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.

To spend time around Dean Phillips, as I have since his first campaign for Congress in 2018, is to encounter someone so earnest as to be utterly suspicious. He speaks constantly of joy and beauty and inspiration, beaming at the prospect of entertaining some new perspective. He allows himself to be interrupted often—by friends, family, staffers—but rarely interrupts them, listening patiently with a politeness that almost feels aggravating. With the practiced manners of one raised with great privilege—boasting a net worth he estimates at $50 million—the gentleman from Minnesota is exactly that.

But that courtly disposition cracks, I’ve noticed, when he’s convinced that someone is lying. Maybe it’s because at six months old he lost his father in a helicopter crash that his family believes the military covered up, in a Vietnam War that was sold to the public with tricks and subterfuge. I can hear the anger in his voice as he talks about the treachery that led to January 6, recalling his frantic search for some sort of weapon—he found only a sharpened pencil—to defend himself against the violent masses who were sacking the U.S. Capitol. I can see it in his eyes when Phillips, who is Jewish, remarks that some of his Democratic colleagues have recently spread falsehoods about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and others in the party have refused to condemn blatant anti-Semitism.

Deception is a part of politics. Phillips acknowledges that. But some deceptions are more insidious than others. On the third Saturday of October, as we sat inside the small, sun-drenched living room of his rural-Virginia farmhouse, Phillips told me he was about to do something out of character: He was going to upset some people. He was going to upset some people because he was going to run for president. And he was going to run for president, Phillips explained, because there is one deception he can no longer perpetuate.

“My grave concern,” the congressman said, “is I just don’t think President Biden will beat Donald Trump next November.”

This isn’t some fringe viewpoint within the Democratic Party. In a year’s worth of conversations with other party leaders, Phillips told me, “everybody, without exception,” shares his fear about Joe Biden’s fragility—political and otherwise—as he seeks a second term. This might be hyperbole, but not by much: In my own recent conversations with party officials, it was hard to find anyone who wasn’t jittery about Biden. Phillips’s problem is that they refuse to say so on the record. Democrats claim to view Trump as a singular threat to the republic, the congressman complains, but for reasons of protocol and self-preservation they have been unwilling to go public with their concerns about Biden, making it all the more likely, in Phillips’s view, that the former president will return to office.

[Read: The case for a primary challenge to Joe Biden]

Phillips spent the past 15 months trying to head off such a calamity. He has noisily implored Biden, who turns 81 next month—and would be 86 at the end of a second term—to “pass the torch,” while openly attempting to recruit prominent young Democrats to challenge the president in 2024. He name-dropped some Democratic governors on television and made personal calls to others, urging someone, anyone, to jump into the Democratic race. What he encountered, he thought, was a dangerous dissonance: Some of the president’s allies would tell him, in private conversations, to keep agitating, to keep recruiting, that Biden had no business running in 2024—but that they weren’t in a position to do anything about it.

What made this duplicity especially maddening to Phillips, he told me, is that Democrats have seen its pernicious effects on the other side of the political aisle. For four years during Trump’s presidency, Democrats watched their Republican colleagues belittle Trump behind closed doors, then praise him to their base, creating a mirage of support that ultimately made them captives to the cult of Trumpism. Phillips stresses that there is no equivalence between Trump and Biden. Still, having been elected in 2018 alongside a class of idealistic young Democrats—“the Watergate babies of the Trump era,” Phillips said—he always took great encouragement in the belief that his party would never fall into the trap of elevating people over principles.

“We don’t have time to make this about any one individual. This is about a mission to stop Donald Trump,” Phillips, who is 54, told me. “I’m just so frustrated—I’m growing appalled—by the silence from people whose job it is to be loud.”

Phillips tried to make peace with this. As recently as eight weeks ago, he had quietly resigned himself to Biden’s nomination. The difference now, he said—the reason for his own buzzer-beating run for the presidency—is that Biden’s numbers have gone from bad to awful. Surveys taken since late summer show the president’s approval ratings hovering at or below 40 percent, Trump pulling ahead in the horse race, and sizable majorities of voters, including Democratic voters, wishing the president would step aside. These findings are apparent in district-level survey data collected by Phillips’s colleagues in the House, and have been the source of frenzied intraparty discussion since the August recess. And yet Democrats’ reaction to them, Phillips said, has been to grimace, shrug, and say it’s too late for anything to be done.

“There’s no such thing as too late,” Phillips told me, “until Donald Trump is in the White House again.”

In recent weeks, Phillips has reached out to a wide assortment of party elders. He did this, in part, as a check on his own sanity. He was becoming panicked at the prospect of Trump’s probable return to office. He halfway hoped to be told that he was losing his grip on reality, that Trump Derangement Syndrome had gotten to him. He wanted someone to tell him that everything was going to be fine. Instead, in phone call after phone call, his fears were only exacerbated.

“I’m looking at polling data, and I’m looking at all of it. The president’s numbers are just not good—and they’re not getting any better,” James Carville, the Democratic strategist, told me, summarizing his recent conversations with Phillips. “I talk to a lot of people who do a lot of congressional-level polling and state polling, and they’re all saying the same thing. There’s not an outlier; there’s not another opinion … The question is, has the country made up its mind?”

[From the November 2023 issue: The Kamala Harris problem]

Jim Messina, who ran Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, told me the answer is no. “This is exactly where we were at this stage of that election cycle,” Messina said. He pointed to the November 6, 2011, issue of The New York Times Magazine, the cover of which read, “So, Is Obama Toast?” Messina called the current situation just another case of bedwetting. “If there was real concern, then you’d have real politicians running,” he said. “I’d never heard of Dean Phillips until a few weeks ago.”

The bottom line, Messina said, is that “Biden’s already beaten Trump once. He’s the one guy who can beat him again.”

Carville struggles with this logic. The White House, he said, “operates with what I call this doctrine of strategic certainty,” arguing that Biden is on the same slow-but-steady trajectory he followed in 2020. “Joe Biden has been counted out by the Beltway insiders, pundits, DC media, and anonymous Washington sources time and time again,” the Biden campaign wrote in a statement. “Time and time again, they have been wrong.” The problem is that 2024 bears little resemblance to 2020: Biden is even older, there is a proliferation of third-party and independent candidates, and the Democratic base, which turned out in record numbers in the last presidential election, appears deflated. (“The most under-covered story in contemporary American politics,” Carville said, “is that Black turnout has been miserable everywhere since 2020.”) Carville added that in his own discussions with leading Democrats, when he argues that Biden’s prospects for reelection have grown bleak, “Nobody is saying, ‘James, you’re wrong,’” he told me. “They’re saying, ‘James, you can’t say that.’”

Hence his fondness for Phillips. “Remember when the Roman Catholic Church convicted Galileo of heresy for saying that the Earth moves around the sun? He said, ‘And yet, it still moves,’” Carville told me, cackling in his Cajun drawl. The truth is, Carville said, Biden’s numbers aren’t moving—and whoever points that out is bound to be treated like a heretic in Democratic circles.

Phillips knows that he’s making a permanent enemy of the party establishment. He realizes that he’s likely throwing away a promising career in Congress; already, a Democratic National Committee member from Minnesota has announced a primary challenge and enlisted the help of leading firms in the St. Paul area to take Phillips out. He told me how, after the news of his impending launch leaked to the press, “a colleague from New Hampshire”—the congressman grinned, as that description narrowed it down to just two people—told him that his candidacy was “not serious” and “offensive” to the state’s voters. In the run-up to his launch, Phillips tried to speak with the president—to convey his respect before entering the race. On Thursday night, he said, the White House got back to him: Biden would not be talking to Phillips.

Cedric Richmond, the onetime Louisiana congressman who is now co-chair of Biden’s reelection campaign, told me Phillips doesn’t “give a crap” about the party and is pursuing “a vanity project” that could result in another Trump presidency. “History tells us when the sitting president faces a primary challenge, it weakens him for the general election,” Richmond said. “No party has ever survived that.”

But Phillips insists—and his friends, even those who think he’s making a crushing mistake, attest—that he is doing this out of genuine conviction. Standing up and leaning across a coffee table inside his living room, Phillips pulled out his phone and recited data from recent surveys. One showed 70 percent of Democrats under 35 wanting a different nominee; another showed swing-state voters siding with Trump over Biden on a majority of policy issues, and independents roundly rejecting “Bidenomics,” the White House branding for the president’s handling of the economy. “These are not numbers that you can massage,” Phillips said. “Look, just because he’s old, that’s not a disqualifier. But being old, in decline, and having numbers that are clearly moving in the wrong direction? It’s getting to red-alert kind of stuff.”

Phillips sat back down. “Someone had to do this,” the congressman told me. “It just was so self-evident.”

If the need to challenge the president is so self-evident, I asked, then why is a third-term congressman from Minnesota the only one willing to do it?

“I think about that every day,” Phillips replied, shaking his head. “If the data is correct, over 50 percent of Democrats want a different nominee—and yet there’s only one out of 260 Democrats in the Congress saying the same thing?”

Phillips no longer wonders if there’s something wrong with him. He believes there’s something wrong with the Democratic Party—a “disease” that discourages competition and shuts down dialogue and crushes dissent. Phillips said his campaign for president won’t simply be about the “generational schism” that pits clinging-to-power Baby Boomers against the rest of the country.  If he’s running, the congressman said, he’s running on all the schisms that divide the Democrats: cultural and ideological, economic and geographic. He intends to tell some “hard truths” about a party that, in its attempt to turn the page on Trump, he argued, has done things to help move him back into the Oval Office. He sounded at times less like a man who wants to win the presidency, and more like someone who wants to draw attention to the decaying state of our body politic.

Over the course of a weekend with Phillips on his farm, we spent hours discussing the twisted incentive structures of America’s governing institutions. He talked about loyalties and blind spots, about how truth takes a back seat to narrative, about how we tell ourselves stories to ignore uncomfortable realities. Time and again, I pressed Phillips on the most uncomfortable reality of all: By running against Biden—by litigating the president’s age and fitness for office in months of town-hall meetings across New Hampshire—isn’t he likely to make a weak incumbent that much weaker, thereby making another Trump presidency all the more likely?

“I want to strengthen him. If it’s not me, I want to strengthen him. I won’t quit until I strengthen him. I mean it,” Phillips said of Biden. “I do not intend to undermine him, demean him, diminish him, attack him, or embarrass him.”

Phillips’s friends tell me his intentions are pure. But they fear that what makes him special—his guileless, romantic approach to politics—could in this case be ruinous for the country. They have warned him about the primary campaigns against George H. W. Bush in 1992 and Jimmy Carter in 1980, both of whom lost in the general election.

Phillips insisted to me that he wouldn’t be running against Biden. Rather, he would be campaigning for the future of the Democratic Party. There was no scenario, he said, in which his candidacy would result in Trump winning back the White House.

And in that moment, it was Dean Phillips who was telling himself a story.

He didn’t see the question coming—but he didn’t try to duck it, either.

It was July of last year. Phillips was doing a regular spot on WCCO radio, a news-talk station in his district, when host Chad Hartman asked the congressman if he wanted Biden to run for reelection in 2024. “No. I don’t,” Phillips replied, while making sure to voice his admiration for the president. “I think the country would be well served by a new generation of compelling, well-prepared, dynamic Democrats to step up.”

Phillips didn’t think much about the comment. After all, he’d run for Congress in 2018 promising not to vote for Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House (though he ultimately did support her as part of a deal that codified the end of her time in leadership). While he has been a reliable vote in the Democratic caucus—almost always siding with Biden on the House floor—Phillips has simultaneously been a squeaky wheel. He’s a centrist unhappy with what he sees as the party’s coddling of the far left. He’s a Gen Xer convinced that the party’s aging leadership is out of step with the country. He’s an industrialist worried about the party’s hostility toward Big Business. (When he was 3 years old, his mother married the heir of a distilling empire; Phillips took it over in his early 30s, then made his own fortune with the gelato company Talenti.)

When the blowback to the radio interview arrived—with party donors, activists, and officials in both Minnesota and Washington rebuking him as disloyal—Phillips was puzzled. Hadn’t Biden himself said, while campaigning in 2020, that he would be a “bridge” to the future of the Democratic Party? Hadn’t he made that remark flanked by Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer on one side and future Vice President Kamala Harris on the other? Hadn’t he all but promised that his campaign was about removing Trump from power, not staying in power himself?

[Read: So much for Biden the bridge president]

Phillips had never seriously entertained the notion that Biden would seek reelection. Neither had many of his Democratic colleagues. In fact, several House Democrats told me—on the condition of anonymity, as not one of them would speak on the record for this article—that in their conversations with Biden’s inner circle throughout the summer and fall of 2022, the question was never if the president would announce his decision to forgo a second term, but when he would make that announcement.

Figuring that he’d dealt with the worst of the recoil—and still very much certain that Biden would ultimately step aside—Phillips grew more vocal. He spent the balance of 2022, while campaigning for his own reelection, arguing that both Biden and Pelosi should make way for younger Democratic leaders to emerge. He was relieved when, after Republicans recaptured the House of Representatives that fall, Pelosi allowed Hakeem Jeffries, a friend of Phillips’s, to succeed her atop the caucus.

But that relief soon gave way to worry: As the calendar turned to 2023, there were rumblings coming from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue that Biden might run for reelection after all. In February, Phillips irked his colleagues on Capitol Hill when he gave an extensive interview to the Politico columnist Jonathan Martin shaming Democrats for suppressing their concerns about Biden. At that point, his friends in the caucus still believed that Phillips was picking a fight for no reason. When Biden announced his candidacy two months later, several people recalled to me, some congressional Democrats were stunned.

“Many actually felt, I think, personally offended,” Phillips said. “They felt he had made a promise—either implicitly, if not explicitly.”

