“The history of all coalitions is a tale of the reciprocal complaints of allies.” Thus said Winston Churchill, who knew whereof he spoke. This summer of discontent has been one punctuated by complaints: from Ukrainian officials desperate for weapons, and from Western diplomats and soldiers who think that the Ukrainians are ungrateful for the tanks, training, and other goods they have received.

Most of the Western sputtering occurred in and around last month’s NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, through anonymous leaks and public grumbles. Indeed, according to one report, the U.S. administration was so miffed by Volodymyr Zelensky’s complaint about the slowness of the NATO accession process that some advocated watering down language about NATO membership for Kyiv. Withdrawing the word invitation from the communiqué would, in their view, be a suitable punishment for a mean tweet.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Stop micromanaging the war in Ukraine]

One gasps at the petulance on display here, as at otherwise staunch British Defense Minister Ben Wallace’s snap about Ukraine treating its Western suppliers as a kind of Amazon of weaponry.

Peevishness about allies is a common and understandable mood that all senior diplomats and national-security officials eventually experience. A monologue sooner or later goes on in their heads that sounds something like this:

I’m lucky if I get a decent night’s sleep once a week. I leave work before my kids are up and get back after they’re asleep, six and sometimes seven days a week. I stress eat and can’t take a vacation without being called back to the office. Meanwhile, everybody thinks that the [insert ally’s name] are a bunch of victims or heroes, when they are, in fact, manipulative, ungrateful little bastards who don’t have a clue what I am doing to save them from [name a rival official, nation, or department of government]. And their American sympathizers are a bunch of nasty dupes who are just as ignorant, but with fewer excuses.

The adult thing to do in such cases is to get in a workout, complain to one’s loving spouse, or commit these thoughts to a diary for the delectation of historians who will read too much into what are, in sober hindsight, mere tantrums. To mention them to the press, or, even worse, act upon them is unfair and irresponsible.

Such eruptions occur when officials let their irritations suppress their empathy. At the moment of peak whine, they forget what it means to have a fifth of your country occupied, or to know that a far bigger country is attempting, every night, to smash your power plants, blockade your ports, and destroy your crops. They are not holding in the forefront of their minds obliterated towns and mass graves. They do not know what it is to welcome back exchanged prisoners of war who have been castrated. Or to mourn old men and women murdered, or younger men and women tortured and raped. Or to worry frantically about thousands of children kidnapped. They forget that while a Western official’s sleep may be interrupted by a phone call or an alarm clock, a Ukrainian official’s sleep is more likely (and more often) interrupted by a siren or the crash of a missile slamming into an apartment block.

[Read: The children Russia kidnapped]

Ukrainian officials are thankful. Analysis of their speeches reveals plenty of expressions of gratitude. But they are also insistent and vociferous in their cries for help. They would be both inhuman and derelict in their duty if they were to be anything else. Hopefully, after a whiskey (or two) on the plane back to Washington or London, Western officials simmer down and return to some level of maturity in understanding their beleaguered ally.

Unfortunately, the impulse behind the whining can also manifest in subtler, but no less pernicious, forms. Much of the public discussion of Ukraine reveals a tendency to patronize that country and others that escaped Russian rule. As Toomas Ilves, a former president of Estonia, acidly observed, “When I was at university in the mid-1970s, no one referred to Germany as ‘the former Third Reich.’ And yet today, more than 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we keep on being referred to as ‘former Soviet bloc countries.’” Tropes about Ukrainian corruption abound, not without reason—but one may also legitimately ask why so many members of Congress enter the House or Senate with modest means and leave as multimillionaires, or why the children of U.S. presidents make fortunes off foreign countries, or, for that matter, why building in New York City is so infernally expensive.

The latest, richest example of Western condescension came in a report by German military intelligence that complains that although the Ukrainians are good students in their training courses, they are not following Western doctrine and, worse, are promoting officers on the basis of combat experience rather than theoretical knowledge. Similar, if less cutting, views have leaked out of the Pentagon.

Criticism by the German military of any country’s combat performance may be taken with a grain of salt. After all, the Bundeswehr has not seen serious combat in nearly eight decades. In Afghanistan, Germany was notorious for having considerably fewer than 10 percent of its thousands of in-country troops outside the wire of its forward operating bases at any time. One might further observe that when, long ago, the German army did fight wars, it, too, tended to promote experienced and successful combat leaders, as wartime armies usually do.

American complaints about the pace of Ukraine’s counteroffensive and its failure to achieve rapid breakthroughs are similarly misplaced. The Ukrainians indeed received a diverse array of tanks and armored vehicles, but they have far less mine-clearing equipment than they need. They tried doing it our way—attempting to pierce dense Russian defenses and break out into open territory—and paid a price. After 10 days they decided to take a different approach, more careful and incremental, and better suited to their own capabilities (particularly their precision long-range weapons) and the challenge they faced. That is, by historical standards, fast adaptation. By contrast, the United States Army took a good four years to develop an operational approach to counterinsurgency in Iraq that yielded success in defeating the remnants of the Baathist regime and al-Qaeda-oriented terrorists.

A besetting sin of big militaries, particularly America’s, is to think that their way is either the best way or the only way. As a result of this assumption, the United States builds inferior, mirror-image militaries in smaller allies facing insurgency or external threat. These forces tend to fail because they are unsuited to their environment or simply lack the resources that the U.S. military possesses in plenty. The Vietnamese and, later, the Afghan armies are good examples of this tendency—and Washington’s postwar bad-mouthing of its slaughtered clients, rather than critical self-examination of what it set them up for, is reprehensible.

The Ukrainians are now fighting a slow, patient war in which they are dismantling Russian artillery, ammunition depots, and command posts without weapons such as American ATACMS and German Taurus missiles that would make this sensible approach faster and more effective. They know far more about fighting Russians than anyone in any Western military knows, and they are experiencing a combat environment that no Western military has encountered since World War II. Modesty, never an American strong suit, is in order.

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

One way to increase understanding among Ukraine’s friends would be to put substantial military legations in Kyiv. American colonels and generals do not have to go on patrols or storm tree lines, but they would benefit from continuous, in-country, face-to-face contact with their Ukrainian counterparts. They would be able to communicate realistic assessments of the fighting and of Ukrainian tactical and operational requirements. They would also convey to Ukraine a reassurance that videoconferences cannot, and perhaps bring a bit of humility to deliberations in Washington.

Such an effort entails risks, but that’s what soldiers sign up for. Maintaining a continuous physical presence in Ukraine with a high-level military mission, supplemented by frequent visits from the head of the U.S. European Command and other senior leaders, would be invaluable in making the judgments that could help Ukraine defeat Russia, regain its territory, and win this war. And winning, not whining, is what it’s all about.

