Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

Many observers are characterizing the recent attack on Israel as that country’s 9/11. On reflection, what did you learn from the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and America’s responses to it?

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

Conversations of Note

Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, and related subjects are far too complex to tackle comprehensively here. So I have tried, this week, to present a range of narratives about Hamas’s attacks and how Israel is responding, if only to underscore how differently the conflict is understood by different people.

My colleague Graeme Wood, who traveled to Jerusalem, described what he found to Radio Atlantic host Hanna Rosin:

There are aspects of rah-rah patriotism. There’s also an ongoing sense of trauma. I mean, the number of people who died, the grisly fashion in which they died. It’s something that every Israeli has been seeing, and has really understood it. I mean, it is so shocking to the conscience, and so close to the lives of so many people here that I think it’s gonna be a while before people have processed this tragedy, this atrocity at that second level.

What you do have, though, is a political consensus and a military consensus that I think appeared relatively quickly after October 7, when Hamas broke through the Gaza wall and killed over 1,000 people. And that consensus is that, whatever else is true, Hamas cannot exist … I haven’t found, I think, almost any Israelis, except for extreme doves, who disagree … As a corollary to that, they also agree that that requires going into Gaza, and depending on who you ask, rooting out Hamas, killing its leaders, or possibly just leveling the whole place, which is something that I’ve heard a number of Israelis say.

Writing in The Times of Israel, Haviv Rettig Gur offers an explanation for that near consensus among Israelis, rooted in how some of them understand “the enemy”:

That enemy is not the Palestinian people … The enemy is not exactly Hamas either, though Hamas is part of it. The enemy is the Palestinian theory of Israelis that makes the violence seen on October 7 seem to many of them a rational step on the road to liberation rather than, as Israelis judge it, yet another in a long string of self-inflicted disasters for the Palestinian cause ...

The Palestinian strategy of terrorizing Israeli civilians is old, older even than the Israeli conquest of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. When the PLO was founded in 1964 with the goal of driving the Jews from the country, the West Bank was still ruled by Jordan and the Gaza Strip by Egypt. The PLO adopted terrorism as the basic strategy for Palestinian liberation not in anger, but because it had just witnessed the astonishing success of the Algerian National Liberation Front in using such terrorism to drive the French from Algeria in 1962. And it goes back further still. Organized Palestinian violence against the Jews in 1920, 1929, the so-called Arab Revolt of 1936–39—all followed the same basic theory: The Jews are an artificial, rootless polity removable by sustained violence, so sustained violence must be deployed to remove them.

This Palestinian vision of Israelis is taught to Palestinian children as the basic truth of the Palestinian struggle. The contrast between “rooted” Palestine and “artificial” Israel is a major theme of Palestinian identity. The consequences of this longstanding vision and strategy has been nothing short of shattering for Palestinians … One can seek out the ideological roots of Hamas’s strategy of brutality in 20th-century decolonization movements or in theologies of Islamic renewal. But that history is mere background decor to the essential point—that this is a brutality that explodes against peace processes as much as against threats of annexation. No peace and no withdrawal will satisfy this impulse or grant Israeli Jews safety from the kind of wild, joyful hatred displayed on October 7. And that brutality has now made itself too dangerous to be tolerated.

In the n+1 article “Have We Learned Nothing?,” David Klion echoes a line of argument I’ve seen repeatedly––that the comparison to 9/11 is apt and Israel is poised to repeat America’s mistakes:

The scale of Israeli casualties, which are still being tallied, greatly exceeds the casualty count of 9/11 as a percentage of the society in question. The scale of the intelligence failure is likewise comparable; all sides are united in wondering how Israel’s lavishly funded, reputedly sophisticated security state managed to miss a border incursion of this magnitude. 9/11 was America’s greatest humiliation since Pearl Harbor, and Hamas’s incursion is Israel’s greatest humiliation since the Yom Kippur War, a full fifty years ago. (In at least one respect, the analogy fails: it took mainstream US media years to begin to acknowledge that George W. Bush had failed to protect American lives, while Netanyahu’s failure is already a topic of fierce public debate in Israel, where Haaretz and some members of the military elite are calling for the prime minister’s resignation.)

