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Eminent legal scholars think the Constitution makes Donald Trump ineligible for office; critics of the idea worry that using the Fourteenth Amendment will create an uncontrollable political weapon.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Explore The Atlantic’s guide to privacy. America gave up on the best home technology there is. Three myths and four truths about how to get happier

A Constitutional Dilemma

For weeks, legal scholars and public intellectuals have been debating whether Donald Trump is constitutionally ineligible to run for president again. Six voters in Colorado filed a lawsuit last week that will test this theory. If you’re confused, or uncertain whether this is a good idea, join the club: I change my mind about it roughly once every 12 hours.

Let’s review some basic civics. Here’s Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, passed by the U.S. Senate in 1866:

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.

At the time, the section’s intention was to prevent the secessionists of the Civil War from walking right back into power in the states where they’d just been defeated. Confederate states were required to ratify this amendment as a condition for regaining representation in the American legislature, and it was finally ratified in the summer of 1868.

Two of America’s great legal minds, the retired conservative federal judge Michael Luttig and the liberal law professor Laurence Tribe, have argued that Section 3 automatically renders Trump ineligible for office. “The clause,” they wrote in The Atlantic last month, “was designed to operate directly and immediately upon those who betray their oaths to the Constitution, whether by taking up arms to overturn our government or by waging war on our government by attempting to overturn a presidential election through a bloodless coup.”

January 6 was a violent attempt to overthrow the constitutional order, for which many people have been convicted of seditious conspiracy. Many more have gone to prison for their actions at the Capitol that day. And they were all there at the urging of Donald Trump, who is now under criminal indictment for multiple felonies stemming from this attempt to subvert American democracy.

I am convinced by this reasoning. Case closed. Take Trump’s name off the ballots.

Well … not so fast. My friend and colleague David Frum believes that all of this talk about using the Fourteenth Amendment is “a fantasy.” David’s argument is that the amendment is, if not an anachronism, a peculiar part of our Constitution whose meaning was clear in 1866 but whose relevance has passed. He warns us not to think of Section 3 as a quick and easy “cheat code” that can obviate Trump’s renomination.

David raises some important practical questions. For one thing, who will make the determination that January 6 was “an insurrection or rebellion”? I think it was, but until things change in this country, The Tom Nichols Institute of Constitutional Adjudication has no power to make its very sensible rulings stick as a matter of law. (Also, I should perhaps point out that Trump has pleaded not guilty in all four indictments.)

Luttig and Tribe assert that Section 3 does not explicitly require such convictions or determinations, but that’s because in 1866 the “rebellion” was obviously the Civil War and the Union Army, as the local authority in the rebellious states, made the on-site determination of who could run for office. David’s correct to predict that invalidating Trump’s candidacy based on “aid and comfort” to an “insurrection” would plunge the country into eternal litigation about what, exactly, all those words mean.

Likewise, how would Trump actually be removed from the election? There is no single national “ballot”; Democratic secretaries of state would have to strike his name from their state ballots, after which Joe Biden would win the Electoral College. But as David writes, Biden would only be “kind of” reelected, in a result that nearly half the country would view as illegitimate. “The rage and chaos that would follow,” he warns, “are beyond imagining.”

David makes a political point that is also worth at least some concern. “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.”

Lest anyone think Republicans would have enough sense to forgo weaponizing important parts of the U.S. Constitution merely for trollish political theater, let us note that as of this morning, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has ordered up an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. This effort will likely backfire on Republicans (if it even gets out of committee), as would attempts to remove Democrats from ballots on a Section 3 objection. But clogging the courts with inane Republican lawsuits would be another deep bruise on the American constitutional system of government.

What a killjoy. Because after reviewing his arguments, I now agree with David.

By temperament, I was overall more inclined to agree with David’s prudential arguments anyway. But Luttig and Tribe make a simple and forceful point that still sticks in my teeth: The Constitution says what it says, and it doesn’t stop saying it just because enforcing it would be hard to do or because bad actors will use it for political mischief.

Indeed, fidelity to the Constitution should be the core of principled opposition to Donald Trump’s continued presence in our public life. Of course, he’s unfit for office for many reasons; he’s vulgar and ignorant and narcissistic, but so are many other people who have made their way into elected office. The singular danger that unites so many of Trump’s opponents, however, is that he has shown himself to be an avowed enemy of democracy, the rule of law, and the Constitution of the United States. How can we flinch now?

And yet I, too, am hesitant to open a legal Pandora’s box. It might not be constitutionally pure to worry about things such as protracted lawsuits and cheap Republican stunts, but the nature of our current political troubles demands a decisive and final answer to Trump’s attempts to destroy the Constitution, and here David makes the strongest of all possible points: The only sure way to stop Trump is with a resounding and undeniable defeat at the ballot box.

Related:

The Constitution prohibits Trump from ever being president again. The Fourteenth Amendment fantasy

Today’s News

Five former Memphis police officers have been indicted on federal criminal charges in connection with Tyre Nichols’s death. At least 5,000 people are dead and thousands more are believed to be missing after severe flooding and dam collapses in Libya. The United States and Iran are moving forward with a prisoner-swap deal. Five American citizens will be released in exchange for five Iranian citizens and the release of $6 billion in frozen Iranian funds.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf compiles reader perspectives on whether racial “color-blindness” is possible.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Photo-illustration by Vartika Sharma. Sources: Steve Pyke / Getty; Harry Borden / Contour by Getty.

From Feminist to Right-Wing Conspiracist

By Helen Lewis

In 2019, a mnemonic began to circulate on the internet: “If the Naomi be Klein / you’re doing just fine / If the Naomi be Wolf / Oh, buddy. Ooooof.” The rhyme recognized one of the most puzzling intellectual journeys of recent times—Naomi Wolf’s descent into conspiracism—and the collateral damage it was inflicting on the Canadian climate activist and anti-capitalist Naomi Klein.

