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.

Replies have been edited for length and clarity.

Last week I asked readers if they want Ron DeSantis’s Republican primary campaign to succeed or to fail.

Ann wants DeSantis to win the nomination over Donald Trump:

DeSantis had a really good interview with Trey Gowdy on the Fox News Channel. He seemed strong, grounded, realistic, determined, capable, balanced, and smart. And he has the values we as Americans should embrace (at least most of them). Donald Trump, unfortunately, cannot control himself. He is too irrational, too narcissistic, and not smart. I voted for Trump the last time, but I hope that I get to vote for DeSantis this time.

Many readers disagreed about whether they feared Trump or DeSantis more. For example, Matt’s top priority is preventing Trump from returning to the White House:

While I won’t be voting for Ron DeSantis in the general election, I might use my primary vote for him. As much as I hope that Joe Biden would beat Donald Trump, I don’t want to take that chance. I would gladly have the lesser of the evils. DeSantis is a performative conservative populist: traditional, Harvard-educated conservatism wrapped in “stick it to the libs” showmanship. He probably stands the best chance to beat Trump. And while I find his politics abhorrent, Trump represents a much larger threat to democracy. DeSantis would be an iterative Republican president. Trump is dangerous, and I wouldn’t take the risk. Practically every other option on the table is better than Trump 2.0.

I’m getting tired of these existential-crisis elections. I miss the days of Obama/Romney, Bush/Kerry, even Obama/McCain. If the other team won, I didn’t doubt the continuation of the Union.

Trump would pose that threat; DeSantis, less so.

Similarly, Steve feels confident that Trump would be awful, while DeSantis, whose behavior in Florida he dislikes, is more of an unknown quantity:

When Trump won, I was hoping that the gravity of the office would somehow enable him to rise to the occasion of personal and professional competence and greatness. Alas, after less than a month in service he demonstrated that this was not to be. Unfortunately, his administration rolled incompetently downhill from there. I feel that as unacceptable as I view DeSantis’s political machinations in his home state of Florida, I’m hoping that much of his socially deplorable behavior and policy there is primarily to satisfy the MAGA base, to get elected. I’m hoping that if he got elected—unlike Trump, who would embark on his revenge and self-aggrandizement tour—DeSantis could, and hopefully would, revert back to the middle under the sacred weight of the Oval Office and perform more credibly for all. At least there’d be a chance—unlike for the ex-president.

Robert fleshes out why Trump is ostensibly worse:

Every American should want DeSantis to beat Trump in the primary. Every American should want anyone to beat Trump in the primary. Trump brazenly violated his oath of office. It was the worst betrayal in American history—worse even than the Confederacy, because that at least didn’t come from the White House itself.

For 224 years, power passed peacefully from one presidential administration to the next. It was something we were proud of. Trump ended that tradition. He has no place in public life.

DeSantis is a smarmy, unimaginative little bully. Even without considering his political positions, he is in every respect a worse man than Biden. We don’t know if he won’t accept the results of the 2024 election if he loses. But we know Trump won’t.

And Paul sketches out a bank-shot scenario:

I would like DeSantis to win, because Trump would be so betrayed and angry—his fragile ego crushed—that he would take his revenge by running as a third-party candidate, practically ensuring a victory for the Democrats and Joe Biden.

In contrast, Emelia fears DeSantis more:

The difference is that DeSantis will carry out and see through his plans. The one advantage of Trump (as awful as he is) is that he can’t focus long enough to see anything through. Often I suspect that many centrists and liberals’ only real issue with Trump is that he’s crass and rude. Plenty of other politicians have policies just as harmful but display basic social niceties.

SHG offered similar analysis:

I had hoped that DeSantis could finally free the Republican Party from Trump’s clutches, but between his positions on abortion, free speech, academic freedom, and pardoning some of the convicted January 6 insurrectionists, I fear that DeSantis will be an uncharismatic—but potentially more capable and therefore more dangerous—Trump-Lite.

Gary disagrees––he wants DeSantis to win the primary and wouldn’t mind if he won the general election too:

I would like to see Governor DeSantis as the Republican nominee. He is very competent at governing. Why is he better than President Biden? Because of his mental acuity and physical stamina. Second, he governs from a more right-of-center position rather than a far-left position.

Conservatism and liberalism both have attractive components to guide a nation’s policies. Too much of either simply causes more division. My distinct feeling is that Biden has little to actually say about policy and that “puppet masters” with a much more radical leftist view are actually developing policy and shaping his public statements.

Another sizable group of Democratic readers are sanguine because they are confident that Biden will win reelection. Here’s Chadd:

As a resident of south Florida, I deplore everything that Ron DeSantis stands for. That said, I think that Trump versus Biden 2024 is a foregone conclusion, and I’m actually fine with it. Of course Democrats are gonna run Biden again. He’s a winner, and regardless of the hair-on-fire coverage on Fox and conservative media, most everyone I know is better off than they were two years ago, and the news isn’t the constant chaos that defined Trump’s presidency.

People want calm. People want to feel safe and that the government functions and isn’t out to get them. Biden has given us a sense of calm, professionalism, and decency that was missed during the Trump years.

I think the establishment Dems want Trump to win the nomination. I don’t know if it’s a conscious effort or just what’s happening, but that’s how it seems. A two-time loser (if we’re going just on popular vote) versus a three-time winner who got the most votes of any presidential candidate in history! The answer is right in front of us.

G. is a college student in Florida:

I may have a bit of a biased perspective, considering that DeSantis just recently barred federal or state funds to DEI programs, but please hear me out. The amount of disrespect DeSantis has for the younger members of Florida’s voter constituency is absolutely something he would bring with him to the White House. He has given up on persuading portions of our age group to support him genuinely, while limiting the amount of information we have access to. A DeSantis administration means that the entire nation would be constantly patronized while DeSantis uses the power of the executive branch to fight a culture war.

I feel inclined to defend my university and my high school’s excellent dual-enrollment and AP programs from the suggestion that they are “woke indoctrination,” because I was never intellectually stifled, censored, or repressed by either of them. We were freely allowed to discuss and exchange serious ideas. There was no one who was too fragile to debate me if we disagreed. We discussed current LGBTQ+ issues in a way that was respectful and dignified. In the Women’s Studies course I took this year, I argued for the end of femininity as a relevant cultural concept, and no one batted an eye. This is an extremely niche viewpoint, but I was allowed to advocate for it theoretically, because my campus was indoctrinating no one and everyone taking this course was there by choice.

DeSantis does not know what it is like to be on a Florida campus, learning and growing and forming ideals. He went to Harvard. I believe Biden could win if voters had to choose between him and Trump.

The Republican Party desires the brute-force approach DeSantis takes. The culture wars energize their base, the fiscal conservatism energizes their rich donors, and DeSantis is considerably younger than Biden. He could very well beat Biden, so I’m hoping he never gets past Trump.

I. S. is ready for a new generation of politicians:

I would take any of the Republicans over Trump. I would take any of the Democrats over Biden. It’s long past time for that generation to start spending more time with their families.