But I also can’t remember a time since 9/11 when emotion and bloodlust overwhelmed reason as thoroughly as they do now, including among liberal elites in media and politics. The lasting impact of the 9/11 attacks was a kind of collective psychosis that overcame most Americans, and perhaps especially those in the DC–NYC corridor charged with crafting and enforcing conventional wisdom, who had witnessed the attacks up close … These were the conditions in which it was possible to sell the public, including leading liberal outlets, on a destructive imperial adventure in Iraq that virtually everyone now acknowledges was premised on false intelligence and wildly hubristic ambitions.

While I concur that the Iraq War was a catastrophic mistake, Ross Douthat’s analysis of America’s reaction to 9/11 is closer to my own:

The United States arguably fought four wars after Sept. 11: A regime change operation in Afghanistan aimed at both Osama bin Laden and his Taliban enablers, a global campaign to disrupt and destroy Al Qaeda, a war in Iraq aimed at toppling Saddam Hussein and (in its more expansive moments) planting a democracy in the heart of the Middle East and, finally, a war against the Islamic State that emerged out of the wreckage of our Iraq policies …

Some lessons probably don’t apply to the current moment at all—particularly the elements of American folly that reflected our universalist overconfidence hyped up by our unique post-Cold War position as a globe-bestriding superpower. In 2003 we imagined ourselves capable of remaking the Middle East and, indeed, the world, on a scale that today’s Israel, a small country set about with enemies, is extremely unlikely to envision.

Other lessons do apply, but not in any simple way. For instance, one basic lesson you could take from America’s post-9/11 disasters is the importance of restraint in moments of maximal emotional trauma, of thinking it through and counting the cost rather than just obeying a do-something imperative. Among all the various factors that led us into Iraq, one shouldn’t underestimate the impulse that we just hadn’t done something big enough in response to the terror attacks, that the Afghanistan intervention alone wasn’t enough to satisfy our righteous rage or prove our dominance. And you can see this as a temptation for the Israelis now, with the horror so fresh—an impulse to reject anything that smacks of half-measures or limitations, to wave away the risks of civilian casualties or regional chaos, to treat any hesitation as a form of cowardice.

But not every aggressive path America took after 9/11 looks mistaken in hindsight. The long-term debacle of our Afghanistan occupation doesn’t make our initial decision to topple the Taliban unwise. The moral failures of our interrogation program don’t mean that we were wrong to take a generally aggressive posture toward Al Qaeda and its satellites. Setting out to destroy the Islamic State’s caliphate rather than seeking stable coexistence was a correct and successful call.

What about America’s influence on the present conflict?

Bob Wright argues that U.S.-backed efforts to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel were bound to seem threatening to three Middle East actors with the power to destabilize the region.

He lists them:

1) The Palestinian people. The prospect of normalized relations between Israel and Arab states had for decades been thought of as leverage to be used on behalf of the Palestinians. The Arab states were to withhold diplomatic recognition until there was a deal between Israel and the Palestinians that ended Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and its blockade of Gaza. So giving Israel the big prize of Arab recognition before that—as both Trump and Biden favor—reduces the chances of the Palestinians ever being liberated from the humiliating subjugation they’ve endured for generations.

The iconoclastic Israeli journalist Gideon Levy this week characterized Israel’s attitude toward the issue like this: “We’ll make peace with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and the Palestinians will be forgotten until they’re erased, as quite a few Israelis would like.” Whether or not that is indeed the way many Israelis thought of the Trump-Biden normalization drive, it’s only natural that Palestinians would assume as much …

2) Hamas. Biden’s Saudi-Israel normalization deal would steer large amounts of money and other resources to the Palestinian Authority—Hamas’s western-backed rival for influence among Palestinians …

3) Iran. There’s no evidence that the Iranians conceived or orchestrated the attack on Israel, but they may have given it their approval. And in any event it’s unlikely that Hamas would have undertaken the attack had the envisioned consequences not seemed at least consistent with the interests of Iran, its long-time supporter. So it’s important to understand how threatening Biden’s proposed Israeli-Saudi deal seemed to Iran. The deal would have given the Saudis a guarantee that America would assist them if they wound up in a war. Iran no doubt feared that this guarantee would embolden the Saudis and also make them more likely to prevail over Iran in the event of war. More broadly, the whole normalization drive, including Trump’s Abraham Accords, seemed aimed at consolidating what Iran sees as an anti-Iran coalition: Israel, the US, and several wealthy Sunni Arab states.

