In the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, both Facebook and Twitter decided to suspend lame-duck President Donald Trump from their platforms. He had encouraged violence, the sites reasoned; the megaphone was taken away, albeit temporarily. To many Americans horrified by the attack, the decisions were a relief. But for some conservatives, it marked an escalation in a different kind of assault: It was, to them, a clear sign of Big Tech’s anti-conservative bias.

That same year, Florida and Texas passed bills to restrict social-media platforms’ ability to take down certain kinds of content. (Each is described in this congressional briefing.) In particular, they intend to make political “deplatforming” illegal, a move that would have ostensibly prevented the removal of Trump from Facebook and Twitter. The constitutionality of these laws has since been challenged in lawsuits—the tech platforms maintain that they have a First Amendment right to moderate content posted by their users. As the separate cases wound their way through the court system, federal judges (all of whom were nominated by Republican presidents) were divided on the laws’ legality. And now they’re going to the Supreme Court.

On Friday, the Court announced it would be putting these cases on its docket. The resulting decisions could be profound: “This would be—I think this is without exaggeration—the most important Supreme Court case ever when it comes to the internet,” Alan Rozenshtein, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and a senior editor at Lawfare, told me. At stake are tricky questions about how the First Amendment should apply in an age of giant, powerful social-media platforms. Right now, these platforms have the right to moderate the posts that appear on them; they can, for instance, ban someone for hate speech at their own discretion. Restricting their ability to pull down posts would cause, as Rozenshtein put it, “a mess.” The decisions could reshape online expression as we currently know it.

[Read: Is this the beginning of the end of the internet?]

Whether or not these particular laws are struck down is not what’s actually important here, Rozenshtein argues. “What’s much, much more important is what the Court says in striking down those laws—how the Court describes the First Amendment protections.” Whatever they decide will set legal precedents for how we think about free speech when so much of our lives take place on the web. Rozenshtein and I caught up on the phone to discuss why these cases are so interesting—and why the decision might not fall cleanly along political lines.

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Caroline Mimbs Nyce: How did we get here?

Alan Rozenshtein: If you ask the companies and digital-civil-society folks, we got here because the crazy MAGA Republicans need something to do with their days, and they don’t have any actual policy proposals. So they just engage in culture-war politics, and they have fastened on Silicon Valley social-media companies as the latest boogeyman. If you ask conservatives, they’re going to say, “Big Tech is running amok. The liberals have been warning us about unchecked corporate power for years, and maybe they had a point.” This really came to a head when, in the wake of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, major social-media platforms threw Donald Trump, the president of the United States, off of their platforms.

Nyce: Based on what we know about the Court, do we have any theories about how they’re going to rule?

Rozenshtein: I do think it is very likely that the Texas law will be struck down. It is very broad and almost impossible to implement. But I think there will be some votes to uphold the Florida law. There may be votes from the conservatives, especially Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, but you might also get some support from some folks on the left, in particular Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor—not because they believe conservatives are being discriminated against, but because they themselves have a lot of skepticism of private power and big companies.

But what’s actually important is not whether these laws are struck down or not. What’s much, much more important is what the Court says in striking down those laws—how the Court describes the First Amendment protections.

Nyce: What are the important things for Americans to consider at this moment?

Rozenshtein: This would be—I think this is without exaggeration—the most important Supreme Court case ever when it comes to the internet.

The Supreme Court in 1997 issued a very famous case called Reno v. ACLU. And this was a constitutional case about what was called the Communications Decency Act. This was a law that purported to impose criminal penalties on internet companies and platforms that transmitted indecent content to minors. So this is part of the big internet-pornography scare of the mid-’90s. The Court said this violates the First Amendment because to comply with this law, platforms are going to have to censor massive, massive, massive amounts of information. And that’s really bad. And Reno v. ACLU has always been considered the kind of Magna Carta of internet–First Amendment cases, because it recognized the First Amendment is really foundational and really important. The Court has recognized this in various forms since then. But, in the intervening almost 30 years, it’s never squarely taken on a case that deals with First Amendment issues on the internet so, so profoundly.

Even if the Court strikes these laws down, if it does not also issue very strong language about how platforms can moderate—that the moderation decisions of platforms are almost per se outside the reach of government regulation under the First Amendment—this will not be the end of this. Whether it’s Texas or Florida or some blue state that has its own concerns about content moderation of progressive causes, we will continue to see laws like this.

This is just the beginning of a new phase in American history where, rightly, it is recognized that because these platforms are so important, they should be the subject of government regulation. For the next decade, we’ll be dealing with all sorts of court challenges. And I think this is as it should be. This is the age of Big Tech. This is not the end of the conversation about the First Amendment, the internet, and government regulation over big platforms. It’s actually the beginning of the conversation.

Nyce: This could really influence the way that Americans experience social media.

Rozenshtein: Oh, it absolutely could, in very unpredictable ways. If you believe the state governments, they’re fighting for internet freedom, for the freedom of users to be able to use these platforms, even if users express unfriendly or unfashionable views. But if you listen to the platforms and most of the tech-policy and digital-civil-society crowd, they’re the ones fighting for internet freedom, because they think that the companies have a First Amendment right to decide what’s on the platforms, and that the platforms only function because companies aggressively moderate.

Even if the conservative states are arguing in good faith, this could backfire catastrophically. Because if you limit what companies can do to take down harmful or toxic content, you’re not going to end up with a freer speech environment. You’re going to end up with a mess.

Few things are more difficult than getting the Roberts Court to side against the Republican Party in a voting-rights case, but the state of Alabama has managed to do so twice in one year.

