After the Hamas attack on Israel October 7, an old, bad argument resurfaced. In the streets of New York, London, and Paris, and on American college campuses, protesters who consider themselves leftists took the position that oppressed people—Palestinians in this case, but oppressed people more generally—can do no wrong. Any act of “resistance” is justified, however cruel, however barbaric, however much these protesters would rage against it if it were committed by someone else.

I remember the same argument from the days of the Algerian struggle for independence from France, when the National Liberation Front (FLN) launched terrorist attacks against European civilians. The movie The Battle of Algiers shows a bomb being planted in a café where teenagers met to drink and dance. This really happened, and figures as eminent as Jean-Paul Sartre defended such attacks. Killing a European, any European, the famous writer announced, was an act of liberation: “There remains a dead man”—the victim—“and a free man”—the killer.

By this same logic, the murder of young and old Israelis has been justified, even celebrated, by people who, again, consider themselves leftists. For them, the Hamas murderers are not ordinary mortals, responsible for what they do; they are agents of resistance, doing what must be done in the name of liberation.

[Simon Sebag Montefiore: The decolonization narrative is dangerous and false]

Framed this way, the issue is simple: Oppressed people have a right to resist; the Palestinians have a right to struggle against the Israeli occupation. But rights come with obligations. What are the obligations of the oppressed and, most immediately, of those who act in their name? This may not seem like an urgent question, given the horrors of the war now unfolding. But it is a question for all time; it is about the moral and political health of all those who fight for liberation—and of everyone who wants to support them.

The Hamas terrorists claim to be acting on behalf of the Palestinian people. At the same time, Hamas is the government of the Gaza Strip—a strange situation: a terrorist organization that also rules a territory. The anomaly explains why Hamas terror leads to actual conventional wars, whereas Irish Republican Army or FLN violence against civilians never did. Hamas’s government is substantial, the real thing, with a civil service and a system of social provision that includes welfare and schooling. It has, therefore, the same obligations that any government has to look after its citizens or, as in Hamas’s case, its subjects. It must secure their rights and protect their lives.

But much evidence suggests that the government of Gaza does not meet these basic obligations. Despite the large funds that Hamas has accumulated, chiefly for its military wing, some 80 percent of Gazans live in poverty. Hamas rejects the very idea of civil rights and liberties; it imposes a harsh religious discipline (though short of the Iranian version), and it does not seem overly concerned with Gazans’ general well-being. Instead of protecting the lives of its people, it exposes them to attack by embedding its military communication and storage centers in the civilian population and firing its missiles from schoolyards and hospital parking lots. It spends much of its money on the manufacture of rockets and the construction of an elaborate network of tunnels for military use. Knowing the wars it plans, it doesn’t build shelters for its people.

Insofar as anyone genuinely cares about Gazans’ well-being, it is the foreign governments that send money (Qatar pays the salaries of the civil service) and the United Nations agencies and other humanitarian organizations working on the ground. One might also mention the state of Israel, which, until October 8, supplied half of Gaza’s electricity. (Cutting off the electricity was, I believe, morally wrong and politically stupid, but those who call it so should acknowledge the years of electric service, even while rockets were fired at Israel.)

What would Gaza look like if Hamas was a normal government? That’s hard to say, because normality is hard to come by in the Middle East today. But when Israel withdrew from the Strip (taking Jewish settlers with it) in 2005, there was excited talk of a Palestinian Hong Kong, with a seaport, an international airport, water-desalination plants, and much else—all of this funded with investment from abroad, chiefly from Western Europe and the Persian Gulf states. Hamas was not interested in anything like that, and all these projects faded with the first major barrage of rockets aimed at Israel in 2006. The definitive end came a year later when Hamas, having won a narrow election victory (the last election in Gaza) seized total power and murdered its opponents. What it wanted was not a prosperous Gaza but a base for a long-term war against Israel—and, later on, against Egypt’s control of the Sinai. Hamas’s rise to power, coupled with the group’s Islamist ideology, is what led to the Israeli-Egyptian blockade, designed (not very successfully) to prevent Hamas from bringing weapons into the Strip.

In light of all this, to cast Hamas solely as an agent of resistance is to overlook a lot. It is a government that has failed its people. It is also a movement for Palestinian national liberation with a significant, but probably minority, following in Gaza and considerable influence throughout the Arab world. It is, finally, a movement that has chosen terror as its means of struggle—not as a last resort but as a matter of policy from its beginning. What are the obligations of a movement like that? I should say right now: Its first obligation is to reject terrorism.

