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Although I don’t know exactly what you were hoping for in your summer vacation this year, I can make an educated guess based on data. The travel company Expedia, in a survey of more than 12,000 travelers, found that 38 percent of them primarily value relaxation, and 37 percent are searching for “contentment and mental well-being.” Meanwhile, no research I have ever seen finds that vacationers are looking for an increase in their stress and aggravation.

Yet an increase in stress is what 65 percent of American travelers have admitted to expecting from their vacations. Some reasons for this are obvious, such as being at the mercy of airlines, which rank in the top five most-hated industries (right up there with cable companies, internet- and cellphone-service providers, and health insurers). The last things you are looking for on vacation are involuntary delays, cancellations, lines, and lame excuses. Other common sources of vacation anxiety include financial worries and the hassles of packing, making travel arrangements, and developing an itinerary. Simply the pressure to have fun is something people report as a downer.

But a commonly overlooked source of vacation stress is a mismatch between your vacation type and your personality type. If you find yourself less relaxed and satisfied after your vacation than before it—or if you always dread what has been planned for you by family or friends—a possible culprit is this mismatch. With a little more information and thought, you can tailor your next vacation to your true personality.

[Arthur C. Brooks: How to have your most fulfilling vacation ever]

But what is that exactly? Psychologists generally define personality according to “Big Five” traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness toward others, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (which can conveniently be remembered by the acronym OCEAN). A huge body of research maps these traits onto many aspects of life, such as job choice, relationship success, religiosity, and general happiness. And a few researchers have looked at how the traits predicted vacation enjoyment. For example, one 2007 paper in the journal Personality and Individual Differences found that more conscientious, less neurotic people did not perceive as much stress on vacation as their less conscientious, more neurotic counterparts.

The Big Five combine to create other personality types that also contribute to vacation satisfaction. Consider narcissism, which is characterized by self-centeredness, entitlement, self-importance, and disregard for others. Narcissists (specifically grandiose narcissists) are typically high in extroversion and low in agreeableness. They also tend to be unrealistically optimistic about the future, which explains why researchers have determined that they commonly have very high expectations for their vacations and are usually disappointed.

Arguably the most important personality traits predicting vacation satisfaction, however, are openness to experience and extroversion. Openness to travel, in particular, is what the researcher Stanley C. Plog termed allocentricity, which he identified as comfort with novelty, independence, and adventurousness. Its opposite is psychocentricity, which involves familiarity-seeking, avoidance of uncertainty, and a desire for routine. Allocentric vacationers want new experiences, spontaneity, and surprises. In contrast, these things stress psychocentrics out.

Want to hear more from Arthur C. Brooks? Join him and a selection of today’s best writers and boldest voices at The Atlantic Festival on September 28 and 29. Get your pass here.

The other important trait is extroversion. Extroverts are outgoing and talkative, as we know, so they get energy from other people and especially like meeting strangers. Introverts are the reverse, preferring the company of a few close friends or relatives and feeling exhausted after too long in the company of strangers. Vacations featuring crowds and a lot of new acquaintances are thus stressful for introverts and energizing for extroverts.

Scholars have combined these axes of allocentricity/psychocentricity and extroversion/introversion to derive a typology of “vacation personalities,” which predict the levels of stress (or its absence, in the form of boredom) that will be experienced by different kinds of people. Based on this typology, we can classify vacationers into four basic types. If you can identify yourself in this schema, you can design a vacation suited to your desired level of risk, adventure, and exposure to crowds and strangers.

1. The Spontaneous Socializer
You are both extroverted and allocentric, so you gain energy from spontaneity, adventure, and meeting new people. The ideal vacation for you is to go someplace crowded and popular, but without a highly structured itinerary. For example, you might want to book a summer trip to Rome for a week with nothing but airline tickets, hotel reservations, and a guidebook. Then you could talk with everyone you meet in restaurants and go dancing at night.

2. The Gregarious Planner
You are psychocentric and extroverted, so you love people but hate travel uncertainty. Meeting strangers gives you energy, but not having activities planned sounds terrible to you. For you, the best vacation is a packaged and preorganized trip to a popular destination. You might consider a guided visit to Disney World or a walking tour of Jerusalem, but either way, you’ll prefer to go with a large group, on a trip carefully curated by a travel company.

3. The Surprise Avoider
Psychocentric and introverted, you are the opposite of the spontaneous socializer—you feel your energy dissipating when you have to worry about what you’re going to do and the prospect of dealing with a lot of people, especially strangers. For you, the ideal vacation this year is the same as last year, and the year before: a beautiful, peaceful place you know well, with a few people you know best. You might want to rent a cabin by a lake for two weeks every year, and invite the same small group of friends or family members.

