Was the sexual revolution a mistake? From the 1960s through today, the majority of feminists would instantly answer “no.” Easier access to contraception, the relaxation of divorce laws, the legalization of abortion, less emphasis on virginity, reduced stigma around unmarried sex—all of these have been hailed as liberating for women.

But in the past few years, an emergent strand of feminism has questioned these assumptions. “Reactionary feminism”—the name was popularized by the British writer Mary Harrington—rests on a premise that sounds far more radical today than it once did: Men and women are different. In her 2022 book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Louise Perry argues that individual physical variation “is built upon a biological substrate. Liberal feminists and trans activists may do their best to deny this, but it is still true that only one half of the human race is capable of getting pregnant, and—failing the invention of artificial wombs—this will remain true indefinitely.” Perry also argues for “evolved psychological differences between the sexes.” Men are innately much hornier, more eager for sexual variety, and much less likely to catch feelings from a one-night stand, she believes. Modern hookup culture serves men very well but forces women to deny their natural urges toward seeking commitment, affection, and protection.

These are heretical thoughts. For more than a decade, the dominant form of American feminism has maintained that differences between the sexes—whether in libido, crime rates, or even athletic performance—largely result from female socialization. Anything else is biological essentialism. The feminist scholar Catharine Mackinnon recently declared that she did not want to be part of “a movement for female body parts … Women are not, in fact, subordinated or oppressed by our bodies. We do not need to be liberated from our chromosomes or our ovaries.” This view extends to the assertion that male and female bodies do not differ enough to justify strict sex segregation in sporting competitions or prisons, domestic-violence shelters, and public changing rooms. Recently, a reporter asked the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, for a response to parents who worry about the safety of daughters competing in sports against genetically male athletes. Jean-Pierre responded with a terse smackdown. The reporter’s question, Jean-Pierre said, implied that “transgender kids are dangerous” and was therefore itself “dangerous.”

The reactionary feminists have no patience for this line of argument. In her new book, Feminism Against Progress, Harrington writes that the internet has encouraged us to think of ourselves as a “Meat Lego,” hunks of flesh that can be molded however we want. For women, that involves suppressing the messy biological reality of the female body—taking birth control, having consequence-free casual sex, even outsourcing pregnancies—to achieve something that might look like equality, but is really just pretending to be a man. “Realizing my body isn’t something I’m in but something I am is the heart of the case for reactionary feminism,” she writes.

Reactionary feminism is having a moment. Harrington recently toured the United States, where Feminism Against Progress was plugged in The Free Press, the heterodox equivalent of a glowing New York Times review. At the recent National Conservative conference in London, she shared the stage with Perry, whose book covers similar themes. Another NatCon speaker was Nina Power, a former leftist who is now a senior editor at Compact, an online magazine whose editors declare that they “oppose liberalism in part because we seek a society more tolerant of human difference and human frailty.”

[Helen Lewis: Why so many conservatives feel like losers]

All three women are British—which is no coincidence. In Britain, where I live, feminism has developed around the assumption that women belong to a sex class with specific physical vulnerabilities. In America, the movement has been filtered through a progressive legal tradition of outlawing discrimination against a variety of marginalized groups, and because of the decades-long abortion fight, American feminism relies heavily on the concepts of choice and bodily autonomy. In the view of many mainstream U.S. feminist writers, Britain is TERF Island, a blasted heath of middle-class matrons radicalized by the parenting forum Mumsnet into conservatism and “weaponized white femininity.” The response of some British feminists is that, in practice, the agenda of mainstream American feminism has shriveled down to the abortion fight and corporate-empowerment platitudes, and is hamstrung by its strange refusal to accept the relevance of biology.

That said, Harrington was radicalized by Mumsnet, which she started reading more than a decade ago. “At the time, I was still a fully paid up Butlerite,” she told me in clipped English tones. She was referring to Judith Butler, the high priest of queer theory, which argues for the subversion of categories and norms. In her 20s, Harrington hung out in bohemian communities online and offline, and sometimes went by the name Sebastian. “My first glimmers of ambivalence” about queer theory, Harrington said, “were when I realized that pretty much every butch woman I’d ever dated had subsequently transitioned, and now thought of themselves as a man.” As a married mother of one, living in a small town, she went on Mumsnet and met other women who shared her ambivalence about the new ideology around gender.

Both Power and Perry had similar experiences that peeled them away from the progressive consensus. Perry’s was in the early days of motherhood, realizing her deep connection with her baby—and her economic dependence on her husband. Power, a scholar of Marxist and continental philosophy, told me that her apostasy was driven by a “general frustration with the progressive movement. It’s just gone mad.”