As recently as the 1990s, Jodi Stookey, a nutrition consultant based in California, remembers hydration research being a very lonely field. The health chatter was all about fat and carbs; children routinely subsisted on a single pouch of Capri Sun a day. Even athletes were discouraged from sipping on fields and race tracks, lest the excess liquid slow them down. “I can’t tell you how many people told me I was stupid,” Stookey told me, for being one of water’s few advocates.

But around the turn of the millennium, hydration became an American fixation. Celebrities touted water’s benefits in magazines; branded bottles overran supermarket shelves. Academic research on hydration underwent a mini-boom. After ages of being persistently parched, we were suddenly all drinking, drinking, drinking, because we felt like we should. It was an aquatic about-face—and it didn’t make total scientific sense.

The importance of hydration, in the abstract, is indisputable. Water keeps our organs chugging and our muscles agile; it helps distribute nutrients through the body and maintains our inner thermostat. Take it away, and cells inevitably die. But the concrete specifics of adequate water intake are still, in large part, a mess. For hydration, “there are no clear numbers, or a threshold you have to maintain,” says Yasuki Sekiguchi, a sports-performance scientist at Texas Tech University. Experts don’t agree on how much water people need, or the best ways to tell when someone should drink; they differ on how to measure hydration, which beverages are adequately hydrating, and how much importance to attribute to thirst. They have yet to reach quorum on what hydration—a process that’s sustained life since its primordial inception—fundamentally is. The murkiness has left the field of hydration research, still relatively young and relatively small, rife with “vicious camps against each other,” says Tamara Hew-Butler, an exercise physiologist at Wayne State University.

[Read: Drink more water]

Forget, for instance, one of water’s most persistent myths: the oft-repeated advice to down eight 8-ounce glasses of water each day. No one can say for certain, but one theory is that the idea  sprouted from a misinterpretation of a nutrition document from the 1940s, which stated that 2.5 liters of water a day (that is, approximately 10 8-ounce glasses) was “a suitable allowance for adults” in “most instances.” The guidance also noted, in the very same paragraph, “Most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods.” But the bigger issue is this: Probably no single number for water intake will ever suffice—not for a population of people with varying weights, genetics, diets, and activity levels, living in varying climates. Even within an individual, what’s best will change through a lifetime. The answer to How much water should I be drinking? is invariably Uh, it really depends.

Today’s hydration zeitgeist seems to hold that no amount of water is too much. The market teems with intake-tracking smartphone apps and time-stamped bottles that cheer drinkers toward hydration goals as high as a gallon a day—a quota astronomical enough to be stressful, even dangerous, should people flood their bodies all at once. But America’s hydration hype machine “has established a narrative that we are all walking around dehydrated, and need to drink more,” Hew-Butler told me. It’s no wonder that some people have reported legitimate anxiety over falling short on water intake.

No single source sold America on water. But a 2021 episode of the podcast Decoder Ring points to Gatorade as one of the first companies to pitch dehydration as a health problem—while simultaneously offering a cure. The company’s sports drinks were originally billed as thirst-quenchers, designed to stave off performance dips. But by the 1980s, Decoder Ring reported, the Gatorade Sports Science Institute was churning out data that supported the benefits of drinking before the mouth got parched. A decade later, the American College of Sports Medicine was recommending that athletes consume “the maximal amount” of water they could stand to keep down.

[Read: The organic Gatorade illusion]

Around the same time, during the fitness craze of the ’70s and ’80s, water was acquiring another identity: the enlightened socialite’s clean drink of choice. When European companies such as Perrier and Evian brought their bottled water to North America, they found a market among those wanting a high-end, calorie- and sweetener-free alternative to sodas, alcohol, and juice. Water “had this healthy, good-for-you halo,” says Michael Bellas, the chair and CEO of the Beverage Marketing Corporation. “There were no negatives.” In 2016, water became the U.S.’s leading bottled beverage, a title it has maintained since.

As water’s market share grew, so did its mythos. Companies hocked the illusion that their products could make people not just healthier but “sexier and more popular,” Peter Gleick, the author of The Three Ages of Water, told me. Hydration was so clearly vital to life that truth-adjacent ideas about its benefits, many of them pushed by prominent people, were easy to buy. Even concerns over single-use plastic bottles could not slow water’s roll: In response, the world cooked up eco-friendly Yetis, HydroFlasks, and Nalgenes, and made those trendy, too.

It’s not that water isn’t healthy. There’s just no evidence to show that guzzling tons of water can fix all our ailments. For people prone to kidney stones and UTIs, drinking more has been shown to cut down on risks; as a swap for sugary beverages, it can also help with weight loss. But for a variety of other issues—such as heart disease, metabolic issues, and cancer—the data is often “really mixed,” Hew-Butler told me. Although researchers have sometimes found evidence that dehydration may raise certain conditions’ risks, that doesn’t automatically imply the inverse—that extra water intake then lowers risk from a typical baseline. At very rare extremes, overdoing it on water can kill us, too.

The connections between hydration and health are shaky enough that health authorities have been reluctant to push a strict recommended daily allowance, like the ones that exist for various vitamins. Instead, the National Academy of Medicine proposes a tentative “adequate intake”: 3.7 liters of total water intake for men, and 2.7 for women (both including hydration from food). Recently, Abigail Colburn, a physiology researcher at Yale, and her colleagues ran an analysis that concluded those figures were sound. Still, the numbers came from population surveys, published in the early aughts, of the amounts that Americans were already drinking—a reflection of how things were, but not necessarily how they should be. And they represent medians within a huge range. Over the years, multiple studies have documented people living, by all appearances healthfully, on daily water budgets that span less than a liter to four, five, or six—sometimes more.

If researchers don’t agree on how much water is good, they also differ on how little water is bad: the point at which dehydration starts to become a problem—or how long people can linger at that threshold without raising long-term health risks.

A bit of water loss should be completely fine. Fluid status is, by design, “a constantly changing state,” Colburn told me. When the body doesn’t take in enough water to recoup the liquid it’s lost—as it naturally does throughout the day, via sweat, urine, and breath—the brain releases a hormone called vasopressin that prompts the kidneys to hold onto fluid. The urine gets darker and less voluminous; eventually, blood-salt levels rise, and the mouth and throat ache with thirst. The goal is to get the body to excrete less water out and take more in so we don’t wring our vital tissues dry. Life forms have evolved to tread carefully down this cascade of steps, and the flexibility is built in—much like a rubber band that snaps back after being stretched and released.

