The Fourteenth Amendment won’t save us from Donald Trump.

Eminent jurists are promising that it will. They argue that language in the Fourteenth Amendment, adopted after the Civil War, should debar the coup-plotting ex-president from appearing on a ballot for any office ever again. Their learning is undisputed. Their judgment is another story. The project to disqualify Trump from running for president is misguided and dangerous. It won’t work. If it somehow could work, it would create problems worse even than Americans already face. In an ideal world, Trump’s fellow Republicans would handle this matter by repudiating his crimes and rejecting his candidacy for their presidential nomination. Failing that—and it certainly seems as if that hope is failing—opponents of Trump must dig deep and beat him at the polls one more time. There is no cheat code to win this game.

To understand what the legal experts are talking about, you need to imagine yourself back in the world of 1866, when the amendment was drafted. (It was ratified in July 1868.)

The North had won the Civil War, but its victory was put in jeopardy by the lax policy of President Andrew Johnson. The successor to the assassinated Abraham Lincoln had been pardoning former secessionists. He had been looking the other way as southern white elites terrorized freed slaves away from voting. As things were going, ex-Confederates were poised to regain power not only at the local level, but also inside the U.S. House and Senate. Union-loyal Republicans faced a terrifying prospect: After so much blood had been spilled, the defeated South might reclaim at the ballot box the political sway it had wielded before the Civil War.

[Read: Trump’s threat to democracy is now systemic]

Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment was written to prevent that outcome. Anybody who had held federal or state office before 1861, and who had then supported the Confederacy in any way, would be debarred from holding office of any kind, federal or state, civil or military. The power to restore political rights would be removed from the president and awarded to Congress. Congress would have to approve the restoration by a two-thirds vote in each chamber.

Soon enough, the problem addressed by Section 3 receded. Johnson left the presidency after a single term, replaced by Ulysses S. Grant. Republicans won a crushing victory in the House elections of 1866 and consolidated their hold on the Senate. By then, the population of the Union-loyal states was growing so rapidly that Republicans could form national majorities even if they lost every state in the South. The prewar world was not coming back. In 1872, a Republican Congress enacted a general amnesty of former Confederates, restoring the political rights of almost everyone disqualified in 1866. As the Civil War passed into history, Section 3 faded into obscurity.

Now some propose to reactivate it to use against Trump. Here’s where we wander into a minefield of problems.

[Adam Serwer: They are still with him]

The least of these problems is the legal one: whether Trump’s scheme to seize the presidency by fraud, then violence, amounts to a “rebellion” or an “insurrection” under the amendment. There will be a lot of disagreement on that point, enough to generate litigation. But let’s suppose that the excluders win in court or that the courts abdicate altogether, kicking the dispute back to the elected branches of government as a “political matter.”

In that case, the use of the section to debar candidates would not stop at Trump. It would become a dangerously convenient tool of partisan politics.

Let’s reconsider the text:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Because Section 3’s meaning seemed so obvious in 1866, a lot of the hard questions about its interpretation and application were shrugged off. I’ll nominate just two examples.

First, the section does not apply only to candidates for president—it does not even mention the president. It mentions senators, House members, electors, and civil and military officers of the United States or any state. The section appears to apply to the presidency only as part of that final catchall category.

Second, that phrase “aid and comfort to the enemies thereof”—what does that mean? The language is copied from Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution. But there, the language was drafted to make it difficult to convict an accused person of crime: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.”

[David H. Gans: The Fourteenth Amendment was meant to be a protection against state violence]

Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment strips away all of the 1787 restrictions: the overt act, the two witnesses, the requirement of public confession. The question of what constitutes “aid and comfort” is left to the judgment of … wait—Section 3 gives no clue about how it should be enforced or by whom. Again, that’s understandable. In 1866, none of this looked complicated. But in a modern context, that enforcement question of a reactivated Section 3 will be nasty.

Consider the scenario in which Section 3 is invoked against Trump in 2024. Although he has won the Republican nomination, Democratic secretaries of state in key states refuse to place his name on their ballots, as a person who engaged in insurrection against the United States. With Trump’s name deleted from some swing-state ballots, President Joe Biden is easily reelected.

But only kind of reelected. How in the world are Republicans likely to react to such an outcome? Will any of them regard such a victory as legitimate? The rage and chaos that would follow are beyond imagining.

And then what? If Section 3 can be reactivated in this way, then reactivated it will be. Republicans will hunt for Democrats to disqualify, and not only for president, but for any race where Democrats present someone who said or did something that can be represented as “aid and comfort” to enemies of the United States. Didn’t progressive Representative Ilhan Omar once seemingly equate al-Qaeda with the U.S. military? Do we think that her political enemies will accept that she was making only a stupid rhetorical point? Earlier this year, Tennessee Republicans tossed out of the legislature two Black Democrats for allegedly violating House rules. Might Tennessee Republicans next deem unruly Democrats “rebels” forbidden ever to run for office again?

[Anne Applebaum: Is Tennessee a democracy?]

Where are the federal courts in all this? Do they actually stand aside as local officials exercise veto power over who’s a loyal enough American to be listed on the ballot for county commissioner? Do they really let the “elected branches” decide? And what would that mean in practice? The section transfers an otherwise presidential prerogative, the pardon power, to Congress. If the courts step back, does that not imply that the House and Senate must somehow find a way to wield the power of the section together?

That seems unlikely. But the alternative of judicial decision is fraught with institutional risks too. Imagine a serious effort to block Trump from appearing on ballots in 2024, and then suppose he challenges that block in court—and ultimately wins a ruling in his favor from the Supreme Court, by a margin of 5–4 or even 6–3. Now the rage and chaos would be reversed. A pro-Trump Thomas-Alito-Gorsuch-Barrett-Kavanaugh majority might obliterate whatever deference the Court still commands among Democrats and liberals. Although much is wrong with the present Court, this country will not be in a better or happier place if it loses its last, imperfect arbiter.

The cleanest exit from the Trump predicament depends upon Republican primary voters. They might spare the country the ordeal of renominating an insurrectionist president. Unfortunately, those voters do not seem in a cooperative mood. Trump’s multiple criminal indictments may send him to prison, but they will not exclude him from the ballot. It’s a long-established precedent that an American can run for office while under indictment, or even from prison. If GOP primary voters put Trump on the 2024 presidential ballot, the American majority is going to have to beat him at the polls.

The good news is that a consistent majority of the U.S. electorate has been anti-Trump every day since he declared for president in June 2015. The bad news is that the anti-Trump majority is a narrow one, and disfavored by the Electoral College.

Stopping Trump by electoral means will be a tough and arduous fight. The fancied alternatives are dreams and delusions. Legal process can prosecute and punish crimes. It cannot save a nation from itself. That duty falls instead on each of us.

This summer’s wish for a constitutional anti-Trump magic wand is an unfeasible, unhelpful fantasy. Let it go.

The spotless giraffe was born at a zoo in Tennessee and could be the only one of her kind on Earth.

The shame of it! Mississippi has found itself in the humiliating position of being compared disobligingly with the United Kingdom. Just last week, the Financial Times ran a column asking, “Is Britain Really as Poor as Mississippi?”  

Most Mississippians do not spend much time worrying about comparisons with Britain. The same cannot be said about those on the other side of the Atlantic. For Brits—and I am one, though now based in Jackson, Mississippi—the issue of whether they are more or less prosperous than Mississippi has become a thing. Indeed, the Financial Times now calls it “the Mississippi Question.”

It was nine years ago when Fraser Nelson, the editor of The Spectator, first suggested that the U.K. was poorer than any U.S. state but Mississippi. This came as an uncomfortable shock for many in Britain for whom Mississippi, as a byword for backwardness, conjures up clichés about the Deep South. Every time anyone has made the comparison since, there has been an indignant outburst from Britons keen to denounce the data.

In practice, when trying to provide a definitive answer to the Mississippi Question, no uniform, up-to-date set of data exists. But if you take the most recent U.S. figure for Mississippi’s GDP and divide it by the state’s population, you get a pretty accurate figure for GDP per capita in current dollar values. Make the same calculation for the U.K., with total GDP data divided by the population, and you end up with two comparable numbers.

[Read: Punching above their weight in Mississippi]

Last year, by my math, the U.K.’s output per person was the equivalent of $45,485; Mississippi’s was higher, at $47,190. If Britain were invited to join the U.S. as the 51st state, its citizens would be at the bottom of the table for per capita GDP. Some might say that, for Mississippi, that is still disconcertingly close.

“That’s not fair!” the critics would counter. “When you compare the wealth of nations, you need to look at how far the money goes. Things cost more in the U.K. than in Mississippi.” To adjust the raw numbers, the argument runs, you need to use an economist’s tool called “purchasing power parity.” Sure enough, when you consider differences in the price of things in Britain and in America, the U.K. does appear richer than Mississippi. Thus, after such PPP adjustments, a Financial Times analyst suggested that for 2021, Mississippi’s per capita GDP was a mere $46,841 to the U.K.’s $54,590 (though conceding that, without the global city-state effect of London’s economy, much of Britain was relatively poorer than the Magnolia State).

“Hold on!” we on Team Mississippi retort. “Why adjust the numbers for our state using U.S. national data?” Here, a dollar goes a lot further than it would in New England or on the West Coast. To produce PPP-adjusted numbers for Mississippi that reflect the buying power of a dollar in places like New York or San Francisco, we say, is absurd. And sure enough, tinkering with the numbers to reflect purchasing power in Mississippi itself puts doubt on the U.K. coming out ahead.

Perhaps more interesting, however, than the way you cut the numbers for any given year is the fact that the gap between Mississippi and Britain seems to be growing. Never mind PPP—just run the numbers for GDP per capita in current dollars for the first part of 2023, rather than 2022, and you can see that Mississippi’s output is rising at a faster rate than Britain’s.

[See: Mississippi—images of the Magnolia State]

Over the past 30 years, several southern U.S. states have seen rapid economic growth. Texas and Nashville, for example, have become economic hubs to rival California or Chicago. North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and even Alabama have all flourished. Mississippi was missing out. Until now.

Historically, business in Mississippi was highly regulated. Licenses used to be mandatory in order to practice many of even the most routine professions. The state has now lifted a lot of these restrictions, deregulating the labor market. According to a recent report by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group representing conservative state legislators, the size of Mississippi’s public payroll has been pared back. In 2013, there were 645 public employees out of every 10,000 people in the population; today, the number is down to 607. Last year, Mississippi also passed the largest tax cut in recent history, reducing the income-tax rate to a flat 4 percent.

