum’s haunting strings and a deliciously grimy bass vibrated the air. Though the track was written entirely in Korean, the crowd roared the lyrics back to him. He practically entered a hypnotic state while running through a rap-heavy opening sequence with the defiant “Daechwita” and the earlier fan favorites “Agust D” and “Give It to Me.”

[Read: The friends who listen to BTS together stay together]

Before the audience could get too settled, Suga brought out his acoustic guitar, its body decorated with messages and drawings from the other six BTS members. He’d only learned to play the instrument during the pandemic, so his unplugged version of “Seesaw” cut a sharp contrast to previous performances of the song, which featured choreography, backup dancers, and an elaborate set. His effortless swagger during the earlier hype songs gave way to the quieter spectacle of Suga in singer-songwriter mode. Later, he sat down at an upright piano and performed his own version of the 2020 BTS track “Life Goes On” and, in a particularly emotional moment, a solo rendition of the song “Snooze,” which features the singer Woosung and the late Sakamoto. A clip of Suga and Sakamoto’s sole meeting, from late 2022, played beforehand on the big screen—the older musician playing the song on a grand piano while the younger man tries to contain his joy. Sakamoto’s presence on “Snooze,” one of his final collaborations, was especially poignant to Suga, who idolized him and wrote the song to comfort younger struggling artists.

[Read: The astonishing duality of BTS]

Again and again, D-Day allowed Suga to experiment in ways that he hadn’t been able to with BTS, and it was thrilling to see. Yes, he was still clearly a seasoned entertainer, who knew how to command the attention of tens of thousands of people, who could jump around a stage rapping without appearing to take a breath, as during the exhilarating medley of BTS rap songs in the middle of the concert. And at two Los Angeles shows, he welcomed guest appearances by the American singers Max and Halsey for their respective collaborations. But his subversive choices stood out too. The concert was interspersed with short films that evoked the dream logic of David Lynch and the grainy aesthetic of grind-house movies, telling the story of the musician’s three identities: the pop idol Suga, the shadow self Agust D, and the human Min Yoongi. The ultimate artistic aim of the concert seemed to be to clarify each of these distinct selves to the audience while recognizing that they must all exist together. Seeing him perform his solo BTS songs, including “Interlude: Shadow,” as well as his verses from tracks with the other BTS rappers, affirmed that he wasn’t looking to reject his past but instead was proud of it. After all, it had taken him to South Korea’s Blue House, America’s White House, the United Nations General Assembly, and the Grammys stage.

In another fascinating production choice, throughout the show, pieces of the extended stage were pulled to the ceiling by chains, giving Suga less and less space to perform, requiring him to navigate the platform more carefully. For his last pre-encore song, “Amygdala,” he stood on a lonely-looking square as fire blazed all around him, a terrifying prison. The centerpiece of the D-Day album, the emo-rap track serves as an origin story for the alter ego of Agust D, referencing his life’s defining traumas—the car accident, his mother’s heart surgery, and his father’s liver-cancer diagnosis—and how they shaped him. During the song’s final lines, apparently depleted, he collapsed on the ground, and the hooded figures returned to carry him away. Only this time, he wore all white, as though he’d been cleansed, his catharsis complete.

By the encore, all of the stage pieces had been removed, revealing the technical equipment that had been hiding beneath it. Scattered about were fire extinguishers, electrical cords, pyrotechnic devices. No longer elevated above the crowd, Suga performed his last few songs at ground level, right in front of fans, sometimes grabbing their phones and filming himself. These last moments were bittersweet: Much of the audience knew that after the tour ended in Seoul in late June, Suga would begin his military service for at least 18 months. That reality made the concerts feel like a temporary farewell. Fans’ glowing lightsticks rippled like a single wave throughout the arena. Every so often, carried by a feral energy, the crowd would start barking, making Suga gawk or laugh. In Oakland, he told the audience that he would return with the rest of the BTS members, asking fans to wait just a little longer.

