Anne Kenner worked for many years as a federal prosecutor, first in the Eastern District of New York, and then in the Northern District of California, trying mobsters and drug dealers. “I like the hairy edge,” she told me. Her job was meaningful to her; it made her feel useful. When she became disturbed by the powerlessness of some of the young people caught up in the system, she developed a curriculum to help students understand their rights if they came into contact with law enforcement: Here’s what to do if the police stop you; here’s what to do if a cop asks to look inside your backpack.

A turning point in Kenner’s life came when she was in her 50s. Her brother, who had been troubled since childhood, shot and killed himself. They’d had a difficult relationship when they were kids, and she hadn’t spoken with him in 33 years. He had cut off almost all contact with her family decades earlier, as his life spiraled into reclusive paranoia. Still, she told me, his death “was a massively tumultuous experience. I wanted to understand why I was knocked sideways personally.”  

Around that time, she heard about what was then a new program at Stanford University called the Distinguished Careers Institute. It’s for adults, mostly in their 50s and 60s, who are retiring from their main career and trying to figure out what they want to do with the rest of their lives. The fellows spend a year learning together as a cohort of a few dozen, reinventing themselves for the next stage. “Somebody told me it offered breathing room, a chance to take a step back,” Kenner recalled.

But that is not how she experienced it: “It wasn’t breathing space; it was free fall.”

On her first day, Phil Pizzo, who’d been a researcher and dean of Stanford’s medical school before founding the program, told the group to throw away their résumés: “That’s no longer who you are. That’s not going to help you.” Kenner took his words to heart. “I thought, Okay, nothing I’ve done matters. Everything I do going forward has to be different.”

Kenner’s first few days on campus were a shock. The fellows, most of whom had been wildly successful in tech or finance or some other endeavor, were no longer running anything. They were effectively college freshmen again, carrying backpacks, trying to get into classes, struggling to remember how to write a term paper. One day Kenner walked into the program’s study area and saw “the guy who was the biggest success and the biggest asshole” in the program lying on his back on the floor.

“What are you doing down there?” Kenner asked.

He couldn’t answer; he was hyperventilating. “This 65-year-old brilliantly successful man was in a total panic” because of the changes to his life, Kenner recalled. Over the ensuing year, she continued, “he became a dear friend.”

At one point during the program, the fellows are asked to get up and tell the group something important about their life journey, something deeper than the items on their CV. Kenner talked about her brother. It was a transformative experience: For her family, her brother’s troubled nature had always been shrouded in secrecy, and not openly discussed. But “keeping secrets was very dangerous in my family,” she now realizes. “Telling my brother’s story was my declaration of independence from all that.”

Her life has a new direction now. When I talked with her in May, a few years after her Stanford experience, she was working with the Magic Theatre in San Francisco to workshop a play she had written about Henry VIII’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, one of Kenner’s lifelong heroes. The play was in rehearsals as we spoke; readings ran during the daytime and Kenner rewrote scenes in the evenings. “I can’t sleep, it’s so exciting,” she told me. “I’m a pretty controlled person. I’m not much of a crier and these theater people are such emotional people. They’re crying all the time. I’m learning to go with that.”

She reflected on one of the things she had learned during her second education in the Stanford DCI program: “It’s all about putting myself in situations in which I know nothing. I can fail big. Who gives a shit? I’m 64.”  

Stanford, Harvard, and Notre Dame have three of the most established postcareer programs in the U.S., but others are popping up. I learned about them when my wife and I agreed to teach at the University of Chicago’s version, the Leadership and Society Initiative, which launches this fall. These programs are proliferating now because we’re witnessing the spread of a new life stage.        

The idea of adolescence, as we now understand it, emerged over the course of the first half of the 20th century. Gradually people began to accept that there is a distinct phase of life between childhood and adulthood; the word teenager came into widespread use sometime in the 1940s.

In the 21st century, another new phase is developing, between the career phase and senescence. People are living longer lives. If you are 60 right now, you have a roughly 50 percent chance of reaching 90. In other words, if you retire in your early or mid-60s, you can expect to have another 20 years before your mind and body begin their steepest decline.

Illustration by Alanah Sarginson

We don’t yet have a good name for this life stage. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, a notable scholar in this area, calls it the “Third Chapter.” Some call it “Adulthood II” or, the name I prefer, the “Encore Years.” For many, it’s a delightful and rewarding phase, but the transition into it can be rocky.

For the participants in these programs, who are largely upper-middle-class and well educated, their careers have defined their identities. Their sense of significance derived from their professional achievements. What happens when that all goes away?

Over the past few months, I’ve had conversations with people who are approaching this transition or are in the middle of it. These conversations can be intense. One senior executive told me that he fears two things in life: retirement and death—and that he fears retirement more.

The business consultant William Bridges argued that every transition involves a period of loss, then a period in the neutral zone, and then a period of rebirth. The loss that comes with retirement can be brutal. Some highly successful people mourn the life that gave them meaning and made them the center of the room. People in the neutral zone don’t yet know who the new version of themselves will be. They report feeling hollow, disoriented, empty.

One 70-year-old told me that when she retired, she learned that she’s bad at predicting what will make her happy. Many of the activities she’d planned to pursue turned out to be dull or unfulfilling. Another retiree told me that, unexpectedly, the thing he misses most about his job is the work emails—the feeling that he was inside the information flow. “It’s the recognition of loss that brings people to programs like ours,” Tom Schreier, who was the vice chairman of the investment-management firm Nuveen in Chicago and who now directs Notre Dame’s Inspired Leadership Initiative, told me. “When they ran an organization, they thought they had 200 great friends. Suddenly, only five are as responsive as they used to be.”  