How did this come about? Policy makers here have drawn inspiration from the State Policy Network, a constellation of state-level think tanks, borrowing ideas that have worked well elsewhere. We got the idea for labor-market deregulation from Arizona and Missouri. Tennessee inspired us to move toward income-tax elimination. Florida’s successful liberalization stands as an example of how we could reduce more red tape.

What was once just a trickle of inward investment has turned into a steady flow. Growth is up, visibly: The areas of prosperity along the coast and around the state’s thriving university towns are getting larger, even if pockets of deprivation in the Delta remain.

Perhaps many in Britain find it hard to accept that Mississippi has overtaken them economically, because they still think of Mississippi as cotton fields and impoverished backwoods, peopled by folk who subsist on God, guns, and grits. But what if Britons’ reluctance to face changing economic realities comes from an outdated perception of themselves?

Most of my fellow Brits like to think that they live in a prosperous free-market society. They have not fully grasped the way in which their country has been sleepwalking toward regulatory regimentation. Stringent new regulations on landlords have seen thousands of owners pull out of the market, resulting in a dire shortage of rental accommodations. New corporate-diversity requirements have imposed additional costs across the financial-services sector, with little evidence that bank customers are getting a better deal.

[Matthew Goodwin: Britons’ growing buyer’s remorse for Brexit]

Individually, none of these restrictions matters all that much. But together, this relentless micromanagement inhibits innovation and growth. And Brits have become so accustomed to government red tape that they no longer seem to see the crimson blizzard that blankets so many aspects of their economic, and even social, lives.

To be fair to them, for many years it did not seem to matter that taxes rose and the regulatory burden grew heavier. Thanks to the use of monetary stimuli in place of supply-side reform since the late 1990s, the country’s economy seemed to defy gravity, engineering the sort of growth that high taxes and tight regulation might otherwise preclude. Few in the U.K. seemed to notice as ever more aggressive doses of monetary stimuli were required to stave off a downturn. Only now that the option of further stimuli has been exhausted are the cumulative consequences of 30 years of folly becoming apparent.

To recognize that one’s country has been run on a false premise for three decades is difficult. To have to acknowledge that Britain is now poorer than the poorest state in the Union could prompt a moment of self-reckoning that many Brits seem determined to postpone.

Britain’s recurrent fixation with the Mississippi Question tells us as much about the country’s state of mind as it does about GDP. Rather than confront uncomfortable truths, my countrymen dispute the data. Instead of facing up to the consequences of bad public policy in Britain, many blame Brexit, or Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine might have caused higher energy prices, but it alone does little to explain Britain’s poor economic performance. As for Brexit, though commentators who originally opposed it love to blame the country’s woes on it now, they never seem to ask why, if leaving the European Union was the cause of Britain’s lack of growth, the country has still managed to outperform much of Europe.

Since Britain voted to leave the EU in 2016, the U.K. economy has grown by 5.9 percent; German GDP has increased by only 5 percent. Unlike Germany, the U.K. has so far also managed to avoid recession. Far from a reduction in trade, Britain has seen a boom in exports, especially in the service sector, since withdrawing from the EU trade block. Service exports grew by nearly 23 percent in real terms from 2018 to 2022—the strongest growth in this sector among the G7 countries, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and far more than in neighbors such as Italy, Germany, and France.

[Derek Thompson: How the U.K. became one of the poorest countries in Western Europe]

In any case, Nelson posed the Mississippi Question nearly two years before Britain voted to leave the EU. The country’s lackluster output, productivity, and growth were apparent well before Brexit. Leaving the EU should have been a perfect opportunity to correct course, but little has been done to address the problem. In fact, after leaving the EU, Britain has been hit by a succession of disastrous policy choices.

Having rushed to impose a lockdown in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, British ministers insisted on more and more draconian measures long after it was apparent that such steps were disproportionate, as well as ruinously expensive. Then, in the name of achieving net-zero targets on “decarbonizing” the U.K. economy by 2050, successive governments have made rash commitments to move to renewables. Higher energy costs have helped price British industry out of world markets.

Instead of changing course, ministers have stuck stubbornly to their dogma—even though the latest moves to outlaw the internal combustion engine and new emissions regulations are making car ownership unaffordable for millions.

Mississippi has managed to borrow good ideas that have proved to work elsewhere. Britain, by contrast, has preferred to pioneer its own bad ideas. The former approach helps explain why Mississippi is emerging as part of a wider southern success story. The latter approach accounts for why a once-successful country is really struggling.

In the sweltering heat of downtown Pittsburgh, on the last Friday of June 2022, a 25-year-old from Tennessee named Dalton Smith stood in the middle of a throng of about 100 people in Market Square, clicked the strap of his helmet into place, and climbed atop his pogo stick. He tightly gripped two handlebars, his sneakers resting on two pegs affixed to the bottom of the aluminum cylinder. Then he started bouncing. He took several small hops, then one massive leap, and his body was airborne. It was at this moment that Smith took his sneakers off the pegs and spun the stick clockwise in front of his face like an airplane propeller, while clearing a horizontal bar positioned 12 feet in the air.

When Smith landed successfully on the other side, he had set the Guinness World Record for highest-ever jump on a pogo stick. And he did it on the Vurtego, perhaps the greatest pogo stick the world has ever seen. “It’s the wand that makes the magic possible,” Smith, now 26, told me this summer.

The spring-loaded contraption that many of us are familiar with was introduced in America shortly after World War I. For almost 100 years, that simple pogo stick didn’t change much. But when two high-school buddies who grew up on surfing, skateboarding, and snowboarding saw a friend messing with his old pogo stick at a party, they got to thinking: Is there any way to reimagine a childhood toy for the extreme-sports world? That’s how Vurtego pogo sticks, named after the Mission Viejo, California, company that has produced them since 2005, were born.

[Read: The magic of a little danger]

Unlike spring-loaded sticks, Vurtego’s devices are powered by air, with shafts that pump in and out of hollow metal tubes. The air pressure inside a Vurtego stick is easily double the PSI of a standard car tire—which means a single bounce can launch a rider more than eight feet into the air. This innovation gave rise to trick pogo, a niche extreme sport centered on an annual competition called Pogopalooza. But it has also put Vurtego in a challenging position: It has to sell the thing to people who don’t want to whip around at neck-breaking altitudes.

As a business imperative, it’s a conundrum Vurtego has to solve, and one it’ll try doing when it begins selling the Slingshot in September. The Slingshot is a shorter, lighter, easier-to-control pogo, but it’s still powered by air. If the Vurtego is a sports car, then the Slingshot is the sedan anyone can drive. Vurtego says the goal is to attract a wider audience: the kids who want more of a thrill than a spring-loaded stick can provide, but also anyone willing to try something new. Yet the business motive belies a more fundamental question: Why jump on a pogo stick at all?

For Smith, a pogo stick evokes a childhood innocence, a time when the only thing you had to worry about was how high you could jump (and how to effectively bail out if the stick started going sideways). “When you jump on a pogo stick, there’s just no way to not feel like a kid,” he told me. “I feel just alive and young and joyful. It gets your whole body worked up into physical joy.”

Old-school spring-loaded sticks usually bounce just a few feet into the air. The first spring-loaded stick that the Vurtego co-founder Ian Britt was involved in making sent a rider as high as five feet. The inelegant design—two old car shocks that he and a buddy welded together and stuck inside a metal tube—yielded a clunky, 60-pound contraption, but it still enabled a higher bounce. Mutual friends connected Britt with Vurtego’s other co-founder, Brian Spencer, whose uncle, a former aerospace engineer, made the key contribution: air instead of springs. To make a spring stick reach world-record heights, you need metal with a thicker gauge, which weighs it down. Compressed air is lighter and can be adjusted on the fly with a bike pump. That’s what allows for insane height: More air pressure equals more altitude.

Photographs by Ben Franke

The Vurtego stick used by most of the athletes at Pogopalooza is the V4, the latest in the company’s line of trick-pogo equipment. Though the stunts guys like Smith bust out are breathtaking to behold—have you ever seen someone do three backflips on a pogo stick?—the V4 itself is inaccessible to the masses. The cylinder is aluminum, the shaft is heavy stainless steel, the pogo is more than four feet tall from shaft to handlebars, and the price is $499.

By comparison, the Slingshot is $149 or $159, depending on the model size: extra-small or small. Materials that Vurtego was able to access only in the past several years enabled the design. The cylinder in this stick consists of six layers of pressure-rolled aluminum. The shaft is aluminum. The pegs are a special blend of thermoplastic and nylon, with glass-filled fibers inserted for additional strength. The pogo itself is shorter. And unlike the V4, which Smith describes as “super punchy and poppy,” the bounce of the Slingshot, according to those who have tried it, is slow and cushioned.

“It’s a lot less intimidating to start with something like the Slingshot, where it doesn’t look like you’re automatically going to break a bone,” says Will Weiner, the CEO and co-founder of Xpogo, the Pittsburgh-based governing body of trick pogo that hosts the annual high-flying contest. “I really think it’s kind of the missing link we’ve been looking for.”

Getting someone to embrace pogo as a leisure activity seems like a long shot. If anything, the Slingshot appears more suited to the trick-stick wannabes, the younger generation that isn’t ready for the jolt of a larger pogo stick.

And that makes sense. Why give a 10-year-old a pogo stick that’s one errant bounce from sending them face-first into pavement? Britt told me that the Slingshot is just the first of two new pogo sticks that Vurtego plans to roll out. Next spring, the company will release the V5, its newest stick for the Pogopalooza set, which will incorporate the softer, trampolinelike bounce of the Slingshot. In fact, an early test model of the V5 is what Smith used to hit his high-jump mark a year ago.

[Read: Summer vacation is moving indoors]

But what makes the Slingshot a presumably easier pogo stick is the same thing that makes it more than just a set of vertical training wheels for an aspiring back-flipper: Anyone can jump on it. That makes it a gateway into unstructured, nostalgic fun, free from the contemplative pressures that weigh down so much of daily life.

“If you go skiing, most people are on the bunny slopes. There’s not many people that are flying in the terrain park,” Britt said. “Most people just want to go up to the mountain, have a couple beers, and chill and have fun. This is our version of that.”

The reason a new pogo stick might matter is because of how little it matters overall: a little buoyancy in a heavy world. Not long before I observed the scene in Pittsburgh, I’d found out I have a particular type of muscular dystrophy, a degenerative disease that causes my body to progressively break down. I’ll never bounce on a Vurtego or a Slingshot or any of the others, but I can appreciate what they represent. Witnessing pogo stunts in person gave me a newfound appreciation for frivolity.

