Today we relaunched The Atlantic’s flagship podcast, Radio Atlantic, with a new host: senior editor Hanna Rosin, a former Atlantic writer who went on to become the editorial director for audio at New York magazine. “There’s this phrase someone said to me recently: road-testing ideas, like you would road-test a car,” Hanna says in the trailer for the new podcast. “You run them through the dirt, see if they can stand up to actual real-world conditions.” I called Hanna to talk about what road-testing ideas will look like on Radio Atlantic, and what America’s national conversation is missing.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Colorado’s ingenious idea for solving the housing crisis DeSantis’s launch was not the only thing that crashed. Think about your death and live better. Why the GOP wants to rob Gen Z to pay the Boomers Rules of Debate

Isabel Fattal: In the podcast trailer, you reflect on your past as a champion high-school debater, and how the experience shaped the way you scrutinize ideas. Explain.

Hanna Rosin: I have an extremely conflicted relationship with my debate past, because winning is fun, but over many years, I came to distance myself from that mercenary way of approaching ideas. The upside of debating is that it keeps you nimble—someone throws ideas at you, and you can look at them from every angle and find the opposing side. It keeps your mind flexible and not rigid, and it teaches you a rigorous discipline of picking things apart. The downside of it is, if you’re not careful, you can lose a sense of what you actually believe. It can seem like a game. If you go too far down that path, you lose a sense of what’s important, what the boundaries are.

Isabel: How do you approach debating now?

Hanna: I no longer think of debate as a game. The way debates are happening in our country right now, everything’s on the table. I feel very nervous about treating it as fun. There are a lot of things being brought back to the table that I thought were completely settled. And there are also forms of debate that used to be completely off the table. If we had made up facts when I was a high-school debater, we would have been kicked out of the league. The whole thing has gotten chaotic and reckless.

The good part of this new world of debate is that the doors are much more open for a lot more people to participate. The bad part of it is that we haven’t established any rules at all. We haven’t established rules about what’s true and not true, what is allowed to be up for debate and what isn’t, and what the tone can be that stays on the right side of respectful. Right now it’s just a free-for-all. That needs to be figured out.

Isabel: How does your thinking about the state of debate play into the new Radio Atlantic?

Hanna: This is a thinking-out-loud podcast. I’m very open to having people on the podcast change my mind in the moment. I like to enter a room and have a fixed idea about something, and then somebody changes my mind about the idea. I'm not especially attached to being the absolute authority on the thing. I know what the rules of journalism and facts are, but I don’t actually know what the rules of debate are. I don’t even know what my own new rules of debate are. So I would like to use this podcast to figure that out.

Isabel: How do you think about the exchange of ideas in podcasting, in particular? What might Radio Atlantic do differently?

Hanna: I think the podcast world divides into two categories. One category is clubby—you’re already in the club, we believe the same things and it’s affirming, and it’s nice to be in a space with people who you consider like-minded. And the other form is neutral: You yourself as the host are just letting the expert lay out their case.

With Radio Atlantic, I’m trying to do neither of those things. I definitely will come in with a position, and hopefully that position will be clear and I will articulate it. Sometimes that position will be aligned with the person I’m talking to, and sometimes it won’t. To me, the momentum of this particular podcast comes from movement—movement in my own position or ideas. You start in one place with an idea or an insight, and you have your curiosity drive you to some totally different place.

Isabel: What are some topics you’ll cover on the show?

Hanna: Our first episode is basically me trying to feel what Anne Applebaum and Jeff Goldberg feel in their Ukraine cover story, because I’m sort of sheepishly admitting that I’ve stopped paying attention. I’m not necessarily resistant—I’m just being honest about the fact that I don’t feel it in the way I did at the beginning of the war, which is probably true of a lot of people. I’m trying, in the studio, to see what they see and feel what they feel.

Another conversation we’re going to have is about social media and teens. There’s so much debate now about whether social media is causing the rise in teen depression. I feel like the conversation has, for almost 10 years, run back and forth from hysteria to “no big deal.” And so my aim in conversation is to actually understand, What do we know? What literally, specifically, do we know? What social media, which teens, how does it affect them, who exactly is vulnerable? And the show does have some narrative elements too, exploring the consequences of ideas on people’s lives.

Listen:

(Re)introducing Radio Atlantic The war is not here to entertain you. Today’s News Governor Ron DeSantis’s campaign launch on Twitter Spaces crashed, delaying his announcement by almost half an hour yesterday. The leader of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, was sentenced to 18 years in prison on charges of seditious conspiracy on January 6th, 2021. The Supreme Court ruled that the Clean Water Act does not allow the EPA to regulate discharges into some wetlands, curtailing the agency’s ability to address water pollution. Dispatches Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf contemplates Ron DeSantis’s presidential candidacy.

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Evening Read Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Library of Congress; Getty.