4. The Lone Wanderer
This kind of vacation personality might seem unlikely: You get energy from spontaneity and risk but are exhausted by strangers and crowds. But that isn’t so strange. In fact, my daughter has this sort of allocentric, introverted personality. For her 18th birthday, she wanted to try skydiving, alone except for me. (We had a great time.) Besides jumping out of a plane with your dad, another idea for this type of vacation could be to drive Route 66 solo on a motorcycle, with no itinerary and only a credit card, a sleeping bag, and a few good books.

The narrow objective of this column is to help you design a better vacation than perhaps the ones you have had in the past. In a larger sense, though, it’s about designing a better life. What you enjoy and what stresses you out on vacation are much the same as what you like and dislike the rest of the year. You are not a Lone Wanderer or a Gregarious Planner for just two weeks a year.

Recently, an Uber driver was telling me how much he hated his old 9-to-5 office job, in which he’d never met new people and did the same thing day after day. Driving for a living, he never knows what he’ll see and whom he’ll meet. Even though driving pays less well, he told me, he is much happier. “You are a Spontaneous Socializer,” I told him, “but you were stuck in a Surprise Avoider job.” After hearing what these terms meant, he said he wished someone had told him that much earlier in life.

[Read: Why must we work so hard before vacation?]

Ask yourself whether the life you have built (or the one that has been built for you) makes you feel stressed or, alternately, leaves you feeling understimulated. If you are an introvert, doing remote work from a cabin off the grid in Montana might be right for you; if you are an extrovert, no amount of convenience will make that sort of isolation worthwhile. If you are psychocentric, you might need to add more structure and schedule to your job and home life, but if you’re allocentric, you should look for a professional life that is unpredictable and different every day.

By trying to match your circumstances to your character, you might just find yourself on vacation all year round.

Vivek Ramaswamy, the 38-year-old entrepreneur running for the Republican presidential nomination, has initiated a war against what he views as an outdated, establishment foreign policy. He is deeply skeptical of NATO. He wants to swiftly end the war in Ukraine, detach Russia from China, and compel Taiwan to defend itself without America. He also proposed reducing American financial aid to Israel, a stance long considered politically impossible on the right, before saying he would do so only with Israel’s approval. This week, Ramaswamy attempted to justify such stands with an essay in The American Conservative called “A Viable Realism and Revival Doctrine.”

Invoking Presidents George Washington, James Monroe, and Richard Nixon—whom Ramaswamy has called “the most underappreciated president of our modern history in this country, probably in all of American history”—the article appears to be an effort to lend coherence and gravitas to Ramaswamy’s worldview. It also seems to be an attempt to counter the attack by former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley that he has “no foreign policy experience, and it shows.” In the article, Ramaswamy promises to restore American national pride and identity after decades of feckless liberal internationalist and neoconservative policies. “We will be Uncle Sucker no more,” he writes.

[David A. Graham: Ramaswamy and the rest]

It would be foolish to underestimate Ramaswamy, who has vaulted past many of his detractors to become a breakout star in the GOP primary. And at a moment when Republican support for the war in Ukraine is plummeting, his call for retrenchment, much like Donald Trump’s denunciation of the Iraq War in 2016, is perfectly pitched to appeal to the party’s nationalist wing. But just how realistic and viable is his vision?

The truth is that Ramaswamy is slapping the realist brand onto a hodgepodge of policy proposals that are divorced from reality. Realism is about a number of things—the balance of power, national interests, spheres of influence—but one thing it is not about is wishful thinking. Yet that is what Ramaswamy is peddling. His vision is no less dogmatic than the neoconservatism he professes to despise, substituting the belief that America should intervene everywhere with the conviction that it shouldn’t intervene anywhere. And his proposals almost seem calculated to injure, not promote, American interests.

Like more than a few Republicans these days, Ramaswamy is obsessed with China, which he depicts as the locus of evil in the world, and cavalier about Russia, which stands accused of perpetrating war crimes in the heart of Europe. He does not explain how China’s current troubles—a faltering economy, an aging population, grave environmental problems—can be reconciled with his portrait of a totalitarian power about to turn a new generation of Americans, as he averred in a speech at the Nixon library, into “a bunch of Chinese serfs.”

[Read: Vivek Ramaswamy’s truth]

Ramaswamy’s demagoguery about China is reminiscent of the apprehensions voiced by American conservatives after World War II, when the GOP contained an “Asia First” wing, led by Senator Robert A. Taft and others who disparaged American aid to Europe and claimed, improbably, that American military supplies to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek would allow him to easily topple the communist dictatorship on the mainland. Ramaswamy seems to want to avert a conflict with Beijing, but his truculent calls for confronting China would render a fresh world war more, not less, probable.