Smith sees his time on a pogo stick as a bridge into the imagination. He remembers when he first started watching YouTube videos of others doing tricks on pogo sticks, and then trying to emulate what he saw. The act, he says, was like playing a character. “It’s so absurd in a way, but it’s so playful,” he said. “That’s at the root of nostalgia, and feeling young and naive.”

This summer, he spent a couple of months at Legoland in Florida performing in a scripted sports show. He was there with his Vurtego, bouncing on stage as “Mike,” a jackhammer operator. The pogo stick, of course, was the jackhammer.

The escalating political struggle over abortion is compounding the GOP’s challenges in the nation’s largest and most economically vibrant metropolitan areas.

The biggest counties in Ohio voted last week overwhelmingly against the ballot initiative pushed by Republicans and anti-abortion forces to raise the threshold for passing future amendments to the state constitution to 60 percent. That proposal, known as Issue 1, was meant to reduce the chances that voters would approve a separate initiative on the November ballot to overturn the six-week abortion ban Ohio Republicans approved in 2019.

The preponderant opposition to Issue 1 in Ohio’s largest counties extended a ringing pattern. Since the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide constitutional right to abortion with its 2022 Dobbs decision, seven states have held ballot initiatives that allowed voters to weigh in on whether the procedure should remain legal: California, Vermont, Montana, Michigan, Kansas, Kentucky, and now Ohio. In addition, voters in Wisconsin chose a new state-supreme-court justice in a race dominated by the question of whether abortion should remain legal in the state.

[Read: The abortion backlash reaches Ohio]

In each of those eight contests, the abortion-rights position or candidate prevailed. And in each case, most voters in the states’ largest population centers have voted—usually by lopsided margins—to support legal abortion.

These strikingly consistent results underline how conflict over abortion is amplifying the interconnected geographic, demographic, and economic realignments reconfiguring American politics. Particularly since Donald Trump emerged as the GOP’s national leader, Republicans have solidified their hold on exurban, small-town, and rural communities, whose populations tend to be predominantly white and Christian and many of whose economies are reliant on the powerhouse industries of the 20th century: manufacturing, energy extraction, and agriculture. Democrats, in turn, are consolidating their advantage inside almost all of the nation’s largest metro areas, which tend to be more racially diverse, more secular, and more integrated into the expanding 21st-century Information Age economy.

New data provided exclusively to The Atlantic by Brookings Metro, a nonpartisan think tank, show, in fact, that the counties that voted against the proposed abortion restrictions are the places driving most economic growth in their states. Using data from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis, Brookings Metro at my request calculated the share of total state economic output generated by the counties that voted for and against abortion rights in five of these recent contests. The results were striking: Brookings found that the counties supporting abortion rights accounted for more than four-fifths of the total state GDP in Michigan, more than three-fourths in Kansas, exactly three-fourths in Ohio, and more than three-fifths in both Kentucky and Wisconsin.

“We are looking at not only two different political systems but two different economies as well within the same states,” Robert Maxim, a senior research associate at Brookings Metro, told me.

The Ohio vote demonstrated again that abortion is extending the fault line between those diverging systems, with stark electoral implications. Concerns that Republicans would try to ban abortion helped Democrats perform unexpectedly well in the 2022 elections in the key swing states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, particularly in well-educated suburbs around major cities. Democrats won four of the six governor contests and four of the five U.S. Senate races in those states despite widespread discontent over the economy and President Joe Biden’s job performance. Even if voters remain unhappy on both of those fronts in 2024, Democratic strategists are cautiously optimistic that fear of Republicans attempting to impose a national abortion ban will remain a powerful asset for Biden and the party’s other candidates.

When given the chance to weigh in on the issue directly, voters in communities of all sizes have displayed resistance to banning abortion. As Philip Bump of The Washington Post calculated this week, the share of voters supporting abortion rights exceeded Biden’s share of the vote in 500 of the 510 counties that have cast ballots on the issue since last year (outside of Vermont, which Bump did not include in his analysis).  

But across these states, most smaller counties still voted against legal abortion, including this last week in Ohio. A comprehensive analysis of the results by the Cleveland Plain Dealer found that in Ohio’s rural counties, more than three-fifths of voters still backed Issue 1.

Opponents of Issue 1 overcame that continued resistance with huge margins in the state’s largest urban and suburban counties. Most voters rejected Issue 1 in 14 of the 17 counties that cast the most ballots this week, including all seven that cast the absolute most votes (according to the ranking posted by The New York Times). In several of those counties, voters opposed Issue 1 by ratios of 2 to 1 or even 3 to 1.

Equally striking were the results in suburban counties around the major cities, almost all of which usually lean toward the GOP. Big majorities opposed Issue 1 in several large suburban counties that Trump won in 2020 (including Delaware and Lorain). Even in more solidly Republican suburban counties that gave Trump more than 60 percent of their vote (Butler, Warren, and Clermont), the “yes” side on Issue 1 eked out only a very narrow win. Turnout in those big urban and suburban counties was enormous as well.

Jeff Rusnak, a long-time Ohio-based Democratic consultant, says the suburban performance may signal an important shift for the party. One reason that Ohio has trended more solidly Republican than other states in the region, particularly Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, he argues, is that women in Ohio have not moved toward Democrats in the Trump era as much as women in those other states have. But, he told me, the “no” side on Issue 1 could not have run as well as it did in the big suburban counties without significant improvement among independent and even Republican-leaning women. “In Ohio, women who were not necessarily following the Great Lakes–state trends, I think, now woke up and realized, Aha, we better take action,” Rusnak said.

The Ohio results followed the pattern evident in the other states that have held elections directly affecting abortion rights since last year’s Supreme Court decision. In Kansas, abortion-rights supporters carried all six of the counties that cast the most votes. In the Kentucky and Michigan votes, abortion-rights supporters carried eight of the 10 counties that cast the most votes, and in California they carried the 14 counties with the highest vote totals. Montana doesn’t have as many urban centers as these other states, but its anti-abortion ballot measure was defeated with majority opposition in all three of the counties that cast the most votes. In the Wisconsin state-supreme-court race this spring, Democrat Janet Protasiewicz, who centered her campaign on an unusually explicit pledge to support legal abortion, carried seven of the 10 highest-voting counties. (All of these figures are from the New York Times ranking of counties in those states’ results.) For Republicans hoping to regain ground in urban and suburban communities, abortion has become “a huge challenge because they really are on the wrong side of the issue” with those voters, Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll, told me.

The results in these abortion votes reflect what I’ve called the “class inversion” in American politics. That’s the modern dynamic in which Democrats are running best in the most economically dynamic places in and around the largest cities. Simultaneously, Republicans are relying more on economically struggling communities that generally resist and resent the cultural and demographic changes that are unfolding mostly in those larger metros.

Tom Davis, a former Republican representative from Northern Virginia who chaired the National Republican Congressional Committee, has described this process to me as Republicans exchanging “the country club for the country.” In some states, trading reduced margins in large suburbs for expanded advantages in small towns and rural areas has clearly improved the GOP position. That’s been true in such states as Tennessee, Kentucky, and Arkansas, as well as in Texas, Iowa, Montana, and, more tenuously, North Carolina. Ohio has fit squarely in that category as well, with GOP gains among blue-collar voters, particularly in counties along the state’s eastern border, propelling its shift from the quintessential late-20th-century swing state to its current position as a Republican redoubt.

But that reconfiguration just as clearly hurt Republicans in other states, such as Colorado and Virginia earlier in this century and Arizona and Georgia more recently. Growing strength in the largest communities has even allowed Democrats to regain the edge in each of the three pivotal Rust Belt states Trump in 2016 dislodged from the “blue wall”: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

In 2022, Democrats swept the governorships in all three states, and won a Senate race as well in Pennsylvania. Support for legal abortion was central to all of those victories: Just over three-fifths of voters in each state said abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances and vast majorities of them backed the Democratic candidates, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media outlets. The numbers were almost identical in Arizona, where just over three-fifths of voters also backed abortion rights, and commanding majorities of them supported the winning Democratic candidates for governor and U.S. senator.

Those races made clear that protecting abortion rights was a powerful issue in 2022 for Democrats in blue-leaning or purple states where abortion mostly remains legal. But, as I’ve written, the issue proved much less potent in the more solidly red-leaning states that banned abortion: Republican governors and legislators who passed severe abortion bans cruised to reelection in states including Texas, Georgia, and Florida. Exit polls found that in those more reliably Republican states, even a significant minority of voters who described themselves as pro-choice placed greater priority on other issues, among them crime and immigration, and supported Republican governors who signed abortion restrictions or bans.

Ohio exemplified that trend as powerfully as any state. Though the exit polls showed that nearly three-fifths of voters said abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances, Republican Governor Mike DeWine cruised to a landslide reelection after signing the state’s six-week abortion ban. Republican J. D. Vance, who supported a national abortion ban, nonetheless attracted the votes of about one-third of self-described voters who said they supported abortion rights in his winning Ohio Senate campaign last year, the exit polls found.

The fate of Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who’s facing reelection in 2024, may turn on whether he can win a bigger share of the voters who support abortion rights there, as Democrats did last year in states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. (The same is likely true for Democratic Senator Jon Tester in Republican-leaning Montana, another state that voted down an anti-abortion ballot initiative last year.)

[Read: It’s abortion, stupid]

Brown has some reasons for optimism. After the defeat of Issue 1 last week, the follow-on ballot initiative in November to restore abortion rights in the state will keep the issue front and center. The two leading Republican candidates to oppose Brown are each staunch abortion opponents; Secretary of State Frank LaRose, the probable front-runner in the GOP race, was the chief public advocate for last week’s failed initiative. Most encouraging for Brown, the “no” vote on Issue 1 in the state’s biggest suburban counties far exceeded not only Biden’s performance in the same places in 2020, but also Brown’s own numbers in his last reelection, in 2018.

For Brown, and virtually every Democrat in a competitive statewide race next year, the road to victory runs through strong showings in such large urban and suburban counties. Given the persistence of discontent over the economy, it will be particularly crucial for Biden to generate big margins among suburban voters who support abortion rights in the very few states likely to decide control of the White House. The resounding defeat of Issue 1 this week showed again that Republicans, in their zeal to revoke the right to legal abortion, have handed Biden and other Democrats their most powerful argument to move those voters.