Let’s pause here and look at a classic argument first worked out in a different liberation struggle—the class war of Europe’s and America’s workers. Lenin famously distinguished between “revolutionary” and “trade union” consciousness among the workers, the first directed toward the distant achievement of a communist society, the second aimed right now at higher wages, better working conditions, and the end of the factory foreman’s tyranny. Lenin favored the first and worried that any advance along trade-union lines would make revolution more difficult. Most workers, it turned out, favored the second approach. Revolutionary consciousness ended in dictatorship and terror or in defeat and sectarian isolation; trade-union consciousness led to the successes of social democracy.

That old distinction holds for national liberation too. In the case of Palestine and Israel, revolutionary consciousness aims at a radical triumph: Greater Palestine or Greater Israel “from the river to the sea.” That aim is often expressed in messianic language—the religious version of revolution. By contrast, trade-union consciousness is represented by those who work for a division of the land—two states, sovereign or federated or confederated. That may seem utopian right now, but it isn’t messianic. One can imagine it as a human contrivance, worked out by Palestinians and Jews who are committed concretely to the well-being of their people. We should judge Hamas, I would argue, by the standard of trade unionism because that kind of politics is genuinely responsive to the needs and aspirations of the people it aims to liberate.

Hamas has never been interested in the kinds of political work that follow from a “trade union” commitment. Begin with the obvious: Hamas should be making Gaza into a model of what a liberated Palestine would look like (perhaps, sadly, that’s what it has done). And then it should be organizing on the West Bank to achieve a Palestinian state alongside Israel. It should be working with Israeli opponents of the occupation and with other Palestinian groups for that version of liberation—which is achievable short of war and revolution. Two states (with whatever qualifications on their sovereignty) would be the most beneficial outcome for both Palestinians and Israelis. So Hamas should be building a mass movement with that end in view, a movement that would stand behind or, better yet, replace its revolutionary vanguard. It should be educating people for civil disobedience and planning marches, demonstrations, and general strikes. It should be working to strengthen Palestinian civil society and create the institutions of a future state.

Of course, Israel will make this work difficult; the current Israeli government will make it extremely difficult, because it includes religious messianists and ultranationalist settlers. Settler thugs regularly attack Palestinians living on the West Bank. Against the thugs, self-defense is required—force against force. But the goal of Palestinian “trade unionists,” a state of their own alongside Israel, requires a mass movement. Fatah, Hamas’s rival, produced something like that in the First Intifada, from 1987 to 1993; it wasn’t entirely nonviolent, but in some ways it resembled the nationalist version of a union strike. It played a large role in making the Oslo Accords possible. Hamas can’t claim any similar achievement; indeed, rockets from Gaza helped undermine Oslo.

There are people on the ground in the West Bank committed to nonviolent resistance and to constructive work of exactly the sort I’ve just described, but Hamas does not look at them as allies. Nor does it regard Palestinians in and around the Palestinian Authority who support the idea of two states as allies. It is committed to a revolutionary, totalizing politics. It insists not only on the replacement of the state of Israel by a Palestinian state but also—equally important to Hamas—on the end of any Jewish presence on what it regards as Arab land.

Hamas is not doing anything in a “trade union” way to build a liberation movement with more limited goals—a movement that might actually succeed. That kind of political work requires an organization less Bolshevik-like, less repressive, less rigidly ideological, more inclusive than Hamas has ever been. Hamas is a vanguard that isn’t looking for an organized rear guard. It is an elite of ready-to-be-martyrs who plan to liberate Palestine and eliminate Israel—not by themselves but only with those allies who won’t challenge their supremacy. They seek the help of the Arab street, excited by Hamas’s violence but not capable of replacing Hamas’s rule—and the help of movements and states that share Hamas’s zealotry and will never question its authoritarianism. The resort to terror follows. It is the natural expression of this kind of politics.

The most succinct argument against terror as a strategy for liberation comes from the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Although he wrote the essay “Their Morals and Ours”—one of the earliest versions of the bad argument that I began with—Trotsky also wrote critically about terrorism, arguing, accurately, that terrorists “want to make the people happy without the participation of the people.” The terrorists, Trotsky continues, mean to “substitute themselves for the masses.” Some on the left view that ambition as heroic and admire terrorists for that reason. But the politics of substitution is an authoritarian politics, not a leftist politics, precisely because it does not look for popular participation. Its end cannot be a democratic state: Algeria, long dominated by authoritarian FLN leaders, is a useful example of how things are likely to turn out. So is Gaza itself.

