The Home Secretary says the breed is a clear and lethal danger, particularly to children.

The struggle over the sweeping red-state drive to roll back civil rights and liberties has primarily moved to the courts.

Since 2021, Republican-controlled states have passed a swarm of laws to restrict voting rights, increase penalties for public protest, impose new restrictions on transgender youth, ban books, and limit what teachers, college professors, and employers can say about race, gender, and sexual orientation. Some states are even exploring options to potentially prosecute people who help women travel out of state to obtain an abortion.

In the early legal skirmishing over this agenda, opponents including the federal Justice Department have won a surprising number of decisions, mostly in federal courts, blocking states from implementing the new laws.

But eventually most of these issues are likely to be resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court, and the court’s six-member Republican-appointed majority has generally ruled in ways that favor the conservative social-policy priorities reflected in the red-state actions. That inclination was most dramatically demonstrated in last year’s Dobbs decision, when the Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion.

In the coming years, the Court will face a series of decisions on the new red-state agenda that may determine whether the U.S. maintains a strong baseline of civil rights available in all states or reverts back toward a pre-1960s world where people’s rights varied much more depending on where they lived.

“The idea of the Bill of Rights was that we would have a floor of civil rights and civil liberties that the states could not go below,” David Cole, the national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, told me. “But for that floor to be meaningful, it has to be enforced by the Supreme Court ultimately.

“In our history, the courts have sometimes done that courageously and bravely, and other times they have fallen down on the job,” Cole continued. “And when they have fallen down on the job, you get a two-tier system in this country.”

Since President Joe Biden’s election, the 22 states where Republicans hold unified control of the governorship and the state legislature have moved with remarkable speed to create a two-tier system on issues including abortion, classroom censorship, and the treatment of LGBTQ people. “The fact that all of this is happening on so many different fronts simultaneously is unprecedented,” Donald Kettl, a former dean and professor emeritus of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, told me.

This broad red-state push to retrench rights, as I’ve written, is reversing the general trend since the 1960s of nationalizing more rights, a process often called “the rights revolution.”

Civil-rights advocates have limited options for reversing this tide of red-state legislation. So long as the Senate filibuster exists, Democrats have virtually no chance of passing national legislation to override the red-state actions on issues such as abortion and voting rights, even if the party regains unified control of the federal government after the 2024 elections.

[Read: Why Biden just can’t shake Trump in the polls]

In some states, opponents can try to rescind these measures directly through ballot initiatives, like the Ohio referendum that, if passed in November, would overturn the state’s six-week abortion ban. But not all states permit such referendums, and even in those that do, ballot measures to reverse many of the key red-state restrictions would face an uncertain fate given the underlying conservative lean of their electorates.

Opponents are challenging some of the new statutes in state courts. The Center for Reproductive Rights, a group that supports legal abortion, has cases pending in six states, including Ohio, Wyoming, Iowa, and Florida, arguing that abortion restrictions adopted since the Dobbs decision violate provisions in those states’ constitutions. But recent rulings by state supreme courts—in South Carolina, upholding the state’s six-week abortion ban, and in Texas, dismissing an injunction against the state’s ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors—show the limitations of relying on red-state courts to undo the work of red-state political leaders.

“Sometimes the state courts provide a sympathetic venue,” Cole said. “But oftentimes in the red states, precisely because the courts have been appointed by red-state governors and legislatures, they are not especially open to challenges to their legislature’s laws.”

That leaves federal courts as the principal arena for those hoping to overturn the restrictive red-state laws.

These federal cases raise a range of legal arguments. Mostly they revolve around the claim that the state laws violate the U.S. Constitution’s protection of free speech in the First Amendment and the due process and equal protection provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. As courts consider these claims, the key early federal rulings have covered cases involving a variety of issues.

Freedom of speech: In a striking victory for critics, a federal district judge in Florida issued two decisions blocking enforcement of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s signature Stop WOKE Act, which restricts how private employers and college and university professors talk about racial inequity. In one ruling, Judge Mark Walker called the law “positively dystopian.” He wrote: “The powers in charge of Florida’s public university system have declared the state has unfettered authority to muzzle its professors in the name of ‘freedom.’”  The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has denied DeSantis’s request to lift Walker’s injunction against the law while the case proceeds.

Federal courts have also blocked enforcement of the Florida law DeSantis signed increasing the penalties for public protest. But another federal judge has twice dismissed a case attempting to block DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” law restricting discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in K–12 classrooms. (Opponents of the law are appealing that decision.)

Litigation against the multiple red-state measures making it easier for critics to ban books in school libraries has not advanced as far. But in May, PEN America, a free-speech group, together with Penguin Random House and several authors filed a suit against Florida’s Escambia County school district over the removal of titles about people of color and LGBTQ people that could become the bellwether case.

Abortion: Though the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision preempted any frontal federal legal challenge to the state laws restricting or banning the procedure, abortion-rights supporters continue to fight elements of the new statutes.

In late July, a federal district judge blocked guidance from Raúl Labrador, the Republican attorney general of Idaho, a state that has banned abortion, warning doctors that they could be prosecuted for helping patients travel out of state to obtain the procedure. A separate federal lawsuit filed in July is challenging Idaho’s law imposing criminal penalties on adults who transport a minor out of state to obtain an abortion. The Justice Department won an injunction last year preventing Idaho from enforcing another portion of its abortion ban on the grounds that it violates federal law requiring treatment of people needing emergency care in hospitals.

“Dobbs overturned 50 years of precedent and got rid of the fundamental liberty right to abortion, but it definitely didn’t answer every question,” Amy Myrick, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told me. “And federal courts are now being faced with a public-health crisis of enormous magnitude, so at some point they will have to decide whether a ban becomes irrational if it forces patients to get sick or even die based on what a state says.”

Immigration: Another front in the red-state offensive is an increasing effort to seize control of immigration policy from the federal government. The Biden administration last week won a federal-district-court decision requiring Texas to remove a flotilla of buoys it has placed in the Rio Grande River to repel undocumented migrants (though the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals put that ruling on hold just one day later). A coalition of civil-rights groups is suing Florida in federal court over a DeSantis law making it a crime to transport an undocumented migrant in the state.