Until recently, Naomi Wolf was best known for her 1990s feminist blockbuster The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, which argued that the tyranny of grooming standards—all that plucking and waxing—was a form of backlash against women’s rights. But she is now one of America’s most prolific conspiracy theorists, boasting on her Twitter profile of being “deplatformed 7 times and still right.” She has claimed that vaccines are a “software platform” that can “receive ‘uploads’ ” and is mildly obsessed with the idea that many clouds aren’t real, but are instead evidence of “geoengineered skies.” Although Wolf has largely disappeared from the mainstream media, she is now a favored guest on Steve Bannon’s podcast, War Room.

All of this is particularly bad news for Klein, for the simple reason that people keep mistaking the two women for each other.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

I was born at the dawn of the 1960s, and I came of age in the 1970s. I am too young to remember much of the ’60s—well, except that I was completely nuts about the original Batman TV series—and the less said about the ’70s, the better. My time was the ’80s: MTV, new wave, Hill Street Blues and Cheers on television, Stripes and Ghostbusters at the theater. And Ronald Reagan—for whom I voted, but we’re all friends here, so let’s not open that can of worms.

That’s why it’s been such a joy to discover a TV show I somehow missed when it came out in 2014: Red Oaks, a coming-of-age series whose first of three seasons is set in 1985. The title refers to a Jewish country club in New Jersey, where young David Meyers works as an assistant tennis pro while trying to figure out his life. It’s funny, and it’s sweet without being cloying, especially when Paul Reiser, as the club president, counteracts the sugar with desert-dry sarcasm. The musical choices are perfect 1980s archeology: Love and Rockets, Culture Club, Roxy Music, and even a one-hit wonder from Roger Hodgson that I thought no one remembered but me.

I haven’t finished the series yet, but I’m taking my time. I was just a shade older than David Meyers and his friends in 1985, and I’m enjoying revisiting some good years back there.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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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 asked, “What roles should ‘color-blindness’ and race-consciousness play in personal interactions?”

Replies have been edited for length and clarity.

Adam is of two minds:

The phrase “I don’t see color” is deservedly a joke; it’s hard to imagine growing up in America and never noticing the racial category that society has placed the person into. Occasionally, that awareness is helpful. I might have doubted a Black friend’s stories of discrimination if I didn’t have an awareness of her race and what that can mean. But, as a white person, color and race are not things I usually try to think about when I’m talking to individuals. I thought it was a good thing when, after moving to an urban area with a racially diverse population, I realized that I no longer always took note of the racial composition of the passengers when I rode city buses. To me, keeping race in the forefront of personal interactions is more likely to lead to false assumptions than real understanding.

And who prefers to be treated as a type?

So long as race means something in our society, and means something to individuals, it’s something to keep in mind. But kept in mind too much, it can create distance, not understanding.

Jaleelah believes that Americans and Canadians tend to approach interpersonal interactions differently:

This question only makes sense in the context of the U.S.A.’s “melting pot,” which replaces ethnocultural identity with racial identity. Slaves and their descendants did not choose to give up their heritage, but many white and Asian immigrants did: They either assimilated happily or assimilated to avoid discrimination. The “melting pot” framework creates taboos against asking people where they are from and being curious about their unique cultures. It dictates that people of all ethnicities should be treated as Americans, and that inquiring about their non-American ancestors and traditions is a rude form of questioning their Americanness. But while the melting pot can blur cultural differences, it cannot obscure the fact that people from different ethnic groups look different. That is why race’s role in American interpersonal interactions needs to be explored.

Ethnicity is much more relevant than race when it comes to casual conversation. In Toronto, which is highly multicultural, asking where someone is from is practically a standard icebreaker. Of course the conversation that ensues will include speaking about ethnicity. There’s nothing wrong with that. It doesn’t “divide people”; it just helps us share basic parts of our lives and selves. Canada’s “mosaic” model makes it easier to perceive different cultural histories and values as beneficial to the identity of the country as a whole.

Karen struggles with how best to interact in Canada:

My prior hairdresser hated that people kept asking her where she was from. She was a person of colour, but she was fifth-generation Canadian on one side and seventh-generation on the other—deeply Canadian, indeed, in a country that continues to experience significant immigration. I am an immigrant—but from the U.S.A., and white, so mostly invisible. My hairdresser’s unfailing answer was “I’m from Victoria (B.C.),” and if people kept pressing, as they often did, with “But where are your parents from?,” she’d just repeat “Victoria.”

My daughter-in-law, when asked about this response, said, “I disagree, at least for myself. I like to tell people about my heritage (which is Malaysian Chinese on the one side, and Filipino on the other). I’m proud of my background.” She feels this way despite receiving significant, sometimes very overt racist comments, and despite people often assuming she is her own children’s nanny, not their mother, since, unless observed closely, her children, my grandchildren, look white. These comments hurt her, and make her angry, but don’t change her desire to discuss her background forthrightly.

It is polite in our First Nations context to describe one’s origins in the process of introductions, which in my case, allows me to say I am mostly of Northern European settler stock. Where appropriate, I can mention my plantation-owning, slave-owning maternal ancestors. But this is mostly not appropriate in majority-white contexts—people look at me like, “Why are you bringing this up?” The answer, of course, is that I am attempting to honestly locate myself as a person who has benefitted from centuries of unjust acquisition and privilege. Colour-blindness in my case would be incredibly self-serving.

Given that I live in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, where as of 2021, over 54 percent of the inhabitants were visible minorities—meaning, of course, that people of colour as a whole are a majority of our population—this question [of where a person is from] is a vexing one. I tend to ask other questions now, assuming that those who want to tell me more will do so. And I tolerate a degree of chronic anxiety about getting it right, not least because it mirrors what people of colour have [to contend with] all the time, even in a majority people-of-colour city, when dealing with us white people. Finally, most of the people of colour I meet are very gracious about all of this, so long as they can assume that one is trying to understand and engage out of a position of humility and human interest.

