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This evening, Ron DeSantis is announcing his presidential campaign by talking to Elon Musk on Twitter. The Florida governor’s attempt to fit into Donald Trump’s shoes is only going to get worse from here.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Four forces bind Trump’s supporters more tightly than ever. The meat paradox There is no evidence strong enough to end the pandemic-origins debate. Local politics was already messy. Then came Nextdoor.

Not Serious People

I am not going to open Twitter this evening to hear Ron DeSantis announce—finally, for real, no joke, this time he means it—his campaign to become the leader of the free world. Neither are you, in all likelihood; Twitter is composed of a tiny fraction of highly engaged social-media users, and most people in America aren’t on the platform. Even fewer use Twitter Spaces, the audio component of Twitter where users can tune in to a live conversation. (I’ve participated in some of them. They’re fun, but a bit cumbersome.)

More to the point, very few of the people Ron DeSantis wants to reach are on Twitter. Most of them won’t hear any of the conversation, unless somehow the Ron and Elon Show is blasted from loudspeakers in Florida’s retirement mecca, The Villages. Yesterday, after Fox News announced tonight’s event, Reuters published an explainer: “What is Twitter Spaces where DeSantis will announce his presidential run?” If you’re unfamiliar enough with Twitter that you need to read the explainer, you’re not likely to join the event.

Regardless of what plays out tonight, or how many people tune in (or don’t) to hear it, I have to wonder: Who came up with the galaxy-brained idea of matching up two of the most socially awkward people in American public life for a spontaneous discussion on Twitter? It’s not even laden with the pomp and suspense of a real announcement: As my colleague David Frum tweeted yesterday, “If you tell Fox News you plan to announce your candidacy on Twitter, isn’t that really … announcing on Fox News?”

In any case, the venue is, to say the least, something of a risk. The last time Musk tried to participate in a Twitter Spaces event, he got exasperated with journalists for asking him questions and quickly left the discussion. (Much like Donald Trump, Musk seemingly cannot internalize that everyone in the world does not actually work for him.) This time, Musk has brought in his friend David Sacks as the moderator. Musk reportedly once tossed Sacks out of a room with a wave of his hand by saying, “David, this meeting is too technical for you.” Sacks denies that this happened, but still, a close Musk adviser like Sacks is unlikely to ask anything too challenging.

DeSantis’s campaign likely saw two reasons for choosing this stunt. First, Trump has not come back to Twitter, despite Musk lifting the former’s president ban from the platform. (Trump vowed not to return, and amazingly, it’s one of the few public promises he’s ever kept.) The Florida governor will get a Trump-free environment, where he can show that he’s cool and hip and down with his fellow kids on the interwebs, unlike the elderly Trump. (Trump, of course, pioneered the abuse of social media for political reasons, but he’s now over on his own platform.)

The second reason is likely more important: DeSantis seems to think he can win the nomination by imitating Trump (sometimes physically), and part of that, apparently, is owning the libs on social media. In that sense, Musk’s weird and cloddish right-wing politics make him a perfect partner for DeSantis; both of them need a public-relations boost after months of missteps. Of course, Musk will still be a billionaire and the CEO of three major companies no matter who likes or hates him. DeSantis, meanwhile, needs money and Republican primary voters, and he has apparently decided that the way to gain Trump’s share of those voters is to troll, and troll hard, while generating free publicity by appearing with the guy who tried to wreck Twitter just to get even with the blue-check media elites.

DeSantis’s moves so far fit into that strategy. The war with Disney, the attack on public education, the phobic reaction to anything regarding race, sexuality, or gender—it’s all performative cruelty aimed at the most socially and politically retrograde voters, which is another way of saying “the GOP-base voters who will decide the primaries.” DeSantis could be a true believer in his own policies, but he’s clearly decided to lean into the idea of being a Trumplike outsider and culture warrior. (As Jill Lawrence pointed out today in The Bulwark, possible candidates such as Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin are also culture-war partisans, but they seem to understand the risks of scaring off less extreme voters.)

In my view,  the United States will be better off if Donald Trump does not become the presidential nominee of the Republican Party. His continued support of violent insurrectionists forever renders him unfit to participate in our elections; anyone would be better on the ticket than Trump, and that includes DeSantis. But DeSantis has learned from Trump that winning the GOP nomination is not about policy; it’s about playacting. He knows that the primary faithful want rallies and revenge, costumes and chaos.

The presidency is a job for a serious person, but in today’s Republican Party, serious people need not apply. DeSantis seems to understand this, and will appear with Elon Musk in the hope, perhaps, of winning over Twitter power users such as @catturd2 and the various pestilential extremists Musk welcomed back to the platform. Though it might be a good move for DeSantis—who needs to do something to reinflate his shrinking political bubble—his cozying up to Musk is just another moment when Succession’s Logan Roy might look at the 2024 GOP primary candidates as he did at his children, shake his head sadly, and say: “You are not serious people.”

Related:

The non-rise and actual fall of Ron DeSantis Twitter is a far-right social network.

Today’s News

Vice President Kamala Harris called for Congress to enact more gun-safety legislation on the first anniversary of the mass shooting in Uvalde. Tina Turner, the rock-and-roll pioneer and pop icon, died at the age of 83 after a long illness. Montana banned people dressed in drag from reading books to children at public schools and libraries, becoming the first state to do so.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Hawaii's feral chickens are out of control, Tove Danovich writes.

More From The Atlantic

The problem with how the census classifies white people The silence that mass shootings leave behind There is no constitutional end run around the debt ceiling.

Culture Break

Read. Chain-Gang All-Stars, a new novel by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah that’s set in a world where imprisoned people duel to the death as entertainment for others.

Watch. Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me (streaming on Netflix), a perplexing new documentary that offers glimpses of the tabloid star but fails to reckon with the forces that ruined her.

P.S.