Voting: As with abortion, critics have found a legal basis to challenge only provisions at the periphery of the voting restrictions approved in most red states since 2021. Last month, the Justice Department won a federal court ruling blocking a measure that Texas had passed making it easier for officials to reject absentee ballots. In July, a federal-district-court judge upheld key components of Georgia’s 2021 law making voting more difficult, but did partially overturn that law’s most controversial element: a ban on providing food and water to people waiting in line to vote.

LGBTQ rights: Federal litigation has probably progressed most against the intertwined red-state moves to impose new restrictions on transgender people. The Biden Justice Department has joined cases seeking to overturn the red-state actions on each of the major issues.

Two federal appellate courts have blocked policies requiring transgender students to use the bathroom (or locker room) of their gender assigned at birth, while the Eleventh Circuit late last year upheld such a law in Florida. Two federal circuit courts have also blocked the enforcement of laws in Idaho and West Virginia barring transgender girls from participating on female sports teams in high school, though a lower federal court has subsequently upheld the West Virginia law.

Of all the issues affecting transgender people, litigation against the statutes passed in 22 Republican-controlled states barring gender-affirming care for minor children, even with their parents’ approval, may reach the Supreme Court first. In a flurry of decisions made mostly this summer, multiple federal district courts have issued injunctions blocking the implementation of such laws in several states. One federal appellate court has upheld such an injunction, but two others recently overturned lower-court rulings and allowed Tennessee and Alabama to put their laws into effect. (After those decisions, a federal district court last week also allowed Georgia to enforce its ban.) Such a split among circuit courts could encourage the Supreme Court to step in, as do the momentous and timely stakes for families facing choices about medical care. “For families who have adolescents who need this care, some of whom have been receiving this care, it’s a matter of family urgency,” Jennifer Pizer, the chief legal officer at Lambda Legal, a group that advocates for LGBTQ rights, told me.

Although liberal groups and the Biden administration have been heartened by many of these early rulings, they recognize that the most significant legal fights are all rolling toward the same foreboding terminus: the Supreme Court.

Over recent years, the Court has restricted the ability of blue states to impinge on rights that conservatives prize while mostly allowing red states to constrain rights that liberals prioritize. The Court has displayed the former instinct in its rulings striking down gun-control laws in blue jurisdictions, allowing religious-freedom exemptions to state civil-rights statutes, and barring public universities from using affirmative action. Conversely, the Court has loosened restrictions on red states with the Dobbs decision and the 2013 Shelby County ruling effectively revoking the Justice Department’s authority to preemptively block changes in state voting laws.

Those who see this past as prologue believe that the current Supreme Court majority may provide the red states great leeway to establish a legal regime that defines rights much more narrowly than in the rest of the country. At various points in American history, the Supreme Court has certainly done that before, most notoriously in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case, when the justices approved the system of “separate but equal” Jim Crow segregation across the South that persisted for nearly the next 70 years.

But several legal experts I spoke with said it was premature to assume that these recent rulings ensure that the Supreme Court will reflexively uphold the contemporary wave of red-state measures. Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of UC Berkeley’s law school, told me that the Court’s decisions in recent years have advanced “what’s been the conservative Republican agenda for decades: Overrule Roe v. Wade; eliminate affirmative action; protect gun rights.” It’s less clear, Chemerinsky believes, what the Court will do with this “new conservative agenda” rising from the red states. Although the six Republican-appointed justices are clearly sympathetic to conservative goals, he said, “some of what the [states] are doing is so radical, I don’t know that the Supreme Court will go along.”

The ACLU’s Cole notes that the Court appeared to move more cautiously in the term that ended in June than it did in the 2021–22 session, which concluded with the cannon shot overruling Roe. With a few prominent exceptions headlined by the decision banning affirmative action in higher education, “civil rights and civil liberties did pretty well in the Supreme Court this term,” Cole maintained. “Much is still to be determined, but I think this term showed us that you can’t just assume that this Court is going to impose right-wing results regardless of precedent.”

Conservatives remain confident that this Supreme Court majority will not reject many of these new red-state laws. They see an early signal of how some of these fights may play out in the August decision by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals allowing Alabama to enforce its law banning gender-affirming care for minors.

Written by Barbara Lagoa, who was appointed by Donald Trump, that ruling specifically cited the Supreme Court’s logic in the Dobbs case to argue that Alabama’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors would likely survive legal scrutiny. In Dobbs, the majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito said the Fourteenth Amendment did not encompass the right to abortion because there was no evidence that such a right was “deeply rooted” in American history. Likewise, Lagoa wrote of gender-affirming care that “the use of these medications in general—let alone for children—almost certainly is not ‘deeply rooted’ in our nation’s history and tradition.”

Sarah Parshall Perry, a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, predicted that such logic would ultimately persuade the conservative Supreme Court majority. “What we are seeing now is the use of the Dobbs framework in actual action,” she told me. “I think the Supreme Court quite frankly is going to be very wary of expanding Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence to rubber-stamp an experimental new treatment, especially when minor children are involved.”

The one point both sides can agree on is that the Supreme Court’s rulings on the red-state measures will represent a crossroads for the country. One path preserves the broadly consistent floor of civil rights across state lines that Americans have known since the 1960s; the other leads to a widening divergence reminiscent of earlier periods of intense separation among the states.

Kettl believes that if the Supreme Court doesn’t constrain the red states, they almost certainly will push much further in undoing the rights revolution. “We haven’t seen what the boundary of that effort will be yet,” he told me, pointing to the ordinances some Texas localities have passed attempting to bar women from driving through them to obtain an abortion out of state.

If the Supreme Court allows the red states a largely free hand to continue devising their own system of civil rights and liberties, Chemerinsky said, it will present Americans with a “profound” question:

“Will the county accept being two different countries with regard to so many of these important things, as it did with regard to other important things such as slavery and civil rights?” he said. “Or will there be a point that people will say, ‘What divides us as a country is much greater than what unites us.’ And will we start hearing the first serious calls to rethink the United States?”