Two years ago, Alabama sought to diminish the voting power of its Black population by creating only one majority-Black congressional district, despite the fact that the state’s Black population—more than a quarter of its overall population—would sustain two. The Voting Rights Act contains a requirement that under certain conditions, states must draw majority-minority districts, a provision meant to counteract the long history of American legislators racially gerrymandering districts to diminish the influence of nonwhite voters.

The Supreme Court, in June, affirmed a lower-court ruling that required the state to redraw its maps to include a second majority-Black  district or something “close to it.” Alabama officials, who feared that a second such district would add a second Democrat to Alabama’s congressional delegation, decided they would defy a direct order from the Supreme Court, instead drawing a second district without a Black majority. In effect, they were telling the justices, There must be some mistake. Don’t you know who I am?

[Adam Serwer: The Roberts Court draws a line]

Yesterday morning, the Court rejected Alabama’s appeal. The original ruling had been 5–4, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh siding with the three Democratic appointees, but the new order noted no dissents, making the rejection of Alabama’s request all the more forceful.

Alabama’s Attorney General Steve Marshall, illustrating the judgment that has already seen his argument rejected twice, decried the Supreme Court’s demand for “separate but equal districts.” The suggestion that not allowing white people to discriminate against Black people is racist against white people is absurd, but I suspect some of the justices will nevertheless find it persuasive.

Does this mean the Roberts Court has diverged from its right-wing agenda of weakening organized labor, gutting antidiscrimination laws, diminishing the authority of regulatory agencies, supporting state imposition of socially conservative values on people who do not share them, and siding with virtually every corporate request that reaches its docket? Absolutely not.

The Alabama-voting-rights case simply put the Court in an impossible position: If the right-wing justices did what the state wanted, political actors would have no reason to obey any ruling the Court ever makes. The state was asking the right-wing justices to undermine their own authority so that the Republican Party could retain one more guaranteed congressional seat in Alabama. As the attorney Kate Shaw wrote in The New York Times earlier this month, if the Supreme Court rewarded Alabama’s defiance, it would mean that “defiance by other political actors, both left and right, can be expected, and will be justified.”

Indeed, it is precisely because accepting Alabama’s defiance would have endangered the Roberts Court’s agenda that the right-wing justices who wished Alabama to prevail offered no dissent from the decision to tell them to go pound sand.

[Adam Serwer: The Constitution is whatever the right wing says it is]

There are several lessons to be learned from this episode. One is that many of those shrieking about the Supreme Court being “delegitimized” by liberal criticism of its rulings are fine with conservatives ignoring those rulings entirely if they oppose them. A second is that despite their insistence that the justices are not “partisan hacks,” Alabama Republicans clearly believed that no request was too absurd or unlawful for the right-wing majority to grant. A third is that even the most ideological right-wing justices will not go along with conservative demands if that means depreciating their own power.

But there is no reason to believe that the Court will not continue to give conservatives precisely what they want almost every time. And where the conservative justices refuse to grant do-overs? They rule as they do not because they are liberal or because they are any less committed to right-wing ideological zealotry, but because repealing the 20th century is a cause too important to risk over something as fleeting as a congressional seat.

The contemporary ethical standards that many Americans want to see the Supreme Court adhere to are exactly that—contemporary. Throughout the Court’s long history, justices have had conflicts of interest that we would find unacceptable today. And in the past, people didn’t seem to mind quite so much.

In 1803, Chief Justice John Marshall, who wrote the Court’s landmark opinion in Marbury v. Madison, should have recused himself by contemporary standards. The case concerned the validity of judicial commissions that he had himself signed and sealed, and that his brother James Marshall had been charged with delivering. But Chief Justice Marshall didn’t recuse himself—and nobody objected at the time. In 1972, Chief Justice Warren Burger spoke by telephone with President Richard Nixon about cases and issues that were or could come before the Court, including school busing and obscenity. The news became public in 1981, while Burger was still chief justice—and was met with a relative shrug.

Nor are potential financial conflicts anything new. The justices have long benefited from the generosity of rich friends, which until recently generated little concern. Justice William J. Brennan’s acceptance of $140,000 in gifts and forgiven debts from a wealthy businessperson in the 1990s, far from making front-page news, showed up in a tiny article on the bottom of page A9 of The New York Times. In 1995, reports that seven different justices enjoyed luxurious trips over a 13-year period, courtesy of a major legal publisher (and Supreme Court litigant), generated little interest from Congress. More recent instances when millionaires and billionaires bankrolled trips taken by Justices Antonin Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer spurred generally mild media coverage with hardly any outrage. (Although Justice Abe Fortas’s financial entanglements with the financier Louis Wolfson ultimately caused Fortas to resign, the allegations against the justice—who had agreed to accept large cash payments from Wolfson for the rest of Justice and Mrs. Fortas’ lives in exchange for the justice providing unspecified “services” to this subsequently convicted felon—were far more serious than any made recently.)

[Bob Bauer: The Supreme Court needs an ethics code]

The current climate is very different. Last year, critics lambasted Justice Clarence Thomas for not recusing in cases involving the January 6 attack on the Capitol after text messages from his wife, Virginia, revealed her involvement in the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Then, in April, ProPublica reported on the relationship between Justice Thomas and the real-estate tycoon Harlan Crow, which was followed by more reports of other financial entanglements between justices and wealthy benefactors. These reports stoked public anger; politicians of both parties, newspaper editorial boards, and numerous commentators called for a formal code of ethics at the Supreme Court, possibly including limits on the gifts the justices can accept and more robust disclosure requirements.

So the question is not why today’s Court has so many potential conflicts and controversies, some of them problematic (the Ginni Thomas texts), some of them less so (Venmogate). The question is why they have generated so much attention and outrage compared with decades past.

