Adam Kinzinger, the former Republican congressman from Illinois, is best known for his service on the congressional committee that investigated the January 6 insurrection. He and Liz Cheney were the only two Republicans on that committee, and completely noncoincidentally, neither one is in Congress today. The new speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, is more typical of the House Republican caucus: He was a leader of the election deniers.

In his new book, Renegade: Defending Democracy and Liberty in Our Divided Country, Kinzinger details his manifold struggles: with his conscience, with his ambition, and, ultimately, with the Republicans who attempted to subvert the Constitution. A six-term congressman and an Air Force veteran, Kinzinger today is chastened but still somewhat hopeful—not hopeful about the short-term future of the Republican Party, but hopeful that pro-democracy voters are still sufficient in number to turn back the authoritarians.

I first met Kinzinger in 2014, when we were both members of the late Senator John McCain’s delegation to the Munich Security Conference. Also in that delegation were Senator Lindsey Graham and then-Representative Mike Pompeo, who later became Donald Trump’s CIA director and secretary of state.

[Peter Wehner: The man who refused to bow]

What follows is an edited and condensed transcript of a conversation I had with Kinzinger earlier this month on stage at the Democracy360 conference, sponsored by the Karsh Institute at the University of Virginia. We started by talking about that now-unlikely constellation of Republicans: Kinzinger, McCain, Graham, and Pompeo.

Jeffrey Goldberg: You guys were all in the same camp, the muscular internationalist Republicans. Two of you went one way, and two of you went another way. What happened?

Adam Kinzinger: Craven politics, craven power—that’s what it is. This is something I still try to grapple with every day, when I look back on January 6. I always thought everybody had a red line. Like, okay, we can play politics to a point, but there’s a red line we'll never cross. I’ve learned that’s not the case.

I’d say [we] are all still probably for a muscular foreign policy. The difference, though, between people that went one way or another is the recognition that U.S. foreign policy also means we have to have a healthy democracy at home, and that democracy-building overseas is fine, but having a strong democracy here, where people have faith in the voting system and faith that whoever gets the most votes will win, is just as important.

I think there are unfortunately too many people that got into the Trump sphere, that it  just became about power, identity, and not looking at the broader picture of your impact in this world.

Goldberg: So I want to stay on this for a while because I want you to name names.

Kinzinger: I can name names for an hour. A couple off the top of my head: One of the ones I’m most disappointed in generally is [former House Speaker] Kevin McCarthy, because I always thought that McCarthy had some version of a political soul. And I’ve come to realize that to him it was all about just the attainment of power. Somebody like Ted Cruz never surprised me. He’s always been a charlatan. But Lindsey Graham has also been a big disappointment to me, because I’ve traveled with Lindsey, leading congressional-delegation trips around the world. I always thought he and I were eye to eye on a lot of these foreign-policy issues. And to watch him so closely adopt and closely support Donald Trump, when Trump was doing exactly what Graham was preaching against just prior to Trump’s arrival on the scene, was a pretty disappointing moment.

[Read: ‘We put sharp knives on the hands of children’]

During this speaker fiasco, I would listen to names during the roll call, people like Mike McCaul, people like Mike Gallagher, and hear them say the name Jim Jordan and know, for a fact, they have no respect for Jim Jordan. But it’s all about that determination to survive politically. I have come to learn that people fear losing their identity and losing their tribe more than they come to fear death.

Goldberg: You saw Lindsey Graham throughout this process. What were conversations like? Did you ever just say, “Lindsey, what are you doing?”

Kinzinger: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, our relationship hasn’t been that strong in the last few years, obviously. So I can’t say there were recent conversations, but it would just be like, “What’s going on? So Donald Trump did this thing. Why are you okay with that?”

People have given so much of their soul, of their values. They’ve compromised so much that at some point to stop compromising, or to recognize that this is a mistake and you need to correct course, would be an indictment against who you are and what you have done for the last four or five years. And I think Lindsey has been a victim of that. He liked the idea of being in the room with Donald Trump.

And I will tell you, I’ve met with Donald Trump a number of times; he is actually one of the most fun people to meet with, because he’s crazy, but it’s like a fun crazy. And he’s really good at drawing you in and making you feel seen at that moment, because he knows how to manipulate you. And it works perfectly with Lindsey. Lindsey says, “Now I have a seat at the table. I care about foreign policy.” But what he didn’t realize is that bargain came with selling who he was as a person.

Goldberg: If John McCain hadn’t died, would Graham have gone over?

Kinzinger: I don’t think so. I think Lindsey Graham needs a strong person to  mentor him or carry him, and it was John McCain. And when John McCain passed, the next guy, the strongman that Lindsey Graham was drawn to, was Donald Trump.

Goldberg: You got to Congress when the Republican Party is still the Republican Party you imagined it to be. One question that people like you always get is: Were you kidding yourself the whole time, or did something actually change?

Kinzinger: Looking back, I can say, “Oh, yeah, there were signs from the very beginning,” but I was part of the moderate Republicans, who constantly had this optimistic view that the Republican Party was this thing of smaller government, hope, opportunity, strong national defense, that kind of stuff. And I always just saw these elements of crazy nationalism, of authoritarianism, of racism exist in the party, but it’s a battle. And I’m fighting on the good side here to try to save the party. And then when Donald Trump came, we lost that fight.

I think the moment I started to realize, like, Okay, we have lost, was January 6. Before that point, I thought, Donald Trump is going to lose; people are going to wake up. Even on January 6 I said, “People are definitely going to wake up now.”

Now, with the benefit of time and looking back, I can say, “You know what? Those strains were there.” Some of them were hidden because it was not yet socially acceptable to say things like “Let’s throw out the Constitution.” I hear a lot of people say “You’re naive, because the Republican Party’s always been this way.” And inevitably those are people on the left that have always had a bad view of the GOP. I understand the viewpoint, but I don’t think that’s correct. I think there were a lot of really good factions in the GOP.