My father and mother met in the winter of 1976. I’ve seen photos. There they are, looking as young and untroubled as any two high-school students on a Friday-night date. Not yet parents, not yet weighed down with the responsibility of caring for four children, both are smiling, my father standing behind my mother, who sits on a stool with her head nestled into his chest.

My parents were introduced by my father’s cousin Larry, whose easy smile and welcoming personality marked him as a charmer. Larry and my mom attended school at J. O. Johnson High in Huntsville, Alabama, where he was two years ahead of her. Intrigued by the sly older boy, my mother dated him, but after the second outing, she opted to let him down easy by introducing him to her friend Wanda. Larry, in turn, suggested that my mother meet his cousin Esau, who went to school out in the country, at Gurley High.

[Dorothy Gallagher: My father’s house]

On that first date, my mother was instantly drawn to my father’s tenderness. She would come to know him as outgoing and funny, but that night he acted shy and polite. They spent the evening parked at a drive-in movie. In the front seat, Larry and Wanda were hitting it off. Larry turned to Esau and said, “Go ahead, cousin, lean in and give her a kiss.”

My dad would have none of it. “I just met the girl,” he said. “I ain’t kissing nothing.”

After the date, my mom boasted that my dad was “the perfect gentleman.” She did not yet know that his tenderness came from grief, which lingered at the edge of his attempts at humor and charm. After a few dates, in a real show of vulnerability, he told her, “My father died a few months back. Right before he died, he told my mother that my brother Barney and I weren’t no good. I just thought that I would give you fair warning.”

Believing she could fix what is broken, my mother was hooked. Even now, knowing this man would become addicted to drugs and abuse her and her children, she is not clear on whether she should have heeded the warning, because their relationship resulted in the birth of her four children who brought her so much joy.

My dad was six feet tall, with an athletic build from his time as a basketball player, his brown skin a shade lighter than the ebony complexion I inherited from further up the family tree. He didn’t have the most expensive clothes, but they were always clean and well ironed. That tendency for cleanliness would remain until he died in 2017. According to my mom, when he was young he was “fine as the day is long, and all the girls wanted him.”

After they had dated for a few weeks, my father brought his new girl home to meet his mother, Wavon, and his grandmother Sophia. According to my mother, Sophia took one look at her and opined, “That is a very good woman right there. You don’t deserve her, Esau.” Turning to my mother, she said, “Laurie Ann, you seem like a nice girl. I would run. He’ll ruin your life the way his daddy ruined ours.” Used to barbs like this, my father didn’t defend himself. His normally wide smile tightened, and he lowered his gaze. My mother did not know how to process Sophia’s words.

They were just kids, and their courtship was brief. By the spring of 1977, my mother’s junior year, she was pregnant with my sister Latasha. They married in the summer of 1979, six months before my birth. My mother was not yet showing in the wedding pictures, but I was there, forming in her belly, when they exchanged their vows and first kiss as a married couple.

Everyone agreed that my dad was hilarious, the kind of man who has a nickname for every family member, friend, and neighbor. When he met you, he’d size you up and decide whether you were an Onion Head, a Potato Head, or even, occasionally, a Banana Head. Whatever he decided to call you, that was your name. The habit of renaming everyone he met is the one practice of his that I adopted as an adult.

A few years after their wedding, my father began working as a truck driver. He would return to the job whenever the terms of his parole did not prohibit travel out of state. Maybe he was drawn to it because driving carries with it an element of escape. He could be on the road, unconstrained by the demands of family and the limits of being poor, Black, and undereducated. He could be whoever he wanted to be to the other truckers he talked with on the CB radio. He could be gone for days at a time and return home a hero with money in his pocket.

When he came back, he told his jokes and bragged about his exploits, and we were all so happy to see him. When it was time for him to leave again, I begged my father to take me with him. I wanted to be his co-pilot, to travel with him and have adventures. He promised that one day he would take me.

When I was 8 or 9, old enough to insist, he finally relented.

I jumped up and down and ran over to my mom. “Did you hear? Did you hear? Dad and I are going on a road trip.” My mom smiled, happy to see me happy.

I packed my bag with a few outfits, my Optimus Prime Transformer toy, and my Bible. My mom came in to make sure that I had all the things I really needed, like my asthma inhaler, a toothbrush, and enough socks and underwear. While I prepared everything, my dad chatted with Latasha in the living room. She had no interest in going on the road, but she was excited to have a few days without her little brother getting on her nerves.

I had never left my hometown, nor had I ever been alone with my father for longer than it took for my mom to have a quick nap or go to the store. But I gathered my courage, doing everything I could to look like I was mature enough to handle an extended trip.

Just as I was about to head outside, he stopped me. “Son, I need to run to the store and get us snacks for the trip. Then I’ll come back and get you.”

“Sure, Dad,” I said.

While he was at the store, I reviewed the contents of my suitcase to make sure I had everything I needed. Then I went outside to wait for him. What should have been a 15-minute jaunt started to seem frighteningly long. Cars, delivery trucks, and the occasional SUV rumbled past our home, but no 18-wheelers.

After an hour, my mom came outside. She was gentle, calling me by my middle name in a silent nod to the fact that my given name, Esau, evoked too much pain. “I don’t think he’s coming back, Daniel.”

I wiped my eyes. “I know he’ll come for me. I know it.” I waited until the sun gave way, and then I wheeled my bag back inside. We did not see him again for months. He did not call or check in. One day he just returned home as if nothing had happened. I never asked to travel with him again.

There was no subtle shift or slow descent. His addiction sprang into my life fully formed, dividing the man in two. One man was the kind and funny person I loved, the other much more formidable. My mom tells me that he switched from marijuana to the hard stuff while on the road. “His trucking buddies introduced him to crack,” she said, “and he was never the same.” The drugs turned my father into something cold and terrible, a danger to my siblings, my mother, and me.

