The Biden administration pauses levies on EU steel and aluminium until after the US election.

The Patriot

In the November 2023 issue, Jeffrey Goldberg considered what a general ought to do when the commander in chief undermines the Constitution.

I am a lifelong Republican voter. The Lafayette Square incident described in Jeffrey Goldberg’s article convinced me that any Democrat would be preferable to a second Trump term. The events of January 6 merely confirmed what Lafayette first suggested—that there are no boundaries Donald Trump will not cross.

General Mark Milley’s willingness to block Trump’s worst impulses puts a very different light on Senator Tommy Tuberville’s ongoing obstruction of military promotions. Perhaps Tuberville’s pro-life pretext is just that, a smoke screen providing a cover to gut the upper echelons of military leadership, such that Trump may have a free hand to load the Pentagon with loyalists if he wins the 2024 election. The first putsch failed. If Trump is reelected, the next one will not; there will be no Milley to stop him.

Steve Mittelstaedt
Ferndale, Wash.

“The Patriot” is a deeply insightful look at how the Constitution sits astride American political power dynamics. General Milley dealt with many complexities when serving as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Trump administration, most notably the challenge of balancing his sense of the obligations of his oath of office and the destructive, ugly fantasies of his commander in chief.

As Milley experienced, the press of time and situation rarely allows for good interpretation of the propriety of an order from someone in your chain of command—but Milley consistently did it exceptionally well. I was an enlisted service member. When I ended my term of duty as an Air Force sentry-dog handler, I was of the opinion that common sense and good moral judgment were likely to be inversely proportional to rank. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to accept that those qualities may simply be independent of military rank, as Milley’s tenure demonstrates.

In October 1968, on our last night on post at Tuy Hoa Air Base in Vietnam, my dog, King, and I were patrolling a section of beach adjacent to the South China Sea. At about midnight, my dog and I spotted a sampan about 75 yards offshore. The rule for fishing boats was that they had to be at least 200 meters offshore and have a running light aboard. The sampan was unlit and way too close to shore. I radioed in the sighting to Defense Control. The sergeant on dispatch replied, “Fire two shots over their heads.” My quick assessment was that those were probably two tired local fishermen who had drifted off course, and not a Vietcong recon team. I radioed back, “Firing a flare.” (When one has a radio or a rifle in one hand, and the leash of an alert 80-pound dog in the other, communications tend to be brief.) The flare signaled that we’d seen the boat and were instructing it not to come any closer. Clearly under surveillance, the people on the boat moved out.

My experience adjusting a military command was trivial compared with what Milley had to deal with during the Trump administration. There can be a risk in bucking orders. But Milley’s example provides a model for how and when to do it.

George Cartter
Vacaville, Calif.

What Mitt Romney Saw in the Senate

Behind closed doors, the hypocrisy and cynicism are even worse than you think, McKay Coppins wrote in the November 2023 issue.

Thank you for your article on the retirement of Senator Mitt Romney. Without his presence in the Senate, there is one fewer Republican willing to stand up for democratic principles and put the country above party and self-interest. His ethics and principles will be sorely missed in government.

Ken Derow
Swarthmore, Pa.

It is both charming and troubling that someone with Romney’s access and experience is surprised by the venality of his fellow senators and the illusory nature of American democracy.

Robert Scribner
Oakland, Calif.

Though Mitt Romney is correct that the Republicans in office now are a different sort of group than Republicans of the past, it’s wrong to say that the change is merely that they’ve fallen for a “demagogue” who doesn’t believe in the Constitution. The shift is far deeper and more insidious than that. Many of today’s Republicans have thrown away democratic principles for the acquisition of power. They disguise their betrayal of democracy with flag waving and hide their personal immorality behind Bible thumping; their main concern is satisfying whatever selfish impulse they are experiencing in the moment, regardless of who or what is harmed. This shift predates Donald Trump. His example just gives them permission to be more open about it.

Ginny Oliver
Santa Maria, Calif.

Behind the Cover

We decided for this month’s issue to use our cover as a table of contents, thereby placing the focus squarely on the stories and their authors. The cover as table of contents is a venerable tradition at The Atlantic : Our covers were used exclusively in this fashion from July 1905 to November 1947. This particular cover explicitly references the design—the typography, the layout, and the color—of The Atlantic in the late 1930s. Above, the August 1939 issue.

— Peter Mendelsund, Creative Director

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “The Commons.”

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.

Many Americans—of both parties—have become untethered from reality. When the voters become incoherent, electing leaders becomes a reality show instead of a solemn civic obligation.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The myth of the unemployed college grad Texas becomes an abortion dystopia. They do it for Trump.

National Hypochondria

It’s been a stormy Monday on the East Coast, but with all respect to the Carpenters, I happen to like rainy days and Mondays. So I promise that what I am about to say is not the result of the rain or any Monday blues.

Millions of American voters appear to have lost their grip on reality.

I have been thinking (and writing) about the problem of poorly informed citizens for a long time. Low-information voters are a normal part of the political landscape; in the 21st century, democracies face the added danger of disinformation efforts from authoritarians at home and hostile powers overseas.

But America faces an even more fundamental challenge as the 2024 elections approach: For too many voters, nothing seems to matter. And I mean nothing. Donald Trump approvingly quotes Russian President Vladimir Putin and evokes the language of Adolf Hitler, and yet Americans are so accustomed to Trump’s rhetoric at this point that the story gets relegated to page A10 of the Sunday Washington Post. Joe Biden presides over an economic “soft landing” that almost no one thought could happen, and his approval rating drops to 33 percent—below Jimmy Carter’s in the summer of 1980, when American hostages were being held in Iran, and inflation, at more than 14 percent, was well into a second year of double digits. (Inflation is currently 3.1 percent—and likely will go lower.)