Though some readers may know that I spent more than 25 years teaching at the Naval War College (and many years before that teaching at Dartmouth and Georgetown), they may not know that I also have taught for 18 years in Harvard’s continuing-education division, the Harvard Extension School. I have now retired from Extension, and last night I was honored to receive the school’s highest award, the Harvard Extension School Medal, for my teaching and service. Harvard’s program is (of course!) the oldest in America: Founded as the Lowell Institute in 1835 (Oliver Wendell Holmes, who named this very magazine, was a lecturer then), it became known as “Extension” in the early 20th century. I was proud to be part of the mission to deliver quality education to anyone who wanted it, including the nontraditional students who would come to class after a full day at work—just as I had.

My time at Extension, however, also taught me that Americans often overlook or underestimate the value of such programs. I am an advocate for residential, four-year college programs—that is, for the students likely to benefit from them. Not everyone can or should go to a full-time program; some students would rather work, others need to pick up a course on a topic only as part of their professional development, and others might be lifelong learners who are coming back to school merely out of interest in a particular subject. Continuing-education programs at America’s universities help provide this learning at a fraction of the cost of a full-time degree, and often with the same instructors and on the very same campuses.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

When Elon Musk tweeted that the Jewish financier George Soros “hates humanity” and “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization,” he drew international condemnation. Musk’s outburst was “not just distressing,” but “dangerous,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the Anti-Defamation League’s CEO, said on Twitter. “It will embolden extremists who already contrive anti-Jewish conspiracies and have tried to attack Soros and Jewish communities as a result.” Later that day, Israel’s foreign ministry tweeted, “The phrase ‘The Jews’ spiked today on the list of topics trending on Twitter following a tweet with antisemitic overtones by none other than the owner and CEO of the social network, Elon Musk.”

But soon after, that statement was deleted and disavowed by Israel’s foreign minister, who promised, “There will be no tweets like this again.” The next day, Amichai Chikli, the country’s minister of diaspora affairs, went further. A hard-right politician who first entered Israel’s parliament in 2021, Chikli broke with his own party when it joined the country’s recent anti–Benjamin Netanyahu government, and was later rewarded with a parliamentary seat in Netanyahu’s Likud party. Last Thursday on Twitter, he publicly praised Musk as an entrepreneur and “role model,” and declared that “criticism of Soros - who finances the most hostile organizations to the Jewish people and the state of Israel is anything but anti-Semitism, quite the opposite!” Chikli subsequently doubled down on this position, citing an op-ed written by Alan Dershowitz that states, “No sin­gle per­son has done more to dam­age Is­rael’s stand­ing in the world, es­pe­cially among so-called pro­gres­sives, than George Soros.”

[Yair Rosenberg: Elon Musk among the anti-semites]

I’ve reported critically on the activities of Soros’s foundation, and I certainly don’t think scrutiny of him is bigoted. But having covered anti-Semitism for more than a decade, I also found Musk’s remarks about Soros to be demonstrably anti-Semitic, and was confused by how some people, like Chikli, seemed willing to excuse such rhetoric out of distaste for Soros’s politics. So I spoke with Chikli yesterday in an attempt to understand his perspective. Our conversation below has been edited for clarity, but there was not much to be found, in part because even after we spoke it was unclear to me whether Chikli had read Musk’s tweets in the first place.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Yair Rosenberg: Let’s start with the tweet that kicked off the whole controversy. Last week, Musk goes on Twitter and writes, “Soros reminds me of Magneto.” What did you think of this comparison when you saw it?

Amichai Chikli: First of all, I hadn’t seen it at the beginning. I just saw the waves of reaction. I listened to what was being said in the media. I saw Soros becoming the victim. I saw Elon Musk becoming the vicious anti-Semite. And it sounded ridiculous to me.

Rosenberg: So you didn’t see the specific thing that he wrote.

Chikli: I was responding to the trend and not directly to the tweet. Obviously, before I wrote something, I learned about the tweet. But I was responding to the trend. What added to my motivation to respond was that a lower-level foreign ministry employee, who is not the minister, was saying that [Israel is] standing up to protect Soros.

Rosenberg: So I assume you saw Musk’s second tweet, where he explained what he meant in the first one. He wrote that Soros “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.” What did you think of that?

Chikli: But I wasn’t responding to his tweets. I was reacting to the reaction to the tweets, and in particular the reaction of nonelected officials in the foreign ministry, who spoke in the name of the state of Israel, and joined the trend that portrayed Elon Musk as an anti-Semite.

Rosenberg: Okay. So let me read what you said. You wrote, “As Israel’s minister who’s entrusted on combating anti-Semitism, I would like to clarify that the Israeli government and the vast majority of Israeli citizens see Elon Musk as an amazing entrepreneur and a role model. Criticism of Soros - who finances the most hostile organizations to the Jewish people and the state of Israel is anything but anti-Semitism, quite the opposite!” So you made a case there, and I suspect you could make a longer case here, that George Soros is anti-Israel.

Chikli: One hundred percent. This is one of the most hostile individuals, who funds dozens of organizations that are all into delegitimizing the state of Israel. It’s not just because of his opinion. It’s very systematic.

Rosenberg: But here is my question. This whole thing happens because of Musk’s tweets. And he didn’t say he didn’t like Soros because of his positions. He said that Soros wants to end civilization because he hates humanity. Aren’t these two very different things? If Musk had just said, “I don’t like Soros, because he doesn’t like Israel,” do you think anyone would have called him anti-Semitic? Didn’t that only happen because Musk accused a rich Jew of wanting to ruin the world, which is what anti-Semites have said about Jews for centuries, whether it’s “Zionists” or the Rothschilds or whoever?

Chikli: But if you’d like to have a serious interview, you must understand, and I will say it, I think it’s the third time. I wasn’t—

Rosenberg: —responding to the tweet, you were responding to the reaction. But it’s confusing to me that you would respond to say Elon Musk is not an anti-Semite when you don’t know what he said.

Chikli: I stand behind my words. I don’t think that he’s an anti-Semite. You can also say that George Soros is doing huge damage, not just to the state of Israel, by promoting the deal with Iran, which I think is damaging for humanity.