In contrast, David Leonhardt argues that America’s waning global influence played a part in the attack:

Russia has started the largest war in Europe since World War II. China has become more bellicose toward Taiwan. India has embraced a virulent nationalism. Israel has formed the most extreme government in its history. And on Saturday morning, Hamas brazenly attacked Israel, launching thousands of missiles and publicly kidnapping and killing civilians.

All these developments are signs that the world may have fallen into a new period of disarray. Countries—and political groups like Hamas—are willing to take big risks, rather than fearing that the consequences would be too dire. The simplest explanation is that the world is in the midst of a transition to a new order … The United States is no longer the dominant power it once was... Political leaders in many places feel emboldened to assert their own interests, believing the benefits of aggressive action may outweigh the costs …

“A fully multipolar world has emerged, and people are belatedly realizing that multipolarity involves quite a bit of chaos,” Noah Smith wrote … Zheng Yongnian, a Chinese political scientist with ties to the country’s leaders, has similarly described the “old order” as disintegrating. “Countries are brimming with ambition, like tigers eyeing their prey, keen to find every opportunity among the ruins of the old order,” Zheng wrote last year.

Of course, that could all be wrong! In The Washington Post, Shadi Hamid prudently urges epistemic humility:

The search for truth, even if one finds it, should not involve rigidity. We are all a product of our environments. When it comes to Israel and Palestine in particular, we bring our own preconceptions to any debate—our own selective read of history and our own developed sense of injustice. This is not about a disagreement over facts; it’s about how to interpret them … It should be possible to acknowledge two things at once. We can—and must—condemn Hamas’s heinous acts against Israeli civilians while refusing to forget that Israel has been a perpetrator of a brutal occupation against Palestinians. Some will condemn this as “bothsidesism,” but there are, quite literally, two primary parties to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, each with competing—and, sadly, irreconcilable—narratives. How could it be otherwise? Talking about atrocities after the fact is a minefield. In a time of war, doing it well requires precisely the kind of presumptive generosity toward the other “side” that war itself militates against.

That’s it for today––see you next week.

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The Kraken has been released—on probation.

Sidney Powell, the attorney who used that catchphrase for her work to overturn the 2020 presidential election, pleaded guilty today to six misdemeanors in Fulton County, Georgia, as part of a sweeping racketeering case against Donald Trump and 16 others. Under the terms of the deal, Powell admitted she conspired to breach the election systems in Coffee County, Georgia. She recorded a proffer video with prosecutors that described the crimes and she agreed to testify at future cases. She also wrote an apology letter to citizens of Georgia and agreed to pay almost $9,000 in fines.

The plea deal appears to be a very good one for Powell—letting her off with only misdemeanors, which can be wiped from her record as a first offender if she complies with the terms of the agreement. She was set to go on trial tomorrow, alongside lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, who is accused of designing a scheme to submit false electors on behalf of Trump. (Powell still faces defamation charges from manufacturers of voting machines, and she’s an unindicted co-conspirator in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s federal case against Trump.)

[David A. Graham: The Georgia indictment offers the whole picture]

“It's a great deal. If I were her I’d be very pleased,” Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State, told me. “It’s a great outcome especially if you’re engaged in what most people would say are obvious felonies.”

The question is what it gives prosecutors. Although today’s plea doesn’t offer the public any new information about prosecutors’ case or the evidence they have, it seems to have a potential to affect the overall Fulton County case in three ways. In short, Kreis told me, “I think there are a lot of people who are in more trouble than they were before.”