The Fight Over Animal Names Has Reached a New Extreme

By Ed Yong

Stephen Hampton has been watching birds for more than 50 years, and for almost all of that time, he thought nothing of names like Townsend’s warbler or Anna’s hummingbird: “They were just the names in the bird book that you grow up with,” he told me. Then, a few years ago, Hampton realized how Scott’s oriole—a beautiful black-and-yellow bird—got its name.

Darius Couch, a U.S. Army officer and amateur naturalist, named the oriole in 1854 after his commander, General Winfield Scott. Sixteen years earlier, Scott dutifully began a government campaign of ethnic cleansing to remove the Cherokee people from their homelands in the Southeastern United States. His soldiers rounded up Cherokee, separated their families, looted their homes, and crammed them into stockades and barges, where many of them died. Thousands of Cherokee, including Hampton’s great-great-grandfather and dozens more of his ancestors, were forced to move west along the Trail of Tears. Scott’s oriole is a monument to a man who oversaw the dispossession of Hampton’s family, and saying its name now “hits me in the gut, takes my breath away,” Hampton, who is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, wrote in 2021.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Watch. You Hurt My Feelings (in theaters now), about a writer who finds out that her husband doesn’t like her novel manuscript, is a hilarious anxiety spiral.

Listen. To a collection of highlights from May’s most popular Atlantic articles, presented by Hark.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If you’re looking to sharpen your own debating muscles, last year, another debate champion recommended 10 books that taught him how to argue.

— Isabel

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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

Question of the Week

Do you want Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida to win or lose his Republican primary race against Donald Trump? Why? How does he compare, in your estimation, to Joe Biden?

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com

Conversations of Note

Back in 2021, I argued that backing Ron DeSantis early was the best bet for Never Trumpers who wanted to deny Donald Trump another GOP nomination. I still think so. And this week, DeSantis launched his campaign, though as my colleague David Graham notes in an article that is bearish on DeSantis’s chances at victory, Trump’s strong numbers in the polls are undeniable.

Still, Rich Lowry, the editor in chief of National Review, argues in The New York Times that it is far too early to count DeSantis out:

He’ll be lavishly funded, his favorable ratings remain quite high among Republicans, he can draw a crowd, he’ll finally actually be in the race, and perhaps most important, it seems he has the correct theory of how to try to topple Mr. Trump …

Mr. DeSantis won’t and can’t make the totalist case against Mr. Trump as unfit to serve that Never Trump Republicans and the press might like to hear. But so it is. Much of his anti-Trump case will be based on electability. There’s no doubt that Mr. Trump blew a winnable race in 2020—Mr. DeSantis will need to say he really did lose—and had a large hand in the Republican Party’s disappointing midterms last year. In all likelihood, Mr. DeSantis would have a much easier time beating President Biden than Mr. Trump would, based on the generational contrast alone. But there are limits to this argument.

Mr. Trump is competitive with Mr. Biden in polling, and an electability message doesn’t usually move the type of self-identified very conservative primary voters Mr. DeSantis needs to pry from Mr. Trump. The risk to Mr. DeSantis is that his candidacy takes on the feel of an establishment front-runner—lots of donor enthusiasm, an electability message—when he’s running from behind against an insurgent populist who happens to have once been president of the United States. To counter that, Mr. DeSantis is obviously going to have to retain his hard edge on cultural issues.

I’ll share my own thoughts about how DeSantis might run against Trump soon.

A Gen Z Teen’s Diagnosis of His Generation

Zach Gottlieb grew up with a therapist mom who taught him that discomfort is part of life, but that the world keeps turning even when you’re sad, a message that helps him to stay resilient.

In the Los Angeles Times, he argues that parents who take the opposite approach are creating depressed kids:

Parents and educators have been trying to figure out how to help teens in my generation who are struggling amid rising rates of depression and anxiety. That’s an understandable goal. What worries me, though, is the possibility that many in my generation are confusing mental health issues with normal discomfort, to the point that the term “mental health” is becoming so diluted that it’s starting to lose meaning.

Social media play a large role in this, promoting pseudo-technical and pathologizing language—often leading to cancellation—as the antidote to emotional discomfort.

Someone disagrees with you? They’re “gaslighting” you! Someone has the “wrong” point of view or perspective? They’re “toxic”! Someone declines to do what you ask? They have “no boundaries”! Instead of talking through these situations or trying to understand another perspective better, we run away to the supposed comfort of not having to deal with them. Click—they’re blocked.

Colleges have disinvited speakers who might be triggering to some students or created “safe spaces” where students can go instead; students in high schools and middle schools can choose not to attend assemblies that might be triggering; TV shows and podcasts tell us in advance that we might be triggered by a certain topic discussed, so we should skip that episode in case it makes us uncomfortable. We strive to make everyone comfortable, all the time and in every way—an impossible goal.

All of the warnings are well-intentioned and supposedly in service of our mental health. And of course, many people my age face mental health stressors that go far beyond the disappointments and conflicts of daily life. Anxiety and depression are serious concerns that need to be addressed, and treatment should be encouraged and accessible.