On the tour’s first night, one more surprise awaited. I had assumed that the final song would be something sentimental or light-hearted. Instead, Suga walked over to an ominous circle of video cameras, stood right in the middle, and began murmuring the opening bars of “The Last.” This song, off his first mixtape, is one of his best and one of my favorites. It’s also a song I have a hard time listening to these days. On “The Last,” Suga raps about his OCD, depression, and social anxiety. His delivery starts out low and subdued and gradually grows more desperate; by the end he sounds like he’s somewhere between screaming and crying. When I first heard it years ago, I recalled my own unceasing panic attacks and the suffocating desire to die. The song lodged itself in my heart, a welcome shard.

[Read: I wasn’t a fan of BTS. And then I was.]

In recent years, Suga has made more music about growth, about self-love and being okay with uncertainty and suffering. He spoke early during the concert, in English, about wanting to perform with less anger, highlighting songs such as “SDL,” “People,” and “People Pt. 2”; these tracks painted a portrait of someone with a great capacity for measured reflection, forgiveness, and humility in the face of life’s challenges. I understand that too: The relief of no longer hurting so badly, of discovering healing on your own terms. So when I heard the first lines of “The Last” (“On the other side of the famous idol rapper stands my weak self, it’s a bit dangerous”), I froze. What was he doing? Those cameras—arrayed like a surveillance system, transmitting the videos to the screen above him—devoured and projected the anguish he was performing, suggesting that I was devouring it too.

But after a minute, I understood. Though he rapped with the same breathless passion he did as a striving 23-year-old, I realized that he wasn’t performing with pure fury but with an anger tempered by time. This emotion was no less powerful or sincere, but it was less damaging to the person communicating it. These days, he could stand in the flames and feel their heat, but not be consumed by them. He could connect with his younger self without fully becoming that person again.

Then the spell was over. The moment the song ended, the house lights went up so that we could see him walking in silence offstage. No goodbye, no drawn-out thank yous and waves to the cheering audience. Not even a glance backward. On the first night, people exchanged confused looks, shocked by his sudden exit. You could perhaps see this whole finale as a quiet confrontation with an audience, a grand assertion of the self by a beloved artist. But if it was a confrontation, it was one rooted in trust rather than condescension. Trust that the audience can sit with discomfort, that they’re self-aware enough not to be offended or horrified by what he’s showing them.

It was the perfect ending. A concert that began in darkness and mythmaking ended in light and exposure. Suga started the show being carried by others; he ended it by carrying himself out. What more could we want? He had just shown us everything.

In a bygone era, Americans could be confident that conservatives, like the former General Electric pitchman Ronald Reagan, were friendlier to corporations than their ideological opponents, and that the most aggressive efforts to rein in corporate power were coming from the left.

Today, the relationship that the American left and right each have with Big Business is different. When corporations advance voting rights or acceptance of gays and lesbians, or oppose racism or laws that restrict the ability of trans people to use the bathroom where they feel most comfortable, many progressives are happy to see corporate power exerted as a counter to majorities in state legislatures or even views held by a majority of voters in red states. And some Republicans who pass socially conservative measures into law, like Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, have responded to corporate opposition with retaliatory rhetoric and actions that cast dissenting corporate speech as illegitimate and antidemocratic.

[From the May 2023 issue: How did America’s weirdest, most freedom-obsessed state fall for an authoritarian governor?]

These changing relationships to corporate power are shaped by the left’s increasing focus on race and gender relative to class and by the rise of populism on the right. They also reflect the never-ending push and pull between public and private power that is found in all healthy free societies. Politicians on both sides of the aisle sometimes get overzealous in the behavior they try to restrict. Though the right and the left both lose sight of this whenever a company takes a stand they don’t like, non-state actors—including corporations—play an important role in tempering excesses of the state. Absent such counterweights to state power, liberty would be at greater risk.

The right has long understood the value of corporate speech when defending free markets and economic liberty. The left now appreciates it more clearly on social issues.

To understand all that has recently changed, recall the world as it looked during President Barack Obama’s first term. Before Black Lives Matter or the #MeToo movement or mainstream support for trans rights or the push for diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies, Occupy Wall Street was the focus of grassroots energy on the left. Bernie Sanders, the senator most aligned with that protest movement, introduced a constitutional amendment with radical implications. Constitutional rights “are the rights of natural persons and do not extend to for-profit corporations,” it declared in part. On the contrary, corporations are “subject to regulation by the people through the legislative process,” it continued, “so long as such regulations are consistent with the powers of Congress and the States and do not limit the freedom of the press.”