First, the plea simplifies the Chesebro trial. Powell and Chesebro had asked for speedy trials, rather than waiting a few months for a more standard trial. Though both are attorneys, their roles were very different. Powell, flashy and drawn to animal prints and chunky jewelry, became a household name in the weeks after the election, as she often spoke to the press about the election scheme, though her role seems to have been mostly lower-level and operational. Chesebro, by contrast, was little known and had no public profile, but worked closely with John Eastman and other lawyers on the broad contours of the paperwork coup.

[David A. Graham: The paperwork coup]

Removing Powell will narrow the Chesebro trial, which could help prosecutors, but it may also satisfy Chesebro, whose attorneys wanted the cases separated. “There has never been any direct contact or communication between Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell,” they argued in a filing last month. “Similarly, there is no correlation or overlap between the overt acts or the substantive charges associated with Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell.” (Chesebro rejected a deal that would have spared him prison time but required him to plead guilty to a felony and testify, ABC News reports.)

Second, Powell’s plea moves forward the Coffee County portion of the racketeering case. According to prosecutors, the conspirators arranged to unlawfully access and copy data from voting machines in the Southeastern Georgia location. Powell is the second person to plead guilty to involvement there, following Scott Hall, an Atlanta bail bondsman who copped a plea in September. Their testimony may help prosecutors to target Jeff Clark, a little known Justice Department official who attempted to lead a coup inside the department, getting Trump to appoint him acting attorney general, and to convince state legislatures to overturn election results. (He has pleaded not guilty.)

[David A. Graham: The cases against Trump—a guide]

“The person in the gravest of danger [now] is Jeff Clark,” Kreis said. “Now we have a direct chain of individuals who can link Sidney Powell to Scott Hall and Scott Hall to Jeff Clark. Now there’s two witnesses who can presumably talk about the way in which Jeff Clark was not just concocting letters in his office to encourage the general assembly to overturn the election but was involved in and linked to unlawful actions in Georgia.”

The third level is the question of how other people accused in the case might react to Powell’s plea. Prosecutors likely hope that it might convince some of the lower-level defendants to conclude that their chances of beating the rap are low but also that cooperating now might produce favorable terms. Agreements to testify would, in turn, presumably make it easier to mount a successful case against the biggest names in the case—Trump, of course, as well as attorneys Eastman and Rudy Giuliani, and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. A trial for these defendants likely won’t occur until next year.

[David A. Graham: This is going to be a mess]

“It’s a real prisoner’s dilemma,” Kreis said. “Who’s talking, who’s doing what, what’s the deal I’m going to get? It’s a complicated set of game theory.”

How all of the remaining defendants, with all their different interests, choose to play will help determine what sort of game is being played: Powell’s conviction could be the first domino in a dramatic cascade, or simply an early piece taken off the board in a long, grueling chess match.

Sidney Powell will now testify for prosecutors at the trial where Donald Trump is a defendant.

In a few weeks, a judge in Colorado will hold a trial to decide whether to bar Donald Trump from the presidential ballot on the grounds that he “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the United States in violation of the Constitution. The proceeding has unsettled many people: Can an unelected judge really stop voters from supporting a candidate of their choosing? The answer is yes. Just ask Abdul Hassan.

Hassan ran for president in the 2012 election as an independent, on a platform of reducing the national debt. He created a website and a YouTube channel, and bought digital ads to spread his message. But he had a problem: To get on the ballot in some states, including Colorado, Hassan had to complete a form swearing that he met the requirements for president spelled out in the Constitution. Been a resident of the United States for at least 14 years? Check. 35 years old? Check. Natural-born citizen? That’s where the trouble began.

Hassan, who was born in Guyana, is a naturalized U.S. citizen, not a “natural-born” one; the latter term has been interpreted to mean either born in the United States (like Donald Trump) or born to an American parent (like Ted Cruz). He is also, by trade, a lawyer who represents employees suing employers over mistreatment. The choice he faced felt like no choice at all: To check the last box on the form was to commit perjury; to walk away was to accept discrimination based on national origin, which is prohibited by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Working out of his office in Queens, Hassan took himself on as a client.