[Michael Ignatieff: Why Israel should obey Geneva even when its enemies do not]

Terrorism is a betrayal of the oppressed men and women whom its protagonists claim to defend—and plan to rule. Because they substitute themselves for the people, they will, if victorious in their struggle, simply replace the oppressors they defeat. But this is only part of the story. What about the people the terrorists kill? Terrorism is the random killing of innocent men, women, and children for a political purpose. But its worst and most common form is not random in a general way but random within a group: the killing of Black people in the United States by police or by white men with guns, or of Europeans in Algeria, Muslims in India, or, as in the recent attacks, Jews in Israel. This kind of directed terror needs to be called out—as American activists did with the slogan “Black Lives Matter.” Remember the counter-slogan, “All Lives Matter,” that many people—including me—took to be a denial of the specific politics, the racial hatred, that drives the killing.

For similar reasons, we should give the attack of October 7 its right name: It was a pogrom, a massacre undertaken for the purpose of murdering Jews. People who refuse the term, saying instead that all killing of civilians is wrong, are right in the general way that “All Lives Matter” is right, but they are avoiding the crucial moral and political point.

Still, precisely because all lives do matter, we must also draw universal moral lines. What about you and me, random individuals, who are sitting in a café or attending a music festival and are suddenly blown up or machine-gunned by attackers who are deliberately trying to kill us? I can’t understand anyone on the left or the right who, when thinking of themselves in the café or at the festival, would say that such violence is all right. Surely we are all innocent: ordinary folk, going about daily business, thinking of politics only occasionally, worrying about money, looking after kids—or just being kids.

But aren’t men, women, and children just like these also the victims of war? Yes, and terrorism—the deliberate killing of innocent people—is often enough a military strategy, as it was, I believe, in the firebombing of Dresden and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. But that is not always true: Many armies and many soldiers aim only at military targets and do what they can to avoid or minimize civilian injury and death. That is especially difficult when the enemy deliberately exposes its civilian population to the risks of combat.

Civilian casualties are obviously much easier to avoid in the course of a political struggle. Those who resist oppression can focus and therefore have to focus narrowly on the oppressors. No good society, no liberated state, can be produced by denying life and liberty to the ordinary folk I have described. No good society without them. No good society without you and me! That is the fundamental principle of a decent politics. Terrorism is a deliberate, overt denial of that principle, and so the defenders of terrorism are the betrayers first of the oppressed and then of the rest of us. Like the terrorists, they may think that they are advancing the cause of liberation, but they have forgotten their obligations to you and me.

Why can it feel like there’s never enough time in a day, and why are so many of us conditioned to believe that being more productive makes us better people? On How to Keep Time, co-hosts Becca Rashid and the Atlantic contributing writer Ian Bogost talk with social scientists, authors, philosophers, and theoretical physicists to learn more about time and how to reclaim it. How to Keep Time launches in December 2023.

Listen to the preview here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript:

Becca Rashid: Ian, I’ve been reading about this concept called the social clock, and it’s sort of this invisible timetable that tells us what we should be doing at different stages of our lives.

Ian Bogost: So, Becca: Are you on time? Are you on track on the social clock?

Rashid: I am off the social clock, and it’s not easy.

Bogost: I’m not sure if I was on or off the social clock when I was your age, but I think there’s a point at which, maybe, the social clock breaks down. The question I face isn’t whether I’m on time, but what should I do with my time?

Sarah Manguso: The diary really helped me suppress some of that: some of that worry, some of that anxiety.

Rashid: You know, given time is finite, it can feel almost impossible to not compulsively try to make every waking minute productive.

Oliver Burkman: The only real way to use time to actually find meaning in the present is, by some definition of the term, to waste it.

Bogost: Is this a uniquely American phenomenon? Are there other cultures where busyness has the same social status as it does in America?

Rashid: Ian, what’s the one thing you wish you had more time for?

Bogost: I wish I had more time to figure out how to use the limited time I have.

Rashid: Existential dread about our limited time is at the core of my curiosity. And I really want to know why so many of us are conditioned to believe that being efficient makes us better people.

This season, we’re going to get into our complex relationship with time and what makes us feel like we’re running against the clock.

—

Rashid: I’m Becca Rashid, producer and co-host of the How To series.

Bogost: And I’m Ian Bogost, co-host and contributing writer at The Atlantic.

Rashid: This is How to Keep Time. The season begins this December.

You have to admit, it seemed like a great way to help anxious and depressed teens.