Soros speaks highly about the “open society” while his foundation has zero transparency about where the money goes. It’s not just anti-Israel, I think it’s anti–freedom of speech. I think he is the No. 1 promoter of what we call today “woke soft tyranny.” And his ideology is a threat to freedom of speech and the core values of the Western civilization. This is far more than the state of Israel.

Rosenberg: Let me try to put this in a different way because maybe I’m not being as clear as I want to be in my question. Here’s an analogy. As you know, many Israelis today think Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to destroy Israel. Many others think former Prime Minister Yair Lapid and the opposition are trying to tear the country apart. But if someone in America says something anti-Semitic about Netanyahu or Lapid, it’s still anti-Semitic, regardless of the target and whether one agrees with them, right? That’s a separate question.

You can have the lowest opinion of Soros, but that still doesn’t give anyone license to say anti-Semitic things about him. So you might not like George Soros at all, but Musk didn’t say Soros is bad on Israel, or he’s bad on freedom of speech. He said Soros hates humanity and wants to destroy civilization.

Chikli: I think we are now on the fourth time, you insist—

Rosenberg: I will print every time that you say this, don’t worry!

Chikli: [Laughs.] You think I was looking with a microscope at every single letter in Musk’s tweets. Again I will say, I was responding first to the trend, and second to the response of unelected officials who took authority from nowhere to speak with the name of the state of Israel on a very serious issue, to protect a man who is super hostile to the state of Israel, and who is maybe the No. 1 promoter of woke anti-Semitism that seeks to delegitimize and demonize the state of Israel.

[Matt Welch: Why the right loves to hate George Soros]

One last thing about the accusation of Elon Musk allowing anti-Semitism to spread on Twitter. The organization that reported this is called the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. And guess what? When you go and check them out, there are a few interesting things about them. One is that they are funded by Soros’s Open Society Foundations. And second, in their methodology, when they are looking for anti-Semitic tweets, they look for the following: Jesus, Hitler, and George Soros. This is also one of the points that I wanted to dispute—suggesting criticism of Soros is anti-Semitism; that is ridiculous.

Rosenberg: Of course. But the question isn’t whether it’s inherently anti-Semitic to criticize Soros. He’s one of the richest and most influential people in the world; obviously, you have to be allowed to criticize him. The issue is that sometimes anti-Semites criticize Soros because he’s Jewish and rich, and it’s not about his positions; it’s about who he is, right? You should be familiar with this problem because the same thing happens to Israel. It’s not anti-Semitic to criticize Israel, but some people criticize Israel because they’re anti-Semites and therefore say anti-Semitic things. Isn’t that what’s happening here?

Chikli: I want to give you the professional answer to why I wasn’t putting the focus on those people who, as you said now, might refer to Musk’s quote from an anti-Semitic perspective. Why was it not my focus at all? In the United States, when we researched the trends in the media, the vast majority of anti-Semitism is new anti-Semitism: the anti-Semitism that delegitimizes, demonizes, and sets double standards against the state of Israel.

It’s true that anti-Semitism coming from the far right is often louder and more violent. But that’s a small part of the phenomenon that we see today. It’s not less disturbing, but it’s not the new, main trend. And I was responding to the big picture. I wasn’t interested in how did everyone feel about the following tweet of Elon Musk, dada dada dada. That’s not what I was responding to, as I said—I think this is now time No. 4.

Rosenberg: Five.

During a CNN town hall earlier this month, Donald Trump acted as expected. He used the phrase “wack job” to describe E. Jean Carroll, who was awarded $5 million in damages because a jury unanimously concluded that Trump had sexually abused and defamed her. His statement elicited applause and laughter from the mostly pro-Trump crowd. He also described the January 6 insurrection as a “beautiful day” and declared that, if reelected president in 2024, he would pardon a “large portion” of the rioters. Those statements, too, brought applause from the raucous audience.

There was more. Trump called the Black police officer who had shot and killed one of the rioters storming the Capitol a “thug,” falsely claiming that the officer had bragged about the incident. Trump defended taking top-secret documents to his Mar-a-Lago estate. He wouldn’t say whether he hoped that Ukraine would win the war against Russia. And he spewed lie after lie after lie about the 2020 election and virtually every other topic that came up.

As the CNN anchor Jake Tapper said of Trump, summing up the night, “He declared war on the truth, and I’m not sure that he didn’t win.”

The day after the town hall, I asked a person in the talk-radio world how his listeners had responded. “One hundred percent approval of Trump’s performance,” this individual, who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly, told me. “I even tried to get people to call me who didn’t think he did well, but no luck. And I received a number of calls saying they had been either leaning towards [Ron] DeSantis or were firmly in his camp, and they said they have now decided to fully support Trump, based on the town hall.”

The question I’ve been asked more than any other during the Trump era is how Trump supporters—including tens of millions of evangelical Christians and Republicans who have long viewed themselves as champions of “family values” and “law and order”—justify their enthusiastic support for the former president. How do they rationalize their embrace of a man whose ethical transgressions and moral depravity so far exceed that of Bill Clinton, whom many of them attacked in the 1990s on moral grounds?

I’m intentional about trying to better understand the mind of Trump supporters. I read their articles and social-media posts, listen to their interviews, and track the findings of focus groups. I engage them in conversation and reply to their emails, less to debate than to listen. I think I’ve come to understand their perspective, even though I profoundly disagree with it.

[Read: The worst thing to come out of Trump’s town hall didn’t come from Trump]

Trump supporters can’t simply be dismissed as “a basket of deplorables.” Many are devoted parents and spouses, loyal friends and good neighbors, willing to reach out a hand to those in need. I can’t deny what I have seen with my own eyes; I can’t let my own aversion to Trump turn his supporters into caricatures. At the same time, they have aligned themselves with a malignant figure whose corruptions are undisguised. How can these things fit together?