John describes another approach:

I’m not color-blind; I’m conscious of your race. I just don’t care. Do you want to go fishing with me this weekend? If so, I could use the help on deck. Do you want to get out of the house and go see the world, from my boat or the windshield of the truck on the way to go hunting? Then you are in. Do you want to talk about fishing for hours, comparing tactics and past success? Then we are friends. In fact, I could simplify. Are you a friendly person? If you don’t have too many friends already (and nobody has too many friends), I’m in.

On several of these trips, the subject of race has come up. And I’m better for it. I’m sure this sounds clichéd, but unless you meet people where they are, you might never know.

Jake lays out a case against interpersonal color-blindness:

Racism still affects individuals; these experiences become part of their identity, and you can’t fully understand the person without understanding that. By analogy, having been raised Mormon or being a former Division 1 athlete or having a disability will color one’s experience in a way that makes it impossible to know someone without understanding the implications.

But what logically follows departs from the constant centering of race as progressives sometimes practice it. First, this should only begin to matter if you’re close friends with someone—if you’re trying to actually know and understand them. Interactions with strangers truly should be color-blind. Second, there’s not really a need to proactively bring up a person’s identity. One should familiarize oneself—from pop culture, literature, and patient friends— with what it means to be Black or Asian or Hispanic or Indigenous (or gay or trans or a woman or disabled) to be a good citizen and a good (potential) friend to those who have those identities. But the effect should be on how one listens and reacts, not approval-seeking or showing off of how educated and understanding you are.

The goal of interpersonal non-color-blindness is to reduce gaps of understanding as much as possible, but also having the discipline to make it about making others feel more comfortable rather than making oneself seem cultured. Put that way, any excesses can be self-correcting: If part of life as a person of color in America is dealing with overbearing apologetic white people, those who care should understand that and take it into account.

Maureen argues that “color-blindness has no role in personal relationships.” She writes:

Color-blindness diminishes the enormously valuable lessons history has taught each race; it ignores the cultural treasures unique to each race; it requires us to be blind to our own race, whatever it may be, and thus, the gifts we can offer others. Race-consciousness, on the other hand, opens wide the gates of understanding. Awareness of our inherent and experiential differences sparks new ideas, solutions, and—surprise—cooperation! All races have yet to explore the potential power of race-consciousness, the exponential growth and advancement of all races. Race-consciousness is a worthy aspiration, available to each of us. May we embrace the qualities unique to each race, and those common to all.

Nan distinguishes between race and culture:

In my view, being color-blind means and feels like no longer seeing skin color as a dominant characteristic––like when people fall in love with a beautiful person, but after some years, that beauty has faded into one of many characteristics instead of the dominant one. In my friendships with people of color, the comfort factor that occurs after years working side by side makes skin color more and more irrelevant. Culture and personal experience, however, remain, as they do for all exchanges in all friendships.

Jerome, who is 80 and white, discusses his interracial marriage of more than 50 years:

When we were first married, interracial marriage was uncommon, and my wife and I felt like we were living in a fishbowl. But I can recall only one overtly racist comment ever directed at us. Interracial marriage is more common now. People don’t even give us a second glance. Perhaps I was naive about my white friends, or fortunate in my choice of white friends, but I never encountered any overt racism among them, and there was never any talk of racial politics. If I had brought up issues of race with them, I feel like they would have responded with puzzlement and disinterest. They were too busy living their lives.

After we married and moved away, seeking work and new opportunities, I naturally gravitated to my wife’s family and her friends. They seemed to have no interest in my take on issues regarding race either, perhaps for a different reason than my white friends, but in any case, they were not consumed on a personal level by racial issues. I believe that Jamelle Bouie’s assessment about being color-blind in our day-to-day relationships is correct. By and large, our better angels seem to be in charge in regard to our personal relationships, and in the interest of preserving social comity, it’s best to follow the instincts of our better angels.

When first married, I think we were both race-conscious on a personal level. Now, after all these years, I think we can honestly say that on a personal level, we are really color-blind. It just never enters our mind. True color-blindness isn’t easy. It takes familiarity and practice.

J. describes a change in perspective:

I always believed I was color-blind and tried my best to treat everyone the same. I’ve never made a big deal of race or espoused any type of acknowledgment practice to any person of color.

Several years ago, my nephew asked me to review and critique an admissions essay he wrote for a summer engineering program. He's the perfect mix of brains and brawn, with an easy-going personality and quick-witted sense of humor. His essay stopped me cold. My nephew is half Native American and half white. I neither thought of nor treated him as different. He’s just my nephew, whom I love and adore. I also never thought about the difficulties he faces as a child of two very different cultures. His words cut like a knife, shredding my self-perceived color-blindness and leaving it in tatters. My idealistic view of equality was naive at best and ignorant at worst. He’s faced maltreatment from both sides of his heritage. He’s too Native for some whites and too white for some Natives. That, alone, blew my mind. He described many instances and situations from his unique perspective. When I finished, I gave him a hug and suggested a few changes to wording. I reiterated how proud I was of him and thanked him for opening my eyes.

At home that night I cried for my nephew and the struggles he has faced. I cried for the stupidity of humanity and its ignorant belief that one color is superior to another. And I cried for myself, for not realizing that I’m white and I’ll never truly understand what any person of color goes through. I haven’t changed the way I treat others and never will. But for me, that is the day I realized color-blindness doesn’t exist. It's a made-up term used by those who’ll never understand the ignorance of its perceived meaning.

Seth asks, “Is it even possible to be color-blind?” He writes:

While it’s nice to aspire to be better, it’s counterproductive to aim to be something we’re not capable of. Race, like other personal traits, contributes to, but doesn’t define, who we are. We shouldn’t let race dictate how we relate to anyone, nor should it be factored out. Everybody wants to be seen and heard as an individual, and your race is one of the many elements that contribute to who you are. A better goal in our interactions would be self-awareness. Recognize our prejudices. Question our assumptions. Then relate to everybody with a sense of curiosity, openness, and compassion.