Around the time Biden was launching his reelection campaign, Phillips was returning to the United States from an emotional journey to Vietnam. He had traveled to the country, for the first time, in search of the place where his father and seven other Americans died in a 1969 helicopter crash. (Military officials initially told his mother that the Huey was shot down; only later, Phillips says, did they admit that the accident was weather related.) After a local man volunteered to lead Phillips to the crash site, the congressman broke down in tears, running his hands over the ground where his father perished, reflecting, he told me, on “the magnificence and the consequence of the power of the American presidency.”

Phillips left Vietnam with renewed certainty of his mission—not to seek the White House himself, but to recruit a Democrat who stood a better chance than Biden of defeating Donald Trump.

Back in Washington, Phillips began asking House Democratic colleagues for the personal phone numbers of governors in their states. Some obliged him; others ignored the request or refused it. Phillips tried repeatedly to get in touch with these governors. Only two got back to him—Whitmer in Michigan, and J. B. Pritzker in Illinois—but neither one would speak to the congressman directly. “They had their staff take the call,” Phillips told me. “They wouldn’t take the call.”

With a wry grin, he added: “Gretchen Whitmer’s aide was very thoughtful … J. B. Pritzker’s delegate was somewhat unfriendly.”

[Read: Why not Whitmer?]

By this point, Phillips was getting impatient. Trump’s numbers were improving. One third-party candidate, Cornel West, was already siphoning support away from Biden, and Phillips suspected that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who had declared his candidacy as a Democrat, would eventually switch to run as an independent. (That suspicion proved correct earlier this month.) As a member of the elected House Democratic leadership, Phillips could sense the anxiety mounting within the upper echelons of the party. He and other Democratic officials wondered what, exactly, the White House would do to counter the obvious loss of momentum. The answer: Biden’s super PAC dropped eight figures on an advertising blitz around Bidenomics, a branding exercise that Phillips told me was viewed as “a joke” within the House Democratic caucus.  

“Completely disconnected from what we were hearing,” Phillips said of the slogan, “which is people getting frustrated that the administration was telling them that everything is great.”

Everything was not great—but it didn’t seem terrible, either. The RealClearPolitics average of polls, as of late spring, showed Biden and Trump running virtually even. As the summer wore on, however, there were signs of trouble. When Phillips and certain purple-district colleagues would compare notes on happenings back home, the readouts were the same. Polling indicated that more and more independents were drifting from the Democratic ranks. Field operations confirmed that young people and minorities were dangerously disengaged. Town-hall questions and donor meetings began and ended with questions about Biden’s fitness to run against Trump.

Phillips decided that he needed to push even harder. Before embarking on a new, more aggressive phase of his mission—he began booking national-TV appearances with the explicit purpose of lobbying a contender to join the Democratic race—he spoke to Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, to share his plans. He also said he called the White House and spoke to Biden’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, to offer a heads-up. Phillips wanted both men to know that he would be proceeding with respect—but proceeding all the same.

In August, as Phillips dialed up the pressure, he suddenly began to feel the pressure himself. He had spent portions of the previous year cultivating relationships with powerful donors, from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, who had offered their assistance in recruiting a challenger to Biden. Now, with those efforts seemingly doomed, the donors began asking Phillips if he would consider running. He laughed off the question at first. Phillips knew that it would take someone with greater name identification, and a far larger campaign infrastructure, to vie for the party’s presidential nomination. Besides, the folks he met with wanted someone like Whitmer or California Governor Gavin Newsom or Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock, not a barely known congressman from the Minneapolis suburbs.

In fact, Phillips had already considered—and rejected—the idea of running. After speaking to a packed D.C.-area ballroom of Gold Star families earlier this year, and receiving an ovation for his appeals to brotherhood and bipartisanship, he talked with his wife and his mother about the prospect of doing what no other Democrat was willing to do. But he concluded, quickly, that it was a nonstarter. He didn’t have the experience to run a national campaign, let alone a strategy of any sort.

Phillips told his suitors he wasn’t their guy. Flying back to Washington after the summer recess, he resolved to keep his head down. The congressman didn’t regret his efforts, but he knew they had estranged him from the party. Now, with primary filing deadlines approaching and no serious challengers to the president in sight, he would fall in line and do everything possible to help Biden keep Trump from reclaiming the White House.

No sooner had Phillips taken this vow than two things happened. First, as Congress reconvened during the first week of September, Phillips was blitzed by Democratic colleagues who shared the grim tidings from their districts around the country. He had long been viewed as the caucus outcast for his public defiance of the White House; now he was the party’s unofficial release valve, the member whom everyone sought out to vent their fears and frustrations. That same week, several major polls dropped, the collective upshot of which proved more worrisome than anything Phillips had witnessed to date. One survey, from The Wall Street Journal, showed Trump and Biden essentially tied, but reported that 73 percent of registered voters considered Biden “too old” to run for president, with only 47 percent saying the same about Trump, who is just three and a half years younger. Another poll, conducted for CNN, showed that 67 percent of Democratic voters wanted someone other than Biden as the party’s nominee.

Phillips felt helpless. He made a few last-ditch phone calls, pleading and praying that someone might step forward. No one did. After a weekend of nail-biting, Phillips logged on to X, formerly Twitter, on Monday, September 11, to write a remembrance on the anniversary of America coming under attack. That’s when he noticed a direct message. It was from a man he’d never met but whose name he knew well: Steve Schmidt.

“Some of the greatest acts of cowardice in the history of this country have played out in the last 10 years,” Schmidt told me, picking at a piece of coconut cream pie.

“Agreed,” Phillips said, nodding his head. “Agreed.”

The three of us, plus the congressman’s wife, Annalise, were talking late into the night around a long, rustic table in the farmhouse dining room. Never, not even in the juicy, adapted-to-TV novels about presidential campaigns, has there been a stranger pairing than Dean Phillips and Steve Schmidt. One is a genteel, carefully groomed midwesterner who trafficks in dad jokes and neighborly aphorisms, the other a swaggering, bald-headed, battle-hardened product of New Jersey who specializes in ad hominem takedowns. What unites them is a near-manic obsession with keeping Trump out of the White House—and a conviction that Biden cannot beat him next November.

“The modern era of political campaigning began in 1896,” Schmidt told us, holding forth a bit on William McKinley’s defeat of William Jennings Bryan. “There has never been a bigger off-the-line mistake by any presidential campaign—ever—than labeling this economy ‘Bidenomics.’ The result of that is going to be to reelect Donald Trump, which will be catastrophic.”

Schmidt added: “A fair reading of the polls is that if the election were tomorrow, Donald Trump would be the 47th president of the United States.”

Schmidt, who is perhaps most famous for his work leading John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign—and, specifically, for recommending Sarah Palin as a surprise vice-presidential pick—likes to claim some credit for stopping Trump in the last election. The super PAC he co-founded in 2019, the Lincoln Project, combined quick-twitch instincts with devastating viral content, hounding Trump with over-the-top ads about everything from his business acumen to his mental stability. Schmidt became something of a cult hero to the left, a onetime conservative brawler who had mastered the art and science of exposing Republican duplicity in the Trump era. Before long, however, the Lincoln Project imploded due to cascading scandals. Schmidt resigned, apologizing for his missteps and swearing to himself that he was done with politics for good.

[Andrew Ferguson: Leave Lincoln out of it]

He couldn’t have imagined that inviting Phillips onto his podcast, via direct message, would result in the near-overnight upending of both of their lives. After taping the podcast on September 22, Schmidt told Phillips how impressed he was by his sincerity and conviction. Two days later, Schmidt called Phillips to tell him that he’d shared the audio of their conversation with some trusted political friends, and the response was unanimous: This guy needs to run for president. Before Phillips could respond, Schmidt advised the congressman to talk with his family about it. It happened to be the eve of Yom Kippur: Phillips spent the next several days with his wife and his adult daughters, who expressed enthusiasm about the idea. Phillips called Schmidt back and told him that, despite his family’s support, he had no idea how to run a presidential campaign—much less one that would have to launch within weeks, given filing deadlines in key states.

“Listen,” Schmidt told him, “if you’re willing to jump in, then I’m willing to jump in with you.”

Phillips needed some time to think—and to assess Schmidt. Politics is a tough business, but even by that standard his would-be partner had made lots of enemies. The more the two men talked, however, the more Phillips came to view Schmidt as a kindred spirit. They shared not just a singular adversary in Trump but also a common revulsion at the conformist tactics of a political class that refuses to level with the public. (“People talk about misinformation on Twitter, misinformation in the media,” Schmidt told me. “But how is it not misinformation when our political leaders have one conversation with each other, then turn around and tell the American people exactly the opposite?”) Schmidt had relished working for heterodox dissenters like McCain and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Listening to Schmidt narrate his struggles to prevent the Republican Party’s demise, Phillips felt a strange parallel to his own situation.

Back on January 6, 2021, as he’d crawled for cover inside the House gallery—listening to the sounds of broken glass and the gunshot that killed the Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt, overhearing his weeping colleagues make good-bye calls to loved ones—Phillips believed he was going to die. Later that night, reflecting on his survival, the congressman vowed that he would give every last measure to the cause of opposing Trump. And now, just a couple of years later, with Trump’s recapturing of power appearing more likely by the day, he was supposed to do nothing—just to keep the Democratic Party honchos happy?

“My colleagues, we all endured that, and you’d think that we would be very intentional and objective and resolute about the singular objective to ensure he does not return to the White House,” Phillips said. “We need to recognize the consequences of this silence.”

On the first weekend of October, Phillips welcomed Schmidt to his D.C. townhome. They were joined by six others: the congressman’s wife and sister; his campaign manager and one of her daughters; Bill Fletcher, a Tennessee-based consultant; and a Democratic strategist whom I later met at the Virginia farm—one whose identity I agreed to keep off the record because he said his career would be over if he was found to be helping Phillips. Commanding the room with a whiteboard and marker, Schmidt outlined his approach. There would be no org chart, no job titles—only three groups with overlapping responsibilities. The first group, “Headquarters,” would deal with day-to-day operations. The second, “Maneuver,” would handle the mobile logistics of the campaign. The third, “Content,” would be prolific in its production of advertisements, web videos, and social-media posts. This last group would be essential to Phillips’s effort, Schmidt explained: They would contract talent to work across six time zones, from Manhattan to Honolulu, seizing on every opening in the news cycle and putting Biden’s campaign on the defensive all day, every day.

When the weekend wrapped, Phillips sat alone with his thoughts. The idea of challenging his party’s leader suddenly felt real. He knew the arguments being made by his Democratic friends and did his best to consider them without prejudice. Was it likely, Phillips asked himself, that his candidacy might achieve exactly the outcome he wanted to avoid—electing Trump president?

Phillips decided the answer was no.

Running in the Democratic primary carried some risk of hurting the party in 2024, Phillips figured, but not as much risk as letting Biden and his campaign sleepwalk into next summer, only to discover in the fall how disengaged and disaffected millions of Democratic voters truly are.

“If it’s not gonna be me, and this is a way to elevate the need to listen to people who are struggling and connect it to people in Washington, that to me is a blessing for the eventual nominee,” Phillips said. “If it’s Joe Biden—if he kicks my tuchus in the opening states—he looks strong, and that makes him stronger.”

It sounds fine in theory, I told Phillips. But that’s not usually how primary campaigns work.

He let out an exaggerated sigh. “I understand why conventional wisdom says that’s threatening,” Phillips said. “But my gosh, if it’s threatening to go out and listen to people and talk publicly about what’s on people’s minds, and that’s something we should be protecting against, we have bigger problems than I ever thought.”

[Eliot A. Cohen: Step aside, Joe Biden]

It was two weeks after that meeting in D.C. that Phillips welcomed me to his Virginia farmhouse. He’d been staying there, a 90-minute drive from the Capitol, since far-right rebels deposed House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, sparking a furious three-week search for his replacement. The irony, Phillips explained as he showed me around the 38-acre parcel of pastureland, is that he and Schmidt couldn’t possibly have organized a campaign during this season had Congress been doing its job. The GOP’s dysfunctional detour provided an unexpected opportunity, and Phillips determined that it was his destiny to take advantage.

With Congress adjourned for the weekend as Republicans sought a reset in their leadership scramble, Phillips reconvened the kitchen cabinet from his D.C. summit, plus a Tulsa-based film production crew. Content was the chief priority. Phillips would launch his campaign on Friday, October 27—the deadline for making the New Hampshire ballot—at the state capitol in Concord. From there, he would embark on a series of 120 planned town-hall meetings, breaking McCain’s long-standing Granite State record, touring in a massive “DEAN”-stamped bus wrapped with a slogan sure to infuriate the White House: “Make America Affordable Again.”

The strategy, Schmidt explained as we watched his candidate ad-lib for the roving cameras—shooting all manner of unscripted, stream-of-consciousness, turn-up-the-authenticity footage that would dovetail with the campaign’s policy of no polling or focus grouping—was to win New Hampshire outright. The president had made a massive tactical error, Schmidt said, by siding with the Democratic National Committee over New Hampshire in a procedural squabble that will leave the first-in-the-nation primary winner with zero delegates. Biden had declined to file his candidacy there, instead counting on loyal Democratic voters to write him onto the primary ballot. But now Phillips was preparing to spend the next three months blanketing the state, drawing an unflattering juxtaposition with the absentee president and maybe, just maybe, earning enough votes to defeat him. If that happens, Schmidt said, the media narrative will be what matters—not the delegate math. Americans would wake up to the news of two winners in the nation’s first primary elections: Trump on the Republican side, and Dean Phillips—wait, who?—yes, Dean Phillips on the Democratic side. The slingshot of coverage would be forceful enough to make Phillips competitive in South Carolina, then Michigan. By the time the campaign reached Super Tuesday, Schmidt said, Phillips would have worn the incumbent down—and won over the millions of Democrats who’ve been begging for an alternative.