Part of this is undoubtedly partisan opportunism, with critics on the Court’s left and right seeking additional reason to delegitimize the decisions of their disfavored justices, amplified through a hyper-politicized media environment. But a more fundamental, albeit interrelated, reason is at play: the rise in recent years of a strong anti-elitism in American politics, what David Brooks has dubbed a “distrustful populism.”

One principal feature of this form of populism is a rejection of an earlier narrative that the powerful attained their posts because of “merit.” Instead, on both the left and right, an increasing suspicion has emerged that meritocracy is toxic, a system that rewards power and privilege with yet more power and privilege.

Attitudes toward Supreme Court justices reflect this shift. Back when Justices Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor were nominated, their paths—from childhood poverty to Ivy League law schools to the highest court in the land—were celebrated as American success stories. But these days, when commentators note that eight of the nine justices graduated from Harvard or Yale Law School, it’s almost always the subject of complaint rather than acclaim.

This anti-elitist turn extends even to the hiring of the justices’ law clerks. Earlier this year, when a study found that going to an elite college greatly enhanced one’s chances of landing a Supreme Court clerkship, an author of the study complained that it reflected “some of the worst pathologies in American society.” When it became public in July 2021 that Justice Elena Kagan offered a clerkship to Jessica Garland, the daughter of former D.C. Circuit Chief Judge and current Attorney General Merrick Garland, the news was condemned as a glaring example of “nepotism” and “another justice not caring about conflicts of interest.” (Jessica Garland’s clerkship has been postponed to a time when her father is no longer attorney general.)

Which is not to say that all distrust and calling out of elites is a bad thing; much of it represents a belated and worthy recognition of deep unfairness in many parts of American society. But recognizing the relative recency of such concerns should also affect the approach to ethics reforms for the Court.

[Glenn Fine: The Supreme Court needs real oversight]

First, although greater scrutiny of the justices is salutary, blaming them for conduct based on standards developed after the actions at issue may be counterproductive. Hyperbolic condemnation of the justices, including calls for impeachment, has the potential to backfire. It makes the justices more defensive—as reflected in a recent Wall Street Journal interview of Justice Samuel Alito, in which he asserted that “no provision in the Constitution gives [Congress] the authority to regulate the Supreme Court”—and less likely to voluntarily adopt an ethics code. And given questions surrounding Congress’s ability to impose ethics requirements on the Court, both constitutionally (because of separation of powers) and politically (because of Republican opposition), getting the justices to adopt a code on their own is still the most likely path to reform.

Second, as history has made clear, as long as the justices are real people underneath their robes, they will have potential conflicts of interest. The justices are human (and Americans want them that way—research shows that Americans trust human judges more than artificial-intelligence judges). The justices will have friends—who might be inclined to entertain or help them, as friends do. The justices will have spouses—who might have lucrative careers and outside clients. The justices will have human desires—perhaps for the finer things of life, perhaps for fame.

Given this, strengthening disclosure requirements—and imposing real consequences for violations, such as serious financial penalties—may be more productive than trying to police the friendships of the justices or the gifts they can receive. An ethics regime that gives the justices broad leeway in their and their spouse’s outside relationships, tied to greater disclosure of those relationships, could be a reasonable compromise acceptable to both Congress and the Court.

Despite its issues past and present, the federal judiciary is one of the world’s best in terms of independence and integrity. We know this firsthand, having clerked for three federal judges between the two of us and having appeared as lawyers before many more. We have also followed and written about the Supreme Court for years, for both scholarly and general-interest publications (separately and together, as a married couple).

Yes, the Supreme Court should adopt an ethics code, at the very least to convey to the public that it is, in Kagan’s words, “adhering to the highest standards of conduct.” But Americans should also proceed with caution and humility when advocating for what such a code should contain, tempering today’s populist sympathies with an understanding of history and a recognition that if the public wants justices to be humans, not Platonic Guardians or AI creations, they must accept the burdens as well as the benefits of that bargain.

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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

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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.

For the past half century, many women in America have enjoyed an unprecedented degree of freedom and legal protection, not because of Roe v. Wade or antidiscrimination laws but because of something much less celebrated: “no fault” divorce. Beginning in the early 1970s, no-fault divorce enabled millions of people, most of them women, to file for divorce over “irreconcilable differences” or the equivalent without having to prove misconduct by a spouse—such as adultery, domestic violence, bigamy, cruelty, abandonment, or impotence.

But now conservative politicians in states such as Texas and Louisiana, as well as a devoutly Catholic husband who tried to halt his wife’s divorce efforts in Nebraska, are attacking no-fault divorce. One of the more alarming steps taken in that direction came from the Texas Republican Party, whose 2022 platform called on the legislature to “rescind unilateral no-fault divorce laws and support covenant marriage.” Given the Republican Party’s control of the offices of governor, secretary of state, and attorney general, and both chambers of the state legislature, Texas has a chance of actually doing it.

Until 1857, divorce in England—whose ecclesiastical laws formed the basis of divorce laws in most American colonies outside New England—was available only through an act of Parliament. A total of 324 couples managed to secure one; only four of those were initiated by women. Husbands could divorce their wives based solely on adultery, but women had to prove additional aggravating circumstances. Proof of brutality, rape, or desertion was considered insufficient to support a divorce. Not until 1801 did a woman, Jane Addison, finally win a divorce based on adultery alone.

[Helen Lewis: The conservative case for liberalizing divorce]

Divorce in the American colonies was often decided by governors, while colonial courts required the innocent spouse to prove marital fault by the other, making divorce virtually nonexistent. Married women were mostly bound by laws of “coverture,” which, in the words of the English jurist William Blackstone, meant that “by marriage, the husband and wife are one person in the law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing.” As recounted by the historian Catherine Allgor, American women had no right to enter into contracts or independently own property, including their own wages and “the clothes on their backs.” Mothers lacked basic parental rights, too, “so that if a wife divorced or left a husband, she would not see her children again.”