Goldberg: Explain the psychology there. What motivates this outburst of anger on the part of the voters that led to Trump’s triumph?

Kinzinger: I think the resentment came from Fox News and the right-wing-media echo chamber. Why do I say that? So this is something I take a lot of personal blame for being part of as well, although I think I did better than most.

In 2010, we learned that fear is the best way to raise money ever. If I send you an email and it says, “Dear Jeffrey, I want to lower tax rates and we need some help, blah, blah, blah,” you may give me money. But if I send you an email and it says, “Nancy Pelosi is trying to murder you and your family,” and in essence, I convince you that I’m the only thing standing between you and the life of you or your family, you’ll part with anything, including a significant part of your fixed income from Social Security. So in 2010, we learned this. And instead of using that kind of fire in a controlled way like politicians do, sometimes we let it burn. There was always this fire going, and we stoked it too far.

Goldberg: How do you reach people who haven’t been reached, to change their minds? There’s 30, 35 percent of the voters who are hard-core.

Kinzinger: Well, if the January 6 committee didn’t do it and the people still believe the scandals, I’m not sure that 35 percent can be turned on a dime today. But here’s the two things we can do. We can convince their children. You would be amazed how many children have a different viewpoint than their parents, and how they can pull their parents off the ledge. I did that with my parents when I got elected. My dad would call, and he’s watching Fox News all the time. And I finally said, “Dad, I’m in the middle of this and I don’t have near the stress you do, and you can’t even see the difference. Right?” And he’s like, “You know what? You’re right.”

The other thing is, if only every one of those people running against Donald Trump in the primary would tell the dang truth, people would actually believe it. Donald Trump gets indicted with all these different indictments and then they ask, you know, ‘What do you think, Tim Scott?” “What do you think, Nikki Haley?” “What do you think, Vivek Ramaswamy? What are your feelings on these indictments?” But every one of those people say this is a witch hunt.

Goldberg: I appreciate the view. I’m not sure I believe you, though. The truest thing that Donald Trump ever said was that he could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and his followers would still support him. It seems like he understood something elemental there.

Kinzinger: I guess I would caveat that. I don’t necessarily believe, if Nikki Haley alone came out and said it, that it would be game over for Donald Trump. I think this is a specific moment where if all these people told the base the truth, they could damage his support significantly.

Goldberg: Stay on this question of Trump and Trumpism. Who do you blame for his return?

Kinzinger: One person: Kevin McCarthy. And I’m going to tell you exactly why. So there was a period after January 6 for two or three weeks. It was quiet. And we’d meet in a room with all the Republican men and women of Congress. Kevin would stand up, all that stuff—if you’re in the room, you could sense there was this trepidation in the room about, like, “We don’t know what’s next. We don’t know where we’re going. What are we supposed to do?” Until the day Kevin McCarthy showed up with a picture of Donald Trump. And just like that, everything changed.

[David Frum: Kevin McCarthy, have you no sense of decency?]

Goldberg: You’re talking about his visit to Mar-a-Lago.

Kinzinger: His visit to Mar-a-Lago. Those of us that voted for impeachment were leading the charge against Donald Trump. People were actually coming up to us and asking us, “How do I do this?” We were talking about “How do we get the downtown PAC community to only support those that are pro-democracy?” We were going to set up our own scoring and vetting system to say This person voted against certification; this person voted for it, and only give money to the people that voted for it. And you think about the power that could have had.

Then that picture happened in Mar-a-Lago, and all of a sudden we went from considering doing a vote of no confidence against Kevin McCarthy because of his role in January 6 to a point where everybody turned against me, Liz Cheney, and the others that voted to impeach, all because of that picture.

Goldberg: So you must be at least a little bit happy about Kevin McCarthy’s downfall.

Kinzinger: I’m very happy about it. I’m very happy. I’ve got to be honest. I’m sorry. It’s not great for the country, but it’s really good.

Goldberg: You’re describing Kevin McCarthy as a person who went along with the radical pro-Trump, anti-democracy right and then he eventually got eaten by them.

Kinzinger: This dynamic to an extent has always existed. It would be people like me fighting against the Jim Jordans, but it was behind the scenes. Now it’s brought out to the open because for the first time you now see the people like me—I will call them the moderates, even though there’s really no moderates left. The moderates are finally standing up and fighting back with some of the tactics that Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan used.

Why is it that terrorists are so powerful? Because they’re willing to do something that most other people aren’t: you know, commit an act of terror if you’re a legislative terrorist, like John Boehner called Jim Jordan very accurately, and he’s willing to vacate the chair or Matt Gaetz is willing to vacate the chair. They’re powerful unless people push back. And that’s what’s happening. How does a Kevin McCarthy get to this point? A man who I thought had a red line, I always thought he was a very good politician and that he could play around the edges, but he wouldn’t cross [the line]. And in January, he cut a deal that made what happened a few weeks ago completely obvious. Everybody knew this would happen. That’s how we’ve gotten to where we are. And this is a moment where the Republican Party either will collapse in a heap of fire or they will actually fix themselves somehow through this.

The country needs a healthy Republican Party regardless of what you feel about the Republican Party, because we need a liberal and a conservative philosophy competing in the United States. That’s what a healthy democracy is.

Goldberg: Does Trumpism survive Trump?

Kinzinger: Five months ago, if we were sitting here and you said, “Does it survive past Trump?” I’d be like, absolutely. Because Trumpism has now been learned by others. But I’m starting to play with the idea that maybe enough Republicans are starting to get exhausted of Trump and maybe Trumpism doesn’t survive. Donald Trump got elected in front of a wave of people that wanted to break the system. But there is an undercurrent right now of people that are desperate to fix and heal the system. And when that right person comes along, like an Obama-type character, I think that may revolutionize the future, but I’m not sure.