Leo stakes out a middle ground:

I don’t think there’s a “should.” There’s more of a natural sorting process. There will always be proponents on both sides of this debate, but we will naturally gravitate to those people more in line with our own thoughts and feelings. And we should be left in peace to do so. My main issue with this debate is when activists or individuals on one side or the other attempt to impose their view on others. I’m not opposed to debating the issue with people who disagree with me, but the topic is often just too heated for a calm and reasonable conversation. And there seems to be little point in such debate when modern anti-racists rush to declare anyone inclined toward color-blindness to be an evil bigot.

I am inclined toward color-blindness. I do not think that the best response to racial discrimination is more racial discrimination. I don’t think that fire is the best substance for putting out a fire. I acknowledge, however, that there may be a place, in certain circumstances, for race-consciousness. I try to remain open-minded. I believe in entertaining doubt. But if I sense that race-conscious leftists have zero receptivity toward anything I say, I avoid them. That’s how this issue impacts my interpersonal relationships.

David argues:

It shows respect to treat people as equals, and it shows arrogance to act as if one is on top of a social hierarchy—even when that may be true. I never learned much about race issues in America until I started reading history in my late 30s. The violence directed at people of color that was officially sanctioned, or condoned by silence, was shocking. I do now have a basic understanding of the systemic racism that has held African Americans and others back. That sort of “race consciousness” should inform policy choices. However, it seems to me (a 65-year-old moderately progressive white guy) that race-consciousness might get in the way of normal interpersonal interactions with people of color.

Being too self-conscious can interfere with social interactions, because one cannot be fully present. Being race conscious in personal interactions seems more likely to create barriers to understanding and relating to the individual in front of you than to invite discourse and understanding. One should be attuned to potential societal burdens experienced by others and how that may manifest, but excessive sensitivity seems to create a new form of “white man’s burden” thinking coming from the left. Like accommodating a disability for people who are not disabled, it seems patronizing.

Accessing the least-crowded section of New York’s Lido Beach requires either money or insider knowledge. Anyone staying at one of the hotels on the beach can walk through the lobby, and those living in the adjoining town can waltz in through a separate gate using a residents-only electronic access code. Everyone else, though, has to come in through a public entrance half a mile away and walk over the sand.

In theory, some portion of every beach in the coastal United States is reserved for collective use—even those that border private property. But exactly how big that portion is varies widely, and in practice, much of the shore is impenetrable. Simply figuring out which patches of sand you’re allowed to lie on requires navigating antiquated laws and modern restrictions that vary by state—not to mention vigilante efforts from landowners intended to keep people out. Lido Beach is a classic (and absurd) example: Like the rest of the New York coast, it’s technically open to everyone up to the high-tide line, but actually reaching that public strip is difficult without trespassing on private land. A trip to the ocean has never been more confusing.

[Read: Beware the luxury beach resort]

Visiting a completely public spot, such as Myrtle Beach in South Carolina or Santa Monica Beach in L.A., might seem like the most drama-free way to get time in the waves. But “in some states, you don’t really have that option,” Shannon Lyons, the East Coast regional director for the Surfrider Foundation, a group that tracks beach-access laws, told me. The nearest totally public beach might be a long drive away or far from public transit. Plus, there just aren’t enough of them. Although plenty of cities and states own entire beaches outright, much of the property bordering the shoreline rests in private hands. In New York and Florida, only about 40 percent of land by the coast is owned by the government. These numbers decrease as you travel north: In Maine, somewhere from 6.5 to 12 percent of the seaboard is fully open to anyone, depending on the source; in Massachusetts, it’s less than 12 percent. Of course, the remainder of the shoreline in those states isn’t entirely private; it’s most likely just adjacent to private property. But as oceanfront land has become some of the most desirable and expensive in the country, actually getting onto the public sections of those partially private beaches has become harder and harder.

Beaches did not always hold the allure they do today. Two centuries ago, they could be used as sites of trade, not leisure, and were clogged by vendors, shoppers, and fishermen. Real-estate agents also saw little value in them: Until 1898, in Connecticut, they were often included for free with the purchase of any nearby property, Kara Murphy Schlichting, the author of New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis From the Shore, told me. But by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a peculiar combination of factors made the beach into a cultural obsession. Doctors began prescribing trips to the sea as cures for “melancholy,” and beaches came to be seen as places of relaxation. Soon after, a new industrial work schedule gave middle-class workers weekends off and the possibility of vacations. Some used that time to go to the ocean, eventually leading to the rise of urban beaches, such as those in Coney Island and Santa Monica. The real-estate bundles went away, and oceanfront property became a moneymaker. In Connecticut, by 1910, land along the water that a decade earlier had sold for $400 to $1,000 an acre was on the market for $3,000 to $10,000 an acre.

[Read: The historic healing power of the beach]

Seaside homes quickly morphed from something relatively accessible to people across class backgrounds into a luxury for the wealthy. These rich newcomers pushed out working-class and Black communities who had long lived on the coast, Schlichting told me. They also began to accuse beachgoers of trespassing. Invoking a legal threat like that, Schlichting said, was “very useful to landowners,” who might hope that the prospect of a fine or a night in jail would scare off sunbathers.  

In many cases, however, visitors weren’t actually trespassing—a reality that holds true to this day. According to the public-trust doctrine, a principle dating back to ancient Rome that has also been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, some section of the entire shoreline must be open to anyone. But states interpret how much of the beach that applies to very differently. In Oregon, all of the dry sand is public, up until the vegetation starts. In Rhode Island, too, people can legally stroll much of the beach, provided they don’t stray more than 10 feet above the high-tide line—although how many people will be able to measure that out at a glance? In Maine and Massachusetts, by contrast, only the space that is essentially always underwater is open for public recreation.