A renowned political philosopher, Amy Gutmann was in some ways an inspired choice to serve as President Joe Biden’s ambassador to Germany. Over the course of a long and fruitful academic career, she has made enormous contributions to the theory of deliberative democracy, identity politics, and the role of educational institutions in a pluralistic society, lines of inquiry that are as urgent as ever on both sides of the Atlantic. And in the thick of Russia’s war in Ukraine, there is an undeniable resonance to having the daughter of a German Jewish refugee represent U.S. interests in Berlin.

But I suspect it was not Gutmann’s considerable achievements as a public intellectual or her ancestral ties that won her one of the nation’s most prestigious ambassadorial appointments. A more likely explanation is that the president felt he owed her a debt of gratitude, as she gave him something more precious than even the most eye-wateringly large Super PAC contribution.

Prior to taking on her new role, Gutmann served as president of the University of Pennsylvania for 18 years, where she was celebrated, and well compensated, for her prodigious fundraising and strategic acumen. Notably, she presided over the establishment of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in February 2017, which was initially led by Joe Biden, who at the same time was named the Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Having a former vice president on your faculty is no small thing, and Gutmann and Biden appear to have developed a strong rapport. And when Biden’s granddaughter Maisy Biden applied for admission to Penn in 2018, he intervened personally to press her case to Gutmann, who seems to have given the former vice president valuable advice about improving her chances. Despite an imperfect academic record, the younger Biden matriculated at Penn in the fall of 2019 and graduated this past spring. By then, Gutmann was comfortably ensconced in Berlin.

[Annie Lowrey: Why you have to care about these 12 colleges]

I don’t begrudge Biden for doing whatever he could to secure his granddaughter’s admission to a prestigious university, an admirable act of grandfatherly devotion, or Gutmann for having been receptive to his entreaties, as her job was in no small part to add luster to the University of Pennsylvania. The relationship between them is striking nevertheless. One would normally expect a university president to be solicitous toward a former vice president of the United States, not the other way around.

But Gutmann wasn’t the president of just any university. She was the president of an Ivy League university, and that made all the difference. Her relationship with the Biden family is a perfect distillation of the immense influence of the Ivy League and its peer institutions—and it points to how that influence might come undone.

Armed with billion-dollar endowments, America’s most selective universities have in recent decades transformed themselves into “the makers of manners” for the nation’s mass affluent population. By mixing the children of the rich and powerful with the children of designated disadvantaged groups, they’ve given rise to a new progressive elite that holds enormous sway over the nation’s cultural and political life. Now, as Ivy-plus admissions practices come under intense scrutiny from left and right, this potent alchemy is at risk, opening  the door for a new set of elite-making institutions.     

One of Gutmann’s distinguished predecessors as U.S. ambassador to Germany is James Bryant Conant, who served as the U.S. high commissioner for Germany and then as the first U.S. ambassador to the Federal Republic at the dawn of the Cold War. In a neat parallel, Conant took on the role after a highly consequential 20-year tenure as president of Harvard University.

Between Conant’s era and Gutmann’s, elite higher education in America reached the zenith of its power. But Conant’s vision for Harvard and Gutmann’s vision for Penn were strikingly different.

The product of a working-class childhood in Boston, Conant famously sought to transform Harvard from a finishing school for the WASP elite into a more meritocratic institution, tasking administrators at the university with finding an aptitude test that would select for the nation’s brightest, most capable young people, which later formed the basis of the SAT. He believed that Harvard could help realize “Jefferson’s ideal,” a nation led by a public-spirited intellectual elite, chosen through a rigorous, evidence-based process. To many Americans, some version of Conant’s thesis is the most compelling justification for the elevated status of Harvard and institutions like it, which is why departures from the meritocratic ideal tend to undermine the legitimacy of Ivy League eliteness.

This brand of meritocratic elitism has never been fully realized in practice, certainly not in the Ivy League. For one, Conant himself presided over Jewish quotas, and he’s been accused of indifference—at a minimum—to the scourge of antisemitism. A long line of university administrators in the decades since have abandoned meritocratic elitism, converging on a different and arguably more robust foundation for eliteness. In lieu of a single-minded focus on academic excellence, elite higher education has taken a more pluralistic approach, one that blends students selected solely on the basis of academic credentials with others whose presence is meant to enrich university life, figuratively and literally. For much of this period, these departures from a meritocratic paradigm were seen as concessions to the imperative of fundraising and other prosaic institutional objectives. In more recent years, however, this brand of admissions pluralism has been given a moral makeover. Call it progressive elitism.

In May 1995, Gutmann, then the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and dean of the faculty at Princeton, delivered the esteemed Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Stanford. Her remarks were focused on racial injustice, which she referred to as “the most morally and intellectually vexing problem in the public life of this country.”

One of Gutmann’s central arguments is that because “public policies and individual practices that would effectively address racial injustice are collective goods,” it is fair and reasonable “for blacks to criticize other blacks who benefit from their efforts to combat racial injustice but who do nothing to aid this cause or an equally urgent one.” That is, Black Americans “need to unite in order to combat racial injustice” by, for example, supporting affirmative-action policies.

And according to Gutmann, it is not just Black Americans who have a special obligation in this domain. “The fewer burdens of race we have to bear,” she argues, “the greater our obligations are to overcome racial injustice.” Americans who are not Black “have a special obligation to fight racial injustice so as to decrease the likelihood that they will be the beneficiaries of unfair advantages that stem from the racial stereotyping of social offices and other forms of institutionalized injustices that unfairly disadvantage blacks.”

If Gutmann is right that advantaged individuals and groups have a special obligation to eschew unfair advantages that reinforce racial inequality, how should one understand the concerted effort of President Biden to secure his granddaughter’s admission to the University of Pennsylvania—or rather, how should we expect the political philosopher Amy Gutmann to understand it?

One potential resolution is that the end justifies the means. That is, it is reasonable and appropriate for privileged people to leverage their status, relationships, and wealth to secure high-status educational opportunities if doing so serves the larger cause of racial and social justice.  

Someone in Gutmann’s position could maintain that because the institution she controls is aligned with causes she and her peers deem worthy, admitting students who can enhance its centrality and prestige is in itself a noble pursuit. A commitment to egalitarianism gives Penn and universities like it not just moral license but moral imperative to fortify their student bodies with the children and grandchildren of the nation’s most privileged families. Doing so gives progressive university presidents like Gutmann a powerful tool to shape the rising generation of the American elite.

Crucially, this project of elite-making needs a more broadly acceptable theory of legitimacy. If meritocratic elitism is justified by the need to inculcate a sense of patriotism and civic duty in the best and brightest, progressive elitism is justified by the need to diversify the American elite. That means increasing the representation of Black Americans and other historically disadvantaged groups in prominent roles in American public life—but it also means protecting and strengthening the role of the Ivy League as an opportunity choke point. Under progressive elitism, the Ivy League isn’t just where dynastic wealth meets the dynamism of first-generation strivers. It is where America’s elite gains its moral imprimatur.    

The Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case shed light on how this approach to elite-making has worked in practice. Students for Fair Admissions, a nonprofit legal advocacy group opposed to racial preferences, retained the Duke University labor economist Peter Arcidiacono to analyze who was admitted to Harvard and who was not, drawing on years of closely guarded data that the university was obliged to share with the plaintiffs. His expert testimony revealed the extent to which the university’s admissions practices disadvantaged Asian American applicants, which helped galvanize conservative critics of race-conscious admissions. Arcidiacono and his co-authors also drew attention to Harvard’s preferences for recruited athletes, legacies, prospective students on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff (ALDCs), which were in some cases strikingly large.

Alarmed by Arcidiacono’s findings, critics and champions of race-conscious admissions united in denouncing preferences for ALDCs, a rare instance of cross-ideological agreement. But racial preferences and preferences for ALDCs are fundamentally complementary, and it is this complementarity that serves as the cornerstone of progressive elitism.   

Consider the mounting evidence that the chief advantage of an elite education is not the quality of instruction but rather the access it gives to relationships with powerful people. In a recent New York Times op-ed, the Princeton sociologist Shamus Khan described how the social binding together of students from privileged and less privileged backgrounds can redound to the benefit of the latter.

“Graduating from an elite school,” writes Khan, “affiliates you with an illustrious organization, offers you connections to people with friends in high places and acculturates you in the conventions and etiquette of high-status settings.” But while students from privileged backgrounds have access to networks of affluent, educated, professionally accomplished adults even before attending institutions such as Harvard or Penn, less privileged students do not. When these students are brought together, the privileged students gain a sense of validation—of their intellect, accomplishments, and character—and the less privileged gain social and cultural capital that can hasten their post-college professional ascent.

Though Khan is no defender of legacy preferences, he observes that “legacy students, with their deep social and cultural connections, are part of the reason less advantaged students get so much out of elite schools.” This logic applies not just to legacy students but to other privileged students as well, including the children and grandchildren of prominent elected officials, major philanthropists, academic and cultural luminaries, and perhaps even accomplished equestrians and squash players.

And progressive elitism is doing much more than just shaping the manners, mores, and life trajectories of students attending elite universities. It allows admissions officers to engage in soulcraft on a much grander scale.  

In 2010, the economists Valerie and Garey Ramey found that intensified competition for prestigious college slots from the mid-1990s on led to a dramatic increase in the time and resources college-educated U.S. parents devoted to their children’s development. In contrast, there was no comparable increase in rivalry among parents in Canada, where the prestige hierarchy in higher education is not nearly as steep. The Rameys conclude that the net result of this intensified competition has been a wasteful, zero-sum “rug rat race.”

Building on this empirical foundation, the essayist Matt Feeney goes further still. In his 2021 book, Little Platoons, he denounces the hubris of selective college admissions, accusing admissions officers of arrogating to themselves extraordinary power over the inner lives of aspirational parents and their children.

Faced with a surge of applications as Millennials came of age, Feeney posits, “admissions people came to grasp that the selection power this competition had given them was also a deep and subtle sort of moral power … They could now tell their applicants which extracurriculars were better, and which sort of personal confessions were more pleasing in admissions essays, which sorts of person, as manifest in these essays and extracurriculars, they liked more.” By signaling these behavioral preferences to parents, teachers, counselors, and anxious young strivers highly susceptible to small gradations of status, admissions officers found that “they could now induce their applicants to become such people.”

A number of scholars and practitioners have called for using selective college admissions to “nudge” parents and students in several ways. In 2017, for example, Thomas Scott-Railton published a provocative article in the Yale Law & Policy Review urging elite colleges to give a substantial admissions bonus to applicants who had attended high-poverty K–12 schools even if they were not from low-income households themselves. “By rewarding applicants for attending socioeconomically integrated schools,” he argued, “colleges would mobilize the resources of private actors across the country towards integration.”