State standards for divorce varied, including the number of times a man could assault his wife before divorce was allowed. (Marital rape was not illegal in all 50 states until 1993.) In 1861, a judge in New York City ruled that “one or two acts of cruel treatment” were not sufficient grounds to grant a woman a divorce, even after her husband beat her unconscious with a piece of wood during a fight over the family dog sleeping in their bed. The judge wrote that “the wife should not seek on slight provocation to dissolve that sacred tie which binds her to her husband for life, for better or worse.” As if the privacy intrusions of a trial were not enough, newspapers routinely publicized divorce cases, often blaming the woman without mentioning her abuse. Norms of “regular marriage” even made their way into national politics when, two months before the Civil War began, President Abraham Lincoln invoked the analogy in a speech accusing the South of wanting a “‘free love’ arrangement” based on “passional attraction” rather than fidelity to the Union.

Against this backdrop, conservative commentators today claim that no-fault-divorce laws destroy the sanctity of marriage and disfavor men. The blogger and Daily Wire host Matt Walsh tweeted this year that no-fault divorce should be abolished. He once tweeted that “no fault divorce grants one person the ability to break the contract without the consent of the other. What kind of contract is that?” The right-wing YouTube personality Steven Crowder has argued that “no-fault divorce … means that in many of these states if a woman cheats on you, she leaves, she takes half. So it’s not no-fault, it’s the fault of the man.” Elsewhere, he claimed, “If you’re a woman that comes from meager means, and you want to get wealthy—you’ve never worked, you didn’t get a degree, you have no skill set, but you’re good-looking—your best path to victory is simply to marry a man, leave him, and take half.”

Republican Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio picked up the argument on the campaign trail last September, stating, “One of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace … is the idea that, like, ‘Well, okay, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term.’”

[Olga Khazan: The high cost of divorce]

Except no-fault-divorce laws did make women happier. Prior to California’s Family Law Act of 1969, which was signed into law by then-Governor Ronald Reagan, all states followed a fault-based system in which divorces were granted very sparingly under strict criteria. Women who wanted out of a bad marriage had little choice but to stay, because most were family caregivers who would wind up destitute without a judicial division of assets. The tight legal controls also led to highly adversarial proceedings and regularized lying in order to secure a divorce decree. Estranged couples fled to more liberal states known as “divorce colonies” simply to end a marriage. It was not until 1949 that divorce was legal at all in South Carolina. Although many states still retain the option of fault-based grounds for divorce, which arguably can carry the benefits of avoiding mandatory separation periods and a greater share of marital assets for the spouse who files for divorce, the last to abandon mandatory proof of fault was New York, in 2010. Late-stage opponents responsible for New York’s delay in the movement included the Roman Catholic Church and some women’s-rights groups fearful that no-fault divorce would diminish women’s leverage to obtain favorable alimony or child-support awards.

No-fault divorce managed to meaningfully shift the power balance in marriage relationships: Women now had the option of leaving without their husband’s permission. From 1976 to 1985, states that adopted no-fault divorce saw their overall domestic-violence rates plummet by a quarter to one-half, including in relationships that did not end in divorce. The number of women murdered by “intimates” declined by 10 percent. Female suicide rates also fell immediately in states that moved to unilateral divorce, a downward trend that continued for the next decade. Researchers have theorized that many women “derive a life-preserving benefit from divorce,” because under the threat of divorce, “the husband … behaves himself, thereby reducing the incidence of domestic violence and spousal homicide.”

Federal law allows for state legislatures to easily roll back women’s ability to initiate divorce without spousal consent or proof of abuse. Although the Supreme Court recognized in 2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges that state laws must yield to federal rights protecting same-sex marriage, nothing in the Constitution or the Court’s precedent clearly prevents states from reversing no-fault divorce.

The writer and attorney Beverly Willett, an opponent of no-fault divorce, has argued that “unilateral no-fault divorce clearly violates the 14th Amendment,” supposedly depriving defendants in divorce cases “of life, liberty, and property without due process of law.” This argument has it exactly backwards. There is no express “right” to marriage in the Constitution. Although troubling vestiges of legal coverture still linger in American law, women these days are not considered legal “property” to which a man’s constitutional due-process rights could conceivably attach.

As for due-process protections for liberty (which the Supreme Court has described as “not confined to mere freedom from bodily restraint,” but instead inclusive of “the full range of conduct which the individual is free to pursue”), that right more compellingly protects the person seeking to end a marriage—and to do so without having to prove to the government that she deserves it.

There’s an old saying that sometimes it is more important for the law to be certain than to be right. Certainty allows people to plan their actions knowing what the rules are going to be.

Nowhere is this principle more urgent than when it comes to the question of whether Donald Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election results have disqualified him from becoming president again. As cases raising the question have begun working their way through the courts in Colorado, Minnesota, and elsewhere, the country needs the Supreme Court to fully resolve the issue as soon as possible.

Eminent constitutional-law scholars and judges, both conservative and liberal, have made strong cases that Trump is disqualified from being president again under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which bars from office those who have taken an oath to defend the Constitution and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” Some of those scholars are professed originalists—as are many of the Supreme Court’s conservative justices—and to make their cases, they have analyzed what they say is the “original public meaning” of this provision. Other conservative and liberal scholars have concluded otherwise about the clause’s meaning, or at least raised serious doubts about whether and how these provisions apply to Trump.

