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A Trump-Biden rematch is inevitable in 2024, even though polling has shown that most Americans wish it weren’t (and even though the former president is possibly facing a third indictment). But the 2024 field is still quite crowded—and the contenders can tell us a few things about America’s politics and anxieties.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Gary Shteyngart: “I watched Russian television for five days straight.” Being anxious or sad does not make you mentally ill. Climate collapse could happen fast.

A Race for Silver

Today, the long-shot Democratic candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testified in a hearing organized by Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. If the GOP using a Democratic presidential contender as an empathetic witness in a hearing sounds strange to you, you’re not alone. But the choice makes more sense when you understand how RFK Jr.’s conspiracy-theory-laden platform speaks to many voters, and how scores of right-wingers are promoting his candidacy.

RFK Jr.’s role in today’s hearing underscores his unique place in contemporary American politics, my colleague John Hendrickson, who recently profiled him, told me today. RFK Jr. is not the only 2024 contender who, despite low odds for winning the presidential race itself, has managed to hold on to something of a spotlight—or at least to elicit some fear from the competition. Below is a short guide to some of these candidates.

The first MAGA Democrat has real support.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign was initially written off by some as a stunt. But Kennedy’s support is not a joke, John noted last month: “So far, Kennedy is polling in the double digits against Biden, sometimes as high as 20 percent.”

Kennedy is “tapping into something burrowed deep in the national psyche,” John writes: “Large numbers of Americans don’t merely scoff at experts and institutions; they loathe them … Scroll through social media and count how many times you see the phrase Burn it down.” And Kennedy is promising to do just that. On the campaign trail, he speaks about collusion among state, corporate, media, and pharmaceutical powers. He has said that if elected, he would “gut” agencies like the FDA and order the Justice Department to investigate medical journals for “lying to the public.”

Across the GOP, it’s a race for second place.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis continues to lag far behind Trump in polling because “his basic theory of the campaign is turning out to be wrong,” my colleague Helen Lewis wrote yesterday. “He promised to run as Trump plus an attention span, and instead he is running as Trump minus jokes. The result is ugly enough for the Republican base to recoil.”

DeSantis has long believed that “mainstream journalists are the enemy and should be treated with undisguised contempt,” Helen writes. But his decision earlier this week to sit down for an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper suggests that he finally understands he needs the mainstream media’s support if he hopes to bolster his candidacy.

I called my colleague David A. Graham, who keeps up our 2024 election “cheat sheet,” to see how he’s thinking about the non-Trump GOP contenders right now. “Tim Scott and Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy are all in this interesting place where you could imagine them busting out of the pack to either match or supplant DeSantis as the leading non-Trump contender, but it’s hard right now to imagine any of them mounting a serious challenge to Trump,” David told me. In the end, he said, “it seems like this is all just a vigorous race for silver.”

And the third-party problem is coming into view.

The centrist group No Labels, whose founding chairman is the former Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman, is preparing to back a third-party presidential ticket in 2024—“to the growing alarm of Democrats,” my colleague Russell Berman wrote earlier this week. (So far, the group has refused to discuss who its nominees might be.)

No Label leaders say they’re hoping to protect voters from a rematch between Trump and Biden. “But Democrats and more than a few Republicans fear that such a plan might ensure exactly what Lieberman insists he would hate to see: Trump’s return to the White House,” Russell notes. No Labels says it will decide whether to nominate a ticket in the spring of 2024. The group might be holding out for two unlikely scenarios, Russell explains: that Biden will change his mind about running for reelection, or that “Trump’s legal woes will finally persuade Republican voters to look elsewhere.”

Meanwhile, a long-shot candidate is inspiring outsize fear in the White House. The academic, civil-rights activist, and Green Party candidate Cornel West will probably not win, my colleague Mark Leibovich writes today, but West has Democrats worried all the same. “West inhabits a particular category of Democratic angst, the likes of which only the words Green Party presidential candidate can elicit,” Mark explains; Jill Stein, as you may recall, swept up votes in key battleground states in 2016 that exceeded the margins by which Hillary Clinton lost in those states.

Democrats’ fear of a third-party candidate is not unfounded: As Mark notes, recent polling suggests that in a head-to-head race between Trump and Biden, Trump is more likely to benefit from the addition of a third-party candidate.

We may see the first real test of the GOP contenders next month, at the first Republican debate on August 23; Trump is reportedly considering skipping the event entirely. The Democratic National Committee, for its part, will not be holding primary debates, which is the norm for the party of an incumbent president seeking reelection. As we head into this next phase of the election, the race for silver will intensify. And other surprises could still await.

Related:

The humiliation of Ron DeSantis The long-shot candidate who has the White House worried

Today’s News

Wheat prices rose for a third day after Russia pulled out of a wartime deal that protected the export of Ukrainian grain, a move that could stoke a global food crisis. A planned burning of the Quran in Stockholm led to counterprotests in Iraq and the expulsion of the Swedish ambassador from the country. New York City will pay about $13.7 million to settle a class-action lawsuit arguing that unlawful police tactics violated the rights of protesters demonstrating after George Floyd’s murder.

Evening Read

Richard Kalvar / Magnum

Seriously, What Are You Supposed to Do With Old Clothes?

By Amanda Mull

In February, I ran out of hangers. The occasion was not exactly unforeseen—for at least a year, I had been rearranging the deck chairs on my personal-storage Titanic in an attempt to forestall the inevitable. I loaded two or three tank tops or summer dresses onto a single hanger. I carefully refolded everything in my dresser drawers to max out their capacity. I left the things I wore most frequently on a bedroom chair instead of wedging them into my closet. I didn’t buy anything new unless I absolutely needed it. Eventually, though, I did need some things, and I didn’t have anywhere to put them.

Realizing you’ve exceeded the bounds of your closet is a low-grade domestic humiliation that’s become familiar to many Americans.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Porn set women up from the start. The Zoom wave isn’t going anywhere.

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: FPG / Hulton Archive / Getty.

Read. Paula Marantz Cohen’s new book, Talking Cure, uncovers the secret to a good conversation.

Listen. Marriages aren’t what they used to be. So why can’t we quit weddings? In the latest episode of Radio Atlantic, Hanna Rosin talks with our staff writer Xochitl Gonzalez about her years as a luxury wedding planner.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If you, like me, are waiting for various loved ones to return to town before joining the Barbie-Oppenheimer fray (or if tickets are sold out), I’d suggest seeing Past Lives, a beautiful film released by A24 still playing in select theaters. My colleague Shirley Li put it perfectly: The movie is an ode to the kind of love that can be both platonic and romantic at the same time; somehow, that gives the film double the resonance and the depth of a classic romantic tale. It’s not overly sentimental, either; the movie is suffused with subtle wit throughout.

— Isabel

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

On New Year’s Eve of 2014, I became the subject of a terrifying experiment. On assignment for The New York Times, I’d agreed to stay in a hotel room for seven days (leaving only for a brief daily swim) while watching Russian state television. Three monitors were arrayed in front of my bed constantly blasting the state-owned Channel 1 and Rossiya 1 networks, as well as the Gazprom-owned NTV. By the end of my stay, I had turned from a happy-go-lucky novelist into a squeaking gerbil of a man, psychologically compromised and barely sure of what constituted reality.