Sanders’s attempt to end corporate influence on politics by stripping corporations of free-speech rights was a response to the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, which said that First Amendment rights extend to corporations. “If the First Amendment has any force,” the majority held, “it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech."

Many progressives were furious about Citizens United. If corporations have the same free-speech rights as people, the decision’s opponents argued, they will be free to marshal power and resources far greater than most people to influence American democracy, calling the integrity of government by the people into question. Conservatives, in turn, argued that corporations were invariably made up of many people, just like labor unions and think tanks and foundations and institutions of higher education. Why should the state have more power to censor associations of people than individuals?

Of course, Sanders and his allies never came close to amending the Constitution and overturning Citizens United. But if they had, I wonder how the left would feel about the change now, as Republican politicians go after companies that take progressive stands.

This brings us back to one of the most powerful state officials opposed to progressivism, DeSantis, who pushed the Parental Rights in Education Act through the Florida legislature last year. Progressives called it a “Don’t Say Gay” bill and were upset with Disney, the most powerful corporation in Florida, for declining to use its power in the fight against the bill. Blasted by progressive activists, socially liberal employees, and left-of-center journalists and celebrities, who objected to the corporation’s disinclination to influence the political process, Disney reversed course. The company declared that it would use its corporate speech to advocate for the law’s repeal while giving millions of dollars to political opponents of the law.

DeSantis was apoplectic, responding as if corporate political advocacy and political giving were affronts to representative democracy. “You’re a corporation based in Burbank, California, and you’re gonna marshal your economic might to attack the parents of my state,” DeSantis said, sounding a bit like Sanders. “We view that as a provocation, and we’re going to fight back against that.”

Thus began a campaign by DeSantis to retaliate against Disney for its political speech. That retaliation ultimately caused Disney to file a lawsuit alleging a violation of the First Amendment rights that the corporation enjoys, rights affirmed in that 2010 Citizens United decision––rights that Sanders and others tried and failed to strip from corporations. Because Sanders failed, the GOP is far more limited now in how much it can constrain what the right calls “woke capital.” Just like “woke” persons, “woke” corporations have free-speech rights (and the right to shift jobs away from any state where the political leadership is not to their liking).

And if the Disney lawsuit goes to the Supreme Court, many progressives will be rooting for the corporation’s victory––rooting, in effect, for the Citizens United precedent to stand––in part because the most common progressive view in 2023 is not that corporations should stay out of the American political process but that corporations are obligated to intervene on the side of progressives. As Joni Madison, then the interim president of the Human Rights Campaign, one of the largest LGBTQ-advocacy organizations in the United States, put it during the legislative fight in Florida, “We need Disney’s partnership in getting the bills heading to DeSantis’s desk vetoed. And if that doesn’t happen, to get these bills repealed. But this is not just about Bob Chapek [then the CEO of Disney] and Disney. This is about every CEO and company in America.”

[Edward Wasserman: My newspaper sued Florida for the same First-Amendment abuses Desantis is committing now]

Progressive nonprofit corporations are wildly successful at lobbying their corporate cousins on some issues. In 2016, the business community largely opposed a North Carolina bill that sought to restrict which bathrooms trangender people could use. In 2021, as Republican-controlled state legislatures sought new restrictions on voting, hundreds of companies, including Amazon, Coca-Cola, and General Motors, publicly opposed the GOP. Meanwhile, as The New York Times reported, “Senior Republicans, including former President Donald J. Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell, have called for companies to stay out of politics.” Of course, even when progressives applaud and conservatives denounce corporate influence on a particular issue, politicians from both ideological camps continue to eagerly seek and accept corporate contributions.

None of this is to say that the right and left have completely switched places. There are many issues on which the GOP remains more aligned with corporate interests and many elected Republicans who remain sympathetic to corporate power. But neither coalition is reliably aligned with or opposed to the power of corporations. The relationship, on both sides, tends to be issue-specific, transactional, and opportunistic, with the left more likely to be closely aligned on social issues and the right more likely to be aligned on fiscal issues.