Arlene advocates for a matriarchy in which I, too, would be replaced:

I want every Republican to lose. I would love to have every white man over 40 replaced by a woman. If we want to preserve America, the America I believe in, we cannot let either of these Republican men win. I don’t know what happened to the Republican Party. I am a white woman of 66 years, and I have never seen such selfishness!

Women are who will save America.   

Vickie wants a unity ticket that she knows won’t happen:

I am a registered Republican. I am also socially liberal. I did not and would never vote for Donald Trump. Ron DeSantis frightens me. He is much smarter than Trump, but not much better. I vacillate back and forth.  Biden isn’t a great choice either. If the Democrats had a better candidate, I’d probably go DeSantis. Since Biden beat Trump once, I’ll wager he can do so again.

I would love to see a mixed-party ticket. I know that I live in fantasy land, but I really believe that would make a major contribution toward the return of a rational democracy. We need two strong, realistic parties. Present strife hurts both.

The Democratic president and Republican speaker are trying to win over lawmakers to the plan in time to avert a default.

Sigmund Freud had a rule. However irresistible the temptation to burrow into the inner life of kings, prime ministers, and tycoons, he wouldn’t analyze famous contemporaries from afar. It just wasn’t right to rummage around in the mind of a subject who didn’t consent to the practice. But in the end, he found one leader so fascinating and so maddening that his ethical qualms apparently melted away.

From the distance of the present, it’s almost impossible to imagine that Woodrow Wilson was the one public figure whom Freud felt compelled to put on the couch. But that’s because the current prevailing image of the early-20th-century president—an enforcer of white supremacy, an enemy of civil liberties, a man preserved in sepia photographs as an unsmiling prig wearing a pair of pince-nez—is so remote from the near-messianic character that he cut in his day.

When Wilson arrived in France at the end of 1918, one month after the armistice that ended the Great War, he was greeted by adoring crowds hanging out of windows, crowding sidewalks, and chanting his name. “An immense cry of love,” read the six-column headline in Le Petit Parisien. That tableau followed him to every European city he visited. What he represented was, in fact, redemption: the promise of eternal peace and the dawn of a new world order.

Of all the politicians of his day, Wilson most clearly envisioned the better world that could emerge from war, built on values of self-determination and democracy. He not only had the best plan for realizing his high ideals, but he also possessed an acute understanding of what might go wrong if the Allies allowed their sense of grievance to drive them to impose harsh terms on the vanquished. Wilson’s failure to make good on these bloated expectations was the source of Freud’s fascination and fury, as it was for a generation of intellectuals.

[Read: The racist legacy of Woodrow Wilson]

Some of the animosity that Freud and other critics aimed at Wilson was unfair: After dinging him for negotiating a treaty they regarded as dangerously misguided, they turned around and chided him for his inability to shepherd it through the U.S Senate, an institution he had carefully studied during his long, celebrated career as a professor. That failure was further evidence, they argued, of Wilson’s abominable statesmanship. He refused to make concessions to his critics, even when that was clearly his only viable choice. And in the end, unable to achieve the purest form of his plans, he bizarrely instructed the Senate to reject a modified version of the treaty altogether. More than any of his enemies, he was responsible for shattering his own dreams. The Senate’s failure to ratify the treaty was one of the greatest embarrassments in the history of the presidency.

Wilson’s inexplicable choices, his extreme stubbornness, demanded a psychological explanation, perhaps one that scrutinized childhood traumas. This was Freud’s business, and he couldn’t resist. Eleven years after the Senate rejected Wilson’s treaty, the world’s most famous psychoanalyst began writing a long study of Wilson’s mind, in collaboration with the American diplomat William C. Bullitt, who had been one of Wilson’s aides. At Freud’s urging, Bullitt went back and interviewed a slew of Wilson’s closest friends and advisers so that the pair could devise their own intimate theory of Wilson’s failures. What emerged was a scathing indictment of Wilson, whom they depicted as neurotic and self-sabotaging, in what was a polemic masquerading as dispassionate biography.

Their book, Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study, has a life and afterlife nearly as complicated and fascinating as its subject. The manuscript sat unpublished for nearly 35 years. When it finally appeared—in 1966, long after Freud’s death in 1939—the doctor’s daughter Anna, a fanatical guardian of her father’s reputation, worked to discredit the final product. (She even managed to tweak a draft of a review panning the work that ran in The New York Times—and succeeded in persuading the book’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin, to nix a preface to the book written by one of Freud’s disciples.) The controversy over the book was such that The New York Review of Books covered it with vituperative essays from mid-century powerhouse intellectuals such as Erik Erikson and Richard Hofstadter. Many of the critics doubted that Freud played a meaningful role in the production of the manuscript, because some of its interpretations deviated from Freudian orthodoxies, and the prose was clunkier and more repetitive than in his masterworks. The doubts stoked in those reviews have hovered over the book ever since.

Patrick Weil, a researcher at both Yale Law School and the French National Centre for Scientific Research, has written a lively book about the book, The Madman in the White House—a work of archival digging that digressively caroms across subjects, from Paris in 1919 to interwar Vienna to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Washington. Even if his attempt to defend the lasting value of Freud’s book isn’t entirely convincing, he has written a vivid shaggy-dog story about a curio that illuminates the possibilities (and perils) of studying the psychological soundness of presidents—a discipline as relevant as ever.

What makes Weil’s book most compelling is that he has a charming, somewhat caddish central character in Freud’s co-writer, William C. Bullitt: a swashbuckling diplomat, a successful novelist, and a bullheaded political operator who habitually provoked controversy.

As a 20-something, Bullitt traveled to Paris as part of Wilson’s entourage, sitting by the president’s side as he presided over negotiations that would end the war. Wilson’s alter ego and closest adviser, Colonel Edward House, stocked the American delegation in France with bright young Ivy Leaguers, but Bullitt received the most exciting assignment of the lot. In early 1919, House furtively dispatched him to Moscow to explore a deal with Vladimir Lenin that would establish American diplomatic relations with the Bolsheviks. That trip ruptured Bullitt’s relationship with Wilson. Word of his mission to Russia leaked and was blasted in the Daily Mail, which accused Bullitt of working on behalf of Jewish interests seeking to bolster the Communists. The British publicly distanced themselves from his efforts. When Bullitt returned with the outlines of agreement, Wilson kept canceling their appointments. (Wilson claimed he had a headache.) The whole effort awkwardly withered.

Cut off from his access to Wilson, Bullitt resigned from the administration—and wrote a letter listing the many reasons that he considered the president’s peace negotiations a disaster. Anticipating what would be the main lines of criticism from John Maynard Keynes and Walter Lippmann, Bullitt accused Wilson of abandoning his high ideals. He had allowed the other victorious Allied nations to impose unnecessarily harsh terms on the vanquished. The emerging peace settlement transgressed the slogan that Wilson had promised would guide their thinking: “Peace without victory.”  