Goldberg: Can you imagine yourself back in Congress as a Republican?

Kinzinger: That’s two different questions. Could I imagine myself back in the House? No. Could I imagine myself back in politics? Yes. Could I imagine myself back in politics as a Republican? Not in the current environment.

Goldberg: In other words, do you think that the fever would break to a point where the Republican Party would be a different party and have you back?

Kinzinger: I think someday; I just don’t know when that’s going to be. And it’s not now. I think if I ran as a Republican now, I wouldn’t do too well.

Goldberg: Are you still a Republican?

Adam Kinzinger: It’s an interesting question. I will not vote Republican. I voted Democratic last election. I intend to vote Democratic this election, not because I’ve changed my mind necessarily—I’ve moderated, you know, quite a bit—but because I think it is a binary choice. Do you like democracy or don’t you like democracy? And I think that the only thing we can vote on in 2024 is democracy. So I’m not giving up the title Republican yet, because I haven’t changed. They have. And I refuse to give them that satisfaction yet. But I feel like a man without a party.

Goldberg: Why do your colleagues want to stay in Congress so badly?

Kinzinger: I don’t know.

Goldberg: It doesn’t look like the greatest job.

Kinzinger: It’s not the greatest job. But, okay, when you walk into a room for five or 10 years and no matter what room you walk in, unless it’s the White House, you are the center of attention because you’re the highest-ranking person there and you’ve spent your whole life to attain this job—a lot of my colleagues spent everything to become that. Losing that freaks you out. As somebody that announced I wasn’t running again, the thing you fear the most is how do I feel the second after I put out that press release?

My co-pilot in Iraq sent me a text that said, “I’m ashamed to have ever served with you.” I had family that sent me a certified letter saying they’re ashamed to share my last name, that I was working for the devil. I used to laugh about it 10 months ago, but I’ve really allowed myself to accept what damage that’s done to me and my family. It’s not easy to go through. But I’m going to tell you, I have 0.0 percent regret for what I did, and I would do it all the exact same again.

The US military in helping Tokyo curb the economic fallout from China’s ban on seafood products from Japan.

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In Los Angeles, where I live, the rites of autumn can feel alien. Endless blue skies and afternoon highs near 90 degrees linger long after Griffith Park opens its Haunted Hayride. When the highs dip toward more seasonably appropriate numbers, they’ll be accompanied by one of California’s unfortunate traditions: wasted clean energy.

During the fall and spring, cloudless afternoons produce a spike in solar power at a time when milder temperatures necessitate less air-conditioning. When that happens, the state’s solar farms make more energy than the state can use, and some panels are simply turned off. This maddening problem—a result of what energy wonks call the “duck curve”—has been getting worse as the amount of available solar power outpaces the state’s ability to move that power around. In early 2017, just more than 3 percent of the state’s solar was wasted this way. The total reached 6 percent by 2022, according to California’s grid operator, and 15 percent in the early afternoons of March 2021. Wind power also can be wasted if the weather is especially breezy, and California’s combined curtailment of wind and solar set a new record this April.

Now the state has punted this dilemma to its residents. In December, the California Public Utilities Commission voted to slash the amount of money homeowners with new solar panels can make from “net metering,” the practice of selling your own extra solar back to the power company. Because the math for buying new panels is less favorable, fewer Californians are installing them, according to the Los Angeles Times. Many sunny rooftops that could generate clean energy simply won’t.

California is outpacing the rest of the country in the energy transition, but its misadventures in solar are going national. Moving away from fossil fuels requires a huge expansion of renewable energy in America. One government report estimated that meeting Joe Biden’s goal of supplying half of the country’s energy with solar would mean doubling America’s capacity annually until 2025—and then quadrupling it annually through 2030. But without better ways to transport that solar power or store it for later, California and several other states are already turning off perfectly good solar panels and clawing back incentives that entice Americans to install their own. Far more of America’s sunny potential is about to go to waste.

A little clean-energy wastage is inevitable, Carey King, the assistant director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Energy Institute, told me. Such is the very imperfect nature of integrating unpredictable renewables onto a power grid built for the predictability of fossil fuels. Compared with an inflexible coal or gas plant, solar panels are easier to turn off and on, so they are first to be cut during times of energy surplus. Ideally, we could stash away sun power and use it to light up the skyline at night, but that would require a build-out of big batteries that is still in early stages. Excess solar can be moved to less sun-soaked places to help them burn fewer fossil fuels, but electricity doesn’t just teleport from sunny Palm Springs to drizzly Portland. Moving it across long distances requires heavy-duty power lines and navigating the bureaucracies of various agencies that operate them.

Take Texas: The state’s famously independent power grid has relatively few interconnections with neighboring systems to send spare renewable energy elsewhere. When Texas started making a big push toward renewables in the 2000s, King said, the state began turning off solar panels and wind turbines, and slowing the construction of new ones because it lacked enough so-called transmission lines capable of zipping renewable energy from windy West Texas to the big cities in the east. A state-mandated power-line expansion solved the problem then. Now, as Texas’s total wind-energy capacity leapt from 10 gigawatts in 2010 to 40 gigawatts by 2022, those new wires have reached their limit. In 2022, Texas wasted 5 percent of the wind and 9 percent of the solar energy it could have created. Without another big fix to the grid, those numbers could jump to 13 percent of wind and 19 percent of solar by 2035.