Leaving aside the merits of this particular proposal, it speaks to the extraordinary power that elite higher education has over the nation’s middle-class-and-up families. Scott-Railton’s proposal could be seen as an exercise in having Ivy League institutions advance a policy objective that Congress would likely reject. Striking legislative bargains in a culturally plural society is hard. Winning over the admissions office is a significantly lighter lift.

This disciplinary power has an ideological character, and it’s not always subtle. In 2018, an admissions officer at Yale University published a note reassuring prospective applicants and admitted students that they wouldn’t be penalized for suspensions or other disciplinary action imposed by their high schools for taking part in gun-control activism. “For those students who come to Yale,” she wrote, “we expect them to be versed in issues of social justice.” Imagine a similar note cheering on prospective applicants to Yale for taking part in the March for Life—and then imagine the opprobrium that would follow for the admissions officer who published it.

The result is that the opportunity choke point of elite college admissions has become, in the hands of progressive administrators and admissions officers, a tool for transforming progressive pieties into elite social norms.

And that leads us to why Ivy League eliteness may have peaked.

If progressive elitism has allowed selective universities to reconcile moralistic progressivism with the elitism that is the source of their desirability, what happens when Ivy League admissions officers’ power to reshape social norms is no longer undergirded by an appeal to racial justice? Since the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions decision curtailed racial preferences, legacy preferences have come under vigorous attack, not least from the Biden administration, which has launched a civil-rights investigation into Harvard’s use of the practice. Amherst College abandoned legacy admissions in October 2021, and Wesleyan University announced this July that it would follow suit. If Shamus Khan is right, although the symbolic value of an elite education for less advantaged students might persist beyond the end of legacy admissions, its value as a source of social and cultural capital will be greatly diminished.

[Richard V. Reeves: The shame deficit]

This in turn could create an opening for a different set of higher-education institutions committed to a different set of values—perhaps even a revival of the midcentury vision of elite institutions that would promote social mobility while instilling patriotism and a sense of civic obligation.

That, at least, seems to be the impetus behind a slew of new higher-education initiatives in red and purple states, where many voters, policy makers, and philanthropists are wary of Ivy League progressivism. The School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University, a public research university that has seen surging enrollment in recent years, is pioneering an approach to civics that welcomes debate and encourages a deep understanding of the nation’s founding principles. In Tennessee, Governor Bill Lee is creating a similar institute, which aims to inculcate an “informed patriotism,” through the state university system.

And then there is the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida, a new initiative that is being led by Will Inboden, a distinguished scholar of international relations who most recently taught at the University of Texas at Austin. With more than 60,000 students at its Gainesville campus, UF is already one of the nation’s most respected public universities and, in light of the Sunshine State’s rapid economic and demographic expansion, it is well positioned for further growth. The Hamilton Center, aimed at fostering diversity of thought and improving the quality of civic education on campus and throughout the state, represents a bet on UF’s enormous potential. One possibility is that it will serve as the seedbed of a new liberal-arts college that would compete with the likes of Penn and Harvard, attracting bright and capable students from a wide range of social and ethnic backgrounds. To date, UF hasn’t distinguished itself as a beacon of social mobility. But that could soon change.  

No one expects these fledgling efforts to dislodge the Ivy League and its peers from their place at the top of America’s higher-education status hierarchy, at least not yet. What we can say is that many young Americans and their families are looking for alternatives to elite education as we’ve come to know it, and a growing number of civic entrepreneurs are hoping to revive something like the still-resonant meritocratic ideal.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week, I put this question to readers: “Donald Trump is guilty of deplorable actions, under indictment for multiple crimes, and yet remains the most popular candidate with voters in the Republican Party’s presidential primary. Why do you think he is still their first choice?”

Replies have been edited for length and clarity.

Randall R. argues that Trump supporters earnestly desire national greatness:

The reason many support Trump (if you have the decency to listen to them) is because they want to make America great again, and there’s no one else close to matching Trump in both prominence and apparent ability to make what they’d say is the most promising and important part of America great, in the face of the internal conflicts that currently exist.

That’s an illusion spread by a politician, offering an addictive thrill that disconnects people from parts of reality. It doesn’t make America great. But making America great, recognizing how it has long been great and how it can be more great, remains important.

Listen to the Trump voters: the neglected, the deplored, the doomscrollers, the people who want to make something of themselves, those who want to raise their family in a better world. Those who vote against Trump fit these same descriptions. It’s essential, for people on opposing sides of what’s become Trump’s divide, to listen to each other with respect, so we can build our way out of America’s problems without being exploited by political operators. You or I have no shortage of illusions in our parts of the political spectrum; shouldn’t we be reexamining those illusions instead of looking down on Trump’s followers?

Bob puts forth a theory of populism:

Populist movements arise from widespread dissatisfaction with cultural and economic conditions and the inability of the government to deal with public concerns. This is fertile ground for charismatic and authoritarian leaders offering quick and simple solutions. Though Trump may be a person of low character, to many of his supporters, he seems like the sort of fighter that is needed—someone who does not follow the rules because the rules are believed to be the problem. James Madison would be sad and disappointed.

Jaleelah analyzes what she sees as the incentives of Trump supporters:

Trump’s supporters sincerely believe that he is being framed, not only because he has been priming them for his conviction for years, but because they have to believe it lest they become severely depressed. Imagine dedicating yourself to a false religion or an unfulfilling career or a bad partner. Imagine losing relationships with your lifelong friends and your adult children who strongly disagree with your choices. When you’ve committed to something at a great cost, it is hard to admit that your commitment was all for nothing.

I don’t think it is strange that so many people insist Trump is innocent. I do, of course, believe he is a fraud who is corrupt enough to have committed the crimes he is accused of. But genuine revolutionary figures get locked up on fake charges all the time. Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi were charged, convicted, and imprisoned. Most reasonable people alive today believe their imprisonments were unjust and that states are capable of fabricating evidence against popular figures who threaten the social order. Trump’s supporters are simply applying a reasonable idea in an unreasonable context.

Liberals and progressives do not seem keen to accept repentant Trump supporters. There is little benefit to switching teams. There is a very high cost. Towns that have unified behind Trump are just as keen on cancel culture as their liberal counterparts. No one wants to be confronted by a horde of their neighbors at church or accused of supporting degeneracy at the grocery store. Peer pressure is probably keeping a lot of people in line.

Dan argues that “most people assume that voters look at a candidate’s record and personality,” but “what really matters is whether a candidate gives a voter an identity.” He explains:

The voters are, because of their support for a candidate, a “somebody.” Trump has done this better than any candidate in 50 years. To voters whose worlds have been destroyed by elites, Trump says: You matter. Become a part of this movement and you are standing up to the elites. You can get your life back with me, and be a SOMEBODY again. Trump’s legal cases are easily rationalized as the price he has been willing to pay, personally, to represent all of the people who see him as validating their lives and giving them identities once again. To his supporters, he is sacrificing for “the cause.”

Christopher scolds Trump’s critics for what he sees as a failure to understand their country:

Trump supporters believe that the economic and cultural game is rigged. Trump supporters disagree with teaching little children about gender or allowing gender-reassignment care to impressionable minors and are branded with a pejorative label for it. They see branding that Florida law as “Don’t say gay”––despite the fact that a majority of Americans would likely support the content and intent of Florida’s efforts to ensure age-appropriate instruction––is wrong. Similarly, when someone supports law enforcement or opposes affirmative action, they are labeled “racists,” even though there are principled reasons to take issue. Trump has tapped into the frustration that comes from playing a rigged game. Trump supporters see Trump as challenging the cultural and economic system that excludes them and their views.

The elites and media need to stop dismissing Trump supporters as some fringe group. Trump received more votes in 2020 than did Obama [in 2008] and came in second in 2020 only to Biden. The 2024 election is likely to be close. The issues Trump has tapped into are not fleeting.

Geoff describes a type of voter he has observed as a retail manager in Colorado, in a store that catered to a Trump-voting demographic:

They are white, working-class, and very knowledgeable about stuff and fixing it, but they don’t value education as it is systematized in America. They are very transgressive in their everyday language but are model citizens overall. The most notable sentiment, for me, was commonly phrased as, “Wouldn’t it be great to vote for a POTUS sitting in prison?!” They defend him out of reaction: It’s “unpopular,” and they are raging against the machine. Think if supporting Nixon was the most “punk rock” thing you could do.

Patricia shares how she became a Democrat and describes some Trump supporters she has observed:

I’m 90 years old, a retired hospital administrator. My late husband and I were brought up in Republican families in California and voted that way until we watched Bill Clinton’s impeachment and witnessed the mean streak and hypocrisy of the Republicans.

We have voted for Democrats ever since.

My co-grandma is currently 89. She immigrated from Argentina at the age of 22, so you’d think she’d recognize authoritarians when she smells them, but no, she likes Trump. She loved watching The Apprentice and watches Fox. And her friends email around crazy stuff they find online. She has a Ph.D. in education and taught at a university for years.

I have a 65-year-old in-law who lives in Orange County, California, and has a successful business. A smart man, but not formally educated. He is a Trump supporter because of taxes mostly.

My granddaughter and her husband recently moved to northern Idaho from the Seattle area because they don’t like the regulations in Washington State. They think Trump is not a nice man but are pretty well aligned with libertarianism—they don’t want government interfering in their freedom, so they think Trump is the only choice. Both are college graduates.

And beyond them, I’ve observed that there are people with a seemingly “genetic” trait who simply enjoy seeing a person “stick it” to others. Trump is exceptionally good at ridicule.

Nick thinks his experience of being young and right-leaning helped him understand support for Trump:

Pre-2016, I identified as a conservative. While in college, if I tried to offer a different opinion on topics such as immigration, I felt ridiculed and looked down upon. I decided my two options were to be met with scorn or to hold my tongue. I know I wasn’t the only one. My good friend started a club to bring liberals and conservatives together to talk about major issues. He did everything he could to get conservatives to show up but just couldn’t get it to happen. I am not surprised because I don’t think I was the only conservative who felt like they couldn’t share out of fear of being “canceled” or called a racist or bigot for not going along with the mainstream liberal line. Perhaps Republicans are rallying around Trump despite his egregious undemocratic and immoral acts because they see themselves in him, a conservative being constantly ridiculed by liberals for his beliefs, except he actually speaks up. I don’t think all conservatives are power-hungry autocrats like Trump, and I don’t think most of them share his views. But I do think that we tend to support someone when we see ourselves in them. Identity politics play in both parties; maybe we’re just seeing the conservative version.    