[Read: Why ‘drink more water’?]

But some researchers have started to worry about repeatedly asking the body to compensate for less than optimal hydration—stretching the band over and over again. The issue isn’t chronic dehydration, Colburn told me, but a subtler precursor state called underhydration, which occurs after a lack of water intake has prompted the body to conserve but before the appearance of signals such as thirst. It’s not clear how worrying teetering on that precipice is. In the same way a rubber band is “designed to stretch,” our fluid balance is built to bounce back, says Evan Johnson, a hydration expert at the University of Wyoming. Over time, though, wear and tear could add up, and resilience could drop.

Tracking those outcomes gets even more complicated when researchers try to quantify how dehydrated individual people are—another thing that experts can’t agree on. “We really don’t have a gold standard for measuring the all-encompassing term of hydration,” Johnson told me, especially one that’s both simple and cheap, and can account for body water’s constant flux. Which leaves scientists with imperfect proxies. Broadly speaking, there’s a urine camp and a blood camp, Stookey told me. Those in the pee camp tend to be hydration conservatives. A change in urine color or volume, they argue, is an early sign—well in advance of thirst—of impending dehydration. The blood-camp crew is more laissez-faire. Diet, medications, and supplements can all alter the shade of urine, making it a fickle clue; Hew-Butler for instance, defines true dehydration as what happens when the plasma’s gotten saltier than usual, to the point where cells have started to shrink—a sign that retaining water is no longer sufficient, and that the body needs to drink.

Which camp researchers fall into influences how bad they think America’s hydration problem is. “When you draw blood, most people are within a normal range if they’re not thirsty,” Hew-Butler told me. But Stookey, who’s firmly in the pee camp, contends that a majority of Americans are “walking around dehydrated” and should be drinking far more. Colburn, too, would rather err on the side of heeding urine’s warning signs. By the time thirst kicks in, “you’re already in a dangerous zone,” she told me.

There can be a middle ground. Sekiguchi, of Texas Tech, told me that for most young, healthy people who are spending plenty of time in the air-conditioned indoors—as so many Americans do—it’s probably fine to just drink when thirsty. (That advice works less well for older people, because the sensation of thirst tends to dull with age.) When specific circumstances shift—a stint of heavy exercise, a week of toasty days—people can take notice, and adjust accordingly.

But guidelines for typical water intake, under typical conditions, are quickly going out the window as heat waves get more frequent and intense. When temperatures skyrocket and humidity makes otherwise-cooling sweat stick stubbornly on skin, our bodies need more water to keep cool and functional, beyond what thirst alone might dictate. Part of the problem is that thirst vanishes more quickly than the body rehydrates, Sekiguchi told me, which means that people who drink until they think they’re sated tend to replace only a fraction of the fluids that they’ve lost.

“We’re never going to be able to tell people an exact number,” Colburn told me, for how much to drink. But in reality, many of the healthy people most worried about fine-tuning their hydration to a perfect level are probably among those that least need to fret. The dangers of water tend to happen not in those middle grounds, but at its extremes—especially when failing infrastructure hampers access to water, or contamination makes it undrinkable. Many of the populations that are most vulnerable to dehydration’s effects also happen to be the same groups that probably aren’t getting enough to drink, Johnson told me. While bottled-water markets boom, plenty of pockets of the U.S. still lack consistent access to safe, reliable water from the tap. And the situation is even worse in many places abroad. Perhaps nothing reminds us of water’s power like dramatic deficit: Water, simply, is what keeps us alive.

In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association established the so-called Goldwater Rule as a response to the many mental-health professionals who had ventured glib and florid diagnoses of Senator Barry Goldwater during his 1964 presidential campaign. “I believe Goldwater has the same pathological makeup as Hitler, Castro, Stalin, and other known schizophrenic leaders” was a representative comment; many other psychiatrists and psychologists deemed him schizophrenic, a “megalomaniac,” and “chronically psychotic.” In the four decades between its enshrining and the 2016 election, the Goldwater Rule—which prohibits psychiatrists from issuing diagnoses of public figures they haven’t seen as patients—was mostly honored.

But from the earliest moments of Donald Trump’s campaign, his behavior, falling far outside the boundaries of conventional candidate comportment, raised the question of whether he could be adequately assessed in purely political terms. Where did politics end and psychology—or psychopathology—begin? Thus the Trump years have inevitably given rise to the routine flouting of the Goldwater Rule, most notably in a collection of writings assembled by the former Yale psychiatrist Bandy Lee, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. (Lee subsequently got fired from Yale for publicly arguing that Alan Dershowitz was suffering from a “shared psychosis” with Trump.)

Now, with Trump the Republican 2024 front-runner—his accumulating indictments notwithstanding—the psychiatrist Peter D. Kramer seems to have successfully engineered an end run around the Goldwater Rule: In his interesting and challenging new novel, Death of the Great Man, Kramer takes on some of the relevant psychological issues of the Trump era via fiction.

Kramer, the longtime Brown University medical-school professor who became internationally famous 30 years ago for writing the best-selling Listening to Prozac, helped transform how we think about psychopharmacology and the self. In this novel, he confronts his protagonist, an idealistic psychiatrist named Henry Farber who shares much of Kramer’s biography, with the question of how and whether to provide psychotherapy to an American president who shares much of Trump’s biography.

Kramer is at pains to emphasize that he doesn’t intend a one-to-one correlation between his fictional president, who is referred to only as the “Great Man,” and the real-life Trump. Yet in his general behavior (he’s an erratic and autocratic populist who has shredded democratic norms) and many details (he has an attractive, younger European wife, and has refused to accept defeat in his reelection campaign, which took place amid the depredations of a global pandemic), the Great Man is unmistakably Trumpian.

The Great Man is also—we learn in the novel’s third sentence—dead, almost certainly murdered; his body was discovered on the couch in Farber’s consulting room in Providence, Rhode Island. The novel flashes back (how did the president come to be in Farber’s office?) and forward (who killed the Great Man? Will Farber get fingered for it?), but it is not a classic whodunit, because Kramer heavily seasons the mystery with stylistic elements drawn from literary fiction and political satire, which allows for both comedy and commentary. For instance, Kramer depicts the Great Man’s wife, Náomi, who on the surface seems much like Melania Trump, as a literary intellectual and former dramaturge with liberal leanings and an interest in existential philosophy. So nauseated is Náomi by the moral (and literal) stench of her husband that she routinely retches when he’s nearby. She also turns out to have been the secret instigator of the effort to recruit a therapist for the Great Man. She may also be his murderer.

I interviewed Kramer on Zoom earlier this summer. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Scott Stossel: What inspired this novel?