Now, slightly more than eight years later, I have decided to replicate this experiment. On the one hand, the length of my sentence has been commuted to five days from seven; on the other hand, since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the state’s propaganda has become even more loud, brash, and genocidal, making any length of exposure to it psychologically problematic. But in some way, Russians were preparing for the bloodshed of innocent Ukrainians as far back as 2014, if not earlier. The images of Ukrainians as a bunch of Nazis hoodwinked by the West were readily presented on Russian television. Back then, I did not want to believe they could lead to the massacres of Bucha and Irpin. Today, I know better.

Day 1

I arrive at the Public Hotel on the Lower East Side on a cold day this past April. My room has nice views of most of the downtown-Manhattan skyline, which lights up in flashes of pink and purple as the sun begins to set over New Jersey. But I am not here to look out on the World Trade Center tower or the New Museum right below the hotel. I am here to suffer and learn. I flick on each monitor in turn: Channel 1, Rossiya 1 (broadcast outside Russia as RTR-Planeta), and NTV. I settle into my large, comfortable bed; order a pisco sour to be sent to my room (the hotel’s restaurant is Peruvian); and rub my eyes in anticipation. It begins.

The first thing you notice when you switch on Russian TV is its totemic fascination with the swastika, which regularly appears on one of my screens. Sometimes it is taken from footage of the Nazi era, sometimes from purported videos of the Ukrainian far right. Sometimes it is on the news, sometimes in a documentary, sometimes in a TV drama. By my third or fourth swastika of the day, I start to believe that when the symbol is shown this often, it is not done so entirely with disparagement, but with a subconscious appeal to authoritarian power and to the state’s own fascism.

[Read: Putin is caught in his own trap]

A lot of time on all three networks is given over to flashy “newsroom” sets populated by older men in blazers who scream about the West. Kto Protiv (“Who Is Against”), on Rossiya 1, is one such program. The subject matter is often akin to what one sees on far-right television in the U.S., the exemplar of which is Fox News. But Russian state television is several degrees to the right of Fox, or even of its more lunatic competitor, Newsmax, although Tucker Carlson, the onetime king of televised white supremacy, is frequently shown on Russian TV as well—or, at least, he was back in April. On tonight’s Kto Protiv, Sweden and Finland are presented as having been coerced into joining NATO. A panelist mispronounces the term LGBTQ+ to general laughter. (“Is it plus or minus?” another panelist asks.) Afterward, an “economic expert” tells the audience that transgender bodies have begun to fall apart. No evidence is cited for any of this; it’s merely people talking or, as some like to say, “asking questions.”  

On NTV, another staple of Russian television appears: the dysfunctional-family showcase. “They beat me, tied up my hands, starved me,” a woman from Volgograd cries. “My grandmother beat my face with a metal stick.” The beaten woman, now in late-middle age, is the daughter of a mother of five, who rejected all or most of her children after giving birth to them. The elderly mother who abandoned her children is presented. A woman with a piece of jewelry around her neck resembling a thick chain screams from the audience: “Why did you give birth to so many children if you didn’t have a husband or money? So that they would be orphans?”

Meanwhile, on Channel 1, a black-and-white documentary shows Khrushchev greeting a group of cosmonauts. The glories of the Soviet past on one screen are contrasted with the realities of the present on another. You may ask why a government obsessed with propaganda would be showing programs about broken families. One reason is that audiences of all nations enjoy watching their fellow citizens in pain. Another is to remind the people that life in the lower depths is a time-honored tradition. The show is presented by two dapper male hosts who are part of a well-trod Russian-TV theme: Provincials in distress are interviewed by stylish urban hosts, as if they are Chekhovian peasants being judged before the district court in czarist times. Subconsciously, shows like these teach poorer and older Russians (the kind of people who regularly watch state television) that they should be ashamed before their betters and that they cannot expect much from life or their immediate families.  

“My husband drank,” the elderly negligent mother explains on NTV. She was a tram driver. Her husband worked in a factory. “He went to prison for three years for stealing a coat. Then he divorced me.” Whereas the manned space flight on Channel 1 was a great accomplishment, NTV is presenting the eternal Russia, which will remain when the glories of the past are left to the history books.

The old woman crawls on the floor. “Forgive me! Forgive me!” she cries to her children. Now we have left the pages of Chekhov and arrived in Dostoyevsky Land. Some of the audience is in tears. “My fate has been so difficult!” the old mother cries out to them, and to her many abandoned children.

On Rossiya 1, the topics of Finland and American transgender people are not yet exhausted. On one screen, men are screaming about geopolitics, while on another women are screaming about their destroyed personal lives.

The show about the dysfunctional family cuts to a commercial for a fast-food chain that has replaced McDonald’s after the sanctions for the Russian invasion of Ukraine were imposed. The copycat McDonald’s is offering an unconvincing-looking “beeeeg speshal roast beef,” as an announcer describes it.

On Rossiya 1, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is giving one of his usual bombastic speeches: “They want to cancel our country, as they like to say. They’re trying to cancel our country for pursuing its own politics. The West has long groomed Ukraine … Just like Germany invaded Russia.” The television shows another Nazi parade, a long sea of swastikas and chanting in German.  

Later on the channel, we see images of Russian President Vladimir Putin striding through gilded Kremlin halls, while U.S. President Joe Biden is shown tripping on the stairs of Air Force One. It’s an advertisement for a show titled Moscow. Kremlin. Putin.

It’s only 9 p.m., but I am exhausted. I have drained two glasses of pisco sour and eaten my ceviche from the hotel’s restaurant, and am blindly watching a movie called Razplata (“Payback”), which seems to be about a drunken man who beats his wife. My vision is getting hazy and my eyes can barely see what’s happening on the three monitors, but I can sense that it is a triptych of a nation that has no idea what it is supposed to be.

Day 2

“Not my King!” The day’s news begins with anti-monarchist demonstrations in the U.K. “At least no one is throwing eggs at him like last time,” the NTV announcer intones as King Charles III is booed. In addition to the constant footage of anti-war and pro-Russian demonstrations in Germany, Russian TV is obsessed with the perfidy of the “Anglo-Saxons.” Here the Royal Family is criticized for a variety of sins, such as colonialism in Africa and the 3 million pounds King Charles supposedly received from a Qatari sheikh. Although Russian propaganda normally skews far right, its producers are able to pivot quickly from feigning horror at transgendered people to promoting a kind of Soviet-flavored anti-colonialism. Surely something will appeal to Misha from Murmansk or Vanya from Vladivostok, or any of the more than 100 million viewers who spend an average of almost four hours a day digesting this spicy gruel.

After the booing of King Charles, the national weather forecast features temperatures in Donetsk and Melitopol in addition to Yalta, all cities stolen from Ukraine. I note that the city of Kherson, liberated by the Ukrainian army, does not make an appearance.

