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.

Question of the Week

Do you trust America’s institutions more than, less than, or as much as you did a decade ago? Why? Feel free to respond generally or to focus on one particular institution, or more, in your emails.

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of Note

In the New York Post, Gerard Baker, the writer, columnist, and former editor in chief of The Wall Street Journal, previews his new book, American Breakdown: Why We No Longer Trust Our Leaders and Institutions and How We Can Rebuild Confidence. The problem as he sees it:

Congress, the presidency, the FBI, the judiciary, the media, colleges and universities, big business, churches, scientists, technology companies, labor unions, public health leaders. What do all these institutions have in common?

Answer: Americans don’t trust them any more.

In the last 30 years, we have witnessed something unprecedented and perilous to the very survival of American democracy—a collapse in public trust in the nation’s leaders and institutions.

If there is one phenomenon that captures better than anything else what’s gone wrong with America in the last few years it is this: we live in a culture of mistrust.

All the major institutions that have defined and shaped American democracy have witnessed a dramatic decline in the faith and credit Americans place in them in the space of a generation.

Is it any wonder, given how they have behaved? …

This plummeting social trust is doing irreparable damage to the bonds that tie Americans together.

More Than a Literary Inspiration

In The Atlantic, Clint Smith has a fascinating piece about the life of Josiah Henson, who was cited by Harriet Beecher Stowe as the inspiration for the titular character of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Smith argues that being so remembered doesn’t do justice to the man:

I first learned about Henson’s remarkable life a year or so ago, as I was doing research for a different story. I wondered why I hadn’t heard of him sooner. He was one of the first Black people to be an exhibitor at a World’s Fair. He met with President Rutherford B. Hayes and Queen Victoria. He built businesses that gave Black fugitives a livelihood after years of exploitation. Why weren’t American students being taught about Henson when they learned about Tubman, or assigned his autobiography alongside Frederick Douglass’s?

One reason might be that Henson chose, after escaping the United States at age 41, to spend the rest of his life in Canada, the country that gave him his freedom and full citizenship. And perhaps educators have been reluctant to spend too much time on a man known as “the original Uncle Tom” when that term has become a virulent insult.

But Henson was not Uncle Tom. Despite being forever linked with the fictional character after Stowe revealed him as a source of inspiration, he longed to be recognized by his own name, and for his own achievements. And he publicly wrestled with the role he had played, as an overseer, in abetting slavery’s violence and cruelty.

Henson’s biography and legacy, I came to see, defy easy categorization. His is not a linear story of triumph over hardship. Rather, it is a story that reflects the complexity and moral incongruence that animated the lives of enslavers and shaped the lives of the enslaved. It is a story of how a man who was at once a victim and a perpetuator of slavery’s evils tried, and failed, and hoped, and evolved, and regretted, and mourned, and tried again. It is a story that reveals the impossibility of being a moral person in a fundamentally immoral system.

A Case for a New Veep

In Very Serious, Josh Barro argues that Kamala Harris has too little political upside as vice-president to justify her being on the Democratic Party ticket in 2024:

When he is renominated as the Democratic candidate for president, Joe Biden will need to choose a running mate. The polls are close and the stakes are high, so he needs a partner who will do as much as possible to help him win re-election. Given widespread public concern about his age, it is even more important than usual that his running mate be someone that a majority of the voting public is comfortable envisioning succeeding to the presidency. And his pick should be someone who is credible as the future leader of the Democratic Party …

Kamala Harris, unfortunately, is not an excellent candidate for the vice presidency. There are better options available and he should pick one of them—specifically, as I’ll discuss below, he should pick Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer …

As Nate Silver noted last week, Harris has run worse than Biden in every national poll conducted since the midterms that asked respondents about both Biden-Trump and Harris-Trump head-to-head contests. On average, she’s put up a margin four points worse than his, which is a lot—in each of the last three presidential elections, a four-point shift in the margin would have been enough to mean the difference between winning and losing. Even despite all the (very real!) voter concern about Biden’s age and stamina, she is a much worse national candidate than he is.

This shouldn’t be surprising, because there is little in Harris’s pre-vice presidential career to suggest that she would be a strong national candidate.

She has never run a race by herself in a politically competitive jurisdiction. Well, that’s unless you count California—in 2010, she very nearly managed to lose a statewide race in California to a Republican, when she was elected attorney general by a margin of less than one point. And her 2020 presidential campaign, famously, flamed out before she entered any of the nominating contests.

Usually, the case for Harris’s electoral appeal is built around her race and gender: That as a black woman, she improves the Democratic ticket’s appeal to black voters and to women. But Harris’s role as a draw for black voters is more theoretical than demonstrated. She has never had a core political base among black voters because she has never been elected in a jurisdiction with a large black population—she held office in San Francisco (which is 6% black) and California (7% black). A key reason her 2020 campaign stalled was that she failed to demonstrate an especially strong appeal to black voters, who tended to prefer her (white) eventual running mate, Biden, even after she accused him of being a segregationist. I’d also note that the Democratic Party has lost substantial ground in recent years among non-white voters without bachelors degrees, including black voters without bachelors degrees, and Harris’s presence in the second-most-prominent position in Democratic politics doesn’t seem to have done anything to stop that. When Harris talks publicly about race, she does so in the voguish style that is popular with the highly educated staffs of Democratic officeholders and progressive organizations, rather than in a style with demonstrated success in appealing to an educationally broad electoral coalition. So while I am open to the idea that nominating more non-white candidates might help the party appeal to more non-white voters, I am doubtful that Harris, with her equity memes, has been helpful in this regard.

To Dress Better, Learn to Thread the Needle

In The Atlantic, Ann Friedman argues that more people should learn to sew:

Learning to sew will not only help you avoid the environmental horrors of modern retail; it will show you the thrill of wearing clothes that actually fit. This is not an argument for a cottage-core lifestyle in which you hand-make every raw-linen garment that touches your body. I’m more for an incremental approach: Acquiring a few basic sewing skills, little by little, will change how you get dressed. Even if you never make a whole garment from scratch, knowing how to adjust a seam will make secondhand shopping easier and more accessible. And when you’re looking for new clothes, knowing your measurements will help you order only items that are likely to fit. The goal is not to become a master tailor. It’s to become fluent in how clothes fit your body.

When you sew for yourself, you really learn your body. You also relearn how to think about your body. Even a beginner-level sewing project makes clear that it is impossible to reduce your complex contours and spans to a single number or letter on a tag. And you learn how you like things to fit you: where you prefer your waistband to hit on your belly, what inseam works for a crop length versus ankle, how low you like a neckline to go. Once you know these things, you will never acquire clothes the same way again.

Sewing skills open up the possibilities of secondhand shopping. Instead of hoping to strike gold with the perfect fit, you can see garments for their possibilities. That dress would be perfect if I took off the sleeves, you’ll catch yourself thinking. Or, I could hem those trousers in about five minutes. And the same goes for your own rarely worn items. The ritual of a closet clean-out takes on a new twist when you can alter things to match your current shape and style. I’ve transformed a shift dress into a skirt and boxy top, turned an old bedsheet into the backing material for a quilt, and cropped too many T-shirts to count. Instead of ending up in the trash or a giveaway pile, these items have gotten a second spin through my wardrobe.

Provocation of the Week

Writing at Substack under a pseudonym, a psychotherapist who works with young people in distress over their gender identity argues that the best approach is to neither affirm nor deny their self-characterizations:

Therapists are sometimes confronted with an unshakable belief that one is trans, rather than that one identifies as trans in a way that acknowledges the reality of sex, or the insistence that long-term, life-changing decisions can be made when the faculties and experience to make such decisions are absent. We cannot—and should not—attempt to change this belief, but rather to work on creating and sustaining a relationship that facilitates the development of internal scaffolding, of a capacity to think and feel as fully as possible without collapse.

My work with gender-distressed and trans-identified youth is not any different from my work with anyone else. That is to say that there is a specificity and singularity to every relationship I have with my patients. Deep and lasting change happens over time through the relationship more so than by any particular thing that is said or discrete insight that is discovered. My task is to attend to what the patient says and does not say, how she relates to me, how I relate to her, what thoughts, feelings, sensations, associations are stirred in my patient, in me, and between the two of us, and what we can learn through these experiences. I do my best to attune to my patient’s needs, desires, and limits; to change tack when I see fit; to survive frustration and anger directed at me without retaliation; to show sincere curiosity about their lives, what they’re thinking about, how they’re feeling, what interests them, why do they like this but not that, what are they yearning for, expecting, fearing; what makes them laugh, cry, scream, want to run away, come close? I can only think about one’s gender identity in the larger, nuanced, and complex landscape of my patients’ particular lives. Through collaborative exploration, we learn about ourselves; through a relationship that is co-created, we learn to experience ourselves and others in new ways. Through this process, some of my patients have desisted from identifying as trans. Some haven’t. Some may still, some may not. I do my best to invite and participate in sense-making, curiosity, engagement, contact, a sense of belonging and aliveness. What happens as a result is beyond my control.

They claim that this approach puts them on the margins of the profession:

When I have expressed my concerns about the gender-affirmative model, i.e., immediate affirmation and a quick push onto the medical pathway, under my own name, I have been accused—in print, on listservs, and in conversations—by those both inside and outside of my field of of being close-minded, bigoted, anti-trans, transphobic, threatened by gender non-conformity, and/or engaged in conversion therapy. I have been interrogated for organizing clinical training presentations by professionals in my field who have pointed out the potential harms of unquestioned affirmation followed by medicalization, discussed alternative ways of thinking about what we call gender dysphoria and how to treat it, and provided information about the state of the evidence base for social transition, puberty blockers, hormones, and surgery. I have also received statements of private support from many within my field who share my concerns but are afraid to express them for fear of encountering the difficulties described above. I am hardly alone in my experience. Most, if not all, of my like-minded colleagues who have publicly shared views that reject the dogmas of gender ideology and that point to the weak evidence base for medical interventions have received a combination of public vituperation and private support.

All of this is to say that I am acutely conscious of the enormous social and institutional pressure being placed on clinicians who resist the culture-wide push of the gender-affirmative model of care. I am pressed to the margins of my profession and constrained in my ability to make the case for what I believe to be best for my patients and for others with similar complexities involving sex and gender. My work goes on in the shadows amidst a carefully vetted network of parents and clinicians while the exponents of the affirmative model proselytize proudly and loudly.

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