In his American Conservative essay, Ramaswamy lauds Nixon as the president whose foreign policy he most admires. “He got us out of Vietnam,” Ramaswamy writes. Not exactly. As president, Nixon embarked upon the policy of “Vietnamization” to reduce American troops, but he needlessly expanded the war with a secret bombing campaign against Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge, led by the genocidal Pol Pot, ended up coming to power in 1975. No less addled is Ramaswamy’s grasp of the history of Nixon’s opening to China. He announces that, as president, he would carry out a new version of what Nixon accomplished in 1972 by traveling to China—visiting Moscow in 2025 to create peace with Russia and then “elevate [it] as a strategic check on China’s designs in East Asia.” But Nixon never sought to isolate the Soviet Union; he sought to create a stable equilibrium among the three countries, pursuing what he and Henry Kissinger called “triangular diplomacy.” In addition, Nixon and Kissinger hoped that a web of economic ties between America and the Soviet Union would constrain its propensity to expand abroad—the very approach that Ramaswamy now condemns when it comes to long-standing American policy toward China.

Declaring that “Putin is the new Mao,” Ramaswamy claims that he will be able to woo the Russian leader away from China. He proposes to bow to Russian suzerainty over the territories it controls in eastern Ukraine and oppose Ukrainian membership in NATO “in exchange for Russia exiting its military alliance with China.” But as others have noted, those two countries do not have a military alliance. In any case, Putin has repeatedly displayed no interest in serious peace negotiations over Ukraine, a country that he remains wholly intent on reducing to the status of an imperial Russian colony.

[David Frum: The next U.S. president will need to defeat isolationism]

Like Trump before him, Ramaswamy tries to disguise his apparent animus toward democratic countries by scorning what he maintains is Western Europe’s piddling military spending. But Central and Western Europe’s military outlays reached $345 billion last year, almost 30 percent higher than they were a decade ago. The obstacle to real reform, we are told, is an ossified NATO bureaucracy that is pushing liberal internationalist missions whenever and wherever it can. Ramaswamy claims that he would transform NATO into a “strictly defensive military alliance”—as though it were an imperialist power marauding around the world looking for wars to wage.

Ramaswamy’s candidacy has exposed real rifts within the GOP over foreign policy. The Wall Street Journal denounced him for seeking to sell out Ukraine, and National Review asked whether “he’s auditioning for a geopolitical game show instead of the presidency of the United States.” To some extent, his comments can be dismissed as bluster. But he and his fellow self-proclaimed realists—a cluster of activists and thinkers at places such as The American Conservative, the Claremont Institute, and the Heritage Foundation—are responding to a genuine, if dismaying, phenomenon in the American electorate. No one is trying to exploit it more audaciously than Ramaswamy, who continues to offer chimerical promises about restoring America’s national identity. We now know better than to disregard such salesmen.

South American nation is grappling with surge in violence as voters prepare for October presidential run-off.

In the year 2000, having narrowly escaped the Y2K computer glitch, Americans should have been poised to party. The bendy riff of the Santana–Rob Thomas joint “Smooth” wailed from Top 40 stations everywhere. Survivor beckoned us to watch people eat grubs for a chance at $1 million. Brad and Jen got married, and the gladiator Maximus Decimus Meridius asked acerbically, “Are you not entertained?”

But we weren’t. In fact, after chugging along steadily for decades, American happiness began to decline that year, modestly but definitively. A chart of American happiness ratings looks like this: a flat, basically happy line that starts in the 1970s, followed by a plunge into meh right around the new millennium.

The chart comes from a recent paper by Sam Peltzman, an emeritus economics professor at the University of Chicago. For the study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, Peltzman looked at the General Social Survey, which since 1972 has asked thousands of Americans, “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days—would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” If you imagine this large sample as 100 people, historically about 50 of those people say they’re “pretty happy,” and that’s still true. But in the 1970s, about 35 people would say they’re “very happy,” and 15 would say “not too happy.” That began to shift around 2000, and now about 32 people say they’re “very happy” and 18 say they’re “not too happy.”

To quote a Destiny’s Child song of that vintage, why the sudden change?

After slicing the demographic data every which way—income, education level, race, location, age, and gender—Peltzman found that this happiness dip is mainly attributable to one thing: Married people are happier, and Americans aren’t getting married as much. In 1980, 6 percent of 40-year-olds had never been married, but today, it’s 25 percent. “The recent decline in the married share of adults can explain (statistically) most of the recent decline in overall happiness,” he writes.