These folks are in the middle of what the psychologist Erik Erikson called a developmental crisis. People will either achieve generativity—a way of serving others—or sink into stagnation. At an age when you think they’d be old enough to know the answers, they find themselves thrown back into fundamental questions: Who am I? What’s my purpose? What do I really want? Do I matter?

These academic programs are meant to help them answer those questions. The people in the Stanford, Harvard, and Notre Dame programs are not average Americans. Most are ridiculously privileged, affluent enough to pay the steep tuition costs and to move for a year to places like Palo Alto or Cambridge. Their lives are a million miles away from the great bulk of humanity who either can’t afford to retire, or who are one setback away from real financial stress, and can’t afford to take a year off to contemplate meaning and purpose.

But the lessons the super-elite learn there apply more broadly than just to them. People at all income levels derive some of their identity from how they contribute to the world and provide for those they love, and people at all income levels feel a crisis of identity, and get thrown back on existential questions, when those roles change or fade away. The working poor struggle with blows to their identity when age or infirmity demands that they cut back or change jobs, even if they have to keep laboring, and even though they don't have the luxury of taking classes where they can engage in deep thought. While the people who attend these programs have built their lives around the pursuit of high-status careers in a way that makes them especially prone to experience profound crises when that success and status are in the rearview mirror, the lessons they learn here have wisdom for all of us.

I’m fascinated by these programs because, among other reasons, I’m hoping they can serve as an antidote to the cultural malady that The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson calls workism. This is the modern way of thinking that, he writes, “valorizes work, career, and achievement above all else.” Many Americans, he continues, have come to assume that work can provide everything that humans once got from their religion—meaning, community, self-actualization, a sense of high calling.

Modern life is oriented around the meritocracy, which implies certain values—that life is best seen as a climb toward the top, that achievement is the essence of a good life, that successful people are to be admired more than less successful people. But this overreliance on our work identities is unhinging us.

Since the dawn of the modern age, people have been complaining about the hollowness of the rat race, but nobody ever does anything about it. If these post-professional programs can help older people figure out what a fulfilling life looks like when work and career are no longer in the center, then maybe they’ll have some lessons for the rest of us. The emergence of a cohort of people who are still vital and energetic but who are living by a different set of values, creating a different conception of the good life, might help the broader culture achieve a values reset.

Most revolutions come from the young. Is it possible that the one we need now will be driven by the old?        

Some people enter one of these programs looking for a relatively simple vocational shift. They have a vague sense that now is the time to give back, so they figure their next life will look similar to their old one, only with more do-gooding. But many soon discover that they underestimated how much of their previous life was oriented around career success. They underestimate the power of the workaholic mentality they’ve adopted—goal-centered, strategic, rationalistic, emotionally and spiritually stunted.

“We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning,” Carl Jung observed. “For what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.” As they leave their corner-office jobs, these erstwhile masters of the universe are smashing into this blunt reality.  

Susan Gianinno, who was the CEO of the advertising firm J. Walter Thompson, attended the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative and is now a co-chair of the program’s alumni association. She observes that in high-powered jobs, life is all about instrumentality and performance—optimizing effort and delivering results. But when you get to the stage beyond your work life, that mentality is not relevant. “The key shift is to go from mastery to servant,” Gianinno told me. When you’re in a high-powered work environment, you think of yourself as a master of performance. But to succeed in this new phase of life, “you have to serve.”   

The fellows have to cast aside the impressive persona their ego wants them to project—a worldly success, someone important. Jacob Schlesinger was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal for more than 30 years. “There was a period when it was a thrill to see your name on the front page,” he says. But the thrill waned, the process of reporting stories grew more bureaucratic and grinding, and he realized he didn’t want to do it anymore. He enrolled in the Stanford program but entered carrying that impressive Wall Street Journal identity with him. When he went to a doctor appointment while at Stanford, Schlesinger told me, the first thing the doctor said was, “Oh, you work at The Wall Street Journal.”   

But gradually, that identity dissipated. New interests emerged. “I immersed myself in spirituality,” Schlesinger said. “I also took a lot of improv classes. I feel stupid saying this, because I used to think it was all stupid—I called it the ‘vulnerability industrial complex.’” He enrolled in a memoir class. “It was jaw-dropping what people were willing to reveal,” he said. “Doing this program opened my mind.”

Beating the meritocratic values out of a 65-year-old requires a very different pedagogy than beating them into a 20-year-old. These programs differ from collegiate programs in a variety of ways. In these classrooms, for starters, teachers and students are similarly aged peers. There are no grades or class rankings—the normal measures of meritocratic rank and status. The readings are shorter than you might assign to a college student. (When I’ve led seminars with middle-aged adults, I’ve found that they can’t get through texts that are easy for college students—their deep-reading skills deteriorated as their career progressed.) But these readings don’t seem so central anyway, because almost every person I spoke with said the single most important part of their program was the chance to walk through this life transition with new friends. “I now have 30 new friends,” Margaret Higgins, who attended the Notre Dame program, told me. “Who in their 60s has 30 good new friends?”

The students serve as mutual support societies for one another as they make a vocational leap of faith. “I wanted a future I couldn’t predict,” Susan Nash, a former litigator, told me. Letting go of the wheel is going to be hard “if control has been your MO,” Father Dan Groody, who teaches in the Notre Dame program, told me. “It’s hard but liberating.”

In my conversations with this cohort, I would confess that the demands of my own career have made me obsessively time-focused. I have this clock ticking in my head. When I pull into a gas station to fill up my tank, I think compulsively to myself: You’ll have 90 free seconds; you can get two emails done. The Encore types responded to my confession with the indulgence you might offer a small child. They’d learned to slow down enough to feel. Some of the programs assign Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book The Sabbath to help students learn to pause. “We start by stopping the busyness train. If you want to go deeper into the heart’s desire, you need to create the silence to hear it,” Father Groody said.