State laws become more complicated from there, and visitors are frequently left to piece together this complex legal picture on their own. Where they’re allowed to be might also depend on what they’re doing. In Massachusetts, for example, hunting and fishing are fair game in the intertidal zone, meaning the wet sand between high and low tide, but sunbathing and most other types of recreation are not; swimming is permitted, provided, per a 1907 court ruling, that your feet don’t touch the ground—a tough law to follow, given how shallow the water tends to be in that zone. So if you’re reading a book near an oceanfront house in Cape Cod, you could be accused of trespassing. But if you have a fishing pole or gun in your hand instead of a novel, your right to sit there is legally protected. “It’s kind of kooky,” Josh Eagle, a law professor at the University of South Carolina who studies beach access, told me.

Even if you master your state’s particular laws, other obstacles may make actually getting to the ocean difficult. Some places make you buy a pass, which can be pricier for out-of-towners: Westport, Connecticut, charges nonresidents 15 times more than residents for season passes. And recently, a Texas legislator proposed a bill that would let people living by the sea block visitors from using footpaths on their land. This could lead to a similar situation to the one playing out at Lido Beach, in which part of the shore is public in name but challenging to reach.

[Read: Is the internet killing the nude beach?]

Other roadblocks skew more rogue: In Malibu, California, homeowners have repeatedly put up illegitimate Private Property signs in the sand or placed traffic cones and unauthorized No Parking signs in nearby lots, trying to scare away outsiders. Elsewhere in the U.S., homeowners have constructed questionably legal barriers that separate their property from the rest of the beach—but also mean that anyone attempting to get to the water would have to climb over a fence.

Some people are trying to democratize beach access. A writer and an activist named Jenny Price co-created an app, Our Malibu Beaches, that spells out exactly where visitors are allowed to go—and which bogus signs, put up by residents, to ignore. In Malibu’s Broad Beach, for instance, the app reminds users that they can park in spaces blocked by traffic cones, which “have no possible legitimate or official purpose.” Meanwhile, in Connecticut, residents built fences and made getting to the beach so difficult that, starting in 1999, the state’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection began erecting signs that outline the public’s legal rights to Connecticut’s shoreline. Dave Kozak, who worked as a coastal planner on the project, told me that local politicians complained to him that the signs were causing overcrowding. Some homeowners would simply take the signs down. But the state kept putting them back up.

Indeed, keeping the beach a common resource has become a practically Sisyphean struggle. Over the past century, just as more people in more regions have come to recognize the value of these prized natural spaces, they have been, sometimes literally, walled off. The public-trust doctrine is remarkable for guaranteeing a public right to the beach, regardless of private-property claims. But it means little in practice if beachgoers have to continue to wade past fake signs and confusing laws to actually go for a swim.

In 2019, a mnemonic began to circulate on the internet: “If the Naomi be Klein / you’re doing just fine / If the Naomi be Wolf / Oh, buddy. Ooooof.” The rhyme recognized one of the most puzzling intellectual journeys of recent times—Naomi Wolf’s descent into conspiracism—and the collateral damage it was inflicting on the Canadian climate activist and anti-capitalist Naomi Klein.

Until recently, Naomi Wolf was best known for her 1990s feminist blockbuster The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, which argued that the tyranny of grooming standards—all that plucking and waxing—was a form of backlash against women’s rights. But she is now one of America’s most prolific conspiracy theorists, boasting on her Twitter profile of being “deplatformed 7 times and still right.” She has claimed that vaccines are a “software platform” that can “receive ‘uploads’ ” and is mildly obsessed with the idea that many clouds aren’t real, but are instead evidence of “geoengineered skies.” Although Wolf has largely disappeared from the mainstream media, she is now a favored guest on Steve Bannon’s podcast, War Room.

All of this is particularly bad news for Klein, for the simple reason that people keep mistaking the two women for each other. Back in 2011, when she first noticed the confusion—from inside a bathroom stall, she heard two women complain that “Naomi Klein” didn’t understand the demands of the Occupy movement—this was merely embarrassing. The movement sprang from Klein’s part of the left, and in October of that year she was invited to speak to Occupy New York. Was it their shared first name, their Jewishness, or their brown hair with blond highlights? Even their partners’ names were similar: Avram Lewis and Avram Ludwig. Klein was struck that both had experienced rejection from their peer groups (in her case, by fellow students when she first criticized Israel in the college newspaper).

Klein had once admired The Beauty Myth, but she realized to her horror that Wolf had drifted from feminist criticism to broader social polemics. When she picked up Wolf’s 2007 book, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, her own book, out the same year, came to mind. “I felt like I was reading a parody of The Shock Doctrine, one with all the facts and evidence carefully removed.” To Klein, the situation began to seem sinister, even threatening. She was being eaten alive. “Other Naomi—that is how I refer to her now,” Klein writes at the beginning of her new book, Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World. “A person whom so many others appear to find indistinguishable from me. A person who does many extreme things that cause strangers to chastise me or thank me or express their pity for me.”

The confusion was particularly galling because No Logo (1999), Klein’s breakout work, was a manifesto against branding. And yet here she was, feeling an urgent need to protect her own personal brand from this interloper. Klein asserts that she didn’t want to write Doppelganger—“not with the literal and metaphorical fires roiling our planet,” she confesses with a hint of pomposity—but found herself ever more obsessed by Wolf’s conspiracist turn. How do you go from liberal darling to War Room regular within a decade?

Like Klein, I loved The Beauty Myth as a young woman, and then largely forgot about Wolf until 2010, when Julian Assange was arrested for alleged sex offenses (the charges were later dropped), and she claimed that Interpol was acting as “the world’s dating police.” Two years later, she published Vagina: A New Biography, which mixed sober accounts of rape as a weapon of war with a quest to cure her midlife sexual dysfunction through “yoni massages” and activating “the Goddess array.” In one truly deranged scene, a friend hosts a party at his loft and serves pasta shaped like vulvae, alongside salmon and sausages. The violent intermingling of genital-coded food overwhelms Wolf, who experiences it as an insult to womanhood in general and her own vagina in particular, and suffers writer’s block for the next six months. (I suspect that the friend was just trying to get into the spirit of Wolf’s writing project.) I remember beginning to wonder around this time whether Wolf might be a natural conspiracy theorist who had merely lucked into writing about one conspiracy—the patriarchy—that happened to be true.