But I wonder if, more broadly, we’re normalizing an almost hyper-vigilant avoidance of anything uncomfortable. By insisting that the mere mention of something difficult is bad for our mental health, are we protecting ourselves from emotional damage—or damaging ourselves emotionally?

Silicon Valley Woo

The writer Tara Isabella Burton argues in The New Atlantis that the zeitgeist has shifted in the following way:

You might call it the postrationalist turn: a cultural shift in both relatively “normie” and hyper-weird online spaces. Whether you call it spiritual hunger, reactionary atavism, or postliberal epistemology, more and more young, intellectually inclined, and politically heterodox thinkers (and would-be thinkers) are showing disillusionment with the contemporary faith in technocracy and personal autonomy. They see this combination as having contributed to the fundamentally alienating character of modern Western life. The chipper, distinctly liberal optimism of rationalist culture that defines so much of Silicon Valley ideology—that intelligent people, using the right epistemic tools, can think better, and save the world by doing so—is giving way, not to pessimism, exactly, but to a kind of techno-apocalypticism. We’ve run up against the limits—political, cultural, and social alike—of our civilizational progression; and something newer, weirder, maybe even a little more exciting, has to take its place. Some of what we’ve lost—a sense of wonder, say, or the transcendent—must be restored.

What could go wrong?

The Tax Code and Swedish Feminism

In a fascinating essay on Sweden’s approach to the state and individualism, the Swedish history professor Lars Trägårdh spends a few paragraphs on the country’s unique tax code and the effect it has had on women:

In 1971, joint taxation was eliminated in favour of strict individual taxation. The idea was that at a time when women began to flock to the labour market, joint taxation presented an obstacle in the form of a negative incentive. If a woman began to earn money, her income would be added to that of the husband, and in an era of progressive taxation that meant the woman’s income effectively would be subject to a higher tax. Add to this that before the 1970s there was no universal, tax-financed childcare yet in Sweden, meaning that such care—without which it would be impossible for both husband and wife to work—had to be paid for privately, a costly proposition.

The introduction of strict individual taxation—there was no option to select joint taxation—and, over time, universal daycare, created the conditions for women to enter the workforce en masse. This in turn gave them the economic independence without which talk of gender equality would only amount to rhetoric. These reforms, to which can be added the world’s first law criminalising the spanking of children, even at home, and the legalising of gender-neutral marriage, meant that the family became more and more of a voluntary society, rather than the old-fashioned traditional family characterised by patriarchal power relations. To be sure, these reforms, which one perceptive writer has referred to as a ‘bloodless revolution’, created opposition. One group called the Family Campaign collected some 60,000 signatures from irate housewives and religious conservatives to protest the new tax law. But, generally, support far exceeded opposition and the days of the Swedish housewife were indeed numbered.

A Defense of Battle Rap

If you’re horrified by the genre––or a bit unsure of what exactly it is––Jay Caspian Kang’s interesting essay in The New Yorker may provoke more complicated thoughts about its value.

He writes:

​​Battle rap offers a kind of representation politics for the unwoke, a space where there’s some separation between the craft and the respect that the combatants have for one another. In this way, it is both a reflection of a certain reality and, for its fans, a fantasy for how we wish we could talk about identity. There’s something compelling, and even democratic, about battle rap’s premise that identity can always be at the forefront, but will never determine who actually wins.

Conversations of Note

Marking the 150th anniversary of John Stuart Mill’s death, Richard Reeves, who wrote a 2007 book about the great liberal philosopher, revisits his arguments for a culture of free speech:

Mill believed that the pursuit of truth required the collation and combination of ideas and propositions, even those that seem to be in opposition to each other. He urged us to allow others to speak—and then to listen to them—for three main reasons, most crisply articulated in Chapter 2 of On Liberty.

First, the other person’s idea, however controversial it seems today, might turn out to be right. (“The opinion … may possibly be true.”) Second, even if our opinion is largely correct, we hold it more rationally and securely as a result of being challenged. (“He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”) Third, and in Mill’s view most likely, opposing views may each contain a portion of the truth, which need to be combined. (“Conflicting doctrines … share the truth between them.”)

For Mill, as for us, this is not primarily a legal issue. His main concern was not government censorship. It was the stultifying consequences of social conformity, of a culture where deviation from a prescribed set of opinions is punished through peer pressure and the fear of ostracism. “Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough,” he wrote. “There needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling.”

Mill never pretended that this would be easy, either at a personal or political level. The humility and openness that is required is hard-won. Our identity as a person must be kept separable from the ideas we happen to endorse at a given time. Otherwise, when those ideas are criticized, we are likely to experience the criticism as an attack upon our self, rather than as an opportunity to think about something more deeply and to grow intellectually. That’s why education is so important. Liberals are not born; we have to be made.  

The article goes on to defend Mill from his detractors on the post-liberal right.