It’s the weekend, and Channel 1 is showing an endless run of old Soviet movies and army choirs singing about glory. But NTV is skewing younger with a show about women being stalked by ex-lovers. “He’s a professional boxer and he punched me several times,” a woman says of her former boyfriend. “He has a very aggressive nature.” A model is being blackmailed over sex videos by her ex. “Smartphones have made stalking easy,” the announcer intones. “He threatened to knock my teeth out,” another woman says, and we are treated to an array of horrifying bruises. The program notes that stalking of exes by spurned lovers is a problem in the U.S. and Germany as well.

This may be true, but after watching Russian television for less than 24 hours, I am starting to see a through line here, which is the consistent presence of violence in Russian shows, usually committed against women and children. The verb meaning “to hit” comes up constantly, which makes sense in a country where men encounter horrific hazing in the military as well as a cruel and violent penal system. In 2017 the Duma even passed a law decriminalizing domestic abuse that does not result in the victim being treated in a hospital.

There’s an ad break for a male anti-impotence drug called “the Emperor’s Secret,” supposedly made in China out of various fungi. “The Emperor’s Secret can be mixed with alcohol,” the announcer helpfully advises the Russian male.

Next up, NTV introduces an American named John McIntyre who fought with the Ukrainians but then fled to Russia. He has been described as mentally unstable by fellow soldiers and commanders and was allegedly pushed out of the Ukrainian army for incompetence, but in Russia he is a prized asset, proudly wearing his Che Guevara baseball cap and T-shirt. The program intimates that it was a right-wing Ukrainian battalion that caused the well-known massacres in Bucha and Irpin, and not the Russian soldiers whose campaign of rape, execution, and terror was well documented.

“Are there people like you in the States?” the interviewer asks McIntyre. “There are many pro-Russian Americans,” the young man replies. “American intelligence, they own the media machines. Most people watch CNN, but Fox has the most objective positions.”

“Their voices are getting louder!” an announcer on a Rossiya 1 newscast booms as older Germans are shown marching in a pro-Russia demonstration. “NATO out of Ukraine!” they chant. “U.S. and CIA out of Ukraine!” Afterward, an attractive young female correspondent brings cakes to Russian soldiers at the front. The war may be brutal, but, for Misha from Murmansk, it can also be sexy and exciting.

Day 3

Channel 1 is stepping up its game in the propaganda Olympics with a “documentary” series called The Age of the USSR, which blends animation and old footage. The Russian language, the announcer tells us, has no word for “loser,” but instead has neudachnik, literally “unlucky person.” “The loser is guilty for what he hasn’t achieved,” the announcer explains. “The neudachnik is not guilty of a lack of achievement, just a lack of fortune, and he deserves sympathy.” Hence, Russia, a country of poor roads, decaying houses, and abysmal life expectancy, is not a nation of losers who lack achievement, but simply those upon whom fortune has not smiled. In other words: Don’t blame Putin for the mess we live in.

The program then pivots to Ukraine. “The history of Ukraine begins with the Slavs,” the announcer says. “The territory of Ukraine passed between Catholic and Orthodox hands. ‘Ukraina’ means ‘the edge of.’ The word first appears in the 12th century.” The program takes the view, per Putin’s own “academic work” on the subject, that Ukraine has no history of its own, only the common history of the Slavs. “Their national character is Russian, only in the south [meaning Ukraine] it comes with increased aggression … ability for betrayal, and infantilism.”

And then the genocidal rhetoric is amped up with an animation showing a half-naked drunk Ukrainian in a pigsty (the actual pig is snorting nearby). The Ukrainian is shown with a haircut featuring a long lock of hair. This hair symbolism refers to the khokhol, a slur that Russians use against Ukrainians. It is equivalent to the worst kind of anti-Semitic and racist slurs. The image of the drunken Ukrainian with his khokhol haircut is no less eliminationist than the “hook-nosed Jew controlling the world” imagery of the Third Reich.

Meanwhile on NTV, more German grannies are chanting “for peace” in a pro-Russia march, participating, whether they realize it or not, in what amounts to their own Nuremberg rally.

[Read: It’s not enough for Ukraine to win. Russia has to lose.]

As the day continues, NTV presents a documentary entitled I Was Zelensky’s Filth. A young imprisoned woman is accused of trying to bomb Mariupol’s city hall, after the battered city held a sham election in favor of joining Russia. “Mariupol is a place of glory for Russian forces and shame for the Kiev führer,” the announcer declares. That führer, of course, is none other than Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself, a Jew whose relatives perished in the Holocaust. The show visits the apartment of the supposed terrorist, which is hilariously staged with an American flag and Nazi memorabilia. Can Sasha from Samara possibly believe this nonsense?

The program breaks for a commercial for Prostricum 100, another erectile-dysfunction supplement. The bottle seems to feature the drawing of a prostate. Meanwhile, on Rossiya 1 news, we learn that German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz has “fully committed himself to America. Germany can’t deal with the rising price of energy. The Greens are to blame. Germany will be turned into Kenya soon.”

Geopolitics takes up an inordinate amount of airtime on Russian TV. Russian viewers are probably subjected to more images of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen than their American or European counterparts. The anger at the West is palpable and, as with everything in Russia, deeply misogynist. An NTV host calls Von der Leyen “Macron’s girlfriend” and notes that she has dry skin.

Meanwhile, Russia’s new Best Friend Forever is Xi Jinping of China. He is presented as a virile and well-armed world leader. Many programs feature Chinese jets seemingly headed for Taiwan. Perhaps to make up for Russia’s increasing vassal status in relation to China, the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko is presented as Russia’s own pet vassal and Putin’s funny sidekick. “Belarus comes to us so many times,” a presenter jokes, “they painted a red carpet on the airport tarmac instead of rolling one out.” (Since June, Lukashenko has gotten a spring back in his step after supposedly mediating the end to Yevgeny Prigozhin’s attempted putsch.)

Rossiya 1 is broadcasting Moscow. Kremlin. Putin. In today’s episode, Putin visits a train factory! The workers at the factory are shown losing their ability to speak in front of their leader, quaking before the “boss,” as the presenters call him. “Don’t hurry,” Putin says kindly to a worker who looks like he has soiled his pants. “We’re just talking.”

Day 4

There is a sadness to watching this much Russian television. I have started drinking earlier and have switched from pisco sours to vodka martinis. A part of me wants to die.

But not before I catch Maria Butina’s new show on Channel 1. Butina is famous for being arrested and jailed as an unregistered Russian foreign agent in the United States. Once she was deported from the U.S., she became a member of Russia’s parliament and, of course, the host of her own TV program. (“Today’s program is brought to you by Erecton Activ. Every woman wants to be near a strong man, strong in every way. Only 2,999 rubles.”)

Today, the redheaded Butina, wearing an equally red blouse and suit pants, decides to talk about Hillary Clinton. Wait, what? Who still cares about Hillary Clinton? Apparently, Butina and Tanya from Taganrog still do.

Tense music begins. According to the program, Clinton laughed “hysterically” when she was shown pictures of the death of Muammar Qaddafi. “What kind of monster responds to a person’s death like that?” Butina asks. A “psychiatrist” appears and says, “Yes, she’s a monster. But it’s because she has had to compete with men.”