He would leave the house sometimes and return home in a rage. The slamming of the door and the barrage of profanities indicated a rough evening ahead. Inevitably, he found fault with something my mother or one of us kids had done:

Why is this house so fucking dirty all the time? Can you clean? Why does this dinner taste like shit?

And you, son, I hear you acting up in school. If I hear of that again, I am going to wear your hind out. You hear me?

What’s a matter? Why are you so quiet? You scared now? Why weren’t you scared when you were acting a fool in that school?

When he was high, he hit us whether we answered or remained silent. There was no clear path out of danger.

Kneeling at my bed every night, I prayed that God would help me grow so that I could defend my family. Too small and weak to fight back, I did what my mother taught me to do: I cried out to God. In the Bible, Esau and Jacob are brothers. Jacob is the chosen one. It is Jacob, not Esau, who wrestles with God during the night, trying to come to grips with his calling and destiny. But within the four walls of our Huntsville home, it was Esau Jr. who tussled with the Almighty.

I know many people who have struggled to believe in a God who allows such suffering, especially of innocent children. To them, my childhood pain is evidence that God either doesn’t care or isn’t powerful enough to help. Religion, they then conclude, is a false promise that keeps people shackled in fear, waiting for a salvation that never arrives.

Such criticism becomes even more urgent in Black contexts, where the question of why God didn’t intervene to end slavery sooner looms large. Where was God on the slave ships, in the cotton fields, in the courtrooms where innocent men and women were condemned to death for crimes they did not commit? Where was God when I was a child in need of his protection? There is no Black faith that doesn’t wrestle with the problem of evil.

My reply to these questions is: We who have suffered must have some say in how that suffering is interpreted. We won the right, through our scars, to discern the significance of what we endured. My grasp of that significance begins with my experiences of God when I was a child on my knees in front of my twin bed, hands clasped and eyes shut tight in prayer, repeating the simplest of prayers: “Help.”

In those prayers, God came to me not with logical explanations of the problem of evil but with his presence. When I prayed, a sensation of warmth that began in my chest moved throughout my body. The room seemed less empty. The lack of a speedy deliverance frustrated and perplexed me, but I never doubted my experiences of God. They were how I survived. God and I have been through hard times together; we have a relationship born of that intimacy. If any testimony deserves our attention, it is the large number of folks who believe there is no way to tell the Black story in the United States without affirming that God carried us through.

Those nights spent in fear set the trajectory for the rest of my life. They simplified my dreams: All I want is to love and be loved. I want to have children who go to school without shame and secrets. I never want the woman I love to have hands reaching for her with affection in one moment and malice the next. My father’s failures turned me into a family man at a young age.

Hate is such a simple emotion, and for long stretches of time it was all I felt. It provided me with a sense of clarity and moral superiority. I believed I had unraveled the world’s great mysteries by age 10. There are good guys and bad guys. My father is the latter; I will be the former.

One night when I was in seventh or eighth grade, my father returned home from yet another night of drinking and drugs and started making threats to my mom and sisters. Older now, I went to the kitchen and picked up a pot and a knife. Holding the knife in one hand and the pot in the other, I told my father, “You are not hitting anyone else in this house again.” My hands trembled. I was not sure what I would do if he decided to test my resolve. Instead he said, “Fuck you and this house,” and he stormed out.

[Read: Why is dad so mad?]

Shortly after this incident, he was arrested on a theft charge. He cycled in and out of jail for the next few years. In his absence, my mother, my siblings, and I came into ourselves. We gained confidence. He wouldn’t be in a place to harm us again.

But his constant departures and brief returns meant that for most of my childhood, my mother and her four children—Latasha, Marketha, Brandon, and I—had to go it alone in a world made to swallow up poor Black families.

Whenever my grandmother Wavon saw me, she would call me over and say, “Old man Daniel prayed three times a day,” recounting the story of my middle namesake from the Bible. She told me that Daniel was taken from his homeland in Israel and carried off into exile in Babylon. Despite all the temptations of life in a foreign land, Daniel remained faithful to God, as evidenced by his habit of praying three times a day. “Have you prayed your three times?” she’d ask.

Wavon was sharing wisdom passed to her, the best guidance she had to offer. Our family, like Daniel and his companions, lived in a land surrounded by danger on all sides. My best chance of survival was prayer to the God who rescued Daniel from the lions’ den.

This article has been adapted from Esau McCaulley’s forthcoming book, How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family's Story of Hope and Survival in the American South.

My most vivid memories of my early years at sleepaway camp, when I was 10 and 11, focus on the bizarre institution of color war. The campers were divided randomly in half for a wide-ranging competition between teams defined around no common identity, status, experience, or prior allegiance—just pure partisan competition. For one entire day, half of my bunkmates and possibly one or both of my brothers would become the sworn opposition. Despite knowing these divisions were both temporary and arbitrary, I engaged in the competition with the utmost seriousness—in relay races, basketball games, and whatever else was on the packed schedule.

At day’s close, two climactic showdowns involved the whole camp, each team gathered on opposite sides of a ball field. The first competition required us to shout self-congratulatory cheers; the victory was awarded to the team that impressed the judges as louder and, thus, more spirited. I would scream myself hoarse. The finale, a tug-of-war, relied less on an umpire’s subjective assessment. We lined up alongside a massive rope stretched across the field and pulled with all our collective might. I can still picture the anchor of my team during one of those summers, a stout boy with a low center of gravity from the oldest age group, wrapping himself with the far end of our rope, his face red from the strain. I also remember the magical feeling, after what seemed like an endless and titanic effort, when the rope began to edge slowly but decisively in our direction.

In both of those contests, my excitement and my motivation to compete rose in proportion to the size of the team I was on, despite the fact that team size was precisely what made my own contribution so much less likely to matter. This is one of the paradoxes of team competition.

Often, I recall the image of the tug-of-war, and the attendant illusion that my cheers or my exertions on the rope were making a meaningful contribution to victory, when I face an impending election season. The parallel is striking: In mass democracies, voters deliberate and agonize over their actions, exert themselves, and trumpet their allegiances, even though they understand rationally that their individual support is wildly unlikely to determine the outcome. The larger the electorate, the less our votes count. And yet we turn out most consistently when the electorate is largest, and we recall most vividly those Election Days when our votes made the least practical difference.