Researchers in Australia assigned more than 1,000 young teenagers to one of two classes: either a typical middle-school health class or one that taught a version of a mental-health treatment called dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT. After eight weeks, the researchers planned to measure whether the DBT teens’ mental health had improved.

The therapy was based on strong science: DBT incorporates some classic techniques from therapy, such as cognitive reappraisal, or reframing negative events in a more positive way, and it also includes more avant-garde techniques such as mindfulness, the practice of being in the present moment. Both techniques have been proven to alleviate psychological struggles.  

This special DBT-for-teens program also covered a range of both mental-health coping strategies and life skills—which are, again, correlated with health and happiness. One week, students were instructed to pay attention to things they wouldn’t typically notice, such as a sunset. Another, they were told to sleep more, eat right, and exercise. They were taught to accept unpleasant things they couldn’t change, and also how to distract themselves from negative emotions and ask for things they need. “We really tried to put the focus on, how can you apply some of this stuff to things that are happening in your everyday lives already?” Lauren Harvey, a psychologist at the University of Sydney and the lead author of the study, told me.

[Read: Why American teens are so sad]

But what happened was not what Harvey and her co-authors predicted. The therapy seemed to make the kids worse. Immediately after the intervention, the therapy group had worse relationships with their parents and increases in depression and anxiety. They were also less emotionally regulated and had less awareness of their emotions, and they reported a lower quality of life, compared with the control group.

Most of these negative effects dissipated after a few months, but six months later, the therapy group was still reporting poorer relationships with their parents.

These results are, well, depressing. Therapy is supposed to relieve depression, not exacerbate it. (And, in case it’s not clear, although it’s disappointing that the therapy program didn’t work, it’s commendable that Harvey and her colleagues analyzed it objectively and published the negative results.)

But for people who study teen-mental-health treatments, these findings are part of a familiar pattern. All sorts of so-called universal interventions, in which a big group of teens are subjected to “healthy” messaging from adults, have failed. Last year, a study of thousands of British kids who were put through a mindfulness program found that, in the end, they had the same depression and well-being outcomes as the control group. A cognitive-behavioral-therapy program for teens had similarly disappointing results—it proved no better than regular classwork.

D.A.R.E., which from the ’90s to early 2000s taught legions of elementary-school students 10 different street names for heroin, similarly had little to show for its efforts. (The curriculum has since been revamped.) The self-esteem-boosting craze of the ’80s also didn’t amount to much—and later research questioned whether having high self-esteem is even beneficial. Anti-bullying programs for high schoolers seem to increase bullying.

Reading these findings, haters of high-school assemblies might tingle with schadenfreude. But the consistent failure of these kinds of programs is troubling, because teen mental health is now considered a crisis—one that has so far resisted even well-considered solutions. From 2007 to 2016, pediatric emergency-room visits for mental-health disorders rose 60 percent. Most teen girls—57 percent—felt “persistently sad or hopeless” in 2021, up from 36 percent in 2011. That figure is a still-not-great 29 percent among teen boys. Nearly a third of teen girls have considered suicide, according to the CDC. (Although school closures probably didn’t help things, these numbers were rising even before the coronavirus pandemic began.) The kids are not all right, and frustratingly, we don’t really know how to help them. It feels like we should be able to just sit the teens down and tell them how to be happier. But that doesn’t seem to work, and sometimes it even backfires.

These types of programs tend to flop for a lot of different reasons. In the case of the Australian study, the teens didn’t opt in to the intervention; they were signed up for it, class by class. But teens don’t like being told by adults how to think or what to do, even if it’s something that could benefit them, experts told me. The Australian kids were instructed to practice the DBT exercises at home, and those who did so had better outcomes, but only about a third practiced at least weekly. This could be considered low, but does anyone really enjoy doing their “therapy homework”? Especially when they have, you know, regular homework? “It’s just another thing they are required and asked to do without any input from them,” as Jessica Schleider, a psychologist at Northwestern University, puts it.

What’s more, these complex, therapy-adjacent concepts might confound young teens—the average age of the kids in the DBT study was just 13.5. And in order to make the program palatable to so many kids, the instructors might have had to dilute DBT beyond the point where it was actually helpful. “It’s kind of like giving somebody a couple of doses of an antibiotic for a serious illness in an attempt to prevent that illness from emerging at a population level, which intuitively makes no sense,” Schleider told me.