Hassan sued in several states, but Colorado, with its formal application process, offered the cleanest case, and his claims got their fullest airing there. First, in a 16-page decision, a magistrate judge rejected Hassan’s claim that the natural-born-citizenship clause had been “trumped, abrogated, and implicitly repealed” by the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, in 1868. Nothing in the historical record, he ruled, suggested that Congress had a “clear and manifest” intent to repeal the citizenship requirement.  

On appeal, Hassan emphasized an alternative theory: Even if the Constitution barred him from assuming the presidency after winning the election, that shouldn’t give states the power to block his candidacy preemptively. This argument fared no better. In a brief order, three judges on the Tenth Circuit ruled that if you’re found to be ineligible, the state can keep you off the ballot as part of its “legitimate interest in protecting the integrity and practical functioning of the political process.”

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

This ruling has been heartening to those who wish to see Trump ruled ineligible on constitutional grounds. The two cases feature some eerie parallels, and not just because they both involve political outsiders from Queens. Colorado is once again center stage. Scott Gessler, who as Colorado’s then–secretary of state kept Hassan off the ballot, has reemerged as a lawyer representing Trump, who is trying to stay on it. And the judge who wrote the Tenth Circuit order in 2012 was none other than Neil Gorsuch, now a Trump-appointed member of the Supreme Court, which may render a final verdict on Trump’s eligibility next year.

There are obvious differences too. The two men couldn’t be more dissimilar in character. One is measured in his comments and steadfast about following the rules, and the other is Donald Trump. Speaking with me, Hassan looked back with appreciation on how the legal system treated his claims. “Judicial rulings are never totally bad or good,” he wrote in an email, “and there is almost always something there to work with.”

Hassan sought shelter in the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. The case against Trump, by contrast, uses a different clause of the same amendment as a weapon to keep him off the ballot. The Fourteenth Amendment, passed in the aftermath of the Civil War, prevents any former “officer of the United States” from holding office again if they have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the nation or aided those who did. According to an academic article by the conservative law professors William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, this straightforwardly disqualifies Trump. But there have been a host of nits picked with the theory: whether the president is technically an “officer of the United States”; whether Trump “engaged in” insurrection or rebellion, or merely encouraged it; whether the January 6 attack on the Capitol and other efforts to overturn the 2020 election results constitute an “insurrection” at all; and, finally, whether Trump must be convicted at trial before a court can bar him from running.

Offering a path through this thicket of questions is Gorsuch’s conclusion about a state’s “legitimate interest in protecting the integrity and practical functioning of the political process.” In Trump, we have a candidate who, without evidence, has denied that he lost the previous election and won’t promise to abide by the results of the next one, despite taking an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Couldn’t Colorado conclude that, to protect the integrity of its election, it will not allow such a candidate to run? The nonprofit organization that brought the lawsuit in Colorado, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, explicitly highlighted Gorsuch’s line in its legal filing.

[David Frum: The Fourteenth Amendment fantasy]

“Hassan is kept off, because he’s not a citizen,” Derek T. Muller, a law professor at Notre Dame who has written about the legal significance of Hassan’s case, told me. “And court after court says, ‘Absolutely, a state can do that.’ So that’s why you’re now seeing these challenges to Trump, and people saying, ‘Aha! You have the power to keep these candidates who are not qualified off the ballot, and Trump is not qualified.’”

Muller added that whether Trump is in fact ineligible involves “intensive, divisive, factual questions.” But he cautioned against concluding that it should be left up to the voters. To do so, he argued, would run counter to the values of the American legal system. “We don’t have many requirements in the Constitution for federal office, but we have a few of them, and they’re designed to limit voters,” he said. “That’s part of the point.” It would be absurd, for example, to say that voters should be allowed to elect a president to a third term in violation of the Twenty-Second Amendment. Constitutional eligibility rules restrain democratic choice by definition.

Even Hassan agrees. He doesn’t have a view on Trump’s eligibility, he said, but he observed that if a court rules against Trump, that should be the end of it. “Because the role of the court is to ultimately interpret and apply the Constitution,” he said, “if you are kept off the ballot in the first place, the voters do not get to decide the issue.”