[Larry Schwartztol: The best way to protect elections from partisan manipulation]

In modern political life, the act of individual voting, conducted in privacy and unfettered by external constraints and pressures, is the hallmark of a democratic society. It’s most of what we mean by democracy. This one occasional exercise bears the heavy burden of representing (or even exhausting) the capacity of ordinary individuals to determine their political circumstances and participate in self-government. But it is also an exercise in which individual choices and actions hardly appear to count at all. The more ostensibly democratic a society—the more widely suffrage is extended or the more robust the turnout on Election Day—the more we as voters ought to feel effectively disenfranchised.

From the perspective of moral and political philosophy, the predicament of the individual voter in a mass election is a type of collective-action problem. Voters might be adhering to some categorical imperative to act as they wish others to do—much as they feel obligated to boycott unsavory business practices, forgo benefit from animal cruelty, or sort their recycling—even when they don’t expect their individual act to have any practical impact, and even when they could simply become free riders on the boycotts or recycling efforts of others.

I imagine that there are voters out there for whom such philosophical considerations come into play, reassuring them or even animating them. Likely for others, the mere possibility (reinforced by the occasional example from a local election) that an outcome could be determined by the action of one voter provides enough motivation. But more commonly, voters adopt other strategies to augment the puny power of our individual ballot. They may try to persuade others to vote, or to vote a certain way, and donate money to organizations that will try to mobilize or influence multiple voters. (For many Americans, and not just the wealthy and incorporated, individual donations have supplanted individual votes as expressions of voter preference and mechanisms for participating in electoral politics.) Others try to maximize the effects of their votes by registering, if they can legally do so, in competitive districts or smaller states where the odds of casting a single decisive straw might be marginally higher. I myself have done all of these things.

These efforts resemble shouting louder or pulling harder at the end of color war; they are desperate attempts to be more than just a solitary voice or a lone body in the massive crowd. But what I recall from those childhood experiences is less some concern about the size of my contribution than the attraction and excitement of belonging to such a large, competitive undertaking. Similarly, for many voters, the sense of participating in a huge partisan battle, more than anything else, may make them feel (typically with the help of some magical thinking) that their votes count.

U.S. party politics offers voters this kind of opportunity. Though partisan remains a slur in our political discourse, partisan feelings are as powerful and pervasive in this country today as at any point in the past century. Despite the current disrepute and relative weakness of the major party organizations, party-line voting is on the rise. Large aggregate shifts in partisan vote from one election to another within communities and regions have become so uncommon that we speak with confidence of red and blue states or counties. Notwithstanding misgivings about the two parties, most U.S. voters gravitate to one of two teams, even if they register as independent. And the competition between those teams fully structures and conditions U.S. politics.

The history of this development is deep and complex. Not all democracies have two-party systems, and nothing in the U.S. Constitution mandates parties at all—most of the Founders abhorred factionalism and expected the new republic to avoid party formation. As ideological differences within George Washington’s cabinet crystallized, though, parties quickly formed, and we’ve had some version of them ever since. But the modern two-party system, with national competition, grassroots organization, and intense loyalty, emerged in the early 1830s. It was initiated by Martin Van Buren when he built the Democratic Party around the presidency of Andrew Jackson—while Jackson’s opponents followed suit and created their own rival organization, the Whigs. Over the next decade, party labels became what they have been ever since: core forms of identity, usually passed down from generation to generation, connecting masses of strangers to one another well beyond a single election season. By 1847, a Whig editor could describe partisanship as the animating emotional force in American electoral politics. With party divisions, he wrote, “pride, emulation, the desire of distinction, the contagious sympathy with numbers, and that disguised form of self-love, the esprit de corps, all concur to swell the tide of feeling, until the desire of party success becomes the master passion of the human breast.” Not patriotism, honor, or sense of justice, but rather partisan desire.

Van Buren defended his two-party system (which he claimed was simply a revival of an ideological division that had always existed) on broader grounds, but a crucial consideration was his desire to forestall sectional division and protect the institution of slavery. His system took shape against the backdrop of Nat Turner’s rebellion in Virginia, Britain’s abolition of slavery in the West Indies, the beginnings of radical abolitionism in the U.S. North, and other warning signs in the early 1830s of a political threat to the practice of slaveholding. Without competition between two national parties, Van Buren wrote, “geographical divisions founded on local interests or, what is worse prejudices between free & slaveholding states will inevitably take their place.” Around the figure of Jackson, a slaveholding southerner who appealed to northern and western voters on other grounds, Van Buren built a Democratic Party dominated by defenders of slavery while effectively forcing Jackson’s opponents to organize against him on a nationwide basis, giving them incentives to avoid slavery politics altogether.

Van Buren’s system achieved its objectives for a couple of decades, until it collapsed into civil war. But the culture of partisan competition that Van Buren had championed outlived both the political crisis that it was designed to avert and the institution it was intended to protect. Despite realignments leading up to the war and a massive influx of new voters in its aftermath, intense two-party competition soon settled back into familiar antebellum patterns and continued to structure American politics. Democrats and Republicans nominated candidates, framed policy debates, motivated and disciplined voters, and furnished the very ballots with which the right of suffrage was exercised. Voters saw elections (on most occasions) as a choice between two parties and experienced Election Day as a contest between two powerful teams. Van Buren’s hopes that national parties would produce sectional harmony had been dashed, but his vision of those parties animating and mobilizing masses of ordinary men as they went to the polls endured.

In the early 20th century, however, the major political parties suffered a heavy blow. Progressive reformers, with the support of big-business interests, introduced neutral ballots, private voting, direct election of senators, ballot initiatives, the professionalized civil service, and other core features of modern U.S. politics. These reforms, along with more high-profile crusades for immigration restriction, the banning of alcohol, and women’s suffrage, all had the intended effect of diminishing the power of political parties over electoral outcomes and limiting their control over public policy. The adjective partisan acquired ever more negative connotations, and parties became institutions from which the democratic process needed to be protected.