That brings us to another problem with universal interventions. Many therapists use DBT to help people struggling with suicidal ideation and self-injury, through months of intensive individual treatment. But the teens in this study weren’t, on average, clinically depressed or anxious to begin with. Many of them were just normal, happy kids. It’s possible that by teaching kids to notice their negative thoughts, the program inadvertently reinforced those thoughts.

“Maybe everybody thinking about how anxious or hurt they are might not be the best idea,” says Jean M. Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University and the author of Generations. “We might be taking people who are doing just fine and trying to teach them these techniques, which may actually call attention to their distress.”

That leaves the question of why the relationships between the DBT kids and their parents soured, even months later. Harvey, the study author, thinks the fact that the intervention didn’t include the parents might have created a gap of sorts between the parents and their kids. The kids might have learned to advocate for themselves more assertively, but if parents didn’t understand where that was coming from, family tensions might have arisen.

Of course, there’s not a huge risk that American public schools will apply mental-health treatments to ninth graders without their parents’ consent. School boards can barely agree on which books to allow, so I don’t anticipate mandatory therapy coming to our shores anytime soon. (Many U.S. schools incorporate “social-emotional learning” into their curriculum, but this differs from the programs mentioned in any of these studies.)

[Read: What’s the smallest amount of therapy that’s still effective?]

Still, we’ve had our share of impotent programs aimed at making teens “better.” And it would be nice if something like a Big Mindfulness Assembly worked. Schleider said that rather than subject entire classrooms of kids to therapeutic information, mental-health treatment should be available to kids when they feel that they need it, not just when it happens to be fifth period. (She has designed some interventions along these lines.) In many states, adolescents can’t access any mental-health care without parental consent. “For teens who don’t feel comfortable going to their parents, that basically just means too bad for them,” Schleider said. “Which, unfortunately, in our research, is about a third of teens.” Most teens don’t have their own money or insurance; many couldn’t drive to a therapist’s office if they wanted to. So they turn to social media, which might actually reinforce poor mental health.

The upshot of all of these failed experiments, from the cheesy D.A.R.E. to the trendy mindfulness, is the old chestnut that you can’t change people who aren’t ready to change. Teens can make poor choices, but they are smart and, on some level, know themselves. Alleviating the teen-mental-health crisis may require something that is not altogether comfortable for adults: trusting that teenagers will know when they need help. We may need to make treatment available but not obligatory. Teens have plenty of obligations as it is.

Representative Adam Schiff was mingling his way through a friendly crowd at a Democratic barbecue when the hecklers arrived—by boat. Schiff and two other Senate candidates, Representatives Katie Porter and Barbara Lee, convened on the back patio of a country club overlooking the port of Stockton, California. Schiff spoke first. “It’s such a beautiful evening,” he said, thanking the host, local Democratic Representative Josh Harder.

It was hard to know what to make of the protest vessel, except that its seven passengers were yelling things as Schiff began his remarks. And not nice things. Although their words were tough to decipher, the flag flying over the craft made clear where they were coming from: FUCK BIDEN. Notably, of the three candidates, Schiff was the only one I heard singled out by name—or, in one case, by a Donald Trump–inspired epithet (“Shifty”) and, in another, a four-letter profanity similar to the congressman’s surname (clever!).

Schiff is used to such derision and says it proves his bona fides as a worthy Trump adversary. Given the laws of political physics today, it also bodes well for his Senate campaign. The principle is simple: to be despised by the opposition can yield explicit benefits. This is especially true when you belong to the dominant party, as Schiff does in heavily Democratic California. One side’s villain is the other side’s champion. Adam Schiff embodies this rule as well as any politician in the country.

In recent years, Schiff has had a knack for eliciting loud and at times unhinged reactions from opponents, even though he himself tends to be quite hinged. The 45th president tweeted about Schiff 328 times, as tallied by Schiff’s office. Tucker Carlson called the congressman “a wild-eyed conspiracy nut.” A group of QAnon followers circulated a report in 2021 that U.S. Special Forces had arrested Schiff and that he was in a holding facility awaiting transfer to Guantánamo Bay for trial (the report proved erroneous). Before Schiff had a chance to meet his new Republican colleague Anna Paulina Luna, of Florida, she filed a resolution condemning his “Russia hoax investigation” and calling for him to potentially be fined $16 million (the resolution failed).