At least, that’s the strategy. Fanciful? Yes. The mechanical hurdles alone, starting with collecting enough signatures to qualify for key primary ballots, could prove insurmountable. (He has already missed the deadline in Nevada.) That said, in an age of asymmetrical political disruption, Phillips might not be the million-to-one candidate some will dismiss him as. He’s seeding the campaign with enough money to build out a legitimate operation, and has influential donors poised to enter the fray on his behalf. (One tech mogul, who spoke with Phillips throughout the week preceding the launch, was readying to endorse him on Friday.) He has high-profile friends—such as the actor Woody Harrelson—whom he’ll enlist to hit the trail with him and help draw a crowd. Perhaps most consequentially, his campaign is being helped by Billy Shaheen, a longtime kingmaker in New Hampshire presidential politics and the husband of the state’s senior U.S. senator, Jeanne Shaheen. “I think the people here deserve to hear what Dean has to say,” Billy Shaheen told me. If nothing else, with Schmidt at the helm, Phillips’s campaign will be energetic and highly entertaining.

Yet the more time I spent with him at the farm, the less energized Phillips seemed by the idea of dethroning Biden. He insisted that his first ad-making session focus on saluting the president, singing his opponent’s praises into the cameras in ways that defy all known methods of campaigning. He told me, unsolicited, that his “red line” is March 6, the day after Super Tuesday, at which point he will “wrap it up” and “get behind the president in a very big way” if his candidacy fails to gain traction. He repeatedly drifted back to the notion that he might unwittingly assist Trump’s victory next fall.

Whereas he once spoke with absolute certainty on the subject—shrugging off the comparisons to Pat Buchanan in 1992 or Ted Kennedy in 1980—I could sense by the end of our time together that it was weighing on him. Understandably so: During the course of our interviews—perhaps five or six hours spent on the record—Phillips had directly criticized Biden for what he described as a detachment from the country’s economic concerns, his recent in-person visit to Israel (unnecessarily provocative to Arab nations, Phillips said), and his lack of concrete initiatives to help heal the country the way he promised in 2020. Phillips also ripped Hunter Biden’s “appalling” behavior and argued that the president—who was acting “heroically” by showing such devotion to his troubled son—was now perceived by the public to be just as corrupt as Trump.

All this from a few hours of conversation. If you’re running the Biden campaign, it’s fair to worry: What will come of Phillips taking thousands of questions across scores of town-hall meetings in New Hampshire?

At one point, under the dimmed lights at his dinner table, Phillips told me he possessed no fear of undermining the eventual Democratic nominee. Then, seconds later, he told me he was worried about the legacy he’d be leaving for his two daughters.

“Because of pundits attaching that to me—” Phillips suddenly paused. “If, for some circumstance, Trump still won …” he trailed off.

Schmidt had spent the weekend talking about Dean Phillips making history. And yet, in this moment, the gentleman from Minnesota—the soon-to-be Democratic candidate for president in 2024—seemed eager to avoid the history books altogether.

“In other words, if you’re remembered for helping Trump get elected—” I began.

He nodded slowly. “There are two paths.”

Phillips knows what path some Democrats think he’s following: that he’s selfish, maybe even insane, recklessly doing something that might result in another Trump presidency. The way Phillips sees it, he’s on exactly the opposite path: He is the last sane man in the Democratic Party, acting selflessly to ensure that Trump cannot reclaim the White House.

“Two paths,” Phillips repeated. “There’s nothing in the middle.”

As president, Donald Trump imposed an array of deeply divisive immigration restrictions on both Latinos and Muslims. And yet from 2016 to 2020, he increased his share of the vote among both groups. Even some Latino and Muslim voters who opposed Trump’s immigration agenda moved to support him anyway because of his record on other issues, particularly the economy and conservative social priorities.

Now Trump and several of his rivals for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination are doubling down on the bet that they can target each group with harsh immigration policies without paying an electoral price.

For months, they have proposed an escalating succession of hard-line measures aimed at deterring mostly Latino undocumented migrants from crossing the southern border. And following the Hamas terror attack on Israel earlier this month, they rolled out a wave of exclusionary proposals aimed at Muslims. Trump has pledged that, if returned to the White House, he will restore his travel ban on people from a number of majority-Muslim nations, expand ideological screening of all potential immigrants to ensure that they agree with “our religion,” and deport foreign students in the United States who express hostility to Israel.

Trump and other GOP 2024 candidates such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis have unveiled these proposals even as many Democratic-leaning activists warn that support for President Joe Biden is suffering in Latino and Muslim communities. Polls have consistently shown widespread discontent among Latinos over inflation and the economy. And many Muslim Americans are angry at Biden for his strong support of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as he pursues his military campaign to destroy Hamas in Gaza. “There is a level of disgust and disbelief and disappointment at the administration’s handling of the crisis so far,” Edward Ahmed Mitchell, the national deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told me.

The movement of some of these voters away from Biden produces a powerful incentive for Republicans to escalate their rhetorical and policy offensive against immigrant communities. It means that Trump could achieve the best of both worlds politically: offering a harsh anti-immigrant agenda that energizes the most xenophobic white voters in his coalition while still maintaining, or even growing, his support among immigrant communities drawn to him (or repelled by Democrats) on other issues.

That process already seems well under way in the agenda that Trump and other Republicans are advancing about the southern border. The fact that Trump’s vote among Hispanics improved in 2020, even after he implemented such aggressive policies as starting the border wall and separating migrant children from their parents, has undoubtedly encouraged him to go even further with his new proposals for mass deportation of undocumented migrants in the U.S. and military action against Mexico (both of which DeSantis has also endorsed).

Likewise, if Trump wins the 2024 election and more Muslim Americans vote for him than in 2020, despite his threats to target Muslim immigrants, he will undoubtedly feel emboldened in a second term to impose more exclusionary policies on that community. Stephen Miller, the hard-line architect of much of Trump’s immigration agenda as president, offered a preview of the deportation agenda that might be ahead when he posted a video of a recent pro-Palestinian demonstration and wrote that ICE agents “will be busy in 2025.”

Over his four years in office, Trump instituted policies more resistant to immigration than any president had since the 1920s, and repeatedly disparaged immigrants with openly racist language (including calling Mexicans “rapists” and decrying immigration from mostly Black “shithole countries”). He is now pushing beyond even that agenda. “What comes next will be … spectacular,” Miller posted recently.

As just a first step, Trump has proposed to reinstate all of the key policies he implemented that raised nearly insurmountable hurdles for those who sought to claim asylum in the U.S., including the “remain in Mexico” policy that required asylum seekers to stay in that country, typically in crowded and dangerous makeshift camps, while their cases were adjudicated. He’s promised to finish his border wall. And during his CNN town hall last spring, Trump refused to rule out reinstating the separation of migrant children from their parents, his most controversial policy. The Biden administration has reversed all of these policies, and it recently settled a lawsuit in which the federal government agreed not to restore the child-separation policy. Still, experts say that a reelected Trump would almost certainly seek to void or evade that agreement.

After the Hamas attack in Israel, Trump also pledged to bring back his travel ban. A bitterly divided Supreme Court upheld the rule in a 5–4 vote in 2018; if reelected, Trump could unilaterally restore the policy through executive action. “The legal framework,” Mitchell from the Council on American-Islamic Relations told me, “is still there just waiting to be used.”

But Trump has new ideas too. These include ending birthright citizenship (though his legal authority to do so is highly questionable) and launching military actions against Mexican drug cartels. In a speech to a conservative group earlier this year, he promised to “use all necessary state, local, federal, and military resources to carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”

He is also calling for requiring prospective immigrants from any country to pass intensified ideological screenings: “If you want to abolish the state of Israel, you’re disqualified; if you support Hamas or the ideology behind Hamas, you’re disqualified; and if you’re a communist, Marxist, or fascist, you are disqualified,” he said earlier this month in Iowa. Monday in New Hampshire, Trump raised the ante when he said he would bar entry for those who “don’t like our religion,” without explaining how he defined “our religion.” He’s pledged to deport students and other immigrants who express what he called “jihadist sympathies.”

David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, says Trump’s record as president shows that it would be a mistake to dismiss even the most extreme of these proposals as simply campaign rhetoric designed to stir his crowds. “Every word that comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth ought to be taken seriously,” Leopold told me. If Trump returns to power, he said, we will see a version of his first term’s “anti-immigrant policy on steroids.”

While Trump was president, and his agenda was in the spotlight, most of his core immigration policies provoked majority opposition in polls. In a compilation of results from its annual American Values Survey polls late in Trump’s presidency, the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that just over half of Americans opposed his Muslim travel ban, about three-fifths opposed his border wall, and fully three-fourths opposed the child-separation policy.

But public tolerance for some of these ideas may be growing amid dissatisfaction with Biden’s record in managing the border and immigration. Less than a third of adults overall—and only about one-fourth of independents—said they approved of Biden’s handling of those issues in the latest annual American Values Survey, released yesterday. A recent national Marquette University Law School Poll found that Americans preferred Trump over Biden on controlling the border by nearly two to one.

A recent Quinnipiac University national poll found that a majority of Americans support building a border wall for the first time since the pollsters initially asked about the idea, in 2016. “With frustration building” over Biden’s record on immigration, “it looks to me that some of these more extreme ideas are gaining traction in the country,” Robert P. Jones, the president of PRRI, told me.

Even many in the communities that Trump’s immigration plans would most directly affect appear more focused on other issues. Every major data source on voting behavior agreed that Trump grew his vote among Latino voters from about three in 10 to nearly four in 10 from 2016 to 2020, largely around economic issues, but also because of gains among cultural conservatives. Though the GOP advance among Latinos stalled between the 2020 and 2022 elections, polls continue to record widespread dissatisfaction among them about inflation, which could further erode support for Democrats in 2024.

The Muslim American community is much smaller—Muslims account for only about 1 percent of the total U.S. population—so reliable information on its voting behavior is less available. Youssef Chouhoud, a political scientist at Christopher Newport University, told me that Trump’s vote among Muslim Americans nationwide improved from about one in six in 2016 to roughly one in three in 2020. Key to those 2020 gains, he said, was sympathy to conservative GOP arguments on issues such as LGBTQ rights and discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools.

Now, Chouhoud and others note, those Republican gains are being reinforced by the backlash among many Muslim activists against Biden’s expansive support for Israel in the conflict with Hamas. Waleed Shahid, a Muslim American Democratic strategist who has worked for several liberal groups and candidates, says that leading Democrats are underestimating the visceral anger over Biden’s words and actions. “I think, unfortunately, Democratic leadership has their heads in the sand about this,” he told me.

Both Chouhoud and Shahid told me they believed that Trump’s return to anti-Muslim rhetoric reduces the odds that any significant number of voters from that community will abandon Biden to vote for the former president. But they both said they considered it likely that some Muslim American voters disillusioned with Biden might stay home or drift to third-party candidates. “The fact that this chorus” in the Muslim community “is so loud” in criticizing Biden, “even given the full knowledge” of Trump’s bellicose rhetoric, “is telling you that there is a groundswell of real animosity toward the policies that the Biden administration is enacting right now,” said Chouhoud, who is also a fellow at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, a nonpartisan group that studies issues concerning Muslim Americans. This discontent could matter most in the swing state of Michigan, where Muslims are a sizable constituency: A mobile billboard drove through the Detroit area this week displaying a message proclaiming that “Israel Bombs Children” and “Biden Pays For It.”

Shahid says he fears that the 2024 election won’t look like 2020’s—when Democrats of all stripes unified behind the common mission of ousting Trump from the White House. Instead, he thinks, the next election will more closely resemble that of 2016, when a decisive sliver of Democratic-leaning voters, particularly younger ones, backed the third-party candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein rather than Hillary Clinton.

“The Democratic base did not turn out for Hillary in 2016, even though Trump was a right-wing extremist,” Shahid told me. “People somehow have collective amnesia about this. But Biden is historically unpopular with the Democratic base.”

Of course Biden may regain Muslim voters’ trust if he can jump-start renewed negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians after the fighting concludes. Similarly, very few Latinos may now be aware of Trump’s proposals for mass deportation of undocumented migrants and military action against Mexico; if he’s the nominee, that would likely change—and prompt substantial resistance, especially among Mexican Americans.

Still, these tensions reveal a larger dynamic underpinning the potential 2024 rematch between the two men. On almost every front, Trump has formulated a 2024 agenda even more confrontational to Democratic constituencies and liberal priorities than he pursued during his four years in the White House. Yet disenchantment with Biden’s performance could be eroding the will to resist that agenda among key components of the party’s coalition, particularly young people and voters of color.

The pressure that the Middle East crisis is placing on Muslim American support for Biden, even as Trump directly threatens that community, shows how hard it may be for Democrats to maintain a united front—even against an opponent whom they consider an existential threat to all that they value.

One paradox of the current House Republican majority, and a sign of the deep cleavages within it, is that having sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election can be both disqualifying and essential to becoming speaker of the House.

After Jim Jordan of Ohio’s campaign to become speaker flamed out, The Washington Post reported that one reason some colleagues refused to vote for him was his vocal role in trying to prevent the inauguration of Joe Biden. Following Jordan’s exit, nine Republicans announced bids for the role, seven of whom had voted not to certify the 2020 election.

The next GOP nominee, however, was Majority Whip Tom Emmer of Minnesota, who voted in favor of certifying the election. That vote—on a matter for which there was no evidence of fraud and no evidence of theft—helped doom Emmer, who withdrew without even seeing a floor vote. Former President Donald Trump, along with some allies, mobilized to block Emmer, citing his certification vote, criticism of Trump after the January 6 riot at the Capitol, and perceived weak defense of Trump amid his 91 felony charges.