T. argues that we’re witnessing a reaction to cultural change:

I’m an architect in a progressive city out west. I abhor Donald Trump, but I understand why my in-laws in Tennessee support him without reservation. What’s mystifying to me is that so many bright, liberal folks of my acquaintance don’t grasp it. Do you recall the deafening silence after the 2016 election, when Hillary lost to the worst presidential candidate in American history? There were a couple of months of serious self-examination among Democrats, but it quickly cooled, and I haven’t heard anything like it since.

I think our lack of understanding is due to the inability of most of us to put ourselves into the shoes of disadvantaged Trump voters. What you’d see coming your way is an all-consuming political, economic, and cultural wave––one that represents not only change, but also disdain for your way of life and destruction of your sense of who you are. I’m not saying that’s true, but the impression is very real. It’s cultural imperialism, which we understand very well when we talk about gentrification, but we miss completely when the encroaching force comes from our side of the fence. After all, how would we feel if confronted by a way of life that mocks our religion, siphons up our brightest young people and convinces them we’re hopelessly ignorant, sells us out to the global economy, promotes behavior that’s been taboo for thousands of years, and cancels us if we disagree? It fits with the experience of Indigenous cultures that were overrun by modern industrial society during the past 250 years. Those Tennesseans are being sold a bill of goods by a flimflam man, but we set them up for it.

JP describes the Trump support of his loved ones:

They do not go to Trump rallies, nor do they look or sound like those abhorrent Trump supporters you see in interview-reel compilations. They are compassionate, kind to strangers, and even have friends in people of all political stripes. We are a racially diverse bunch: Black, Hispanic, and white. And yet, these same people believe in their bones that for every lie Donald Trump has told, the liberal media has told more. For every crime Donald Trump has committed, the liberal elites in our politics and culture have committed more.

And regarding his claims of election fraud, despite lack of hard evidence, they feel in their gut that he is right on some level. I doubt I could do or say anything to convince them otherwise.

Paul describes the pull of tribes:

Part of being a human being is wanting to belong. One way we do that is to identify with someone or something. Passionate sports fans are a good example. And once we link our identity, our sense of who we are, to those teams, we look at everything about those teams through a positive perspective. People have identified with Trump and now their well-being and self-image are tied to him. That prevents them from viewing any reality other than the one that he creates. It will take some sort of disruption to break up with him, but it doesn’t look like that will occur. When their identity is at risk, the most comfortable path is to stay with Trump and distort new data to fit their views.

Michael believes that demographic insecurity is a factor:

I suspect that support for Trump is rooted in people’s fears of becoming a minority and suffering economic demise due to competition from immigration by humans who are unlike them.

Tim believes that Trump’s appeal is even simpler:

Give someone a reason to feel good about their anger and resentment and you can gain their loyalty.

Country music, the century-old genre of nostalgia, tradition, and twang, has never been more in style. Last week, for the first time in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, the three most popular songs in America were country songs. One explanation for the milestone is that the genre’s artists and audiences are finally leaning into streaming: This year, country has experienced a 20 percent rise in listenership, a surge outpaced only by those of Latin music and K-pop.

But this is a strange victory to celebrate—and not only because last week’s No. 1 song, Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town,” has proved to be a political flash point. The tracks breaking through right now each sound like something other than country. The genre always conveys some amount of underdog defiance, but lately, the music and the conversation around it have a distinct tinge of resentment.

In “Try That in a Small Town,” Aldean, the 46-year-old Georgia hitmaker, salutes supposedly rural values (honor, neighborliness, gun ownership) by warning the listener that supposedly urban pathologies (robbery, spitting at cops, burning flags) don’t fly in what some would call “Real America.” “Around here, we take care of our own,” he boasts. But the music hardly brings to mind peaceful pastures or sawdust-strewn saloons. As soon as I heard the song’s grumbling guitars, drooping minor chords, and riff ripped from Foo Fighters’ “Everlong,” I felt transported back to my suburban-male adolescence, circa Y2K—a time when I lived in an oversize black hoodie, listening to the groaning of men with soul patches. Aldean’s song is country in name, but its sound is post-grunge alternative rock.

In the early ’90s, Nirvana and its peers opened space for a new strain of mainstream manliness: vulnerable about feelings of failure and alienation, but with a hard, noisy edge that no one could possibly construe as sissy. Soon came a flock of melodically moaning bands, such as Bush, Creed, and Nickelback, that sheared grunge of its punk disposition, creating a broadly appealing template for directionless angst. Now Aldean has updated that template with pedal steel and right-wing talking points.

You’ve probably heard that the song is controversial. Aldean set a perfect discursive trap, taking advantage of America’s current split between two theories of its own history, and the predictability and profitability of backlash-to-backlash cycles. Though the song makes no mention of race, many listeners heard a dog whistle in it: The “good ol’ boy” vigilantism endorsed by Aldean’s lyrics has historically been affiliated with white-supremacist violence. His music video included images of Black Lives Matter protesters (though that footage was later edited out), and was shot in front of a Tennessee courthouse where a Black man was lynched in 1927. (The production company that made the video told The Washington Post that it had chosen a “popular filming location outside of Nashville.”) But critiques of the song have only amplified it: After Country Music Television banned the video, the track’s streams shot up 999 percent.

[Read: Music that mourns, whether it wants to or not]

Aldean professes mystification at the dustup he’s provoked. The song, he has said, simply “refers to the feeling of a community that I had growing up.” (Aldean, for what it’s worth, grew up in the midsize city of Macon, Georgia.) This insistence, more than the southern lilt of Aldean’s voice, makes the track country. Aldean is working in a tradition of music that disses cities while celebrating rural can-do. But he’s not singing with the wry, plucky tone of Merle Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee” or even with the gruff confidence of Hank Williams Jr.’s “A Country Boy Can Survive.” Nor is he delivering provocative slogans with the rock-star panache of Toby Keith. Rather, Aldean sounds wallowing and fearful in that distinctly post-grunge way—even as his words profess action.

Perhaps that vibe of sublimated anxiety reflects the tragedy underlying the song: small-town America’s decades-long economic decline. The big-city problems Aldean laments—violent crime, sedition, even fraying communal ties—are, in many cases, worse problems outside the cities than in them. This reality is a major driver of right-wing resentment—and music about it should, by all rights, have a hint of malaise. Aldean was previously known for anthems of carefree country living (although his 2018 single “Rearview Town” did almost seem like a dirge for rural dreams, it was actually a breakup song). A better precedent for “Small Town” is Staind’s 2001 hit, “It’s Been Awhile”: “It’s been a while / Since I could hold my head up high.” Not coincidentally, Staind’s Aaron Lewis is now a popular country musician—and one of the most effective right-wing protest singers in memory.

It’s also not a coincidence that Morgan Wallen—currently the most popular country artist by a wide margin, and the singer of “Last Night,” last week’s No. 2 song on the Hot 100—is a spiritual child of Nickelback. The Canadian rock band, famous for the catchy aughts rumble of “How You Remind Me” and “Photograph,” is often mocked as the ultimate example of musical blandness. But Wallen has unapologetically cited the group as an influence. His go-to producer, Joey Moi, produced many of Nickelback’s early-2000s hits, including “Photograph”—and then co-founded Big Loud, which is now one of the hottest labels in Nashville.

[Read: Country music can no longer hide its problems]

A 30-year-old former contestant on The Voice, Wallen is a serious pop talent, and “Last Night”—a sensation since its release in February—is excellent (which explains why it replaced Aldean’s track at the top of the Hot 100 today). There’s a bit of a Nickelback quality to the laminated nature of the production, and the way that the singer conveys a light hatred of himself, but “Last Night” mostly exemplifies a separate trend in Nashville: so-called hick-hop, modern country influenced by rap. Singing in a sassy twang about drunken fighting and reconciliation, over a brisk guitar loop and handclaps that form a syncopated beat, Wallen emanates the same sleazy charm as Drake. The irony here is obvious: In 2021, Wallen was caught saying the N-word on camera, which resulted in a supposed “cancellation” that, like Aldean’s, only boosted his listenership.

Last week’s No. 3 song in the nation, Luke Combs’s take on Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” has created a little controversy as well. It is basically a note-for-note cover of a 1991 classic, differentiated mostly by the gruff beauty of Combs’s voice. After it began to rise in the charts last month, some commentators pointed out that neither Chapman nor any other Black woman had ever had the kind of success in country music that Combs is enjoying. This observation sparked conservative annoyance louder than the original critique, likely boosting the song’s popularity. As my colleague Conor Friedersdorf argues, the discourse around the song demonstrates how media coverage of race can inspire more confusion than reform.

But is it tenable to ask observers of this authenticity-minded, all-American genre to avoid speaking about conspicuous truths? The reality of country music’s Billboard Hot 100 takeover this past week is glaring. The music is diverse, but the performers aren’t: Between Aldean’s protest rock, Wallen’s laid-back rap flow, and Combs’s soul-folk cover, this boom for mainstream country is rooted not in sound but in white, male, and—at least in Aldean’s case—aggrieved identity. Of course, all genres are defined by demographics. But streaming technology, not to mention social and political media, now rewards the inflaming of passionate pluralities, including by sowing division. Inflaming stan versus stan, or right versus left, can prove profitable—at least for a short while (Aldean’s song today fell from No. 1 to No. 21 on the Hot 100).

Artists in other genres are going to learn lessons from this boomlet. Just a few days ago, Aldean made a surprise appearance at a Nickelback concert in Nashville. Nickelback’s front man, Chad Kroeger, has never been known for his political outspokenness. But that night, he made a speech: For 20 years, he said, “they’ve been trying to cancel us.”

In June 1953, at the height of the McCarthy era, while congressional investigators and private groups were hunting down “subversive” or merely “objectionable” books and authors in the name of national security, the American Library Association and the Association Book Publishers Council issued a manifesto called “The Freedom to Read.” The document defended free expression and denounced censorship and conformity in language whose clarity and force are startling today. It argued for “the widest diversity of views and expressions” and against purging work based on “the personal history or political affiliations of the author.” It urged publishers and librarians to resist government and private suppression, and to “give full meaning to the freedom to read by providing books that enrich the quality and diversity of thought.” The manifesto took on not just official censorship, but the broader atmosphere of coercion and groupthink. It concluded: “We do not state these propositions in the comfortable belief that what people read is unimportant. We believe rather that what people read is deeply important; that ideas can be dangerous; but that the suppression of ideas is fatal to a democratic society. Freedom itself is a dangerous way of life, but it is ours.”