Part of the explanation can be found in the realm of human psychology. None of us live comfortably with cognitive dissonance, the mental stress that results when people’s beliefs and actions come into direct contradiction with one another. This disharmony causes distress, agitation, and self-loathing. It can’t be sustained; something has to give.

The human mind creates defense mechanisms to eliminate such negative feelings: avoiding or ignoring the dissonance, undermining evidence of the dissonance, belittling its importance. What we human beings don’t do nearly enough is change our behavior so that it aligns with values that are estimable and ennobling.

If a person is on a diet and spends late nights eating snacks, they may tell themselves that they’ll work out the next day to burn off the extra calories. A smoker may justify her habit by reassuring herself that even though smoking can cause cancer, she knows people who have smoked and lived long, healthy lives. A man who cheats on his spouse may justify his actions by saying that the marriage was irretrievably broken, that he felt unloved by his wife, that he hasn’t felt happy for many years and she’s to blame.

“By coming up with these rationalizations, people are able to preserve the impression that their behaviors and attitudes are consistent,” Benjamin Le, a psychology professor of Haverford College, has written.

Which brings me back to supporters of Donald Trump. It’s a challenge for many of them, especially those who identify as people of faith, to reconcile what they claim to value—integrity, honor, truthfulness, decency, compassion—with the fact that they support a misogynist who has cheated on his wives and sexually abused women; threatened judges, prosecutors, and election officials; used hundreds of millions of dollars in military assistance to pressure a foreign leader to dig up dirt on his political opponent; catalyzed a violent insurrection and engaged in a multipart conspiracy to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election; dined with white-supremacist and anti-Semites; cheated on his taxes; lied pathologically; routinely used cruel and dehumanizing rhetoric; and promoted political violence.

So what are the psychological defense mechanisms Trump supporters employ to relieve feelings of dissonance, shame, and embarrassment?

First, Trump supporters deny the worst things he has done. Jury verdicts against him are always unfair; impeachments are unjust partisan acts. Investigations of him that have found wrongdoing, all of them, are “WITCH HUNTS.” That is true in perpetuity. So whatever Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and Special Counsel Jack Smith find, whatever indictments they may bring, the charges are by definition unwarranted. Trump is always the victim of persecution. “I think I have been violated as badly as anybody that's ever walked,” he recently said.

Trump is not perfect, most of his supporters will concede; he may be rough around the edges—a “bull in a China shop,” in the words of one friend of mine; a “wrecking ball,” in the words of another—and a man who does some unsavory things. But all of that, and far more than that, is acceptable because he is a “fighter” for their cause, which they are convinced is just, true, and right. His conduct may not always be ideal, and you may not want your son to model his life after Donald Trump’s. But more than any other Republican politician, he understands the viciousness of his opponents and will respond in kind. Trump will bring an AR-15 to a cultural knife fight, and his supporters find that to be anywhere from tolerable to thrilling.

Second, Trump supporters catastrophize the threats of the left. It’s one thing to believe, as some of us do, that the progressive movement includes dangerous, illiberal elements that need to be opposed. But that is quite different from believing that if Democrats gain or maintain power, calamity follows and America as we know it dies.

What we’re talking about isn’t just fear; it’s a sense of desperation and impending doom. Trump supporters feel that the political right has lost on every front over the past several decades, even though that’s clearly not the case. Since 1990, for example, the right has gained significantly more power in the courts, in Congress, and in the media—hardly unimportant institutions. Roe v. Wade was overturned after a half century, securing one of the great goals of the American right, and no land has afforded more religious-liberty protections to Christians than the United States today. Yet none of these victories offers much reassurance to people addicted to “doomscrolling,” searching social media for upsetting news.

Moreover, the unwillingness of others to share in their despair—the unwillingness to fight as if our lives depended on the outcome of this or that political election—is viewed as a sign of weakness. All of this is reinforced by a media ecosystem that is constantly promoting narratives that elicit feelings of fright, grievance, agitation, and rage. Those outlets take their cue from Trump, who last year said Democrats are responsible for “blood, death, and suffering on a scale once unthinkable.” He added, “Our country is going to hell.”

If the threat is truly existential, then it justifies—indeed, it demands—that patriotic Americans stand with Trump, regardless of his ethical transgressions. To offer anything less than full support would be a betrayal of our nation. A significant number of Trump supporters see themselves as embattled but heroic figures, involved in a great drama, standing against the demise of almost everything they cherish.

[Peter Wehner: MAGA is ripping itself apart]

But this disposition comes with a price. Perfect love may cast out fear, as the New Testament says, but the converse is also true. As Aldous Huxley wrote, “Fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth.”

Third, Trump and his supporters are frantically trying to portray President Joe Biden as more corrupt than his predecessor. If Trump is an innocent man forever being framed, Biden is the head of a “crime family,” according to Trump, who labeled a set of unproven allegations against Biden as “Watergate times 10.”

The charge against Biden is led by the chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, James Comer, who declared himself a “Trump man” shortly after the January 6 assault on the Capitol.

Comer’s target isn’t simply Hunter Biden, the president’s son, who has engaged in problematic business dealings. The U.S. attorney in Delaware, David C. Weiss, will soon decide whether Hunter Biden should be prosecuted for crimes related to taxes and a gun purchase. (The investigation into Hunter Biden began in 2018 and initially centered on his finances related to overseas business ties and consulting work, but later shifted in focus.)

However, Republicans are after the president himself, not his son, and so far, despite months of investigation, they have yet to uncover incriminating material about him. That doesn’t stop Republicans from accusing President Biden of wrongdoing. The Trump acolyte Charlie Kirk has admitted that “one of the reasons why Joe Biden is tough to beat is because he’s tough to hate.” Portraying Biden as unscrupulous is one way to change that impression, even if the specific charges made against him are false. If Republicans are able to get at least a draw between Biden and Trump on personal and public morality, they’ll take it.