This onslaught has also been good for business, inspiring equal passion in Schiff’s favor. A former prosecutor, he became an icon of the left for his emphatic critiques of Trump’s behavior in office, including as the lead House manager in Trump’s first impeachment trial. “You know you can’t trust this president to do what’s right for this country,” Schiff said as part of his closing argument, a speech that became a rallying cry of the anti-Trump resistance. (“I am in tears,” the actor Debra Messing wrote on Twitter.) Opponents gave grudging respect. “They nailed him,” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell told Mitt Romney, according to an account in a new Romney biography by my colleague McKay Coppins. Schiff’s own Trump-era memoir, Midnight in Washington, became a No. 1 New York Times best seller.

Representative Adam Schiff speaks to supporters at a barbecue hosted by fellow Democratic House member Josh Harder in Stockton, California. (Photographs by Austin Leong for The Atlantic)

You could draw parallel lines charting the levels of vilification that Schiff has encountered and his name recognition and fundraising numbers. Both the good and the grisly have boosted Schiff’s media profile, which he has adeptly cultivated. Schiff has come in at or near the top of the polls in the Senate race so far, along with Porter. A Berkeley IGS survey released last week revealed him as the best-known of the candidates vying for the late Dianne Feinstein’s job; 69 percent of likely voters said they could render an opinion of him (40 percent favorable, 29 percent unfavorable). He raised $6.4 million in the most recent reporting period, ending the quarter with $32 million cash on hand, or $20 million more than the runner-up, Porter. That’s more than any Senate candidate in the country this election cycle, and a massive advantage in a state populated by about 22 million registered voters covering some of the nation’s most expensive media markets.

[Read: A final chapter unbefitting an extraordinary legacy]

“He’s become an inspiration and a voice of reason for many of us,” Becky Espinoza, of Stockton, told me at the Democratic barbecue.

Or at least the sector of “many of us” who don’t want him dead.

Schiff started getting threats a few months into Trump’s presidency. “Welcome to the club,” Nancy Pelosi, his longtime mentor, told him. He endured anti-Semitic screeds online and actual bullets sent to his office bearing the names of Schiff’s two kids. “I can’t stand the fact that millions of people hate you; they just hate you,” Schiff’s wife, Eve—yes, Adam and Eve—told her husband after the abuse started. “They just hate you.”

No one deserves to be subjected to such menace, and the threats can be particularly chilling for a member of Congress who would not normally have a protective detail. (Schiff’s office declined to discuss its security staffing and protocols.) Schiff is not shy about repeating these ugly stories, however. There’s an element of strategic humblebragging to this, as he is plainly aware that being a target of the MAGA minions can be extremely attractive to the Democratic voters he needs.

In June, congressional Republicans led a party-line vote to censure Schiff for his role in investigating Trump. As then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy attempted to preside, Democrats physically rallied around Schiff on the House floor chanting “shame” at McCarthy. On the day of his censure, Schiff was interviewed on CNN and twice on MSNBC; the next morning he appeared on ABC’s The View. “Whoever it was that introduced that censure resolution against him probably ensured Adam’s victory,” Representative Mike Thompson, another California Democrat, told me. A few colleagues addressed him that day as “Senator Schiff.”

I dropped in on Schiff periodically over the past few months as he traversed the chaos of the Capitol, weighed in on Trump’s legal travails, and campaigned across California. What did a Senate candidacy look like for a Trump-era cause célèbre who is revered and reviled with such vigor? I found it a bit odd to see Schiff out in the political wild—glad-handing, granny-hugging, and, at the barbecue in late August, nearly knocking a plate of brisket from the grip of an eager selfie-seeker. He has graduated to a full-on news-fixture status, someone perpetually framed by a screen or viewed behind a podium, as if he emerged from his mother’s womb and was dropped straight into a formal courtroom, hearing room, or greenroom setting.

I watched a number of guests in Stockton clutch Schiff’s hand and address him in plaintive tones. “After I stopped crying a little bit, I just wanted to thank him for all he did during impeachment and to just save our democracy,” said Espinoza, following her brief meeting with the candidate.

Nearby, David Hartman, of Tracy, California, put down a paper plate of chicken, pickles, and corn salad and made his way to Schiff. “I just want to shake the man’s hand and thank him,” Hartman told me, which is what he did. So did his wife, Tracy (of Tracy!), who was likewise surprised to find herself in tears.

“I’m like a human focus group,” Schiff told me, describing how strangers approach him at airports. “Sometimes I will have two people come up to me simultaneously. One will say, ‘You are Adam Schiff. I just want to shake your hand. You’re a hero.’ And the other will say, ‘You’re not my hero. Why do you lie all the time?’”