As the fellows shed the optimization mindset, time stretches out. There isn’t a long-term career trajectory to manage. There’s more freedom to ask What do I want to do today?

At their best, the programs compel students to ask some fundamental questions, and to come up with new answers. The first question is Who am I? The programs run people through various exercises that help them reflect on their lives. At Stanford, many students take a memoir-writing class. At Notre Dame they go to cemeteries and write their own obituary.        

They are learning to get beyond conceiving of their lives as just a series of résumé notches. They are also learning to think in different ways. The psychologist Jerome Bruner argued that there are two modes of thinking: paradigmatic mode and narrative mode. Put simply, paradigmatic mode is making the case for something; narrative mode is telling stories.

Most of us spend our careers getting good at paradigmatic mode—making arguments, creating PowerPoint presentations, putting together strategy memos, writing legal briefs. But in plotting the next chapter of their lives, the fellows need to update their story, which requires going into narrative mode. They have to weave a tale of how they grew and changed, going back to childhood.

The programs use various devices to help students see themselves at a deeper level. Harry Davis, a longtime management professor at the University of Chicago who is an adviser to and teacher in its Leadership and Society program, asks his students to identify their core self, their visible self, and their best self. At Notre Dame, instructors draw on Thomas Merton’s theories about self and identity, asking students to describe both their true self and the false self they show the world. Tom Schreier, the Notre Dame program director, observes that most people find themselves surprisingly unfamiliar with their true self.

[From the September 2023 issue: David Brooks on how America got mean]

The second big question the students must answer is What do I really want? When we’re young, we tend to want what other people want: the things that will bring affirmation, status, and financial gain. But in the Encore phase, students are compelled to move from pursuing the extrinsic desires the world rewards to going after their intrinsic desires.

That process can be daunting. Father Groody remembers that “one day we were introducing the topic of the inner world and the heart’s desires. There was palpable tension in the room. People were getting red in the face; their veins were popping out. These were these high-achieving folks and to many of them, the idea of sharing from vulnerable spaces … that was just really frightening.”

Many people in this stage of life realize that they abandoned some dream on their way up the career ladder—the dream of becoming a musician or a playwright or a teacher. They pick up the lost strands—the activities and the talents that have gone unrealized—and build their new lives around them.

“The hard thing to do when you get old is to keep your horizons open,” the theologian and civil-rights hero Howard Thurman once wrote. “The first part of your life everything is in front of you, all your potential and promise. But over the years, you make decisions; you carve yourself into a given shape. Then the challenge is to keep discovering the green growing edge.”

The third question for the students is What should I do? Many fellows enter the programs thinking they’ll take on some project that is adjacent to their previous career. A real-estate developer may want to work on affordable housing. But according to Schreier, there turns out to be nearly zero correlation between the thing students want to do at the beginning of the year and the thing they want to do at the end. Their horizon of options widens.

Many of the alumni I spoke with have launched or joined programs to take on big, obvious social problems: school reform, homelessness, the dearth of women of color in tech. But I was most entranced by the people doing little things with great joy. Davis, who has worked as a management professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business for 60 years, told me, “I want to open a bakery. I don’t want to run it. I just want to bake.” Susan Nash, the former big-time lawyer, talked with great enthusiasm about how much fun she’s having reporting for a local wire service. After a career in venture capital, M. J. Elmore took a course in art history while at Stanford and now paints. “I’m in the third trimester of life,” she told me. “I’m filling it with painting.”

Illustration by Alanah Sarginson

“People in these programs do not care what you did before,” Nash told me. “We all start over in forming new identities.” Many of the students ultimately end up not missing their sparkling careers; in fact, they can’t believe they allowed themselves to be stuck in those professional ruts for all those decades. Students in the middle of the program come up to Father Groody and say, “How did I miss this for so long?” They are grieving, he said, telling him, “I should have done this earlier.”

For people like me, still in full-bore career mode, hearing this is jarring. We throw ourselves into work, consumed by finishing this or that project, convinced that each professional task is truly important. And yet if what these oldsters say is true, it’s likely that at some point we’re going to leave it all behind and not look back.

What lesson should the rest of us glean from these folks? If you’re 35 or 49 or 57 and see people living their deepest lives after they’ve shed the curse of workism, should you drop out of the rat race and take this whole career thing less seriously?

That’s the conclusion that many young people I know are drawing. They look at the manic careerism of the older generations and see a recipe for an anxious, exhausting, and existentially empty life. Maybe you’ve encountered the TikTok influencer Gabrielle Judge, who popularized the #lazygirljob meme. The idea behind #lazygirl (and also behind the ostensible trend toward “quiet quitting”) is that you should find a job that will pay the bills but won’t demand much of your time or passion. Abandon the ordeal of careerism and devote your energies to the daily pleasures of life.

Maybe I’m stuck in a generational rut, but my own view is that the #lazygirl approach isn’t quite right. If you make only a half-assed commitment to your work, you’re settling for mediocrity in an endeavor that will necessarily absorb a large chunk of your life. And if you decide to prioritize pleasure, you’ll spend your days consuming random experiences that you’ll measure on shallow, aesthetic grounds—was today tasty or bland? You’ll accumulate a series of temporary experiences that don’t add up to anything substantial.

The people who enroll in Encore programs have chosen purpose over leisure. In their senior years, they’ve revealed something I take to be a general human truth: Most of us don’t just want simple happiness; we want intensity. We want to feel that sense of existential urgency you get when you are engrossed in some meaningful project, when you know you are doing something important and good. These programs don’t quiet ambitions so much as elevate them, redirect them toward something generous—whether it’s a grand project, like reforming schools, or a local passion, like painting, baking, or writing a play about Anne Boleyn.

