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.

Ken Paxton, a Donald Trump ally, is accused of bribery and abuse of public trust - he denies the accusations.

As Judge Amit Mehta sentenced Stewart Rhodes yesterday to 18 years in prison—the longest yet for a defendant involved in the January 6 insurrection—he explained why the leader of the far-right group the Oath Keepers needed to be behind bars for a long time. “You pose an ongoing threat and peril to our democracy and the fabric of this country,” Mehta told Rhodes.

Mehta was right about that. At his sentencing, Rhodes was unrepentant. In a 20-minute speech before the court, he portrayed himself alternately as a character in Kafka’s The Trial; as an “American Solzhenitsyn,” after the Soviet dissident writer who was sent to the gulag; and as a misunderstood advocate for peace. This monologue was standard fare for Rhodes, a Yale Law School graduate who likes to align himself with literary heavyweights and historical leaders.

And yet Rhodes also unwittingly revealed deepening fissures in the far-right movement that, two years ago, resorted to violence to keep Donald Trump in the White House. The defendant used some of his time to distance himself from the Proud Boys, another extremist organization, with whom he had met in the days before the insurrection. “Unlike other groups like the Proud Boys, who seek conflict and seek to street-fight,” Rhodes explained, “we deter.” I’ve been misunderstood, he was telling the court; the Proud Boys are the ones you want.

Rhodes, it seems, is not entirely in sync with his radical brethren. A unified extremist front is a threat to our democracy; but the story is different when extremists start pointing fingers at one another in the criminal-justice system.

[From the November 2020 issue: A pro-Trump militant group has recruited thousands of police, soldiers, and veterans]

The rift between the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers has been simmering for years, and it hasn’t kept them from collaborating in the past. In 2019, the two groups arrived in Portland, Oregon, to support far-right protests. Rhodes pulled his group, he later claimed, after learning that white nationalists were involved in the demonstrations. Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, was outraged. Tarrio—who has also been found guilty of seditious conspiracy for January 6—and Rhodes remained at odds even as they coordinated efforts for the insurrection, including at a secret meeting in a parking garage the night before.

Both testified before the congressional committee investigating January 6 and spoke at length of the division between them. “I didn’t like Stewart Rhodes. I still don’t like Stewart Rhodes,” Tarrio told the panel. The Oath Keepers, Rhodes insisted, are “quiet professionals” who believe that Trump won a second term. The Proud Boys believe the same about Trump, Rhodes said, but are “sloppy” and have been infiltrated by racists.

Whether such distinctions are real matters less than the fact that the rift appears to be deepening. On January 6, a variety of groups put aside their differences, but solidarity is difficult to sustain. As prosecutions continue and participants in the insurrection try to save themselves, divisions within the far right over ideology and strategy—as well as conflicts driven by pure ego—are reasserting themselves.

Over time, mismanagement and general pettiness distract many extremist groups from their cause. Al-Qaeda and ISIS similarly devolved into catfights as they lost on battlefields. Rhodes, who imagines himself an intellectual, appears to feel tarnished by alliances with mere racists. That he would defend himself in court by complaining about the Proud Boys signals to would-be followers that he’s self-absorbed, not that he’s sacrificing himself for noble cause. An effective way to combat right-wing extremism is to put its leaders’ selfishness on display.

[David A. Graham: It was sedition]

Violence, of course, clearly remains a threat to our democracy. The day before Rhodes was sentenced, the Department of Homeland Security warned of a “heightened threat environment” in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election. This week, a man carrying a Nazi flag and praising Hitler rammed his U-Haul into a security barrier protecting the White House.

Violent, noxious ideologies do not just vanish with a tough sentence. Success against them can’t be measured by whether bad people see the light, but whether they are able to expand their ranks. Raising money and organizing large-scale collective actions becomes more difficult if seemingly like-minded groups are at war with each other. Far-right groups make noise about left-wing conspiracies, but they are under attack from within their own cause.

Rhodes will have 18 years to contemplate the violence and stew in his resentment of the Proud Boys. In the meantime, let the infighting continue.

The former US president is one of several Republicans Mr Johnson has met on a trip to the US this week.

This story contains spoilers through the ninth episode of Succession Season 4.

Roman Roy was ready. He had written his eulogy for his father—a great man, he would say, great despite and because of it all—on hot-pink index cards. He had practiced the speech in front of a mirror. He had “pre-grieved,” he kept telling people, and so could be trusted to fulfill, one last time, the core duty of the family business: to love in a way that moves markets.