[Read: A happiness columnist’s three biggest happiness rules]

Married people are much happier than the unmarried, according to these data. Looking at those same 100 people, 40 married people will say they’re happy, and 10 will say they’re not happy. But single people are about evenly split between happy and not happy. It doesn’t really matter if you are divorced, are widowed, or have never married: If you’re not married, you’re less likely to be happy. “The only happy people for 50 years have been married people,” Peltzman told me.

One paper alone might be easy enough to dismiss, but this is a fairly consistent finding dating back decades in social-science research: Married people are happier. Period.

To be honest, this puzzles me, because after 13 years of cohabitation, I’m currently trying to get married, and it’s not making me very happy at all. I say “trying” because this event, which should be entirely within my partner’s and my control, instead relies on a sprawling, expensive bureaucracy that doesn’t always reply to my emails.

Marriage, in theory, doesn’t have to cost much; a license usually runs less than $100. In practice, though, the costs can be considerable. The average wedding now costs $30,000, according to a survey from The Knot. Prenups are becoming more popular; a Harris poll recently reported that 15 percent of Americans have signed one. And that leaves aside the psychic toll of checking in with, following up on, and coordinating all the marriage-adjacent entities that inevitably get sucked into the process.

Getting married, especially at an advanced age, is difficult and expensive even if, like my boyfriend and me, you’re not planning an actual wedding. As of this writing, we’re waiting on my prenup lawyer to get back to me, so that I can wade through a bunch of paragraphs that start with “Notwithstanding the forgoing” and identify any changes I’d like to make, so that my boyfriend’s prenup lawyer can then reconcile those changes and we can get the thing notarized. This will cost us at least $1,200 each, on top of the $600 we already spent drafting the prenup. (I didn’t think I needed a prenup, either, until I had a physical therapist who alternately kneaded my spine and regaled me with the story of her traumatic divorce that almost bankrupted her.) I’m not sure which is more magical: this, or picking out a health-insurance plan.

Even beyond the preparation stages, marriage has a reputation for sapping joy and freedom. Bachelorette parties are proclaimed to be the “last fling before the ring,” as though in matrimony you won’t be flinging much but emergency paper towels across the kitchen. The single life is freewheeling, fun, and fabulous; marriage is “settling down”—down to earth, to baseline, to not-too-happiness. How could something so boring and restrictive make people so happy?

[Read: Fewer sex partners means a happier marriage]

Peltzman didn’t explore why married people are happier, but other researchers have, and they fall into two competing camps. Camp No. 1, that of cynical libertines like me, believes that marriage doesn’t make you happy; rather, happy people get married. One 15-year study of more than 24,000 Germans, for instance, found that those who got married and stayed married were happier than the unmarried ones to begin with, and any happiness boost they got from the marriage was short-lived. “Most of the research indicates that the happiest couples marry, not that marriage causes happiness,” Brienna Perelli-Harris, a demography professor at the University of Southampton, in the United Kingdom, told me over email. According to this theory, Americans stopped being as happy, and they stopped getting married, and either the two trends don’t have much to do with each other, or glum people aren’t in the mood for wedding planning.

The first camp’s argument makes sense if you think about the kind of person who gets married: This person has a sufficiently winning personality to run the gantlet of online dating. They are desirable enough to get their Hinge match to propose to them. They are optimistic enough to promise to love their Hinge match forever, forsaking all other Hinge matches. This person is, in other words, already pretty happy.

When people aren’t happy in marriage, they tend to divorce, which plunks them into the unhappy single pool and makes the married pool look happier by comparison. “We have very high expectations of marriage. So that tends to mean that people don’t get married unless they have a strong, close, and supportive relationship,” says Stephanie Coontz, the director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families. “You’re not going to get married and then find that you are much more happy.” As the classic Adam Sandler sketch goes, you’re still going to be you on vacation. You’re still going to be you when you’re married. If you’re sad now, marriage probably won’t change that.

In Camp No. 2 are the romantics, who believe that getting married makes you happy, because there’s something special about marriage. In a research brief for the conservative Institute for Family Studies, the research fellow Lyman Stone crunched the GSS data again and found that getting married does boost happiness, for at least two years after the wedding, and it does so even when you control for the person’s previous level of happiness.

The logic of this camp goes as follows: Close, supportive, long-term relationships make you happy. Finding those types of relationships through friendships is possible, but it’s hard. People move away; they get busy. Most friends don’t buy houses or raise children jointly—the kinds of activities that glue people together and force them to cooperate. Marriage, says Andrew Cherlin, an emeritus sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University, is “the usual way to find a durable, caring relationship that undoubtedly makes you happier than you would be if you didn’t have it.”