Principled stands against all corporate influence are few.

Take corporate influence on the education system. As recently as 2016, leftist outlets like AlterNet that were sounding the alarm when the Walmart Family Foundation exerted money and influence to change the public-education system, particularly when it supported the often right-coded solution of charter schools. Today, however, Walmart and the nonprofits associated with it are using their money and influence to support the expansion of left-coded diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in Arkansas schools, according to the right-leaning Washington Free Beacon, which is raising concerns, even as most progressives don’t seem to mind.

Corporations wield cultural power, too, apart from electoral contests and legislative fights. And there, too, the left and right coalitions are adopting noticeably different postures than before.

Consider the past and present of major beer brands.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, labor disputes at Coors Brewing and opposition to the conservative politics of the Coors family fueled a beer boycott that lasted into the ’80s.

“Women’s groups are joining labor unions, Chicanos and homosexuals in an informal but increasingly powerful boycott,” the Copley News Service reported in March 1978. “Though the National Organization of Women is not participating in the anti-Coors campaign, local chapters of NOW are carrying ‘Don’t Drink Coors’ banners in their newsletters.”

By the mid-’80s the company worked to end the boycott by making concessions to the left. “The boycott stirred up negative feelings for a long time, and the job now is to wipe them away,” Peter H. Coors, then president of the Coors brewery division, told the Los Angeles Times. “Who wants to drink a beer when the guy on the next bar stool might say, ‘The people who make that beer are anti-union, or anti-this or that’?”

The beer industry, especially its advertising, was a common target of feminist critique that same decade. By the ’90s, such critiques of sexism in beer advertising were sufficiently common and well known for The Simpsons to spoof the conflict in a 1993 episode. As recently as 2015, Anheuser-Busch was under fire from feminist critics for its “Up for Whatever” campaign, which included the slogan “The perfect beer for removing ‘no’ from your vocabulary for the night” on bottle labels.

Across all those years, a premise of the feminist critiques was: Beer advertising matters in that it shapes American culture. And those critiques got results. In 2016, The New York Times reported that beer companies were moving away from misogynistic advertising messages. “It was fine to show a frat party making fun of girls five or eight years ago,” a brand consultant told the Times. “But it’s ineffective and potentially damaging to do today.” In March of this year, at Forbes, Jeanette Hurt wrote that Miller Lite had launched a new campaign to “collect sexist advertisements and turn it into compost to grow hops for women brewers.”

In April, Bud Light partnered with the transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in a social-media promotion. “Some conservative commentators and celebrities began calling for a boycott,” The New York Times reported soon after. The conservative boycotters believed that beer ads matter in that they shape American culture––and they, too, got results. The Times wrote, “After Bud Light’s sales slumped and the brand found itself thrust into the nation’s culture wars, Anheuser-Busch, the beer’s brewer, announced last week that two of its executives were taking a leave of absence. The company also said on Thursday that it would focus its marketing campaigns on sports and music.”

I have tended to believe that beer advertisements pander to existing attitudes in society rather than shaping future attitudes, so I don’t know if this change in Bud Light’s marketing strategy really matters. But some on the right consider it a major victory. “I’m not sure if most people fully appreciate the significance of this Bud Light stuff,” the socially conservative, anti-transgender-rights commentator Matt Walsh declared. “We made an iconic American brand toxic, virtually overnight, because it endorsed gender ideology. This is a pivotal moment. A map to follow going forward.”

What are the next 10 years likely to bring in the left’s and right’s relationship with corporations? I’d wager that corporations will continue to side with progressives and against democratic majorities on some social issues, even as they continue making campaign contributions to many Republicans.

As Josh Barro once explained at Business Insider, “Free markets are not small-d democratic. Some consumers matter more than others.” That is to say, many corporations want to attract consumers who are young and affluent, two demographics that are trending progressive on most social issues. “And that’s why ‘woke capitalism’ is likely to persist even if it’s not an effective strategy for getting Democratic lawmakers to stay away from tax increases and new regulations,” Barro wrote. “As long as companies’ core customer demographics remain opposed to cultural conservatives on these issues, companies will end up in opposition to cultural conservatism––not as a lobbying strategy, but as a customer retention strategy.”