But Roman failed. His grief overcame him; trying to speak, he sobbed. The funeral that had been so carefully scripted suddenly broadcast dead air. Kendall, ad-libbing, stepped in to speak. Then Shiv. Their addresses—honest, calculating, and hewing to the talking points—were valedictories for Logan, and for their show. They also returned Succession, in its penultimate episode, to its original premise. The declining monarch, the children who compete for his crown, the rotating cast of lackeys and fools: Succession is King Lear, retold for the age of the media empire. And Logan’s funeral punctuates the translation. It transports Lear’s famous first scene to a cathedral on the Upper East Side. Kendall and Shiv are Goneril and Regan, complying with their father’s demands for flattery. Roman is Cordelia, the youngest and most devoted, unable to turn love into a show. Their performances will carve their kingdom, and this is both a ludicrous circumstance and a logical one: Family, for them, is an endless act of politics.

Lear treats loyalty as a fact so remarkable that its presence doubles as a plot twist. Succession is not alone in finding resonance in that concession. Late last month, having cited Lear’s connection to our “savage and judgmental” political environment, Kenneth Branagh shared his plans to stage it in London and New York. The news followed Al Pacino’s announcement that he, too, would be adapting Shakespeare’s play. Lear has been used as a lens for understanding, among many others, Dianne Feinstein, Elon Musk, Boris Johnson, Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump, and Trump’s children. (In response to the former president’s indictment in March, the older sons, like Gonerils with Truth Social accounts, offered up theatrical rage; Ivanka’s wan response, meanwhile, had a whiff of both crisis comms and Cordelia.) Maureen Dowd recently treated Lear as a metaphor for American gerontocracy. She was inspired by the fact that, this spring, “the hottest ticket” in Washington, D.C., was the Shakespeare Theater Company’s take on the tragedy—a production channeling the chaos that comes “when madmen lead the blind.”

Lear may be, as the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley called it, “the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world”: a five-act ode, sprawling and taut, to the hard work of being human. Aging, selfishness, sacrifice, love, loyalty, grief—the play’s wisdom aches across the centuries. But Lear’s psychological insights are not, I think, what account for its new currency. Its political insights are. Shakespeare’s tragedy is a study of monarchy in crisis—of all that goes wrong when a leader’s problems become everyone else’s emergency. With every new staging, conditions that Americans prefer to think of as relics of an older, sadder time—inherited rule, incompetent despotism, coups—reveal their abiding impact. Lear’s ubiquity, in that sense, is understandable. It is also deeply embarrassing. The play should not translate so well. But here it is, all the same, ancient and acutely familiar. “Was he, maybe … losing it, a little?” Roman Roy asks himself, preparing the eulogy he will not deliver. He is talking about his father but also speaking to us, the audience. We might wonder the same. We, too, are the heirs of kings in decline.

Logan was not supposed to have survived Succession’s first season. The patriarch was originally set to die fairly early in the show, leaving his children to battle in the world he left behind. But the writers changed course. Logan lived. The decision made Succession even more directly Lear-like than it might have been. Succession’s characters speak, at times, with early-modern dudgeon. (“This is the day his reign ends,” Kendall announces as he executes one of many failed plans to usurp his father.) Sandy and Sandi Furness, the Roys’ rivals and sometime collaborators, call back to Horace Howard Furness, the 19th-century Shakespeare scholar, and to the son who shares his name. Connor spends the series living out an extremely Shakespearean joke: Logan’s oldest son, his most obvious heir, plays the role of the illegitimate child.

It is through Logan, though, that Succession transported some of Lear’s most famous iconography to the small screen. He is played by Brian Cox, an actor so famous for performing Lear that he wrote a book about the experience. Logan, the patriarch named for a king, wanders on seaside moors. Ailing, he is confined both to hospital beds and to a body that proves ever more unruly. He rages at his children, and his fury strikes like thunder.

Lear features more references to the natural world than any of Shakespeare’s other plays. Civilization and wildness, the allusions suggest, are never as distant as they might seem. And the two collide, in Lear, in the figure of the king. The monarch is, in the play, nature itself: the natural order exerting its brute continuities. But Lear violates that system. First, he abdicates. Then, he loses control over himself. Both forms of decline lead to destruction for everyone around him. The fragile order crumbles. Among those who seek to take his place, pettiness turns into violence. Bureaucracy gives way to brutality. Humans reveal themselves to be what they have been all along: animals, clawing their way to the top.

Lear’s own fall is both natural—to age, Lear concedes, is to decline—and exceptional. He raves. He acts like a child. Because of that, he is sometimes dubbed the “mad king.” (Performances of the play were banned during the reign of George III, for fear that the fictional monarch might remind audiences of the real one.) The play, though, resists a direct diagnosis for its main character. It treats Lear’s madness less as a conclusion than as an all-consuming question. Has the king lost his temper, or his mind? Where does being mad end and going mad begin? Do the distinctions, in the end, matter?