[Read: The threat to democracy is coming from inside the U.S. House]

The next man up is Mike Johnson of Louisiana. Some observers speculate that Johnson, the caucus’s fifth choice, might actually manage to obtain the gavel in part because of fatigue: Republicans understand how bad the failure to elect a speaker is, both for governance and for public appearance. Johnson also hasn’t made as many enemies as the prior nominees, in part because he’s only been in Congress since 2016. But Johnson also has cachet in the MAGA fringe of the House and with Trump, because he was, as The New York Times described him last year, “the most important architect of the Electoral College objections” to certifying the election.

A certain logic dictates that the leader of the House GOP would be an election denier, because the median GOP member is. In 2021, 139 House Republicans voted not to certify the election, and 109 of them remain in the House out of 221 current total Republicans. Of the GOP members who have been newly elected since, several are election deniers. (One, Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin, was even present at the Stop the Steal rally before the riot.) But what is striking is how a failed vote nearly three years ago has become a central issue in the weeks-long speaker fight.

[David A. Graham: The wackadoodle wave]

Kevin McCarthy, the recently deposed speaker, fit the bill, having voted not to certify. But McCarthy is widely viewed as an institutionalist, so his vote garnered him neither much credibility with conservatives nor the condemnation it deserved among some Democratic and mainstream observers. For better or worse, McCarthy’s vote was treated as cynical, insincere politicking. (It didn’t help that he was publicly bullied into signing an amicus brief to the Supreme Court challenging the results in four states.)

But Johnson was not just a member going along with the election denial for political expediency. He was the intellectual force—such as it was—behind one major prong of the denial. Although Johnson is mild-mannered and little-known outside Congress, he’s practically just Jim Jordan with a suit jacket, conservative glasses, and a less hectoring voice.

Johnson, a constitutional lawyer by profession, concocted what he called a “third option” to allow Republicans to challenge the election without endorsing the wildest claims of flipped votes and Venezuelan interventions. Instead, as the Times reported in detail, he argued that the way some states had changed voting procedures in response to the coronavirus pandemic was unconstitutional. Delivered in a careful way, this seemed like a lawyerly argument, but the intended effect was radical: It aimed to have the votes of several key states that voted for Biden simply thrown out, disenfranchising millions of Americans and handing Trump reelection. (The premise was also shaky; the number of votes affected by the changes wouldn’t have flipped the states.)

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

When Texas’s attorney general made a similar argument to the U.S. Supreme Court, Johnson wrote an amicus brief in support of it and rounded up House Republicans to sign it, using an implicit threat: He said that Trump would “be anxiously awaiting the final list” of signers to review. According to the Times, the lawyer for House Republican leaders said that Johnson’s arguments didn’t hold water, but he still managed to get 125 members to sign. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court rejected the argument in December 2020, saying that Texas had no standing to sue.

Having run out of other options, many of the same Republicans decided to vote on January 6 not to certify the election. Johnson put out a phenomenally disingenuous statement explaining that vote, in which he spread claims that undermined faith in elections despite a lack of evidence or legal grounding, all in the name of building faith. “Our extraordinary republic has endured for nearly two and a half centuries based on the consent of the governed,” he and 36 colleagues wrote. “That consent is grounded in the confidence of our people in the legitimacy of our institutions of government. Among our most fundamental institutions is the system of free and fair elections we rely upon, and any erosion in that foundation jeopardizes the stability of our republic.” Johnson also told The New Yorker, apparently with a straight face, that he “genuinely believe[d]” that Trump was challenging the election on principle and not just to stay in power.

Last night, after Johnson was designated the speaker nominee, a reporter asked him about his role in trying to overturn the election. His colleagues jeered at the reporter while Johnson smirked and then said, “Next question.” The dismissiveness is unwarranted, especially when three former lawyers for Trump have pleaded guilty to crimes related to election subversion just in the past week. But Republican members don’t want to talk about the topic, because they know that election denial is not popular with the American people. Within the GOP caucus, however, it’s not just mainstream—it might be a prerequisite for leadership.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Robert Menendez has held on to his Senate seat and retained the loyalty of many Democratic colleagues through past scandals. But, given the current political environment and the gravity of the charges he now faces, many fellow Democrats have had enough—and voters might turn on him too.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

What’s the alternative to a ground offensive in Gaza? The great underappreciated driver of climate change A humanist manifesto

Undermining the High Ground

Yesterday afternoon, a couple of hours after pleading not guilty to the charge that he had conspired to act as an agent of a foreign government, Senator Robert Menendez announced that “the government is engaged in primitive hunting, by which the predator chases its prey until it’s exhausted and then kills it. This tactic won’t work.”

The senior senator from New Jersey’s plea—and subsequent defiant statement—came just a few weeks after he pleaded not guilty to three separate counts of corruption. Menendez and his wife, Nadine, were accused of accepting bribes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for helping the government of Egypt and several businessmen. The original indictment was quite dramatic, peppered with talk of more than $500,000 of stashed-away cash and photos of gold bars found in his New Jersey home. Within hours of Menendez’s indictment, several state leaders, including the governor, called on him to step down. But Menendez is fighting hard against the allegations, even as colleagues turn on him.

Menendez has positioned himself as a victim, and has invoked identity politics in trying to defend himself. “It is not lost on me how quickly some are rushing to judge a Latino and push him out of his seat,” he said shortly after his initial indictment was announced. He has also accused “those behind this campaign” of smearing him as part of their political agenda: “For years, forces behind the scenes have repeatedly attempted to silence my voice and dig my political grave,” he said in a statement last month. “Menendez has been using explicitly Trump-y talking points in his defense,” my colleague David Graham, who has covered the Menendez charges, told me.

The Menendez imbroglio puts the Democrats in a difficult position. The party has enjoyed some moral high ground as Donald Trump faces various criminal indictments. But having a member of their own party facing such galling corruption charges—and saying in his own defense that, essentially, the deep state is out to get him—may not only undermine that high ground, David said. It may weaken Democrats’ case against Trump’s own statements about being the victim of deep-state machinations, and it could damage voters’ faith in the Democratic Party.

This is not Menendez’s first time facing federal bribery charges: In 2015, he was accused of receiving gifts and some $750,000 in campaign donations from a Florida eye doctor. Those charges resulted in a hung jury, and ultimately the judge declared a mistrial. Menendez was able to maintain his seat through the turmoil, and he denied any wrongdoing. His colleagues, by and large, stood by him. But this time, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy called on Menendez to resign almost immediately after his indictment, and other state Democratic leaders soon followed. Cory Booker, the junior senator from New Jersey who has called Menendez a mentor and friend, urged his colleague to step down a few days after the indictment. Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, meanwhile, has reportedly confronted Menendez in the halls of Congress (or, more precisely, on an escalator) to tell him to resign. More than half of Senate Democrats have called on Menendez to resign, though Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has been more reserved. “The Senator has made it clear that he is innocent and will not resign from his position as the senior U.S. Senator for New Jersey,” Robert Julien, a spokesperson for Mendendez’s office, told me in an email.

Part of the reason that many of Menendez’s colleagues are turning against him this time, David explained, has to do with the relative severity of the charges. Bribery charges are never a great look, but the charges Menendez currently faces cut to the core of his committee work in the Senate, accusing him of using his position as the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to work on behalf of a foreign power.

The calculations are likely political too: The last time Menendez faced bribery charges, Republican Chris Christie was the governor of New Jersey. If Menendez had given up his seat, Christie could have appointed a Republican in his place. Now the state has a Democratic governor in Murphy, who would presumably appoint a Democrat to replace him, David explained. Even so, Democrats are anxious about introducing uncertainty when they have such a razor-thin majority over Republicans in the Senate. Democrats have become more and more obsessed with beating their Republican opponents. That fixation on winning comes at a cost, David said: “If you are so focused on beating Republicans that you’re willing to look past corruption allegations, you ultimately undermine yourself, even if you can win the next election.”

But whether Menendez can actually win his next election is still a major question. He is a savvy backroom fighter, David explained, which has helped him stay in power in the cutthroat world of New Jersey politics. “There’s lots of backstabbing in ways that are totally legal, but not necessarily savory,” he said. Menendez has hung on through turbulence, but whether he can make it through this scandal intact will be, in part, up to the courts. It will also be up to voters.

Menendez’s trial is scheduled to begin on May 6, about a month before the primary race for his Senate seat. So far, Menendez has made no public indication that he won’t run for reelection. But his odds are not looking promising. He is being trounced in polls by Andrew Kim, a member of the House of Representatives who announced his campaign for Menendez’s seat the day after the senator was indicted. Menendez is innocent until proven guilty, but his constituents might just be ready to move on.

Related:

Bob Menendez never should have been senator this long in the first place. The case against Bob Menendez (From 2015)

Today’s News

A third former Trump-campaign lawyer, Jenna Ellis, pleaded guilty in the Georgia election-interference case. Israel escalated attacks on targets in Gaza, including a refugee camp. The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry said that more than 700 people were killed in a 24-hour period. House Majority Whip Tom Emmer has dropped out of the Speaker of the House race, just hours after becoming the nominee.

Evening Read

Fryderyk Gabowicz / picture-alliance / dpa / AP

Britney Finally Tells Her Story. It’s Dark.

By Spencer Kornhaber

One of the most disturbing parts of Britney Spears’s story has long been the way people talk about her. As soon as the pop star was released from the legal guardianship of her father in November 2021, ending a 13-year ordeal that she has described as torture, some onlookers asked whether one of the most successful women on Earth could handle living as an adult. In barroom chitchat, meandering podcasts, and online comment sections, you can now find people claiming that freeing Britney—allowing her to, for example, choose how she spends her money or what she eats for dinner—was a mistake. They cite alleged evidence of erratic behavior such as the recent video that the 41-year-old Spears posted of herself dancing sexily with prop knives.

Usually such skeptics speak in a conspiratorial tone, indicating that they think of themselves as radical truth-tellers defying the pink-uniformed groupthink of the #FreeBritney movement. But Spears’s new memoir makes clear that this shaming and second-guessing, using the language of care and concern, is deeply conventional. She portrays herself—including with the title The Woman in Me—as battling the media expectation that she remain trapped in girlhood, virginal and helpless.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Shawn Fain’s old-time religion The Axis of Resistance has been gathering strength. Hands off Shakespeare.

Culture Break

A former inhabitant of the Chagos Archipelago—expelled when the U.S. built its military base there in the early 1970s—and his granddaughter in Port Louis, Mauritius. (Tim Dirven / Panos Pictures / Redux)

Read. A new book from Philippe Sands, The Last Colony, tells the story of the Chagossians, an island people who were expelled from their homes by the British and Americans.

Watch. The Pigeon Tunnel (streaming on Apple TV+) tries to capture the essence of John le Carré. It’s one of our critics’ 22 most exciting films to watch this season.

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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

“This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill,” President Lyndon B. Johnson said as he put his signature on the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, at the base of the Statue of Liberty. “It does not affect the lives of millions.” All that the bill would do, he explained, was repair the flawed criteria for deciding who could enter the country. “This bill says simply that from this day forth those wishing to immigrate to America shall be admitted on the basis of their skills and their close relationship to those already here.”

Edward Kennedy, the 33-year-old senator who had shepherded the bill through the Senate, went even further in promising that its effects would be modest. Some opponents argued that the bill would lead to a large increase in immigration, but those claims were false, Kennedy said. They were “highly emotional, irrational, and with little foundation in fact,” he announced in a Senate hearing, and “out of line with the obligations of responsible citizenship.” Emanuel Celler, the bill’s champion in the House, made the same promises. “Do we appreciably increase our population, as it were, by the passage of this bill?” Celler said. “The answer is emphatically no.”

Johnson, Kennedy, Celler and the new law’s other advocates turned out to be entirely wrong about this. The 1965 bill sparked a decades-long immigration wave. As a percentage of the United States population, this modern wave has been similar in size to the immigration wave of the late 1800s and early 1900s. In terms of the sheer number of people moving to a single country, the modern American immigration wave may be the largest in history. The year Johnson signed the immigration bill, 297,000 immigrants legally entered the United States. Two years later, the number reached 362,000. It continued rising in subsequent decades, and by 1989 exceeded 1 million.

This article was adapted from David Leonhardt’s new book, Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream.

How could the law’s advocates have been so wrong about their own policy? One explanation is that they engaged in motivated reasoning. They believed, justly, that they were righting a historical wrong by remaking the racist immigration system that the country had adopted in the 1920s, which allocated almost all of its slots to Western Europeans. The new law created a first-come-first-served system that treated all parts of the world equally, and it made the United States a fairer society. In their eagerness to achieve that victory, however, the reformers dismissed almost any criticism of the bill as unreasonable and even hateful.

In part, they were reacting to the identity of the bill’s critics: Many were opponents of the civil-rights movement who indeed made racist arguments against the immigration bill. Yet skeptics also raised legitimate questions about the bill, pointing to potential loopholes, including that its annual worldwide quota did not apply to many immigrants. These immigrants were considered “nonquota” entries, allowed to enter the country without being counted. The most consequential nonquota entries proved to be family members, including extended family. The law declared that immigrants who were coming to join relatives already in the United States would not count toward the quota. That loophole was not wholly new. But it had not mattered much before 1965, because the overall system was so restrictive. The new law opened the doors to the entire world without solving the nonquota problem.

The critics’ predictions—that annual immigration might soon triple, as one conservative congressman forecast, and eventually surpass 1 million, as another anticipated—ended up being more accurate. The advocates of the 1965 law also incorrectly promised that any increase in immigration would come from white-collar professionals filling specific job shortages. Willard Wirtz, Johnson’s labor secretary, went so far as to tell Congress that the bill offered “complete protection” against increased labor competition. In truth, many arrivals have been blue-collar workers, admitted as extended family, seeking a broad range of jobs.