Her final exile from the mainstream can probably be dated to 2019, when she was humiliated in a live radio interview during the rollout of her book Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love. She had claimed that gay men in Victorian England were regularly executed for sodomy, but the BBC host Matthew Sweet noted that the phrase death recorded in the archives meant that the sentence had been commuted, rather than carried out. It was a grade A howler, and it marked open season on her for all previous offenses against evidence and logical consistency. The New York Times review of Outrages referred to “Naomi Wolf’s long, ludicrous career.” In the U.K., the publisher promised changes to future editions, and the release of the U.S. edition was canceled outright.

Klein dwells on this incident in Doppelganger, and rightly so: “If you want an origin story, an event when Wolf’s future flip to the pseudo-populist right was locked in, it was probably that moment, live on the BBC, getting caught—and then getting shamed, getting mocked, and getting pulped.” If the intelligentsia wouldn’t lionize Wolf, then the Bannonite right would: She could enter a world where mistakes don’t matter, no one feels shame, and fact-checkers are derided as finger-wagging elitists.

“These people don’t disappear just because we can no longer see them,” Klein reminds any fellow leftists who might be enthusiastic about public humiliation as a weapon against the right. Denied access to the mainstream media, the ostracized will be welcomed on One America News Network and Newsmax, or social-media sites such as Rumble, Gettr, Gab, Truth Social, and Elon Musk’s new all-crazy-all-the-time reincarnation of Twitter as X. On podcasts, the entire heterodox space revels in “just asking questions”—and then not caring about the peer-reviewed answers. By escaping to what Klein calls the “Mirror World,” Wolf might have lost cultural capital, but she has not lost an audience.

[Helen Lewis: Why so many conservatives feel like losers]

Klein notes that this world is particularly hospitable to those who can blend personal and social grievances into an appealing populist message—I am despised by the pointy-heads, just as you are. She ventures “a kind of equation for leftists and liberals crossing over to the authoritarian right that goes something like this: Narcissism (Grandiosity) + Social media addiction + Midlife crisis ÷ Public shaming = Right wing meltdown.” She is inclined to downplay “that bit of math,” though, and feels uncomfortable putting Wolf on the couch. Nonetheless, I’m struck by how narcissism (in the ubiquitous lay sense of the term) is key to understanding conspiracy-theorist influencers and their followers. If you feel disrespected and overlooked in everyday life, then being flattered with the idea that you’re a special person with secret knowledge must be appealing.

Klein’s real interest, as you might expect from her previous work, tends more toward sociology than psychology. Her doppelgänger isn’t an opportunist or a con artist, Klein decides, but a genuine believer—even if those beliefs have the happy side effect of garnering her attention and praise. But what about the culture that has enabled her to thrive?

At first, I thought what I was seeing in my doppelganger’s world was mostly grifting unbound. Over time, though, I started to get the distinct impression that I was also witnessing a new and dangerous political formation find itself in real time: its alliances, worldview, slogans, enemies, code words, and no-go zones—and, most of all, its ground game for taking power.

To explore this ambitious agenda, the book ranges widely and sometimes tangentially. At one point, Klein finds herself listening to hours of War Room, hosted by a man who has built a dark empire of profitable half-truths. Why does Klein find Bannon so compelling? Here Doppelganger takes a startling turn. The answer is that, quite simply, game recognizes game. Klein’s cohort on the left attacks Big Pharma profits, worries about “surveillance capitalism,” and sees Davos and the G7 as a cozy cabal exploiting the poor. Understandably, she hears Other Naomi talk with Bannon about vaccine manufacturers’ profits, rail against Big Tech’s power to control us, and make the case that Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum has untold secret power, and she can’t help noting some underlying similarities. When Bannon criticizes MSNBC and CNN for running shows sponsored by Pfizer, telling his audience that this is evidence of rule “by the wealthy, for the wealthy, against you,” Klein writes, “it strikes me that he sounds like Noam Chomsky. Or Chris Smalls, the Amazon Labor Union leader known for his EAT THE RICH jacket. Or, for that matter, me.”

[From the July/August 2022 issue: Steve Bannon, American Rasputin]

This is Doppelganger at its best, acknowledging the traits that make us all susceptible to manipulation. In a 2008 New Yorker profile of Klein, her husband described her as a “pattern recognizer,” adding: “Some people feel that she’s bent examples to fit the thesis. But her great strength is helping people recognize patterns in the world, because that’s the fundamental first step toward changing things.” Of course, overactive pattern recognition is also the essence of conspiracism, and a decade and a half later, Klein expresses more caution about her superpower. When 9/11 truthers turn up at her events—drawn perhaps by her criticism in The Shock Doctrine of George W. Bush’s response to the tragedy—their presence leads her to conclude “that the line between unsupported conspiracy claims and reliable investigative research is neither as firm nor as stable as many of us would like to believe.”

We live in a world where the U.S. government has done outlandish stuff: The Tuskegee experiment, MK-Ultra, Iran-Contra, and Watergate are all conspiracies that diligent journalism proved to be true. QAnon’s visions of Hollywood child-sex rings might be a mirage, but the Catholic Church’s abuse of children in Boston was all too real—and uncovering it won The Boston Globe a Pulitzer Prize. Klein worries about whether a political movement can generate mass appeal without resorting to populism, and about how to stop her criticisms of elite power from being co-opted by her opponents and distorted into attacks on the marginalized.

[Read: A 2014 interview with Naomi Klein about climate politics ]

However, Klein’s (correct) diagnosis of American conspiracism as a primarily right-wing pathology prevents her from fully acknowledging the degree to which it has sometimes infected her own allies and idols. In Doppelganger, Klein notes that anti-Semitism has served as “the socialism of fools”—stirred up to deflect popular anger away from the elite—but she does not discuss the anti-Jewish bigotry in the British Labour Party under its former leader Jeremy Corbyn, whom she endorsed in the 2019 election. (Corbyn once praised a mural of hook-nosed bankers counting money on a table held up by Black people, and his supporters suggested that his critics were Israeli stooges.) The party has since apologized for not taking anti-Semitism seriously enough.