Perhaps the strongest evidence for this camp’s thinking comes from a 2017 study of thousands of British people that found that those who got married were more satisfied with their life than those who didn’t, even when you control for how satisfied they were before they got married. It also found that the married Brits were more satisfied years later (meaning the happiness boost wasn’t fleeting), and that marriage inoculated the couples somewhat from the midlife dip in happiness that most people experience. The people who felt the biggest happiness boost from marriage, that study found, were those who said their spouse was their “best friend.” Those people got almost twice as much satisfaction from marriage as other people did.

[From the December 2014 issue: The real roots of midlife crisis]

A spouse, then, is like a super-friend. Ideally, they’re “committed to spend their entire life helping you in everything that matters to you,” Stone says. A good spouse will buffer you from the stress of your job, your kids, your family of origin. They’ll give you emotional, and sometimes financial, support, allowing you to “feel and think with double strength,” as George Eliot put it. Because you live in the same house, your spouse is always there. (Boy, are they always there!) It can be exasperating—until the day comes when you really need a friend.

The question remains, though: Why get married? As a cohabitant, I feel I reap all the benefits of marriage without spending even a minute crying over caterers. In countries where unmarried cohabitation is widespread, relatively accepted, and stable, the arrangement can have similar benefits as marriage. One study of Germans, for instance, found that cohabitation leads to a happiness boost about two-thirds as big as that of marriage. (The study doesn’t explain the slight gap between married people and cohabitants, but it could be that some cohabitants aren’t quite happy enough with their partner to pull the trigger on marriage.) In these cultures, cohabiting partners act like pseudo-spouses, and they support each other in much the same way. “It’s the sharing of the stuff,” says John Helliwell, an emeritus economics professor at the University of British Columbia and a co-author of the 2017 British study. “And the legal thing is probably the least important part of it.”

But in the United States, people don’t tend to cohabit for years and years (present company excluded). They just get married. “I’ve been waiting for Americans to have long-term cohabiting relationships like the Europeans do for decades now, and it hasn’t happened yet,” Cherlin says. Happy cohabiting couples don’t show up in the data because there just aren’t that many of us.

For me, getting married is more optical than emotional. I’m tired of being a woman pushing 40 who has a “boyfriend.” People keep asking me if I’m against marriage, and I have to sheepishly reply that it’s more that I’m against spending thousands of dollars on a piece of paper. But my partner has been by my side for 13 years. He’s the first person I call with good or bad news. He doesn’t like to be mean, but he will hate on my enemies with me when he can tell that I really want him to. I have a lot going on in life, and I want to plant a firm stake in shifting soil. He’s already my super-friend; now I just want to make it official.

Popular sentiment has a role in the political life of all nations, but the Jewish state, born after two millennia of persecution and yearning, offers a particularly strong case study in how emotion can affect politics—underlying everything from ideology to the drawing of lines on a map. The last six months alone has seen a surge of strong sentiment, ironically, over the question of who gets to decide whether a particular law is “reasonable.” The streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem have filled with passionate protestors, their faces distorted by crying or yelling, waving giant flags as water cannons force them off their feet. And the debate has been colored as much by argument as by resentment, anxiety, pride, and a plethora of other potent feelings.

Two new books, Eva Illouz’s The Emotional Life of Populism and Derek Penslar’s Zionism: An Emotional State, zero in on those emotions, like love and fear, which are so seldom acknowledged for what they are but play an outsize role in shaping politics.

Though written from different angles—Illouz is a prominent sociologist, and Penslar is a distinguished historian—both echo the brilliant Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, that “emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself.”

Historians have always acknowledged the impact of emotions on the body politic. In his history of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides emphasized how fear led the Spartans to declare war on Athens, how fear deafened Athenians to the reason of Pericles, and how fear made them vulnerable to the demagoguery of Cleon. But Thucydides also emphasized the role of love, noting that Pericles failed to persuade his fellow citizens to love Athens and lamenting that Alcibiades, Pericles’s unworthy successor, seduced the Athenians with his proposal to invade Sicily—generating a bolt of eros that, after galvanizing the city, led to its eventual downfall.

More than two millennia later, fear and love are still tearing us apart and bringing us together. Both Illouz and Penslar consider these and other emotions. On the dark side, there are the usual suspects: resentment, disgust, and (in Penslar’s case) hatred; on the light side, Illouz focuses on pride as well as love, while Penslar takes up gratitude.