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The budget cuts that House Republicans are demanding in their high-stakes debt-ceiling standoff with President Joe Biden sharpen the overlapping generational and racial conflict moving to the center of U.S. politics.

The House GOP’s blueprint would focus its spending cuts on the relatively small slice of the federal budget that funds most of the government’s investments in children and young adults, who are the most racially diverse generations in American history.

Those programs, and other domestic spending funded through the annual congressional-appropriations process, face such large proposed cuts in part because the GOP plan protects constituencies and causes that Republicans have long favored: It rejects any reductions in spending on defense or homeland security, and refuses to raise taxes on the most affluent earners or corporations.

But the burden leans so heavily toward programs that benefit young people, such as Head Start or Pell Grants, also because the Republican proposal, unlike previous GOP debt-reduction plans, exempts from any cuts Social Security and Medicare. Those are the two giant federal programs that support the preponderantly white senior population.

The GOP’s deficit agenda opens a new front in what I’ve called the collision between the brown and the gray—the struggle for control of the nation’s direction between kaleidoscopically diverse younger generations that are becoming the cornerstone of the modern Democratic electoral coalition and older cohorts that remain predominantly white and anchor the Republican base.

The budget fight, in many ways, represents the fiscal equivalent to the battle over cultural issues raging through Republican-controlled states across the country. In those red states, GOP governors and legislators are using statewide power rooted in their dominance of mostly white and Christian nonurban areas to pass laws imposing the conservative social values and grievances of their base on issues including abortion, LGBTQ rights, classroom censorship, book bans, and even the reintroduction of religious instruction into public schools. On all those fronts, red-state Republicans are institutionalizing policies that generally conflict not only with the preferences but even the identity of younger generations who are much more racially diverse, more likely to identify as LGBTQ, and less likely to identify with any organized religion.

[Read: Why Biden caved]

The House Republicans’ plan would solidify a similar tilt in the federal budget’s priorities. Because Social Security, Medicare, and the portion of Medicaid that funds long-term care for the elderly are among Washington’s biggest expenditures, the federal budget spends more than six times as much on each senior 65 and older as it does on each child 18 and younger, according to the comprehensive “Kids’ Share” analysis published each year by the nonpartisan Urban Institute. Eugene Steuerle, a senior fellow there who helped create the “Kids’ Share” report, told me, “We are already in some sense asking the young to pay the price” by cutting taxes on today’s workers while increasing spending on seniors, and accumulating more government debt that future generations must pay off.

Spending on children 18 and younger now makes up a little more than 9 percent of the federal budget, according to the study. But that number is artificially inflated by the large social expenditures that Congress authorized during the pandemic. By 2033, the report projects, programs for kids will fall to only about 6 percent of federal spending.

One reason for the decline is that spending on the entitlement programs for the elderly—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—will command more of total spending under the pressure of both increasing health-care costs and the growing senior population. Under current law, in 2033 those programs for seniors will expand to consume almost exactly half of federal spending, the “Kids’ Share” analysis projects.

By protecting those programs for seniors from any cuts, and rejecting any new revenues, while exacting large reductions from programs for kids and young adults, the GOP plan would bend the budget even further from the brown toward the gray. The implication of the plan “is that children will get an even smaller slice of federal spending” than anticipated under current policies, Elaine Maag, an Urban Institute senior fellow and a co-author of the “Kids’ Share” report, told me.

Federal spending on kids is particularly at risk because of how Washington provides it. The federal government does channel substantial assistance to kids through tax benefits, such as the child tax credit, and entitlement programs, including Medicaid and Social Security survivors’ benefits, that are affected less by the GOP proposal. But many of the federal programs that benefit kids and young people are provided through programs that require annual appropriations from Congress, what’s known as domestic discretionary spending. As Maag noted, the programs that help low-income and vulnerable kids are especially likely to be funded as discretionary spending, rather than entitlements or tax credits. “Head Start or child-care subsidies or housing subsidies are all very targeted programs,” she said.

The GOP plan’s principal mechanism for reducing federal spending is to impose overall caps on that discretionary spending. Those caps would cut such spending this year and then hold its growth over the next nine years to just 1 percent annually, which is not enough to keep pace with inflation. Over time, those tightening constraints would result in substantially less spending than currently projected for these programs. If the GOP increased defense spending enough to keep pace with inflation, that would require all other discretionary programs—including those that benefit kids—to be cut by 27 percent this year and by almost half in 2033, according to a recent analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive advocacy group. If the GOP also intends to maintain enough funding for veterans programs (including health care) to match inflation, the required cuts in all other discretionary programs would start at 33 percent next year and rise to almost 60 percent by 2033.

[Read: This debt crisis is not like 2011’s. It’s worse.]

As Sharon Parrott, the president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told me this week, by demanding general spending caps, the GOP does not have to commit in advance to specific program reductions that might be unpopular with the public. “What they are trying to do is put in place a process that forces large cuts without ever having to say what they are,” Parrott said.