Among the unresolved issues are whether the disqualification provision applies to those who formerly served as president, rather than in some other office; whether Congress must pass legislation authorizing the Department of Justice to pursue a civil lawsuit in order to bar Trump; whether Trump “engaged” in “insurrection” or “rebellion” or at least gave “aid or comfort” to “the enemies thereof.” Unsurprisingly, given that this provision emerged in response to the Civil War in the 1860s, there is virtually no modern case law fully resolving these issues, and many enormous questions remain on which reasonable minds disagree—for example, who would enforce this provision, and how.

Those are the legal questions. The political questions are, in some ways, even more complicated, and at least as contested. If Trump is disqualified on Fourteenth Amendment grounds, some believe that this would become a regular feature of nasty American politics. Others worry that significant social unrest would result if the leading candidate for one of the country’s major political parties were to be disqualified from running for office rather than giving voters the final say on the issue.

[David Frum: The Fourteenth Amendment fantasy]

All of these questions, however, are somewhat beside the point. This is not merely an academic exercise. Trump, right now, is already being challenged as constitutionally disqualified, and these issues are going to have to be resolved, sooner or later. My point is that sooner is much better than later.

A number of legal doctrines could lead courts to kick this issue down the road for some time. Maybe the provision applies not to primaries, but only to candidates in a general election. Maybe voters don’t have standing to sue, because they can’t show a particularized injury. Maybe this is a political question to be decided by the political branches, such as Congress, rather than by the judiciary.

But courts should not dally, because judicial delay could result in disaster. Imagine this scenario: Election officials and courts take different positions on whether Trump’s name can appear on the ballot in 2024. The Supreme Court refuses to get involved, citing one of these doctrines for avoiding assessing the case’s merits. Trump appears to win in the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. Democrats control Congress, and when January 6, 2025, arrives and it is time to certify the vote, Democrats say that Trump is ineligible to hold office, and he cannot serve.

As I and my co-authors argue in our report on how to have a fair and legitimate election in 2024, such a scenario raises the possibility of major postelection unrest. The country would have one political party disqualifying the candidate of the other party from serving—after that candidate has apparently won the results of a fair election.

The Supreme Court is the only institution that can definitively say what the law is in this case, and it should not wait once a case reaches its doorstep. Think of Republican voters and candidates soon to participate in the primary process. They, and everyone else, deserve to know whether the leading candidate is actually eligible to serve in office.

A Supreme Court decision to disqualify Trump from the ballot would obviate the need for Congress to resolve the question on January 6. Trump would not be allowed to run. In contrast, a judicial decision that Trump is not disqualified would make it very difficult politically for Democrats in Congress to try to reject Trump anyway after a 2024 victory.

[J. Michael Luttig and Laurence H. Tribe: The Constitution prohibits Trump from ever being president again]

How the Supreme Court would—or should—resolve the question of Trump’s disqualification on the merits is far from clear. There is no question that Trump tried to subvert the results of the 2020 election, using pressure, lies, and even the prospect for violence to overturn Joe Biden’s victory. Trump so far has faced no accountability for his actions: The Senate did not muster the two-thirds vote in 2021 to convict him after his second impeachment, a step that could have led to his disqualification under Congress’s impeachment-related powers. The federal and Georgia cases against Trump for his alleged election interference may yet go to trial, but whether verdicts will ever be reached is far from certain. In any event, even a guilty verdict would not disqualify Trump. If there is going to be any accountability for Trump’s actions in 2020, it might have to come from this disqualification provision. A reading of the Fourteenth Amendment in this way helps protect our democracy.

But serious legal questions continue to dog any use of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. My general view is that to avoid the overall criminalization of politics, reserve prosecuting politicians for instances when both the law and the facts are clear; marginal cases are best left to other remedies. Disqualification, of course, is not a criminal procedure, but borrowing this principle from the criminal context recommends caution here too. In close cases, the voters should get to decide at the ballot box.

The pressure to disqualify Trump is only going to grow until there’s a final resolution of the question. When this issue reaches the Supreme Court, the country will need the Court to decisively resolve it—or risk chaos later on.

Twenty years ago, a Republican president, George W. Bush, created the most successful, life-giving global-health program in history. This year, House Republicans appear determined to undermine it. If they succeed, it will be an act of extraordinary recklessness, done even while claiming to be the pro-life party.

In 2003, nearly 30 million Africans had AIDS, including 3 million under the age of 15. In some countries, more than one-third of the adult population carried the disease. More than 4 million required immediate drug treatment, yet only 50,000 AIDS victims were receiving the medicine they needed.

“To meet a severe and urgent crisis abroad,” President Bush said in his 2003 State of the Union address, “tonight I propose the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief—a work of mercy beyond all current international efforts to help the people of Africa.” He asked Congress to commit $15 billion over the next five years, including nearly $10 billion in new money, to turn the tide against AIDS in the most afflicted nations of Africa and the Caribbean. PEPFAR—the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief—was the largest commitment by any nation to combat a single disease in human history.

In 2007, Bush asked Congress to double America’s initial commitment and approve an additional $30 billion for HIV/AIDS prevention, care, and treatment over the next five years, which Congress did. At that point, estimates were that 1.2 million lives had been saved and that PEPFAR had helped bring lifesaving treatment to about 1.7 million people around the world.

“Calling to mind the story of Jesus raising his friend from the dead,” Bush has observed, “Africans came up with a phrase to describe the transformation. They called it the Lazarus Effect.”

PEPFAR has since been supported by the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations. Over the span of two decades, more than 25 million lives have been saved in more than 50 countries. More than 20 million women, men, and children are receiving lifesaving antiretroviral treatment. More than 7 million orphans, vulnerable children, and their caregivers have been aided. Five and a half million babies who would have otherwise been infected with HIV have been born without it. PEPFAR has also helped train 340,000 health-care workers to deliver and improve HIV care. The program has typically been reauthorized for five years at a time, drawing support from liberals and conservatives, and from different religious groups. In an acrimonious era, PEPFAR was one program that was immune to our polarized politics.