A fourth justification that supporters of Donald Trump have constructed is that his presidency was an unqualified success, that Trump did practically everything right. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary: failing to build the wall or to get Mexico to pay for it, to reduce illegal immigration, to handle the coronavirus pandemic, to close the trade gap, to narrow the deficit or, pre-pandemic, substantially grow the economy and real wages. The Trump presidency, however, did witness health-care costs and drug prices increasing; income inequality growing; abortions rising after a three-decade decline; homicides spiking, including the largest single-year increase in murders in more than a century; the erosion of U.S. credibility worldwide; a posture of petty feuding with allies and abject capitulation to dictators; and a U.S.-Taliban agreement and subsequent announcement that the American military would withdraw, which had a devastating effect on the Afghan military’s morale and was a “catalyst” for its collapse, according to a May 2022 interim report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Yet all of these things, and more, are either ignored or explained away.

Let’s assume that Trump supporters believe, contrary to the facts, that every bad thing that happened on Trump’s watch was not because of his policies but in spite of them. Even then, they’re conceding how easily thwarted Trump was and how, in many cases, he was ineffective.

[Peter Wehner: Trump supporters think they’re in a fight to the death]

A fair-minded assessment would conclude that on Trump’s watch, some things got better and some things got worse, some of which he’s responsible for and some of which he’s not. But no one can reasonably make the case that America was markedly better or stronger during the Trump presidency than under either his predecessor or his successor. And certainly America under Bill Clinton, reviled by many on the right, prospered in ways that far exceed anything we saw under Trump. But back then, unlike now, we were told that character mattered.

The psychological phenomenon I’ve described in this essay isn’t exclusive to members of one party or to politics. We all live in ways that are at odds with our deepest beliefs. We all rationalize our shortcomings; we all engage in forms of denial. Each of us has blind spots, seeing confirmation bias in others but not in ourselves. But there are varying degrees of self-deception, different lengths to which we go to justify our decisions. What is so striking is just how much Trump demanded of his supporters. He has gone to the darkest places, and they have followed him every step of the way.

So, will anything invalidate the rationalizations of Donald Trump supporters? Or do his violations bind them to him more tightly than ever? For almost eight years, the answer has been the latter. Trump’s sensibilities have become theirs; they have thoroughly internalized his will-to-power ethic. An extraordinary psychological and moral accommodation has occurred.

If a decade ago you had told Trump supporters that this is the kind of man they would defend, that this is what they would become, most of them would have been horrified.

At this stage, though, for Trump supporters to call him out would be to call out themselves, and that’s too painful for too many people. The greater the ethical compromises we make, the fiercer our justifications become—and the angrier and more frustrated we get at those who won’t go along for the ride.

If most Republicans finally do break with Trump—and at this point, very little evidence suggests they will—it won’t be because of any road-to-Damascus revelation. It will be done respectfully, even reverentially, not because they have rejected his style of politics, but because they sense that his time has come and gone. And if Trump is dethroned as the leader of the Republican Party, whoever succeeds him will have modeled themselves after him. Trumpism will outlive Trump. It’s the cost of the lies we sometimes tell ourselves.

How do you persuade the whole world to stop eating meat?

I have been trying for half a century. My book Animal Liberation was published in 1975, when I was 29 years old. I argued that our treatment of animals is ethically unjustifiable: If it’s wrong to cause unnecessary suffering, then it’s wrong regardless of the sufferer’s species. On that basis, I urged readers to stop eating meat. Though I described how animals are forced to endure extreme suffering on factory farms and in laboratories, my appeal was to rationality, not emotion. I believed I had proved that there was no reasonable defense for animal cruelty.

At the time, my position was widely considered radical, even bizarre. Today it’s mainstream. And yet the paradoxical fact remains: Even as the ethical arguments for avoiding meat have become better known, meat consumption has risen not only in countries that are emerging out of poverty, but in the U.S. as well. I never could have predicted that vegan living and carnivorousness might rise in tandem in the same society. What should we make of that?

I have been asking myself this question recently while working on Animal Liberation Now, which renews and updates my earlier book. The process has made me wonder what my younger self would have thought if he had known that, 48 years later, meat consumption would be higher than ever.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from the publication of Animal Liberation. It began as an essay in The New York Review of Books. Robert Silvers, the magazine’s legendary editor, told me that my arguments persuaded him to give up meat. This was immensely encouraging. If I, an academic philosopher, could win over the editor of what was then America’s preeminent publication for progressive ideas, surely millions of other converts would swiftly follow. It seemed reasonable to hope that the market for the products of factory farms would soon shrink or even collapse.

[Read: Your diet is cooking the planet]

Measured against those expectations, Animal Liberation was a failure. Some of the rise in meat eating simply tracks population growth and increased prosperity in countries, like China, whose citizens were once too poor to afford meat. But even in the United States, per capita consumption of meat and poultry is 24 percent higher than it was in 1975. The average American is eating less beef, but that has been more than offset by higher consumption of chicken and turkey. That’s even worse from an animal-welfare perspective. More birds must be raised and killed to produce the same quantity of meat, and they are raised in more crowded and intensive conditions than cows are.

At the same time, I would have been pleased to know that the book would succeed at changing minds. Back in the early 1970s, the treatment of animals was a nonissue, especially on the political left, where it was seen as a sentimental concern limited to animal lovers. Animal Liberation seems to have helped change that. Ingrid Newkirk, the founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, has written that the book “made people—myself included—change what we ate, what we wore, and how we perceived animals.”

In the decades since, the animal-welfare movement has achieved important reforms, especially in Europe. The European Union and the United Kingdom have prohibited keeping hens in bare wire cages that prevent them from stretching their wings. Veal calves and breeding sows used to be housed in stalls so narrow that they were unable to turn around or walk more than a single step; that is now also illegal. These changes fall far short of what is needed but they give hundreds of millions of animals a better life.

Perhaps the most obvious change is cultural: In the West, there are far more vegetarians today than there were in 1975. I did not dare advocate going vegan in the original version of Animal Liberation, because it seemed too extreme. Today, avoiding all animal products isn’t so daring.