Inevitably, reactionary feminism’s focus on sex differences has been welcomed by many on the political right—who enjoy portraying liberals as reality-deniers and themselves as no-nonsense realists. It has also been welcomed by the manosphere, that loose collection of blogs and YouTube channels whose content melds positive advice and help for men with anti-feminism and misogyny. Perry has appeared on podcasts with Jordan Peterson and Rod Dreher; Harrington’s American publisher is Regnery, the conservative imprint whose top authors include Ann Coulter and Republican Senator Josh Hawley. “I walk a very strange line,” Harrington told me. “The best engagement I get is when my work hits a sweet spot between conservative Catholics, radical feminists, and the weird online right. That’s not a Venn diagram that I really thought existed, but apparently it’s an underserved niche.”

[Helen Lewis: The abortion debate is suddenly about ‘people’ not women]

In her advocacy for marriage and opposition to the birth-control pill, Harrington finds fans among religious conservatives. In her opposition to commercial surrogacy, the sex trade, and gender self-identification, she is aligned with radical feminists. And in her language and arguments, you can see the influence of internet micro-celebrities such as the pseudonymous author Bronze Age Pervert, whose self-published manifesto warned that modern society was replacing masculine strength with phalanxes of weedy “bugmen.” (His book became briefly popular with junior staffers in the Trump administration.)

Reactionary feminists and the manosphere like to cast liberal feminists as daydreaming utopians. Both groups argue that, look, men are men and women are women, and evolution ordained it so. Yes, they say, a small percentage of people are gay or gender-nonconforming, but that doesn’t change an overall picture shaped by millennia of sexual selection. Both groups invoke evolutionary psychology to explain their conclusions on female dating preferences, the reasons men cheat, and why so-called short kings struggle in the dating market.

I asked Stuart Ritchie, an academic psychologist turned science writer who has previously criticized the evidence base for Perry’s claims on porn use causing erectile dysfunction, if he finds this pop-science approach troublesome. He told me via email that evolutionary psychologists stress that their findings merely describe reality, rather than morally endorsing the effects of natural selection—what’s known as the naturalistic fallacy. “Both reactionary feminists and manosphere red-pillers are often committing exactly this fallacy, assuming that everything natural must be good, and that things that are more prevalent in the modern world [than in the past]—contraception, divorce, surrogacy, etc—must therefore be bad,” he added. “That’s not necessarily to defend any of those modern things, but just to say that the arguments used against them are often very weak and fallacious—and that might be the main overarching thing reactionary feminism and the manosphere have in common.”

Because it argues that men and women are fundamentally different in ways shaped by millennia of evolution, reactionary feminism is deeply fatalistic about the possibility of social change. (“Political horndogs will always abuse power,” Harrington claims in a recent article.) In Perry’s book, her belief, derived from evolutionary psychology, that men are uncontrollable sex beasts sits uneasily alongside the assertion that monogamous marriage and children are the optimum conditions for female flourishing. “Her core message seems to be simultaneously that men are usually ghastly and often potential rapists, and yet that women should also try very hard to marry one and never divorce him,” the British journalist Hugo Rifkind wrote after reading it. “Which, I must admit, I found a little unsatisfactory.”

When I asked Harrington how Americans had received her book, she said that Baby Boomers had been more defensive of the post-1960s ethos than younger generations have been. Many Gen Z and Millennial women are disillusioned with the modern sexual marketplace of abundant porn, dating apps, and unfulfilling hookups: In 2021, Billie Eilish told Howard Stern that she’d started watching porn at age 11, and “it destroyed my brain.” In the novels of Sally Rooney, sadomasochism is repeatedly presented as abusive and miserable rather than kinky and fun—much to the chagrin of “sex positive” feminists. In The Right to Sex, the ultraliberal Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan describes being challenged by her own students over what they see as her complacency about violent and misogynist porn. The widespread discontent felt by young people has led to unexpected collisions, such as the Washington Post columnist Christine Emba being interviewed by Church Times, a religious magazine, about her book-length critique of consent-only culture, Rethinking Sex: A Provocation. Generation Z might not all agree that “New York’s Hottest Club Is the Catholic Church,” as a New York Times trend piece put it, but they aren’t all libertines either.