Until now.

The deadline for the next five-year reauthorization for PEPFAR is September 30, and opposition to it is being led by right-wing groups and members of Congress, including Representative Chris Smith, a onetime champion of PEPFAR who now insists the program is promoting abortion.

That charge is carelessly false. U.S. law does not allow taxpayer money to fund abortions in global-aid programs. No credible authorities have found that the program is being used to promote abortion-related activity, and nothing has changed in how PEPFAR is administered in this respect since the advent of the program. Oversight and reporting requirements are greater for PEPFAR than for other global-health programs.

Father Richard Bauer, who spent 25 years working in clinics for people with HIV in Kenya, Tanzania, and Namibia, condemned in The New York Times the “falsehoods that have been disproved by people close to PEPFAR’s daily work and governance—including me.” Bauer, who is pro-life, managed two major PEPFAR-sponsored programs through the Catholic Church in Namibia and Kenya, and “at no point was abortion part of our work or our mission. If anything, we prevented women with H.I.V. from seeking abortions, by using PEPFAR funding and treatment to provide hope that they could deliver H.I.V.-negative babies.”

Doug Fountain, the executive director of Christian Connections for International Health, a group that has supported local organizations fighting HIV/AIDS throughout Africa for decades, told Christianity Today that the abortion criticism is coming from people who don’t have “field experience.”

“If there was a concern,” he said, “the faith communities in the implementing countries would have complained.”

Instead, some 350 leaders of faith-based organizations in Africa wrote to Congress to defend the program, calling the claim that it funds abortion “unfounded and grossly unfortunate.” Identifying themselves as “steadfast believers in the right to life for both the unborn and the living,” they emphasized that, thanks to PEPFAR, “life expectancy is rising, orphanhood is falling, healthy births are increasing in health care facilities.”

And Shepherd Smith, an evangelical pro-lifer who co-founded the Children’s AIDS Fund International, wrote, “There simply is no factual evidence to support the rumor that PEPFAR is funding, or has funded, abortion or promoted abortion.” Some PEPFAR critics have claimed that organizations that receive money from PEPFAR will then have funds freed up to perform abortions. But Smith notes that grants under PEPFAR have strict compliance requirements; they require close congressional oversight; and “a total ban on funding to any entity that, with its private dollars, carries out activities contrary to moral teachings would render it impossible to invest in anything, from infrastructure to defense to anti-poverty programs to lifesaving international assistance.”

My former Bush-administration colleague Mark Dybul was one of the architects of PEPFAR and served as the United States global AIDS coordinator. He told me that U.S. rules on the funds are very clear. “Fungibility just doesn’t—and can’t—exist because of how money flows and is accounted for,” he said. Dybul explained that the NGOs that work with PEPFAR typically raise money for their other activities through grants and contracts. Very little of that money is unrestricted, which means it can’t be moved around. Large NGOs that implement PEPFAR live grant to grant and contract to contract; when they lose a grant, they sometimes have to fire hundreds of people or even close down country offices. The most notable exceptions to this pattern, ironically, are faith-based organizations (FBOs). They generally raise money with no strings attached and can decide how best to use it—but they’re not the groups that concern PEPFAR critics.

“Money dedicated to PEPFAR doesn’t free up money for abortion any more than money dedicated to abortion frees up money to fund PEPFAR work,” Dybul told me.

Dybul pointed out that African society generally remains very socially conservative. If groups funded by the United States government “were running around supporting abortion, it would be shouted from the rooftops,” he said. There’s a reason that’s not happening.

Spurious claims about PEPFAR supporting abortion have been made before, and they’ve been debunked before. But this time around, misinformation and disinformation have far greater reach. And much of the rhetoric being used by critics of PEPFAR—for example, the claim by an executive at the Family Research Council that PEPFAR is “being used as a massive slush fund for abortion and LGBT advocacy”—is not just false but maliciously untrue.

PEPFAR’s critics are not looking to defund the entire program—at least not yet; they are advocating a one-year authorization. But they have clearly turned on the program and are attempting to weaken it. If the U.S., which has provided global leadership on PEPFAR, pulls back its commitment to the program, other nations will follow. Right-wing critics of PEPFAR are insisting on changes that would sabotage it—for example, that PEPFAR must be governed by the Mexico City Policy, which requires foreign NGOs to certify that they will not “perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning” using funds from any source, including non-U.S. funds, as a condition of receiving U.S. global-family-planning and global-health assistance. (The Mexico City Policy has not been in place for PEPFAR for 16 of its 20 years in existence.) Groups opposing the reauthorization of PEPFAR are going so far as to promise to register a vote for a five-year reauthorization as a vote for abortion rights on the scorecards they issue, which would make some Republicans vulnerable to a primary challenge. This threat may well intimidate enough Republican House members to ensure that reauthorization of PEPFAR is defeated.

So House Republicans and their allies are advocating “solutions” that don’t apply to a problem that doesn’t exist, ringing alarm bells that don’t need to be rung, while in the process threatening one of the most effective and humane programs in American history.

The most generous explanation is that groups and individuals who have made defending the sanctity of life central to their work believe they are being faithful when in fact they are misinformed. In May, the Heritage Foundation published a deeply flawed report about the program, attacking what it described as “the Biden Administration’s effort to poison bipartisan support for PEPFAR by misusing it to promote abortion.” A lot of people with little knowledge of how PEPFAR actually works took the foundation’s assertions at face value. The claim that PEPFAR was funding abortion became a rallying cry in the pro-life movement, even something of a litmus test. Once people publicly committed to a position critical of PEPFAR, they became reluctant to change, despite the mounting evidence undermining their original stance. They have convinced themselves that being wrong is better than being seen as weak.