Donald Trump, whom Russian television adores, is shown calling her “unstable.” “What an awful woman,” the former U.S. president says.

“Hillary Clinton,” the chyron reads. “A shark floating belly up?”

A so-called expert on America is produced to diagnose Hillary’s early years: “She wore big glasses, she had terrible teeth, and then she threw herself at Bill Clinton.” But Hillary is just the appetizer to the entrée of evil that really controls the strings of world government. That man is of course George Soros. “He helped the Gestapo arrest his own co-religionists and then take away their own possessions,” an announcer says to chilling background music. “George Soros. The spider.”

Of course, the image of Jew as vermin or as a spider holding the world in its web is typical and, frankly, not even very imaginative anti-Semitic propaganda. But as I watch Butina’s show, I remember that my own grandfather was a Jew born in Ukraine who died fighting Germany’s fascist armies during the siege of Leningrad. A decade after his death, another fascist named Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in the city my grandfather died defending. Watching Butina and her garden-variety anti-Semitism feels like a terrible desecration of his memory.

Meanwhile, on NTV’s news program, Elon Musk declares in a clip, “All news is propaganda. People have to decide for themselves.” Russian state television could not have said it better.

Day 5

I can almost taste my freedom. The weather is improving, spring is finally here, and all of New York seems to be beckoning me to escape my luxurious prison cell. But I also feel overwhelming disgust, as if there’s a thick layer of dirt behind my shirt collar.

I watch a show called For Men / For Women, in which a woman is attacked on the street by her ex-husband, who, with the aid of his relatives, also kidnaps her little son. “I fell on the asphalt, and he is holding me down and beating me,” the woman says. “I lost my breast milk. I went to the police. The police didn’t do anything.”

“Nikolai drank a lot and still drinks a lot,” the woman continues. “He gets aggressive and he takes it out on people. I was his victim and had to obey him.”

The poor woman’s lament reminds me of the show I watched a few days prior (it now seems like a lifetime ago) about women being stalked and beaten by their ex-lovers. “He has a very aggressive nature,” a woman said of her former lover, the professional boxer. As does Russia in 2023. So many of the shows I’ve watched during the past five days were obsessed with the West, with our Clintons and Soroses and Von der Leyens. Russia is the spurned lover with the “very aggressive nature” taking out his inhumanity on the innocent neighbor next door. Despite all the posturing and doublespeak, Russian television announces as much to the world. Whether on the airwaves or, perhaps someday, at the Hague, the evidence has been clearly presented.

Pull up a sticky green lawn chair, everyone. It’s time for another round of Mounting Democratic Jitters, cherished summer pastime from Wilmington to the West Wing. Today’s installment: Cornel West, unlikely MAGA accessory.

West, the famed academic and civil-rights activist, is a Green Party candidate for president. He probably will not win. Not a single state or, in all likelihood, a single electoral vote. But he remains a persistent object of concern around the president these days.

I’ve talked with many of these White House worrywarts, along with their counterparts on Joe Biden’s reelection team and the usual kettles of Democratic anxiety who start bubbling up whenever the next existential-threat election is upon us. Even with the nuisance primary challenger Robert F. Kennedy Jr. polling in the double digits, West inhabits a particular category of Democratic angst, the likes of which only the words Green Party presidential candidate can elicit.

You can understand the sensitivities, given the history. Democrats still recoil at the name Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee in 2016, whose vote total in key battlegrounds—Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—wound up exceeding the margins by which Hillary Clinton lost in those states. What’s Dr. Stein doing these days, anyway?

“She is my interim campaign manager,” Cornel West told me this week in a phone interview. Not a joke, as Biden would say. Or an acid flashback. Apparently Ralph Nader was not available. Not Dennis Kucinich, either (already snapped up to run RFK Jr.’s campaign). It might be kind of funny if the stakes didn’t involve a return Trump ordeal in the White House.

“The fact that Jill Stein is running his campaign is a little on the nose,” one senior Democratic campaign strategist told me.

[Read: The first MAGA Democrat]

West has repeatedly denied that he might play a spoiler role. “I would say that most of the people who vote for me would not have voted for Biden,” he told me. “They would have probably stayed home.” In a recent CNN appearance, West dismissed the two parties as a “corporate duopoly” and professed “great respect for my dear brother Ralph Nader and great respect for sister Jill Stein.” This did nothing to assuage Democratic jitters.

I asked West whether he would campaign all the way to Election Day 2024, or if he might reconsider his venture at some point. “My goal is to go all the way to November,” he said, but allowed that circumstances could change and so could his plans. “I’m trying to be a jazzlike man,” he said. “Trying to be improvisational.”

In his campaign-launch video, West promised that his candidacy would focus on core progressive issues such as health care, housing, reproductive rights, and “de-escalating the destruction” done to the Earth and our democracy. “Neither political party wants to tell the truth,” West said, by way of explaining why he is running as a third-party candidate.

Notably, West has asserted that NATO was as much to blame for Russia’s war in Ukraine as the Kremlin. He has railed against the coalition as an “expanding instrument” of Western aggression, which he says is what provoked Russia’s onslaught. “This proxy war between the American Empire and the Russian Federation could lead to World War III,” he wrote in a social-media post calling for diplomatic talks. West also dismissed as a “sham” a House resolution—passed Tuesday—that affirmed U.S. support for Israel. “The painful truth is that the Israeli state—like the USA—has been racist in practice since its inception,” West wrote on Twitter.

Several Democrats were eager to tell their own truths about West’s endeavor, expressing uniform exasperation.

“This is not the time in order to experiment. This is not the time to play around on the margins,” warned Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison during a recent appearance on MSNBC. “What we see is a lot of folks who want to be relevant and try to be relevant in these elections and not looking at the big picture.”

“Too little attention is being paid to this,” David Axelrod, the former top Barack Obama strategist, told me. Axelrod recently gave voice to the gathering Democratic freak-out when he tweeted out some basic historical parallels. “In 2016, the Green Party played an outsized role in tipping the election to Donald Trump,” he wrote. “Now, with Cornel West as their likely nominee, they could easily do it again.”

In our interview, Axelrod noted that the 2020 race between Biden and Trump, in which neither Stein nor West was on the ballot, underscores how slim the Democrats’ margin of error remains. “When you have three states that you won by 41,000 votes combined, you just cannot afford to bleed votes, even a few of them,” Axelrod told me.

Ben Wikler, the Democratic Party chair of one of these states—Wisconsin—said he expects Trump allies to help prop up any third-party effort as a way to undermine Biden. “Regardless of the motivations of third-party candidates themselves, they can have the effect of delivering net votes to Trump next year,” Wikler said, “especially if a Trump-aligned super PAC pours money into targeted messages,” he added. “And those are exactly the kind of cynical games you have to expect.”

Cedric Richmond, a former Democratic congressman and White House adviser who recently signed on as co-chair of the Biden campaign, called West a “substantive person.” But Richmond argued that Biden has earned the support of the left through his record on the environment, health care, gun reform, and other progressive causes. “They also know that [Biden] could have done a hell of a lot more if not for this hostile Supreme Court,” Richmond told me. “And they know they got this hostile Supreme Court because ‘Hillary wasn’t good enough,’ because ‘we weren’t happy and we wanted to support Jill Stein’ or whatever the reason was at the time.” Now that voters have experienced a Trump presidency, he said, the cost of casting a protest vote with a third-party candidate should be much more apparent. “I think people have seen this movie, and they know the ending,” Richmond said.