The resignation of a 28-year-old aide would not have normally grabbed global headlines. But Bullitt, with his flair for spectacle, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and bluntly accused Wilson of lying about what took place at Versailles, dramatically wielding Wilson’s own typewritten notes as evidence. It was a public turn that profoundly wounded the treaty’s prospects of being ratified in the Senate. And in the days that followed Bullitt’s testimony, Wilson complained of more “blinding headaches, breathing difficulties, and exhaustion.” His physical deterioration progressed: drooling and the drooping of the left side of his face, followed by the paralysis of half his body. His stroke was so severe that the aides feared his imminent death and considered how they might replace him. Physically, politically, and perhaps cognitively, Wilson no longer had the capacity to fight for his treaty. He never recovered.

Bullitt’s anger toward Wilson was itself worthy of psychoanalysis—and, in fact, Bullitt found himself in Vienna in 1926, knocking on Freud’s door and asking if he would take him on as a patient. Bullitt’s marriage was crumbling, and he had lost his sense of professional purpose. Apparently, Freud recognized his name and agreed to admit Bullitt to what the diplomat called the “sacred couch.”

The relationship wasn’t a straightforward doctor-patient one, and their long conversations would invariably circle back to their shared animus toward Wilson and their mutual disappointment in his ineffectual leadership. The former president was the unevictable tenant squatting in Bullitt’s mind, and he used his sessions to hash out the contents of a play that he was writing about Wilson. Bullitt dedicated the script, which never made it to the stage, to “my friend Sigmund Freud.”

Four years into their relationship, Bullitt described a book he wanted to write about the leaders who populated the Paris Peace Conference and their personalities. He asked if Freud might want to write the chapter on Wilson. Despite his principled reservations about analyzing public figures, Freud loved the idea. Bullitt sensed an opportunity and suggested that Freud’s chapter become the whole of the book. Freud agreed, on the condition that Bullitt perform the donkey work of compiling the raw material that would allow them to sketch their shared analysis.  

As they began researching and writing the book, Freud told him, “I hope one result of the publication of this work will be your reintroduction to politics.” But it was precisely Bullitt’s reintroduction to politics that scuttled the publication of their work. Just as they finished their collaboration in 1932, Bullitt told Freud that he worried that the book might undermine his chances for a job in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s incoming administration. Publishing a scathing portrait of the previous Democratic president, a president whom FDR revered, might be received as evidence that Bullitt was a loose cannon. His caution was rewarded. Roosevelt named Bullitt the first American ambassador to the Soviet Union.

From his perch in Moscow, Bullitt mentored George Kennan, his deputy, and befriended the novelist Mikhail Bulgakov. In 1935, he hosted perhaps the most famous party in American diplomatic history, a spring festival that included an aviary in the embassy’s great hall, white roosters in glass cages, a menagerie that included goats, a banquet table covered in a lawn of emerald-green grass, and a baby bear that sipped champagne. (The bear vomited on a Soviet general.) Bulgakov, who attended, used the party as inspiration for a memorable set piece in The Master and Margarita.

In 1936, after three years of aggravating back-and-forth with Stalin—Bullitt described him as “a wiry Gipsy with roots and emotions beyond my experience”—Roosevelt rescued Bullitt from Moscow and relocated him to Paris, where he remained ambassador until the Nazi invasion. Bullitt styled himself as Roosevelt’s roving emissary in Europe—and made it his mission to serve as Freud’s protector once the continent became a dangerous place for a famous Jewish doctor. After the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, Bullitt pushed German diplomats to let Freud leave—and he dispatched the American chargé d’affaires in Vienna to rescue their manuscript before the Nazis had a chance to rifle through Freud’s study. When the Freud family finally departed on the Orient Express, the State Department supplied a bodyguard to watch over them.

Despite his diplomatic skills, Bullitt frequently said the undiplomatic thing. He began to regard FDR as hopelessly soft on communism and dangerously duped by Stalin. Estranged from the administration, he became a brash freelancer. Toward the end of the war, he enlisted in Charles DeGaulle’s Free France army. (He was run over by a vehicle during fighting in Alsace and spent two months in the hospital.) And in the aftermath of the conflict, his commitment to the anti-communist cause took him to Taiwan, where he advised Chiang Kai-shek. Back at home, he adopted Richard Nixon as his foreign-policy protégé.

Only at the very end of his life did Bullitt’s thoughts return to releasing the Wilson book into the world. Weil suggests that Bullitt spent decades dithering over publishing it, because he harbored misgivings about some of its sensational conclusions.

Weil’s speculation is grounded in his sleuthing. He tracked down the long-lost versions of the book, following the scent to a box filled with drafts in an archive at Yale. What he discovered settles some of the old debates about Freud’s authorship. Weil found the good doctor’s signature on each chapter of the manuscript, evidence that he considered himself the book’s intellectual co-owner.

[Read: How Sigmund Freud wanted to die]

But after Freud’s death, Bullitt kept on editing. As he prepared the text for publication, he cut some of its most incendiary claims. He culled passages about Wilson’s teenage masturbatory habits and excised sections implying that Wilson was a latent homosexual. (One of Wilson’s aides would share his bed on the president’s speaking tours, but he also testified that there was never any hint of sex.) In effect, Bullitt was trying to save the book from the embarrassing excesses of Freudianism.

Still, the work remained an unabashed expression of Freudian theory, placing Wilson at the center of an Oedipal drama. The president appears in its pages as a hopeless neurotic trying to best the father he revered and resented. The book argues that Wilson cast his father as God—and himself as Christ, a long-suffering servant. This accounts for Wilson’s tendency to accuse his closest confidants of betrayal, and for his sanctimony.   

Weil struggles to make a compelling case for the interpretative value of Freud and Bullitt’s book. But in describing the manuscript, he also damns it by calling attention to its tenuous claims. For example: Wilson’s overbearing father was a Presbyterian minister—and as a teenager, Wilson idolized British prime ministers, especially William Gladstone, whose speeches he memorized; as an academic, Wilson argued that American presidents should behave more like their counterparts in the U.K. It was a theory he tried to turn into practice: Once he became head of state, he initially styled himself as a parliamentary leader. Freud and Bullitt trumpet this fascination with becoming prime minister as evidence of his desire to be a more important minister than his father, one-upmanship in his Oedipal struggle.

To the extent that Weil has a larger point to make, it’s that the character of political leaders matters. It’s hard to disagree with that. Certainly, recent American history provides a disturbing confirmation of the importance of presidential temperament. But, as Freud and Bullitt’s book illustrates, it can also be a distorting obsession. The focus on presidential character tends to overstate its importance and to encourage what’s been called Green Lanternism, the idea, coined by the political scientist Brendan Nyhan, that a president could accomplish more if only they tried harder.

The psychological approach can flatten the career of a politician. If Wilson had a self-defeating Christ complex, how, then, is it possible to explain the many domestic accomplishments of his first term? More bizarrely, Freud and Bullitt downplay Wilson’s stroke, which clearly incapacitated him at a crucial moment in his presidency and exacerbated his stubbornness. His mental and physical deterioration remained dangerously out of public view, and the constitutional system faltered in its attempts to compensate for his incapacity and limit the damage he inflicted in his deteriorated state—an object lesson in how not to deal with an impaired president.