But how on earth did we end up with a society in which 65-year-olds have to take courses to figure out who they are, what they really want, and what they should do next? How did we wind up with a culture in which people’s veins pop out in their neck when they are forced to confront their inner lives?

The answer is that we live in a culture that has become wildly imbalanced, like a bodybuilder who has pumped his right side up to excessive proportion while allowing his left side to shrivel away. To put it another way, a well-formed life is governed by two different logics. The first is the straightforward, utilitarian logic that guides us through our careers: Input leads to output; effort leads to reward; pursue self-interest; respond to incentives; think strategically; climb the ladder; impress the world. This is the logic that business schools teach you.

But there is a second and deeper logic to life, gift logic, which guides us as we form important relationships, serve those around us, and cultivate our full humanity. This is a logic of contribution, not acquisition; surrender, not domination. It’s a moral logic, not an instrumental one, and it’s full of paradox: You have to give to receive. You have to lose yourself to find yourself. You have to surrender to something outside yourself to gain strength within yourself.

If career logic helps you conquer the world, gift logic helps you serve it. If career logic focuses on “how” questions—how to climb the career ladder, how to get things done efficiently—gift logic focuses on “why” questions, such as why are we here, and what good should we ultimately serve? If career logic is about building up the ego, gift logic is about relinquishing it and putting others first.

A well-lived life, at any stage, is lived within the tension between these two logics. The problem is that we have managed to build a world in which utilitarian logic massively eclipses moral logic. The brutal meritocracy has become such an all-embracing cosmos, many of us have trouble thinking outside of it. From an early age, the pressure is always on to win gold stars, to advance, optimize, impress. That endless quest for success can come at the expense of true learning. Many of the students I’ve taught over the years don’t have time for intellectual curiosity or spiritual growth—a condition that only worsens through adulthood as their obligations proliferate.

I see these Encore programs as green shoots, little buds for a new set of countercultural institutions for people who have thrived in the meritocracy but are now eager to live according to gift logic. They are hoping to live in the sides of themselves that have atrophied—to live a spiritual life, a life of moral purpose. These programs are places where it’s okay to think about purpose, okay to want to shed your old workist identity, okay to orient your life around the ideal of self-sacrificial service. At their best, these programs are trying to cultivate moral imagination, so that people can picture a nobler life and muster the courage to go out and live it.

These programs should not just be for rich people; they are in urgent need of democratization. Tens of millions of people transition to their Encore phase every year. Attending less rarified versions of these programs, if only for a couple of weeks or sporadically throughout the year, should be a rite of passage leading up to retirement. Phyllis Moen is a life-stages scholar who studied some of the established Encore programs before starting one of her own at the University of Minnesota. Her program isn’t geared toward the masters of the universe but rather to middle-class types—teachers, small-business owners, some physicians. She says her fellows at Minnesota confront the same challenges as the CEO types at Stanford and Harvard—the same loss of identity, the same need to retell their life story, the same uncertainty about what to do next. Differences in social class don’t necessarily mean differences in the crisis of identity that confronts people upon retirement.         

Shouldn’t there be more programs like Moen’s, that balance utilitarian logic with moral logic for different phases of life? I’m not an entrepreneur, but while working on this story, a fantasy kept popping into my head: Somebody should start a company called Transition Teams. This would be a firm that helps people organize into cohorts during life’s crucial transitions—after college, after divorce, after a professional setback, after the death of a spouse, after retirement. These are pivotal moments when the most humane learning takes place, and yet America today lacks the sort of programs or institutions that could gentle the transitions and maximize the learning through mutual support. (In the old days, the Elks Club or the Ladies Auxiliary or the VFW hall or your worship community might have helped, but they’ve receded in recent decades, as has been well documented.)

These programs wouldn’t have to be expensive: Rent some rooms at a local college or at the local library. Offer a choice of different curricula. Hire facilitators to keep the conversations going. Let the participants themselves run the show.

The human hunger for meaning and fulfillment is strong. And yet America today is too awash in workism and too short on purpose. We shouldn’t have to wait until we’re 65 to learn how to transform our lives. Maybe the people reinventing themselves now in these Encore programs can show the rest of us the way.

On Wednesday night, the 2024 campaign season officially began, and it was the weirdest season opener in recent memory. Former President Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination, did not show up. And even though the contenders on the stage likely have no chance of winning the nomination, the debate was important, in that a lot was revealed about the future of the party.

Nikki Haley came across as the reasonable, truth-telling candidate. She got nowhere. Newcomer Vivek Ramaswamy, meanwhile, offered a newer and shinier version of Trumpism. On this week’s Radio Atlantic, we talk with Atlantic staff writers McKay Coppins, reporting from the debate, and Elaine Godfrey about why Ramaswamy popped, why Ron DeSantis didn’t, and what all that means for the future of the party and the culture of politics.

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. On Wednesday night, the 2024 campaign officially began.

Bret Baier [Archival Tape]: Tonight, the race for the White House takes flight. Welcome to the first debate of the 2024 presidential campaign. Live at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee.

Rosin: Fox News hosted eight Republican candidates for the first primary debate of the season. Although this one was unusual because it happened without the front runner.

Bret Baier [Archival Tape]: But we have a lot to get to in this second hour of this GOP primary debate policy discussions. Americans want to hear you all on, but we are going to take a brief moment and talk about the elephant not in the room.