Across the country, clean energy is similarly hemmed in by the limits of transmission lines. Existing plants can’t get all their electricity where it needs to go, because there aren’t enough power lines for them to thrive, says Timothy Hade, the co-founder of Scale Microgrid Solutions, which builds clean-energy systems for homes and businesses. The Biden administration has pledged billions to modernize the grid and expand high-voltage transmission lines, but actually building them is very, very, very hard. As Robinson Meyer wrote in The Atlantic last year, “If you want to build new transmission, then you need to win the approval of every state, county, city, and in some cases, landowner along the proposed route.”

[Read: Unfortunately, I care about power lines now]

The Herculean task of building new transmission lines wasn’t such a pressing issue before the rise of renewable energy. But now solar power is so pervasive that parts of the country have no choice but to turn down the supply. Although that could take the form of fewer industrial-size wind and solar plants coming to fruition, the other option is giving a cold shoulder to people who have their own solar panels and sell it back to the power company through net metering. After all, net metering can create lots of power: California gets more than 15 percent of its energy from big solar farms and roughly 10 percent from residential rooftop panels, according to the EIA.

Like California, other states are choosing the second option. Indiana phased out net metering, and in North Carolina, solar advocates are now suing the state for allowing its giant utility, Duke Energy, to force a minimum monthly bill upon its customers and adjust net metering in a way the advocates say will reduce payouts. Arizona is considering cutting payments for homemade solar, as is Madison Gas and Electric in Wisconsin, according to Energy News Network. A few other close calls show the perilous state of net metering: This year, it has so far survived in New Hampshire, barely, when utilities backed the practice at the last moment. Last year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis vetoed a bill that would have ended the practice and hit home-solar users with extra fees.

That isn’t to say that the clampdown has happened everywhere. Texas, for example, has allowed Tesla to set up a “virtual power plant” so that people with Elon Musk’s solar panels and batteries can make gobs of money selling back energy whenever they have extra. And there are legitimate fears about using this method as a way to grow the country’s solar supply. Hade calls net metering a “blunt instrument”—too crude an approach for the complex energy system of the future. One major problem is that solar-panel owners tend to be far richer than the average American but don’t pay their fair share for the upkeep of the electrical grid, which is built into the price the power company charges everybody else. The more houses that have rooftop solar, the argument goes, the more that people without solar must pay to maintain all the infrastructure that everyone needs. “Net metering can’t be the end-all solution as we go forward,” King said. “It’s just going to create a little bit too much disparity.”

The growing backlash against net metering isn’t just a response to wasted solar power—it’s also about for-profit power companies wary of rooftop solar panels that don’t make them money. The idea of turning homes, apartment buildings, and businesses with solar panels into mini power plants is a potentially transformative one—and net metering is a big part of how people can afford solar panels in the first place. Solar panels can cost upwards of $10,000, and in California, the extra cash from net metering has helped residents recoup the expensive cost of panels in five to six years. Now it will take up to 15 years, according to one analysis.

In that way, America will end up squandering more potential clean energy down the line. Fewer than 10 percent of U.S. homes have installed solar panels so far. The rest constitutes an enormous swath of untapped real estate—billions of square meters of sun-drenched rectangles that could be making clean energy. Incentives for solar energy still exist from states and the federal government, but the result of slowing down net metering is that residents will put on smaller solar panels that make only enough energy for their own use, Hade told me, because they can’t make much money selling their bonus juice. Or they won’t get solar at all.

The squeeze on homemade solar is a missed opportunity in the making. A retreat from net metering makes solar-panel owners less like mini power plants and more like doomsday preppers, perhaps filling the backup battery in the basement with electricity to get through a blackout but adding nothing to the country’s clean-energy supply. With a more nuanced form of net metering to allow people to sell their surplus, or with the advent of “microgrids” that tie together communities and allow them to share energy, American rooftops could contribute gigawatts toward running the country on clean energy. Such a DIY approach would be a way around our inability to build new power lines, but it is deeply at odds with the way America has operated for a century, and will seemingly operate for many more years to come: The power company sends you the power, and you use it.

A decade ago, I arrived in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, for my first stint of field research into the island’s volatile politics. While unpacking in my hotel room, I heard sporadic celebrations erupting in the streets below. Confused, I asked a jubilant man what was going on.

“The army captured the militia’s sorcerer,” he told me. “The president just announced that soldiers seized all of the sorcerer’s diabolical objects—and they’ll soon be destroyed.”

Heavily armed criminal militias, known as the dahalo, had been terrorizing civilians in rural Madagascar. Now their sorcerer was in custody, and his talismans were broken and burned. The government and the public believed that the dahalo had suffered a severe blow, and that a more peaceful future was possible. The president, who had been in a precarious state politically, got a much-needed popularity boost.

The lesson was obvious: Whether the sorcerer or the talismans really had powers didn’t matter. What mattered was what people believed. Beliefs, true or false, rational or irrational, shape politics.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: This Halloween, let’s really think about death]

Almost exactly three years ago, I saw a similar spectacle unfold on television as the president faced a tough reelection bid. Early returns suggested that his time was up, but his chief spiritual adviser, known for warning the public about the dangers of “a demon prince in the form of a many-headed dragon,” had one more trick up her sleeve. She marshaled spiritual forces to save the embattled incumbent, calling on “angels of Africa” and denouncing the “demonic confederacies” who were channeling satanic forces in their quest to remove him from power.

Except this time, the spectacle was unfolding not in Madagascar but in the United States—and the speech was from Paula White, the woman whom Donald Trump had handpicked to lead prayers both at his inauguration and at his ill-fated rally on January 6, 2021.

The rationalists among us may scoff at supernatural beliefs and little imagine that politics could be decisively swayed by superstition, mysticism, and theories of demonic forces. But we don’t need to imagine. Forty percent of the global population believes in witchcraft, defined as the “ability of certain people to intentionally cause harm via supernatural means.” Surveys covering nearly 100 countries and published last year in a top scientific journal show that the prevalence of belief in witchcraft varies widely, from Tunisia (where 90 percent of the population believes it’s real) to Sweden and Denmark (where the figure is below 10 percent).