For his first eight terms in Congress, Schiff, 63, was not much recognized beyond the confines of the U.S. Capitol or the cluster of affluent Los Angeles–area neighborhoods he has represented in the House since 2001. “I think, before Trump, if you had to pick one of these big lightning rods or partisan bomb-throwers, you would not pick me,” Schiff told me.

Largely true. Schiff speaks in careful, somewhat clipped tones, with a slight remnant of a Boston accent from his childhood in suburban Framingham, Massachusetts. (His father was in the clothing business and moved the family to Arizona and eventually California.) A Stanford- and Harvard-trained attorney, Schiff gained a reputation as an ambitious but low-key legislator in the House, and a deft communicator in service of his generally liberal positions.

A Fox News reporter and other guests at the barbecue in Stockton.(Photographs by Austin Leong for The Atlantic)

After Trump’s election, however, Schiff’s district effectively became CNN, MSNBC, and the network Sunday shows, along with the scoundrel’s gallery of right-wing media that pulverized him hourly. This included a certain Twitter feed. The worst abuse Schiff received started after Trump’s maiden tweet about him dropped on July 24, 2017. This was back in an era of relative innocence, when it was still something of a novelty for a sitting president to attack a member of Congress by name—“Sleazy Adam Schiff,” in this case.

Schiff tweeted back that Trump’s “comments and actions are beneath the dignity of the office.” Schiff would later reveal that he rejected a less restrained rejoinder suggested by Mike Thompson, his California colleague: “Mr. President, when they go low, we go high. Now go fuck yourself.” Anyway, that was six years, two impeachments, four indictments, 91 felony counts, and 327 tweets by Donald Trump about Adam Schiff ago.

[Adam Schiff: America must stand as a bulwark against autocracy]

“Adam is one of the least polarizing personalities you will ever find,” said another Democratic House colleague, Dan Goldman, of New York. “The reason he’s become such a bogeyman for the Republican Party is simply that he’s so effective.” Goldman served as the lead majority counsel during Trump’s first impeachment, working closely with Schiff. “We originally met in the greenroom of MSNBC in June of 2018,” Goldman told me. (Of course they did.)

Schiff understands that some of the rancor directed at him is performative, and likes to point out the quiet compliments he receives from political foes. Trump used to complain on Twitter that Schiff spent too much time on television—in reality, a source of extreme envy for the then-president. Schiff tells a story about how Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, came to Capitol Hill for a deposition from members of Schiff’s Intelligence committee in 2017. “Kushner comes up to me to make conversation, and to ingratiate himself,” Schiff told me. “And he said, ‘You know, you do a great job on television.’ And I said, ‘Well, apparently your father-in-law doesn’t think so,’ and [Kushner] said, ‘Oh, yes, he does.’” (Kushner didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

One of Trump’s most fervent bootlickers, Senator Lindsey Graham, walked up to Schiff in a Capitol hallway during the first impeachment trial and told him how good of a job he was doing. Schiff, who relayed both this and the Kushner stories in his memoir, says he gets that from other Republicans, too, usually House members he’s worked with—including some who lampoon him in front of microphones. A few House Republicans apologized privately to Schiff, he told me, right after they voted to censure him.

“The apologies are always accompanied by ‘You’re not going to say anything about this, are you?’” Schiff said. When I urged Schiff to name names, to call out the hypocrites, he declined.

I asked Schiff if he would prefer the more anonymous, pre-2017 version of himself running in this Senate campaign, as opposed to the more embattled, death-threat-getting version, who nonetheless enjoys so many advantages because of all the attention. He paused. “I’d rather the country didn’t have to go through all this with Donald Trump,” he said, skirting a direct answer.

As with many members of Congress seeking a promotion or an exit, Schiff gives off a strong whiff of being done with the place. “The House has become kind of a basket case,” he told me, citing one historic grandiloquence that he was recently privy to—the episode in which Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene called her colleague Lauren Boebert a “little bitch” on the House floor.

“And I remember thinking to myself, There used to be giants who served in this body,” Schiff said. He sighed, as he does.

I met with Schiff at the Capitol in early October, amid the usual swirl of weighty events: Feinstein had died three days earlier; news that Governor Gavin Newsom would appoint the Democratic activist Laphonza Butler as her replacement came the night before. That afternoon, Republican Representative Matt Gaetz had filed his fateful “motion to vacate” that would result in the demise of McCarthy’s speakership the next day. Schiff stood just off the House floor, colleagues passing in both directions, Republicans looking especially angry, and reporters gathering around Schiff in a small scrum.