Rosin: Former President Donald Trump skipped the event and instead recorded an interview with Tucker Carlson. And in fact, today as we are recording this, Trump will be arraigned on felony charges in Georgia, one of four cases he’s indicted in. Fox News even cut to a live shot of the jail during the debate.

Martha MacCallum [Archival Tape]: Right now you are looking live at Fulton County Jail, where former President Donald Trump will be processed tomorrow.

Rosin: Yeah, so definitely the weirdest launch of a campaign season I can remember, but still it revealed a lot about where the Republican party—and in fact, our entire political culture—is headed. So today we’re talking to Atlantic writer McKay Coppins, who was at the debate in Wisconsin. And is probably very tired. And staff writer Elaine Godfrey, who covers politics for the Atlantic. McKay, how much sleep did you get last night?

McKay Coppins: I got a wonderful three hours at the, Four Points Hotel, by the Milwaukee Airport, so I’m feeling great and ready for this conversation.

Rosin: And Elaine, you’re just jealous that you didn’t get to go ?

Elaine Godfrey: I love Milwaukee. I am jealous. (Laughs.)

Rosin: McKay, what was your and all the other political reporters’ expectations going in? What were you watching for?

Coppins: Well, I think everybody came in wondering if Ron DeSantis the Florida governor and second place candidate in the primaries could do anything to turn around his summer slide in the polls. As recently as April, he was only 15 points away from Trump. It looked like they were going to be the kind of two main guys in the race, and there were a lot of predictions about how DeSantis would, overtake Trump soon.

His campaign has not gone well. I think he’s now 40 points down from Trump. And so, without Trump at this debate, I think the question was: Will Ron DeSantis seize this moment? Somehow convince voters that he is a viable alternative to Trump and turn around his campaign?

Rosin: That isn’t the news coming out of the debate. It’s more about this newcomer, Vivek Ramaswamy. Elaine, he was essentially introducing himself to a lot of people.

ARX: So first, lemme just address a question that is on everybody’s mind at home tonight. Who the heck is this skinny guy with a funny last name and what the heck is he doing in the middle of this debate stage? I’ll tell you, I’m not a politician, Brett, you’re right about that. I’m an entrepreneur. My.

Rosin: You’ve seen him on the stump. What is it about him that stands out?

Godfrey: I saw Ramaswamy for the first time back in May. I just dropped by this event that he was at, expecting nothing basically. I hadn’t even Googled him before I went. And so, Vivek Ramaswamy is 38. He’s an entrepreneur from Ohio. He has a lot of money. Tall, skinny guy, pretty good looking, huge dazzling white teeth.

Rosin: Yes. The teeth.

Godfrey: He’s very teeth-forward.

Rosin: Yes.

Godfrey: And he just stands up on the stage in a black V-neck, black skinny jeans. His hair is gooped up very tall. And he just has this sort of electric personality that people are drawn to.

And it’s partly his youth. I think people are just like: Whoa. He’s sparkly and young. And it’s partly that he has this high-school debate captain vibe. The guy who’s always raising his hand in your Politics 101 seminar.

And I, I think last night, the world finally saw that on a mass stage. And I don’t know how it translated for voters. I think some people were probably annoyed by the way that he sort of—

Coppins: … certainly several of his opponents on stage were extremely annoyed by him. Which I actually found fascinating watching. For example, the former vice president Mike Pence—who’s somebody I’ve been writing about and covering for years—is like the most mild-mannered human being I’ve ever met. And he repeatedly kind of lost it on Ramaswamy.

He clearly had just let this guy get under his skin and was kind of taking stray shots at him for no reason and interrupting him and lobbing insults at him and it was really bizarre. But you actually saw several different candidates do that last night and it I think spoke to Ramaswamy’s effectiveness and also how much his style, and to a certain extent his worldview, irritates what you might call the old guard of the Republican party.

Rosin: Okay, so let’s unpack that for a minute. When political analyst says someone “won” a debate, I think what they mean is that person made the most lasting impression. But does that win actually mean anything? Or does that just mean he was the most annoying? Or the most different? I couldn’t tell what the pop that he was getting actually meant or translated into.

Godfrey: I think he’ll probably get a small bump in the polls from this. I think this is going to be good for him in terms of potentially being on the VP shortlist for Trump, or perhaps more likely being a cabinet pick. I think that would be a really easy thing to do. Kind of like the Pete Buttigieg of the Joe Biden administration.

But more broadly, the way that Ramaswamy presented himself—the sort of success he was able to have with people in the audience and that he has every time he speaks—I think is going to be real. I think we’re going to see more of it.

I think we’re going to see more candidates try to emulate that sort of young gunner. He was sort of being a stand-in for Trump. Like a young, bubbly Trump. And I just think he did it much more effectively than someone like DeSantis could .

Rosin: That is what this performance left me wondering about. I have long thought of Trump as a singular character. But watching Ramaswamy, I felt like Trumpism has morphed into a strategy. Like, maybe this is a new political type? Here is the young, not white, not Christian, techie version of Trump. And are there infinite other varieties out there? And is that terrifying?

Coppins: Well, I’m curious about this because what about him reminds you of Trump? Because while watching the debate, I was trying to identify what it was that made him Trumpy. Because I agree, and I think the other candidates on this stage, frankly, saw him as a proxy for Trump.

Trump wasn’t there, so they were almost kind of venting their frustrations with Trump at Ramaswamy saying: He’s a political neophyte. He’s a rookie. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but he is putting everyone down. You could hear kind of shades of the frustration that they probably have with Trump, but don’t dare speak out loud.

When they were talking about Ramaswamy, he is very different in style in some ways. I mean, he talks fast. He does that thing where he has kind of the high-school debate, Model-UN patter that he thinks makes him sound smart, or, and I personally think kind of makes him seem like a salesman, but a lot of people respond to it.