The phenomenon is not limited to any one region or level of economic development. Roughly two-thirds of Latvians, half of Brazilians, a third of Spaniards, and a fifth of French people self-report a belief in witchcraft. In the United States, the figure is 16.4 percent—one in six Americans. And in the United States, unlike, say, in France, a subset of those who believe in demonic forces and witchcraft have become a potent political force, exerting significant sway on right-wing elected officials. In turn, cynical figures in the MAGA movement have worked to co-opt these true believers for their political goals.

When trying to understand a political culture, you have to examine the society as it exists, irrational warts and all. And yet, most of us prefer to look at the world through a reverse fun-house mirror, in which the complex and sometimes-wacky beliefs of our fellow citizens are reflected back at us with the straight, clear-cut lines of reason and logic. We attribute voter behavior to policy proposals and economic data, rather than to the knock-on effects of widely held conspiracy theories or other nonrational beliefs.

In other words, most of us who professionally study human societies—or try to explain political systems in the press—have a severe case of rationality bias: We think of ourselves as purely rational agents, and we too often wrongly assume that everyone else thinks about the world the same way we do. This assumption distorts our understanding of how people actually make decisions, why they behave the way they do, and, by extension, how and why big social and political changes take place.

Figures vary, but by most estimates, about 85 out of every 100 people in the world believe in God. And yet, an analysis of top political-science-research journals found that only 13 out of every 1,000 articles published were primarily about religion (a rate of just over 1 percent). That figure is absurdly low—professional malpractice for a field that attempts to explain political systems. But the scholarship is even thinner on disorganized but widespread belief systems, such as acceptance of the power of witchcraft. The analysis didn’t provide data on how many research articles focused on other forms of supernatural belief, including shamanism, animism, and the like, which we can safely assume have received even lower billing. The upshot is that we political scientists have an enormous blind spot. Pundits are even worse: When’s the last time you heard a serious cable-news discussion about the political influence of witchcraft and demonic forces? A serious rift divides the way professional analysts explain political systems and the way voters within those systems actually see the world, whether in the United States or in societies where such seemingly strange beliefs are more openly discussed.

“There is little doubt,” writes Ronald Hutton, the author of The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present, “that the majority of recorded human societies have believed in, and feared, an ability by some individuals to cause misfortune and injury to others by uncanny (‘magical’) means.” In modern times, such views are ridiculed among educated elites. But, as Hutton told me, “the overwhelming majority of Europeans still feared witchcraft until the early 20th century.” (The black cloak and pointy hat of popular Halloween attire were just what poor women wore in parts of 17th-century Europe.) Political elites mounted a concerted campaign to stamp out those beliefs over centuries, and its success was uneven, leaving some countries with far higher rates of belief in witchcraft and uncanny magic than others.

[From the May 2020 issue: Why is witchcraft on the rise?]

Anthropologists note that nonrational, magical, or superstitious beliefs appear in nearly all human societies, helping to make sense of a world in which individual lives can feel like the playthings of larger, unseen forces or, sometimes, random chance. When, say, cancer strikes, people look for explanations, and some fasten on literal demons. Nonrational beliefs can also allow believers to feel that they are harnessing unseen forces for their own purposes. They use witchcraft, voodoo, or other forms of uncanny magic to assert control in a world that feels uncontrollable. As a result, such worldviews tend to be most prevalent among those who feel powerless and face relentless calamities. Many believers view magic pragmatically, unsure of how an amulet or a talisman might work, but willing to try it nonetheless. As the Oxford historian Theodore Zeldin put it, superstition is a bit like the “modern car-driver, who does not know how his car works, but trusts it all the same, interested only in knowing which button to press.”

Mystical beliefs are not mere outliers to be edited out of our “rational choice” understanding of how and why political actors and voters behave, or how and why societies change over time. Rather, such nonrational beliefs have decisively shaped domestic and global affairs in countless cases.

For example, the United States nearly invaded Haiti in 1994, in “Operation Uphold Democracy,” in order to topple a brutal post-coup military regime. As American gunships anchored off the Haitian coast, voodoo priests drew curses outside the American embassy in Port-au-Prince. A few days later, a plane crashed near the White House, and some houngans, or voodoo priests, interpreted this as evidence that the curse had worked. With that fortuitous sign, they prepared for battle, threatening to defeat U.S. forces with their own army of zombies. (A celebrity voodoo priest named Max Beauvoir and known as “houngan to the stars”—he had previously met Bill Clinton—eventually defused this crisis.)

In the first Liberian civil war of the 1990s, a preacher named Joseph Blahyi, who went by the nom de guerre General Butt Naked, led a particularly feared paramilitary unit. Said to be protected by magical amulets, Blahyi’s brigade fought naked to show their confidence that clothes and body armor were unnecessary. The unit committed mass atrocities and played a significant role in the outcome of the conflict.

Similar examples abound: In Myanmar, the former dictator Ne Win wrecked the economy by making banknotes worthless because they weren’t in denominations that were divisible by nine, his lucky number. In response, students organized mass protests on August 8, 1988, because they saw the number eight as powerful. Thousands of civilians were killed in the subsequent 8888 Uprising, as it became known, which still affects Myanmar’s politics today (it launched Aung San Suu Kyi to international prominence and is often compared to today’s anti-coup resistance).

Nonrational belief systems continue to drive geopolitical shifts. Recent research has shown that Chinese firms take significantly fewer financial risks during the company chairman’s zodiac year, which is said to bring bad luck. What’s more, ordinary Chinese citizens take fewer economic risks during their own zodiac years, too, affecting China’s wider economy.