In turn, I suspect that the more those corporations articulate values that Republicans dislike, the more Republican politicians will try to use the power of the state to constrain corporations, even as they themselves keep raising as much as they can from corporate donors. Finally, corporations will sometimes be targeted by both the right and the left, as when conservatives and progressives scrutinize content-moderation policies at big social-media companies.

As the left and right coalitions change their positioning relative to Big Business, it will be tempting––perhaps even fruitful––to point out instances of hypocrisy. But those instances should also serve as an opportunity for people on all sides of American politics to better understand why well-meaning fellow citizens have always been on all sides of the questions of if, when, and how corporations should influence America’s political and cultural disagreements. When corporations wield power, they do so undemocratically. They might be acting to advance the interests, values, or opinions of shareholders, their board of directors, their CEO, their employees, or some complicated combination thereof. Regardless, the general public doesn’t get a say. And corporations often succeed in influencing government in a way that serves their special interests rather than the general interest. Such rent seeking can fuel unjust inequality. And no matter what stances a corporation takes, there is never a moment when any citizen can go to the ballot box and replace it.

There are good reasons, in other words, to have checks on corporate power. But one can go too far in that direction. “Corporations are fundamentally illegitimate,” the leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky declared in an interview that appears in the 1998 book Common Good. “Just as other oppressive institutions—slavery, say, or royalty—have been changed or eliminated, so corporate power can be changed or eliminated,” Chomsky continued, championing the power of the state. “What are the limits? There aren’t any. Everything is ultimately under public control.” The Italian fascists had a similar formulation: “everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” But it is actually better for a society if power is not concentrated wholly in the state. A healthy society has many power centers, including undemocratic ones like churches, media outlets, universities, fraternal organizations, and, yes, corporations.

None of those alternative repositories of power are fully unaccountable.

For-profit corporations are all accountable to consumers and all corporations are subject to  laws––but also benefit from the limits on state power set forth in the Constitution. The Obama administration could not force Hobby Lobby to fund contraceptives for its employees because of the company’s religious-freedom rights. The Trump administration could not force Nike to nix relations with athletes who kneeled during the national anthem because of that company’s free-association rights. Such limits on the state enable America to have a thriving civil society and a private sector that generates wealth and innovative goods that Americans enjoy as much as Disney World and use as often as Google Search. The result isn’t perfect but is better than systems where businesses are powerless to dissent, whether fascism or communism or an alternate America where Senator Sanders and Governor DeSantis could suppress corporate speech. If you don’t like the status quo, you can boycott a corporation or start your own.

The third graders were not interested in meeting the state auditor.

It was career day at Samuelson Elementary School in Des Moines, and Rob Sand had assembled a table in the gymnasium alongside a dozen other grown-ups with jobs. All the other adults had brought props: the man from the bathroom-remodeling company handed out yellow rubber ducks, a local doctor let the kids poke and prod a model heart, and an engineer showed off a long, silly-looking tube that had something to do with the mass production of hot dogs.

Sand had packed only a stack of fliers, and for an hour, the rail-thin auditor stood alone while most of the children gave him a wide berth. At one point, a little girl with braids approached him cautiously: “What’s auditing?” she asked. Sand was excited. “Auditing, well, it’s about finding the truth,” he told her, crouching down. “And it usually has to do with where money’s going or whether people are following the rules.” But the little girl wasn’t listening anymore. She was staring at the hot-dog tube.

Sand has spent the past two months practically begging people to care about his job. Iowa Republicans passed a bill in March limiting the auditor’s access to information, against the Democrat’s loud objections, and the governor is expected to sign it soon. People on both sides of the political aisle told me that the bill is a blatantly partisan move meant to defang the last remaining Democrat in a statewide elected position. Republicans in Iowa are so determined to crush their opponents, in other words, that they’re going after a man whose office most of their constituents don’t even know exists.