Even though Weil hints at his own quibbles with the thesis of the Freud-Bullitt collaboration, he doesn’t voice those objections very loudly, because they would diminish his justification for writing this book. But Freud should have never violated his own rule.

Depending on whom you ask in politics, the sudden advances in artificial intelligence will either transform American democracy for the better or bring about its ruin. At the moment, the doomsayers are louder. Voice-impersonation technology and deep-fake videos are scaring campaign strategists, who fear that their deployment in the days before the 2024 election could decide the winner. Even some AI developers are worried about what they’ve unleashed: Last week the CEO of the company behind ChatGPT practically begged Congress to regulate his industry. (Whether that was genuine civic-mindedness or self-serving performance remains to be seen.)

Amid the growing panic, however, a new generation of tech entrepreneurs is selling a more optimistic future for the merger of AI and politics. In their telling, the awesome automating power of AI has the potential to achieve in a few years what decades of attempted campaign-finance reform have failed to do—dramatically reduce the cost of running for election in the United States. With AI’s ability to handle a campaign’s most mundane and time-consuming tasks—think churning out press releases or identifying and targeting supporters—candidates would have less need to hire high-priced consultants. The result could be a more open and accessible democracy, in which small, bare-bones campaigns can compete with well-funded juggernauts.

Martin Kurucz, the founder of a Democratic fundraising company that is betting big on AI, calls the technology “a great equalizer.” “You will see a lot more representation,” he told me, “because people who didn’t have access to running for elected office now will have that. That in and of itself is huge.”

[Annie Lowrey: AI isn’t omnipotent. It’s janky.]

Kurucz told me that his firm, Sterling Data Company, has used AI to help more than 1,000 Democratic campaigns and committees, including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and now-Senator John Fetterman, identify potential donors. The speed with which AI can sort through donor files meant that Sterling was able to cut its prices last year by nearly half, Kurucz said, allowing even small campaigns to afford its services. “I don’t think there have ever been this many down-ballot candidates with some level of digital fundraising operation,” Kurucz said. “These candidates now have access to a proper campaign infrastructure.”

Campaigns big and small have begun using generative-AI software such as ChatGPT and DALL-E to create digital ads, proofread, and even write press releases and fundraising pitches. A handful of consultants told me they were mostly just experimenting with AI, but Kurucz said that its influence is more pervasive. “Almost half of the first drafts of fundraising emails are being produced by ChatGPT,” he claimed. “Not many [campaigns] will publicly admit it.”

The adoption of AI may not be such welcome news, however, for voters who are already sick of being bombarded with ads, canned emails, and fundraising requests during election season. Advertising will become even more hyper-targeted, Tom Newhouse, a GOP strategist, told me, because campaigns can use AI to sort through voter data, run performance tests, and then create dozens of highly specific ads with far fewer staff. The shift, he said, could narrow the gap between small campaigns and their richer rivals.

But several political consultants I spoke with were skeptical that the technology would democratize campaigning anytime soon. For one, AI won’t aid only the scrappy, underfunded campaigns. Deeper-pocketed organizations could use it to expand their capacity exponentially, whether to test and quick produce hundreds of highly specific ads or pinpoint their canvassing efforts in ways that widen their advantage.

Amanda Litman, the founder of Run for Something, an organization that recruits first-time progressive candidates, told me that the office seekers she works with aren’t focused on AI. Hyperlocal races are still won by the candidates who knock on the most doors; robots haven’t taken up that task, and even if they could, who would want them to? “The most important thing for a candidate is the relationship with a voter,” Litman said. “AI can’t replicate that. At least not yet.”

Although campaigns have started using AI, its impact—even to people in politics—is not always apparent. Fetterman’s Pennsylvania campaign worked with Kurucz’s AI-first firm, but two former advisers to Fetterman scoffed at the suggestion that the technology contributed meaningfully to his victory. “I don’t remember anyone using AI for anything on that campaign,” Kenneth Pennington, a digital consultant and one of the Fetterman campaign’s earliest hires, told me. Pennington is a partner at a progressive consulting firm called Middle Seat, which he said had not adopted the use of generative AI in any significant way and had no immediate plans to. “Part of what our approach and selling point is as a team, and as a firm, is authenticity and creativity, which I think is not a strong suit of a tool like ChatGPT,” Pennington said. “It’s robotic. I don’t think it’s ready for prime time in politics.”

If AI optimists and pessimists agree on anything, it’s that the technology will allow more people to participate in the political process. Whether that’s a good thing is another question.

Just as AI platforms could allow, say, a schoolteacher running for city council to draft press releases in between grading papers, so too can they help a far-right activist with millions of followers create a semi-believable deep-fake video of President Joe Biden announcing a military draft.

“We’ve democratized access to the ability to create sophisticated fakes,” Hany Farid, a digital-forensics expert at UC Berkeley, told me.

Fears over deep-fakes have escalated in the past month. In response to Biden’s formal declaration of his reelection bid, the Republican National Committee released a video that used AI-generated images to depict a dystopian future. Within days, Democratic Representative Yvette Clarke of New York introduced legislation to require political ads to disclose any use of generative AI (which the RNC ad did). Early this month, the bipartisan American Association of Political Consultants issued a statement condemning the use of “deep-fake generative AI content” as a violation of its code of ethics.

[Read: Just wait until Trump is a chatbot]

Nearly everyone I interviewed for this story expressed some degree of concern over the role that deep-fakes could play in the 2024 election. One scenario that came up repeatedly was the possibility that a compelling deep-fake could be released on the eve of the election, leaving too little time for it to be widely debunked. Clarke told me she worried specifically about a bad actor suppressing the vote by releasing invented audio or video of a trusted voice in a particular community announcing a change or closure of polling sites.

But the true nightmare scenario is what Farid called “death by a thousand cuts”—a slow bleed of deep-fakes that destroys trust in authentic sound bites and videos. “If we enter this world where anything could be fake, you can deny reality. Nothing has to be real,” Farid said.

This alarm extends well beyond politics. A consortium of media and tech companies are advocating for a global set of standards for the use of AI, including efforts to authenticate images and videos as well as to identify, through watermarks or other digital fingerprints, content that has been generated or manipulated by AI. The group is led by Adobe, whose Photoshop helped introduce the widespread use of computer-image editing. “We believe that this is an existential threat to democracy if we don’t solve the deep-fake problem,” Dana Rao, Adobe’s general counsel, told me. “If people don’t have a way to believe the truth, we’re not going to be able to decide policy, laws, government issues.”

Not everyone is so concerned. As vice president of the American Association of Political Consultants, Larry Hyuhn helped draft the statement that the organization put out denouncing deep-fakes and warning its members against using them. But he’s relatively untroubled about the threats they pose. “Frankly, in my experience, it’s harder than everyone thinks it is,” said Hyuhn, whose day job is providing digital strategy to Democratic clients who include Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. “Am I afraid of it? No,” Hyuhn told me. “Does it concern me that there are always going to be bad actors doing bad things? That’s just life.”