And yet the two-party system persisted. Despite additional realignments over the past century, nationwide competition between Republicans and Democrats still structures and constrains both elections and government policy to a degree that sets the United States apart from many other nations. Control of the presidency, Congress, and every state legislature in the country is determined by an electoral contest between the two major parties. Third parties and independent candidacies remain at least as marginal today as they were before the Progressive reforms.

Just as significant, the passions of partisan identification that first appeared in the decades before the Civil War are alive and well in our political culture. Modern parties may have been designed in large part around the abortive and discredited goal of avoiding a reckoning over slavery, and they flourished in an era when electoral politics was a male privilege and voting a display of masculinity, but almost two centuries and many constitutional amendments later, partisan competition continues to fulfill one of its other original purposes: It enables a mass electorate to feel emotionally connected to and invested in democratic government.

[From the 2008 issue: The case for partisanship]

Ordinary American voters today proclaim their passionate investments from their virtual rooftops, and generally behave more like sports fans than like jurors: They boldly predict results, wager money, emblazon other people’s names on their chest and property, bask in the reflected glory of their candidates’ victories, and occasionally cut off reflected failure by disowning the losing side or blaming someone on the team for the loss. The sports fans they resemble are neither the hobbyists who follow athletic spectacles for entertainment’s sake or to acquire and display expertise, nor the hooligans who take the action on the field as license to enact other kinds of violent antagonism, but rather the partisan fans who root deeply for one team and imagine their support as somehow part of the competition.

This sense of belonging to a political team, a fundamentally abstract but variously embodied entity whose successes and failures reflect the efforts of individual voters and supporters, does lots of emotional work around elections. Some observers might see it as evidence of the trivialization of politics as spectator sport. Others might lament a distressing tribalization in American life. I’m more sympathetic. A democratic process with hundreds of millions of participants is daunting and potentially disempowering. Recognizing our individual efforts in a mass election as part of a team project, as so many American voters have done in the past, is not purely spectatorial and is not purposelessly tribal. It is a reasonable means (perhaps even a necessary means) of motivating the forms of participation that mass elections, by definition, both require and discourage. We are all more likely to vote, donate, and otherwise contribute to the outcomes of elections when we feel like part of a team. Imagining ourselves tugging on the massive rope that extends across the country in November requires a bit of magical thinking, but that might be what our political system demands and rewards. And in the 21st century, with the differences between the two parties so stark and significant and the stakes of these partisan contests so grave, we desperately need that kind of thinking.

William Safire wrote in the introduction to his classic compendium Lend Me Your Ears that “what makes a draft speech a real speech is the speaking of it.” But I’ve found that some of the most interesting speeches written were never delivered at all. I spent years collecting examples of the words that went unspoken because events intervened, or a leader had a change of heart, or history took a sudden turn.

Last year, shortly after leaving my role as a special assistant and senior speechwriter for President Joe Biden, I published them as a book. For 19 of the speeches I wrote about—all historically significant, many previously unseen—I could offer readers the full text of what might have been. The 20th remained elusive.

[From the September 2021 issue: What Bobby McIlvaine left behind]

I first learned of its existence in 2004, from a report in The Washington Post. “Top Focus Before 9/11 Wasn’t on Terrorism; Rice Speech Cited Missile Defense,” the front-page headline read. The story by Robin Wright detailed a speech that was to have been delivered by President George W. Bush’s national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, on September 11, 2001. In the excerpts published by the Post, she seemed dismissive of the threat of terrorism: “We need to worry about the suitcase bomb, the car bomb and the vial of sarin released in the subway, [but] why put deadbolt locks on your doors and stock up on cans of mace and then decide to leave your windows open.”

But the Post hadn’t seen the full speech, and assessing the excerpts without their full context was difficult. In 2019, as I began working on my book in earnest, I filed a FOIA request, which yielded ancillary materials used in the creation of the speech, but not the text itself. I then requested relevant documents from the files of the man who’d drafted the speech. That, too, was denied. I appealed last September. And a month ago, I finally received the drafts and read the speech that the public never heard, and whose authors tried so hard to forget had ever existed.

What I found was more measured and more thoughtful than I had expected. It also held some surprises. As we mark the 22nd anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the speech might be more relevant than at any time since the morning on which it was suddenly scrapped.

On August 6, 2001, Matthew Waxman, who was serving as Rice’s executive assistant, tapped out an email to John Gibson, the National Security Council’s director for foreign-policy speechwriting. “DCR would like to change the focus of the Rostov Lecture,” he wrote. “Instead of focusing on the unilateralism/isolationism issue, she’d like to speak on missile defense … She wants to emphasize that missile defense is one part of a larger effort to transform the relationship w/Russia. As she says it, ‘lets take a shot at 10 years of calling it the post-Cold-War era.’ It’s time to move beyond.”

Gibson turned to Bob Joseph, who was serving as the NSC’s senior director for proliferation strategy, and asked him to put together a draft that would reflect the limited guidance they had. (Like other Bush-administration officials named in this story, Gibson did not respond to my request to speak about the preparation of the speech.)

“We really ought to use this opportunity to do something we’ve never done in the President’s speeches and statements on this: take on the countervailing arguments,” Gibson wrote. “The president’s speeches on this have been very good in making an affirmative case for why he’s right and this speech should also, but I think it would greatly benefit by fully acknowledging and dealing with the other side … By not doing it on this issue, I think we have not only failed to score substantive points but have also reinforced some negative impressions of the President – i.e., when you don’t take people’s arguments on, it reinforces a charge of arrogance and unilateralism.” Gibson also noted that the Rostov Lecture, held at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, “is a fairly big deal, serious talk.” And he reminded everyone of the timeline to get it written; Rice would be delivering it on September 10, 2001. He was off by a day. The speech was actually scheduled for September 11.

Conventional wisdom holds that the threat of massive retaliation is the only thing stopping a nuclear attack on America. This is the doctrine of mutual assured destruction, or MAD.