At times, this can be a frustrating book. Near the end, Klein says she requested an interview with Wolf, promising that it would be “a respectful debate” about their political disagreements. She also hoped to remind Wolf of their original meeting, more than three decades earlier—when Wolf, then 28, captivated the 20-year-old Klein, showing her the possibilities of what a female author could be. But Wolf never responded to the request, and the doppelgängers have not met face-to-face since then.

Still, Klein emerges with a sense of resolution. She writes that the confusion between the two of them has lately died down, now that Other Naomi has become an “unmistakable phenomenon unto herself.” Even better, the situation has introduced “a hefty dose of ridiculousness into the seriousness with which I once took my public persona.” Not that the zealous Klein has disappeared: The next few pages are a paean to collective organizing, worker solidarity, and “cities in the grips of revolutionary fervor.”

Doppelganger is least interesting when Klein returns to her comfort zone, but her brutally honest forays into self-examination are fascinating. The book is also a welcome antidote to the canceling reflex of our moment and a bracing venture across ideological lines. Klein successfully makes the case that the American left is more tethered to reality than the right—not because it is composed of smarter or better people, but because it has not lost touch with the mechanisms, such as scientific peer review and media pluralism, that act as a check on our worst instincts. Exposed to many of the same forces as her conspiracist doppelgänger—fame, cancellation, trauma, COVID isolation—this Naomi stayed fine. That has to offer us some hope.

This article appears in the October 2023 print edition with the headline “The Other Naomi.”

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I have heard this statement from thousands of people in my career of teaching and researching happiness. I have said it myself many times; you probably have too. As the philosopher and theologian Saint Augustine declared in 426 C.E., feeling no need to offer proof, “There is no one who does not wish to be happy.”

But what do we actually mean when we say we just want to be happy? Usually, that we want to achieve and keep certain feelings—of joy or simple cheerfulness—but that some obstacle prevents this. “I just want to be happy” is almost always followed by naming a source of unhappiness, such as money problems, relationship problems, health problems—or real tragedies. (As I write these words, the Maui wildfires have killed dozens, displaced thousands, and caused suffering that has affected us all.) From small problems to major catastrophes, life seems to conspire to make our wished-for happiness fleeting at best, inaccessible at worst. What a cruel paradox: We are wired to desire happiness yet seemingly doomed to a life of struggle that makes it unattainable.

This column draws on ideas from his new book, co-written with Oprah Winfrey, Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier, which is out today.

But what if this paradox was based on a misunderstanding of happiness itself? In fact, much of the most common and popular wisdom about happiness relies on a series of myths. As Oprah Winfrey and I are working together to show in our new book, Build the Life You Want, anyone can make true progress in building a better life for themselves and others if they can get past these myths, even amid a life that contains no small amount of suffering.

Myth 1: Happiness is a feeling.
We all know what happiness feels like: It involves clear emotions such as joy, love, and interest—much as unhappiness involves emotions such as fear, sadness, disgust, and anger. But calling happiness itself—or unhappiness—a “feeling” is a mistake. That is like asserting that your job and your money are the same thing. You need your job to pay you, and how much you earn may be evidence of your professional effectiveness. But to reduce your work to money would be inaccurate and depressing.

In a similar way, your emotional states both derive from and help deliver well-being, but they’re not identical to that well-being. Happiness is more than a series of neurological signals evolved to help keep you alive, safe, and able to reproduce. I prefer to think of it as a combination of three much less ephemeral components: enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.

[Arthur C. Brooks: How to get the most happiness from your social life]

Enjoyment starts with simple pleasure and then adds the company of other people, which calls on  our higher consciousness by requiring the executive capacity of our brain to exercise social skills. So a way to think of enjoyment, then, is: pleasure plus the company of others plus memory. Enjoyment raises happiness, as pleasure alone does not. That’s one reason, for example, ads for food and drink usually show people together, sharing a meaningful time in their lives, instead of consuming alone. The advertisers want to associate the product with long-term enjoyment (and thus happiness), not just momentary pleasure.

Satisfaction is the joy you get from accomplishing something you’ve worked for. It’s that feeling you experience when you get an A in school after studying hard; it’s the glow from a well-earned promotion at work. Satisfied is how you feel when you do something difficult, even painful, that meets what you see as your life’s purpose.

Psychologists have defined meaning as a combination of coherence (things happen for a reason), purpose (direction in life), and significance (your life matters). We can make do without enjoyment for a while, and even with little satisfaction. But if we lack meaning—which takes a lot of effort and sacrifice to find—we are utterly lost. Without it, we can’t navigate life’s inevitable challenges and crises. When we do have a sense of meaning, we can face life with hope and inner peace.

Myth 2: Your problems are the problem.
You might have noticed in the preceding definition of happiness something that seems strange, possibly unsettling: All three of happiness’s elements call for some degree of effort, discomfort, or suffering, even for some unhappiness.

[Helen Lewis: Harry and Meghan are playing a whole different game]

Enjoyment demands the investment of time and effort. It means forgoing easy, effortless thrills. It can mean saying no to cravings and temptations. It can require taming the appetite for pleasure and living according to the rules of personal conduct on which you decide—such as staying faithful to your partner. Satisfaction, too, entails some work and hardship. If you don’t suffer for something, at least a little, it’s unlikely to satisfy you much.

The common strategy of trying to eliminate problems from life to get happier is futile and mistaken. We must instead look for the “why” of life to make our problems an opportunity for learning and growth. And unsurprisingly, that last component of meaning involves the most suffering of all. “The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life,” the psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote in his 1946 book, Man’s Search for Meaning.

Myth 3: Your goal is happiness.
In truth, you can’t be happy. You can, however, be happier.