In recent days, the putative-centrist outfit No Labels—which many Democrats have been quick to label as a pro-Trump collaborator—has been the main source of third-party hand-wringing.  The group is trying to recruit a so-called unity ticket that would appear on ballots across the country, possibly led by Senator Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat.

[Read: Joe Lieberman weighs the Trump risk]

“The idea that a third-party candidate won’t hurt the Democratic nominee is preposterous on its face,” Matt Bennett, executive vice president of Third Way, a center-left policy think tank that lately has been focused on stopping No Labels, told me. Recent polls show that in a head-to-head race between Trump and Biden, Trump is more likely to benefit when a third-party candidate is added to the mix. Likewise, an NBC survey from last month revealed that 44 percent of registered voters would be open to a third-party candidate—and there were considerably more Democrats saying this (45 percent) than Republicans (34 percent).

But Bennett explained that if No Labels does not recruit a serious candidate to actually run, the group will remain a largely hypothetical menace. West, meanwhile, is definitely running. The Green Party has an organizational structure in place in many states that will ensure the nominee’s position on general-election ballots. West has deep roots on the left, and is better known than Stein was in 2016. Like Clinton, Biden has faced uncertainty about how much enthusiasm he can expect from his own party, especially young progressives.

“Dr. West has a huge following among college-age voters and a lot of folks who are more interested in social movements than they are in supporting Democratic or Republican candidates,” Basil Smikle, a Democratic strategist who was the executive director of the State Democratic Party of New York from 2015 to 2018, told me.

West was a vocal supporter of Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign in the 2020 Democratic primary. He has said that he wound up voting for Biden in the general election because “a fascist catastrophe is worse than a neoliberal disaster.” He also dubbed Biden “mediocre” and “milquetoast” (a tepid endorsement, let’s say).

Supporters of Biden are hopeful that the blessing of progressive allies such as Sanders, who endorsed his reelection in April, will insulate the president from the threat of West-inspired defections to the Green Party. “What Bernie can do is say, ‘Look man, we thought the existential threat of Trump had waned, but it’s still here,’” Smikle said. “We need you to show up again.”  

Another prominent Bernie booster from 2020, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, endorsed Biden during a recent appearance on the podcast Pod Save America. The host Jon Favreau asked a follow-up about what she thought of West. Ocasio-Cortez appeared to tread carefully but sounded deferential. “I think Dr. West has an incredible history in this country,” she said. “What he gives voice to is incredibly important.” She went on to slam No Labels as a source of great concern, given “the sheer amount of money and bad-faith actors involved with it.”

“Not all third-party candidacies are created equal,” Ocasio-Cortez summarized. But she landed on a pragmatic point. “The United States has a winner-take-all system, whether we like that or not,” she said, adding that the cost of messing around could be fascism. “We have to live with that reality,” she said. Live with Joe Biden, in other words. Because the alternative is far worse—not a joke.

A recurring dynamic of the Trump era is that his opponents warn darkly about his secret motives or actions, and then he bluntly confirms their hunches in public.

For years, Democrats insisted that Trump had secret, illicit ties to Russia. Then, in the summer of 2017, Donald Trump Jr. abruptly disclosed a 2016 meeting he’d held with Russians promising “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. “I … worked on this story for a year … and … he just … he tweeted it out,” one writer famously lamented. Two years later, congressional Democrats launched an investigation to prove that the president was privately pressuring Ukraine to investigate the Bidens; Trump promptly asked China, publicly, to do so. He was accused of interfering secretly in the 2020 election; he started just doing it by tweet. More recently, claims spread that Trump was sifting through boxes of documents he’d removed from the White House; when Sean Hannity gave Trump a chance to deny the suggestion, he confirmed it instead.

[David A. Graham: Trump just did it out in the open]

One common anti-Trump belief—one might even call it a conspiracy theory—post-2020 is that Trump is running for president again in 2024 mostly as a way of trying to avoid prosecution in the several current and possible cases against him. He frequently talks about how annoying it was for him to leave behind his comfortable life to be president, and he didn’t really seem to enjoy the job much. His 2024 campaign has so far been mostly about bad personal vibes, not building walls and making Mexico pay for them. Almost exactly a year ago, Rolling Stone reported that Trump was “leaving confidants with the impression that, as his criminal exposure has increased, so has his focus on the legal protections of the executive branch.”

True to form, the former president’s lawyers have now confirmed all these suspicions, contending in a court document that his status as presidential contender ought to indefinitely spare him a trial. In a filing last night to Judge Aileen Cannon, the judge overseeing his indictment for mishandling classified documents, they asked that a trial be delayed at least until after the 2024 election.

For one thing, they write, he’s just too busy. “President Trump is running for President of the United States and is currently the likely Republican Party nominee. This undertaking requires a tremendous amount of time and energy, and that effort will continue until the election on November 5, 2024.” As for his co-defendant, Walt Nauta, his “job requires him to accompany President Trump during most campaign trips around the country. This schedule makes trial preparation with both of the Defendants challenging.” Many defendants in criminal cases would prefer to pursue other opportunities instead of face charges, but that doesn’t usually entitle them to indefinite delay. Although some commentators have argued that a current or prospective president ought to be held to a higher standard of behavior, Trump’s lawyers are effectively arguing the reverse, saying he should receive extra forbearance because of the job he’s seeking.

[David A. Graham: A guide to the indictments of Donald Trump]

They go on to argue that he simply can’t go through the judicial system now because he is running for president: “There is simply no question any trial of this action during the pendency of a Presidential election will impact both the outcome of that election and, importantly, the ability of the Defendants to obtain a fair trial.” (They do, however, nod to his other legal troubles, adding, “Previously scheduled trials in other matters for both President Trump and
defense counsel make it nearly impossible to prepare for this trial by December 2023.”)

The logistical and political hurdles the Trump team identifies aren’t imaginary. No comparable situation has ever occurred in U.S. history, a fact that Trump attributes to persecution but that’s better chalked up to his uniquely aberrant behavior. But the justice system has to balance interests, and the implications of being able to punt the trial just because he has voluntarily decided to run for president are troubling. It would suggest that as long as you are credibly seeking the most powerful position in the land, you can’t be held accountable for your actions.

If Trump wins, he would have the effective power to shut down any federal case against him. He and his allies are already laying the groundwork for further eroding the political insulation of the Department of Justice, which brought the documents case against him. (He would also presumably argue that, once he was president-elect or president, he would be too busy to stand trial.) If he does not win the election, his legal prospects are bleaker—which gives him additional incentives to subvert the election, just as he tried to do in 2020.

[From the January/February 2022 issue: Trump’s next coup has already begun]

Cannon originally proposed an August trial date. Federal prosecutors have requested a delay until December. Cannon’s rulings will be closely scrutinized, not only because of the stakes of the case but because she is a Trump appointee whose procedural rulings before the indictment were widely blasted as too friendly to him.