But a small group of policy makers disagree, emphasizing instead the potential of missile defense. The idea really entered the public conversation in 1983, when President Ronald Reagan called for the use of ground- and space-based systems to shield the United States against a first-strike missile attack. The goal, he said, was to make “nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.” Reagan called the plan the Strategic Defense Initiative. But it was largely theoretical, dependent on yet-to-be-invented technologies such as X-ray lasers powered by nuclear explosions. Senator Ted Kennedy derisively described these ideas as “reckless Star Wars schemes.” The nickname stuck.

Research and investment in missile defense did move forward, but because of the technical complexity of such systems (the analogy most often used was “hitting a bullet with a bullet”), support for long-range missile defense was more about ideological positioning than practical

deployment. And the ideology, in the words of Reagan’s secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger, was “a radical rejection of benign acquiescence in mutual assured destruction.”

But even if the cost could be borne and the technical and political hurdles overcome, a geopolitical hurdle would remain. In 1972, the United States became a signatory to the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which was explicitly designed to prevent countries from building missile defenses. The philosophy behind the treaty was that no defense would be perfect, so any missile defense would simply force adversaries to build up their missile offenses, leading to endless arms escalation.

Although the treaty became a cornerstone of American foreign policy, and several follow-on agreements reduced nuclear arsenals, many conservative policy makers remained adamant that the ABM was dangerously outdated, because it didn’t account for ballistic missiles in the hands of rogue states or actors.

One of those policy makers was Donald Rumsfeld, who served as secretary of defense under President Gerald Ford and returned to that role under President George W. Bush. In 1998, Rumsfeld chaired a commission to assess the ballistic-missile threat to the United States, and though the findings of the report it produced were controversial, it stated that a rogue ballistic-missile threat could emerge sooner than previously thought. One month later, North Korea launched a missile that was intended to put a payload into orbit (a necessary precursor to an intercontinental ballistic missile), further stoking those fears.

When President Bush came into office in 2001, his foreign-policy team was focused on the linked goals of withdrawing America from the ABM Treaty and building an effective missile-defense system. In a speech to the National Defense University four months after his election, Bush made the case for building a missile-defense system (despite the immature technology) and for the need to “move beyond the constraints of the 30-year-old ABM Treaty.”

Secretary of State Colin Powell remained skeptical, preferring to bring allies along rather than act rashly and unilaterally in scrapping the treaty. Nor did he see much of a rush: Missile defense remained unproven, controversial, and costly.

However, Powell was being outmaneuvered by Rice. From the moment she was named national-security adviser, Rice staked out a role that made her both more of a policy architect and more of a policy advocate than many of her predecessors were. Indeed, Rice, not Powell, became the Bush administration’s first top foreign-policy official to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a departure from traditional protocol that hadn’t occurred since Henry Kissinger served as national-security adviser. Similarly, Rice, not Powell, gave the major speech laying out the administration’s foreign policy. And Rice was the one now preparing to deliver the Rostov Lecture.

On September 9, 2001, Rice appeared on Meet the Press to argue that it “would not be … responsible of the president of the United States to not respond to that threat” of ballistic missiles.

The guest who followed her was Joe Biden, then the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Biden proceeded to deconstruct Rice’s argument, passionately arguing that missile defense “will not protect us from cruise missiles. It will not protect us from something being smuggled in. It will not protect us from an atom bomb in the rusty hull of a ship coming into a harbor. It will not protect us from anthrax … all of which the Defense Department says are much more likely threats than somebody sending an ICBM with a return address on it.”

The next day, in a speech at the National Press Club, Biden pressed the point further, arguing that “missile defense has to be weighted carefully against all other spending and all other military priorities … In truth, our real security needs are much more earthbound and far less costly than missile defense.”

(Biden’s words sounded especially prescient in retrospect; in the 10 days that followed his appearance, America experienced not just the attacks of September 11 but also a series of deadly anthrax attacks on the offices of two Democratic senators and several news outlets.)

At that moment, another factor was in play: The Bush presidency was foundering. Bush’s policies had driven Senator Jim Jeffords to switch parties, throwing control of the Senate to Democrats and hobbling the president’s legislative agenda. The Dow had dropped by nearly 10 percent since Bush had taken office, unemployment was on the rise, and a poll that appeared on the front page of The Washington Post found that a majority of Americans no longer approved of his signature tax cut. Republican senators were claiming that the Bush administration’s foreign policy lacked a big picture.

In this context, a strong statement on missile defense felt like it could satisfy both the policy goals of the true missile-defense believers and the political goals of providing strength, clarity, and direction.

The initial draft, prepared by John Rood and Bob Joseph, arrived in Gibson’s email on September 7. In order to make the argument against the ABM Treaty, it first credentialed Rice as one of its biggest proponents.

I was one of the High Priestesses of Arms Control; a true believer. I had little doubt that sound, verifiable arms agreements were a way the world could avoid the Apocalypse. Like so many others, I eagerly anticipated those breathtaking moments of summitry where the centerpiece was always the signing of the latest arms control treaty; the toast; the handshake, and, with Brezhnev, the bear hug. For those precious few minutes the world found comfort in seeing the superpowers affirm their peaceful intent. And the scientists would set the clock back a few minutes further away from midnight. Deep down we knew that arms control was a poor substitute for a real shared agenda based on common aspirations. But it was the best way anyone could think of regulating the balance of terror.

Her authority thus established, Rice turned to explain why those agreements were no longer relevant, why those handshakes and toasts were worthless, and why it was time to pursue missile defense in a robust way, replacing a reliance on treaties and multilateral agreements with a comprehensive strategy to deal with proliferation.

The section that followed, however, failed to deliver that comprehensive strategy, or much of a strategy at all. It enumerated the treaties the administration supported that were currently in force, and then attacked the Clinton administration for its approach to these agreements.

That Administration often signed treaties that it knew the U.S. Senate would never approve of for ratification. At other times, it justified its signature of flawed agreements as necessary to enable it to seek changes to the documents later. In the private sector, no one believes that signing a contract is the best way to get it changed. This is true of treaties as well.