Reactionary feminists take these concerns to their logical end. Louise Perry’s book begins by imagining the grave of the Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, who asked to be buried next to Marilyn Monroe. The sexual revolution worked out well for Hefner, she argues—he gained a house full of “playmates” and built an empire on female flesh bared in the name of empowerment. But for Monroe, being the sexiest woman alive brought mostly misery, including a string of men who wanted to bed her for the bragging rights. “There is never a reckoning with what sexual liberation does to those women who follow its directives most obediently,” Perry writes.

[From the September 2021 issue: Sally Rooney addresses her critics]

Reactionary feminism also lionizes motherhood with a zeal that, in the case of Perry and Harrington, feels very personal. Perry wrote her book while pregnant, and Harrington wishes she could have had more than one child. “I came to motherhood pretty late, and I wish I’d started sooner,” Harrington told me. “That’s an ongoing source of regret for me.” Power, who does not have children, is nonetheless sympathetic to the other two women’s pro-family stance. “I’ve spoken to people in their 30s who desperately want to have a family and can’t,” she told me. “There’s something tragic about women who want to have a child but miss the moment. Louise is saying: Be realistic. Think about it sooner than later.”

Unfortunately, these paeans to the nuclear family sound judgmental, no matter how many times the reactionaries insist that they aren’t demonizing gay couples, single parents, and people without children—not least because they hand ammunition to anti-feminists who really do want women barefoot and pregnant.

Harrington’s jeremiad against the pill is the kookiest part of Feminism Against Progress. Put simply, she thinks sex is hotter when it might lead to conception, “because a woman who refuses birth control will be highly motivated to be choosy about her partners.” She lost me with the assertion that the rhythm method is freakier than BDSM because it’s “sex with the real danger left in.” And there’s more: “In a lifelong partnership, the possibility of conception itself is deeply erotic.” If there’s anything less sexy than imagining that your future child will soon be in the room with you, I don’t want to hear it.

While Perry’s book specifically castigates “those conservatives who are silly enough to think that returning to the 1950s is either possible or desirable,” renouncing effective birth control would immiserate many women and imprison some in abusive relationships. The pill’s reported downsides, such as irritability and anxiety, also have to be weighed against the toll that decades of childbearing took on previous generations, both physically and economically. While researching my 2020 history of feminism, Difficult Women, I found wrenching letters that the contraceptive pioneer Marie Stopes had received, and I told Harrington about some of them. “I have a very Weak Heart if I have any more it might prove fatal my inside is quite exausted [sic] I have a Prolapsed Womb, it is wicked to bring children into the world to Practicly [sic] starve,” read one from a 37-year-old mother of nine children. Another woman wrote: “He says if you won’t let me at the front, I will at the back. I don’t care which way it is so long as I get satisfied. Well Madam this is very painful to me, also I have wondered if it might be injurious.”

Is that a world to which any woman would want to return? “You can be sure that Stopes would have selected them to underline the point she wanted to make,” Harrington told me. “And the demographic that would have been writing to Stopes would have been self-selecting, for the reasons you would expect.”

Again and again, reactionary feminism offers a useful corrective and then goes to the edge of overkill. For example, its proponents argue for the revival of men’s single-sex spaces: sports clubs, bars, voluntary associations. This sounds unobjectionable, but could bring back the Mad Men days, when deals were sealed at the golf club or the strip club or a weird elitist retreat with a 40-foot owl. But Louise Perry takes the idea further by arguing that women should never get drunk or high “in public or in mixed company,” because of the risk of sexual assault. She thinks this is pragmatic; I find it incredibly bleak. As I told her during an interview about her book, I don’t want to live in a voluntary Saudi Arabia.

Reactionary feminism is not the dominant strain in Britain, any more than its opposite (what Harrington calls “Verso feminism,” after the radical-left publisher) is. Most British feminists, as far as I can tell, are centrists and soft-left moderates, the heirs of a tradition that developed in tandem with labor unions, placing hard constraints on both its conservatism and radicalism. The movement has stayed grounded in material conditions arising from physical sex differences—the challenges of pregnancy and motherhood, the threat of violence by bigger and stronger males. In the absence of a strong religious right and red-state governors banning abortion and passing punitive bills on LGBTQ issues, the gender debate is not so polarized here, and feminist thinkers and LGBTQ activists have more space to acknowledge that their interests are not always identical.