Succession applies those ambiguities to its own wayward monarchy. The show does not suggest that Logan has lost his sanity. Instead, it asks whether Logan’s brute rationality might be its own form of madness. Succession is, like Lear, preoccupied with the animal world—its hierarchies, its insults, its violence. And the show weaves that dour Darwinism into its treatment of power. Logan is, in every way but the most specific, a king. His health is a market indicator. His body is, like Lear’s, a proxy for nature. Logan makes his own climate. His whims become everybody else’s weather. He is selfish. He is cruel. In him, the assumptions that drive our political systems—market competition, callous individualism, survival of the fittest—come to their logical conclusions.

[Read: The bodily horrors of Succession]

The eulogies delivered at Logan’s funeral, by people who have spent their lives in his storm, are reminders of that. “He had a vitality, a force that could hurt,” Kendall told the crowd. “And it did.”

His pain is eloquent. It is also, in some sense, an answer to the question Roman asked as he rehearsed his eulogy: Had Logan, maybe … lost it? Roman answered that query as he answers most others: noncommittally. (“Who knows?” he shrugged to himself, on the matter of his father’s sanity. “But.”) And his indifference, like Kendall’s acknowledgement of Logan’s abusiveness, is something of a thesis statement for the show. Logan himself is not mad. He spreads madness all the same.

That tension makes for one of Succession’s most jarring, and powerful, tributes to Lear. In the show, as in the play, madness defies definition so insistently that the defiance itself begins to look like the point. Analyze these men however you want; debate their mental states as you will; they’ll keep doing what they do. They will keep inflicting their flaws on everybody else. They will keep seeing themselves not as agents of misfortune but as its victims. The rational mind acknowledges not only the reality of life but also the humility of it: The world does not belong to you; you belong to it. But the unfettered power that both men have enjoyed abets their delusion. Their ravings are arrogance gone awry.

And the delirium, crucially, is contagious. In Succession, it settles on Roman when, finding democracy to be personally inconvenient, he becomes a one-man act of election fraud. Kendall cedes to it when, after his panicked ex-wife tells him that she fears for their children, he dismisses her concerns: “You’re too online,” he tells her. “Okay? You’ve lost context. Everything is fine.” Rava is alive to the world in a way Kendall is not. The violence is spreading. It is violence that the Roys have brought about. But Kendall refuses to see it. He takes refuge in his fantasies. This is madness. It is also his true inheritance.

Succession can be hard to watch. Its satires—insights powered less by ironic distance from the world than by proximity to it—stab and sting and chafe. Logan is most obviously a stand-in for Rupert Murdoch, a man who, like Logan, made billions promising people that the world can be made simpler than it is. But he is also a proxy for Trump. Pundits have spent years analyzing the former president’s mind: Is he a narcissist? Is he gripped by dementia? Are his ravings real or merely extensions of his show? The answer is the same for Logan, and for Lear: It doesn’t matter. Trump does what he does because he can. His mind exerts itself wantonly. His delusions become inescapable.

And then, in short order, they become destructive. Trump is instability incarnate. Institutions pride themselves on minimizing the power of chance over people’s lives. Corporations have boards. Governments have redundancies. Every day, though, Trump lays bare the ease with which the weakness of one man—that addled brain, that cold heart—can settle into a system. The age of Trump is also the age of rampant conspiracism, of misinformation, of, in general, error run amok. Rantings and ravings are no longer exceptional; they are our rule. We live in a world that goes, every day, a little madder.

That is why Lear is so able to reach across the centuries and punch modern audiences in the gut. The typical Shakespearean plot is dense, full of jams and twists; Lear’s, though—teeming with affairs, betrayals, murders, tortures, banishments, poisonings, hangings, blindings—is especially frenzied. Story arcs lead to high-speed collisions; chaos becomes a narrative proposition. The tumult serves one of Lear’s most urgent insights: Power, when it becomes unreasonable, begets nihilism. The critic Harold Bloom has observed Lear’s obsession with absence. (“Nothing will come of nothing,” goes one of the king’s most famous lines.) And the play’s soap operatics abet all the emptiness. They disorient and overwhelm. Even in a play—even with action that is contained, neatly, to a stage—there is only so much chaos we can take before we give up trying to make sense of it all. For Lear’s audience as well as its characters, madness becomes environmental.