He doesn’t totally sound like Trump, but it’s almost like he’s taken the core elements of Trumpism in style. It’s the kind of comic insult routine, the bluster. And in worldview, it’s the kind of right-wing populism, nationalism, the accusation that “all these other candidates were bought and paid for.” He said that a couple times or called his rival “super-PAC puppets.” He was drawing on some of those populist themes. But I think it’s an interesting question because I’ve long wondered how trumpism could be replicated. And I don’t think the answer is to do what Ron DeSantis has done, which is actually kind of literally mimic Donald Trump’s mannerisms and manner of speech, but rather to channel the kind of themes of Trumpism and then make it their own. Is that what you saw in Ramaswamy?

Godfrey: Well, to me, yeah. I mean , stylistically they’re very different. To me, Ramaswamy is just brighter, shinier than Trump. Faster talking. But yeah, he seems to have this sort of nothing-to-lose attitude that Trump also had and continues to have that makes him able to just raise his hand when no one else is or say whatever he’s thinking.

He appears as Trump did to me to have just arrived at a lot of these, conclusions about, right-wing populism. in the past couple of years of his life, he sort of seems to be trying out a lot of ideas and they’re working. So that’s what he believes now. That’s the familiar thing to me.

Coppins: I’m also struck by the extent to which he has channeled the kind of almost reckless distrust of all government institutions to the extent that he’s flirting with 9/11 trutherism, as our colleague John Hendrickson reported earlier this week. Donald Trump did the same thing when he kind of came on the scene in 2016.

He sounded different from other Republicans because his version of conservative, populist grievance, manifested in ways that were once considered too taboo for a Republican to venture into. He was, besmirching the Bush family and attacking the Iraq War and flirting with various conspiracy theories around 9/11 and vaccines and it seemed so kind of radical.

And I think now, the savvy politicians like Ramaswamy have realized that there really isn’t that much political cost to engaging in that kind of conspiracizing that was once seen as outside the Overton Window.

Rosin: Yeah. That’s what struck me about Ramaswamy as a template. It felt like modern technological thinking: There’s a disruption. Trump is the disruption. You take from that disruption and you perfect upon it. So I am Trump 2.0 or 3.0. You sort of morph it and twist it so that it’s sort of slightly better than the original disruption. That’s how it felt like he was operating, which made DeSantis feel like a sort of a broken coding or something like whatever it was that DeSantis was doing, just to finish the metaphor.

Coppins: You really landed the plane with that metaphor. I was impressed.

Rosin: Thank you. Anyway, let’s talk about DeSantis for a minute. So many moons ago, there was a notion that he might succeed Trump. Last night was a chance to bring that notion back. How is it looking now?

Coppins: I mean, I would say it’s not looking great. I’ve seen a few people make this observation that he seemed to perform as if he was the front runner trying to nurse his lead and protect his standing in the polls. But he’s not the front runner. He is down 40 points. He needed to do something dramatic to turn things around for his campaign. I don’t think he did it.

After the debate, in the spin room, I was talking to people from the DeSantis camp and they almost seemed like they were unwilling to acknowledge the actual state of affairs in this race. I talked to Congressman Chip Roy, for example, a Republican congressman who’s endorsed DeSantis.

And when I asked him about Trump’s 40 point lead in the polls, he kind of scoffed at me and said, “Oh, well look at where Ted Cruz was in the polls at this point 2015.” And I was kind of confused, and said: “Well, yeah, but Ted Cruz didn’t win.” And Chip Roy said, “Yeah, well, but he won Iowa.”

Boy, if the best case you can make for your candidate is that he is following the Ted Cruz 2016 trajectory, then you don’t have a great case for how well your candidate’s doing.

Rosin: Elaine, did you just watch DeSantis last night and think that’s it? That’s the end of the road for him?

Godfrey: I feel like I’ve watched DeSantis and thought that many different times during this campaign. Especially when, after the debate, the clip of him half-heartedly smiling really slowly after introducing himself was just all over my Twitter feed. Like it’s just cringeworthy now, and it's hard to fully understand why. I mean, it comes down to personality. Like, he has a really great ground game in Iowa. But again, so did Ted Cruz. And he may win Iowa, but that’s not enough. And people don’t connect with him. And he didn’t take any opportunities to seem less like a wax statue at this debate. And he should have. He totally should have. He had plenty of opportunities.

Coppins: I have to say, I was actually surprised. We were chatting before this debate and I thought that DeSantis would do better because where he’s struggled is on the campaign trail talking to regular voters. He’s come across as awkward. But I kind of thought in this context, behind a debate podium where he could have his one-liners pre-written and act domineering, that he’d make more of an impact.

But Ramaswamy ended up taking that role from him. I think also DeSantis is struggling with the fact that his key wedge, the thing that had propelled him to Republican stardom, was his handling of COVID. And he talked about it at the debate. Florida reopened schools earlier than a lot of states. He pushed back against vaccine mandates and mask mandates. And for certain element of the Republican party—and a good portion of the conservative base—he was seen as kind of a hero of pushing back against the excesses of COVID policies. But I don’t think that in the summer of 2023, many voters are thinking that much about COVID anymore.

I don’t think that’s where the conversation is. I don’t think anyone really wants to think back to when their kids’ schools were closed and the pandemic was wreaking havoc on the country. And so I think DeSantis has struggled because that was his main selling point, and it’s just not as potent as it was a year or two ago.

Rosin: Right. So the historical box then that he lands in is the box of presidential candidate who was a governor, who had some kind of moment, who rode some wave. Like Scott Walker or Jeb Bush. But it doesn’t translate. Is that who he becomes in our political future?