Her response to the filing will give some indication of the prospects for the case. In the meantime, though, Trump’s critics for years spread the innuendo that he was running to avoid prosecution, and … his legal team … just filed it in federal court.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a man of many misguided ideas. He thinks that vaccinations are harmful, that Wi-Fi radiation causes cancer, and that chemicals in the water supply are producing gender dysphoria. Most political commentators do not share these ideas, but they have implicitly adopted another of the presidential hopeful’s questionable notions: that Kennedy’s voters care about Kennedy’s ideas and are supporting him because of them.

“RFK Jr. says things—whether about vaccines causing autism, SSRIs leading to school shootings, or the CIA killing his dad and uncle—that are described by mainstream media as disinformation and ideas that are simply beyond the pale,” the political commentator Bari Weiss wrote. “But his high polling suggests that many Americans are tuning in to what he has to say. And perhaps they think that we have drawn the lines of debate too narrowly.”

Other analysts have adopted this reading in making the case for experts to publicly debate Kennedy and his proposed policies. “If a large chunk of the public is in the grip of mistaken ideas about these issues, part of the job of experts is to wade in and correct those ideas,” the leftist writer Ben Burgis argued. “If you don’t think he should be publicly debated, you need some other theory of how the curious can be persuaded away from his ideas,” the conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote.

[Read: The first MAGA Democrat]

All of these arguments assume that Kennedy is polling in double digits because his personal positions are resonating with the electorate. But this is a mistake. Although some voters do share Kennedy’s skepticism of the COVID-19 vaccines, they are predominantly Republicans; few Americans of either party oppose all childhood vaccinations, as he does. In reality, Kennedy’s popularity comes not from his odd ideas, but from his anti-establishment affect. He has not unearthed a new constituency for banning wireless internet and immunizations; he has tapped into a very old one that fundamentally repudiates the American political system and its official options. Kennedy’s campaign is a protest movement, not an intellectual argument, and seeking to rebut his specific stances misunderstands his appeal and dignifies his fringe fantasies with respect they do not command among voters.

Presidential-primary polling this century tells a clear story: About a quarter of voters reject their party’s political establishment and resent its attempts to anoint a presidential nominee. These voters want no part of a coronation, whether the chosen candidate is Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush, and when the opportunity presents itself, they readily rally behind other contenders who echo their anger at the political class. For decades, this bloc has boosted candidates of deeply divergent backgrounds who share little in common besides their anti-establishment outlook.

In 2004, the beneficiary of this energy was former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, whose campaign declared that he was running against the Democratic “establishment” and regularly denounced the “Washington Democrats in power.” In the early primary races, Dean garnered around a fifth of votes, but he ultimately flamed out, unable to expand beyond this showing. In 2008, first-term Senator Barack Obama captured the same constituency with his pointed critique of the Iraq War, which doubled as a critique of those who had supported the ill-fated military action—not just Clinton, Obama’s primary opponent, but many others among his party’s elites. By combining this insurgent support with a commanding majority of Black voters, Obama was able to dethrone the front-runner and nab the nomination.

In 2016, as Obama was departing the scene, another Vermont politician picked up the anti-establishment torch. In his own words, Senator Bernie Sanders was not merely a progressive calling for reform but a “socialist” calling for “revolution.” In interviews and public appearances, he attacked the Democratic Party, even as he sought to lead it. And he repeatedly assailed the “corporate media,” by which he meant not simply conservative channels such as Fox News but also mainstream outlets including CNN, ABC, and NBC. If this rhetoric sounds familiar, it should—and not just when it comes from Kennedy’s campaign. After all, on the other side of the aisle, another candidate rode similar sentiment to victory against a divided GOP field.

Few remember today, but the slate of candidates for the 2016 Republican presidential primary was reputed to be one of the strongest in recent memory, brimming with electorally successful Republican politicians including Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Scott Walker, and Marco Rubio. On paper, these men represented their party’s best and brightest. Then Donald Trump crashed that party. He dismissed Bush as a low-energy establishment lackey, mocked past presidential nominee John McCain for being captured during the Vietnam War, and brushed off a public denunciation from the party’s prior standard-bearer, Mitt Romney.

That Trump had previously explored running for president as a third-party candidate and once told CNN, “In many cases, I probably identify more as a Democrat” did not hinder his campaign. If anything, it burnished his outsider credentials, much as Sanders’s previous registration as an independent had bolstered his insurgent bona fides, and Kennedy’s famous last name now grants him credibility as a critic of his class. Again and again, Trump told his supporters that he was being persecuted on their behalf, and that those in power did not want anyone to hear what he had to say.

The point here is not that Trump, Sanders, Obama, and Dean propounded similar positions or worldviews. They obviously did not. But each of them played the same symbolic role for primary voters: as protest candidates against an ossified and corrupt elite. Their personal affect, rather than their policy aspirations, was a key source of their electoral appeal. And the same is true for Kennedy today.

The notion that some voters choose their candidates based on vibes rather than a careful examination of their specific stances is anathema to many pundits and professional politicians, who invest a tremendous amount of time in parsing such positions. But the historical record is clear. Just listen to Kennedy himself.

In an interview with Weiss, Kennedy noted that his slain father “was also a populist leader” who challenged a sitting Democratic president. He then offered a telling anecdote about what this meant. Kennedy recalled how he’d accompanied his father’s body by train from New York to Washington, D.C., after his assassination, and was met on the tracks by thousands of supporters—Black Americans in cities such as Trenton and Baltimore, and white Americans in the countryside. “There were hippies, there were people in uniform, there were Boy Scouts,” Kennedy recounted. “Many people, white men and women, holding signs that said Goodbye, Bobby, holding American flags, holding up children.”

But four years later, the younger Kennedy had a rude awakening about these same people. Examining demographic data from the 1972 presidential campaign, he discovered that “the predominant numbers of white people” who had supported his father had not voted for George McGovern, “who was aligned with my father on almost every issue,” but rather “ended up supporting George Wallace, who was antithetical to my father in every way—he was a fierce, rampant segregationist and racist.”

In the interview, Kennedy casts this about-face as an illustration of how populist energy can be channeled for good or ill. But he can’t quite bring himself to acknowledge the obvious implication: For backers of Kennedy Sr., as for those of Kennedy Jr., the choice was never about policies but about a posture, which is why the same voters were willing to support outsider candidates with seemingly opposite ideals.

[Read: Social media has collapsed good debate]

This is a consistent pattern. At the 2016 Democratic national convention, two prominent Sanders supporters officially put forward his candidacy for the nomination: then-Representative Tulsi Gabbard and former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner. The two women could not have been more different. Gabbard went on to become a right-wing critic of the Democratic Party, and now serves as a commentator on Fox News. Turner, by contrast, is a socialist firebrand who has repeatedly challenged the Democrats from the left. And yet, both supported Sanders against Clinton in 2016; today, Gabbard is defending Kennedy on Fox News and Turner is demanding that Biden debate him. Persona over policy, affect over aspiration.