Peter D. Kramer: This was an epiphany. It was December of 2016, and Trump had just been elected. I was in New York, consulting on clinical cases at Cornell medical school. One of my editors had a short amount of time for me at the end of the day, and so I went to Union Square, near my publisher’s offices, a little early. It was rainy, so I went into the Barnes & Noble to look for books for my grandsons. I was on the escalator and the book just came to me: I thought I should write a novel that relates to Trump. The framework came to me almost whole. I went into a little corner in the children’s books section and started writing notes on my phone.

And then I went in and presented my idea to the editor, and he said: “Absolutely not.” And I thought, well, this is what I have to write, and I sat down to write it anyway.

[Read: Evaluating Trump’s psyche in public]

Stossel: What was the editor’s objection?  Fear of political blowback or just “this isn’t gonna sell”?

Kramer: I knew from the start that this book was going to begin with a toxic populist U.S. president dead on a psychiatrist’s couch—and of course if Trump had died at some point in between the writing of the book and its publication, that wouldn’t have been amusing.

This editor had another reasonable objection, which is that assassination for regime change is an illiberal expedient. It’s not amusing. You can’t kill off presidents—it’s just morally not the right thing. But in the novel, this isn’t murder for regime change; every character around him has a reason to want the Great Man dead. And these reasons are really only incidentally political. He’s just so horrible to everyone, and so many people have their own motives for killing him.

Stossel: How close did you mean to make the Great Man to Trump? Did you start with the public Trump we all see on TV and try to imagine his inner life?

Kramer: The thinking began with Trump, but of course characters take on their own lives for the writer. I am not an expert on politics or history, so I focused on what Trump would look like to a psychotherapist. That meant I had to create what I didn’t know about, which is this intimate person: How does he treat his wife? How does he treat people around him? How would he do in therapy? And I was running into this other constraint, which is that psychiatrists are not supposed to diagnose public figures from a distance. I didn’t want to violate the Goldwater Rule by saying, “Oh, this is fiction” and then depicting Trump exactly. I wanted, instead, to play with the question of what psychiatrists would do if they could really get close to a Trump figure.

Stossel: The reader’s mind inevitably goes to Trump because the Great Man behaves in very Trumplike ways and has a very Trumplike biography.

Kramer: My model was the dictator fiction that’s common in Latin America. In The Autumn of the Patriarch, Gabriel García Márquez takes a particular dictator, Gustavo Pinilla of Colombia, and adds elements of General Franco of Spain and Juan Vicente Gómez of Venezuela, and creates this outrageous version of a dictator. Márquez has him basically governing the country from the grave. So that gave me, I thought, license to create a comic character who was outrageous in certain ways. Whether he’s more outrageous than Trump, I can’t say. But he’s outrageous in his own way, and specifically Trumplike in five or six other ways.

Stossel: Let’s talk about the Goldwater Rule. Don’t mental-health professionals have a “duty to warn” when somebody poses a danger to themselves or others? And what if that danger posed is not to an individual but to the entire American population, which is clearly how some of the experts in the Lee book see Trump?

Kramer: The real function of the Goldwater Rule is to protect psychiatry from itself—from all these doctors expressing their political views through making diagnoses without a careful respect for the clinical facts. I remember an era when—this is way back—people would say, “Well, if your patient has not expressed anxiety about the atom bomb, the patient is in denial.” And I thought, My patients will express whatever they express, and the introduction of uniform political views into psychiatry is a disaster. I’ve had patients who were very much on the front lines of the anti-abortion movement, and I am very much on the other side. But you are out to treat the patient who’s in front of you—you’re not out to impose your views or ask them to see things differently than they do.

You just need to deal with patients as you find them—even with patients who are racist and prejudiced and anti-Semitic or whatever. To create some kind of internal rule in psychotherapy that integrates political views is a disaster.

Stossel: Let’s say you have a patient referred to you with depression, and he quickly evinces extreme racist and misogynistic views, and election denialism. What would that encounter in the consulting room look like?

Kramer: This is very much one of the topics of the book. One of the worries regarding Henry Farber is that he will go and treat the Great Man, and that will just give the Great Man some ease, and make him better able to do the terrible things he does. Farber has great faith in his therapeutic method, so the setup is this: He’s known—as I am—for writing a book early in his career that was a best seller, and he’s also known as a sleep doctor. Later in life he’s specialized in the treatment of paranoid men. And he’s brought in to treat the Great Man’s insomnia, but secretly there’s some hope on the part of the people who bring him in that he will treat the personality problems as well. And I think Farber is comfortable with what seems like a corrupt assignment, because he just believes in his therapeutic method, which is that if he sits empathetically beside his patient—metaphorically speaking—and looks out at the world as his patient does, and gets the patient to feel what he feels and be aware of his feelings, good things will happen, that there will be some general liberation, and that will be useful both for his sleep problems and his disordered personality. But he’s not trying to nudge the person in any direction; he’s trying to get the person to free himself of whatever it is that constrains his feeling and thinking.

Farber’s extreme commitment to this approach is comic. When the Great Man throws him into a jail cell at one point, Farber thinks, How can I utilize this thing that my patient has done? The patient will indirectly notice how I behave in the jail cell, and maybe I can do that in a way that’s therapeutic; I’ll prepare for our next encounter by reviewing similar cases. I don’t know that I am self-abnegating in that way. But I do retain an idealistic faith in the therapeutic method that if you put people in touch with themselves—that’s your job, and your job isn’t to guide the direction of progress.

Stossel: Let’s say, as implausible as this is, Ivanka calls you up and says, “My father is suffering from grave depression after his brush with COVID mortality”—would you do as Farber does and take Trump on as a patient?

Kramer: I would take the case in a minute. I think Farber cross-examines this stuff: Is he taking the case because this will demonstrate that he’s a virtuoso of empathy, or out of his own self-aggrandizement because this is such a challenging case? I do think I would be tempted by the level of effort that would be required. I like taking on cases that I thought were difficult for me because they were unlikeable patients. (Anyone who’s my patient: That wasn’t you!) I do think the book is my attempt to imagine what the level of effort would be like. Farber keeps looking for the element of full humanity in his patient. When he perceives this little spark of it, he’s so encouraged by it; he thinks there’s something here he can work with. I think that would be a challenge with someone like Trump: sort of waiting him out until you see that little hint of something that’s not propaganda and self-praise but something that has a little texture and dimensionality to it. I mean, I was really trying to imagine what that would look like for Trump.

Stossel: And what would that look like?