Consider fear. Illouz paraphrases a famous remark by Thomas Hobbes in writing that when Israel was born, fear was born as its twin. She neglects to add that Hobbes insisted that the news of the Spanish Armada invasion in 1588 caused his mother to give premature birth to him. As for Israel, the fear that accompanied the country's founding stemmed not just from the news that the Arab armies were invading in response to its announcement of independence but also from the “quasi-metaphysical belief,” as Illouz puts it—stoked by centuries of anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic experiences that climaxed in the Holocaust—that the world, quite simply, demanded the annihilation of the Jews.

This sense of constant threat is an active force in the country, where fear is permanently installed over the political landscape, giving rise to what Illouz calls a “securitist democracy” whose politics are shaped by existential imperatives. Of course, she does not dismiss the serious and several threats that confront Israel. (Among the people she interviewed were three women who belong to a kibbutz in the northwestern Negev, where “constant fear” dictates their daily schedules and sentiments.) But Illouz also emphasizes the crippling fears that inform the lives of Arabs living in Israel. As a lawyer in East Jerusalem observes, one “lives with the constant threat of incarceration, of stop and frisk … You are in constant fear of being in the wrong place.”

[Read: After 30 years in Israel, I see my country differently]

In the realm of fear, the demagogue is king. The fear spurred by a clear and present danger can have a positive consequence, forging a sense of unity and community where none had before existed. Much more often, however, fear is exploited by political leaders for partisan goals inimical to the nation’s well-being. Illouz describes the dependence of Benjamin Netanyahu’s long political career—he has served as Israel’s prime minister longer than Franklin Roosevelt did as America’s president—on his relentless and skillful manipulation of fear. Illouz even goes so far as to say that Netanyahu wrote the playbook to which Donald Trump’s political career is an appendix. Netanyahu’s rhetoric, she concludes, portrays a state of Israel divided between two camps: “one that would defend the survival of the state, another that would threaten it.”

Similarly, Penslar associates Netanyahu with what the author calls “Catastrophic Zionism,” which combines and capitalizes on the “fear for the survival of Jews outside Israel and those in the state of Israel itself.” Like Illouz, Penslar emphasizes that Netanyahu fueled this fear on the eve of the 2015 elections, when his campaign deliberately blurred the line between Palestinians living in the occupied territories and those who were Israeli citizens, sending a text message warning supporters that “Arab voters [are] moving in droves to the polling stations.” It was a winning strategy for Netanyahu, as it was for other populists one year later. In 2016, as British voters prepared to vote on the Brexit referendum, posters appeared picturing droves of nonwhite migrants under the bold red warning Breaking Point, while American voters, poised to vote in the 2016 presidential election, listened to the Republican candidate Donald Trump warning against droves of drug dealers and rapists massing at the southern border.

We tend to hate the things we fear. With great care and clarity, Penslar traces not just the long  history of hatred aimed at Jews by anti-Semites and many anti-Zionists. He also tracks the hatred that most Zionists directed at the British during the mandate governing Palestine from 1918 to 1948—a hatred that shifted to Palestinians after independence. His summary of Israel’s denial of its citizens’ own anti-Palestinian hatred and its baleful consequences is especially powerful. Though many Israelis, Penslar writes, “bore the knowledge of what they had done during the 1948 war, the instruments of official memory … presented a sanitized version, denying not only the violence wrought by Jews against Palestinians but also the presence of hatred and rage behind it.”

We also hate those things which disgust us. In another of her books, From Disgust to Humanity, Nussbaum measures this emotion’s noxious effects on societies. Whereas anger, which can lead to urgent political or social reforms, has its uses, disgust is worse than useless. As Nussbaum argues, it leads at best to “escape and disengagement” and at worst to racism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny. Illouz, who cites this book of Nussbaum’s, argues that disgust also fuels anti-Arab sentiment in Israel, a trend boosted by what she calls “disgust entrepreneurs” whose task is “to create, engineer, and reinforce disgust from some groups to others.”

One trailblazing entrepreneur was among America’s most toxic exports: Meir Kahane, the founder of Israel’s ultranationalist and racist Kach Party. His extremist views on citizenship, marriage, and education—all of which align with a politics of purity driven by fear of contamination—set the standard for admirers who now have prominent roles in Netnayahu’s government, including Itamar Ben-Gvir, the current national-security minister, who belonged to Kach’s youth movement, and Bezalel Smotrich, the current finance minister, who called for “wiping out” a West Bank town that was recently at the center of violent actions against settlers.