Coppins: I mean, this has been my suspicion about DeSantis from the beginning of the hype cycle. I just feel like I’ve covered politics long enough now that I’ve seen a lot of candidates go through this exact situation. You could even go back to Rudy Giuliani right after 9/11. He was “America’s mayor.” He seemed perfectly positioned. And then he flamed out. And I think that a lot of Republicans gain a certain amount of notoriety because of some big battle they’ve picked or victory they’ve scored for the conservative base that is no longer quite as relevant once they’re actually running for president. And I think that’s what’s happening to DeSantis.

Rosin: So one thing I was surprised about in the post-debate coverage is that not more people talked about Nikki Haley. She really surprised me in the way she called other candidates out on, basically, untruths they were saying on stage. Political realities. She used the word “accountant” and yet she didn’t get a lot of love. Why is that?

Godfrey: Nikki Haley is tough. I think she surprised me too. She did better than I thought. I mean, she said the same thing she says on the stump, but she just seemed so reasonable when, to the side of her, you had Pence and DeSantis and Ramaswamy fighting. And she was just like: Okay, boys, I’m going to talk about what matters.

And I think she did really well. She got some really big applauses. She definitely doesn’t have the sort of Vivek Ramaswamy sparkliness. But when she first made that transition about Margaret Thatcher saying: “If you want something done, ask a woman.” That kind of thing. People love that. My mom texted me. My mom, who is a Rachel Maddow-loving, MSNBC-watching liberal texted me: “I love Nikki Haley.” Which I thought was amazing—

Coppins: …though perhaps doesn’t bode well for her standing in the Republican primary. (Laughs.)

Godfrey: (Laughs.) Exactly! It bodes well if she makes it to a general, but she’s not going to.

Coppins: I had the same thing. A woman in my life who’s not a Republican primary voter texted me, “I thought Nikki Haley sounded really smart on abortion.” and there was that moment in the debate where she was pressing Mike Pence on the idea of a federal abortion ban.

Nikki Haley [Archival Tape]: Don’t make women feel like they have to decide on this issue when, you know we don’t have 60 Senate votes .

Mike Pence [Archival Tape]: 70% of the American people support legislation banning abortion after a baby is capable of experiencing pain.

Nikki Haley [Archival Tape]: But 70% of the Senate does not! (Cheers.)

Coppins: And she made this point from what she called a “unapologetically pro-life” perspective. So it’s not as if she was wishy-washy on abortion. She was just saying: let’s be realistic about this. I think that’s the kind of thing that reporters and voters and pundits appreciate. And I think that non Republican primary voters also seem to have appreciated it. At least based on the text messages Elaine and I received.

The question is whether Republican primary voters will appreciate it. I think there’s actually a case that the average Republican primary voter is not as doctrinaire on abortion as, for example, Mike Pence is. And so maybe Nikki Haley will make some headway with suburban Republican women with the way she talks about abortion.

But, to answer your question, Hanna, I think that the reason she’s not lighting the world on fire after this debate is that she does represent an old Republican party.

I think she’s very politically talented. I think she presents well. I think she’s smart. And she has a record in South Carolina she could run on as the former governor. But she doesn’t channel that same kind of visceral distrust of institutions that Trump and Ramaswamy and many of the most popular media figures on the right these days do.

You could see it in the way that she talked about even Ukraine. She had this kind of old-school idea of promoting democracy around the world. In America asserting its power abroad in idealistic ways. That was once the bread and butter of the Reagan-era, GOP, and even the Bush-era, GOP. And that now kind of sounds out of step with where a good chunk of the party’s base is.

Rosin: Right, like her failure and Ramaswamy’s success was, to me, the two data points I put together to think: oh, that’s the future of the Republican party. Because if I had to sit down and write who the perfect candidate is , it would be a non-white woman who was the governor of a conservative southern state who has international experience, who herself is very conservative, but can also appeal to non Republican voters.

On paper, she seems absolutely perfect. And yet, such is the future and style of Republican politics that she is going to get nowhere.

Godfrey: And they had that back and forth that was so illustrative of that. Which is Ramaswamy talking about Ukraine and Russia, and how we shouldn’t be helping Ukraine anymore, and she just looks at him and says: “You have no foreign policy experience and it shows.”

And that was a really great line. But that line doesn’t resonate with GOP primary voters. They don’t want to hear that. That is the old guards scolding the MAGA newbies.

Rosin: So outside these theatrics, there were also some other interesting displays of genuine policy differences, like the climate change moment. Fox News airs this question from a young student asking: What does my party intend to do about climate change?

McKay, can you describe what happened next?

Coppins: I actually have a question about this. So the question came up and Ramaswamy kind of seized the conversation by saying: “I’m the only candidate on stage who isn’t bought and paid for, so I can say this climate change is a hoax... the reality is more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change.”

Now, I couldn’t tell from the media filing center. Maybe it was more clear on TV if you weren’t surrounded by 500 reporters. It sounded to me like Ramaswamy got booed when he said that? And I don’t know if he was getting booed for the climate change comment or for saying that everybody else on stage was bought and paid for. But I was actually struck that that was not the clear applause line that he thought it would be.

Vivek Ramaswamy [Archival Tape]: I’m the only person on the stage who isn’t bought and paid for, so I can say this: the climate change agenda is a hoax.

Coppins: I mean, this is a case of an issue where—and I’m kind of struck that Ramaswamy, as the millennial candidate at 38 years old, hasn’t picked up on this—but this is an issue where I actually think we’ve seen some movement in the Republican base.