Kramer: I think it could be exposure of vulnerability. Could just be genuine emotion. There are easy emotions like anger, which is sort of the lowest-level emotion; patients who can’t access much else can often access rage. But there are other moments where I imagine under all the grievance there could be some genuine pain or sadness, and you’re curious about that.

Stossel: Imagine Trump meeting with a child psychiatrist when he was a younger person. Do you think this would help him process whatever the trauma of growing up with his father was?

Kramer: I think it’s at least possible to think that this grudge against the world, the constant sense of having been wronged, could have been diminished. That’s what psychiatry that examines early-childhood injuries is out to do—free people from being in the thrall of their resentment for the rest of their lives.

Stossel: Allen Frances, the former head of the American Psychiatric Association who presided over the composition of the DSM-4, has written that Trump’s presidency and aberrant behavior are more symptoms of culture that’s gone mad than of any psychiatric illness. And Jeffrey Lieberman, a psychiatrist at Columbia, has written that Trump doesn’t have any DSM illness—he’s just “a jerk.” Do you think there are links between various personality types and certain political ideologies or behaviors?

Kramer: I know Jeff and Allen a little bit, and I don’t agree with the argument “Well, this is just evil, and diagnosis has nothing to do with it.” Diagnosis aside, I think what we saw was four years of a certain kind of personality on display. And it was almost impossible to be a political analyst without wondering about certain of his actions; there wasn’t enough logic in the behavior to explain it only in political terms. In the book, I write about “arbitocracy.” This isn’t really authoritarianism, because it’s not consistent enough, or organized well enough—not that authoritarian regimes generally are either—but this seemed to be even more arbitrary and herky-jerky. So, yes, I think personality is relevant in talking about the politics of Trump.

Stossel: I know you don’t want to diagnose Trump. But having sat, as Henry Farber, in therapy sessions with the imaginary Great Man, what would you diagnose Great Man with? If he’s gonna file an insurance claim, that requires your giving him a DSM diagnosis, right?

[Read: Trump is not well]

Kramer: Right. I’m with Farber, who says that the men in his paranoid-men’s group do not meet a strict by-the-book definition of paranoia; they’re people who have this same kind of hypervigilant posture in the world. And he says of the Great Man, “Yes, he would qualify as one of my patients.” So it’s sort of a loose paranoia for the Great Man.

Stossel: Is paranoia a DSM disorder?

Kramer: It’s a delusional disorder, which is in the DSM. And of course I diagnosed patients in my practice for the purpose of deciding which medicine to use, and for insurance claims. I think diagnosis is very helpful. But personality disorders—that is, borderline personality, sociopathy, or paranoia, the kinds of diagnoses that were debated with regard to Trump—were never something where I’ve found the particulars that useful. Patients don’t necessarily stick with one personality-disorder diagnosis—they can have one and a year later have another, or the diagnosis can even disappear, and they end up with just depression or drug abuse or something, and don’t have the personality disorder. It’s not a very stable diagnosis.

Stossel: Are personality disorders susceptible to treatment by medication? If you were treating Trump—or, if you prefer, if Farber is treating the Great Man—is there a drug regimen that could ease their distress or make them less inclined to wreak pain and havoc on everyone around them?

Kramer: Well, the experience of treating personality disorder with medication has not been terrific. There certainly was a lot of use of SSRIs in treating borderline personality disorder, with some success and a lot of failure. I think the results were similar for lithium. In Listening to Prozac, I talk a lot about rejection sensitivity, a category that isn’t written about a lot anymore. And people had this diagnosis of rejection sensitive dysphoria, which sometimes did well on antidepressants. It turned out that really what was going on was that their vulnerability to social insult was so great that they looked very erratic, and on medication they could be less erratic and less in pain.

But as a therapist looking at the relationship between Henry Farber and the Great Man, I wasn’t tempted for Farber to reach for the prescription pad. I did not want to introduce medication to the book.

Stossel: You can’t medicate a politician into making better policy.

Kramer: Yeah. I mean, I think if you got up close to one of these political figures and saw that he had ADHD, maybe a stimulant would be calming in a paradoxical way. Or if the person really is manic, maybe lithium would be helpful. You can imagine some diagnosis that can’t be made from a distance but here up close you might see something that was not as evident in these speeches and debates. Medication could possibly help with those.

The protagonist of Passages, an incisive new romantic drama from the director Ira Sachs, is a man obsessed with perfecting others’ movements, even as he struggles to control his own. The story opens on a Paris film set, where a director named Tomas (played by Franz Rogowski) critiques an actor’s stiff entrance into a party scene. “This is just a transition moment, but we are turning it into a huge drama moment, because you’re not able to make some fucking simple steps down the staircase!” Tomas yells, arms motioning up and down the threshold his actor can’t seem to cross with sufficient finesse.

Passages is filled with similarly stressful snapshots of the tightly wound director, who is no less taxing in his personal life. His recklessness gives rise to the movie’s central tension, which kicks off at the wrap party for Tomas’s apparently exasperating film (also called Passages). After his husband, Martin (Ben Whishaw), leaves the party, Tomas revels in the attention lavished upon him by a young French woman named Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos). The night progresses, and their bodies migrate from the dance floor to a bedroom. The next morning, Tomas bursts through the door of the apartment he shares with Martin, waiting all of two minutes to announce: “I had sex with a woman. Can I tell you about it, please?” Weary of his husband’s destructive searches for postproduction catharsis, Martin withdraws from the conversation.

A different kind of film might have focused on this rupture between the two spouses, using the director’s infidelity to plumb their respective and shared emotional landscapes. Passages does broach this territory, but the film is more of a character study of Tomas than it is a portrait of his relationship with Martin or his affair with Agathe. It’s no tortured-artist hagiography, though: Agathe is originally enthralled by his artistry, but the quality of Tomas’s oeuvre ends up being nearly irrelevant to who he is, both in her estimation and in the film’s. Unrelenting and frank, Passages captures the creeping discontents of its Fassbinder-lite protagonist without losing sight of how his transgressions affect those around him. He may be magnetic, but Tomas is also unquestionably egotistical, brash, shortsighted, and mean. With a sparse visual sensibility and sharp dialogue, the film surveys the interpersonal damage wrought by Tomas’s carelessness, making poignant observations about power, desire, and the psychological contours of creative life.