One person who is staunchly pro-life, and who asked for anonymity in order to speak candidly, told me that what is happening can’t be understood apart from what this person called “the politics of the pro-life movement.” In a post-Dobbs world in particular, I was told, “You can’t have anyone get to your right.”

I also spoke with a theologian who began to help AIDS victims in Africa decades ago. He told me that he thought “strategic cynicism” explained, at least in some cases, the newfound opposition to PEPFAR. What better way for the new right to discredit a previous Republican era, he told me, than to “tar and feather” one of its greatest and most compassionate achievements?

Nor can the attacks on PEPFAR be separated from the sensibilities of right-wing culture warriors. We have seen it in the COVID-vaccine attacks, which are baseless but powerfully resonant on the right. Those critiques, along with the ones aimed at PEPFAR, seem to be driven by a need to find a “woke” social agenda even where it doesn’t exist. An obsessive concern, animated by an unrelenting and unforgiving ideology, has now produced an entire infrastructure that fully incentivizes such attacks. This is what happens in a diseased political culture.

Almost every domain of contemporary American life, including science and health, has now been sucked into the culture-war maw. But nihilism has also come to characterize much of the American right. Attacking the establishment, burning things down, owning the libs—that’s what draws attention and attaboys. The very fact that so many “elites”—including Democratic members of Congress and the public-health establishment—want to extend PEPFAR is cause for suspicion, and evidence that opposing it embodies bravery and conviction.

What makes all of this even stranger is that, as others have pointed out, the right has significantly more power in media, the courts, and Congress than it did in, say, the 1990s. Just last year, a conservative Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which had been the pro-life movement’s top priority for the past half century. Yet catastrophism is fashionable on the American right. Some people find the belief that they’re involved in an existential struggle vivifying. It provides purpose to their life that would otherwise be lacking, and so they go in search of monsters to destroy. Even imaginary monsters. Even PEPFAR.

That the pro-life movement and many self-described Christians are spearheading this effort is sad and painful, especially for those of us who have been sympathetic to the pro-life cause and count ourselves as followers of Jesus. But it isn’t surprising. For individuals and organizations claiming to be committed to the sanctity of life to undermine a program that has saved 25 million people is only the most recent manifestation of the right’s morally inverted world. It is a world that is detached from reality and, even unwittingly, cruel. But there is a way back. There is always a way back.

In Matthew 25, Jesus teaches that to select those who will inherit the Kingdom of God, he will separate his true followers from his counterfeit followers by how they love and care for those in need. The test, presented in a parable, is a simple one: How did you treat the hungry, the thirsty, and the stranger; those who needed clothes; those who were sick and imprisoned?

“Truly I tell you,” Jesus says, “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

It is not too late for House Republicans to cast a vote later this month to continue to heal the sick and the wounded, to care for the stranger, and to help the least of these. To do anything else—to do anything less—would be lethally dishonorable.

Right before Sha’Carri Richardson smoked the field in the 100-meter final at the U.S. Outdoor Track and Field Championships in Eugene, Oregon, in July, the 23-year-old star sprinter sent a thrilling message to every Black woman who’s ever been shamed for her hairstyle and never felt fully free to be herself.

Richardson pulled off her signature bright-orange wig and threw it to the side, exposing the braids underneath. She then won the U.S. title by posting the fastest time by an American woman since 2011. After the race, Richardson boasted to reporters, “I’m not back. I’m better.”

Richardson told no lies. The larger point was that, whether she’s wearing her hair unadorned or in any of a number of exuberant colors, it’s a source of distinction and even power—and a challenge to the criticism that other Black women have faced.

Richardson has shown fans many different looks during her career: blue, platinum blond, red, wavy, sleek, curly. Last week, she concluded her spectacular track season with another viral hair moment—when she ran the Diamond League final without a wig or braids. “I had to pull out the natural,” she said afterward. It was appropriate punctuation to a season that also included her running the sixth-fastest time ever in the 100 meters at the Miramar Invitational and besting her elite Jamaican competitors to win the gold medal at the world championships in August.

[Read: When “good hair” hurts]

Her recent triumphs are quite a departure from how many people viewed Richardson two years ago, when she was disqualified from the 2021 Olympic Games in Tokyo for a positive marijuana test. She was suspended from competition for a month. Back then, she was a disappointment—someone critics saw as lacking humility, shirking responsibility, and wasting her ample talent. Richardson explained that she had turned to marijuana to cope with her biological mother’s death, which she had the misfortune of learning about from a reporter a few days before competing in the national track-and-field championships. But for some, that did not make her more sympathetic. Richardson tweeted: “I’m sorry, I can’t be y’all Olympic Champ this year but I promise I’ll be your World Champ next year.”

Richardson’s steady comeback has been one of the most compelling stories in sports—and that story has been intertwined with her insistence on presenting herself however she likes.

Beyond simple personal expression, Richardson’s hair is also an engagement with history. Black women’s beauty choices have long been used to justify racism and anti-Black discrimination. An 18th-century Louisiana law required Black women to cover their hair completely in public, lest their braided and intricate hairstyles prove too irresistible to white men. It took a landmark Supreme Court case in 1976 to prohibit employers from discriminating against people who wore Afros. Twenty-four states have now passed legislation, known as the CROWN Act, to address bias against Black hairstyles, but the need for such legal protections speaks to how polarizing the subject remains. One survey earlier this year found that in the workplace, Black women are two and a half times more likely to have their hair perceived as unprofessional than their female co-workers. Black Americans’ bodies have always been policed, right down to the roots of their hair.