Can we attribute this shift to the success of ethical arguments? Recent experimental evidence suggests that they did play a role. In 2016, the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel invited me to collaborate on a study designed to test whether a single discussion about the ethics of eating meat would make students more likely to choose vegetarian meals. Eric thought it would not. Based on my anecdotal experience, I thought it might.

We randomly divided more than 1,000 undergraduate students at UC Riverside into two equal groups. One was assigned to read an article arguing, on ethical grounds, against eating meat from factory farms, which was followed by a small-group discussion and an optional video advocating avoiding meat. The other, the control group, got a similar lesson plan about donating money to help people in poverty. Because many students at Riverside use their student-ID cards to pay for meals, we could track their food choices after the lessons. Meat consumption stayed the same for the control group, but declined among those in the group that discussed animal ethics. Another recent study found similar results using arguments about meat consumption’s role in global warming, rather than animal suffering. Remarkably, the researchers found that the effect persisted three years later.   

The most awkward conversations I have had since publishing Animal Liberation have not been with people who reject my arguments, but with those who tell me that they think I’m right—and continue to eat meat anyway. I have always known that ethics are not paramount for everyone all the time. Only a bold person would claim that they always do what they believe to be right, no matter the sacrifice. Still, I will never forget when, shortly after I arrived at Princeton, a new colleague told me at dinner that she agreed with my views about the treatment of animals. She told me this, you see, over the factory-farmed chicken she had just ordered from a menu that included the perfectly adequate vegan meal I was enjoying.

My older, wiser, and reluctantly realistic self now accepts that most people can easily continue doing something they believe is wrong as long as they have plenty of company. I suspect that when these people say they agree with my views, what they’re really saying is that they care about animal welfare and climate change, but they’re not going to adjust their individual habits until everyone else does.

[Read: The coming obsolescence of animal meat]

This doesn’t mean that ethical arguments are useless. It means, rather, that their effect is felt most powerfully at the level of the policy changes that voters will support, rather than in people’s choice of what to buy at the supermarket. Many people have a sense that their individual actions don’t matter, but are in favor of passing laws that would constrain their options. In 2018, 63 percent of California voters supported Proposition 12, which required that all products from farmed animals sold in California must come from animals who have sufficient space to turn around and stretch their limbs or wings. (Earlier this month, in a major victory for the animal-welfare movement, the Supreme Court rejected a claim by pork producers that Prop 12 violates the U.S. Constitution.) A similar 2016 initiative in Massachusetts passed by an even more lopsided 78 percent. In both states, most of those voting for change must have been consuming animal products produced under the very conditions they were voting to prohibit.

When it comes to public policy in the United States, however, the role that money and lobbyists play makes changing anything that agribusiness opposes very difficult. It’s telling that, of the 14 U.S. states that have required-minimum-space allowances for farmed animals, all but two provide for ballot initiatives. There is no such federal mechanism. This helps explain why animal-welfare laws are further developed in democracies where money plays a more restricted political role, and where improvements for farmed animals have come through national or (in the case of the EU) transnational legislation.

Political hurdles will be more surmountable if we invest in alternatives to meat that people want and can afford, making it easier for them to align their actions, and votes, with their ethics. The rise of more appealing meat alternatives is a major cause for optimism. Novel plant-based foods that taste and chew like meat help people switch to a more ethical diet, although these products need to get cheaper to compete with meat from animals. Lab-grown meat could be even more revolutionary. Chicken produced from cultured animal cells is already on sale in Singapore. In Israel, the biotech firm Remilk says it can produce “real” dairy products made by copying the gene responsible for milk production in cows and inserting it into yeast cells. The company received regulatory approval in April. But lab-grown products are even further from being affordable and sustainable at scale than plant-based foods are. It’s crucial for investors to support research and development, for regulators to ease products’ path to market, and for governments to encourage their production.

I was an idealistic young man when Animal Liberation was published. Today I am an idealistic old man. The world has changed since 1975 in ways I couldn’t have imagined, many of them for the worse. But I remain convinced that philosophical arguments can shape how people live their lives. As long as that is true, there is hope for a future in which we will cease to inflict avoidable suffering on any sentient being.

Forty-year-old Josh Epperson works 10 to 15 hours a week and makes about $100,000 a year. After more than a decade in the corporate world and seven years working at a global brand consultancy, he has spent the past three years running what he calls “The Experiment.” The Experiment has three precepts. First, Epperson accepts only work that he finds meaningful. Second, he accepts only work that pays well (his rate is $130 an hour). Third, he never works more than 20 hours a week. Rather than leverage his expertise for more money, as is customary for most ambitious professionals, he’s chosen to leverage his expertise for more time.

For much of human history, the more wealth an individual accumulated, the less time they spent working. But in the past 50 years, a strange trend has occurred: Despite gains in wealth and productivity, many college-educated Americans—and especially college-educated men—have worked more than ever. Instead of trading wealth for leisure, American professionals began to trade leisure for more work.

This article is excerpted from Stolzoff’s new book.

Epperson—whom I first interviewed last year while researching the role of work in Americans' lives—grew up with his mother and older sister in a Section 8 housing project in Reston, Virginia. After a few years of community college, he transferred to Virginia Commonwealth University, in Richmond, where he’s lived ever since. His first job after school was “as one of those people who waved the little glow sticks” for United Airlines at the Richmond airport. He worked five night shifts a week, from 4 until the last plane arrived, after midnight. He was paid $10 an hour with no overtime, even when flights were delayed into the morning.

Epperson’s early experience was typical of many exhausted employees working long hours just to get by. According to a report from the Economic Policy Institute, the lowest-earning quintile of Americans worked nearly 25 percent more hours in 2016 than they did in 1979. As wages have stagnated for low-income Americans, they’ve had to work more hours to make ends meet.