And the United States doesn’t just have Paula White. Millions believe in QAnon, and more and more people are attending formal exorcisms, which often have overt political messages in support of Trump. The popular ReAwaken America tour was founded by a man who claims that COVID-19 vaccines are associated with the “mark of the beast.” A speaker at one such event warned that several diseases afflicting women are caused by “demon sperm.” The tour doesn’t just feature fringe characters with little influence; its speakers have included Michael Flynn, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Eric Trump, and Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona. Across the aisle, self-described witches and “magical thinkers” attempted to curse Trump’s presidency with spells. Unlike their Republican counterparts, however, those groups have effectively zero influence on Democratic Party politics.

Beliefs drive politics—and irrational beliefs are widespread. Discussions of demons have become mainstream in Republican political gatherings and echo from the lips of influential MAGA firebrands. Political scientists and commentators shouldn’t dismiss these views because they seem outlandish. We need more research into these communities—and a better understanding of the political extremism they may unleash. We also need polling and survey research that tries to accurately measure these beliefs, so that we can better understand the reality of voter perceptions rather than asking only about more traditional concerns such as taxes and health care. Because, like it or not, those who worry about the potent force embedded in certain diabolical objects are not just to be found in places like Madagascar. They also have the ear of the man who may soon return to the White House.

Happy Halloween!

More than one in four Americans have been a victim of violent crime in the past decade, but few were able to get the help they deserve. Less than 10 percent of violent-crime victims get assistance from victim-services agencies, and two-thirds of all victims report never receiving mental-health or financial assistance. Many suffer further, losing their jobs due to injury, accumulating insurmountable medical debt, and assuming financial burdens left over from deceased loved ones—all while facing the health effects of the traumas they have suffered, such as chronic and debilitating stress, hypervigilance, depression, and insomnia.

In battles over U.S. crime policy, victims are rarely anyone’s priority. Advocates for a more punitive system focus on strengthening the power and reach of criminal-justice agencies, stressing strict punishments and more arrests. Reformers trying to reduce the system’s punitiveness, for their part, tend to gloss over the devastating consequences of violence as they focus on slashing incarceration. Victims are lost in this shuffle, disregarded both by the institutions meant to protect them and many of the advocates claiming to support them.

[David A. Graham: How criminal-justice reform fell apart]

And the disregard is not felt evenly. Low-income people and people of color, as well as people with disabilities and members of the LGBTQ community, are more likely to be repeatedly hurt by violence and less likely to garner victim assistance. Young people from these demographic groups are particularly affected. The most harmed are the least helped.

Ten years ago, I founded the Alliance for Safety and Justice, a national organization that works to advance public safety and criminal-justice reform. We have conducted interviews with representative groups of victims across the country about their experiences and policy preferences. Since our start, we’ve surveyed more than 10,000 victims—that is, people who have either been directly hurt by violent or property crime or whose immediate family members have been murdered. We found that most victims prefer an approach to public safety that addresses the problem at its roots—say, by treating addiction, offering conflict mediation and mentorship for vulnerable youth, or providing crisis assistance for people with mental illness—and prepares people with convictions for reintegration and law-abiding citizenship. Victims are generally no tougher on crime than nonvictims; they prefer rehabilitation over tough justice, even though they’ve had firsthand experience with crime and the criminal-justice system.

That research stands in stark contrast to common wisdom. At first glance, victims’ rights and tough-on-crime politics might seem like natural bedfellows. In the 1970s, victims’ advocates expressed frustration with an unresponsive justice system, and prosecutors and police complained that defendants had more rights in court than victims did. Plenty of real-world examples showed victims being ignored: Many surviving family members whose loved one had been murdered never received return phone calls from detectives, and many victims of sexual assault were turned away when they reported what had happened—or were berated by courtroom lawyers in the few cases police pursued. So, the line of reasoning went, it was urgent to give victims more influence in court proceedings, roll back the rights of the accused, and aggressively pursue punishment. Media coverage of violent crimes (commonly when victims were white and middle-class) fueled these sentiments, as politicians, at times joined by understandably distraught victims’ families, called for maximum punishments. States built more prisons, ratcheted up sentence lengths, and expanded budgets for police, probation, courts, prosecutors, and sheriffs. The bureaucratic agencies that make up the U.S. criminal-justice system went from relative political insignificance to a behemoth set of institutions that had the capacity to influence elections and advocate for sweeping legislation.

During the tough-on-crime era, President Ronald Reagan, who once called victims “forgotten persons,” enacted a range of federal budgetary and legislative reforms that led to a drastic increase in the U.S. incarceration rate. In response to high-profile homicides, President Bill Clinton championed sentencing policies such as “three strikes and you’re out.” Wide-net surveillance, militarized police agencies, pretrial detention, and harsh prison sentences and conditions became standard.

These changes were popular but focused on punishment and retribution with little regard for helping victims or alleviating the deeper common causes of crime and violence. And this is what does set victims apart from nonvictims: They know intimately how poorly our system supports those who have been hurt by crime. Even though the law-and-order agenda birthed new victims’ rights, it also exacerbated a long-standing hierarchy of harm: Victims face discrimination along racial and socioeconomic lines at every stage, affecting which crimes get the most media and political attention, which victim-compensation applications are approved, which cases receive the most thorough investigation, and which victims are treated with dignity by police, prosecutors, and medical personnel. As the power and reach of the justice system grew, so did discrimination and disregard.

Additionally, ignoring victims can perversely result in more crime. I saw this firsthand when, fresh out of law school in 2001, I began working with parents of incarcerated youth, who were virtually all low-income people of color. Almost every young person I encountered had been a victim long before they were ever arrested for committing a crime—a phenomenon is all too common for both youths and adults entering our justice system. One teenager had been jumped so many times on the way to school that he stopped going. Another was placed in foster care after suffering sexual abuse at home, only to be sexually abused again in the foster-care system. Others had lost siblings to homicide or been robbed or assaulted numerous times. Most of these kids hadn’t received any help to cope with PTSD, anxiety, and near-constant fear.