Sachs, a veteran independent filmmaker who also directed the family sagas Frankie and Little Men, is particularly attuned to the cris-crossing complexities of relationships. (Passages was co-written by Sachs, who is American, and his frequent collaborator, the Brazilian screenwriter Mauricio Zacharias; additional dialogue is credited to the French screenwriter Arlette Langmann.) The characters in Passages circle one another constantly: Before Agathe and Tomas’s catalytic dance-floor encounter, it’s Martin who first approaches her at the bar, after watching her have a conversation with the man she came to the party with, whom she ends up rejecting. “Sorry to intrude,” Martin says in Anglophone-sounding French, when Agathe looks confused by his attentiveness. “I thought maybe you wanted to talk to someone.” As Agathe’s affair with Tomas unfolds, Martin never antagonizes her, and the film transcends familiar love-triangle clichés in part because the characters don’t blame one another for the wounds Tomas inflicts.

[Read: Frankie is a moody meditation on mortality]

Passages indulges in the pleasure and tyranny of all its main subjects—foremost Tomas, but also its more abstract concerns: the intertwined pursuits of art, love, sex, and belonging. Tomas’s affair with Agathe spurs Martin’s interest in a writer named Amad (Erwan Kepoa Falé), whose novel becomes a symbol of the chasm between the two husbands. When Agathe tells Tomas that she found the book and the author both “very original,” the comment briefly destabilizes their union too. Tomas is troubled that she admires another talented man; the fact that Amad lives in Agathe’s literary imagination is as disturbing as his physical relationship with Martin.

As Rogowski plays him, the fiercely needy Tomas vibrates with anxiety even as he projects a self-assured image. Throughout the film, he is seemingly incapable of stillness, ping-ponging across the city on his bicycle, flitting from one lover’s house to the other’s, popping up unannounced at either’s workplace. Passages contrasts his live-wire persona with the steadiness of his two lovers, whom Whishaw and Exarchopoulos play with quiet, masterly resolve. Tomas lays his insecurities at their feet, asking Martin to soothe the sting he feels from Agathe’s judgments, and vice versa.

The only time Tomas is at ease, it seems, is when he’s having sex. Refreshingly, Tomas, though prone to navel-gazing, doesn’t lament any perceived confusion about his sexuality or what labels he ought to use. (This is, perhaps, partly a function of the film’s multicultural Parisian setting and the attendant fluidity in language.) The closest he comes to a crisis of identity is more a crisis of cultural norms: After disastrously fumbling his first meeting with Agathe’s parents, Tomas runs back to Martin, admitting to his estranged husband that he misses being with men. The tearful confession doesn’t register as a comment on Tomas’s sexual preferences but rather an expression of how suffocated he feels by the social expectations placed on him as a man who appears to be in a heterosexual relationship.

Sachs excels at choreographing all manner of intimacies. Scenes such as that ill-fated meeting with Agathe’s parents reveal as much about his characters’ relationships as the film’s sex scenes, which have made it the latest in a long line of queer dramas to be given an NC-17 rating. (One of the others, the director Abdellatif Kechiche’s troubled 2013 romance, Blue Is the Warmest Color, also stars Exarchopoulos.) The sex in Passages is indeed stark—nearly wordless, hardly silent. But the beds in the film aren’t just loci of connection, illicit or otherwise. They’re also excavation sites, the minefields where characters unearth tensions between one another and within themselves. They’re reminders, above all, of how a relationship must change when one person refuses to.

Christopher F. Rufo is what is sometimes known as a shit-stirrer—a particular type of troublemaker whose game is to find something stinky, then waft its fumes toward the noses of those mostly likely to be outraged by it. In the past several years, controversies over race, gender, and campus leftism have ripened in part due to his publicity. Often the so-called antiracists, trans activists, and tenured radicals at the center of the controversies are self-discrediting. All Rufo has to do is quote them or post their videos on his Twitter feed—a teacher fanatically devoted to a trendy form of social justice, say, or someone preening about their identity. Even those who find their behavior outrageous often find Rufo’s tactics distasteful as well. (Many of his targets strike me as mentally unbalanced.) But the thing about shit-stirrers is that even if they are distasteful or loathsome, they’d be out of work if there were not already raw material to stir.

Rufo’s new book, America’s Cultural Revolution, is in this context surprisingly hygienic. It is not about the raw material but about the manufacturers of the porcelain vessels in which it is found. He curates a gallery of activists, academics, and Communists active in the mid- and late 20th century, and he describes how their ideas slowly took over campuses, HR departments, and leftist political circles. These figures are well known, and it is ethically refreshing to see him focus his revilement on public figures in full command of their rhetoric and ideas, rather than on possibly disturbed nobodies.

[Graeme Wood: DEI is an ideological test]

Even more unexpected are his points of agreement with his enemies. The people Rufo names as intellectual progenitors of wokeness are in fact the same ones the most literate postliberal leftists would name: the German philosopher Herbert Marcuse, his American student Angela Davis, the educational theorist Paulo Freire, and founders of critical race theory (CRT) such as the Harvard Law professor Derrick Bell, all perennial entrants in what Jonathan Yardley once called the “America Sucks Sweepstakes.” (The most noteworthy omission is Michel Foucault.) These figures argued that the basic values of liberalism—freedom, equality, justice—are lies, and the systems and institutions that tout them are incorrigibly complicit in evil. To be “woke” is simply to be roused from the naive and dogmatic slumber in which one might dream that these lies were true. The remedy is cynical and radical: Stop believing the lies, and destroy the political and social systems that tell them.

Your appreciation of this book will depend in part on whether you prefer Rufo the carnival barker, luring in members of the public to see the lefty freakshow he curates, or Rufo the intellectual historian. The first is more fun but the second is just as biased. His description of the careers of these intellectual figures is meant for readers who know nothing of their work, and do not care to learn about it from a sympathetic source. The narrative is meant to build them up only to villainize them—and this is not difficult. Like Rufo’s TikTok freaks, his woke progenitors often said and did things that need no additional commentary to make them into villains.

Marcuse said he was “honored” to be associated with Mao, who was then in the midst of killing tens of millions of people. Davis, in a famous moment of candor quoted by Rufo, once said that political prisoners behind the Iron Curtain “deserve what they get.” (Prison abolition, one of Davis’s causes, evidently did not extend to the Gulag.) In 1970, Davis bought a shotgun that was used two days later to blow the head off a California judge. Paulo Freire called Mao’s Cultural Revolution “the most genial solution of the century,” a line that sounds, when applied to mass starvation, straight from the mouth of Lex Luthor.

Rufo, a recent appointee of Governor Ron DeSantis to the board of New College of Florida, hates all of these people, but he is plainly fascinated by their ability to achieve political traction for their bad ideas. Take Freire, a Brazilian crackpot who taught that the path to peasant education was through Maoist class suicide. His contribution to human well-being was almost certainly a net negative—yet his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed is taught in every education school in America. “History should have reduced [it] to an ideological curiosity,” Rufo writes, with what I think is grudging admiration. He quotes Marcuse saying that the way to convert his ideas into political action is to abandon direct activism and instead infiltrate institutions, to take over universities and bureaucracies, and to initiate a silent revolution that ends in a radical victory before any of the old guard is aware of what happened.