“The Freedom to Read” was covered in papers and on TV news. President Dwight Eisenhower, who that same month had urged the graduating class of Dartmouth College not to “join the book burners,”’ sent a letter of praise to the manifesto’s authors. In one of the darkest periods of American history, the manifesto gave librarians and publishers the courage of their principles. One librarian later wrote, “There developed a fighting profession, made up of dedicated people who were sure of their direction.”

This past June, the library and publishers’ associations reissued “The Freedom to Read” on its 70th anniversary. Scores of publishers, libraries, literary groups, civil-liberty organizations, and authors signed on to endorse its principles. And yet many of those institutional signatories—including the “Big Five” publishing conglomerates—often violate its propositions, perhaps not even aware that they’re doing so. Few of them, if any, could produce as unapologetic a defense of intellectual freedom as the one made at a time when inquisitors were destroying careers and lives. It’s worth asking why the American literary world in 2023 is less able to uphold the principles of “The Freedom to Read” than its authors in 1953.

The attack on intellectual freedom today is coming from several directions. First—and likely the main concern of the signatories—is an official campaign by governors, state legislatures, local governments, and school boards to weed out books and ideas they don’t like. Most of the targets are politically on the left; most present facts or express views about race, gender, and sexuality that the censors consider dangerous, divisive, obscene, or simply wrong. The effort began in Texas as early as 2020, before public hysteria and political opportunism spread the campaign to Florida and other states, and to every level of education, removing from library shelves and class reading lists several thousand books by writers such as Toni Morrison and Malala Yousafzai.

Given that states and school districts have a responsibility to set public-school curricula, not all of this can be called government censorship. But laws and policies to prevent students from encountering controversial, unpopular, even offensive writers and ideas amount to a powerfully repressive campaign of book banning, some of it probably unconstitutional. The campaign stems from an American tradition of small-minded panic at rapid change and unorthodox thinking. You can draw a line from Tennessee’s 1925 Scopes trial to Florida’s 2022 Stop WOKE Act. This threat to intellectual freedom is the easiest one for the progressive and enlightened people who predominate in the book world to oppose. No one at Penguin Random House or the National Book Foundation hesitates to stand up for Gender Queer and The Handmaid’s Tale.

“There is more than one way to burn a book,” Ray Bradbury once said. “And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.” The second threat to intellectual freedom comes from a different source—from inside the house. This threat is the subject of a new report that PEN America has just published, “Booklash: Literary Freedom, Online Outrage, and the Language of Harm.” (Because I have written about censorship and language in the past, PEN asked me to read and respond to an earlier draft and gave me an advance copy of the final version.) The report is focused on the recent pattern of publishers and authors canceling their own books, sometimes after publication, under pressure organized online or by members, often younger ones, of their own staffs. PEN has tracked 31 cases of what might be called literary infanticide since 2016; half occurred in just the past two years. “None of these books were withdrawn based on any allegation of factual disinformation, nor glorification of violence, nor plagiarism,” the report notes. “Their content or author was simply deemed offensive.”

A few cases became big news. Hachette canceled Woody Allen’s autobiography after a staff walkout, and Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth was withdrawn after publication by Norton, both following accusations of sexual misconduct by the authors (Allen and Bailey denied the accusations). Publishers have canceled books following an author’s public remarks—for example, those of the cartoonist Scott Adams, the British journalist Julie Burchill, and the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.

In one particularly wild case, an author named Natasha Tynes, on the verge of publishing her first novel, a crime thriller, saw a Black employee of the Washington, D.C., Metro system eating on a train (a violation of the system’s rules). She tweeted a picture of the woman at the transit authority with a complaint, and immediately found herself transformed into a viral racist. Within hours her distributor, Rare Bird Books, had dropped the novel, tweeting that Tynes “did something truly horrible today.” The publisher, California Coldblood, after trying to wash its hands of the book, eventually went ahead with publication “due to contractual obligations,” but the novel was as good as dead. “How can you expect authors to be these perfect creatures who never commit any faults?” Tynes lamented to PEN. Most publishers now include a boilerplate morals clause in book contracts that legitimizes these cancellations—a loophole that contradicts tenets of “The Freedom to Read” that those publishers endorsed.

Many of the cases discussed in the report have nothing to do with an author’s offensive statements or bad behavior. Instead, they involve sins of phrasing, characterization, plot, subject matter, or authorial identity. Last year Picador dropped a schoolteacher’s prizewinning memoir when it was attacked for racially insensitive portrayals. A scholarly study of Black feminist culture was withdrawn by Wipf and Stock after critics pointed out that its author was white. Simon & Schuster preemptively killed a biography for children of Hitler because of Hitler. Four young-adult and children’s novels (which seem particularly vulnerable to attack) were pulled for supposedly offensive stories and descriptions. One of them, A Place for Wolves—a novel about two gay American boys set in Kosovo during its war with Serbia—was canceled by its author, Kosoko Jackson, himself a prosecutor of literary offenses via Twitter, after people on social media accused him of violating his own edict about identity placing strict limits on appropriate subject matter: “Stories about the civil rights movement should be written by black people,” he’d tweeted. “Stories of suffrage should be written by women. Ergo, stories about boys during horrific and life changing times, like the AIDS EPIDEMIC, should be written by gay men. Why is this so hard to get?”

At the heart of these literary autos-da-fé is identity—or, in a phrase the report uses several times, “marginalized identities.” The trip wires that can blow up a writer’s work—charges of “harmful” language, failures of “representation,” “appropriation,” or generally “problematic” content—are all strung along lines of identity. When Jeanine Cummins, a white writer, received a lot attention (and, reportedly, a seven-figure book deal) in 2020 for American Dirt, a novel about a Mexican mother and child on the run from a drug gang, she was denounced for taking an opportunity that should have gone to a Latina author who would, some critics said, have written a better book. Her publisher, Flatiron/Macmillan, didn’t pull the novel—it was selling far too many copies—but it canceled Cummins’s tour, citing safety concerns, and issued an abject statement of self-criticism. The ordeal of American Dirt showed publishers that crossing lines of identity can be dangerous, prompting one former editor, interviewed anonymously by PEN, to ask: “Are we saying that not anyone can write any story? Do you have to have a certain identity? There’s a lot of fear around that.”

A skeptic might ask why a few dozen awkward decisions and minor controversies out of tens of thousands of books published every year should matter. The answer is that these incidents reveal an atmosphere of conformity and fear that undermines any claim book publishing has to being more than just a business. Most of the canceled books described in the report are victims of a pervasive orthodoxy. At its most rigid, this orthodoxy puts the claims of identity above everything else—literary quality, authorial independence, the freedom to read. Its reach can be seen in how many of the canceled books were already making obvious, if clumsy, efforts to abide by the values of equity and inclusion; and in Natasha Tynes’s attempt to defend herself from online attacks by pleading that she herself is “a minority writer.”

Eventually, orthodoxy makes the suppression of books unnecessary because it leads to self-censorship by editors and writers. One canceled author interviewed by PEN said, “It has shut me down, creatively. There is always a censor, perched on my shoulder, telling me I cannot write about this or that topic.” What writer can honestly say it isn’t true of them? Almost none of the editors interviewed for the PEN report were willing to be quoted by name. What are they afraid of, if not the fate of their authors?

Below the waterline lie all the books that aren’t contracted, or even written, because of the examples that become public. In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, the best-selling author Richard North Patterson wrote that his latest novel—about an interracial relationship set against battles over voting rights and white racism—was rejected by “roughly 20” New York publishers. “The seemingly dominant sentiment was that only those personally subject to discrimination could be safely allowed to depict it through fictional characters,” Patterson wrote. (Trial was published in June by a conservative Christian firm in Tennessee and currently ranks around No. 37,000 among all books on Amazon. Several books in the PEN report, canceled by major publishers, were grabbed up by small houses with far less reach.)

PEN is a free-speech organization. Having already issued a lengthy report and numerous statements condemning book banning by state and local governments, it seems to have realized that it could not ignore a pattern of suppression closer to home, by organizations that publish PEN members and sponsor its fundraising galas.

In May, PEN landed in the middle of its own free-speech controversy when two Ukrainian soldier-writers announced that they would withdraw from the organization’s World Voices Festival if two Russian writers were also included on another panel. Rather than cancel the Ukrainians, who had already arrived in the United States, and send them back home to the war, PEN asked the Russian writers and their panel’s moderator, Masha Gessen, a PEN board member, to speak under a different banner, that of PEN America. The Russians and Gessen instead decided to cancel their own event, and Gessen resigned from the board in protest for what was seen as PEN caving in to the Ukrainians’ demands. (One of the Russian writers later said that she did not want to participate if the Ukrainians didn’t want her there.) A month later, PEN declared it “regrettable” and “wrongheaded” when the writer Elizabeth Gilbert suspended publication of her next novel because Ukrainian readers were upset that it was set in Soviet Russia. All of this merely shows that it’s easier to hold a principled position on free speech when you’re not the one facing unpleasant consequences.

PEN spent months researching and internally debating the new report, anticipating controversy. An early draft was hampered by reflexive hedges and tactical critiques, and a few of them remain in the published report: Accusations of literary harm “risk playing into the hands of book banners” on the right who use the same rhetoric; the publisher of American Dirt might have avoided trouble if it had marketed the novel with more sensitivity.

The report is an important, even courageous, document in our moment. PEN is offering guidance and backbone for a book trade that appears to have lost its nerve and forgotten its mission in the face of ceaseless outrage. Among its recommendations, the report urges that “publishing houses should rarely, if ever, withdraw books from circulation.” It calls for greater transparency and author involvement in any decisions about cancellations. Goodreads, the online review site, where mobs sometimes beat books to death before they’re even finished, let alone published and read, is asked to “encourage authentic reviews” and prevent “review-bombing.”

These technical fixes would greatly improve policies and procedures in the publishing industry, but they can’t solve the wider problem—a climate of intolerance and cowardice that stifles the book world. In the conclusion to its report, PEN calls for “a broader tonal shift in literary discourse,” which is necessary but probably beyond the power of any report. Essentially, PEN is saying to the remaining gatekeepers, “Remember your purpose,” and to the new gate-crashers, “Don’t use speech to limit speech.” For inspiration it reprints “The Freedom to Read” in full and urges workers in the book world to take it to heart. Ayad Akhtar, the president of PEN America, told me that he hopes publishers will include the 70-year-old manifesto along with DEI training for new hires. PEN wants its report to have an effect similar to that of the earlier document—to make publishing once more “a fighting profession.”

And yet something holds the report back from using the full-throated language of “The Freedom to Read.” I think the difficulty lies in an earlier report that PEN published last year.