[Read: The unending assaults on girlhood]

Because of fears of being tarred as fascists or bigots, some American feminists refuse to even engage with any reactionary-feminist arguments. That is a shame, because the movement’s final tenet—that the unfettered free market should be kept away from bodies, particularly female ones—is one you might expect the political left to embrace. Reactionary feminism offers pungent criticism of liberal “choice feminism” and its laissez-faire attitude to the exploitation of women who have ostensibly chosen their circumstances. The reactionaries dare to say that some choices are better than others, and that being offered two bad options is no choice at all.

Many liberals support commercial surrogacy: Let women do what they want with their bodies, the argument goes. The reactionaries, meanwhile, reply that the industry is driven by inequality: Rich couples open their wallets, and poor women provide the labor. (They also argue that separating a newborn from its mother is cruel unless absolutely necessary.) Similarly, they note that the shibboleth that “sex work is work” is complicated by the fact that rich men buy sex, and poorer women (and men) sell it. Harrington sees trans medical care, too, as unhappily consumerist—an empowerment movement acting as a sales rep for Big Pharma. She also believes that feminists who advocate for government-supported day care—downplaying the importance of maternal attachment to small babies, in her view—are useful idiots for corporations who want women back at their desks.

“There are a great many conservatives who haven’t noticed quite how much Marxism I’ve smuggled in,” Harrington says. “Don’t put that in The Atlantic.” Then she relents: Reactionary feminism was coined half as a joke—turning an insult into a badge of honor—and half as a “signal scrambler.” If it isn’t provoking you, then it hasn’t worked.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained.

Today’s special guest is Maya Chung, an associate editor on the Books team and a frequent contributor to our Books Briefing newsletter. Lately, Maya has been enjoying the style and ambience of the French novelist Maylis de Kerangal, is still thinking about a recent exhibition of work by the surrealist 20th-century artist Meret Oppenheim, and is enjoying post-hype-cycle prestige TV, which includes the fourth and final season of Succession.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

A star reporter’s break with reality The instant pot failed because it was a good product. The fake poor bride

The Culture Survey: Maya Chung

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: I really hope to see the Shakespeare in the Park production of Hamlet in New York’s Central Park this summer. The early pandemic made me realize how much I’d taken for granted living in a city with such incredible theater, so I’ve been cherishing the experience of seeing live theater this past year. And there’s nothing like Shakespeare in the Park—whatever the play, it’s a totally enchanting experience. This year it’s a contemporary Hamlet directed by the celebrated Kenny Leon, who also did this season’s Tony-winning revival of Topdog/Underdog on Broadway. Setting Shakespeare in the modern day can sometimes be gimmicky, but when it’s done right, it captures the magic of his work, and how enduring it remains. [Related: All of Shakespeare’s plays are about race.]

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: I don’t love watching shows when they’re at the height of their popularity, because when there’s a ton of chatter, I have a hard time figuring out what my actual, original thoughts are (and if I have any!). So I just finally started watching the fourth season of Succession. Avoiding spoilers while working on the Culture desk here has been nearly impossible, and some of the big bombshells did slip through. But I’m still savoring all of the delicious drama and insult-hurling. [Related: The Succession plot that explained the whole series]

I’m even more behind on The Handmaid’s Tale, which I also just started watching a couple weekends ago. The show came out in 2017, which wasn’t that long ago, but it has been really fascinating to watch it with a little bit of distance, especially given the political climate in which it premiered. Also, the performances are spectacular, and it’s visually gorgeous. [Related: The visceral, woman-centric horror of The Handmaid’s Tale]

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I read Maylis de Kerangal’s short novella Eastbound earlier this year, which is about a young Russian conscript who, once aboard the Trans-Siberian rail, decides to desert and meets a French woman who helps him. I haven’t stopped thinking about it. I then read de Kerangal’s book The Heart, a similarly tense novel about the events and characters involved in a heart transplant—including the young man who dies in an accident, the woman who receives his heart, and the doctors and bureaucrats who make the transplant possible. In recent years I’ve sought out books for style and ambience rather than plot, perhaps because of my fickle attention span or perhaps after reading one too many plodding books. But de Kerangal reminded me how transportive it is when an author successfully creates that itching desire to know what happens next—without forgoing an ounce of style.

As for nonfiction, I’ve loved Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes, a book of fragmentary “notes”—which include memoir, theory, photos, and poetic musings—about Black life in America. I’ve been reading the book in blips and spurts over the past couple of months, which in some ways has felt like the best way to read it, because it’s meant I’ve been carrying Sharpe’s intelligent, lyrical voice around with me.