[Annie Lowrey: Low-wage jobs are becoming middle-class jobs]

At 25, Epperson found an administrative job at a local hospital that paid $12 an hour. Though the pay increase wasn’t life-changing, for the first time Epperson was surrounded by people who were passionate about what they did. “Being in the orbit of people who cared about how they spent their time, to the point where they wanted to dedicate a ton of time to their job, was novel,” he told me. “It challenged my ideas about what work could be.”

In 2011, while working for the hospital, Epperson started to explore his next career step. He took a trip to New York City to attend a five-day conference called the Festival of Ideas. The conference featured keynote speeches from authors, meals from up-and-coming restaurateurs, and public art installations from the city’s trendiest museums and galleries. Of the hundreds of exhibits, one project captured Epperson’s imagination.

The project was called FEAST, an acronym for Funding Emerging Art with Sustainable Tactics. At each FEAST event, artists and organizations presented their project ideas to attendees. Afterward, attendees voted on their favorites, and ticket sales from the event were distributed as grants to the winners.

After returning from New York, Epperson and a friend got busy bringing a Virginia version of FEAST to life. Epperson still worked at the hospital during the day, but his passion and attention lay elsewhere. The Festival of Ideas had sparked a new identity for him. Epperson left the hospital job. He wrote articles about gallery openings and concerts for local publications. He produced the first FEAST Virginia event, which sold out.

After witnessing his community-organizing skills at FEAST, a local consultancy called Prophet hired Epperson to plan a series of events to showcase Richmond’s history. At 28, Epperson began his first salaried job, making $45,000 a year. The agency became the center of Epperson’s life, social circle, and sense of purpose. As Epperson advanced at Prophet, so did his income. Soon he was making $140,000 a year. He worked long hours and traveled in his role multiple times a month. But even as the work wore him down, he interpreted his burnout as a sign of success.

The irony was that as Epperson worked more hours, his work didn’t necessarily get better. As he started to lead teams and take on more responsibility, meetings and corporate bureaucracy condensed the space in his days where he could synthesize what he had learned and generate new ideas. Still, Epperson kept his head down. He was making a salary that would have been unfathomable to the young boy who grew up in project housing. He was also vying for a promotion to become one of the firm’s creative directors.

[Derek Thompson: Workism is making Americans miserable]

One day, Epperson’s work mentor invited him to go for a walk. Epperson thought he knew what the invitation meant: a promotion. But instead his mentor turned to him and said, “I’m sorry, Josh, but you’re not going to get it.” Without skipping a beat, Epperson said, “All right, I’m leaving.”

Epperson decided to give himself a three-month sabbatical. But after the first two weeks, he started to feel uncomfortable. Rather than avoid that feeling of guilt, he chose to interrogate it. “Do I believe that in our one, short human life the thing that gives my life value is contributing to corporate work that has economic returns?” he asked himself. “No. My answer to that question is no.”

Epperson had no delusions. He needed to make money. But if he wanted to infuse more awe into his life when he returned to the working world, he knew he would need to make changes, including integrating more unstructured time into his days.

Epperson began The Experiment by scaling back the obligations on his time and money. He resigned from his role on the board of a Black film festival. He moved out of his swanky apartment to a cheaper part of Richmond and traded in his Land Rover for a Honda CR-V. Despite these downgrades, his new path came with advantages. Epperson prepared his meals and ate more healthily. He spent unhurried afternoons with friends in the garden. And he got into regular meditation and exercise.

Epperson also saw how the added time benefited his professional life. He started working on projects for the Smithsonian and an urban-farming nonprofit called Happily Natural. With more space around his work, his work got better. “In the old industrial model of employment, the more hours you put in, the more products come out,” he explained. But if the product is an idea for a marketing campaign or a headline for a website, Epperson found that there wasn’t a positive correlation between how many hours he put in and the quality of the output. With more room to seek inspiration and develop his ideas, Epperson was doing more work that made him proud.

There’s something to Epperson’s insight that less work can yield better work. From 2015 to 2019, Iceland conducted two large-scale four-day-workweek trials. Combined, they reduced the workweek from 40 hours to 36 or 35 for more than 1 percent of the nation’s workforce without cutting pay. The workers came from a wide range of industries and included teachers, police officers, construction workers, and employees in the Reykjavík mayor’s office.

For context, Icelandic people work more hours on average than those in any other Nordic nation. The country has a robust social safety net and low unemployment, but it lags its Scandinavian peers in productivity. “Worn down by long hours spent at work, the Icelandic workforce is often fatigued, which takes a toll on its productivity,” the final report on the trials reads. “In a vicious circle, this lower productivity ends up necessitating longer working days to ‘make up’ the lost output, lowering ‘per-hour productivity’ even further.”

[Read: Kill the five-day workweek ]

Given this backdrop, the results of the four-day-workweek studies were impressive. Across industries, there was no decline in work output. The immigration department, for example, reported no delays in processing time. Other organizations actually improved their productivity. A government call center showed 10 percent more calls answered than a control workplace with longer hours. Workers reported having not just more time, but also more energy for hobbies, social lives, and family. And with well-rested employees, organizations maintained, if not improved, the quality of their services.

More recent, though smaller, experiments in the United Kingdom and the United States have found similar results. Among the 60 firms that partook in the U.K. study, 92 percent plan to continue with a shorter workweek. Reducing hours is harder for sectors like manufacturing and construction, where there is a more direct relationship between hours worked and output. “We couldn’t afford to give staff one day off every week,” the owner of one industrial-supplies company told the BBC. But for the most part, workers were able to get the same amount of work done in fewer hours.

However, although productivity-based arguments might help persuade employers and legislatures to consider shorter workweeks, we shouldn’t shorten hours just because we can still produce the same amount of stuff. In addition to the business case, there’s the moral one. We shouldn’t work less simply because it allows us to be better workers. We should work less because it allows us to be better humans.

What impressed me most from my time with Epperson is that he doesn’t treat leisure only as grist for the mill. He doesn’t unplug so that he can be more productive when he sits back down at his computer. Nor does he, like so many of us, exist in a perpetual state of half-work, swiping down at dinner to see if any new emails have come in.