In “Reading Between the Lines: Race, Equity, and Book Publishing,” PEN examined in detail how the American book business has always been and, despite recent improvements, remains a clubby world of the white, well connected, and well-off. It presented a damning picture, backed by data, of “the white lens through which writers, editors, and publishers curate America’s literature.” It called for publishers to hire and promote more staff of color, publish more books by writers of color, pay them higher advances, and sell their books more intelligently and vigorously.

The two reports are related, but the relation is fraught. The first showed the need for an intensified campaign of diversity, equity, and inclusion across the industry. The second argues for greater freedom to defy the literary strictures of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Is there a contradiction between the two?

PEN doesn’t think so. The new report states: “It is imperative that the literary field chart a course that advances diversity and equity without making these values a cudgel against specific books or writers deemed to fall short in these areas.” In the words of Suzanne Nossel, PEN’s executive director, “You can dismantle the barriers to publication for some without erecting them anew for others.” But this might be wishful thinking, and not only because of practical limits on how many books can feasibly be published. In a different world, it would be entirely possible to expand opportunity without creating a censorious atmosphere. In our world, where DEI has hardened into an ideological litmus test, the effort to place social justice at the center of publishing almost inevitably leads to controversies over “representation” and “harm” that result in banned books. The first report presented DEI in publishing as an urgent moral cause. The second report takes issue with “employees’ increasing expectation that publishers assume moral positions in their curation of catalogs and author lists.” But those employees no doubt believe that they are carrying out the vision of the first report.

Social justice and intellectual freedom are not inherently opposed—often, each requires the other—but they are not the same thing, either. “The Freedom to Read” makes this clear: “It would conflict with the public interest for [publishers and librarians] to establish their own political, moral, or aesthetic views as a standard for determining what should be published or circulated.” That statement was written at a time when the cause of intellectual freedom was non- or even anti-ideological. Its authors advocated no other goal than the widest and highest-quality expression of views. But in PEN’s new report you can feel a struggle to reconcile the thinking of its earlier one, in which every calculation comes down to identity, with the discriminating judgment and openness to new and disturbing ideas that are essential to producing literature. As one editor told me, “There’s no equity in talent.”

Last year, a federal judge blocked a bid by Penguin Random House, the largest publisher in America, to buy Simon & Schuster, the third largest (a takeover would have practically made the conglomerate a sovereign country). This year, book sales are down across the industry, bringing waves of layoffs; last month, senior editors at Penguin Random House were given the option of a buyout under the shadow of termination, and some of the most illustrious gatekeepers in publishing headed for the door. These events bring me to the third and most serious attack on the written word.

This one is more insidious and pervasive and therefore harder to see clearly, let alone oppose, than book bans and cancellations. It’s the air every writer and reader breathes: the consolidation of publishing into a near-monopoly business; the correspondent shrinking of heterodoxy and risk taking; the fragile economic situation of employees; the withering away of bookstores and book reviews; the growing illiteracy of the public; the decline of English instruction in schools, regardless of political pressures; the data crunching that turns ideas into machine-made products and media into highly sensitive barometers of popularity (with artificial intelligence coming soon to replace the last traces of human originality). All of these trends amount to an assault on the free intellect perpetrated not by Moms for Liberty or YA Twitter, but by Mark Zuckerberg, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Amazon. In a sense, this third attack underlies the other two, because strong emotions and extreme language are programmed into the brains of book banners of every type by algorithms that profit a handful of technology and media giants.

Literature and journalism have never been remunerative fields. But compared with three decades ago, the chances of a serious, sustained career today are far slimmer. I can’t help thinking that these circumstances have something to do with the willingness of publishers to be frightened by a few hundred tweets. Perhaps years of consolidation and precarity have so weakened their conviction in the mission of book publishing that a little outrage online and in house is sufficient to erase it. If the editor’s function is to match the identity of writer and subject matter, then gather data to measure the success of the product, perhaps gatekeepers have finally outlived their usefulness.

When ChatGPT entered the world last fall, the faculty at SUNY Buffalo freaked out. Kelly Ahuna, the university’s director of academic integrity, was inundated by panicked emails. “It has me thinking about retiring,” one English professor confessed. He had typed a prompt into ChatGPT and watched in horror as an essay unfurled on-screen. There were errors, sure: incorrect citations, weird transitions. But he would have given it a B-minus. He anticipated an onslaught of undetectable AI plagiarism. Ahuna found herself as something of a spiritual mentor, guiding faculty through their existential angst about artificial intelligence.

The first year of AI college was marked by mayhem and mistrust. Educational institutions, accustomed to moving very slowly, for the most part failed to issue clear guidance. In this vacuum, professors grew suspicious of students who turned in particularly grammatical essays. Plagiarism detectors flagged legitimate work as AI-generated. Over the summer, some universities and colleges have regrouped; they’re trying to embrace AI at the institutional level, incorporating it into curriculum and helping instructors adapt. But the norm is still to let individual educators fend for themselves—and some of those individuals seem to believe that they can keep teaching as if generative AI didn’t exist.

[Read: The first year of AI college ends in ruin]

Modernizing higher education is a formidable task. I graduated from college this past spring. Before the pandemic, my professors insisted that we print assignments out and hand them in—forget submitting online. Although ChatGPT was available for nearly my entire senior year, the university administration sent out only one announcement about it, encouraging faculty to understand the implications of the technology. My friends, meanwhile, talked incessantly about it. I don’t know anyone who wrote an entire paper with ChatGPT—or who would admit to it, at least—but people used it in other ways. Some asked it to generate practice-exam questions for them to solve. Others turned to it for help with their philosophy reading, asking the chatbot to explain, say, Parfit’s definition of a self-effacing theory. One of my friends asked ChatGPT how to get over her ex-boyfriend. (The advice was generic but excellent.) But only one of my professors ever mentioned it: Halfway through the spring semester, my computer-science professor announced that we couldn’t use ChatGPT to complete our codes. Then he said he would rely on the honor system.

Heading into the second year of AI college, some institutions are trying to develop a less technophobic approach. According to Kathe Pelletier, a director at the tech-focused education nonprofit Educause, the most enthusiastic AI adopters tend to be public universities or community colleges that serve large, diverse student bodies and see education as a means of social mobility. Arizona State University is piloting an introductory writing course in which an AI bot offers feedback on students’ work. The class is taught to remote learners at a low cost, and the AI could allow for something like peer feedback for students who take classes alone, on their own schedule. Administrators at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville have organized a professor-led task force to suggest different ways for faculty to add generative AI to the classroom. The University of Florida launched a $70 million AI initiative in 2020 with funding from the chip-manufacturing giant Nvidia. Sid Dobrin, an English professor who is part of the initiative, says that it will sponsor a competition this year in which students can win prize money for the most creative use of generative text or image AI. These schools are preparing to feed employers’ hunger for AI-savvy graduates. “I always say: You are not going to lose your job to AI,” Dobrin told me. “You are going to lose your job to somebody who understands how to use AI.”

Other universities, however, still have no overarching institutional posture toward AI. Administrators are wary of announcing policies that could age poorly. Professors are left to figure out how to leverage the technology on their own. In its defense, this stance preserves academic autonomy and encourages experimentation. For example, the teacher of Harvard’s introductory computer-science course deployed a teaching-assistant chatbot this summer built based on OpenAI’s code. But the hands-off institutional approach also forces instructors, many of whom have yet to master the “Mute” button on Zoom, to be at the vanguard of a technology that isn’t fully understood even by the people who created it. In a recent informal poll by Educause, 40 percent of respondents said that they weren’t aware of anyone at their institution taking responsibility for decisions around how generative AI should be used. “A president or provost is thinking, Should I jump on this only to have it become the most unpopular thing in the world?” Bryan Alexander, who teaches at Georgetown University’s school of learning, design, and technology, says.

Some academics have been eager to add the alien technology to their classroom. Ted Underwood, who teaches English and information science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says that every student should learn the basics of AI ethics. He likens the topic to the tenets of democracy, which even people who won’t pursue political science need to understand. Other professors see AI as a way to enliven instruction. The new introductory writing course at the University of Utah asks students to compare sonnets written by William Shakespeare, Pablo Neruda, and ChatGPT; professors say that using an AI bot is the easiest way to generate usefully bad poems.

Another faction within academia sees generative AI as an enemy. In the age of large language models, a student’s writing assignment can no longer reliably confirm whether they’ve understood a topic or read a text. Weekly reading responses and discussion posts, once a staple of higher education, seem useless. Some instructors are trying to adopt countermeasures. One SUNY Buffalo faculty member told Kelly Ahuna that he would keep his weekly online quizzes but employ technology that tracks students’ eye movements to detect potential cheating. Others seem to hope that prohibition alone can preserve the familiar pre-ChatGPT world. Most instructors at Bryn Mawr College have declared that any use of AI tools counts as plagiarism, says Carlee Warfield, the head of the school’s honor board. Darren Hick, a philosophy professor at Furman University, told me he refuses to abandon take-home essays. In his view, in-person exams aren’t real philosophy. They leave no time for rumination and serious engagement with a thinker’s work. “It’s gimmicky,” Hick said. “My pedagogy is good, my students learn, and I don’t like the idea of having to upend what’s been a tradition in philosophy for millennia because somebody has a new technology that students can use to cheat.”

[Read: The college essay is dead]

Many of the professors and administrators I spoke with likened generative AI to earlier waves of technological change; perhaps an analogy offered perspective and solace when confronting something so mystifying. They compared it to Wikipedia (riddled with inaccuracies), to calculators (students still learn long division), and even to microwave dinners (ChatGPT’s writing is a frozen meat loaf; a student essay is a marbled steak).

But the most common comparison was to the advent of the internet. Charles Isbell, the dean of computing at Georgia Tech, points out that the web did not immediately create the kind of nightmarish scenario that people had predicted. Supersonic email exchanges didn’t scramble our brains, just as the “Undo” button hasn’t eroded our sense of consequence. For now, Isbell isn’t concerned about students cheating with AI: If they submit a ChatGPT-written essay, the errors will give them away, and if they try to avoid detection by meticulously fact-checking the chatbot’s writing, they’ll learn the material. But just like the internet, which spawned smartphones and social-media sites that few people could have foreseen, AI will undercut the most basic patterns in higher education. “It’s perfectly reasonable to hold in your head both thoughts,” Isbell told me. “It’s not going to be the big, destructive force that we think it’s going to be anytime soon. Also, higher education will be completely unrecognizable in 15 years because of this technology. We just don’t really know how.”