Betsy Hoover, a former Obama-campaign organizer who now runs a venture-capital fund that invests in campaign tech, argued that voters are more discerning than people give them credit for. In her view, decades of steadily more sophisticated disinformation campaigns have conditioned the electorate to question what they see on the internet. “Voters have had to decide what to listen to and where to get their information for a really long time,” she told me. “And at the end of the day, for the most part, they’ve figured it out.”

Deep-fake videos are sure to get more convincing, but for the time being, many are pretty easy to spot. Those that impersonate Biden, for example, do a decent job of capturing his voice and appearance. But they make him sound slightly, well, younger than he is. His speech is smoother, without the verbal stumbles and stuttering that have become more pronounced in recent years. The technology “does require someone with some real skill to make use of,” he said. “You can give me a football; I still can’t throw it 50 yards.”

The same limitations apply to AI’s potential for revolutionizing campaigns, as anyone who’s played around with ChatGPT can attest. When I asked ChatGPT to write a press release from the Trump campaign announcing a hypothetical endorsement of the former president by his current Republican rival, Nikki Haley, within seconds the bot delivered a serviceable first draft that accurately captured the format of a press release and made up believable, if generic, quotes from Trump and Haley. But it omitted key background information that any junior-level staffer would have known to include—that Haley was the governor of South Carolina, for example, and then served as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations.

Still, anyone confident enough to predict AI’s impact on an election nearly a year and a half away is making a risky bet. ChatGPT didn’t even exist six months ago. Uncertainty pervaded my conversations with the technology’s boosters and skeptics alike. Pennington told me to take everything he said about AI, both its promise and its peril, “with a grain of salt” because he could be proved wrong. “I think some people are overhyping it. I think some people are not thinking about it who should be,” Hoover said. “There’s a really wide spectrum because all of this is just evolving so much day to day.”

[Read: Bots are destroying political discourse as we know it]

That constant and rapid evolution is what sets AI apart from other technologies that have been touted as democratic disrupters. “This is one of the few technologies in the history of planet Earth that is continuously and exponentially bettering itself,” Kurucz, Sterling’s founder, said. Of all the predictions I heard about AI’s impact on campaigns, his were the most assured. (Because AI forms the basis of his sales pitch to clients, perhaps his prognostication, too, should be taken with a grain of salt.) Although he was unsure exactly how fast AI could transform campaigns, he was certain it would.

“You no longer need average people and average consultants and average anything,” Kurucz said. “Because AI can do average.” He compared the skeptics in his field to executives at Blockbuster who passed on the chance to buy Netflix before the start-up eventually destroyed the video-rental giant. “The old guard,” Kurucz concluded, “is just not ready to be replaced.”

Hoover offered no such bravado, but she said Democrats in particular shouldn’t let their fears of AI stop them from trying to harness its potential. “The genie is out of the bottle,” she said. “We have a choice, then, as campaigners: to take the good from it and allow it to make our work better and more effective, or to hide under a rock and pretend it’s not here, because we’re afraid of it.”

“I don’t think we can afford to do the latter,” she added.

As clocks across Washington, D.C., struck 1 on the morning of March 4, 1879, the Capitol bustled with activity. Sleepless tourists packed its halls; Cabinet secretaries stayed huddled in consultation with congressmen; diplomats and socialites remained shoulder-to-shoulder in the Senate viewing gallery, transfixed by the scene unfolding below them.

They were all witnessing a grimly fascinating event—one that few Americans had, until that moment, thought possible: Their government was about to run out of money. More startling, the reason for its insolvency was not some economic crisis, nor war, but a deliberate act of sabotage. For the first time, one party had decided to withhold federal funding in an attempt to extort policy change from the other.

Modern Americans have grown tragically accustomed to party politics interrupting the core functions of government. Federal shutdowns seem to come and go like bad-weather events. President Joe Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy are currently sparring over what it will take for Congress to raise the nation’s debt ceiling so that we don’t default on our debts. That is what makes the country’s first self-inflicted funding crisis so fascinating: In the events informing the almost-shutdown of 1879—and the force that eventually resolved it—are lessons that might help us snap out of what has become an awful national habit.

The possible 1879 shutdown was devised with a particularly nefarious policy goal in mind. The House was controlled by the Democratic Party, whose representatives wanted to force Republican President Rutherford Hayes to yield what remained of Black voting rights in the post-Reconstruction South. To achieve this, they attached “riders” to crucial funding bills in the spring of 1879—addendums explicitly banning federal troops from monitoring southern polling sites against violence or fraud. When Hayes refused to sign these, Congress adjourned on March 4 without having passed sufficient funds for the government to operate. The president was forced to immediately summon a special session.

The battle had been met, but already its outcome was essentially decided. The Democrats’ unprecedented attempt to use their budgetary influence to secure policy change was doomed to fail, for three reasons.

The first was the president’s refusal to come to the bargaining table. From the onset of the funding standoff, Hayes expressed outrage at both its goal (as a friend had explained to him: to help Democrats “kill with impunity so many negroes as … to frighten the survivors from the polls of the South”) and its brazenness. He ruled out any compromise, promising to veto any new funding bills containing the riders. “It will be a severe, perhaps a long contest,” he wrote. Still, Hayes continued, “I do not fear it. I do not even dread it.”  

The second reason for the shutdown’s futility presented itself after Hayes’s announcement. Now confident in White House support, House Republicans—led by future President James Garfield—developed an aggressive floor plan aimed at publicly confronting Democrats for gambling with the economic and social well-being of the country.

Garfield’s March 29 House speech launching this strategy shocked even Republicans with its vigor. Arms waving, the minority leader spent an hour accusing Democrats of treason for taking the government fiscally hostage. Garfield was a famously mild-mannered presence in Congress, but he could not contain his fury at the abuse of procedural power on display. He decried it as a potential deathblow to the country:

The House has today resolved to enter upon a revolution against the Constitution and government of the United States … the Democratic Representatives declare that, if they are not permitted to force upon the other house and upon the Executive, against their consent, the repeal of a law … this refusal will be considered sufficient ground for starving this government to death. That is the proposition which we denounce as revolution. On this ground we plant ourselves, and here we will stand to the end.

The effect was immediate. Garfield’s speech sent some Democrats scurrying to tell journalists that they didn’t support the shutdown. Others persisted in passing funding bills with the offensive riders attached, but President Hayes fulfilled his promise to veto these. Ultimately, though, the final and most important reason America’s first federal shutdown failed was that citizens were appalled by it.

Bankers publicly decried the impact of the crisis on “the business interests of the country.” Voters buried Democratic congressmen with letters and petitions demanding an end to the nonsense. Most devastating, America’s early comedians had a banner season; all through the spring, major papers ran joke columns about the partisan tail-chasing in Congress (“The dessert always reminds me of the veto, because it is the last thing on the bill”).   