Federal agencies have projected that the cuts required under the Republican spending caps would force 200,000 children out of the Head Start program, end Pell Grants for about 80,000 recipients and cut the grants by about $1,000 annually for the remainder, and slash federal support for Title I schools by an amount that could require them to eliminate about 60,000 teachers or classroom aides. The plan also explicitly repeals the student-loan relief that Biden has instituted for some 40 million borrowers. Its cuts in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, generally known as welfare, could end aid for as many as 1 million children, including about 500,000 already living in poverty, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has calculated.

The appropriations bill that a House subcommittee recently approved for agricultural programs offers another preview of what the GOP plan, over time, would mean for the programs that support kids. The bill cut $800 million, or about 12 percent, from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children. Parrott noted that to avoid creating long waiting lists for eligibility, which might stir a more immediate backlash, the committee instead eliminated a pandemic-era program that gave families increased funding through WIC to purchase fruits and vegetables. “They are saying the country can’t possibly afford to make sure that pregnant participants, breast-feeding participants, toddlers, and preschoolers have enough money for fruits and vegetables,” she said.

Parrott doesn’t see the GOP budget as primarily motivated by a desire to favor the old over the young. She notes that the GOP plan would also squeeze some programs that older Americans rely on, for instance by reducing funds for Social Security administration or Meals on Wheels, and imposing work requirements that could deny aid to older, childless adults receiving assistance under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Instead, Parrott, like the Biden administration and congressional Democrats, believes that the GOP budget’s central priority is to protect corporations and the most affluent from higher taxes. “To me, that’s who they are really shielding,” she said.

Yet the GOP’s determination to avoid reductions in Social Security and Medicare, coupled with its refusal to consider new revenue or defense cuts, has exposed kids to even greater risk than the last debt-ceiling standoff. Those negotiations in 2011, between then-President Barack Obama and the new GOP House majority, initially focused on a “grand bargain” that involved cuts in entitlements and tax increases along with reductions in both discretionary domestic and defense spending. Even after that sweeping plan collapsed, the two sides settled on a fallback proposal that raised the debt ceiling while requiring future cuts in both domestic and defense spending.

The House Republicans’ determination to narrow the budget-cutting focus almost entirely to domestic discretionary spending not only means more vulnerability for programs benefiting kids, but also less impact on the overall debt problem they say they want to address. Even some conservative budget experts acknowledge that it’s not possible to truly tame deficits by focusing solely on discretionary spending, which accounts for only about one-sixth of the total federal budget. Brian Riedl, a senior fellow and budget expert at the conservative Manhattan Institute, supports Republican efforts to limit future discretionary spending but views it only as an attempt to “prevent the deficit from getting worse.”

Riedl told me that in his analysis of long-term budget trends, he found it impossible to prevent the federal debt from increasing unsustainably without also raising taxes and significantly slowing the growth in spending on Social Security and Medicare. But, as he acknowledged, the GOP’s willingness to consider reductions in those programs has dwindled as their electoral coalition in the Donald Trump era has evolved to include more older and lower-income whites. “As the Republican electorate grew older and more blue collar, they revealed themselves as more attached to entitlements [for seniors] than previous Republican electorates,” he said.

Trump in 2016 recognized that shift when he rejected previous GOP orthodoxy and instead   opposed cuts in Social Security and Medicare. Trump has maintained that position by publicly warning congressional Republicans against cutting the programs, and attacking Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who entered the 2024 GOP race yesterday, for supporting such reductions in the past. Biden has also pressured the GOP to preserve Social Security and Medicare.

Though it’s not discussed nearly as much, the GOP’s refusal to consider taxes on high earners also has a stark generational component. With the occasional exception, older Americans generally earn more than younger Americans (the top tenth of people at age 61 earn almost 60 percent more than the top tenth of those age 30). Older generations are especially likely to have accumulated more wealth than younger people, Steuerle noted. As part of the economy’s general trend toward inequality, Steuerle said, older generations today are amassing an even larger share of the nation’s total wealth than in earlier eras.

Refusing to raise taxes on today’s affluent while cutting programs for contemporary young people subjects those younger generations to a double whammy. Not only does it mean that the federal government invests less in their health, nutrition, and education, but it also increases the odds that as adults they will be compelled to pay higher taxes to fund retirement benefits for the growing senior population.

Although Biden also wants to avoid cuts in entitlements for seniors, his call for raising more revenue from the affluent still creates a clear contrast with the GOP. By proposing higher taxes, Biden has been able to devise a budget that protects federal spending on kids and other domestic programs while also reducing the deficit. Biden’s budget proposal achieves greater generational balance than the GOP’s because the president asks today’s affluent earners, who are mostly older, to pay more in taxes to preserve spending that benefits young people. If Biden reaches a deal with congressional Republicans to avoid default, however, their price will inevitably include some form of spending cap that squeezes such programs: the real question is not whether, but how much.