What does all of this mean for Kennedy’s presidential prospects? In most cases, an anti-establishment approach puts a ceiling on a politician’s appeal. In a democracy, the establishment is the establishment for a reason: It retains power because most voters like what it is selling. For this reason, running against the party you seek to lead is generally a recipe for frustration, as Sanders discovered, first with Hillary Clinton and then with Joe Biden. It’s hard to beat a defined establishment alternative when your base is capped at roughly a quarter of the primary electorate.

But an anti-establishment insurgent can win when a clear alternative doesn’t exist, which is how Trump managed to succeed in 2016. Facing a divided primary field filled with candidates more interested in attacking one another than him, Trump rode his minority faction to victory, executing a hostile takeover of the Republican Party in the process. Unfortunately for Kennedy, he faces a clear establishment favorite in the incumbent president. Having consolidated the anti-establishment vote, the eccentric activist has nowhere else to go, and unlike Obama in 2008, he has no other natural constituency. As the Semafor reporter David Weigel recently noted, “When [Kennedy] entered the race, public polling put his support in the teens. Two months later, after copious earned media, those numbers haven’t budged, and the share of primary voters who say they won’t vote for him is rising.”

Populist insurgents like Kennedy point to their polling as evidence of the popularity of their ideas. But in actuality, those numbers reflect the real but limited popularity of their anti-establishment posture. In American politics, there is always a market for someone calling to burn down the entire edifice; the specific kindling is beside the point.

The riot, when it finally happened, was a leisurely one. In the weeks leading up to August 11, 1834, the people of Boston had been openly discussing burning down the Ursuline Convent that stood just outside the city, in what is now Somerville. The convent, many had become convinced, was a den of sexual iniquity, where priests used the confessional as a mixture of blackmail and mind control to exert power over young women and force them into sexual depravity. Further, many in the town had come to believe, infants born of these transgressions were being murdered and buried in the convent’s basement. The only solution was to liberate the women and, calmly, burn the whole place to the ground.

The Ursuline convent was targeted because of conspiracy theories that, in many ways, were the 1830s version of the contemporary panic on the right regarding child sexual abuse: Pizzagate—the conspiracy theory that, in a secret basement under a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C., Hillary Clinton and her circle abused children, drank their blood, and harvested their organs; Operation Underground Railroad—a dubious nonprofit group that alleges a vast network of child sex traffickers; and QAnon—the totalizing conspiracy theory that regularly incorporates accusations of child abuse.

Although it is tempting to see these moral panics as something new, they have been part of American culture for nearly two centuries, and they recur at key moments in history for specific, identifiable reasons. Combatting them requires first understanding that they are not only not novel, but in fact rote—almost to the point of banality.

Conspiracy theories tend to emerge in times of rapid cultural or demographic change; many of them reflect unease with that change, suggesting that it is not just the result of evolving values or newly emergent communities—the messy progression of democracy—but instead the work of a hidden network of nefarious actors whose ultimate goal is the destruction of America itself. And they often portray the American nuclear family, particularly its women and its children, as uniquely vulnerable and in need of protection.

In the late 1820s and ’30s, a sharp increase in immigration, mainly from Ireland and Germany, led to an explosion in anti-Catholic attitudes. Anti-Catholicism itself wasn’t new—it had been fundamental to the founding of American democracy: a model of political participation that wasn’t ruled by a divine authority. Catholics, Protestants feared, could not be trusted to participate in representative democracy, because rather than act as autonomous citizens making informed decisions, they’d vote as a bloc in accordance with the wishes of the pope. (This “philosophical” aspect of anti-Catholicism, which targeted not the individuals so much as the idea that people could be controlled by a religious authority not bound by American sovereignty, helps explain why it was so easily repackaged more recently against Muslim immigrants and the specter of Sharia law.)

“We make war upon no sect,” Senator Sam Houston of Texas said in an 1855 speech at a barbecue for the rabidly anti-immigrant Know Nothing party, while also asserting the need to resist “the political influence of Pope or Priest.” More fundamentally, he wondered, “Are not their doctrines opposed to republican institutions?” One only had to look at Mexico, Houston continued, where “priestcraft rules, and civil liberty is subordinate. There is no freedom where the Catholic Church predominates.” He favored a 21-year naturalization period for immigrants before they could gain the right to vote, which would, he argued, be enough time for them to shed their knee-jerk subservience to foreign religious leaders.

By the mid-19th century, the influx of Catholic immigrants had transformed a rather philosophical question about Catholicism into something more urgent and paranoid. Catholic was now becoming a rumor and a slur. Conspiracy theories proliferated, many framed around the threat of white Protestants being “enslaved” at the hands of the pope. These were a means of preserving a sense of white unity as the question of actual slavery continued to drive apart the country in the decades before the Civil War. Anti-Catholic conspiracists repeatedly used the fear of Catholic mind control to shift the discussion away from America’s divisions. Although white people disagreed on whether or not Black people should be enslaved, they could all agree that none of them wanted that fate for themselves.

A new literary genre emerged. Many popular books—some purported to be memoirs, some pure fiction—involved convents. Scipio de Ricci’s Female Convents: Secrets of Nunneries Disclosed, Richard Baxter’s Jesuit Juggling: Forty Popish Frauds Detected and Disclosed, and dozens of others detailed a nightmare world of women in bondage, lecherous priests, and unwanted infants murdered and buried in cellars.

In these stories and the other sensationalist faux memoirs, the convent was revealed to be not a place of piety and devotion but a secret den of illicit sex and infanticide. George Bourne’s novel Lorette: The History of Louise, Daughter of a Canadian Nun, described the convent as “the sepulchre of goodness, and the castle of misery. Within its unsanctified domain, youth withers; knowledge is extinguished; usefulness is entombed; and religion expires.”

Even in newspapers, such attitudes were reported as straightforward fact. “Convents,” The Harrisburg Herald reported in November 1854, “are the very hot-beds of lust and debauchery.”

Conspiracy theories always breed strange architectural imaginings. They start with something like the rumors of illicit sex between priests and nuns, and from there the allegations of unwanted pregnancies. But no children are around, so the infants must have been murdered. Where are the bodies buried? You start to envision deep catacombs, hidden structures, sub-basements and labyrinths. You must, because how otherwise to account for the lack of evidence? The idea of the subterranean, the house with secrets—all of this becomes an architectural necessity to explain where the dead are hidden.

These books were popular because they were both titillating and moralizing. They promised a world of illicit sex and fantasy while at the same time decrying such a world. For all their lurid detail, there was a heavy hand to the moral worldview here. Scipio de Ricci told his readers that the “sole object of all monastic institutions in America is merely to proselyte youth of the influential classes of society, and especially females; as the Roman priests are conscious that by this means they shall silently but effectually attain the control of public affairs.”

The convent was a space distinct from the home, and thus an affront to the role of the Protestant woman as a mother and wife. Women in the early days of the republic could not vote, and yet were envisioned as the keepers of democracy, because it was their job to raise sons and inject values into them. This is what the scholar Linda Kerber has called “Republican motherhood”: the complicated way in which women were held up as the vessels of American ideals even as they were denied access to political power. As such, men worried about secret subversion often fretted about the susceptibility of women to moral decay and degeneration, and assumed that foreign conspirators would target them as the key to bringing down America itself.