Study after study spanning the course of the past 30-plus years has demonstrated that people in the justice system have among the highest rates of chronic trauma exposure of any group. A 2014 study found that more than half of the men incarcerated in a high-security prison reported being victimized in at least one violent traumatic event, such as being robbed or assaulted, and nearly all had experienced some kind of trauma in their lives. Incarcerated women, too, have extremely high rates of prior victimization. Another 2014 study, for example, found that 53 percent of a sample of women incarcerated in urban and rural jails have had PTSD, compared with 10 percent of the general population. Helping people recover long before they resort to crime would almost certainly do more for public safety than locking them up after they traumatized someone else.

A lot has changed since I was a young lawyer in the 2000s. The perils of mass incarceration have been well documented and hotly debated. Politicians and the public now broadly accept that the United States has a criminal-justice problem. Over the decade of declining crime rates preceding the coronavirus pandemic, policy makers from both sides of the aisle embraced a range of reforms to reduce incarceration. But after COVID hit and gun-related homicides spiked in 2020, candidates began demanding a return to “law and order.” Even as attitudes regarding criminal justice shift, public officials continue to overlook the needs, experiences, and preferences of people being hurt the most by crime. If public safety were truly the goal, and victim voices really mattered, healing trauma would be a more important focus.

[From the October 2020 issue: The new Reconstruction]

A new generation of leaders is emerging. People from communities most affected by crime are building preventative, restorative, and effective solutions. The Cleveland native Brenda Glass was only 13 years old the first time she became a victim of violence. She was raped at gunpoint by a group of men she knew and trusted. Unable to find help for the fear and anger she felt, she sought protection in a group of older teens and adults who also abused her and coerced her to carry out crimes. Being imprisoned led to more hopelessness. After a police officer told her she needed spiritual help, not more jail time, she promised herself that she’d escape the cycle. She became a licensed clinical social worker and a psychotherapist and, in 2017, launched Cleveland’s first trauma-services program of its kind for victims. The need was so great that in 2020 she cashed out her retirement funds and poured all of her savings into creating the Brenda Glass Multipurpose Trauma Center. Since then, she has helped hundreds of survivors of gun violence, domestic violence, and sexual assault get therapy, find jobs, and obtain permanent housing. All of the services are free. “We help victims heal,” Glass told me, “through the long process of recovering in all aspects of their lives.” She also joined my organization as a volunteer member and has been advocating to expand these kinds of victim services across Ohio.

Glass’s center is one of more than 50 similar trauma-recovery programs across the country offering a one-stop model of services for victims. “People want to recover,” Glass said. “People, whether they are victims or perpetrators, need hope. Rarely do we give people that vision. If you can envision that there is a possibility that your life can be different, you will reach for it. Hope is the key. That’s what we provide—to everyone.” Programs like Glass’s are the most promising development of the past decade when it comes to solving the dual crises of increasing violence and a broken justice system. Politicians need to catch up.

Today, only a few Westerners are still attending President Vladimir Putin’s showcase events, such as the Valdai conference in Sochi, which, before the war, was Russia’s most prestigious international gathering. This year, one of those foreign guests was a journalist from a German far-left newspaper, who asked Putin to explain a seeming contradiction: If Russia is liberating Ukraine from Nazis, as Putin claims, why is the Kremlin maintaining high-level contacts with the far-right Alternative for Germany party?

The question had particular saliency because the AfD is growing in power and popularity across Germany. Earlier this month, it achieved historically good results in regional elections in Bavaria and Hesse, two traditionally centrist states. Nationally, the AfD is polling at a record 21 percent, making it the second-most-popular party in Germany. After next year’s regional elections, it could even become the leading party of several states in its eastern-German stronghold.

Putin’s response was revealing. He questioned the notion that the AfD is far-right and defended his contacts with the group. He went on to suggest that the AfD was the victim of “Nazi methods” rather than a party “using them.” As evidence, he pointed to rumors of an assassination attempt on one of the party’s leaders during a recent campaign event. The German authorities have not confirmed that any such attempt took place, but the AfD tried to exploit the rumor in the days before this month’s regional elections. Putin’s surprisingly detailed knowledge of a little-known conspiracy theory involving the AfD points to the special interest that the Kremlin is taking in Germany’s far right.

[Read: What Germany says about far-right politics]

Putin’s connection to Germany is personal. A country that he thought he understood, from his posting to East Germany as a young KGB officer, has turned its back on him. “I still have friends in Germany,” Putin said at Valdai. “And it may seem strange, but their number is growing.” The implication, when taken with his remarks about the AfD, was that he’s finding new friends among Germany’s right.

Putin seems to hope he can make an ally of Germany’s far right in an effort to sow discord in German society. This would meet an important goal in his broader campaign to dissolve Western unity and reduce support for Ukraine.

Living and serving in East Germany in the years leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union had a huge influence on Putin’s life and political priorities. Throughout his career, he has shown a consistent preoccupation with Russia’s relationship with Germany. “Russia has always had special sentiments for Germany,” he said in a speech—delivered in fluent German—to the Bundestag in 2001. Many times, he has tapped into German guilt over its World War II history and harped on the debt of gratitude Germany owes the Russian people for the country’s reunification. Putin’s tactics have been very effective, and Germany has long put its relationship with Russia before that with any of its Eastern European neighbors.

In 2014, Putin extended his arm-twisting by drawing a parallel between Germany’s reunification and Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Just as the Russian people had supported the “desire of the Germans for national unity,” he said in a public address, so he expected Germany to “also support the aspiration of the Russians, of historical Russia, to restore unity.”