An author I will read anything by: For a long time I didn’t have an answer to this, but as a books editor, you get asked this, or a version of this question, a lot. Though my answer will likely change, right now, it’s Rachel Cusk and Rachel Ingalls. Two very different writers, both completely enrapturing and honest and intricate. [Related: Rachel Cusk won’t stay still.]

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: I loved seeing Meret Oppenheim’s work at the Museum of Modern Art earlier this year. I was previously uninitiated in her work but came away from the show entranced by her bleakness and her whimsy. My favorite part came near the end, where, across opposite walls on large sheets of paper, Oppenheim had made a blueprint for a retrospective of her work in Bern. For this, she drew tiny reproductions of her works so that the curators could see what order they should be displayed in. It made me strangely sad to see the artist’s career captured two-dimensionally, in such miniature. But that’s probably the wrong way to look at it; it’s likely that Oppenheim was proudly looking back at her life’s work, taking control of how exactly it should be consumed.

The last thing that made me snort with laughter: Even the title of Nicole Holofcener’s new movie, You Hurt My Feelings, made me snort—I love a literal title. (When I encountered the similarly prosaic book title Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, by the biologist Rupert Sheldrake, in this lovely profile of his son, the mycologist Merlin Sheldrake, I knew I had to get my hands on a copy.) In the movie, a woman falls apart when she overhears her husband admitting that he doesn’t like her new book. I’m an editor, not a writer, so I was able to laugh heartily at this premise. But I could imagine that for my writer colleagues, this one might hit a little too close to home. [Related: You Hurt My Feelings is a hilarious anxiety spiral.]

The Week Ahead

Season 2 of The Bear (all episodes streaming on Hulu on Thursday) I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, Lorrie Moore’s strange new novel, full of death but also the author’s trademark humor (on sale Tuesday) Asteroid City, Wes Anderson’s new film that shows the director at his best, according to our critic (in theaters everywhere Friday)

More in Culture

Long live the delightfully dumb comedy. Paul McCartney: I saw you standing there. Killer Mike’s critique of wokeness Asteroid City is Wes Anderson at his best. What to read when you’re feeling ambitious What’s so funny about dying?

Catch up on The Atlantic

Jack Smith’s backup option Why Trump might just roll to the presidential nomination The pregnancy risk that doctor’s won’t mention

Photo Album

Stunning Cephalopod: Aquatic Life Finalist. The iridescent symmetry of this blanket octopus plays a key role in the cephalopod’s success as a predator. Four species of blanket octopuses roam tropical and subtropical seas—including the Gulf of Mexico, the Indian Ocean, the Great Barrier Reef, and the Mediterranean—searching for fish and crustaceans to eat.

Scroll through winners of the 2023 BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition.

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Earlier this week, Donald Trump was arraigned in Miami on charges that he willfully retained documents containing some of the nation’s most sensitive secrets and obstructed justice when federal officials tried to retrieve them.

Trump was charged with more than three dozen criminal counts covering seven different violations of federal law. The indictment is a chilling and devastating portrait of a president who betrayed his country. But it comes as no surprise. It constitutes only the latest link in an extraordinary chain of corruption.  

Trump doesn’t just cross moral lines; he doesn’t appear capable of understanding moral categories. Morality is for Trump what colors are to a person who is color-blind.

But what’s true of Trump isn’t true of the majority of his enablers. They see the colors that Trump cannot. They still know right from wrong. But for a combination of reasons, they have consistently overridden their conscience, in some cases unwittingly and in some cases cynically. They have talked themselves into believing, or half-believing, that Trump is America’s martyr and America’s savior.

[David A. Graham: This indictment is different]

Trump’s behavior obviously speaks to his own character. But Trump’s behavior has also proved to be a test of the character of others—Republican politicians and voters, the GOP establishment and the evangelical movement. It’s proved to be a test of character for those who claim to be “constitutional conservatives” and “family values” advocates, for ethicists and public intellectuals, for right-wing commentators and party strategists.

With very few exceptions, and to varying degrees, they have failed it. They have turned against—or at the very least, at a crucial hour, they have failed to defend—ideals and institutions they once claimed to cherish. Donald Trump could not have so deeply wounded our republic without his enablers. It took a team effort.

And now here we are, eight summers after Trump announced his first bid for the presidency, and we find him facing 71 felony counts while still 30 points above his nearest GOP rival, having transformed the Republican Party in his own image in ways that exceed even what Ronald Reagan did. His imprint is on the party in a thousand different ways. Tens of millions of Americans see Trump as their angel of vengeance, and they can’t wait for the second act to get started.