But as the lone Democrat in state office, Sand is a glimmer of hope for his party in Iowa, where the past several years have brought only defeat after miserable defeat. “They’re trying to clip his wings, but they paid him a compliment,” David Yepsen, a former chief political reporter at the Des Moines Register, told me, referring to Sand’s Republican adversaries. “He’s [got] an early leg up to be the Democratic nominee” for governor.

Sand’s office in the Capitol building occupies a stately chain of rooms decorated with the heads of dead animals. I gasped when I walked in, suddenly face-to-face with an enormous bison. “North Star Preserve, Montour, Iowa,” Sand said. He pointed at the other trophies mounted on the walls and recited where in Iowa he’d shot them with his compound bow. “Madison County. Madison County. Des Moines city limits.”

Sand is a Democrat, but he is a Democrat who hunts. Bowhunting may be a genuine passion, but it’s also part of the myth he’s built up around himself: a duty-bound centrist, who will hold everyone in government to account, no matter their party. He wears camo and seed-company hats. He goes to church every Sunday. He went out of his way to appoint a Republican, a Democrat, and an independent to serve on his leadership team in the auditor’s office.

[Read: A fresh, bouncy brand of Trumpism]

Sand often says that he hates political parties, and he constantly paraphrases John Adams: “My greatest fear is two great parties united only in their hatred of each other.” Sand registered as a Democrat in 2004 because of his Christian faith’s social gospel, he said; they do “a better job of looking out for those that are on the bottom rungs of society.”

The auditor is 40 but looks 20. He’s lanky, with eyes that crinkle at the corners and a big forehead. Good-looking in an impish way, and a little preachy aside from the occasional expletive, Sand is part Pete Buttigieg, part youth pastor. Like Buttigieg, he was a young achiever. He grew up in Decorah, Iowa, then moved East to major in political science at Brown University. Somewhat incongruously, given his down-to-earth image today, Sand did some fashion modeling in college, appearing in runway shows in Paris and Milan. Today, he likes to say that he turned down Harvard Law to attend the University of Iowa for his law degree. He worked for seven years under Democratic Attorney General Tom Miller, for whose office Sand successfully prosecuted, in his 30s, the Hot Lotto scandal, in which a man had rigged lottery tickets in five states.

Sand can sometimes sound self-righteous—his wife’s brothers refer to him as “Baby Jesus.” But the job of auditor requires being a Goody Two-Shoes about the rules—and having a solid backbone. Sand seems to fit that bill. He didn’t drink until he was 22, and he stopped again for more than a decade as part of a commitment to a friend who was struggling with alcoholism. “He’s kind of a square, and he can come across as a little bit arrogant,” a personal friend of Sand’s, who asked for anonymity to speak more candidly, told me. “But he’s a hugely decent person.”

Sand’s wife, Christine, the CEO of an agri-science business, comes from a wealthy family; her relatives have provided much of the funding for his campaigns. When Sand first ran, in 2018, his bid was notable for its dad humor—and his pledge to “wake up the watchdog,” bringing more action to the auditor’s office and cracking down hard on waste, fraud, and abuse. He did that: During the coronavirus pandemic, Sand’s office discovered that the Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, had misspent federal relief money on two occasions. But he also defended the governor on other occasions: When some residents accused the Iowa Department of Public Health of fudging COVID numbers, Sand’s office reported that the state’s data were accurate.

Last year was not a good one for Democrats in Iowa. Sand won his reelection campaign by two-tenths of a percentage point; the two other Democrats in state office—the attorney general and the treasurer, each the longest-serving in their office in Iowa history—were knocked out of their seats. Reynolds was heard on tape in the spring of 2022 saying that she wanted her “own” attorney general and “a state auditor that’s not trying to sue me every time they turn around.”

The governor got the former. Now her party’s working to deliver the latter.

GOP lawmakers claimed that the new auditor bill was about protecting privacy. But the final version of the legislation prevents Sand from being able to subpoena state agencies for records. Disputes over information would instead be settled by an arbitration panel comprising one representative from Sand’s office, one from the governor’s office, and one from the agency being audited—most likely someone appointed by the governor. Sand would be outnumbered every time.