Looming over these choices is the intertwined generational and racial re-sorting of the two parties’ electoral coalitions. As Riedl noted, especially in the Trump era, the GOP has become more dependent on older white people who are either eligible for the federal retirement programs or nearing eligibility. According to a new analysis published by Catalist, a Democratic electoral-targeting firm, white adults older than 45 accounted for just over half of all voters in the 2022 and 2018 midterm elections and just under half in the 2020 and 2016 presidential campaigns. But because those older white Americans have become such a solidly Republican bloc, they contributed about three-fifths of all GOP votes in the presidential years, and fully two-thirds of Republican votes in midterm elections.

Democrats, in turn, are growing more reliant on the diverse younger generations. Catalist found that Democrats have won 60 to 66 percent of Millennials and members of Generation Z combined in each of the past four elections. Those two generations have more than doubled their share of the total vote from 14 percent in 2008 to 31 percent in 2020. Adding in the very youngest members of Generation X, all voters younger than 45 provided almost 40 percent of Democrats’ votes in 2022, Catalist found, far more than their overall share (30 percent) of the electorate.

The inexorable long-term trajectory is for the diverse younger generations to increase their share of the vote while the mostly white older cohorts recede. In 2024, Millennials and Gen Z may, for the first time, cast as many ballots as the Baby Boomers and older generations; by 2028, they will almost certainly surpass the older groups. In the fight over the federal budget and debt ceiling—just as in the struggles over cultural issues unfolding in the states—Republicans appear to be racing to lock into law policies that favor their older, white base before the rising generations acquire the electoral clout to force a different direction.

As the government careens toward the brink of default without a deal to lift the debt limit, an unlikely source of reassurance has emerged.

“I think everyone needs to relax,” Mitch McConnell told reporters on Tuesday in his home state of Kentucky. “The country will not default.” The longtime Republican leader, who once boasted of being the Senate’s “grim reaper,” isn’t known for his soothing bedside manner. His equanimity was hard to reconcile with the vibes emanating from the Capitol on that particular day, where House Republican negotiators were accusing their Democratic counterparts in the White House of intransigence and insisting that the sides remained far apart.

The Treasury Department has said that if Congress does not raise the nation’s borrowing limit, the government could, as early as June 1, default on its debt for the first time. The economic repercussions could be catastrophic—first a market crash, then, economists believe, a recession. Because the House and Senate would need at least a few days to approve any agreement that President Joe Biden strikes with Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the real deadline could be even sooner.

But McConnell, who has spent nearly half of his 81 years on Earth in the Senate, has seen more than a few difficult negotiations. Despite all the histrionics—the censorious sound bites, the “red lines” each side has drawn, the breakdowns and “pauses”—the talks thus far haven’t looked all that different from past Washington deadline dances, which tend to end with a deal. “This is not that unusual,” McConnell said.

[Read: Why Biden caved]

The public feuding is actually a good sign, and so, in a way, is the delay. “They need this to run to the very last minute,” Brendan Buck, a former aide to Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan, told me. As Buck sees it, the theatrics between GOP and Democratic leaders is a necessary precursor to a deal, because it shows partisans on their respective sides that they fought as hard as they could before reaching a compromise.

Biden and McCarthy are trying to find a solution that can pass both a Republican-controlled House and a Democratic-controlled Senate. A quick-and-tidy agreement is likely to be viewed suspiciously by both parties, and particularly the GOP’s hard-right faction, which made McCarthy sweat out 15 votes to become speaker. “There’s no way McCarthy could have walked in two weeks ago, had a one-hour meeting with the president, and come out and said, ‘We have a deal,’” Matt Glassman, a former congressional aide who is now a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute, told me. “That would be just deadly for him with his conference.”

Today’s impasse has drawn comparisons to the debt-ceiling negotiations in 2011 between Boehner and then-President Barack Obama. Those talks featured even more drama, including the sudden collapse of a “grand bargain” and, later, a worried prime-time address to the nation from Obama. Even though the two parties have since drifted further apart (mostly thanks to the GOP’s move rightward), the gap between them in these negotiations is much smaller.

Back then, Obama was pushing aggressively for tax increases, while Boehner wanted several trillion dollars in spending cuts, including major changes to entitlement programs. Biden initially took a harder line this time, refusing for months to engage McCarthy in negotiations over the debt ceiling. But since backing off that position, he’s made only half-hearted—and swiftly rejected—attempts to get McCarthy to raise taxes or make any kind of policy concession. To the frustration of progressives, he’s even seemed willing to tighten work requirements for people receiving federal safety-net benefits. Republicans, for their part, have agreed not to seek cuts to Medicare or Social Security. “I don’t actually think this is that difficult of a deal to reach,” Buck said. Getting that deal through the House and the Senate, he said, will be more difficult, which is why both Biden and McCarthy will need to save the biggest deadline pressure for the votes themselves.