The moral wreckage of Donald Trump’s presidency and post-presidency was predictable and even inevitable. The reason? Trump’s moral depravity, which touches every area of his life, private and public, has long been in public view, undisguised and impossible to miss.

In July 2016, I described Trump as temperamentally unfit to be president—erratic, unprincipled, unstable, obsessive, a serial liar, and a misogynist who made racist appeals and who suffered from what, at the time, I called a “personality disorder.” On the day after Trump’s inauguration, I wrote, “A man with illiberal tendencies, a volatile personality and no internal checks is now president. This isn’t going to end well.” It hasn’t.

The scope and seriousness of Trump’s misconduct over the past eight years is staggering. He has relentlessly promoted lies and conspiracy theories, brutalized and dehumanized his opponents, threatened prosecutors and judges, and used his pardon power to subvert the legal system. He was found liable in a civil case of sexual abuse and defamation. He made hush-money payments to a porn star. He instigated a violent attack on the Capitol and attempted to overturn an election. He was impeached twice. And he is the first former president to be indicted, not once but twice. More indictments are likely to come.

Other shady and unethical individuals have served in the White House—Richard Nixon and Warren Harding among them—but Trump’s full-spectrum corruption puts him in a category all his own. His degeneracy is unmatched in American presidential history and unsurpassed in American political history.

[Ryan Goodman and Andrew Weissmann: Jack Smith’s backup option]

If Trump’s malice is obvious, what’s behind it is more difficult to assess. In 2016, the psychologist Dan McAdams wrote a psychological portrait of Trump for The Atlantic, which he later expanded into a book, The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning. McAdams describes Trump as “psychologically singular,” a man who “lacks an inner story to provide his life with temporal continuity, purpose, and meaning. He is the episodic man, living (and fighting) in the moment.” And that moment is free of ethical considerations and ethical constraints.

“Trump is like the alpha chimp who is always playing the short game, a brute-force game, to win at all costs,” McAdams claims. Trump himself said years ago, “Man is the most vicious of all animals, and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat.”

Whatever the precise nature of Trump’s psychological pathologies—McAdams says Trump is “way more strange than any mental illness category that one can apply or create”—we can see for ourselves how they manifest: extreme narcissism, lack of empathy, feelings of persecution, grandiosity, and deceitfulness; impulsivity, shamelessness, remorselessness, and rage; a compulsive desire for attention, an obsessive need to dominate others, an eagerness to shatter social norms, and the belief that rules that apply to others don’t apply to him.

In his 1983 book, Statecraft as Soulcraft, George Will, one of the most consequential conservatives of the past half century, wrote that “the purpose of politics is to facilitate, as much as is prudent, the existence of worthy passions and the achievement of worthy aims.” Will was channeling Aristotle, who said in the Nicomachean Ethics, “The main concern of politics is to engender a certain character in the citizens and to make them good and disposed to perform noble actions.”

That is an extremely complicated and difficult task, but a worthy and ennobling one. There is dignity in the political vocation, which is why many of us went into politics in the first place.

Donald Trump, rather than using the presidency to elevate human sensibilities, did the opposite, and he did it relentlessly. Among the most damaging legacies of the Trump years is his barbarization of America’s civic and political life. He called the spirits from the vasty deep, and they came when summoned.

Many millions of Americans responded, determined that their country become more decent, more humane, more just. We are now in mid-story; none of us knows quite how it will end. An extraordinary drama is playing out, and each of us has a role to play in shaping the outcome.

[David Frum: An exit from the GOP’s labyrinth of Trump lies]

In his first book as president of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic, Václav Havel offered his reflections on the nature and practice of politics. Is there a place for morality and simple decency in politics? Did his ideals and principles, forged through two decades of courageous opposition to totalitarianism, have a place in public life?

Havel believed they did, but he knew it was a struggle. “Anyone who claims that I am a dreamer who expects to transform hell into heaven is wrong,” he wrote in Summer Meditations. “I have few illusions, but I feel a responsibility to work towards the things I consider good and right. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to change certain things for the better, or not at all. Both outcomes are possible. There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.”

The playwright and former dissident added this: “A moral and intellectual state cannot be established through a constitution, or through law, or through directives, but only through complex, long-term, and never-ending work.”

What does that work look like in practice? “It is a way of going about things, and it demands the courage to breathe moral and spiritual motivation into everything, to seek the human dimension in all things. Science, technology, expertise, and so-called professionalism are not enough. Something more is necessary. For the sake of simplicity, it might be called spirit. Or feeling. Or conscience.”