And part of it is the conversation about how to address climate change has expanded to technological innovation and areas of rhetoric where conservatives are more comfortable. But I think, especially among younger conservatives, climate change is increasingly an issue that they care about the way that younger non-conservatives care about it. And I thought that was kind of an odd moment for Ramaswamy to kind of whiff.

But I think it also speaks to—and I’ll just say this—that every cycle there’s a candidate like Ramaswamy, in that it’s a young Republican who looks youthful and maybe idealistic, but that is actually playing the part of a young person to appeal to older Republican primary voters.

Rosin: It reminds me of a great Michael Kinsley line about what someone once wrote about Al Gore: that he was an old person’s idea of a young person.

Coppins: That’s exactly right. And I think we see a lot of that in politics. And I could see the average Fox News viewer in their upper sixties or seventies applauding that. But in the room, it did not go over well. Which I thought was interesting.

Rosin: So what does that actually mean about climate change in the Republican party? I mean, how many degrees was it in Wisconsin that day?

Godfrey: One million.

Coppins: A hundred degrees. It was over a hundred degrees! It was very hot. I mean, maybe this was just a reaction to a crowd that was sweaty and uncomfortable. (Laughs.)

Or maybe I’m being too optimistic. But I think that moment suggested that there might be an openness on the right among Republican voters to take climate change more seriously.

Rosin: Yeah, so maybe Republicans booing at this climate change moment was surreal, but for me, the most surreal moment was when we suddenly had this flash of local-news visuals on the national debate stage. It was an image of the Fulton County Jail at night where nothing was happening. It was just like...

Godfrey: Very spooky.

Rosin: It was extremely spooky. It was nighttime, with one light from the guard’s little booth. Because today, Trump is being arraigned in Georgia. I need you political reporters to incorporate this for me. I just find it so, so strange.

Did he plan this? Because that’s how you would do it on reality TV. You would crush the debate by bringing the spotlight back to yourself the next day immediately, such that all this irrelevance fades away, even if the spotlight is showing you getting a mugshot. Is that the logic of all of this?

Coppins: The answer to all of that was yes. (Laughs.)

Godfrey: Unequivocally yes.

Coppins: All of us have spent too much time inside Donald Trump’s head over the last 10 years. But I mean, this has been his strategy since 2015, right? He wants attention. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad. And when it’s bad, it often helps him anyway. As long as he’s the center of the political universe, nobody can take him down. At least in the Republican party. I mean, he clearly programmed this as a way to draw attention back to himself.

I think this is his fourth indictment. I think he’s realized by now—and the data has borne out—that every time he’s indicted, it helps him in the Republican primary polls.

As perverse as that seems to us, he knew that this would probably be a good political moment for him. And so he engineered it so that he would be immediately in the aftermath of the debate, showing up at the Fulton County Jail to take a victory lap and get arraigned.

Godfrey: He is done persuading people to like him. He’s got the people he’s got. He’s giving those people what they want.

This is just like the Iowa State Fair. When DeSantis is there, he’s doing all the things candidates have to do. He’s talking with the governor. He is walking around. He is doing the sort of humiliating burger-flipping. And then Trump just shows up and flies over in his plane with “Trump” emblazoned on the side. Immediately, no one cares about DeSantis anymore. This man knows everything there is to know about attention and the media spotlight and how to get it.

Rosin: Right, but in one election that translated to victory. In the second election, it didn’t translate to victory. So what does it matter anymore? In the debate, in the moments that Trump did come up, except for Ramaswamy who was the most pro-Trump you could possibly get, everybody else was just kind of trudging along with the show. But it’s not going to get you where you want to go. He might not win. So what is it about?

Coppins: Well, I think that Republican voters who support Trump do think he’ll win. And I think that they are well past the point of rationally weighing the electoral pros and cons of Donald Trump’s nomination. There was a poll that came out over the weekend from CBS News and YouGov that found that, among supporters of Donald Trump, over 70% say that they will believe anything that Donald Trump tells them. And they went down the line and it was something like 40-something percent of them would believe what their religious leaders tell them. So that’s just as a point of reference.

Donald Trump tells them that he’s innocent, that he’s a victim of political persecution and that he’s going to beat the charges and win. And most of his supporters just basically take that at face value. And that’s been the case for eight years now. And that’s his biggest advantage, and why everybody else is struggling to kind of dent his inevitability.

Rosin: Right, and I get that, but has he also convinced them that Biden is weak and pathetic and anybody could beat Biden and so even though he actually lost to Biden, he’s somehow going to win this time.

Godfrey: I think that part of it is a lot of people think he didn’t lose in 2020. But also, Biden is older and Biden looks older than Trump. He just does. And I think that they’re really hoping—Team Trump and Republicans—are really hoping that that footage persuades people to give Trump a shot again.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. Well there will be more debates, but from what you guys are saying, we’re just going to walk along with some entertainment, some disasters, but we’re basically marching towards the inevitable showdown. Right? Very few things could divert us from that?

Coppins: Well, nothing has changed that so far. I mean, it could change, but I will just say that, in the spin room, I heard from multiple people in different campaigns saying: Well, we hope that Trump will show up at the next one. We hope he’ll debate.

And so the strategy appears to be wishful thinking that maybe they can lure him back to the debate stage and beat him that way. But so far Trump has not signaled that he will be participating in any of the future debates.

Rosin: Great. So another season of magical realism. Anyway, McKay, we wish you a nice flight home. We’ll see you soon. And Elaine, thank you so much for joining me.

Godfrey: Thank you, Hanna.

Coppins: Thank you.

[MUSIC]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak. The executive producer of Atlantic Audio is Claudine Ebeid. And our managing editor is Andrea Valdez. I’m Hanna Rosin. We’ll be back with new episodes every Thursday. And all of them are going to be about Republican debates. Just kidding.