Although Germany joined the widespread European and American condemnation of the annexation of Crimea, the country’s dependence on natural gas, and Russian supplies of it, was growing. That vulnerability bolstered Putin’s confidence that Germany’s business-driven political system would not dare cutting ties, regardless of Russia’s aggressive actions elsewhere.

That belief was affirmed by his close relationship with former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (Putin has attended Schröder’s birthday parties, and once took Schröder on a Christmas sleigh ride in Moscow). After Schröder left office in 2005, he was appointed chairman of the boards of both Nord Stream AG and Rosneft, two major Russian-controlled energy companies. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Schröder fell into disgrace, and the Nord Stream 2 gas-pipeline project between Russia and Germany that he championed has been abandoned. Yet Putin continues to defend his friend as a “true son of his people.”

[David French: Hatred makes fools of us all]

The German response to Russia’s 2022 assault on Ukraine suggests that Putin did not know Germany as well as he thought. Even when Moscow cut off gas supplies to Germany—a move that many countries, including the United States, long feared would sway German decision making—Germany continued to support Ukraine. In fact, Berlin became Kyiv’s second-biggest military supplier after Washington. Although Germany has hesitated to step into a leading role in Europe—delaying the delivery of tanks and still debating whether to provide long-range missiles to Ukraine—the era of a special relationship between Russia and Germany is over.

Putin’s reaction to this has been to turn his false narrative about neo-Nazis in Ukraine back on Germany. “It’s unbelievable but true,” he said at an event earlier this year commemorating Soviet sacrifices during World War II. “We are again being threatened with German Leopard tanks.” (Germany had “panther” and “tiger” tanks in World War II, but no “leopards,” in fact.) Germans, however, thought of a different wartime analogy for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: Hitler’s attack on Poland in 1939. “Acting as an imperial power, Russia now seeks to redraw borders by force,” wrote Olaf Scholz, Germany’s current chancellor, and “my country’s history gives it a special responsibility to fight the forces of fascism, authoritarianism, and imperialism.”

Despite the evidence to the contrary, Putin appears to hope that a return to Russia’s pre-2022 relationship with Germany is possible. Because “one line of Nord Stream 2 has survived” (the other line was blown up last year), “tomorrow we open the valve,” he has offered—if Germany asks to resume its Russian gas supply. But this is something, he complained, that Germany’s “bosses in Washington” will not allow the country to do. (The idea that the U.S. dictates policy to Berlin is a favorite trope of his: The Americans “continue to occupy Germany,” he said on Russian TV earlier this year.)

Rebuffed by Germany’s centrist politicians, Putin has been forced to look for allies on the more extreme margins of German politics. A supposed lack of national sovereignty and independence is a popular narrative among far-right parties and conspiracist movements in Germany. For example, AfD is calling for emancipation from the United States and rapprochement with Russia in its platform for the candidates it’s running in next year’s European parliamentary elections. The rhetoric of Germany’s continued “occupation” is also echoed by the ultra-reactionary Reichsbürger movement, whose members do not accept the legitimacy of the postwar Federal Republic and wish for the restitution of the “German Reich” that ended with the defeat of the Nazis.

[Anne Applebaum: Poland shows that autocracy is not inevitable]

AfD politicians have repeatedly argued that Germany should move away from the European Union’s sanctions and reopen the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. As well as calling for an end to support for Ukraine, they have also blamed NATO expansion for provoking Russia. For its part, Moscow has cultivated relations with the AfD, including a 2020 meeting between senior party members and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov. The Kremlin has also brought AfD members on all-expenses-paid trips to Russia and invited them to act as “election observers” in Crimea. In August, an investigation by Der Spiegel found that an AfD staffer in the Bundestag who was preparing a lawsuit against the German government over its arms supplies to Ukraine had taken multiple trips to Russia, returning with large sums of cash and suspected contacts to Russian intelligence.

The attitudes of the AfD and movements like Reichsbürger conveniently align with some of Putin’s views about Germany. Reichsbürger is growing in strength, and now has more than 20,000 members. A regional branch of Germany’s domestic-intelligence service last year warned that Russia is actively encouraging the movement in online disinformation campaigns.

The likely reasons for Putin’s interest in his new friends are not hard to discern. The rise of Germany’s far right makes it easier for Russia to undermine social cohesion and public consensus. The political center in Germany is growing weaker: The three parties in the governing coalition—the Greens, the Social Democrats, and the Free Democrats—are not performing well. No major party has given any indication of being willing to include the AfD in a coalition. That makes it very unlikely that the AfD will gain power at the federal level. But its strength in local and regional elections is eroding the firewall that Germany’s political center has tried to build between itself and the far right.

[David Frum: Can Germany resist the Trump disease?]

To make things worse, a new nationalist left-wing party just launched by the charismatic politician Sahra Wagenknecht echoes some of the AfD’s positions on Russia. In the past, the Kremlin has also targeted Germany’s far left with hopes of establishing an anti-war coalition between the far left and the far right. Wagenknecht’s party may draw votes away from the AfD, but even if it succeeds in doing so, the presence of two populist antiestablishment and pro-Russian parties threatens to further destabilize the political center.   

By backing the AfD and other extreme actors in German politics, Putin is betting not only on diminishing support for Ukraine in Germany, but also on European and American fatigue with the war effort. As major elections approach in Western countries in 2024 and 2025, Russian interference and disinformation efforts are bound to increase. Its support for far-right groups in the West is not just about weakening democratic societies; it is part of a geopolitical strategy. At a time when the world faces political turmoil on several fronts, the success of Putin’s tactics will be decided at ballot boxes across Europe and in the United States.

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