[Conor Clarke: There is no constitutional end run around the debt ceiling]

By most accounts, the parties are haggling chiefly over whether to freeze government spending at current levels—Biden’s latest offer—or cut as much as $130 billion by reverting to 2022 spending, as Republicans have proposed. Republicans want to exempt the Defense Department from any cuts, which is a sticking point for Democrats.

Considering the yawning philosophical differences between the parties, that’s not much of a gap. “Compromising over numbers isn’t that hard,” Glassman said. “It’s not like compromising over abortion.”

Look closer and there are other reasons for optimism. Although some of McCarthy’s members are urging him to hold fast to the conservative provisions of the debt-ceiling bill Republicans narrowly passed last month, the speaker has moved off those demands. Even the blowups have been timed, either intentionally or coincidentally, to avoid spooking investors and causing stock markets to slide. The White House meetings between McCarthy and Biden, for example, have all occurred after the markets closed, and the biggest breakdown in the talks (so far) happened over the weekend before negotiations resumed on Monday.

Republicans have many reasons for not causing a stock-market crash; the simplest is that they and many of their constituents would stand to lose a lot of money. Another possible reason is that party leaders, and McConnell especially, seem to recognize that a panic over the debt ceiling is not in their political interest and could undermine their negotiating position.

McConnell is not a soothsayer—his prediction that Donald Trump’s grip on the GOP would loosen, for example, has not exactly panned out. Nor is his confidence that the country will avert default merely a forecast from a disinterested observer. If McConnell is saying it, he must think it benefits Republicans for him to do so.

But even a self-interested assurance is one more indication of hope, a sign that Republicans want to prevent economic disaster. A debt-ceiling deal between Biden and McCarthy remains more likely than not. It might just take a few more days of posturing and setbacks before it happens.

It would have been better for Governor Ron DeSantis if his Twitter Spaces announcement had crashed altogether. As bad as the tech failures were, the really bad part of his presidential launch was the part when the tech worked—and the world could hear a man radically and pathetically unready for national leadership.

DeSantis won the governorship of Florida in 2018 after a campaign in which he proclaimed himself one of Donald Trump’s most zealous and fawning followers. His best-known ad showed him indoctrinating his infant children into the Trump cult: “Then Mr. Trump said, ‘You’re fired.’ I love that part.” That history raised the question: Could DeSantis ever emerge as his own man; could he transition from follower to leader?

Last night’s formal presidential announcement offered him a big-audience opportunity to reveal himself in a new role. Instead, he showed himself to be a beta to the bottom of his soul, one of nature’s henchmen.

After racing through his drab, standard-issue stump speech, DeSantis submitted himself to what felt like an old-time radio call-in show, hosted by Elon Musk and Musk’s business partner, David Sacks, who is also known as one of the most scornful anti-Ukraine trolls on Twitter. The two hosts made it clear that, in their opinion, DeSantis was the third-ranking attraction of the evening. They talked about Twitter, not about DeSantis’s presidential aspirations. They summoned callers from the weirdest corners of the far right. One of them needed to be reminded to unmute himself, like Grandpa on the Zoom call. Another praised DeSantis as a “cold-blooded, ruthless assassin”—this on the first anniversary of the Uvalde school massacre.

In the aftermath of the debacle, declaring a presidential run in a Twitter chat may appear to have been a miscalculation. Yet it started as a calculation entirely in keeping with DeSantis’s style of campaigning.

DeSantis’s ads raise barriers between the candidate and the voters. In his first one, voters again and again encounter the candidate via a screen: They see him on TV, on their phone. In the one scene in which the candidate is inserted among actual people, they look at one another and raise their phones toward him, presumably to video the encounter. In his second ad, DeSantis walks toward a speaker’s platform as somebody else’s voice delivers his message for him. Obviously, the directors of these ads are adopting strategies to cope with an immediate problem: DeSantis looks awkward when he interacts with people, and his voice is grating and uninspiring. But the unintended effect is to send a message that the candidate is a contrivance.

So it was unsurprising that DeSantis would make his announcement on what sounded like an amateur hour. He was literally invisible at his own announcement. He did not interact with voters. He was protected from direct exposure by the interposition of allies and supporters. Or such was the plan.  

[David A. Graham: The non-rise and actual fall of Ron DeSantis]

Only, the plan backfired. This time, DeSantis was not protected by all the layers of mediation around him. He was thoroughly and humiliatingly exposed.

Nobody ever seemed to have given any thought to the question What’s our message to the people we hope to persuade to our cause?

Watch some old announcement speeches on YouTube, and you see a carefully considered plan in every one. The candidates stand among family or supporters; they speak to particular crowds; they focus on biography or policy or some crisis of the day. Somebody has thought hard about why the candidate is there, what the candidate hopes to achieve, what the point of this exercise is.