For Epperson, reducing his working hours gives him the space to invest in other facets of his life. He is involved in his community. He is a generous friend. He takes care of his body. Walking the streets of Richmond with Epperson is like walking next to the mayor—he seemed to know every shopkeeper and skateboarder we passed.

On my last day in Richmond, Epperson and I sat on a boulder in the middle of the James River, the sounds of chirping birds and rushing water in our ears.

“Do you ever worry about how long you can keep this experiment up?” I asked.

He nodded. “There have been times where the money has started to slow down and I ask myself: Is this working? Is this worth it?”

He paused for a second. “But I hold. I’m not ready to walk out of the lab just yet.” Frankly, he has the time.

This article is adapted from The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life From Work.

With negotiations over the debt ceiling dragging on and the country running low on cash, many Democrats have urged President Joe Biden to take a unilateral action that will make those negotiations moot: Simply declare the debt limit unconstitutional. Last week, dozens of progressive House members signed a letter urging him to do so, and over the weekend, Biden expressed cautious sympathy for the argument. “I think we have the authority,” he told reporters, though he noted that the move would be challenged in court.

There is an excellent reason why this theory has never been tried in any of the dozens of times the country has approached the limit over the past 70 years: It’s wrong. Congress has maintained some form of a debt limit, without constitutional controversy, since the dawn of the republic. According to widely held legal principles, its existence creates no conflict with the Constitution, and the Supreme Court would almost certainly reject any attempt to argue otherwise.

The ignore-the-debt-limit idea hinges on the obscure public-debt clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, passed in the aftermath of the Civil War, which declares, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.” If Congress fails to raise the debt limit, according to this line of thinking, the U.S. might not be able to come up with the money to service existing borrowing. If that happens, the argument goes, the debt limit would amount to an unconstitutional “questioning” of the nation’s debt. Faced with such a predicament, Biden would have the power, and perhaps even the obligation, to ignore the debt limit and continue borrowing in order to avoid default.

[Read: Why Biden caved]

The most glaring weakness of this theory is the fact that the Constitution gives authority over the debt to Congress, not the president. Article I commits to Congress the power to “borrow Money on the credit of the United States,” and the Fourteenth Amendment itself provides that Congress “shall have the power to enforce” its terms. These provisions are a formidable obstacle to unilateral presidential action. When the text of the Constitution speaks this clearly about which branch of government has the power to do what, the Supreme Court is apt to listen.

History poses another obstacle. Statutory limits on the executive branch’s ability to issue debt were common both before and after the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, a fact likely to matter to an originalist Supreme Court. Some early American spending laws gave the president authority to borrow, but they always limited that authority in ways similar to what we see today. In 1793, for example, Congress appropriated a little more than $1.5 million for the expenses of the government and gave the president authority to borrow “any sum or sums, not exceeding, in the whole, eight hundred thousand dollars” for those expenses. This practice continued throughout most of the 19th century. The very same month that the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, for example, Congress gave the executive branch a limited authority to issue “an additional amount of temporary loan certificates, not exceeding twenty-five millions of dollars.” The drafting history of the amendment is devoid of any sense that the public-debt clause would or could invalidate such legislation. Since 1868, Congress has tinkered with debt limitations more than 100 times.

There is no particularly good reason to think that the current crisis is different. Arriving at the so-called X-date—the point at which obligations exceed cash on hand—does not mean that the public debt of the United States would suddenly be dishonored. As Kristin Shapiro and I have argued elsewhere, if that day comes, the Treasury will still have sufficient cash to make interest payments on the public debt, and the principal can be lawfully “rolled over.” In at least one past debt-limit showdown, the Treasury had a plan to prioritize debt service in exactly this fashion.

Even if we really did have insufficient funds to service our debt, the Fourteenth Amendment theory would have problems. In that worst-case scenario, the debt ceiling would be only one of several causal factors keeping the nation from making its payments. One could just as easily blame insufficient tax revenue or excessive spending. If Biden were to assert that the debt limit alone is what “questions” the public debt, he would open himself to the argument that his own spending agenda did so too—or to the charge that, by refusing a deal to end the crisis, he had violated his own oath to defend the Constitution. In short, the broad and novel reading of the Fourteenth Amendment would create plenty of unconstitutional accusations to go around—many of which could be pointed at the president.

[Annie Lowrey: The trillion-dollar coin might be the least bad option]

A more sophisticated constitutional theory, long advanced by the legal scholars Neil Buchanan and Michael Dorf, leans less on the vague authority of the Fourteenth Amendment and instead argues that the debt limit creates a kind of constitutional “trilemma.” If the nation has insufficient funds, this theory goes, the president must choose among three supposedly unconstitutional options: Reduce spending and usurp Congress’s spending power; raise taxes and usurp Congress’s taxing power; or breach the debt limit and usurp Congress’s borrowing power. Within that framework, Buchanan and Dorf argue that the third would be the “least unconstitutional” option.

Putting aside the substantial practical uncertainties—would there be a market for constitutionally suspect securities?—this framework rests on a flawed premise. Under-spending is not unconstitutional. Federal agencies sometimes run out of funds to accomplish legislative goals. Sometimes Congress doesn’t appropriate enough. Sometimes a natural disaster delays spending. (In a somewhat ungainly phrase, the comptroller general calls this a “programmatic delay.”) These familiar scenarios have happened for hundreds of years without anyone proclaiming a violation of the Constitution’s spending clause. In 1957, the Eisenhower administration actually canceled some expenditures to avoid breaching the debt limit. In the years since, the comptroller general has repeatedly acknowledged that the debt limit might lead to a spending shortfall.

None of this is to suggest that brinkmanship over the debt ceiling is a good thing. The limit was never intended to be an after-the-fact check on government spending, and arriving at the X-date would carry real risk and uncertainty. But the nature of the crisis is political, not constitutional. The solution will have to be political too.