Searching for happiness is like questing for El Dorado, the fabled South American city of gold. When we look for happiness, we might get glimpses of what it feels like, but it doesn’t last. Some people talk about happiness as if they possess it, but no one does. And all too often, the very people society thinks should be completely happy—the rich, the beautiful, the famous, the powerful—wind up in the news for their bankruptcies, personal scandals, and family troubles.

[Read: Queen Sugar is the most luxurious show on earth]

If the secret to pure happiness existed, we all would have found it by now. If happiness were simply a commodity in that way, it would be big business, sold on the internet, taught in schools, and provided by the government. But it’s not. The one thing every human has ever wanted since Homo sapiens first appeared about 300,000 years ago in Africa has remained elusive. We’ve figured out how to make fire, the wheel, the lunar lander, and TikTok videos, but despite all that human ingenuity, we have mastered neither the art nor the science of getting and keeping the one thing we really want. Some people manage to have more happiness than others, but no one can maintain it consistently.

That’s because happiness is not a destination but a direction. We won’t reach a place of complete happiness in this life. But wherever we are in our journey of life, and however satisfied or dissatisfied we naturally tend to be, we all can be happier with self-knowledge, good habits, and a commitment to improve.

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

If the message that happiness requires effort, involves unhappiness, and is largely unattainable strikes you as bad news, it shouldn’t. It should set you free. What it tells you is that your feelings can’t dictate your well-being, that your problems can’t stop you from getting happier, and that you can finally leave off looking for a lost city of gold that doesn’t exist. Here are four ways to apply this information to your life.

Truth 1: Check whether you’re getting your happiness nourishment.
If you go to a nutritionist because you feel that your diet needs improvement, they’re bound to analyze your macronutrient profile—the amount of protein, carbohydrates, and fat you eat—to see where it’s out of balance and make adjustments. Enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning are the macronutrients in your happiness diet. So this is a good place to start as you assess your happiness and how it could be higher.

Ask yourself whether you’re settling for mere pleasure or doing the work you need for real enjoyment. Are you making the sacrifices necessary to accomplish satisfying things? Do you have a secure sense of your life’s coherence, purpose, and significance? The answers you come up with for these questions can help you see where you should apply more effort, and where you can make the most progress toward getting happier.

[Rebecca Rashid and Arthur C. Brooks: How to know that you know nothing]

Truth 2: Stop trying to eradicate your unhappiness.
The Woodstock hippie motto was “If it feels good, do it!” This is plenty-bad advice—not least because it suggests settling for pleasure over enjoyment. But just as bad is a more contemporary moral imperative: “If it feels bad, make it stop.” A major reason people fail to get happier is that they spend so much of their time and energy trying to eradicate unhappiness from their life.

You need negative emotions and experiences to achieve enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning in your life. We’re talking about not medical issues, such as anxiety and depression, but the ordinary suffering that befalls everyone at one time or another. You don’t need to seek out this suffering; it will find you. The key is not to fight it—with denial or palliatives—when it does find you but to accept it, learn from it, and grow as a person.

Start each day remembering that every experience you have—positive and negative—is part of being fully alive. If you have been expending a lot of effort trying to avoid normal conflict, shielding yourself from rejection and disappointment and running away from sadness and fear, turn around and say, “Bring it on.” That will take some practice, but in time, you will be amazed at how much this can improve your quality of life.

Truth 3: Remember the progress principle.
One of the great paradoxes of happiness is that what brings joy is not attaining a desired goal but making progress toward it. Some aims—chasing money, power, or fame—are misguided and harmful, but taking steps toward personal growth, skill acquisition, and connection with others is strongly correlated with enhanced well-being.

This principle of progress was well understood at America’s founding. The Declaration of Independence did not guarantee happiness—a utopian promise beyond anyone’s capacity to realize. Rather, our “unalienable right” was the pursuit of happiness. Because happiness is a direction and not a destination, its pursuit makes that utopian promise as near self-fulfilling as we can hope for.

[Arthur C. Brooks: The path to happiness is easy but narrow]

How to pursue happiness, then? Not by valuing happiness highly—that is too vague, and overvaluing happiness as a goal can even lead away from well-being, just as saying, “I want more money” not only won’t make you richer but will make you feel more acutely that you don’t have enough. Instead, the right approach is to make noticeable progress in the habits that add up to making you happier.

Truth 4: Adopt the four happiness habits.
It is easy to imagine that the habits that bring happiness to you are very personal and unique. After all, we are all different in our tastes. But looking at the research, we can identify some broad patterns in the consistent practices of the happiest people. They develop and abide by a faith or philosophy of life; they maintain a strong connection to family; they stay close to friends; and they strive to serve others through their work. Understanding exactly what these things mean and how they are made manifest in your life requires reflection and discernment. However, the broad categories of these habits are common to all.

Perhaps these myths and the better-informed truths all make perfect sense to you. Even so, they can be devilishly hard to remember and practice as you go about your complicated life. So here is one more item, designed to cement the rest into your thinking and daily routines.

Instructors sometimes use a technique known as “plastic-platypus learning” to teach people how to communicate newly gained knowledge by explaining it to an inanimate object—such as a plastic platypus. The research on this technique shows that if you can give a coherent account of recently acquired information, you will absorb and remember it better. A plastic platypus works just fine, but even better is a real person—a lot of research indicates that teaching a subject is one of the most reliable ways to learn it deeply yourself.

You might ask how you can teach someone else to get happier when you still have so far to go yourself. That is precisely when and why you are the most effective teacher. The best happiness instructors are those who have had to work to gain the knowledge they offer, not the lucky ones who fall out of bed most days in a great mood. The lucky few are like the fitness influencers on Instagram who have superior genetics, can eat whatever they want, and have no idea what the challenges are for the rest of us.

Don’t hide your own struggles; use them to help others understand that they’re not alone and that getting happier is possible. Your effort and pain give you credibility; your progress makes you an inspiration. And sharing the experience with others adds to that progress, making it a truly happy win-win.