My concern here is not that people aren’t taking Trump’s threat seriously enough (even if they aren’t) or that Biden isn’t getting some of the credit he deserves (even if he isn’t). Rather, the political reactions of American voters seem completely detached from anything that’s happened over the past several years, or even from things that are happening right now. We use vibes to talk about all of this: We’re not in an actual recession, just a “vibecession,” where people feel like it’s a recession.

But you can’t solve imaginary recessions with real policies, just as you can’t cure imagined diseases with real medicine. We are experiencing a kind of political and economic hypochondria, where our good test results can’t possibly be true.

Consider, for example, that last month, Americans felt worse about the economy than they did in April 2009. The key word is feel, because by any standard remotely tied to this planet, it is delusional to think that things are worse today than during the meltdown of the Great Recession. As James Surowiecki (a contributing writer for The Atlantic) dryly observed on X about the comparison to 2009, “It’s true that if you ignore the 9% unemployment rate, the financial system melting down, the millions of people being foreclosed on and losing their homes, and the plummeting stock market decimating people's retirements, it was better. But why would you do that?”

For many reasons, people often say things are bad when they’re good. Even during the best times, someone is hurting. But a simple and very human phenomenon, as I wrote a few years ago, is that people can feel reluctant to jinx the good times by acknowledging them. And of course, partisanship makes people change their views of the economy literally overnight. The media, especially, enables the obsession with bad news. Too many stories about good economic reports (especially on television) are tied to the trope that begins: Not everyone is benefiting, however. Here’s a town …

Such stories are in the name of not forgetting the poor, the dispossessed, the left-behind. The reader or viewer of such stories might be moved to say, “There but for the grace of God go I,” but more likely they will reach the conclusion that the good economic news is a fluke and the destitution before them is the ongoing reality.

A much deeper and more stubborn problem, however, is that Americans, for at least 30 years or more, have developed immense expectations and a powerful sense of entitlement because of years of rising living standards. They are hypersensitive to any change or setback that produces a gap between how they live and how they expect to live—a disconnect that is unbridgeable by any politician.

Trump deals with this disconnect by encouraging it. He indulges his base by talking about “carnage” and the collapse of America, about how terrible things are, how much better they were, and how they’ll be good again in a year. Biden and the Democrats, still tethered to reality, gamely respond with data. Hussein Ibish recently wrote in The Atlantic that Biden can win with this approach: “Biden should ask voters Ronald Reagan’s classic question: Are you better off today than you were four years ago? The answer can only be yes.”

But I think Ibish is being too optimistic. In general, reality-based voters would answer yes. But what if the voters say no?

Even in casual conversations, I find myself flummoxed by people who argue, with much conviction, that America is in fact worse off, even if their own situation is better. When I respond by noting that inflation is not going up, say, or that America is at full employment, or that wages are outpacing prices, or that pay is increasing fastest for the lowest-paid workers, none of it matters. Instead, I get a response that is so common I can now see it coming every time: a head shake, a sigh, and then a comment about how everything is just such a mess.

And yet, after all of the hand-wringing about all the mess, people aren’t acting as if they’re living in an economic crisis. As my colleague Annie Lowrey pointed out recently, few people are spending less, no matter how much they carp about inflation; in surveys, she notes, “people say that they are trading down because of cost pressures. But in fact they are spending more than they ever have, even after accounting for higher prices. They’re spending not just on the necessities, but on fun stuff—amusement parks, UberEats.”

Such paradoxes suggest that dumping on the economy has transcended partisanship or the news cycle and is now a fashion, a kind of expected response, a way of identifying ourselves—no matter what we really believe—as a friend of the downtrodden, a reflex that prevents people from saying that they are doing well and the country seems to be doing fine. No one, after all, wants to get yelled at by the local Helen Lovejoy.

For now, I am going to hope that what we’re seeing is the classic problem of lag: The data are good, but people are still thinking about their situation three months ago—you know, back when the 2023 economy was worse than the Great Recession—and that perceptions will catch up. Abraham Lincoln implored citizens in 1838 to rely on “cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason.” But if Americans are now stuck in the mode where nothing but vibes and feelings matter, much more is at risk than one or two elections. No democracy can long survive an electorate whose only guidance is emotion.

Related:

The bad-vibes economy Why Trump won’t win

Today’s News

The Vatican said that the Pope had allowed priests to bless same-sex couples but clarified that the new rule does not amend the Church’s traditional doctrine on marriage. A new ProPublica investigation reported that Justice Clarence Thomas made private complaints in 2000 about his salary, raising alarm across the judiciary and Capitol Hill that he would resign. Governor Greg Abbott of Texas signed a bill into law that gives law enforcement the power to arrest migrants suspected of illegally crossing the Mexican border. The law takes effect in March, but lawsuits against it are expected.

Dispatches

Galaxy Brain: Charlie Warzel asks: Why does nobody know what’s happening online anymore? Stuck in our own corner of the internet, the concept of what makes a trend viral is now up for debate.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Hannah Price

In 2021, Wright Thompson wrote about the barn where Emmett Till was tortured.

The Atlantic article caught the attention of Shonda Rhimes, who today announced a donation to the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, which will buy the barn and convert it into a memorial.

Read Wright’s article.

More From The Atlantic

The curious SNL return of Kate McKinnon The new family vacation The little-known rule change that made the Supreme Court so powerful Give Russia’s frozen assets to Ukraine now.

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic

Listen. Today, work isn’t done exclusively in the workplace. What if there are better ways to separate your personal and professional time? Becca Rashid and Ian Bogost discuss in the latest episode of How to Keep Time.

Read. Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction, the most buzzed-about work of literary scholarship published this past year, explores the invisible forces behind the books we read.

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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