I realize that some readers may be feeling a little uncomfortable about the history described here. The celebration of immigration has become core to the political beliefs of many Americans, on both the left and the right. Immigrants are underdogs, heroes, and—for most of us—ancestors. Many opponents of immigration are xenophobes. In the 21st century, the contours of the immigration debate can seem binary: Somebody is either in favor of immigration or opposed to it.

Historically, however, the debate was more nuanced. It included many people who were comfortable distinguishing between the issues of who should be admitted and how many should be admitted. Separating these two makes clear that it is possible to honor immigrants and decry bigotry without believing that more immigration is always better. The people who wrote the 1965 law claimed to hold precisely these beliefs.

That law deserves to be remembered as a monumental civil-rights achievement. It ended decades of discrimination against Asians, Africans, Eastern Europeans, Southern Europeans, and disabled people. In other respects, though, the law represents a failure of democracy: It was sold to the American public with repeated promises that it would not do what, in fact, it did. In particular, it was sold with the false claim that there would be no increase in the number of immigrants seeking low-wage jobs.

In 1965, the United States already had a more open immigration system than many other countries, with a higher percentage of foreign-born residents than most of Europe, and a far higher share than Japan. The 1965 bill went further, and became what the journalist Margaret Sands Orchowski has called arguably the world’s most liberal immigration law. Theodore White, the chronicler of 1960s political history, described the law as “noble, revolutionary—and probably the most thoughtless of the many acts of the Great Society.”

[From the November 1983 issue: Immigration–how it’s affecting us]

My goal is not to convince you that any specific view of immigration policy is correct. But I hope to demonstrate that every piece of evidence does not line up neatly to support the conclusion that more immigration is always good or always bad. The advocates of the 1965 law did such a poor job of anticipating its effects partly because they tried to ignore facts that they found inconvenient. The rest of us do not need to repeat their mistakes.

At a moment when immigration has returned to political prominence, it helps to think about the continuing post-1965 immigration wave through three empirical questions. First, how have the immigrants fared in this country? Second, what have been the economic effects for people who were already in the United States? And third, how has the immigration wave altered American politics?   

Many Americans—across the political spectrum—think they know the answer to the first question. They believe that immigrant families in recent decades have been less likely to climb the country’s ladder than those of earlier generations. But that bit of conventional wisdom is inaccurate.

Children of post-1965 immigrants have ascended at a pace strikingly similar to their predecessors, as two economists—Leah Boustan of Princeton and Ran Abramitzky of Stanford—have documented. As in the past, immigrants themselves tend to remain poor if they arrive poor. And as in the past, their children tend to make up ground rapidly. Overall, most children of the recent immigration wave have grown up to earn at least a middle-class income. “The American Dream is just as real for immigrants from Asia and Latin America now as it was for immigrants from Italy and Russia one hundred years ago,” Abramitzky and Boustan write. There is no permanent underclass of American immigrants.

There are certainly caveats. In a country as large as the United States, averages hide a lot of variation. Some immigrant families suffer discrimination and remain in poverty for multiple generations, much as some native-born American families do. It is also worth pointing out that intergenerational research necessarily comes with a lag. Many recent immigrants have indeed been poorer than earlier immigrants were, and perhaps their children will struggle. The children of undocumented immigrants face particular hardships.

In the big picture, however, past patterns seem likely to continue: Many immigrants themselves will remain poor, but their children will do considerably better. This may also be true for most children of undocumented immigrants, given that anybody born in the United States automatically becomes a citizen. In their research, Abramitzky and Boustan examine not only income but also other measures of assimilation, such as where immigrants live, whom they marry, and whether they speak English. On these metrics, recent immigrants look similar to those from past generations. And by some measures, like intermarriage, the current wave is assimilating more rapidly than previous generations.

THE SECOND BIG question about immigration is how it has affected the living standards of people who were already in the United States. On the surface, the facts look damning.

The decades when the American masses enjoyed their fastest income gains—in the middle of the 20th century—were also the decades when immigration was near historic lows. The 1965 law ended this era and caused a sharp rise in the number of immigrants entering the workforce. Shortly afterward, incomes for poor and working-class Americans began to stagnate. The 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s were a time of low immigration and rapidly rising mass living standards. The period since the ’70s has been neither.

Correlation and causation, obviously, are not the same thing. To distinguish between the two, economists have devoted extensive effort to figuring out how much immigration has affected the living standards of native-born Americans. One finding from these studies is that immigration has not been the dominant cause of post-1970s wage stagnation, despite the suspicious timing. You do not need to be able to read peer-reviewed articles in an academic journal to grasp this conclusion, although those articles support it. You simply need to notice that the regions attracting the largest number of immigrants are not the ones suffering the worst wage stagnation.

But the story does not end here. The same evidence suggests that immigration has played a meaningful, if secondary, role in holding down wages. In 2017, the National Academy of Sciences released a 600-plus-page report on immigration, produced by a committee of prominent scholars. The committee reviewed the relevant research, including studies of surges of immigration to specific metropolitan areas. The report included a table summarizing the estimated effect of immigration on native wages, from each of the relevant studies since the 1990s. The table is dominated by negative numbers. Immigration does have costs.

Logic and history point to the same conclusion as the economic data. That is why CEOs long favored high levels of immigrants and labor leaders such as A. Philip Randolph and Samuel Gompers long opposed them. It is also why the architects of the 1965 law vowed that it would not allow more manual workers to enter the country. When immigration increases, employers often have the upper hand. When immigration is low, the economist Sumner Slichter explained a century ago, employers are forced “to adapt jobs to men rather than men to jobs.” People sometimes claim that immigrants work in jobs that native-born Americans do not want. But Christopher Jencks, a social-policy professor at Harvard University, has pointed out that this statement is incomplete: Immigrants typically work in jobs that native-born Americans do not want at the wages that employers are offering. One reason that employers can offer such wages, Jencks adds, is the availability of so many immigrant workers.

The post-1965 immigration wave has had both benefits and costs. On the plus side, it has probably accelerated economic growth, mostly by expanding the labor force. With a larger population, the United States has been able to produce more goods and services. Immigration also appears to have benefited many high-earning, native-born professionals. The costs of immigration for these workers have been fairly low because they face relatively little competition from immigrant workers. Few of the highly educated immigrants who come to the U.S. are lawyers or doctors, partly because some professions have created barriers that restrict entry. In medicine, foreign doctors are required to complete a multiyear residency program in the United States, regardless of their prior experience. Professionals who have enough political influence to shape labor-market rules, like doctors, understand that a larger labor pool can reduce incomes.

For many lower-earning workers, there are no such protections. In retail, construction, and child care, more immigrants have been able to compete for jobs. Their entry has had two separate effects that have increased inequality. For the lower end of the income distribution, the expansion of the labor pool has held down wages. For the higher end of the income distribution, these lower wages have held down the prices of frequently used services such as restaurant meals and landscaping. Still, several other forces, including the decline of labor unions and the rise of trade with China, have almost certainly had a larger impact on depressing wages.

If the United States wanted to keep immigration high and ameliorate the effects on inequality, it could do so—say, by cutting taxes for low-earning workers and raising taxes on high-earning professionals. The problem is that the country has not used government policy to reverse the growth of inequality; the tax system has instead exacerbated inequality. For all the benefits of the post-1965 immigration wave, American workers are not delusional to think that it has had costs—and that they, rather than more affluent Americans, have borne those costs.

The third big question involves the political effects of immigration—and the discipline of economics is less helpful than psychology in answering it.

In the 1990s, an American psychologist named Jonathan Haidt was thinking about how notions of morality differed from one culture to another. Together with Brazilian psychologists, he designed a survey based on very short stories in which somebody violated what Haidt called a “harmless taboo.” In each anecdote, a fictional person took an action that did not hurt anybody else but that might nonetheless seem wrong. The survey’s respondents had to judge whether the behavior was immoral or simply a matter of individual choice.

[From the May 2022 issue: Wh]y the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

In one story, a boy refused to wear a required school uniform. In another, a woman cut up a national flag that she no longer needed and used the pieces as cleaning rags. The researchers conducted the survey in two Brazilian cities, and Haidt repeated it in Philadelphia, where he was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. In all three cities, the psychologists surveyed people in two different social classes, one higher and one lower.

As Haidt expected, the answers varied by city. In Philadelphia, people were less likely to judge the violation of a social convention—like refusing to wear a uniform or cutting up a flag—as immoral. Philadelphians were more individualistic: If nobody was harmed, what was the problem? In Recife, a poor Brazilian city, more respondents judged violations of social convention as wrong: Society has rules and traditions, and defying those norms is immoral. In Porto Alegre, a relatively affluent, European-influenced city, the responses fell in the middle.

But the data also contained a surprise. The class differences within each country were larger than the differences between Brazilians and Americans. In all three cities, lower-income people were much more likely than upper-class people to judge the violation of social conventions as wrong. The working-class respondents emphasized communal standards and traditions. The professionals emphasized individual notions of freedom. “I had flown five thousand miles south to search for moral variation when in fact there was more to be found a few blocks west of campus, in the poor neighborhood surrounding my university,” Haidt wrote.

In the years that followed, Haidt and his colleagues created a broader version of the survey, known as the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. Around the world, educated professionals emphasize two values above all: care for others, especially the vulnerable, and fairness. Working-class people put significant weight on those values, too, but not quite as much. And working-class respondents emphasize values that are of little import to college graduates, such as respect for authority, appreciation of tradition, and loyalty to family and community. Other researchers have come to use the terms universal and communal to describe the two belief sets.

Both universalism and communalism have important advantages. The universalist passion for fairness and harm prevention has undergirded every great social-justice movement of the past century. While some communalists defended racial segregation and sexism as cultural traditions, universalists refused to accept them. In foreign policy, universalism helped lead to the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II. Universalism has made the world both freer and more equal.

Communalism can claim its own accomplishments, though. Without loyalty, tradition, and respect, human beings would not have been able to form groups that allowed them to survive. In modern times, communalism has inspired Americans to enlist in the military and become teachers at local elementary schools. The same outlook helps explain why working-class households tend to give a greater percentage of their income to charity (often their churches) than upper-income households. Communalism also played a central role in social-justice movements: Religious groups, and the loyalty they inspire, were crucial to both abolitionism and civil-rights activism. Today, communalism continues to promote equality of opportunity: According to research by the Harvard economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues, children are more likely to escape poverty if they grow up in a place where people have strong social connections.

Immigration policy presents a distillation of the tensions between the two worldviews. To communalists, a government should limit arrivals and prioritize its own citizens. To universalists, national loyalties can be dangerous, and immigration can lift global living standards by allowing more people to share in a rich country’s prosperity. In recent decades, this debate has become part of the growing political polarization in many Western countries, including the United States. Surveys show that liberals tend to be universalists who support higher levels of immigration, and conservatives tend to be communalists who favor less immigration.

This polarization is relatively recent. Across American history, communalism has not been simply a synonym for conservatism. Many communalists were progressives who emphasized fairness and equality within a community. When they had to choose between protecting neighbors who were vulnerable and others who were vulnerable, they were comfortable focusing on the needs of their vulnerable neighbors.

Almost 30 years ago, President Bill Clinton asked former Representative Barbara Jordan to lead a federal commission studying immigration. Jordan, a Houston native, had become famous during the Watergate hearings for a stirring speech that denounced Richard Nixon and celebrated the Constitution. For many Americans, it was the first time they had heard a major speech from either a female or a Black member of Congress. The speech also put Jordan’s communalism on display. She believed that loyalty, tradition, and social connection were crucial to the struggle for a fairer world. She knew that human beings had a natural urge to be part of a group and feel pride in that group. “We are all in this little village called America together,” she once told a group of schoolchildren.

As she studied immigration policy, Jordan came to believe that being strongly pro-immigrant and strongly pro-immigration were not the same thing. Americans needed to make decisions about whom they would and would not admit, as every other nation did. They had to decide what forms of immigration were in the national interest and what forms were not. The drafters of the 1965 law had claimed to be prioritizing the national interest, but the law’s loopholes had come to dominate the immigration system. As a result, that system did not maximize the well-being of Americans, immigrant and native-born alike. The country had an immigration system that almost nobody had meant to create.

Unlike the authors of the 1965 law, Jordan tried to separate the issues of who should be admitted and how many people should be admitted. She decried the long history of racist opposition to immigration and denounced the immigrant-bashing of the 1990s. “There have always been those who despised the newcomers,” she said. Borrowing John F. Kennedy’s phrase, she described the United States as a nation of immigrants. To her, though, both parts of his phrase—immigrants and nation—were vital.

[From the May 2021 issue: America never wanted the tired, poor, huddled masses]

The United States had been such a successful society, where millions of people aspired to move, because it was a distinct nation. It was a community, with traditions and bonds that fostered trust among citizens and investments in their shared future. Immigrants had become a part of this community, first by choosing to leave their home for a new land and then by embracing their new home. Jordan’s preferred word for this process was Americanization. “That word earned a bad reputation when it was stolen by racists and xenophobes in the 1920s,” Jordan said, “but it is our word, and we are taking it back.”

To nurture the American community, the federal government first needed to regain control of its immigration system, Jordan believed. Her commission called for a major effort to reduce illegal immigration, by cracking down on employers who hired undocumented workers. “Any nation worth its salt must control its borders,” she said. On legal immigration, the commission pushed for some increases, including a temporary rise in the admission of immediate family members, to reunite families, as well as an annual floor on refugee admission to ensure that the United States remained a haven of freedom. On net, however, the commission called for a large reduction—by roughly one-third—in legal immigration from about 800,000 annual entrants the year before down to about 550,000. “The commission finds no national interest in continuing to import lesser skilled and unskilled workers to compete with the most vulnerable parts of our labor force,” Jordan said. Her commission effectively tried to undo the unintended consequences of the 1965 law.