Ben-Gvir spoke at a commemoration for Kahane last year and reminded his audience, “Ultimately, Rabbi Kahane was about love.” That love can be as problematic as it is powerful was underscored by Ben-Gvir’s proviso that Kahane loved Israel “without compromise, without any other consideration.” In a superb account of the ties that bind Eros and Eretz Israel, Penslar reveals the pivotal role played by historians and novelists—not just Jewish writers such as Heinrich Graetz, whose sentimental historical narratives about Jews over the centuries won a wide following in Europe in the 19th century, but also Gentile writers such as George Eliot. The eponymous hero of the latter’s novel Daniel Deronda, a noble and sensitive youth who discovers his Jewish roots, in effect became Victorian England’s rejoinder to the self-interested, unscrupulous character of Fagan from Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist— Deronda was someone with whom Jewish and Gentile readers could fall in love.

Penslar pursues the impact of literary works on the evolution of American Jewry’s emotional ties to Israel well into the 20th century, including a long glance at Leon Uris’s Exodus. Published in 1958, the novel sold more than 20 million copies and galvanized American Jewish readers. As they became enamored with the characters Ari Ben Canaan and Kitty Fremont, they fell even more deeply in love with the idea of Israel—albeit an Israel where all Israelis were portrayed as brave and brilliant and all Arabs as untrustworthy and unworthy. (Penslar gives short shrift, though, to the film version. Was I the only American teenager who, when he left to work as a kibbutz volunteer, was humming Ernest Gold’s theme song?)

[Read: Israel has already lost]

Just as love can unite a people, a love that is built on excluding others can also divide. Illouz offers a sobering account not only of the deepening animosity between Israelis and Palestinians, but also of the persistent acrimony between Israel’s Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish communities. It is no secret that Netanyahu’s Likud party has won the support of Sephardic voters by exploiting their resentment over the discrimination they have experienced. As Illouz argues, Likud’s populist and nationalist rhetoric has seduced the Mizrahim—Jews of Afro-Asian descent—despite the fact that the leadership is almost exclusively Ashkenazi and their neoliberal policies penalize the very people who support them. As a result, she concludes, “nationalism has come to be a class marker, as it has become the identity of those who stand diametrically opposed to … the ‘cosmopolitan class.’”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Illouz and Penslar both conclude their books by investigating hopefulness as an emotion. Israel, after all, originated as a great vessel of hope for people across the world—nationalism as a kind of redemption for a long-suffering people. Illouz suggests that hope, in principle, can strengthen the bonds of fraternity not just among the nation's own members but with other countries as well, opening the way to dialogue, tolerance, and justice. Perhaps, but there is something forlorn in hoping that hope will carry the day. Given recent events in Israel (and the United States),  Penslar’s conclusion, tragically, carries greater weight. He reminds us that the Hebrew word for hope is tikvah, whose literal biblical meaning is “cord” or “rope”—“something to hold onto.” Many of us now find ourselves grasping this cord more tightly than ever before.

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Former President Donald Trump continues to smash through boundaries without losing support. Below, I explain why Trump’s chances of winning the 2024 Republican nomination now seem stronger than ever. But first, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The end will come for the cult of MAGA. The courtroom is a very unhappy place for Donald Trump. Rudy Giuliani’s attacks on democracy are attacks on people. Fall’s vaccine routine didn’t have to be this hard.

Wilder and Clearer

Consider the Kool-Aid Man. He is large, red-faced, perpetually stuck in the late ’80s, and, whenever he breaks through walls? Celebrated. Our 45th president, much like the Kool-Aid Man, has aligned his personal brand with gleeful destruction. And, at least among GOP leaders and his steadfast base of supporters, Trump’s product remains extremely popular.

Ever since his political rise eight summers ago, Trump’s opponents have been naively clinging to the hope that he might one day say or do something so awful as to alienate even his most ardent fans. This will never happen. The premise itself is flawed—Trump’s enduring appeal is derived from his ability to storm past perceived barriers. Were he to suddenly start walking through doors like the rest of us, he’d lose his bad-boy sheen.

Trump’s recent statements, namely on the idea of imprisoning his enemies if reelected and the specter of political violence, are prime examples of just how flawed this “reckoning” idea really is. At the moment, his rhetoric is as heightened as it’s ever been, and yet his dominance in the Republican presidential primary continues. He’s currently polling at an average of about 50 percent, with his closest competitor, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, at just under 15 percent. The rest of the field is fighting to break out of the single digits.