Eventually, House Democrats got the message. A freshman from Texas joined their caucus in June. New colleagues asked whether voters had elected him to add “backbone” to the shutdown fight. No, he solemnly replied, the people wanted not backbone, “but brains” in Congress for a change.

Democrats caved by late June, passing funding bills that mostly contained only scaled-down, meaningless riders. These Hayes duly signed into law. “Was there ever anything more ridiculous?” the secretary of state harrumphed as things in Washington finally got back to normal.

Modern Americans can answer this question with an embarrassed “yes.” What was once dismissed as absurd has been normalized. Though the issues at stake have changed, Garfield’s warnings of a future wherein Congress can abuse its power of the purse to “starve” the rest of government for policy concessions have been validated. It is almost certainly a reason Americans mistrust government (and Congress in particular) more than ever.

So long as officeholders of either party continue to view budget standoffs as possible political boons, all Americans suffer. Fortunately, the parable of 1879 shows how this “new normal” might be reversed—if enough citizens commit themselves to leading the charge.

We certainly have more ways to do so than ever before. Business leaders can get on television to communicate the dire economic consequences of petty political fights—as they recently have. Through social media, average Americans can focus their frustration directly on fiscal saboteurs in the House. Humor—whether from late-night hosts or TikTok stars—can “go viral” in a way that 19th-century columnists would only marvel (and probably grimace) at.

In the long run, though, ending the politics of fiscal sabotage will still require Americans to take their dissatisfaction with it to the ballot box, as we have before. There is something comforting in that.

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.

Ron DeSantis is the governor of one of the most scenic states in America. Reelected by eye-popping margins in 2022, he does not lack for superfans. And yet, instead of launching his presidential campaign in front of palm trees and adoring crowds, he did so last night on Twitter, in an awkward audio-only exchange with Elon Musk that took place only after 25 minutes of excruciating technical difficulties.

It might seem strange for a presidential candidate who is arguing that Republicans should not tie their fortunes to an impulsive, internet-poisoned millionaire to announce his campaign by wedding it to an impulsive, internet-poisoned billionaire. But DeSantis’s choice of venue makes sense in context: It is the latest in a series of appeals to his party’s most online activists, who idolize individuals such as Musk and monopolize Twitter, the social-media site that Musk owns. Cultivating the base and wealthy donors is smart politics, and DeSantis is a better politician than both his progressive and pro-Trump critics admit. But as the Twitter-launch fiasco demonstrated, his obsession with the online could seriously hamper his prospects offline. Campaigns that mistake social-media virality for electoral reality tend to end poorly.

One of the many misguided lessons that politicians learned from Donald Trump’s 2016 success was that Twitter wins elections. But in fact, Trump’s first victory owed little to social media and more to traditional media. His candidacy capitalized on a decades-old reputation for business acumen that he had built through reality TV and the tabloids. The telegenic Trump then overwhelmed his Republican primary opponents by garnering ample media coverage, with cable news channels racing to air his raucous rallies live.

By contrast, one of the few things that even Trump’s own supporters repeatedly told pollsters that they didn’t like about him was … his tweets. This shouldn’t surprise. Social-media sites—and Twitter in particular—are rife with conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and niche jargon that have little resonance in the real world. This is why when politicians start talking like Twitter feeds, they start losing voters—which is exactly what happened to many Democrats in 2020.

[David Frum: DeSantis’s launch was not the only thing that crashed]

Consider the case of “Defund the police.” That mantra, alongside its more radical cousin “Abolish the police,” emerged as a rallying cry during the 2020 protests after the killing of George Floyd, momentarily turning a previously marginal approach to policing into a mainstream one. Channeling righteous anger into a radical proposal, “Defund” quickly became an online litmus test, and many progressive politicians racked up retweets by embracing it. Judging by its online impact, the slogan was a smashing success.

It’s also not how anyone in the Democratic Party talks today. “I think allowing this moniker, ‘defund the police,’ to ever get out there, was not a good thing,” Keith Ellison, the progressive Minnesota attorney general, told the Washington Post reporter David Weigel in November 2021. “We should all agree that the answer is not to defund the police,” said President Joe Biden in his first State of the Union address, to a bipartisan standing ovation. “It’s to fund the police—fund them!” In late 2021, New York City elected Mayor Eric Adams, a Black former cop who promised to invest more in law enforcement, not less. This month, Philadelphia’s Democratic primary voters picked Cherelle Parker, a Black city-council member with an uncompromising tough-on-crime platform, to be the city’s likely next mayor. Meanwhile, Brandon Johnson, the newly elected mayor of Chicago, backed away from his previous “Defund” position to secure his victory.

What happened? It turned out that although “Defund” was popular among the activists who disproportionately drive online progressive discourse, it was deeply unpopular with voters. Polls found that most Americans, including Black voters, overwhelmingly rejected defunding the police, and the slogan proved to be a millstone around the neck of many candidates, even in relatively progressive regions. The Democratic lawmakers and donors who echoed this rhetoric neglected one basic truth: Twitter is real life for the people who are on it, but most people are not on Twitter. According to the Pew Research Center, just 23 percent of U.S. adults use Twitter, and of those, “the most active 25% … produced 97% of all tweets.” Simply put, almost all tweets come from less than 6 percent of American adults—far from a representative slice of the broader public.

[Read: Twitter is a far-right social network]

But one Democrat didn’t fall into the Twitter trap. Not coincidentally, Joe Biden is now the president. In the 2020 Democratic primary, while his rivals competed to cater to the latest enthusiasms of the online left, the former vice president consolidated the party’s more moderate mainstream. In the general election, Biden’s aggressively offline campaign helped Democrats avoid the worst consequences of their 2020 Twitter excesses, as he was not implicated in them, and tended to treat social media as a place to be managed by staffers, not mirrored by the candidate. Trump, on the other hand, dove down every internet rabbit hole, ranting during speeches and debates about obscure bit players in online conspiracy theories at a time when a pandemic was ravaging the country. He lost by 7 million votes.

No politician can or should ignore social media, which still drives a lot of public discourse and engages many activists. The sweet spot is rather to be aware of the internet but not consumed by it. My colleague Derek Thompson refers to this as being “optimally online.” And for a while, it looked like Ron DeSantis had mastered this maneuver. He hired an army of pugilistic spokespeople, most notably his former press secretary Christina Pushaw, who reveled in trolling reporters and liberals on Twitter, including labeling Democratic politicians as “groomers.” By delegating this operation to staff, DeSantis was able to appeal to his party’s most rabid Twitterati while maintaining distance and deniability from their actions, preserving his appeal to everyday voters even as he provided virtual red meat to the online base.