Has the American labor market ever been better? Not in my lifetime, and probably not in yours, either. The jobless rate is just 3.8 percent. Employers added a blockbuster 336,000 jobs in September. Wage growth exceeded inflation too. But people are weary and angry. A majority of adults believe we’re tipping into a recession, if we are not in one already. Consumer confidence sagged in September, and the public’s expectations about where things are heading drooped as well.

The gap between how the economy is and how people feel things are going is enormous, and arguably has never been bigger. A few well-analyzed factors seem to be at play, the dire-toned media environment and political polarization among them. To that list, I want to add one more: something I think of as the “Economic Annoyance Index.” Sometimes, people’s personal financial situations are just stressful—burdensome to manage and frustrating to think about—beyond what is happening in dollars-and-cents terms. And although economic growth is strong and unemployment is low, the Economic Annoyance Index is riding high.

There’s plenty to be annoyed about. Voters are just not excited about the Joe Biden versus Donald Trump rematch. Trump’s favorability among Republicans has fallen. Half of Democrats want someone other than Biden to be the nominee. And voters really hate the guy running on the other side of the aisle. Polarization is fueling a huge gap in partisan economic expectations: Republicans don’t think the economy is good when Democrats are in charge, just as Democrats refuse to believe the economy is good when Republicans are in the White House. The effect has grown big enough over time to lower Americans’ aggregate views of the economy.

The media environment is not helping matters either. We’ve now had several years of headlines warning about an impending recession that has not yet materialized, or anything close to it. Consider how The New York Times covered the great job news earlier this month. When I looked at the top of the homepage one recent Friday, I saw three headlines about the employment numbers: “U.S. Job Growth Surges Past Expectations in Troubling News for the Fed”; “The Jobs Report May Hamper the Federal Reserve’s Efforts to Cool the Economy and Wrangle Inflation”; and “Interest Rates Are Jumping on Wall Street. What Will They Do to Housing and the Economy?” Meanwhile, in The Wall Street Journal: “The Markets Are Jittery. Here’s Why the Strong Jobs Report May Not Help.” Each of these stories was a good story with a lot of nuance. But the overall message was This is bad!, not Wow, what a labor market!

The relentless focus on bad news helps explain the enormous differences between how people say they are doing and how they say the world is doing, as my colleague Derek Thompson has noted. Most Americans think their personal-financial situation is pretty good—that makes sense, given the unemployment rate and income figures we’ve seen over the past few years. But most think the country is doing horribly, because of all the worries about the Fed, interest rates, and inflation, putting us in a “vibecession,” as the writer Kyla Scanlon has memorably described it.

Those surveys asking people about their personal situation may also be missing the tenor of their response: Something is driving a wedge between economic sentiment and the headline economic reality, and people might be admitting that they’re doing okay only through gritted teeth. Almost everyone who wants a job has one—that’s great. Wages are rising across the board—also good. But a lot of economic factors that are frustrating and vexing to deal with are tempering people’s feelings about the economy as a whole.  

First and foremost: inflation. Yes, price growth has moderated. Yes, people’s incomes are rising faster than prices are rising, leaving most consumers better off overall. But people hate inflation. They hate doing the mental math and realizing how expensive everything is every single time they go to the grocery store, pick up takeout for dinner, and stock up on shampoo and painkillers at the pharmacy. Inflation does not just erode people’s earning power. It ticks people off. (Student loans have a similar effect. Most people who take out student loans come out ahead. But folks hate feeling like they have a second mortgage to pay down month after month.)

Second, and relatedly: interest rates. Borrowing money is very, very expensive right now. As a result, credit-card defaults are way up, and many people are putting off buying big things on credit. The average monthly payment on a new car is more than $700, well beyond what many families can afford. The housing market is a nightmare too—something that is not easy to see in headline economic statistics. Rental prices are sky-high in many metro areas. And the real-estate market is frozen solid because of those high interest rates. Nobody can sell, because who wants to give up a low mortgage rate? And nobody can afford to buy. The situation is going to be miserable for years to come too: If interest rates go down, buyers will flood into the market, pushing prices up even higher. Lots of people are trapped in places they don’t want to be living, with no end in sight.