But by the 1990s, a powerful bipartisan coalition had come to support the status quo, and the commission’s recommendations quickly came under attack. Business lobbyists and Republican leaders in Congress favored high immigration partly because it restrained wage growth. Liberal groups saw immigration as a human-rights issue and pointed out that any reductions would especially affect Latin American and Asian immigrants. Clinton, after initially embracing Jordan’s recommendations, backed away from them. Congress instead passed several provisions to reduce illegal immigration, though they were less aggressive than the commission’s proposals. The laws governing legal immigration remained largely the same. The few members of Congress who complained tended to be conservative Republicans.

To many Democrats, support for immigration had come to feel like a moral imperative. Immigration lifted people out of poverty. It enhanced the country’s cultural diversity. It reflected a universalist belief in equality, regardless of a person’s country of origin. Democrats cherished the legacy of the 1965 law, accidental though it may have been.

In the 2000s, the Democratic Party has moved even closer to a universalist position. Democrats now speak more positively about immigration than any party has in the country’s history, according to an analysis of the Congressional Record. Many liberals have grown uncomfortable talking about restrictions and criticize both Clinton and Barack Obama for their positions. Obama combined full-throated support for immigrants, including legalization for many who were undocumented, with support for border security. When “an employer undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers,” Obama said, it violates America’s promise.

Top Democrats would not make such an argument today. They are also unlikely to revere assimilation, as Jordan did. To universalists, glorifying American culture is jingoistic.

This new Democratic approach, however, is not popular with most Americans. Polls have long shown that most Americans oppose very high levels of immigration, as the authors of the 1965 law knew. Americans, to be clear, are not opposed to immigration. Most believe that it has strengthened the country, but they favor it in moderation. If immigration policy reflected public opinion, it would have been very different over the past half century.

The new Democratic consensus on immigration is part of the rise of what the economist Thomas Piketty has called “the Brahmin left”—the shift of progressive parties in both the United States and Western Europe toward the views of highly educated professionals. For much of the 20th century, left-leaning parties attracted the bulk of their support from working-class voters. Today, college graduates make up a growing share of these parties, and their upscale voters have pushed the parties further to the left on social and cultural issues than on economic issues. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the Democratic Party actually moved to the right on economics, as it adopted pro-market positions on global trade and regulation that were often described as neoliberal (a word that echoes the classical definition of liberal, which implies skepticism of government). Although the party has since tacked back to the left on economics, especially on trade, the Democratic economic agenda is not significantly more progressive than it was in the postwar decades.

Immigration is a fascinating part of this story. If you think about immigration as a social issue—a question of human rights—you might say that Democrats have moved to the left by favoring more immigration. If you think about it as a domestic economic issue—one that affects the power dynamic between American employers and workers—you would instead say that a policy of more immigration is a right-wing position. After all, the conservative intellectual giant Milton Friedman also favored high levels of immigration. Either way, the Democratic Party’s shift on immigration policy is consistent with Brahminism, in which the party has become more progressive on social issues than economic ones.

Today, immigration is the one issue on which even the left flank of the Democratic Party continues to support the neoliberal position. Democrats have grown more skeptical of deregulation and the free flow of trade than they were during the Clinton years. But they have grown even more supportive of the deregulated flow of people across borders. Many liberals are passionately universalist on the subject.

Most voters take a more communalist view, which makes sense when you consider that most are not highly educated professionals. The American majority is a working-class, communalist majority. Most people without a four-year degree say that the United States is the greatest country in the world; most college graduates (and most Democrats) do not. Most Americans also believe that the country should prioritize its own citizens while welcoming a limited number of immigrants each year and taking steps to reduce unlawful immigration.

The universalists may have won the struggle over government policy, but their victory has come with a political cost. The high level of immigration since the 1960s helped move the working class to the political right. A rich stream of social-science research has documented the phenomenon, and not only in the United States. Immigration helped Donald Trump win the presidency in 2016 and helps explain why many working-class voters distrust Democrats.

Racism, of course, is part of this story. In both the United States and Europe, right-wing politicians like Trump have tried to raise fears of immigrants by using xenophobic stereotypes and lies. This racism can be anti-Latino, anti-Asian, anti-Black, or anti-Muslim, depending on the time and place. The tactic has proved distressingly effective at winning working-class voters.

But the distinction between communalism and universalism is important partly because it highlights the fact that immigration is not only about race. There are good reasons that every country in the modern world maintains borders. Some high-income countries, such as Japan and South Korea, have maintained very restrictive policies. Once a country has established borders, it must confront the unavoidably thorny issue of which outsiders it should admit and which it should not. In the United States—a nation of immigrants, where most of us, me included, live here only because of previous immigration—the question raises poignant tensions.

“For those who believe in a multicultural America, this question can be uncomfortable to confront, because any system short of open borders invariably requires drawing distinctions that declare some people worthy of entry and others unworthy,” Jia Lynn Yang, a journalist, wrote in her history of immigration law. Because of this discomfort, the modern Democratic Party has struggled to articulate an immigration policy beyond what might be summarized as: More is better, and less is racist. The party has cast aside the legacies of Jordan and other progressives who made finer distinctions.

In response, many working-class voters have decided that the Democratic Party does not share their values. Notably, some of these voters are not white and are themselves the descendants of recent immigrants. In the 2020 and 2022 elections, the Republican Party made gains among Latino voters, especially in Texas and Florida, as well as Asian American voters. Polls showed that a sizable chunk of both Latino and Black voters who otherwise leaned toward the Democratic Party preferred the Republican position on illegal immigration. “Immigration,” Haidt, the psychologist, told me, “is one of the top few blind spots of the left, which causes right-wing parties to win all over the Western world.”

In the United States of the mid-20th century, immigration was so low that it disappeared as a major political issue. Polls found that Americans’ view of immigrants became more positive. Many native-born Americans saw immigrants primarily as fellow citizens, rather than outsiders or recent arrivals. Americanization, in other words, described more than just the assimilation of immigrants; it described a national process of binding. A slowdown in the diversification of the country made Americans more comfortable with their newfound diversity. This cohesion fostered a progressive economic consensus, making possible high taxes on the affluent, large government investments in infrastructure and science, and modern welfare state programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Low immigration numbers in the mid-1900s improved the lives of recent immigrants by fostering a stronger safety net for everybody. The modern era of high immigration levels, by contrast, has hardly been a golden age for progressive politics.

PERHAPS THE MOST important point about immigration is that it involves trade-offs. For centuries, opponents of immigration have portrayed it as inherently bad, and their claims have been disproved again and again. More recently, universalists have portrayed immigration as inevitably positive, an argument that depends partly on wishful thinking. Immigration can be wonderful, but good things are rarely free, as Jordan said.

The post-1965 immigration wave has had large benefits. Most important, it has helped lift millions of people out of poverty and allowed them to experience the American dream. Most immigrant families have both assimilated into their new country and changed it for the better. They have contributed to scientific breakthroughs, started businesses and community organizations, and enriched American culture, in literature, film, music, sports, and food.

[Read: The immigration act that inadvertently changed America]

On universalist grounds, a relatively open immigration system is easy to support. But the other side of the ledger matters. Immigration tends to impose costs on lower-wage workers and to alter the political atmosphere in ways that make government policy less generous to those same workers. The past century suggests that there are trade-offs between immigration levels and progressive policy goals. Reducing immigration would probably make reducing economic inequality in the United States easier. Lower levels could make Americans more amenable to policies that would benefit immigrants who are already here, such as a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented.

What might an ideal system look like? That is a difficult question, but Jordan’s basic principles still seem relevant. The United States should treat immigrants with decency. This decency includes the admission of immediate family members—but only immediate family members, such as spouses and young children. The country should embrace its role as a beacon of political freedom and prioritize the admission of refugees fleeing persecution, a group that in recent years has included Iranians, Cubans, Sudanese, Ukrainians, and Uyghurs from China. The United States should also make clear that it is a nation of laws, as Jordan said, and do more to reduce illegal immigration than it has in the past. When citizens of other countries believe that they will be allowed to remain in the United States so long as they manage to enter it, the country’s laws have little meaning. And high levels of undocumented immigration are a political gift for right-wing parties.

There is another theme from Jordan’s recommendations, one that was also part of the promises that the authors of the 1965 law made. Both called for a system focused on the admission of people with specific job skills that the American economy needed. Both argued against the wide-scale admission of workers who could compete for most jobs. Canada did adopt such a system in the 1960s, and the politics of immigration there are more muted partly for that reason. This approach tends to reduce economic inequality. It expands the labor pool for professionals, making them less scarce and holding down their future wage increases, rather than focusing the wage effect on lower-income workers. Professionals also tend to pay more in taxes, which suggests that the admission of more high-earning immigrants can improve the country’s fiscal situation as the population ages and more Americans retire.

The U.S. immigration system is always going to be complex, full of difficult decisions and trade-offs. But the system we have today is not the only option, nor is it the one that political leaders promised us. It has instead become one more way that the economy and political system have drifted from the interests and values of many working people.

This article was adapted from David Leonhardt’s new book, Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream.

Just three weeks before Hamas’s gruesome attack on southern Israel, the first anniversary of Iran’s “Women, life, freedom” movement quietly passed on September 16. Even in the heat of events in Israel, the women’s uprising was worth a lament: If the theocracy hadn’t subdued it, Iranians might have toppled the Islamic Republic; and among all the other salutary effects, Hamas’s onslaught against Israel could conceivably have been smaller and less ambitious, or might not have happened at all.  

Hamas, an offshoot of the Sunni Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, is an independent actor but has ties to the Islamic Republic that have grown substantially over the years. Its political head, Ismail Haniyeh, has often visited Tehran and Beirut, where other Hamas officials are in regular contact with the Lebanese Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful, operationally savvy proxy. As Iranians in ever larger numbers have rejected the Islamic Revolution and its theocracy, the clerical regime has sought affirmation and legitimacy abroad—an aggressive disposition that isn’t likely to abate until Iranian dissent finally triumphs.

Officially, the Iranian regime characterizes internal protests as foreign-inspired, but most of its insiders actually know that the Islamic Republic’s worst problems are homegrown. They are mournfully aware that Iranians have deeply absorbed secular and democratic values. But despite its frequent expressions, that popular discontent has not yet become a revolutionary challenge to the ruling elite.  

A revolution is a rare historical phenomenon that is impossible to predict. Its proximate causes—loss of confidence in institutions, a widespread feeling of unrelenting injustice, economic disparity, for example—can be found in many nations that don’t rebel. A revolution takes place only when a large swath of the public behaves irrationally, in the sense of confronting clearly superior power in ever increasing numbers and regardless of personal cost. Foreign powers cannot instigate a revolution (although Germany might get partial credit for sending Lenin back to Russia); they can, however, advance the hollowing of a despised autocracy. They can, at a minimum, let those who bravely oppose tyranny know that their struggle has the attention of the outside world, which seeks to support their courageous efforts.

Therein lies the principal question for the United States regarding Iran: Does Washington want to try to aid the Iranian people in their long, so far fruitless, quest to curtail tyranny in Tehran—and in doing so, help mitigate the threat that Iran and its proxies pose to regional security?

For decades now, American and European policy toward Iran has focused almost exclusively on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions. The diplomatic approach to this problem has now reached a dead end: Because of Hamas’s attack and Iran’s long-standing ties to the group, the White House just froze the $6 billion in Iranian oil revenues that it had recently unfrozen to secure the release of five dual citizens held hostage in Iran. The payment was supposed to be a prelude to future nuclear talks. Refreezing the funds has likely killed the principle—cash for atomic restraint—behind all the diplomacy since 2013, when U.S.-Iranian talks started.

[Read: I was a hostage in Iran. The deals are part of the problem.]

In truth, Iran will almost certainly get the bomb, and sooner rather than later. Neither diplomacy nor military intervention, which the United States and Israel have repeatedly decided against, seems credible. The Islamic Republic is already a threshold nuclear state that can quickly enrich uranium to bomb-grade. And so the best bet for neutralizing the menace of a nuclear-armed, virulently anti-American, expansionist, Islamist regime is regime change—or, if that phrase is too disturbing, a gradual but turbulent evolution from theocracy to democracy.

Democracy isn’t a novel idea in Persia: Its gestation there is older than in many lands where representative government has taken root in what was once considered barren soil. And Iranians have learned painfully why theocracy and monarchy aren’t appealing. Democratic passions helped fuel the revolution in 1979; their continuing vibrancy could end the Islamic Republic that resulted from it. Just look at the way the clerical regime has cracked down on dissent since the 2009 prodemocracy Green Movement pushed the theocracy, to quote Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, to “the edge of the abyss.” Recurrent protests have left the ruling clergy and Revolutionary Guard commanders to live in fear of an unexpected spark—rather like the death of the Iranian Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini last year—that might turn rational demonstrators into an irrepressible swarm.

America and Europe, which have foreign policies that blend liberalism with realism, are in a bind on Iran. Focused on the nuclear program to the detriment of all other issues, unwilling to use force to secure nonproliferation, unable to abandon the idea that commerce with the Islamic Republic can bring political moderation, uncomfortable with sanctions that hurt the Iranian people, and yet operating with a certain indifference, if not outright hostility, to actions that smell of regime change, the West has become feckless. And the truth about Iran—that it probably isn’t now in a prerevolutionary state, and that the Islamic Republic may perish only through slow rot—reinforces the inclination to do nothing.

Washington needs to step back from the nuclear question and focus instead on human rights and Iranians’ democratic aspirations. As should be painfully obvious to all by now, without political consensus, Washington simply cannot sustain any—let alone an effective—Iran policy. Democrats and Republicans need to figure out how best to aid the Iranian people in throwing off a regime that is a danger to them and to the region.