[Read: King Lear, from the June 1880 issue]

Shakespeare, in that way, anticipated the discord that shapes, and misshapes, this postmodern political moment. Monarchs, in Shakespeare’s time, rationalized their reigns tautologically: They were proxies for the divine, they claimed, ruling because they were meant to. Their ascendance to the throne, whether achieved through battle or treachery or accident of birth—and the choices they made while in power—were matters of godly will.

Americans, learning that history, typically take pleasure in mocking it. But we defer, too, to dynasties. We structure our society around birthrights. We allow inheritance—familial privilege, educational privilege, generational wealth—to act as a form of destiny. Succession indicts that inclination. The news offers daily reminders of it. “The question is, when Rupert dies, how are the kids aligned?” a former News Corp executive told the reporter Gabriel Sherman about the Murdoch family’s succession drama. This is a throwaway quote that says everything. Inheritance, for the Murdochs, is a game of musical chairs. It is a battle of attrition that will be won or lost in whatever arrangement happens to be there when the music ends. One family’s fortunes will become, in short order, everyone else’s fate.

Succession twists that dynamic, applying the vulnerabilities to its monarchs. At every turn, characters’ grandest plans are waylaid by mundanities. One of Kendall’s early attempts to overthrow his father is stymied by a traffic jam. Another attempt fails—and a man dies—because a deer, at just the wrong moment, leaps into a road. A shareholder meeting that will determine the fate of one of the world’s most powerful conglomerates falls apart because of … a urinary tract infection. (“The piss-mad king,” Roman pronounces the ailing Logan.)

Few would argue that the state of affairs that Succession is highlighting—so much power, concentrated among so few—is optimal. Systems, working well, have redundancies and safeguards, checks and balances. They will not crumble when one person goes rogue. In Succession, as in Lear, the people who will bear the brunt of all the melodrama are largely absent from the stage. That does not mean, though, that they are excluded from the stories. Audiences of Shakespeare’s time, taking in the tale—failing fathers, greedy children, madness, machinations, victors, spoils, chance—would have recognized their own history. And they would have understood, intuitively, the true impact of all the palace intrigue. When kingdoms are divided, the king’s subjects will bear the burdens.

Succession emphasizes the same thing. The show’s first episode closes with a shot of an apartment building in New York City. It is nighttime. The windows are ablaze with the flicker of televisions. The image captures the extent of the Roy family’s power. It also acknowledges the people who live under their rule. It clarifies the stakes of the show’s satire: We believe, still, in the divine right of kings. We merely outsource the old entitlements to newer gods.

A common criticism of Succession, and a fair one, is that the show, over time, has become repetitive. It recycles storylines. It reuses language, themes, and tropes so reliably that the viewer might wonder whether the echoes are resonant or simply redundant. But that recursiveness—Succession’s steady development, over its four seasons, of a sense of no ending—is integral to its messaging. In this universe, despite the appearance of world-shaking drama, very little meaningfully changes. The wealth that gives the Roys their power also gives their show a stifling sense of inertia.

The antics, and the stasis, resonate. We live in the wreckage of consequential absurdity. Succession came from a moment that was similar, in its way, to Lear’s: 1606, the year Shakespeare wrote his tragedy, was a time of relentless crisis. King James had ascended the throne in 1603, with hopes of joining England and Scotland into a unified Britain; he failed. In late 1605, a group of dissident Catholics attempted to destroy Parliament while the king and his family were in attendance. The Gunpowder Plot—“5/11”—was foiled at the last moment. The summer of 1606, in London, brought an outbreak of plague.

Shakespeare channeled the instability into his story of a kingdom fighting for its sanity. His Lear was a telling of another play, the True Chronicle History of King Leir. The original story ended happily, with Cordelia and her father raising an army together and reclaiming their kingdom in triumph. But Shakespeare, a bit like Cordelia herself, chose not to flatter his audience. He changed Leir’s ending, reshaping it to conform to that elemental definition of a Shakespearean tragedy: Pretty much everyone dies. In the process, he created an ageless omen. No redemption will come when the madmen lead the blind. The final tragedy of Lear is not that the king declines. It is that the king declines and takes everyone down with him. His madness spreads. It seeps. It writes itself into every story, and soon enough into history. And then—the greatest tragedy of all—the history repeats.

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

Question of the Week

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

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com

Conversations of Note

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Gen Z Teen’s Diagnosis of His Generation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silicon Valley Woo

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

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

What could go wrong?

The Tax Code and Swedish Feminism

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

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

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

A Defense of Battle Rap

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

He writes:

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

Conversations of Note

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

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

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

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

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

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

By submitting an email, you agree to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note, and may be edited for length and clarity.

Sentence is the longest yet for a participant in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, led by Donald Trump supporters.

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.