DeSantis’s corporate sponsors had a plan. They were there to demonstrate the messaging potential of Twitter Spaces for far-right political content. That plan went awry when Twitter Spaces proved glitchy and unreliable, but still, a plan it was. DeSantis, though, had no plan. He just twirled about Elon Musk’s ballroom, dancing to Musk’s tune.

Why should Ron DeSantis be the Republican nominee, then perhaps ultimately the president of the United States? What does he hope to achieve for his country? Those were the questions he should have been seeking to answer, but almost all of his remarks were backwards-looking: about COVID, book bans, his feud with Disney. Whether you agreed or disagreed with his talking points, whether you thought his tone whining and aggrieved or righteous and defiant, everything he had to say was about the past, his past: how he’d been right and his critics had been unfair and wrong (he specifically complained about The Atlantic).

Announcement speeches are occasions for broad visions, reflections on the things that bind and unite Americans. Barack Obama expressed such a vision in 2007:

This campaign can’t only be about me. It must be about us. It must be about what we can do together. This campaign must be the occasion, the vehicle, of your hopes, and your dreams. It will take your time, your energy, and your advice to push us forward when we’re doing right, and let us know when we’re not. This campaign has to be about reclaiming the meaning of citizenship, restoring our sense of common purpose, and realizing that few obstacles can withstand the power of millions of voices calling for change.

George W. Bush hit the same notes in 1999:

We will also tell every American, “The dream is for you.” Tell forgotten children in failed schools, “The dream is for you.” Tell families, from the barrios of L.A. to the Rio Grande Valley: “El sueno americano es para ti.” Tell men and women in our decaying cities, “The dream is for you.” Tell confused young people, starved of ideals, “The dream is for you.” This is the kind of campaign we must run.

There was no such message from DeSantis for Americans in 2023. No dreams, no commonality. It was a message for a faction, not a nation. It was a small message for a big country. DeSantis has gotten this far by identifying enemies rather than building coalitions—but it now seems that “this far” is as far as he’s going to go.

Into the gap where the intentional message should have gone, DeSantis’s true message inserted itself. He’s a divider who seeks a position that usually is won by unifiers. To the question of his potential for the highest office, he showed us once again that he is merely one of nature’s followers hoping to thrust himself into a leadership role that does not suit him.

[David Frum: Is Ron DeSantis flaming out already?]

DeSantis likes to present himself as a man eager for political combat. In a 2022 ad for reelection as governor, he dressed up in a flight suit and pretended to instruct fellow pilots: “Never, ever back down from a fight.” His super PAC is literally named “Never Back Down.” Yet in the fight immediately upon him, the fight against Trump for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, DeSantis always backs down. He may deal the occasional side insult in oblique, passive-aggressive language that does not mention Trump by name. He decries a “culture of losing” in the GOP, and maybe that’s supposed to imply that Trump did, in fact, lose the presidential election of 2020. But DeSantis does not dare say so explicitly—and it’s almost unimaginable that he’d ever have the nerve to say so to Trump’s face on a debate stage, assuming he ever had the nerve to share a debate stage with Trump at all.

“Trump specializes in creating dominance-and-submission rituals,” I wrote here a year ago. “Roll over once, and you cannot get back on your feet again.” DeSantis has rolled over so often for Trump that by now he qualifies for a job with Cirque du Soleil. Trump attacks, and DeSantis bleeds; Trump attacks again, and DeSantis bleeds some more. DeSantis is tough on gay school teachers, tough on Disney, but weak on foreign dictators and weak on Trump.

Bill Clinton used to say that “strong and wrong beats weak and right.” DeSantis already bet his political career on the hope that truculence and peevishness might be perceived as strength. That bet was proving a bad one even before his self-abasing announcement event. It looks even worse afterward.

[David Frum: Never again Trump]

Those of us who identify as Never Trump Republicans are sometimes challenged: Why don’t we  back DeSantis, the poll-leading alternative to Trump? One answer was to doubt that DeSantis ever presented much of an alternative. Back in 2021, a wealthy Floridian who had donated to DeSantis’s campaigns for governor cautioned me, “There are two kinds of people in politics: those who think DeSantis is a viable national candidate, and those who have met Ron DeSantis.”

Yet even assuming his viability, the question remains for us: What kind of alternative would DeSantis be? We did not want Trump’s abuse of power for selfish advantage replicated by a president who differed from Trump only by arriving at the office on time instead of watching television until 11 a.m. We did not want a more efficient use of nontransparency to conceal financial corruption. We did not want more strenuous disdain for allies—Ukraine today, who knows who else tomorrow? We did not want a more systematic and shrewd exploitation of tensions in American society, more deft manipulation of resentments along lines of race, faith, sex, region, and educational attainment.

Never Trump Republicans want a free-trade, free-market economic conservative. We want a Republican who upholds the rule of law, defends free institutions, and supports democracies under fire. We want honor, character, and largeness of spirit. Is that too much to ask from our former political home? And if so, why would we return to it?