The case of CRT is particularly striking in Rufo’s account. Rufo has made a bogeyman out of CRT, but it is real, radical, and influential beyond its origins in legal academia. CRT holds that white supremacy is systemic, insidious, and embedded in supposedly neutral liberal norms like color-blindness and freedom of speech. Derrick Bell argued that white supremacy is ineradicable, and that racial progress is just a veneer over a permanently rotten system. The norms and orthodoxies of a rotten system are owed no deference, because they are in fact part of the rot. Among the norms in legal academia that Bell broke was the format of the journal article, which later in life he eschewed in favor of short, didactic fiction, including a science-fiction story about white Americans selling Black people to aliens.

[Daniel Golden: ‘It’s making us more ignorant’]

Rufo notes that these theories were widely critiqued even as they were proposed. He cites a potent dissent from the literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., who warned against CRT’s unnerving calls to expand state power, in a manner “incompatible with democracy.” Its theorists’ aim was “not to resist power, but to enlist power.” When Randall Kennedy, a fellow Black legal academic, drafted another dissent, Rufo writes, “Bell personally intervened” to persuade Kennedy not to publish his critique. Kennedy published it anyway, leading Bell to suggest that he was auditioning to be an “academic minstrel” and professional race traitor. Kennedy’s 2019 essay assessing Bell’s legacy is revealing. He contrasts Bell’s “certitude” with his own self-doubt, and he notes Bell’s disregard for teaching students already motivated by racial justice “to understand and take seriously perspectives at odds with those that they embraced.” Kennedy says he attempts to teach these perspectives in courses about race; Bell considered this “a betrayal.”

Rufo is more interested in exhibiting these theories than assessing them. In most cases I would agree with him that the assessment should be negative. Freire’s argument that the path to literacy lies through Maoist collectivization; Davis’s belief that policing and imprisonment should be abolished; Bell’s contention that Brown v. Board of Education was wrongly decided and that “separate but [actually] equal” schooling for Blacks and whites would have been better, and that racial progress is a myth—these are all disastrous views, with grave and sometimes morally abhorrent consequences. It’s reasonable to wonder, as Rufo does, how these doctrines came to be taught with so little resistance. He accurately describes the takeover of certain sectors of education as a “long march through the institutions,” a Maoist reference to Marcuse’s suggestion that radicals hunker down in bureaucracies. And it’s worth considering the broken safeguards that allowed this strategy to succeed.

Rufo nonetheless seems to have little idea what universities are for. This is a significant deficiency, given not only his subject matter in this book but also his position as a university trustee. In this role, Rufo envisions himself as a tribune of the people of Florida, curtailing in their name the influence of leftist professors and administrators whose views they would find objectionable, hateful, or racist. He wants to end political tests that would exclude centrists and conservatives from the faculty. He thinks the solution to the problem is democratic oversight and policing the excesses of the left, in particular by exerting political control over hiring of faculty. I see little sign of a vision for a real intellectual space—which would have to include and even embrace weird or odious speech, especially the kind many Floridians disagree with.

I would not want Davis or Freire running a Department of Justice or Education. I suspect that if they ran even a Froyo stand it would devolve, as Rufo says of a Weatherman cell, into a fiesta of “hangovers, jealousies, gonorrhea, and lice.” But that does not mean Davis and Freire are unfit for professorships. Universities are precisely the places where society should stash its radicals and nutjobs, and universities function best when some fraction of their faculty is certifiable. Rufo is appalled that the University of California and Harvard employ such people. I am relieved.

[Conor Friedersdorf: DeSantis chose the wrong college to take over]

Consider Davis’s signature intellectual achievement, which is the call to abolish prisons. On this point my view is more in line with Richard Pryor’s after six weeks filming in an Arizona prison. Seeing so many Black men removed from their families and communities “made my heart ache,” Pryor said. Listening to those same men describe their murders made him “thank God we have penitentiaries.”

But the idea of prison abolition is powerful and challenging. (I recommend Tommie Shelby’s recent book on the subject.) Plenty of hitherto common penal practices have been abolished: ear cropping, castration, boiling in oil, amputation. Imprisonment is a corporal punishment that involves the whole body, all at once, and under some theoretical condition, we could imagine a day when it is retired along with those other corporal punishments. Davis saw this before others, and her radicalism forces reconsideration of the most basic ideas about how American society is, and should be, organized. Her ideas (about violence, communism, prison, and much else) are bad, but bad ideas can spawn good ones. And that is one of the ways universities work, by providing spaces where bad ideas proliferate along with good ones. Rufo might retort that the current balance is off, and the bad ideas have driven out the good. But nuking the bad ideas without collateral damage among the good is impossible, and DeSantis’s reforms in Florida look to me like a neutron bomb, more likely to kill off all ideas than just to reduce the bad ones.

The late novelist Cormac McCarthy was affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), an educational and research institution best known for its programs in theoretical physics. He understood the value of having madmen around. In 2015, he drafted a new mission statement for SFI. Its principles would make better guidance than whatever DeSantis is implementing. “SFI is always pushing creativity to its practical limits. We always court a high risk of failure,” he wrote. “Occasionally we find that an invited guest is insane. This generally cheers us all up. We know we’re on the right track.”

This article contains spoilers through the Season 3 finale of The Righteous Gemstones.

Though it uses the register of low comedy rather than moody character study or tragicomic caper, HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones, which follows a family of materialistic and vaguely corrupt religious showpeople, is prestige TV in the classic mold. Like Succession or Better Call Saul, it centers on a richly flawed antihero as he builds his empire, and, in the process, studies the workings of American power and money. The popularity of these shows has led some critics to suspect that closely attending to such protagonists—especially when they are lent the glamour of handsome, high-budget production values—doubles as a form of subtle approval. In applying this storytelling model to a specifically Christian milieu, though, Gemstones upends it. Its characters are also flawed, and also vividly rendered. But for their bad behavior, they expect—and are granted—absolution, a worldview that foregrounds how strange and arbitrary the act of forgiveness is in the first place.