In short, we will not sign treaties that do not serve our national interests. It is not isolationist to suggest that the United States has a special role in the world and should not adhere to every international convention or agreement that someone thinks to propose. Going along with the crowd is not leadership.

An additional point the initial draft made was that the pursuit of missile defense would not stand in the way of protecting against “other means of delivering a WMD payload to the United States, such as a terrorist using a suitcase or car bomb.” By the time the draft reached its fourth iteration, that idea had shrunk to a couple of paragraphs.

Gibson thought the draft was a strong start, although he asked pointed questions—for example, was the “2.5 percent of the defense budget” that was cited as the cost the total, or a downpayment on some tests? If the latter, he thought that shouldn’t be buried rhetorically, but stated clearly, as “a very modest payment to at least find out what we can do.”

He worked to more thoroughly dismantle arguments in favor of the ABM Treaty. One line of argument—“If the ABM Treaty had never existed, no serious person would urge us to create such an agreement today”—was consistent in each successive draft.

However, the next line fell out. “Yet serious people do defend the treaty—with an attachment that almost seems theological.” Gibson seems to have recognized the irony of mocking an excess of belief while promoting a technology that required a leap of faith.

But Gibson thought that the draft was missing some of the “strong leadership” points he wanted to make. So the subsequent iterations (I was able to review four drafts in all) sharpened their criticism of treaties, noting:

The United States is a signatory to over 50 conventions and treaties that still await ratification … Many were designed even though—or even worse, because their ratification prospects were so grim … The United States is a great power. We have been for a century. Today, we occupy a position on the global stage that can only be described as singular. Our interests span every time zone. Nothing anytime soon is going to change that fact. And it is neither isolationist—nor unilateralist—to suggest that we have to adhere to every international convention and agreement that someone thinks to propose.

One of the documents that appears in the speech file seems to be an attempt to buttress that call for leadership. It’s a series of quotes from President Harry Truman on the importance of leaders doing what is right, polls be damned, including this choice one:

How far would Moses have gone if he had taken a poll in Egypt? What would Jesus Christ have preached if he had taken a poll in the land of Israel? What would have happened to the Reformation if Martin Luther had taken a poll? It isn’t polls or public opinion of the moment that counts. It’s right and wrong and leadership.

If one of the goals of Rice’s speech was to burnish Bush’s leadership bona fides, a quote from a president that served to put Bush in the company of Moses, Jesus, and Martin Luther wouldn’t have hurt.

No Truman quote, however, made it into any of the drafts that I was able to gain access to. Gibson did write his own version of that idea, in what reads today as a powerful—but tragically ironic—line:

Once you strip away the myths, misconceptions, shibboleths, I think the argument becomes pretty simple. If you think the threat is real—and it is—and if you think we have the technology to protect ourselves against the threat—and a robust testing program will tell us—then don’t you have an obligation to move forward? Would it be gross malfeasance to take a pass? Five, ten, fifteen years from now—following some catastrophic event—I certainly would not want to be in the position of having to answer why, in the face of these facts and these arguments, I urged a course of inaction. And I won’t.

Of course, the defining catastrophic event of a young century was already in motion.

On the morning of September 11, Gibson was going back and forth with Rice on final edits.

Interestingly, none of the four drafts I was able to access included the lines that appeared so damning in the excerpts that were leaked years later to The Washington Post. (They were apparently added between the fourth and final drafts.)

Rice was in her office at 8:46 a.m. when her assistant told her that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. Like most Americans, Rice thought it was a horrible accident. She was in her regular 9 a.m. staff meeting when her assistant rushed in: A second plane had hit the other tower of the World Trade Center.

Even in the midst of world-changing events, many speechwriters are afflicted with a project-based myopia, trying to figure out if a speech will still happen and, if so, how much of it will need to be rewritten. In a conversation we had years ago, Gibson remembered keeping his phone on throughout the afternoon, wondering if the speech would still be given and awaiting any additional edits, even as it became clear that the United States had suffered its most devastating attack since the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor.

The speech he wrote was never delivered.

Seven months after September 11, Rice finally gave the Rostov Lecture. Her new speech showed just how quickly and completely the world had changed.

Rice spoke almost exclusively about the administration’s anti-terrorism efforts. The only mention of missile defense was a reference to using “every tool at our disposal to meet this grave global threat.” There was no need to rhetorically manufacture strong leadership against the theoretical threat of missiles when President Bush had seized the opportunity—from atop a smoldering pile of rubble at Ground Zero and in the well of the House of Representatives—to demonstrate that toughness against the clear and present threat of terrorism.

Rice celebrated the international cooperation, intelligence sharing, and multilateral partnerships required to effectively prosecute the War on Terror—the very relationships her earlier, undelivered speech had been set to diminish, if not dismiss outright.

According to the Washington Post article that broke the story about the original speech, administration officials said that the speech Rice ultimately delivered did not contain any of the original text. However, that wasn’t quite accurate. One phrase appeared in both drafts: “tectonic plates.”

In the original speech, Rice was to have chided supporters of the ABM for “a failure to recognize that the tectonic plates of history really have shifted.” In the remarks she ultimately delivered in April 2002, she said, “An earthquake of the magnitude of 9/11 can shift the tectonic plates of international politics.”

[From the September 2021 issue: 9/11 was a warning of what was to come]

Today, there are those such as James Acton, who leads the nuclear-policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who argue that America’s withdrawal from the ABM, which formally took place in December 2001, has failed to yield a system that could protect us from a rogue state such as North Korea. It has, however, fueled a new arms race, encouraging Russia to develop new nuclear-delivery systems, such as intercontinental hypersonic gliders, and China to arm some ICBMs with multiple warheads. In that sense, our withdrawal may have intensified the very threat its proponents claimed it would counteract.

It’s fitting that the only phrase that survives both drafts is “tectonic plates.” After all, the historical lesson and the geological lesson are one and the same, one that has the power to shake our world: Tectonic plates are always shifting.

NEW DELHI (AP) — President Joe Biden goes Sunday to a Vietnam that's looking to dramatically ramp up trade with the United States — a sign of how competition with China is reshaping relationships across Asia.

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