Developing a new approach will be difficult. Even before the presidency of Barack Obama, differences in sentiment—if not as acutely in approach—toward the Islamic Republic divided Democrats from Republicans. Liberals have tended to feel guilty about America’s past in Iran and often tried to recast U.S.-Iranian troubles since the Islamic Revolution as bridgeable misunderstandings; conservatives, for the most part, don’t negatively view U.S. cooperation with the last shah. If they regret anything, it’s that Jimmy Carter didn’t do enough to save him.

Before the atomic question took center stage, both sides occasionally reached out to Tehran to see if it wanted to improve relations. Republicans did so bizarrely and illegally with Iran-Contra in 1985–86 and hesitantly after the earthquake in Gilan in 1990. Democrats tried more optimistically, such as with Bill Clinton’s “genuine reconciliation” appeal to Iranian President Mohammad Khatami in 1998 and Obama’s letters to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in 2009.   

Before the 2013 interim nuclear agreement, the Joint Plan of Action, the two sides could find common ground in sanctions. The Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996, signed by Clinton and largely written by Republican congressional staff, really began the era of more effective economic measures against the theocracy. In his first term, Obama expressed annoyance with bipartisan sanctions measures but nevertheless signed legislation that significantly amped up economic pressure on Tehran.

This strained bipartisanship came utterly apart with the 2015 nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Obama brought a new approach to the Iran question, in part provoked by the enormous progress the Islamic Republic had achieved in developing a nuclear-weapons infrastructure (an enrichment site buried beneath a mountain was revealed in 2009), and by Obama’s belief that diplomacy, his personal touch, and the removal of punishing sanctions could gain a good-enough nuclear deal and significantly improve U.S.-Iranian relations. The American right’s profound disagreements with him, on a wide variety of issues, crystallized on the Iran question and the JCPOA, which received negligible Republican support. In 2018, President Donald Trump wiped out his predecessor’s most significant foreign-policy achievement by withdrawing the United States from the accord.  

[Read: Iran’s influence operation pays off]

Biden administration officials are quick to express their bitterness about Trump’s decision, which undoubtedly has complicated their lives. But assuming that the administration, congressional Democrats, and the liberal intellectual ecosystem have now realized that buying off the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions doesn’t have a promising future, the failure of this initiative may now allow the left and the right to move forward in common cause.  

Letting go of nonproliferation is the essential first step. The American right has effectively already done so, because no significant Republican has been willing to argue publicly for military strikes in some time (Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton have come close). Some on the right try to blur their intentions, suggesting that the military option is still viable if a reinvigorated sanctions regime fails. Given how far the Iranian program has advanced, however, the only conceivable remaining red line would be the actual construction of a nuclear device, which is effectively no red line at all: U.S. intelligence had no concurrent, helpfully precise idea when the Soviets, Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis, South Africans, Israelis, and North Koreans built their nuclear weapons. Unless the CIA gets really lucky, a rare occurrence, the denouement of the clerical regime’s atomic quest will likely be no different.  

If Trump triumphs in 2024, common cause regarding the Islamic Republic could be a nonstarter. Would Democrats have the stomach to work with Trump on Iran? And no one knows what Trump would do: He might bomb Iran; he might try to get the Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, on the telephone and offer “the deal of the century”; or he might just ignore the Islamic Republic entirely (and offer Saudi Arabia a nuclear program with on-site uranium enrichment). If Trump wins reelection, the clerical regime could well take the opportunity to rapidly test a nuclear device—making regime change, however it arrives, the only possible path to get nukes out of the hands of Iranian Islamists.

As for the Democrats, team Biden has occasionally offered sincere words of support to well-known Iranian dissidents, but much like the Obama administration, it has never allowed regime atrocities—or Tehran’s new alliance with Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China—to intrude much into its rhetoric. Even now, regarding Hamas’s deadly onslaught against Israel, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has acknowledged that Iran is “complicit” in aiding Hamas’s growth into a deadly terrorist organization but has been careful to avoid invoking anything closer to a casus belli. Hamas just killed and kidnapped American citizens in Israel, but neither the Biden administration nor the Israeli government wants the war to expand into Lebanon, let alone Iran. The pattern is familiar from the American experience in Iraq: Iran’s allied militias launch devastating attacks, and the targeted nation is too busy putting out the flames to focus on the source of fire.

The administration also suffers from a lingering addiction to nonproliferation, the eternal hope that something down the road will break its way. The rougher the rhetoric against Iran, the more difficult for the theocracy to reciprocate a U.S. entreaty, and the more unpleasant for American politicians and officials to look past the regime’s wickedness toward some new nuclear “understanding.”

No matter what happens in 2024, Iran policy has reached an impasse—one that could allow it to become an exception to partisan politics and a place where Democrats and Republicans could together push harder for human rights and democracy than they push anywhere else in the Middle East. The easiest common ground will surely be sanctions.

Washington is overdue for a serious debate about why it sanctions the Islamic Republic. Sanctions can have a serious impact on a hostile country, but the United States should stop using them as its primary weapon of nuclear deterrence, as though they might stop the Iranian nuclear advance if only they were enforced more effectively, or if we traded them away for Iranian restraint. North Korea is a less scientifically advanced, less economically capable, more isolated country than Iran, and it still got the nuke.

Shifting the rhetorical focus of U.S. sanctions away from the nuclear question, and toward human rights and democratic freedoms, is both the morally and the geopolitically responsible thing to do. Such a move certainly will not meet with objections from the Iranian people. In the nationwide demonstrations in Iran in the years 2017–18 and 2019–20, which had economic catalysts, protesters had the opportunity to express disapproval of the American-led sanctions regime. Condemning Trump then was a global passion. And yet virtually no one in Iran—outside of the regime—publicly criticized the United States, its sanctions, or Trump. Given the vividness and spleen of Persian social media, we would’ve seen it.  

Terrorist sanctions ought, of course, to remain: If the clerical regime is targeting Iranian Americans, Iranian dissidents in the U.S., and former senior U.S. officials for kidnapping or assassination, Washington should mount a tidal wave of sanctions. Nor should a bipartisan consensus against Iran for its aid to Hamas be hard to come by.

Shifting the primary purpose of sanctions will perforce improve the way Washington talks about Iran. If Washington had an Iran czar at State and an Iran chief at the National Security Council, both spending a lot of time on Iranian oppression and dissent; and if the president, vice president, speaker of the House, and the Senate majority leader all used the bully pulpit, including regular meetings and official dinners with Iranian exiles who have traction in their homeland, Washington would give Iranians greater reason to hope and might even galvanize dissent. Czech President Václav Havel offered Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty a new, free home in Prague when Washington didn’t want to foot the bill in Munich for a reason. He knew from his own prison experience how decisive it was to hear voices of freedom when an autocracy drives one to despair.

Case in point: The clerical regime has tried repeatedly to eliminate the irrepressible dissident and women’s-rights advocate Masih Alinejad, now a resident in the United States. Khamenei, who rails against the toxicity of Westernization, is trying to kill her for cause. Women may well be the Achilles’ heel of the Islamic Republic, which is why Khamenei wants Alinejad dead.

In the absence of a bipartisan commitment to aiding Iranian dissent, the U.S. government has offered Alinejad little more than photo ops with the national security adviser and the secretary of state. Senior U.S. officials and their staff ought to give much more time and rhetorical support to Alinejad’s cause: They should speak about the Iranian regime’s abuse of women’s rights in interviews with the Persian services of Voice of America and Radio Liberty, and in regular speeches in English, too. The voice of the U.S. government echoes overseas, especially in Iran, where a deeply conspiratorial regime magnifies everything American officials say.  

[Read: The battle for Iran]

Washington should also bring exiled Iranian dissidents together to amplify their demands. In so doing, the U.S. government should not try to create an Iranian government in exile, or to elevate one dissident over another. Like most exile diasporas, Iran’s is diverse and can be bitterly fractious. Washington should strive merely to give Iranian dissidents a platform from which to speak, a venue for meeting, the opportunity to focus their discussions, and the security and travel expenses to make such gatherings possible. Expatriate discussions of the regime’s many crimes, injustices, and fundamental incompetence tend to drive the theocracy nuts. Washington should stoke that anxiety. Dissidents associated with the Iranian left used to keep their distance from the U.S. government; given the regime’s crimes, most no longer do.

A bipartisan human-rights-first policy might even consider cautiously using the CIA. Iranian dissidents and their families who have been battered to their breaking point, who can no longer operate inside the country without facing certain death, could benefit from exfiltration. Unlike most dissidents, who can do more inside a country than out, their contribution could continue if they and their immediate families survived. The Directorate of Operations, an impatient institution that is disinclined to engage in covert action, could nevertheless probably figure out how to do this. It could learn from the Israelis, who have demonstrated repeatedly that the Islamic Republic’s borders are operationally porous. Langley has far greater resources than the Mossad; it just needs volition, which comes only from a bipartisan coalition directing the DO, through the White House and the congressional intelligence oversight committees, to do what’s necessary.

Nothing more complicated or provocative for the CIA should be considered. The age of large-scale covert action is probably over. Perhaps if China drives American unity, and Tehran’s alliances with Beijing and Moscow become even more galling, then the ghosts of the 1953 CIA-backed coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh, which usually intrudes into how the left views CIA actions in Iran, might fade. But the overriding operational issues for outsiders thinking about agency activities should always be capacity and competence. If any CIA action is worthwhile, saving those who could die is a good place to start. If Langley can handle this, then a bipartisan consensus might develop behind more ambitious projects.

A lot of Iranian dissidents today appear to be in a funk. A year ago they hoped that the clerical regime might finally be cracking. But the theocracy once again proved its resilience. Enough young and middle-aged men, through faith, fear of failure, or personal reward, are willing to do terrible things in the regime’s security services to allow the theocracy to survive. But Iranian dissidents, as well as U.S. intelligence analysts and diplomats, who have a hard time seeing change over the horizon, should remain aware that revolutions can, in fact, come on quickly. In 1974, the writer Frances FitzGerald wrote a brilliant essay in Harper’s called “Giving the Shah Everything He Wants.” In it she foresaw many of the issues that drove the shah down in 1978 and 1979. Clerical Iran isn’t as hollow as the Pahlavi state was at the end, but popular anger and the loss of regime esprit are profound and growing. As Americans and Europeans should know from their own tumultuous histories, unexpected events do happen. What seems permanent can become perishable.

The significance of President Joe Biden’s Oval Office address to the nation last night was signaled in the opening sentence: “We’re facing an inflection point in history.”

What followed was a speech that may well define Biden’s presidency.

The proximate cause for the speech was Biden’s desire to urge Americans to stand with Israel in its war with Hamas and Ukraine in its war with Russia. The president is expected to ask Congress for emergency assistance to the two nations in a $100 billion spending package. But the speech was not primarily about money; it was about America’s teleology, about how Biden sees the role of the United States in a world that is fraying and aflame.

Biden used phrases loaded with meaning. America is “the arsenal of democracy,” he said, invoking a phrase from a 1940 speech by Franklin D. Roosevelt. But in case that wasn’t clear enough, Biden said America is “the essential nation” and the “indispensable nation.” It “holds the world together,” Biden said. Israel and Ukraine are 1,200 miles apart. The conflicts are quite different; Ukraine is battling a world power, and Israel a terrorist organization. But Biden twinned the two conflicts, presenting the outcome of these wars as vital to America’s national security.

[Elliot Ackerman: The arsenal of democracy is reopening for business]

“History has taught us that when terrorists don’t pay a price for their terror, when dictators don’t pay a price for their aggression, they cause more chaos and death and more destruction,” he said, while promising to keep American troops out of harm’s way. “They keep going. And the cost and the threats to America and the world keep rising.”

Biden displayed “a passion, emotion and a clarity that is usually missing from the president’s ordinarily flat and meandering speeches,” according to David Sanger of The New York Times. In an act of extraordinary solidarity, President Biden has traveled to both Israel and Ukraine in the midst of their wars. One gets the sense that Biden believes this isn’t just America’s moment; it is his moment. It is as if he has found his purpose.

President Biden’s speech illustrated the profound shifts we’re seeing in American politics and within the two major parties. The commander in chief Biden most sounded like was Ronald Reagan, using phrases such as “pure, unadulterated evil” to describe the actions of Hamas (Reagan described the Soviet Union as the “evil empire”) and “beacon to the world” to describe America (Reagan often described the United States as a “shining city on a hill”).  

Meanwhile Republicans have become the more isolationist party, deeply wary of America providing moral leadership in the world. In last fall’s midterm elections, well over half of voters for Republican candidates—56 percent—said the U.S. should take a less active role in world affairs.

[From the December 2022 issue: A new theory of American power]

It is the American right, much more than the American left, that is disparaging of NATO, critical of aid to Ukraine, and appeasement-minded toward Russia. Donald Trump—the dominant and defining figure in the GOP—has repeatedly praised Vladimir Putin, among other brutal dictators, holding Putin up as a model and, at various points, denigrating America in the process. He even sided with Russian intelligence over U.S. intelligence at a joint press conference with Putin in Helsinki.

And so it was a bit disorienting for some of us who are conservative and who were shaped by the Reagan era—and in my case, who worked as a young man in the Reagan administration—to see our foreign-policy principles championed last night not by the Republican Party but by the Democratic president, who spoke with impressive moral force and moral clarity. Our journey through the looking glass continues.

Representative Jim Jordan may or may not break down the last few Republican holdouts who blocked his election as House speaker yesterday. But the fact that about 90 percent of the House GOP conference voted to place him in the chamber’s top job marks an ominous milestone in the Republican Party’s reconfiguration since Donald Trump’s emergence as its central figure.

The preponderant majority of House Republicans backing Jordan is attempting to elevate someone who not only defended former President Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election but participated in them more extensively than any other member of Congress, according to the bipartisan committee that investigated the January 6 insurrection. As former Republican Representative Liz Cheney, who was the vice chair of that committee, said earlier this month: “Jim Jordan knew more about what Donald Trump had planned for January 6 than any other member of the House of Representatives.”