It was only a matter of time until these salacious rumors and simmering xenophobia burst forth into violence.

Boston’s Ursuline convent had opened in 1820, and quickly established itself as a leading school for the young women—both Catholic and Protestant—of the city’s elite. But it was far from the city center, looming up on Mount Benedict over its neighbors, mostly brickmakers and other working-class laborers. Relations between them and the nuns, particularly the mother superior, Sister Mary Edmond St. George, were tense. As one John Buzzell would later say of St. George, “She was the sauciest woman I ever heard talk.”

These local tensions were fueled by the rise of national anti-Catholic sentiment, and by the flood of lurid best sellers. So when, on the night of July 28, 1834, a young woman named Elizabeth Harrison fled the convent, the community was quick to see confirmation of their deepest suspicions. The woman, who had taught music there for 12 years, sought refuge with a local neighbor before being taken to her brother in Cambridge. There, distraught, she said that she didn’t want to return to Mount Benedict—for reasons that were never fully made clear. But within a few hours, the Bishop had arrived and was able to comfort the young woman, persuading her to return.

Years of anti-Catholic fearmongering now had a narrative to cling to. On August 8, a local newspaper ran an article headlined “MYSTERIOUS,” relating the story in brief and ending on a suspicious note: “After some time spent in the Nunnery, she became dissatisfied, and made her escape from the institution—but was afterward persuaded to return, being told that if she would continue but three weeks longer, she would be dismissed with honor. At the end of that time, a few days since, her friends called for her, she was not to be found, and much alarm is excited in consequence.”

That same weekend, Lyman Beecher (the father of Harriett Beecher Stowe and the abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher) delivered a series of anti-Catholic sermons in Boston, and though he would later claim that he had no influence on the events that followed, something was clearly in the air.

The decision to riot seems to have developed rather leisurely. Genuine concern about Harrison’s status was mingled with a long-simmering resentment toward these women who seemed to look down on their laboring neighbors. Local men began to talk openly of securing Harrison’s rescue and burning down the convent. Placards and posters appeared throughout the city that read: GO AHEAD. To Arms!! To Arms!! Ye brave and free the Avenging Sword unshield! Leave not one stone upon another of that cursed Nunnery that prostitutes female virtue and liberty under the garb of Holy Religion.

A week before the riot, a farmer named Alvah Kelley was holding court at a local bar, complaining about the Catholics; another patron asked if there was a plan to attack the convent, and “in a cool deliberate manner,” Kelley replied that if Harrison was not “liberated” within a few days, the nunnery would come down.

Early in the evening on August 11, St. George allowed a fact-finding mission: Prominent men toured the convent and found nothing amiss and Harrison apparently happy and fine. Satisfied, the group prepared a report to this effect to be published in the papers the following morning. But it was too late—by the time the report was published, the Ursuline convent was a smoking ruin.

By 11 p.m., a crowd had lit several barrels of tar on fire in a neighboring field to provide ready incendiaries and torches. St. George, sensing what was in the offing, threatened the rabble, telling them, according to one account, “The Bishop has 20,000 Irishmen at his command in Boston who will whip you all into the sea,” but this only infuriated them. Around midnight, men stormed the convent; after making sure that the nuns and their pupils had all been evacuated, they ransacked the place in search of the hidden crypts where the bodies of infants were buried, and in search of what they assumed would be Harrison’s corpse. They found nothing, but razed the building anyway.

Once it became clear that law enforcement would make no effort to put down the mob, the scene turned carnivalesque. John Buzzell broke into the bishop’s retreat inside the convent and draped himself with the bishop’s vestments. Rioters, disappointed in their search for dead babies, overturned coffins in the crypt and desecrated the remains. One of the students, Louisa Whitney, later described the mob’s cheery violence as the work of “amiable ruffians”; the Christian Examiner described the seen as “a sort of diabolical frolic, as if such an atrocity were no more than the kindling of a great bonfire.”

Having destroyed the nuns’ homes, the rioters seemed to think they had acted philanthropically. The morning after, some of the men told Whitney (according to her later court testimony), “We’ve spoiled your prison for you. You won’t never have to go back no more.” Whitney, who’d just seen her home burned to the ground, was incredulous: “The general sentiment of the mob seemed to be that they had done us a great favor in destroying the convent, for which we ought to be grateful to them.”

Following the riot, multiple men were arrested, but they would face no serious punishment. This marked the beginning of a major turn in America’s paranoid history. Anti-Catholicism became mainstream, a successful political posture. After 1854, newly elected lawmakers forced the Church to divest its real-estate holdings, transferring property to boards of trustees instead. “Nunnery committees” in Massachusetts and Maryland were founded to investigate convents over rumors of sexual abuse. (The Massachusetts committee ran into scandal, predictably, when the chairman himself was revealed to be engaging in sexual impropriety, using taxpayer money to pay for his mistress’s lodging.)

A book supposedly by an ex-nun, Maria Monk (but actually written by a group of Protestant preachers), Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal, yet another pornographic morality tale, appeared soon after and sold 300,000 copies, becoming one of the most popular books in antebellum America, second only to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In 1835, two more enormously successful books were published: A Plea for the West and Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States. Both warned that Protestant America was on the verge of being caught unawares by a new George III: the pope in Rome.

The panic abated only as concern began to shift away from the Vatican toward the more pressing crisis of slavery. In the South, those who enslaved others were riven with paranoia of uprisings and abolitionist saboteurs. In the North, fears focused instead on the slavocracy and its brutal political power. In 1854, the journalist Charles A. Dana wrote that “neither the Pope nor the foreigners ever can govern the country or endanger its liberties, but the slavebreeders and slavetraders do govern it, and threaten to put an end to all government but theirs.”

As for the convent itself, not much remains today, not even the hill on which it was built. The site where it once stood is now Broadway, a thoroughfare that runs through Somerville and connects Cambridge and Boston. A small public library sits there today, with only a small stone marker noting that the Ursuline convent “burned” in 1834. The hill itself, the text explains, was dug down in the late 19th century, which gave rise to the place’s current name: Ploughed Hill.

A hill that’s been ploughed, a name that testifies to its erasure.  In a city known for meticulously preserving its history, it’s disorienting to see how little is said about what happened here.

Part of the reason these moral panics resurface so frequently is that they’re so easily forgotten. The same script gets recycled again and again, only to be memory-holed as soon as the fervor subsides. What happened in Boston in 1834 would resurface in 1920s, with the Ku Klux Klan’s willingness to use violence to defend against fictitious assaults on Protestant women’s “purity” by Catholics and Jews, and again in the ’80s during the Satanic panic, when children were coerced into accusing day-care employees and even their own parents of ritualistic abuse and murder. Contemporary conspiracy theories about Clinton’s murderous sex cabal may sound outlandish, but it’s only the latest page in a playbook that is more than 200 years old. If we remember this, perhaps we can rob the next panic of its heat and fury.

This essay is adapted from the authot’s forthcoming book Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy.