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Every nation needs parties of the left and the right, but America’s conservative party has collapsed—and its absence will undermine the recovery of American democracy even when Donald Trump is gone.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

So much for “learn to code” Where the new identity politics went wrong The origins of the socialist slur The coming attack on an essential element of women’s freedom

The Danger That Will Outlast Trump

The American right has been busy the past few days. The Republicans in Congress are at war with one another over a possible government shutdown that most of them don’t really want. Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona (channeling the warden from The Shawshank Redemption, apparently) railed about “quislings” such as the “sodomy-promoting” Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and said he should be hanged. Gosar, of course, was merely backing up a similar attack from the likely GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, who over the weekend floated the idea of executing Milley and swore to use government power to investigate a major television network for “treason.”

Normally, this is the kind of carnival of abominable behavior that would lead me to ask—again—how millions of Americans not only tolerate but support such madness.

But today I’m going to ask a different question: Is this the future of “conservatism”? I admit that I am thinking about this because it’s also one of the questions I’m going to tackle with my colleagues David Frum, Helen Lewis, and Rebecca Rosen on Thursday in Washington, D.C., at The Atlantic Festival, our annual two-day gathering where we explore ideas and cultural trends with a roster of stellar guests.

Slightly more than a year ago, I tried to think through what being a conservative means in the current era of American politics. I have not been a Republican for several years, but I still describe myself as a conservative: I believe in public order as a prerequisite for politics; I respect tradition, and I am reluctant to acquiesce to change too precipitously; I think human nature is fixed rather than malleable; I am suspicious of centralized government power; I distrust mass movements. To contrast these with progressivism, I think most folks on the left, for example, would weigh social justice over abstract commitments to order, be more inclined to see traditions as obstacles to progress, and regard mass protests as generally positive forces.

This is hardly an exhaustive list of conservative views, and some on the right have taken issue with my approach. A young writer at National Review named Nate Hochman took me to task last year for fundamentally misunderstanding modern conservatism. Mr. Hochman, however, was apparently fired this summer from the Ron DeSantis campaign after he produced a campaign video that used Nazi symbolism, which suggests to me that I do, in fact, understand the modern conservative movement better than at least some of my critics might admit.

In any case, the immediate problem America faces is that it no longer has a center-right party that represents traditional conservatism, or even respects basic constitutional principles such as the rule of law. The pressing question for American democracy, then, is not so much the future of conservatism but the future of the Republican Party, another question our panel will discuss—and one that continually depresses me.

The United States, like any other nation, needs political parties that can represent views on the left and the right. The role of the state, the reach of the law, the allocation of social and economic resources—these are all inevitable areas of disagreement, and every functioning democracy needs parties that can contest these issues within the circumscribed limits of a democratic and rights-respecting constitution. Today’s Republican Party rarely exhibits such commitments to the rule of law, constitutionalism, or democracy itself.

The current GOP is not so much conservative as it is reactionary: Today’s right-wing voters are a loose movement of various groups, but especially of white men, obsessed with a supposedly better past in which they were not the aggrieved minority they see themselves as today. These reactionary voters, as I have written recently, are reflexively countercultural: They reject almost everything in the current social and political order because everything around them is the product of the hated now that has displaced the sacred then.

(Although many of my colleagues in academia and in the media see Trumpism as fascism, I remain reticent to use that word … for now. I think it’s inaccurate at the present time, but I also believe the word has been overused for years and people tend to tune it out. I grant, however, that much of the current GOP has become an anti-constitutional leader cult built around Trump—perhaps one of the weakest and unlikeliest men ever in history to have such a following—and could become a genuinely fascist threat soon.)

America needs an actual conservative party, but it is unlikely to produce one in the near future. The movement around Trump will come to an end one way or another; as the writer Peter Sagal noted in The Atlantic after interviewing former members of various cults, “the icy hand of death” will end the Trump cult because it is primarily a movement of older people, and when they die out, “there will be no one, eventually, to replace them.” Although the cult around Trump will someday dissolve, the authoritarians his movement spawned will still be with us, and they will prevent the formation of a sensible center-right party in the United States.

Too many Americans remain complacent, believing that defeating Trump means defeating the entire threat to American democracy. As the Atlantic contributor Brian Klaas wrote yesterday, Trump’s threats on social media against Milley should have been the biggest story in the nation: “Instead, the post barely made the news.” Nor did Gosar’s obscene pile-on get more than a shrug.

Meanwhile, the New York Times opinion writer Michelle Cottle today profiled Ohio Senator J. D. Vance, a man who has called his opponents “degenerate liberals” and who is so empty of character that even Mitt Romney can’t stand him. Cottle, however, noted Vance’s cute socks, and ended with this flourish: “Mr. Trump’s Republican Party is something of a chaotic mess. Until it figures out where it is headed, a shape-shifting MAGA brawler who quietly works across the aisle on particular issues may be the best this party has to offer.”

Something of a mess? That’s one way to put it.

And what about Fox News, the source of continual toxic dumping into the American political ecosystem? “Fox News,” the Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle said yesterday, “does not have nearly as much power over viewers’ minds as progressives think. I am not cutting Fox any slack for amplifying Trump’s election lie nonsense. But I also doubt that it made that much of a difference.” Having traveled the country giving talks about misinformation and democracy for years, and hearing the same stories so many times of people who now find it impossible to talk to their own parents, I have no such doubts.

If Trump wins in 2024, worries about Fox’s influence or reflections on Vance’s adorable socks will seem trivial when Trump unleashes his narcissistic and lawless revenge on the American people. But even if he does not win, America cannot sustain itself without a functional and sane center-right party. So far, the apathy of the public, the fecklessness of the media, and the cynicism of Republican leaders mean that no such party is on the horizon.

Related:

The end will come for the cult of MAGA. Trump floats the idea of executing Joint Chiefs Chairman Milley.

Today’s News

The Supreme Court ruled against an attempt by Alabama Republicans to retain a congressional map with only one majority-Black district. The Federal Trade Commission and 17 states are suing Amazon in a broad antitrust lawsuit that accuses it of monopolistic practices. An increasing number of Senate Democrats is calling for Senator Bob Menendez to resign from Congress following his federal indictment.

Evening Read

Franco Pagetti / VII / Redux

How We Got ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’

By Martin Baron

I should not have been surprised, but I still marveled at just how little it took to get under the skin of President Donald Trump and his allies. By February 2019, I had been the executive editor of The Washington Post for six years. That month, the newspaper aired a one-minute Super Bowl ad, with a voice-over by Tom Hanks, championing the role of a free press, commemorating journalists killed and captured, and concluding with the Post’s logo and the message “Democracy dies in darkness.” The ad highlighted the strong and often courageous work done by journalists at the Post and elsewhere—including by Fox News’s Bret Baier—because we were striving to signal that this wasn’t just about us and wasn’t a political statement …

Even that simple, foundational idea of democracy was a step too far for the Trump clan. The president’s son Donald Trump Jr. couldn’t contain himself. “You know how MSM journalists could avoid having to spend millions on a #superbowl commercial to gain some undeserved credibility?” he tweeted with typical two-bit belligerence. “How about report the news and not their leftist BS for a change.”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Wilford Harwood / Hulu

Read. In Orphan Bachelors, Fae Myenne Ng explores the true cost of the Chinese Exclusion era through an aching account of her own family.

Watch. The Hulu series The Other Black Girl dramatizes the pains of managing Afro-textured hair—and other people’s perceptions of it.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I’m off to The Atlantic Festival, so I’ll be brief today. But I’ll be back on Friday to talk about Barry Manilow, whom I saw this past week in Las Vegas as he broke Elvis Presley’s record for performances at the venerable Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino. If you’re, ah, ready to take a chance again, you might enjoy it, even now, especially as we’ll be talking about the old songs. All the time, until daybreak.

I’m sorry. I promise: no more Manilow puns. See you in a few days.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

For years after World War II, the “liberal consensus”—the New Deal idea that the federal government had a role to play in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, and promoting infrastructure—was a true consensus. It was so widely popular that in 1950, the critic Lionel Trilling wrote of the United States that “liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.”

But the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional tied the federal government to ensuring not just economic equality, but also civil rights. Opponents of the liberal consensus argued that the newly active federal government was misusing tax dollars taken from hardworking white men to promote civil rights for “undeserving” Black people. The troops President Dwight Eisenhower sent to Little Rock Central High School in 1957, for example, didn’t come cheap. The government’s defense of civil rights redistributed wealth, they said, and so was virtually socialism.

[Read: An attempt to resegregate Little Rock, of all places]

This intersection of race and economics was not new to the second half of the 20th century. It reached back into the past to resurrect an argument made by former Confederates during the Reconstruction years to overturn federal protection of Black rights after the Civil War.

Some of today’s Republicans are in the process of making that argument reality. Their insistence that all their opponents are socialists goes hand in hand with their effort to suppress Black and brown voting. When former President Donald Trump insists that the country has fallen to communism and “Marxists,” what he’s really saying is that a government in which racial minorities have a say is illegitimate.

The accusation of “socialism” had sharp teeth in the 1950s, as Americans recoiled from the growing influence of the Soviet Union and the rise of Communist China. But Republicans’ use of the word typically had little to do with actual, Bolshevik-style socialism. The theory that the people would rise up and take control of the means of production has never been popular in the United States. The best a Socialist Party candidate has ever done in an American presidential election was when Eugene V. Debs won about 6 percent of the popular vote in 1912.

Rather, in the United States, the political charge of socialism tended to carry a peculiar meaning, one forged in the white-supremacist backlash to Black civil rights in the 1870s.

During the Civil War, the Republicans in charge of the government both created national taxation and abolished legal slavery (except as punishment for crime). For the first time in U.S. history, voting in federal elections had a direct impact on people’s pocketbooks. Then, in 1867, Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act, extending the vote to Black men in the South. White southerners who hated the idea of Black people using the vote to protect themselves started to terrorize their Black neighbors. Pretending to be the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers, they dressed in white robes with hoods to cover their faces and warned formerly enslaved people not to show up at the polls.

But in 1870, Congress created the Department of Justice to enable the federal government to protect the right of Black men to vote. Attorney General Amos Akerman oversaw the prosecution of more than 3,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan, winning more than 1,000 convictions. Meanwhile, Congress passed laws to protect Black voting.

Suddenly, it was harder for white southerners to object to Black rights on racial grounds. So they turned to a new argument, one based in economics.

They did not want Black men voting, they said, because formerly enslaved people were poor, and they would vote for leaders who promised to build things such as roads and hospitals. Those public investments could be paid for only with tax levies, and most of the people in the South with property after the war were white. Thus, although the infrastructure in which the southern legislatures were investing would help everyone, reactionaries claimed that Black voting amounted to a redistribution of wealth from white men to Black people, who wanted something for nothing.

Black voting was, one magazine insisted, “socialism in South Carolina.”

This argument that poor Black workers were dangerous socialists offered justification for former Confederates to block their Black neighbors from the polls, to read them out of American society, and ultimately to lynch them. It’s a peculiarly American version of “socialism,” and it might have been a historical anomaly had a small group of business leaders and southern racists not resurrected it in the 20th century as part of a deliberate effort to destroy the liberal consensus.

After World War II, most Republicans joined Democrats in believing that the federal government had to oversee business regulation, welfare programs, and infrastructure. They knew what businessmen would do to the economy unless they were checked; they had seen people homeless and hungry during the Depression.

And they scoffed at the notion that the New Deal system was a bad idea. They looked around at their homes, at their candy-colored cars that they drove on the new interstate highways built under what was then the biggest public-works project in U.S. history, and at their union-boosted paychecks in a nation with its highest gross domestic production ever, and they dismissed as a radical fringe the people trying to undermine this wildly successful system.

But the federal protection of civil rights added a new element to the liberal consensus that would threaten to tear it apart. Between 1967 and 1977, a North Carolina billboard urged people in “Klan Country” to “help fight Communism & Integration.”

The stagflation of the ’70s pushed middle-class Americans into higher tax brackets just when they needed their income most, and helped spread the sense that white tax dollars were being siphoned off to help racial minorities. As towns and governments tried to make up their declining funds with higher property taxes, angry property owners turned against the government. Republicans courted white workers by painting the Democrats as a party of grievance and special interests who simply wanted to pay off lazy Black supporters, rather than being interested in the good of America as a whole.

In 1976, former California Governor Ronald Reagan ran for president with the story of a “welfare queen” from the South Side of Chicago—code words for “Black”—who lived large on government benefits she stole. “She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands,” Reagan claimed. “And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names.” There was such a woman, but she was a dangerous criminal rather than a representative welfare recipient. Nonetheless, the story illustrated perfectly the idea that government involvement in the economy handed tax dollars to allegedly  undeserving Black Americans.

Reagan suggested a solution to such corruption. In August 1980, he spoke to voters in Philadelphia, Mississippi, 16 years and just a few miles from where the civil-rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner had been found murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan as they registered Black voters during 1964’s Freedom Summer. There, Reagan echoed the former Confederates during Reconstruction: “I believe in states’ rights,” he said.

Reagan’s campaign invited voters to remember a time before Black and brown voices and women began to claim equal rights. His campaign passed out buttons and posters urging voters to “make America great again.”

Voters put Reagan in the White House, where his administration cut taxes and slashed spending on public welfare programs (while pouring money into defense spending, and tripling the national debt). In the name of preventing socialism, those programs began the process of hollowing out the middle class.

In the years since 1981, wealth has moved dramatically upward. And yet, the language that linked socialism and minority voting never ceased to escalate.

Talk hosts such as Rush Limbaugh insisted that socialism was creeping through America at the hands of Black Americans, “feminazis,” and liberals. After its founding in 1996, the Fox News Channel joined the chorus of those who insisted that their political opponents were socialists trying to wreck the country. Republicans insisted that Barack Obama was a full-fledged socialist, and in 2018, Trump’s White House Council of Economic Advisers used the word socialism 144 times in a 72-page report attacking Democratic politicians. Trump’s press release for the report read: “Congressional Democrats Want to Take Money From Hardworking Americans to Fund Failed Socialist Policies.”

There is a long-standing fight over whether support for the modern-day right is about taxes or race. The key is that it is about taxes and race at the same time: Since Reconstruction, white supremacists have argued that minority voting means socialism, and that true Americans stand against both. In recent history, that argument has led Republican-dominated state legislatures to make voting harder for people of color, and to rig the system through gerrymandering. Three years ago it led Trump and his supporters to try to overturn the results of a presidential election to keep their opponents out of power. They believed, and insist they still believe, that they had to destroy the government in order to save it.

This article is adapted from Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America.

In an age of democratized self-expression, you need not be Serena Williams or Prince Harry to write a memoir—or for people to want to read about your life. Not all of these first-person works are good, but more of them means that some will be good, even fascinating. Take an ever-swelling corner of the memoir market: those written about the Asian American experience. Identity, in these books, is a constant theme, but refreshingly, it plays out in all sorts of different registers—say, racial politics (Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings) or grief (Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart) or friendship (Hua Hsu’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Stay True). The most compelling of these create space for bigger questions—about the historical legacy of marginalization, or the nature of belonging—through the details of a particular set of lives.

A recent entrant into this arena reassures me that the proliferation of first-person storytelling is yielding outstanding works. Fae Myenne Ng’s Orphan Bachelors, an aching account of the author’s family in San Francisco’s Chinatown at the tail end of the Chinese Exclusion era, is an exemplar of the historical memoir.

Exclusion, which lasted from the late-19th century to World War II, was the United States’ official policy of forbidding immigration and citizenship to Chinese people. The orphan bachelors were the men who, during that period, came to work in America’s goldfields, on its railroads, or in its restaurants and laundries. Most came as “paper sons” who circumvented the law by falsely claiming to be the sons of Chinese American citizens. Trading their identities for fake ones, they toiled alone in America. Some had wives and children in China who could not legally come over, and those who were single suffered from a double exclusion—the law forbade not only immigration but also interracial marriage. These men are known in Cantonese as the lo wah que, the “old sojourners.”

Ng’s father called Exclusion a brilliant crime because it was bloodless: “four generations of the unborn.” Ng and her siblings were part of the first generation that repopulated their neighborhood after the lifting of Exclusion but before the immigration reforms of the 1960s. Beyond telling her family’s story, Ng memorializes an enclave stuck in time, its demographics twisted by cruel constraints. She shows that Exclusion has a reverberating and painful afterlife that dictates the limits of inclusion: One does not simply lead to the other.

Orphan bachelor is not a translation from Chinese, but a phrase that Ng’s father came up with. To her, it signals the tragedy and romance of the sojourners: their labor and loneliness, and also their hope. By the time Ng is coming up, these men are wizened and gray-haired; the generational shift is clear. Still, though the memoir plays out from Ng’s perspective, it is full of color from the old timers’ lives. As young girls, Ng and her sister respectfully address these men, who while away the time in Portsmouth Square, as “grandfather.” When she introduces them to us, she uses names that bespeak their individuality: Gung-fu Bachelor, Newspaper Bachelor, Hakka Bachelor, Scholar Bachelor. In the park, they argue politics and play chess. Some have jobs; others do not. They shuffle off, Ng writes, “their steps a Chinese American song of everlasting sorrow.”

From an early age, Ng seems to have an inclination toward history, and toward storytelling—tendencies that help her observe the bigger-picture currents at the edges of her family’s tale. She spends time with Scholar Bachelor in particular, who lives in an SRO hotel, works in a restaurant, and teaches in the Chinese school where the immigrants’ kids go in the afternoon after “English school.” A sincere, tyrannical teacher who recites Chinese poetry from the Tang dynasty, he encourages Ng, a budding writer, to look “to the old country for inspiration.”

Another orphan bachelor who influences Ng is her father, a merchant seaman and raconteur who can “take one fact and clothe it in lore.” He lived in San Francisco’s Chinatown for almost a decade before he went back to his ancestral village and found a wife, with whom he returned to California, after Exclusion lifted, to start a family. Like many who’ve faced unjust barriers and ongoing precarity, he tells tall tales filled with warlord violence, famine, and adversity. These stories are the currency traded among the orphan bachelors in the park, necessary in order to believe that their present misfortunes are not the worst. It may be bad in America, but not as bad as it was in China.

The impulse to narrate hardship—and, in so doing, lay claim to it—is evident in the relationship between Ng’s parents, who are full of pity, both for themselves and for each other. They have little in common other than their suffering, but even in that, they are competitive. Ng’s dad rails about the racism he has faced in the United States. Her mom retorts that “nothing compared to the brutality of Japan’s imperial army,” which she experienced growing up in pre-Communist China. Seeking relief from all of the fighting, Ng’s father ships out and leaves his wife and children for a month or more at a time. Her mom works as a seamstress, during the day at the sewing factory and at night at home; Ng and her sister go to sleep and wake up to the sound of the sewing machine.

Theirs is not a story of upward mobility or assimilation. Going to sea and sewing, the arguments and resentments—they all continue, even after the parents buy a small grocery store and a house on the outskirts of the city. In the 1960s, Ng’s father signs up for the U.S. government’s Chinese Confession Program, in which paper sons could “confess” their fake identities in exchange for the possibility of legalized status. The program is controversial: A single confession implicates an entire lineage, and there is no guarantee of being granted legal status (indeed, some are deported). Ng’s mom pressures Ng’s dad to confess; she wants to be able to bring her mother, whom she has not seen for decades, to the States. But confessing invalidates his legal status, and his citizenship isn’t restored until many years later.

[Read: Racism has always been a part of the Asian American experience]

Confession ruins the marriage. Still, there are small acts of devotion. When Ng’s mother is diagnosed with cancer, her father travels to Hong Kong and smuggles back an expensive traditional Chinese treatment: a jar of snake’s gallbladders, which he tenderly spoon-feeds her at her bedside. This ongoing tension is one of the memoir’s remarkable qualities. The story it tells is, in one sense, simply about the aches and dramas of a single family. But in another, its scope is more deeply existential. It considers the unjust constraints that can make unhappiness feel like fate, and the role that stubborn fealty can play in helping a family, somehow, stay together.

One of the things Ng’s dad, ever the weaver of yarns, teaches her is that stories always contain secrets; the important thing is to find the truth in them, however hidden they might be. That makes Orphan Bachelors something of an excavation—one that seems to build on a previous effort. Thirty years ago, Ng’s evocative debut novel, Bone, told a version of this story.

That novel was similarly focused on a family in San Francisco’s Chinatown during the Confession era: The mother is a seamstress and the stepfather is a merchant seaman; the marriage is fraught, buffeted by adversity; the first-person protagonist is, like Ng herself, the eldest daughter. In the novel, the middle daughter has jumped to her death from the rooftop of the Chinatown projects. The sister’s death is the plot device that forces a reckoning with the lies that fester in the family’s troubled relationships—and the bigger lies that have structured the lives of the paper sons.

Bone is full of minimalist but distinctive place-setting details—a chicken being plucked “till it was completely bald,” the culottes the mother must sew to meet popular demand in the flower-power ’60s. In Orphan Bachelors, Ng has enriched the environment further by attending to linguistic subtleties. She understands what language can reveal about identity formation—what it creates and enables, what it denies and obscures. Of the subdialect of Cantonese that she hears crisscrossing the neighborhood while growing up, Ng writes, “Our Toishan was a thug’s dialect, the Tong Man’s hatchetspeak. Every curse was a plunging dagger. Kill. Kill. You.” (It’s written in English, and although I can hear the Chinese, non-Chinese speakers will have no trouble getting it.) The second-generation children live in between languages, “obedient, polite, and respectful” in English school, yet like “firecrackers” in Chinese school. “We talked back. We never shut up,” Ng writes. “Our teachers grimaced at our twisty English-laced Chinese. We were Americans and we made trouble.”

In a way, the secret that Ng reveals about this era—across fiction and memoir—is how the trauma of Exclusion is transferred from one generation to the next: the complications of true and fake family histories, the desire of the younger generation to unburden themselves of that difficult inheritance, the impossibility of actually escaping it. In Bone, we see the dissonance between familial duty and selfhood playing out from a young woman’s point of view. Orphan Bachelors captures the longer arc of Ng’s life as a Chinatown daughter, including her parents’ deaths. The struggle to balance devotion to your elders with living your own life, it suggests, does not necessarily end when those elders have passed away.

As a historian who has written three books on aspects of Chinese Exclusion, I have explained how Exclusion separated families and how Confession separated them still. I hope I have told the story well enough. I am grateful to Ng for lending her voice to this history and crafting a narrative that reckons with this period’s devastating psychic costs. The storyteller’s delusion, as Ng puts it in Orphan Bachelors, is the belief that if you tell the story right, you will be understood. It may be an impossible task, but with this latest endeavor, she is getting closer.