The show follows Jesse Gemstone, played by its showrunner, Danny McBride, with his trademark defensive combustibility, as he prepares to inherit a religious-entertainment empire from his father, Eli (John Goodman). Through flashbacks, the series shows us the rise of the Gemstones from hardscrabble small-time religious revivalists to Reagan-era TV stars to scandal-plagued Christian-theme-park operators. In depicting this ascent, the show also allows us to see that this family—Jesse; his youth-pastor brother, Kelvin (Adam Devine); his horny, aggressive sister, Judy (a particularly brilliant Edi Patterson); Eli, the stern patriarch; and his late wife, Aimee-Leigh (Jennifer Nettles), the closest thing the family had to a conscience—is knee-deep in much that is toxic about American culture. Whether it’s celebrity worship, consumerist waste, or phony relationship advice, the Gemstones have a hand in it. But the show never really allows the viewer to hate them. They are too funny, too desperate, too pathetic, too humanly appetitive to lose the audience’s grudging affection.

Part of the reason that this type of prestige show works is the creators’ genuine fascination with the environment their characters live in. McBride is the only storyteller I can think of who understands the particular world of religious showpeople well enough to fully exploit its dramatic potential—which is, like Jerry Falwell, way too rich. Because of the cultural and financial power held by televangelists, there’s immense artistic possibility to be found in digging into any discrepancies between their behavior and their beliefs, and the details of the ways they work—the grist of many great TV shows.

When televangelists succeed, they can find themselves on top of their world, just like Tony Soprano or Don Draper. But when they fail, as the Gemstones often do, they are both funnier and sadder than Saul Goodman: Nothing is more incongruous than a person performing the role of a wealthy and powerful person to their own disinterested family. Just as a person needn’t like organized crime in order to enjoy David Chase’s dissection of the mobster’s psychology, a secular viewer can observe the Gemstones’ worldly machinations with fascination (as does the investigative reporter Thaniel Block, played by Jason Schwartzman in the show’s second season). We’ve had a few classic novels (Elmer Gantry, Wise Blood) and movies (The Apostle, The Eyes of Tammy Faye) about the world of revivalist, Pentecostal Christianity, but Gemstones is the first show to fully dive in. The details of the first-season plot were so perfectly observed that the series seemed prophetic: Around the time its pilot aired, depicting Jesse being blackmailed with a video of himself and his church buddies snorting cocaine alongside sex workers, the second-generation evangelical figure Jerry Falwell Jr. found himself embroiled in a sex scandal. A more recent Southern Baptist controversy over the roles of women echoes the struggles of Judy to find her place in a patriarchal order.

[Read: The Netflix series that should make religious people uncomfortable]

In the most recent season, Eli and his family are pitted against a set of relatives who have attempted to keep their Christianity weird and countercultural, in pointed contrast to the materialistic Gemstones. Unfortunately, in their case this means being violent right-wing survivalists. If the Gemstones practice a syncretism of Christ and money, their relatives are outright worshiping war and confusing it for worship of Christ. Their presence as a foil doesn’t exactly absolve the Gemstones; as we learn in a flashback episode, the relatives were put on this path because they lost all their money investing in Gemstone-branded Y2K-survival kits. Fittingly, the season’s climax involves a plague of locusts descending on everyone, and a big explosion—fire and judgment. And yet it ends, as both the previous seasons have ended, on a bizarrely moving and warm family reunion, one that—judging from the presence of Peter Montgomery (Steve Zahn), a character we have just seen blown up in a truck—may be taking place in some kind of afterlife. The show chastens the characters rather than destroying them.

In part due to these callbacks and returns, which make each season follow the same reassuringly predictable rhythms as a church service, the show has at times felt repetitive over its three-season run (with a fourth on the horizon): further scandals, yet more troublemaking extended family, yet another conciliatory whole-cast finale. The characters, too, develop only in inches: McBride needs them venal and voracious enough to remain funny, but if they learn nothing at all from their often egregious behavior, the show becomes impossible to enjoy. The characters grow exactly as much as people tend to when they know they will have another chance. The show treats these apparent weaknesses by turns mockingly and sentimentally; the odd interplay prompts the viewer to think again about what forgiveness is, and what it’s for.

Forgiveness is a fundamental part of any durable human social relations; sooner or later, even the best intentioned human beings hurt one another, and people need ways of recognizing and moving on from that hurt. Christianity takes this practice an extra step: Christ enjoins his followers to pray for their enemies, and to do good to those who hurt them, even when those enemies are still in the process of inflicting those wounds. But the tent-style revivalism practiced by Eli and Aimee-Leigh, built on intense appeals to sudden conversion, severs Christian practices of confession and forgiveness from churches and their representatives. If you are moved to repent in your heart, it says, you need not talk to a priest about it or make recognizable amends.

Revivalist faith is easy to mock—its rhetorical power can be hard to separate from performative salesmanship. But even an unbeliever might see the appeal of a religion that promises instant transformation. For the younger Gemstones, this promise initially comes not from a deep emotional experience but complacently, from their parents. Faith, to them, feels theoretical, an idea that forms the cornerstone of their lives but that’s also untested. They seem tempted to push the boundaries of sinful behavior—Jesse’s adultery, Judy’s meanness, the entire family’s materialism—to see if they will still be forgiven. They develop a conveniently weak sense of self: “And thank you, Lord, for forgiving me of my wrongdoings, which you know are not who I am,” prays Jesse in a first-season episode.

[Read: Christian America’s must-see TV show]

TV critics in recent years have objected that the prestige-TV antihero, too, enjoys the forgiveness of viewers a little too easily. The idea is that we slip from finding a character like Logan Roy or Walter White interesting to tolerating or even admiring them—and then, perhaps, their real-life analogues. For some viewers, this is probably true; think of the many Breaking Bad fans who seem to have walked away from the show hating Walter’s mildly judgmental wife, Skyler, rather than the meth kingpin himself. To the extent that such series do work that way, it is the characters’ charisma that motivates our forgiveness. For the characters of Gemstones, a background truth of their worldview is that God has already forgiven them before the shouting even starts. That existential cushion, paradoxically, seems to allow these defensive, vain, frail characters enough room to start to change their behavior, as in the unexpectedly moving second-season sequence where Uncle Baby Billy (Walton Goggins) meets the adult child he once abandoned and immediately returns to the wife and baby he is in the process of leaving.

Impious as the show is, the way it scrambles cause and effect aptly captures the weird, anti-dramatic quality of forgiveness. On Gemstones, someone has to tell you you’re forgiven before you can start to make the sorts of choices that might render you forgivable. Part of the power of a good TV show is that it reminds us that rooting for characters and approving of them are not the same thing. Perhaps the same might be true of how we relate to the flawed, grasping people in our own lives. Or even to our flawed, grasping selves.

International pressure mounted Thursday against leaders of the coup in Niger as the American secretary of state said the United States “stands very much” in support of West African leaders who have threatened to use force to restore the nation's democracy, and Senegal offered troops to help.