Finally, nostalgia, true or false, is driving up the Annoyance Index. Even if things are pretty good at the moment, many Americans remember them feeling better in the recent past. Families had way more cash on hand during the pandemic. Interest rates were much lower. Wage growth was faster a year ago. Prices were lower—a lot lower—before the pandemic. And many employees have been forced back to the office, when they were happy working at home.

Things are great, but folks are mad. All we need is for prices to come down, interest rates to stabilize, housing markets to normalize, polarization to decrease, and the news media’s incentives to change. Until then, the Economic Annoyance Index will just keep getting higher.

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The ongoing drama over electing a speaker of the House is not about governance. It’s about giving Republican voters the drama-filled reality show they voted for and want to see—even at the expense of the country.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Self-checkout is a failed experiment. What conservatives misunderstand about radicalism at universities Hezbollah watches and waits. Four misconceptions about the war in Gaza

What the Voters Wanted

Like many Americans, I have been both fascinated and horrified by the inability of the Republican majority to elect a new speaker of the House. I admit to watching the votes like I’m rubbernecking at a car wreck, but perhaps that’s not a good analogy, because I at least feel pity for the victims of a traffic accident. What’s happening in the House is more like watching a group of obnoxious (and not very bright) hot-rodders playing chicken and smashing their cars into one another over and over.

As I watch all of this Republican infighting, I wonder, as I often do, about GOP voters. What is it that they think will happen if Jim Jordan becomes speaker? Jordan has been in Congress for 16 years, and he has almost nothing to show for it. He’s never originated any successful legislation, never whipped votes, never accomplished anything except for appearing on Fox and serving up rancid red meat to his Ohio constituents and MAGA allies.

And therefore, as speaker, he would … what? Order up more impeachments, perhaps of Biden-administration officials? Shut down the government? Pound the gavel and prattle on for hours in his never-take-a-breath style? (Jordan’s the kind of guy who probably would have interrupted the Sermon on the Mount.) Perhaps from a position of greater power, he could more effectively assist Donald Trump in undermining yet another election in 2024.

Maybe that’s why Trump endorsed him for speaker.

Is that what Republican voters really want? Apparently so; as my friend Sarah Longwell, the founder of the anti-Trump Republican Accountability Project, told my Atlantic colleague Ronald Brownstein, “Even if he doesn’t make it, because the majorities are so slim, you can’t argue that Jim Jordan doesn’t represent the median Republican today.”

And that is the part we tend to overlook when we’re focused on the drama inside the Capitol: The disorder in the GOP caucus is not some accident or glitch triggered by a handful of reprobates, but rather a direct result of choices by voters. The House is a mess because enough Republican voters want it to be a mess.

This accusation might seem unfair: Jordan is just one member from a super-red (and blatantly gerrymandered) district, and many of his Republican colleagues are furious about this humiliating bungle. But right-wing voters have shown no inclination to punish people such as Matt Gaetz and other political vandals; indeed, Gaetz and his like-minded colleagues are rapidly becoming folk heroes in the Republican Party.

It’s not much consolation to recognize that the Republicans are now the party their voters want them to be. Their antics endanger us all, especially during multiple international crises when the United States needs to be unified and effective both at home and abroad. But to treat the GOP as merely dysfunctional is worse than a distraction; it is a fundamental error that offers the false hope that a mature and governing majority is somehow within reach, if only Jordan or Gaetz would get out of the way.

The real problem is that many Republican voters have now completely internalized the cynicism of Trump and the GOP opportunists around him, and they draw no connection between national politics and the ongoing health and security of the United States. These voters rely on everyone else (including those Americans they deride as the “deep state”) to keep the country functioning. They vote for masters of performative nonsense, such as Jordan and Gaetz, who do nothing for the “forgotten” working families in the places that the MAGA movement claims have been left behind by the rest of us.

The twists and turns of the Trump years, in which many elected Republicans became big spenders, critics of law enforcement, and apologists for the Kremlin, illustrated that MAGA voters have almost no interest in anything like conservatism, or even in coherent policy. Instead, they want to indulge resentments and grievances that have little to do with government and everything to do with boredom and dissatisfaction in their own lives. A few years ago, I wrote a book about how such voters project that anger and sourness onto everything around them. Their ennui spurs their desire to see chaos, so they argue that the existing order needs to be shaken up, or burned down, or defunded.