[Read: Cutting my hair was my first revolutionary act]

Richardson is the latest in a long line of prominent Black American women who have fought back against norms established and enforced by people whose natural hair texture doesn’t look like theirs. The political activist Angela Davis’s Afro became the indelible image of Black liberation. The track legend Florence Griffith Joyner’s long, glorious tresses gave the public an enduring image of unabashed freedom. Serena Williams’s and Venus Williams’s beaded braids were a reminder to little Black girls that being themselves was, and always would be, enough.

Fortunately, as Richardson worked to reclaim her position as the top female American sprinter, she kept chasing glory on her own terms—which include not only a broad range of hairstyles but also voluminous eyelashes and bright acrylic nails. Her hair has come to symbolize rebirth.

“I’m having so much more fun, and I want people to understand it is not just because of winning,” she told reporters recently. “I’m having fun because I’m better within my spirit, within my mind, within my community that I created for myself. That’s the happiness that you guys see. The wins are just the bonus, but it shows when you’re whole within yourself what you will attract.”

Richardson’s hair speaks to the complexity of her journey, signaling joy, imagination, defiance, authenticity, and excellence—sometimes all at once.

In a court of law, defendants are entitled to a presumption of innocence. In the court of public opinion, Senator Bob Menendez enjoys no such indulgence.

The Democrat from New Jersey was indicted today—along with his wife, Nadine, and three others—on three counts of corruption. Federal prosecutors say the group accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes to assist the Egyptian government. Among other allegations, they say Menendez gave sensitive U.S.-government information to the Egyptians and tried to shield two of the defendants from prosecution.

This isn’t the first federal corruption case against Menendez, and his continued representation of his state in the Senate and as head of the powerful Foreign Relations Committee (at least up until today: Menendez stepped down from the chairmanship after his indictment) are a testament to the pusillanimity of Democrats. The news also shows how the heated partisanship of the current era can keep bad politicians in office for fear of helping the other party.

The indictment includes claims that New York accurately characterizes as “cartoonish.” In Menendez’s closet, FBI agents found envelopes full of cash in the pockets of jackets that had Menendez’s name sewn on them. They also turned up more than $100,000 worth of gold bars, like in some sort of harebrained Yosemite Sam scheme. (For good measure, the bars are stamped Swiss Bank Corporation.) Prosecutors also cite texts from Nadine to Bob Menendez complaining that a co-defendant, Wael Hana, had not paid the bribes he’d promised. And prosecutors allege the senator agreed to derail a prosecution in exchange for a Mercedes C-300 convertible. The document is, perhaps needless to say, a compelling read.

If corruption allegations against Bob Menendez sound familiar, that’s not just because you’re familiar with the recent history of other Democratic senators from New Jersey. In 2015, Menendez was indicted by federal prosecutors for a sweeping bribery scheme, alongside a doctor named Salomon Melgen.

The evidence against Menendez seemed compelling, but he got a lucky break: In the midst of his trial, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out a corruption conviction of former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, a Republican, a decision that, Matt Ford wrote, “fundamentally changed the standard for bribery.” The jury hung, the Justice Department dismissed charges, and Menendez got off with a severe admonition from the Senate Ethics Committee. (Melgen was later convicted and sentenced to 17 years in prison for Medicare fraud. Donald Trump commuted his sentence in one of his last acts as president, crediting Melgen’s “generosity in treating all patients especially those unable to pay or unable to afford health-care insurance”—on your dime.)

By then, as the journalist Dick Polman wrote in The Atlantic, Menendez had “escaped more scrapes than Houdini,” and his name was “synonymous with ethical lapses.” The moment would have seemed right for Democrats to be rid of Menendez. Not only was he an ethical liability in his own right, but his presence also undercut the corruption accusations the party was lodging against Trump. But they didn’t want to expel him from the Senate, because New Jersey’s governor at the time, Chris Christie, is a Republican, and could have appointed a Republican to the seat. So Menendez stayed, and in 2018 was reelected to the Senate.

Some people might lay low for a while after a fortuitous escape from the law, but prosecutors say Menendez promptly went back to doing corruption in spring 2018, around the time of his censure. The scheme was helped by the fact that in February 2018, just after charges were dropped, Menendez became the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Three years later, when Democrats retook the Senate, he became the chair. That gave him a perfect position to use his power to benefit Egypt.

Menendez says he’s innocent, and released a scorching statement this morning. “For years, forces behind the scenes have repeatedly attempted to silence my voice and dig my political grave,” he said. “Since this investigation was leaked nearly a year ago, there has been an active smear campaign of anonymous sources and innuendos to create an air of impropriety where none exists. The excesses of these prosecutors is apparent.”

He added: “Those behind this campaign ... see me as an obstacle in the way of their broader political goals.” That sounds a lot like Trump’s “I’m being indicted for you,” and his claims that he’s the target of retribution by the “deep state.” Menendez’s protests are hard to take seriously given that New Jersey is run by Democrats and the president is a Democrat (though Menendez is not a close pal of Biden’s), but voicing these arguments could help validate Trump’s defense against his own indictments, just as Menendez’s presence undermined the political case against Trump in 2018. But Democrats may have only delayed their headache, because Menendez is up for reelection in 2024. His travails could give Republicans a chance at taking his seat.

Menendez’s survival has left New Jerseyans, and Americans, with an ethically compromised senator, because Democrats were afraid that getting rid of him would produce a Republican senator—something they viewed as even worse. Today’s politics is suffused with what political scientists call negative partisanship—the phenomenon where partisans are more motivated by fear and loathing of the other party than affection or affinity for their own. In this way, Menendez’s indictment echoes the 2024 presidential election too, in which each party is poised to nominate a candidate based on the belief that he’s the one best positioned to defeat the other side—not for his own talents or character. Are there worse things than losing an election? The Menendez prosecution might offer one answer to that question.