Trump’s 2024 challengers have failed to unite in opposition to him. During last week’s GOP debate, former Vice President Mike Pence and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie each took their best shot at condemning Trump in relation to January 6, yet neither appears to have even a remote chance of winning the nomination. Most of the others hemmed and hawed. The majority of the field raised their hands in the affirmative as to whether they would support Trump as the Republican nominee even if he were a convicted criminal. That night, the MSNBC host Chris Hayes characterized Trump as “a guy who’s running 40 points ahead, who tried to end the constitutional republic, and whose braying mobs chanted for the murder of one of the guys on stage.” Taken as a whole, the event had a disturbing patina of resignation and nihilism.

Trump, of course, didn’t even bother to show up and field questions from the Fox News moderators. Instead, he staged counterprogramming: a sitdown with the former Fox star Tucker Carlson on X (formerly Twitter). The pair’s conversation was ominous. Rather than wave off Carlson’s questions about the possibility of conflict on American soil, Trump was disconcertingly vague and threatening: “There’s a level of passion that I’ve never seen. There’s a level of hatred that I’ve never seen. And that’s probably a bad combination.”

Yesterday, the former Fox host Glenn Beck asked Trump whether he would “lock people up” if he becomes president again. Trump replied that he would have “no choice because they’re doing it to us,” referring to his own criminal indictments.

Even Trump’s mug shot, which the art critic Jerry Saltz deemed “the most famous photograph in the world,” carried a palpable rhetorical message. As my colleague Megan Garber observed, Trump’s scowl symbolizes his power. “He treats his mug shot as our menace.”

It keeps working. All of it. As we approach September, some four months ahead of the Iowa caucuses, it’s looking less and less likely that anything could slow Trump’s march to the nomination. Rather than being humbled by a jailhouse booking, Trump transformed even that event into a product he could monetize. (A “Never Surrender!” mug-shot T-shirt will set you back $34; a mug-shot coffee mug is a comparative steal at $25.) Citing self-reported campaign data for the past three weeks, the former president’s team sent an email blast yesterday with the subject line “ICYMI: Trump fundraising spikes after Fulton County mugshot, surpassing $20M in August.” (These emails barge in multiple times a day, not unlike the aforementioned Kool-Aid Man.)

Trump’s messaging is simultaneously wilder and clearer than ever. He portrays himself as a martyr and a victim, and, according to the arc of his hero’s journey, he believes that he will return home to the White House as a victor. Trump has shrewdly ascertained that, even eight years later, America can’t look away from the epic saga that is his life. Or, as another recent campaign-email subject line read: “Another disgrace I have to tell you about.”

Related:

The mug shot is a warning. The courtroom is a very unhappy place for Donald Trump.

Today’s News

Hurricane Idalia made landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast as a Category 3 storm and is traveling across Florida and into Georgia and other parts of the Southeast. A federal judge ruled that Rudy Giuliani was liable for defaming two Georgia election workers after he claimed that they had mishandled ballots during the 2020 election. Narcan, the opioid-overdose antidote, will for the first time be widely available over the counter and online next week at major retailers, including Walgreens and CVS.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Readers respond to Conor Friedersdorf’s question: What would you ask the Republican presidential candidates? The Weekly Planet: Kylie Mohr asks: What happens when the heat repeats?

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Sources: David Lees / Getty; Grzegorz Czapski / Alamy; The J. Paul Getty Museum

In Praise of Heroic Masculinity

By Caitlin Flanagan

The phrase toxic masculinity was coined in the 1980s by a psychologist named Shepherd Bliss. He was a central figure in what he named the “mythopoetic” manhood movement. Bliss had grown up in a punishing military household with a domineering father, and he meant the new term to connote “behavior that diminishes women, children, other men,” a way “to describe that part of the male psyche that is abusive.”

It was a potent phrase, one that expressed something that had never had a name—that there is a particular poison that runs in the blood of some men and poses a deep threat to women, children, and the weak. The phrase didn’t break into the common culture until relatively recently, when the crimes of Harvey Weinstein and his ilk needed to be understood with some kind of shared language. They were men, but they were the kind of men who are filled with poison.

As it is with most new terms that roar quickly and powerfully into the culture, toxic masculinity was a rocket ship to the moon that quickly ran out of fuel and fell back to Earth.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Violence is the engine of Modi’s politics. The trouble with Trump’s tariffs The Simone Biles revolution

Culture Break

Illustration by Molly Fairhurst for The Atlantic

Read. Alicia Kennedy’s first book, No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating, lays out the benefits of a meatless diet—without scolding those who find the idea hard to swallow.

Watch. The third and final season of Reservation Dogs (streaming on Hulu) fleshes out its ensemble with backstories that illustrate the lasting effects of grief.

Play our daily crossword.

Nicole Blackwood contributed to this newsletter.

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