They think this way because they have never had to live under a government that has actually been shaken up, burned down, or defunded. Jordan and his colleagues (who have made entire careers out of encouraging such nihilism) are poor leaders but good politicians. They deliver what their voters really want: show trials and passion plays, and, mostly, to see other people unsettled and angry. These citizens vote not for determined legislators with complicated plans—that stuff is just so boring—but for entertaining rogues who can liven up the Fox prime-time hours.

Years ago, I thought that Republican voters would demand changes from the party if the GOP lost enough elections. But even losses don’t seem to matter in a party that is clearly more comfortable with performance art centered on imaginary grievances than with actual governing. The shenanigans of the past two weeks might even cost the Republicans control of the House in the next election—that’s one reason Jordan’s colleagues are trying to stop him—but that political collapse might not matter to right-wing voters. They’ll get another episode of their favorite show—and for them, maybe that’s enough.

Related:

The threat to democracy is coming from inside the U.S. House. Jim Jordan could have a long fight ahead.

Today’s News

President Joe Biden visited Tel Aviv and backed Israel’s claims that it had no involvement in the al-Ahli Arab Hospital attack in Gaza City. A 4.2-magnitude earthquake struck Northern California, affecting Sacramento County and sections of the Bay Area. The Venezuelan government and opposition party have struck a deal to work toward fairer elections in 2024.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: The insurance industry’s climate math is brutal, Zoë Schlanger writes. Sometimes, an uninsurable town can become uninhabitable.

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Evening Read

Courtesy of Matthew Cox / The Atlantic

The Con Man Who Became a True-Crime Writer

By Rachel Monroe

Last April, I received an odd email from a man named Matthew Cox. “I am an inmate at the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex in Florida,” he wrote. “I’m also a true crime writer.” He had one year left on his sentence and was “attempting to develop a body of work that will allow me to exit prison with a new career.” He included a story about a fellow inmate who’d been ensnared in a complicated currency-trading scam, hoping that I’d write about it for The Atlantic.

“This is fascinating,” I replied. I didn’t mean the currency-trading scam, which was too procedural for my tastes, but Cox’s own trajectory. He described himself as “an infamous con man writing his fellow inmates’ true crime stories while immersed in federal prison.” I’d never had a possible subject pitch his own tale so aptly. I wasn’t entirely sure that was a good thing.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Beware the language that erases reality. Five reasons the FBI failed to prepare for January 6 Let the activists have their loathsome rallies.

Culture Break

Illustration by Ben Kothe. Source: Getty.

Read. In Wellness, Nathan Hill recounts a love story, but also much, much more.

Watch. Wes Anderson’s renditions of Roald Dahl’s short stories (streaming on Netflix) ask us to think actively—even skeptically—about what we’re seeing.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Lately, as I’ve been indulging my habit of watching vintage television from the 1960s and ’70s, I’ve noticed how often I encounter William Windom. He was a mainstay of my childhood television days, and when I mentioned him on social media, I realized how many folks out there remember him as fondly as I do. He was a remarkable character actor (the other night, I saw him on both Mannix and Barney Miller), and he even brought some gravitas as the president in Escape From the Planet of the Apes. Many of us of a certain age, however, remember his starring role in My World and Welcome to It, based on the humor and cartoons of James Thurber, which ran for only one season yet is still beloved by many.

But I will always have a soft spot for Windom because of two roles. One, famous among Star Trek nerds like me, was his 1967 turn as Commodore Matt Decker, the tormented Starfleet officer who loses his ship and crew to an alien doomsday machine. He was also the star of one of Night Gallery’s best stories, a 1971 segment titled “They’re Tearing Down Tim Riley’s Bar,” about a man facing loss and nostalgia as he enters middle age. “Tim Riley’s Bar,” written by Rod Serling, was a different kind of episode for Night Gallery, and it was nominated for an Emmy.

Movie stars are great, but give me a solid character actor like Windom any day.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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