The bill was the punctuation mark at the end of the most consequential legislative session Iowans have seen since 1965, Yepsen said, in which Republican lawmakers dutifully passed almost every item on the governor’s wishlist, including bans on gender-affirming care for minors, prohibitions on sexuality and gender discussions in school, and new limits on SNAP and Medicaid eligibility. Republicans have a lock on the legislature now in Iowa, and they’re using it.

The auditor bill stands out most, though, for its almost comically obvious targeting of Sand. It is, in the phrase of my colleague David A. Graham, another example of “total politics”—a growing phenomenon in which politicians “use every legal tool at their disposal to gain advantage” without regard for democratic norms or long-term effects. We’ve seen similar moves in Tennessee, where Republicans in the state House expelled two Democrats over their gun-violence protests, and in Montana, where GOP lawmakers are trying to rewrite election laws for a single cycle to make it easier to defeat Democratic Senator Jon Tester.

[Read: Nikki Haley’s dilemma is also the Republicans’ problem]

Well-respected, nonpolitical organizations such as the American Institute of CPAs and the National State Auditors Association have spoken out against the Iowa bill affecting Sand. Even six Republicans in the Iowa statehouse voted against it: “It opens the door to corruption,” one of them, Luana Stoltenberg, who represents the Davenport district and who attended the pro-Trump Stop the Steal protest near the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, told me. “It doesn’t matter who’s in [the office]—that’s wrong.”

“If Rob Sand were a Republican, would this bill have been introduced, and would it have passed?” Mike Mahaffey, a former chair of the Iowa Republican Party who endorsed Sand in 2022, told me. “I think we all know—or we can plausibly argue—it probably wouldn’t have.” The legislation is shortsighted, he and other Republicans I talked to agreed. “Some of these Republican legislators (and it’s not just Iowa) are acting like they’ll never be in the minority again,” one Iowa GOP strategist, whom I agreed to grant anonymity so they could speak candidly, texted me.

But for many Democrats, the Republicans’ targeting of Sand seems less about owning the libs than about neutralizing any political threat, however slight. Right now the auditor “is the entire Democratic bench. He’s their main hope,” Sand’s friend told me. “He’s their Luke Skywalker.”

The Iowa Democrats’ Luke Skywalker drives a white Ford F-150 pickup, because of course he does. Sand picked me up in it last weekend on his way to two events in the conservative southwest corner of the state. Every year, he holds a town hall for each of Iowa’s 100 county seats; auditors don’t normally do that kind of thing. But Sand thinks it’s important for Iowans to hear what his office is up to. Or maybe he feels it’s important for people to know who he is.

We stopped in Treynor, population 1,032, for what was billed as a bipartisan fundraising event; most attendees were Republicans, and Sand was one of three Democrats invited to speak. When he walked in, people flocked to him with questions. “Oh, Rob,” Shawnna Silvius, the mayor of nearby Red Oak, said. “You’ve really been going through it out there. You’re like a lone swan.” Sand laughed: “I haven’t gotten ‘lone swan’ before.”

I watched as the auditor mingled for a while, looking fairly comfortable despite the fact that at least two of the lawmakers who’d voted to limit his power were sitting at a nearby table. People were finishing up their pork chops and cheesy potatoes when it was Sand’s turn to speak. He walked up to the podium, and went for it.

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The auditor bill “is a disaster in waiting for this state,” Sand told the room. Everyone was silent. He laid out the changes that the new legislation would make, and the consequences those changes would have. “The purpose of the Office of the Auditor of State is to prevent abuses of power that destroy our trust in our ability to have a system where we govern ourselves,” Sand concluded. “That was a revolutionary idea a little while back. If we want to keep it, we need to maintain those checks and balances.”

When Sand finished, everyone clapped. A few Republicans came up to ask questions. They had no idea the bill did this, they said. How could they help? Was it too late? Sand wrote down his email and handed out business cards. He urged them all to reach out to the governor, share their concerns, and ask her not to sign the bill. “I didn’t vote for you,” one woman told Sand. “But I would have.”