[Read: Jim Jordan could have a long fight ahead]

Jordan’s rise, like Trump’s own commanding lead in the 2024 GOP presidential race, provides more evidence that for the first time since the Civil War, the dominant faction in one of America’s two major parties is no longer committed to the principles of democracy as the U.S. has known them. That means the nation now faces the possibility of sustained threats to the tradition of free and fair elections, with Trump’s own antidemocratic tendencies not only tolerated but amplified by his allies across the party.

Ian Bassin, the executive director of the bipartisan group Protect Democracy, told me that the American constitutional system “is not built to withstand” a demagogue capturing “an entire political party” and installing “his loyalists in key positions in the other branches of government.” That dynamic, he told me, “would likely mean our 247-year-old republic won’t live to celebrate 250.” And yet, he continued, “those developments are precisely what we’re witnessing play out before our eyes.”

Sarah Longwell, the founder of the anti-Trump Republican Accountability Project, told me that whether or not Jordan steamrolls the last holdouts, his strength in the race reflects the position inside the party of the forces allied with Trump. “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,” she told me.

Longwell said House Republicans have sent an especially clear signal by predominantly rallying around Jordan, who actively enlisted in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, so soon after they exiled Cheney, who denounced them and then was soundly defeated in a GOP primary last year. “Nominating Jim Jordan to be speaker is not them acquiescing to antidemocratic forces; it is them fully embracing antidemocratic forces,” she said. “The contrast between Jim Jordan potentially ascending to speaker and Liz Cheney, who is out of the Republican Party and excommunicated, could not be a starker statement of what the party stands for.”

In one sense, Jordan’s advance to the brink of the speakership only extends the pattern that has played out within the GOP since Trump became a national candidate in 2015. Each time the party has had an opportunity to distance itself from Trump, it has roared past the exit ramp and reaffirmed its commitment. At each moment of crisis for him, the handful of Republicans who condemned his behavior were swamped by his fervid supporters until resistance in the party crumbled.

Even against that backdrop, the breadth of Republican support for Jordan as speaker is still a striking statement. As the January 6 committee’s final report showed, Jordan participated in virtually every element of Trump’s campaign to subvert the 2020 result. Jordan spoke at “Stop the Steal” rallies, spread baseless conspiracy theories through television appearances and social media, urged Trump not to concede, demanded congressional investigations into nonexistent election fraud, and participated in multiple White House strategy sessions on how to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to reject the results.

Given that record, “‘undermining the election’ is too soft a language” to describe Jordan’s activities in 2020, Jena Griswold, Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state, told me. “He was involved in every step to try to destroy American democracy and the peaceful transfer of the presidency.” If Jordan wins the position, she said, “you could no longer count on the speaker of the House to defend the United States Constitution.”  

Jordan didn’t stop his service to Trump once he left office. Since the GOP won control of the House last year, Jordan has used his role as chair of the House Judiciary Committee to launch investigations into each of the prosecutors who have indicted Trump on criminal charges (local district attorneys in Manhattan and Fulton County, Georgia, as well as federal Special Counsel Jack Smith). Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, has described Jordan’s demand for information as an effort “to obstruct a Georgia criminal proceeding” that is “flagrantly at odds with the Constitution.”

The willingness of most GOP House members to embrace Jordan as speaker, even as he offers such unconditional support to Trump, sends the same message about the party’s balance of power as the former president’s own dominant position in the 2024 Republican race. Though some Republican voters clearly remain resistant to nominating Trump again, his support in national surveys usually exceeds the total vote for all of his rivals combined.

Equally telling is that rather than criticizing Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, almost all of his rivals have echoed his claim that the indictments he’s facing over his actions are unfair and politically motivated. In the same vein, hardly any of the Republican members resisting Jordan have even remotely suggested that his role in Trump’s attempts to subvert the election is a legitimate reason to oppose him. That silence from Jordan’s critics speaks loudly to the reluctance in all corners of the GOP to cross Trump.

“If Jordan becomes speaker, it would really mean the complete and total takeover of the party by Trump,” former Republican Representative Charlie Dent, now the executive director of the Aspen Institute’s congressional program, told me. “Because he is the closest thing Trump has to a wingman in Congress.”

All of this crystallizes the growing tendency at every level of the GOP, encompassing voters and activists as well as donors and elected officials, to normalize and whitewash Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. In an Economist/YouGov national poll earlier this year, fully three-fifths of Trump 2020 voters said those who stormed the Capitol on January 6 were participating “in legitimate political discourse,” and only about one-fifth said they were part of a violent insurrection. Only about one-fifth of Trump 2020 voters thought he bore a significant share of responsibility for the January 6 attack; more than seven in 10 thought he carried little or no responsibility.

That sentiment has solidified in the GOP partly because of a self-reinforcing cycle, Longwell believes. Because most Republican voters do not believe that Trump acted inappropriately after 2020, she said, candidates can’t win a primary by denouncing him, but because so few elected officials criticize his actions, “the more normal elements of the party become convinced it’s not an issue or it’s not worth objecting to.”  

The flip side is that for the minority of House Republicans in highly competitive districts—18 in seats that voted for President Joe Biden in 2020 and another 15 or so in districts that only narrowly preferred Trump—Jordan could be a heavy burden to carry as speaker. “Everyone is worried about their primary opponents, but in this case ameliorating the primary pressures by endorsing Jordan could spell political death in the general election in a competitive district,” Dent told me. Even so, 12 of the 18 House Republicans in districts that Biden carried voted for Jordan on his first ballot as a measure of their reluctance to challenge the party’s MAGA forces.

The instinct for self-preservation among a handful of Republican members combined with ongoing resentment at the role of the far right in ousting Kevin McCarthy might be enough to keep Jordan just below the majority he needs for election as speaker; many Republicans expect him to fail again in a second vote scheduled for this morning. Yet even if Jordan falls short, it’s his ascent that captures the shift in the party’s balance of power toward Trump’s MAGA movement.

Bassin, of Protect Democracy, points to a disturbing analogy for what is happening in the GOP as Trump surges and Jordan climbs. “When you look at the historical case studies to determine which countries survive autocratic challenges and which succumb to them,” Bassin told me, a key determinant is “whether the country’s mainstream parties unite with their traditional opponents to block the extremists from power.”

[Philip Wallach: Newt Gingrich’s degraded legacy]

Over the years, he said, that kind of alliance has mobilized against autocratic movements in countries including the Czech Republic, France, Finland, and, most recently, Poland, where the center-right joined with its opponents on the left to topple the antidemocratic Law and Justice party. The chilling counterexample, Bassin noted, is that during the period between World War I and World War II, “center-right parties in Germany and Italy chose a different course.” Rather than directly opposing the emerging fascist movements in each country, they opted “instead to try to ride the energy of [the] far-right extremists to power, thinking that once there, they could easily sideline [their] leaders.”

That was, of course, a historic miscalculation that led to the destruction of democracy in each country. But, Bassin said, “right now, terrifyingly, the American Republican Party is following the German and Italian path.” The belligerent Jordan may face just enough personal and ideological opposition to stop him, but whether or not he becomes speaker, his rise captures the currents carrying the Trump-era GOP ever further from America’s democratic traditions.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Is RFK Jr., the conspiracist scion of American political royalty, merely a nuisance, or will he present a genuine threat in 2024?

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

China changed its mind about World War II. What is Israel trying to accomplish? Jim Jordan could have a long fight ahead.

A Wild Card

The Kennedy family is synonymous with the Democratic Party. And, for a time, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. framed his long-shot bid for the Democratic presidential nomination as that of a “Kennedy Democrat” who believes in strong unions and the middle class. But last week, he broke with the party.

RFK Jr., who rose to prominence as a respected environmental lawyer before veering into conspiracism and anti-vaccine activism around 2005, said last Monday that he is now running for president as a third-party candidate. “We declare independence from the cynical elites who betray our home and who amplify our divisions,” he said, announcing his decision in Philadelphia. “And finally, we declare independence from the two political parties.” Putting aside the irony of a Kennedy criticizing elites, RFK Jr.’s announcement could add an element of uncertainty into the near-inevitable rematch between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump in 2024. My colleague John Hendrickson, who profiled Kennedy in June and has covered his campaign, told me that, because of various state-level qualifying rules, Kennedy does not appear to have a viable path to collecting the 270 electoral votes required to win the presidency as an independent candidate. But even if the possibility of Kennedy actually becoming president is moot, he “could siphon voters away from Biden and Trump, and make it harder for either of them to hit 270,” John said. In a presidential race that may be close, especially in key swing states, a wild-card factor could cause headaches for both sides.

An independent run like RFK Jr.’s could also damage the American public’s already fragile trust in the integrity of the electoral system. As Jesse Wegman wrote in The New York Times this week, if a single candidate is unable to garner 270 electoral votes, a little-known provision in the Twelfth Amendment would kick in, enabling the House to elect the president; each state would cast one vote, and their tally would decide the presidency. “This is about as far from the principle of majority rule as you can get,” Wegman writes, noting that Thomas Jefferson called the provision “the most dangerous blot in our Constitution.”

The likely rematch between Trump and Biden is unwelcome news for many voters: “Americans are suffering a bit of 2020 PTSD, and the prospect of replaying that whole year over again is filling people with dread,” John told me. Poll results released by the Monmouth University Polling Institute earlier this month found that just 19 percent of voters are very enthusiastic about Trump running as the party nominee, and 14 percent are very enthusiastic about Biden. Meanwhile, Kennedy’s favorability ratings have at times surpassed those of both Trump and Biden. But Jon Krosnick, a political-science professor at Stanford University, told me that Kennedy will likely take such a small number of votes from Trump and Biden that his presence will prove inconsequential. “The only way he’s going to be influential in the outcome of the election is if he participates in debates,” which would give him a major platform for his ideas, Krosnick told me. Those experts who do believe that Kennedy could hurt the major-party candidates are divided on whether his presence in the race might inspire anti-vax or libertarian voters to divert their votes from Trump, or cause Biden-weary Democrats to jump ship, hurting the incumbent.

Third-party candidates have always been on the sidelines of American politics. Krosnick explained that sometimes, votes for them make no difference in electoral outcomes, because they tend to attract voters who just wouldn’t have voted otherwise. But these candidates have exerted power at key moments. No candidate from outside the two dominant parties has ever won a presidential election, but third-party candidates have sometimes served as “spoilers,” pulling votes from candidates in close matchups. In 2000, Ralph Nader, who received some 97,000 votes, siphoned votes in the close race—the difference in Florida was about 500 votes—between George Bush and Al Gore. In 2016, Jill Stein garnered votes that could have helped Hillary Clinton in her race against Trump.

“Some third-party independent candidate could arrive at that moment and grab the spotlight” in 2024, but “Robert Kennedy doesn’t strike me as that type of candidate,” Krosnick said. Kennedy isn’t the only third-party contender entering the fray: A third-party centrist group called No Labels has reportedly raised $60 million and qualified for 11 states’ ballots. Some Democrats are threatened by this: No Labels is “going to help the other guy,” Biden told ProPublica. And in July, my colleague Russell Berman wrote that, according to surveys and polling, a moderate independent candidate could capture a decisive number of votes in a close race. Cornel West, the intellectual and activist, is also running; he switched from the Green Party to an independent run earlier this month.

“Extreme polarization,” Krosnick told me, “does make this a special moment in history.” Some voters, desperate for an alternative to Trump or Biden, may vote for whomever they genuinely hope to see in the White House—even if that person has no chance of winning. People who vote for Kennedy, Krosnick said, are voters who think, “I don’t care whether he wins or not. I will feel best about myself if I vote for him.”

Related:

The first MAGA Democrat Joe Lieberman weighs the Trump risk.

Today’s News

Jim Jordan did not secure enough Republican votes to become speaker of the House in a first vote. At least 500 people were killed by an airstrike at a hospital in Gaza City, according to Palestinian authorities; Israel says the explosion was caused by a misfired Palestinian rocket from the group Islamic Jihad. President Biden will visit Israel tomorrow. Ukraine struck Russian helicopters in its eastern region using long-range missiles newly supplied by the United States.

Evening Read

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Sources: Elise Hardy; Shalom Ormsby; Tim Platt; dobok / Getty

An Awkward Evolutionary Theory for One of Pregnancy’s Biggest Complications

By Katherine J. Wu

In the early 1990s, while studying preeclampsia in Guadeloupe, Pierre-Yves Robillard hit upon a realization that seemed to shake the foundations of his field. Preeclampsia, a pregnancy complication that causes some 500,000 fetal deaths and 70,000 maternal deaths around the world each year, had for decades been regarded as a condition most common among new mothers, whose bodies were mounting an inappropriate attack on a first baby. But Robillard, now a neonatologist and epidemiologist at Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de La Réunion, on Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean, kept seeing the condition crop up during second, third, or fourth pregnancies—a pattern that a few other studies had documented, but had yet to fully explain. Then, Robillard noticed something else. “These women had changed the father,” he told me. The catalyst in these cases of preeclampsia, he eventually surmised, wasn’t the newness of pregnancy. It was the newness of paternal genetic material that, maybe, the mother hadn’t had enough exposure to before.

Robillard’s idea was unconventional not only because it challenged the dogma of the time, but because it implied certain evolutionary consequences … If preeclampsia is a kind of immune overreaction, then perhaps unprotected sex is the world’s most unconventional allergy shot.

Read the full article.

More from The Atlantic

India isn’t signing up for China’s new world order. These birds got a little too comfortable in birdhouses. The best of bad options for recovering the hostages

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Read. When you’re frustrated with the status quo, read these books.

Watch. Taylor Swift’s record-breaking concert film (in theaters) did what Hollywood studios could not.

Play our daily crossword.

Did someone forward you this email? Sign up here.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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