But it’s starting to look like this wasn’t a strategy but rather just the first stage of internet poisoning that now threatens to overwhelm DeSantis’s presidential campaign. In recent months, the governor has sounded less like a populist politician and more like an instantiation of his party’s worst Twitter talkers. Take DeSantis’s hard turn against transgender rights. “Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely,” declared The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles, who has nearly 1 million followers on Twitter, in March. His colleague Matt Walsh regularly dubs transition care for minors as “abuse” and “mutilation” to his 1.8 million followers. But what excites reactionary Twitter doesn’t move voters: Most Americans oppose discrimination against transgender people, even as they express apprehension over medical transition for minors or the participation of trans athletes in women’s sports. And yet, earlier this month, DeSantis signed and celebrated a bill that, in his words, “permanently outlawed the mutilation of minors.”

In other words, the ill-fated launch event with Musk wasn’t a one-off miscalculation. It was the latest instance of DeSantis losing sight of the electorate in favor of online obsessions. Tellingly, in his 67-minute appearance last night, the governor repeatedly derided the “woke” left but never mentioned Trump—the candidate DeSantis must dethrone if he is to claim the nomination.

On a Wednesday afternoon in March, the Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church, in Denver’s South Park Hill neighborhood, was packed. The local chapter of the progressive group Indivisible was sponsoring a mayoral-candidate forum. Five candidates had been invited to attend. The moderator asked the usual questions about crime and public safety, homelessness and guns. Then came a question comprehensible only to a close observer of Denver politics: “Do you support releasing the city-owned conservation easement on the Park Hill Golf Course to allow the currently proposed redevelopment of this site?”

Four candidates raised their hands, a couple only halfway, as if that sign of reluctance might lessen the coming disapproval. It didn’t. The crowd booed.

In 1997, Denver paid the owners of the Park Hill Golf Course $2 million to place a conservation easement on the property, limiting how it could be used. More than 20 years later, Westside Investment Partners bought the by-then-defunct golf course for $24 million. After a contentious community-input process, lawsuits, and allegations of stolen lawn signs, the company settled on a proposal to build 2,500 homes (including a significant number of affordable, family, and senior units) as well as some commercial space. It also promised to reserve two-thirds of the 155-acre property as open space. In 2021, Denver voters approved a ballot measure giving themselves the power to decide the easement’s fate.

On April 4 of this year, voters declined to lift the easement. The split was 59–41, not exactly close. Some observers have taken this outcome as a signal that the people of Denver (or, at least, the fewer than 100,000 who voted down the proposal) reject new development. But in that same election, voters sent two candidates who supported the proposal to a mayoral runoff. Back in the 2022 statewide election, almost a quarter million Denver voters supported Democratic Governor Jared Polis, who campaigned on increasing housing supply and dismantling local roadblocks to construction in order to get a handle on Colorado’s housing-affordability crisis. Also that year, nearly 1.3 million Coloradans voted to dedicate hundreds of millions of dollars to increasing affordable housing. In Denver, the measure won 70–30. Deciding “what the people believe” is not so easy.

Colorado is short an estimated 127,000 homes. The Denver metro area alone is short nearly 70,000 homes. The housing shortage is the main driver of the region’s affordability crisis, and housing-policy experts—though they remain divided on many questions—are nearly unanimous in their belief that resolving it will require bringing many more homes to market. From 2012 to 2017, the region permitted only one new home for every 5.4 new jobs; over the same period, home prices in Denver jumped by 50 percent.

When someone who favors new development in theory opposes a specific project near where they live, we call them a NIMBY. NIMBYism is regularly characterized as a case of revealed preferences: Talk is cheap, and support for policies in the abstract is worthless. Voting for a candidate who champions pro-housing policies is one thing; agreeing to new development in your neighborhood is another.

Conflicting desires do not by themselves prove hypocrisy, however. Some people really do want to see more housing in general, even if they don’t want construction next door. The problem is that the local institutions charged with land-use decisions are attuned to parochial complaints, not large-scale needs.

[Jerusalem Demsas: Housing breaks people’s brains]

The level of government at which we choose to resolve a conflict shapes public opinion and the eventual outcome. The same question posed at a town hall, at a county-council meeting, in the governor’s office, or by Congress will not be answered the same way in each venue. The tools available, the norms of debate, and the architecture of accountability change drastically from place to place. Americans believe that housing is a local issue. And it is a local issue. But it is also a regional issue, a state issue, and a national issue. By restricting the debate to the hyperlocal level, we’ve blocked out our big-picture values.

Across metro areas, in states led by Democrats and Republicans alike, the same pattern emerges: Local governments decide what gets built and where, and they use that power to ban multifamily housing, entrench economic segregation, and perpetuate a national affordability crisis.

It’s tough to admit, but sometimes NIMBYs have a point. In Denver, I spoke with dozens of community leaders, elected officials, and voters who live near the Park Hill Golf Course. Opponents of the project raised concerns about preserving open spaces, about gentrification, about the democratic process itself.

Former Mayor Wellington Webb told me he opposes developing the Park Hill site because it’s “the last piece of open space, land, in Denver.”

Leslie Herod, a Colorado state representative and an unsuccessful candidate in this year’s mayoral race, also opposes the proposal. She told me she had identified more than 80 underutilized city-owned lots already zoned for residential development where she would rather see housing built.

The Denver city-council member Candi CdeBaca made a version of the “other places” argument too, questioning why development efforts are never focused on wealthy neighborhoods. “We’re not talking about development in places where people have privilege,” she told me. “Those places are protected with their zoning, those places are protected with their level of engagement, those places are protected by the people they have elected to represent them.”

Some voters told me they simply distrusted the process. “There’s no guarantee that if the conservation easement is lifted that the [developer] will honor what they’ve said with creating a park, creating affordable housing,” a landscape architect with an antidevelopment yard sign said.

Of course, no project can solve every problem or skirt every concern. Comparison shopping for umbrellas is fine on a sunny day. When you’re caught in a torrential downpour, it’s wise to take what’s available and run for cover.

For their part, proponents of the Park Hill project, in their eagerness to win votes, tended to oversell what it could accomplish. Some described it as a blow against racism or climate change, or a way to help the working class. In my conversations with the plan’s backers, I sometimes had to remind myself that we were talking about a 155-acre lot, not the fate of the republic.

Land-use regulations and development patterns are a key driver of inequality, pollution, and financial strain. But whether or not the Park Hill plan was approved would have a negligible impact on these larger crises, which will require collective action beyond the scope of any one project. Asking a neighborhood or municipality to bear the responsibility for a housing crisis and its knock-on effects is asking for failure. Local government simply wasn’t built to do this.

Local government is about what you can do for me, right now. Because local officials have a narrow jurisdiction, engaged voters have a direct line to them and significant influence on their decisions. This tight relationship is good for handling issues like broken streetlights and potholes, but it doesn’t lend itself to managing society-wide problems, such as a housing crisis. This is why the political logic of building a lot more housing rarely carries the day at the local level.

Who would have lived in the Park Hill housing development, had voters approved it? No one knows. It could have been a recent University of Colorado at Boulder graduate or empty-nesters from the suburbs looking to downsize. Many of the people who would most benefit from the new housing don’t yet live in Denver—so they don’t have a vote.