When we got back in the truck, I asked Sand what the point of all of it was. Of course Reynolds would sign. Was he possibly that naive? “Even if it’s finished, and the bill is done, this is really fucking important,” Sand said. People “need to know what is going on.” We sat while he thought out loud about whether anyone in that room would actually reach out to the governor, or email him to ask more questions—whether they’d care enough to follow through. “How else do I do this?” he asked me. “What else am I supposed to do?”

Sand has been making many such speaking visits lately—and posting regularly on Twitter and Instagram—to broadcast his concerns to Iowans. But this moment has also provided an opportunity for Sand to broadcast himself. It’s obvious that he has bigger political ambitions. You can tell, in part, because he’s so eager to market himself. When a New York Times reporter asked him for suggestions of interesting Iowans to profile in 2020, Sand proposed that she write about him. He has taken at least two national reporters with him on hunting trips, just as he invited me along to watch as he stood up for his current cause. When I met Sand last week, he told me he was reading The Man From Ida Grove, the autobiography of Harold Hughes, a former Democratic senator and governor of the state—a little on the nose.

Sand said he had thought about challenging Reynolds in 2022, but didn’t run because he didn’t want to miss out on time with his two young sons. Left unsaid was the political reality that last year would have been a terrible year to run. Reynolds crushed her Democratic opponent, Deidre DeJear, by nearly 20 points. Sand would probably have done better, but maybe not by much.

He doesn’t have to decide now. Reynolds isn’t up for reelection until 2026, and by then, she may have decided not to run again—or maybe, if a Republican becomes the next president, she’ll have accepted a federal appointment. If Sand does run, he’ll have some trends in his favor: Most Iowa governors also grew up in small towns and served at least a term in public office. “In the field of Iowa Democrats, he’s the shiny light, and we don’t have a lot of light switches on right now,” Jan Norris, the chair of the Montgomery County Democrats, told me.

[Read: A world without Chuck Grassley in the Senate?]

But the broader political current would be pushing against him. For decades, Iowa was purple. Voters here sent Democrat Tom Harkin and Republican Chuck Grassley to the Senate, together, every chance they had. But in 2016, 31 counties that Barack Obama had won twice swung to Donald Trump—more than in any other state in the union. Six years later, Iowa elected an entirely Republican delegation to Congress for the first time in more than 60 years. Sand might have had a good shot at the governor’s mansion in that old version of Iowa. Whether he would in this one is not clear.

“His fate is tied to the macro picture of what’s going on in the Midwest,” Yepsen, the former reporter, told me. Rural America is getting redder, and that’s a serious problem for Democrats, even one as demonstrably centrist as Sand. “Harry Truman couldn’t get elected anymore in Missouri,” Yepsen said. “George McGovern couldn’t win in South Dakota.”

Our final stop on the truck tour of southwest Iowa was a church in Red Oak, population 5,362, where Sand gave a quick pep talk to the Montgomery County Democrats. He was casual, calm. He rolled up his sleeves and sat on the edge of a folding table to face them—youth-pastor mode. “Losing sucks—and that is what we have been doing at the top of the ticket for the last 10 years,” Sand acknowledged to the group of mostly older Iowans.

One man asked what three issues Sand would emphasize if he were in charge of messaging for the Iowa Democratic Party. The auditor bill, Sand replied. People nodded. Plus the private-school vouchers and the way that Republicans are “criminalizing abortion.” The attendees took notes as Sand described an app they could download called MiniVAN that would help them with their door-knocking efforts.

Sand urged the group of Democrats to have hope. He rattled off some stats: There were more split-ticket voters in Iowa than in any other competitive state in 2022, outside of Vermont. More than 48 percent of Iowans voted for three Democrats for statewide office in November. Iowa Democratic Party Chair Rita Hart lost her race in the Second Congressional District by only six votes in 2020—one of the closest House races in American history. Hearing it all, group members seemed to sit up taller in their chairs, like wilting plants getting a little water.

“Democrats can win in the state of Iowa,” Sand said. “I’m not a unicorn.” But in Iowa, right now, he sort of is.

Subjected to all kinds of racism, the gifted, plain-spoken orator became an inspiring role model for social justice.