No matter what happens next November, Schiff is not running for reelection in the House. He told me he has long believed that he’d be a better fit for the Senate anyway, where he has been coveting a seat for years. Schiff said he considered running in 2016, after the retirement of the incumbent Barbara Boxer (who was eventually succeeded by Kamala Harris).

A Democrat will almost certainly win the 2024 California race. Senate contests in the state follow a two-tiered system in which candidates from both parties compete in a March primary, and then the two top finishers face off in November, regardless of their affiliation. In addition to Schiff, Porter, and Lee, the former baseball star Steve Garvey, known also for his various divorce and paternity scandals, recently entered the race as a Republican. A smattering of long shots are also running, including the requisite former L.A. news anchor and requisite former Silicon Valley executive. Butler announced on October 19 that she would not seek the permanent job.

To varying degrees, all of the three leading Democratic candidates have national profiles. Lee, who has represented her Oakland-area district for nearly 25 years, previously chaired both the Congressional Progressive and Black Caucuses. Porter was elected to Congress in 2018 and has gained a quasi-cult following as a progressive gadfly who has a knack for conducting pointed interrogations of executives and public officials that go rapidly viral. A few of her fans were so excited to meet Porter at the Stockton barbecue that three actually spilled drinks on her—this according to the congresswoman, speaking at an event a few days later.

[Ronald Brownstein: Who will replace Dianne Feinstein?]

Schiff, Porter, and Lee all identify as progressive Democrats on most issues, though Schiff tends to be more hawkish on national security. He voted to authorize the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and supported the 2011 U.S. missile strikes against Libya. Lee, who opposed all three, recently criticized Schiff’s foreign-policy views as “part of the status quo thinking” in Washington. (Porter was not in office then.) Schiff expressed “unequivocal support for the security and the right of Israel to defend itself” after last month’s attacks by Hamas. Lee has been more critical of the Israeli government, and called for a cease-fire immediately after the Hamas attacks. As for Porter, she has been a rare progressive to focus her response on America’s Iran policy, which she called lacking and partly to blame for the attacks.

Although Schiff is best known for his work as a Trump antagonist—and happily dines out on that—he is also wary of letting the former president define him entirely. “This is bigger than Trump,” he reminds people whenever the conversation veers too far in Trump’s inevitable direction. Schiff dutifully pivots to more standard campaign themes, namely the “two hugely disruptive forces” he says have shaped American life: “the changes in our economy” and “the changes in how we get our information.” He reels off the number of cities in California that he’s visited, events he’s done, and endorsements he’s received as proof that he is a workmanlike candidate, not just a citizen of the greenroom.

A group of hecklers in a boat floats by near the barbecue. (Photographs by Austin Leong for The Atlantic)

Recently, he lamented that many of his Republican colleagues are now driven by a “perverse celebrity” that he believes the likes of Greene and Boebert have acquired through their Trump-style antics and ties to the former president. I pointed out to Schiff that he, too, has received a lot of Trump-driven recognition. Doesn’t being affiliated with Trump, whether as an ally or an adversary, have benefits for both sides?

“Well, I don’t view it that way at all,” Schiff said. “I don’t view it as having any kind of equivalence. On one hand, we’re trying to defend our democracy. And on the other hand, we have these aiders and abettors of Trump by these vile performance artists. It’s quite different.”

Schiff’s biggest supporter has been Pelosi, who endorsed him over two other members of her own caucus and delegation. This included Lee, whom Pelosi described to me as “like a political sister.” I spoke by phone recently with the former speaker, who was effusive about Schiff and scoffed at any suggestion that he benefited from his resistance to Trump and the counter-backlash that ensued. “If what’s-his-name never existed, Adam Schiff would still be the right person for California,” Pelosi said. It was one of two occasions in our interview in which she refused to utter the word “Trump.”

“I just don’t want to say his name,” she explained. “Because I worry that he’s going to corrode my phone or something.”

In one of my conversations with Schiff, I asked him this multiple-choice question: Who had raised the most money for him—Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, or Donald Trump? My goal was to get Schiff to acknowledge that, without Trump, he would be nowhere near as well known, well financed, or well positioned to potentially represent the country’s most populous state in the Senate.

“I’m not sure how to answer that,” he said. After a pause, he picked himself. “I am my own biggest fundraiser,” he declared. Okay, I said, but wasn’t Trump the single biggest motivator for anyone to donate?

“It’s the whole package,” Schiff maintained, ceding nothing. He then made sure to mention the person who’s been “most formative in helping shape my career and phenomenally helpful in my campaign—Nancy Pelosi.” He was in no rush to give what’s-his-name any credit.