Local housing-policy debates are thus asymmetrical. Construction projects have no readily identifiable beneficiaries, but they do levy clear harms, in the form of excessive noise and street closures and changing neighborhood aesthetics.

Just a small fraction of people even engage in local housing fights. Many of those who do are extreme voices or otherwise unrepresentative of the broader community. Look at Fort Collins, Colorado. After more than five years of community engagement, and many months of work by city planners, a 5–2 majority on the city council voted to liberalize land-use policies to allow more housing. But a small group of opponents pressured the council to reverse itself, gathering 6,500 petition signatures—this in a city of more than 160,000. And they won. The council voted again, this time 7–0 to repeal the change.

In interviews, both the head of the Colorado Municipal League, Kevin Bommer, and Denver’s current mayor, Michael B. Hancock, touted regional collaboration as a solution to the affordability crisis. But just as one town cannot ensure that the entire region maintains adequate green space while increasing density, it cannot force neighboring towns to work together to find the right balance. The incentive is too strong for an individual government to say to its neighbor, “You can have all the apartments—we’ll just keep our parks.”

In addition to the Colorado Municipal League, Colorado has several influential regional associations, including the Metro Mayors Caucus and Colorado Counties Inc. Yet greater Denver is still tens of thousands of housing units short of its needs.

The Denver metro area is particularly desperate for small multifamily dwellings (two to nine units) to meet the demand for affordable housing. According to Carrie Makarewicz, a professor at the University of Colorado at Denver, roughly 10 percent of homes in the region meet this criteria. By contrast, 85 percent of residentially zoned land is reserved for single-family homes. By this measure, too, the regional associations have come up short.

Collective-action problems require a body that can hold everyone accountable. Regional associations—which rely on voluntary participation—aren’t going to cut it.

The democratic process begins by defining the democratic body. And when it comes to housing, the body of concern does not end at a town’s boundary line. People moving to the Denver metro area look across the city and into the suburbs for a place to live. One suburb’s opposition to building more housing directly affects prices miles away, because it constrains the supply in a market that spans municipalities. Local governments, in seeking to satisfy local concerns, undermine statewide goals. At least, they do in the absence of state intervention.

State government is also about what you can do for me, but on average: That’s the electoral reality of representing voters across geographic constituencies. Governors and other statewide officials are forced to see the bigger picture because they’re accountable not only to the people who live in a particular community, but also to past residents priced out of and displaced from that community, and to future residents as well. (Nor are newcomers overwhelmingly from out of state, as many seem to believe; census data reveal that about 82 percent of moves happen within states.) Denver’s city council represents the people of Denver, not Aurora, and vice versa. The state represents them all. And in recent polling, 60 percent of registered voters supported eliminating local restrictions to allow for multifamily housing.

The Colorado state capitol is just a short drive from Park Hill and a brisk walk from city hall, but feels miles away from the thrum of local politics. I went there two days after the Indivisible forum to interview Governor Polis. From across a large round table in his office, Polis told me that “housing, transit, travel, roads: These are interjurisdictional issues because really, very few Coloradans live their whole lives in one jurisdiction.” Unencumbered by the need to defend any one project or developer, the governor reiterated a simple point: “Demand has exceeded supply for the last couple decades, and prices have gone up.” Colorado has to “create more housing now.”

Soon after providing that clean summary of what Colorado needs, Polis announced his best shot at providing it. Washington, Oregon, California, Utah, Montana, and Massachusetts have, to varying degrees, pulled authority for land-use decisions up to the state level. Following their lead, he proposed a bill compelling local governments to adjust their land-use policies to meet housing goals, a process that state officials would oversee. The bill addressed climate, infrastructure, and equity concerns; included provisions for increasing and preserving affordable and multifamily housing; encouraged development near transit; and removed onerous parking requirements.

I asked the governor how he would deal with the political opposition to his bill. “People across the board—Republican, Democrat, independent—housing costs is one of the top items of concern,” he replied. I asked again. “People understand that housing needs to be built,” he told me.

Polis’s original proposal was greeted by fierce opposition from local governments, though not because of objections to open space, affordability, or new parking rules. The fight was over where the power to make land-use decisions should lie.

Kevin Bommer, of the Colorado Municipal League, offered a pithy synthesis of local governments’ position: “Respectfully, get off our lawn,” he told me.

I asked Bommer about his policy disagreements with the governor, but he kept stressing the issue of local control. “My members statewide don’t necessarily disagree with a lot of [Polis’s] goals, but to start with saying that the state gets to set a model code and the state gets to regulate and the state will be in charge of land use going forward is a nonstarter,” he said.

Bommer pointed me to an old amicus brief filed in defense of a local moratorium on fracking by then-Representative Polis. It defended local government’s authority over land-use decisions as both a state-constitution matter and a policy matter. Polis wrote that local democracy allows for “widespread citizen input and broad stakeholder involvement,” as well as “more opportunities for public participation.”

The fact that Representative Polis disagrees with Governor Polis is exactly the point. A congressman represents his district; he has little reason to care that local control can harm the rest of the state. A governor has a wider remit. If Polis the representative was right, and localities really are the best transmitters of their residents’ housing preferences, then what explains clear, widespread discontent with the outcomes of those decisions? Colorado’s housing crisis is undeniable, and its land-use authority has rested with local government virtually unquestioned for decades.

Colorado’s legislative session ended on May 8. The bill died in the Senate without a final vote.

Afterward, the governor told me he intends to keep fighting. States that have passed land-use reforms, such as California and Washington, suffered multiple defeats before seeing a first victory. Polis told me he’s frustrated by communities that said, No, we should do it. “The thing is, they’re not doing it!” he said with a laugh. Polis returned again to his central argument: “It’s beyond the capabilities of [local government] even if there’s a city council or mayor with the best of intentions … We have to figure this out together.”

[Annie Lowrey: Everything is about the housing market]

Two citywide votes, multiple lawsuits, and accusations of racism, classism, and harassment that divided Denver. What was the point? The property owner is now promising that the former golf course will become … an active golf course. (This despite the fact that the company has never developed a golf course; its founder told me they’re “doing research on it now.”) Well-meaning objectors judge proposals against a hypothetical better option, but in reality, the alternative to a decent project is often no project at all.

Kelly Brough, who supported the development project and was in the runoff to become Denver’s next mayor, is nevertheless hesitant to embrace state interference. “I can’t say Denver should not control its destiny … I’m just not ready to give it up yet.”

This power struggle is playing out across the country. It’s ostensibly a struggle over housing affordability, but it is also a fight over how we see voters. In polls and interviews, voters express deep empathy for people experiencing homelessness and deep frustration with widespread housing unaffordability. But that’s not the part of us that local government can hear. Instead local politics magnifies our selfish concerns: How will this affect my parking availability? What will this do to my view?

Everyone has a little NIMBY in them. It doesn’t have to be the part that wins.

This article appears in the July/August 2023 print edition with the headline “Local Government Has Too Much Power.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Principled stands against all corporate influence are few.

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

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

Consider the past and present of major beer brands.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

None of those alternative repositories of power are fully unaccountable.

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