From the standpoint of many on the left, former President Donald Trump did exactly two good things in office. He supported Operation Warp Speed, which facilitated the development and production of the first COVID-19 vaccines. And in 2018, he signed the First Step Act, a bipartisan criminal-justice bill that shortened federal prison terms, gave judges more latitude in sentencing, and provided educational programming to ease prisoners’ eventual return to the outside world.

The best account of how Democrats and Republicans improbably joined forces in the lead-up to this effort to reduce mass incarceration comes from the political scientists David Dagan and Steven Teles. On the left, progressives managed to persuade centrist Democrats that Clinton-era tough-on-crime policies, such as lengthy prison terms for drug crimes and mandatory life sentences for repeat violent offenders, had done more harm than good. Meanwhile, on the right, a group of savvy conservative activists, some moved by Christian notions of forgiveness, reframed mass incarceration as an example of wasteful government spending. With crime hovering around a 50-year low, a vanishingly rare moment of cooperation became possible. Trump was proud to seal the deal.

We’re not in that moment anymore. Violent crime rose during the pandemic, and although it has since ebbed somewhat, fear remains high. Republicans have seized the opportunity to mobilize their base and court independents, attacking progressive criminal-justice reforms and calling for a retrenchment. Taking a dig at Trump earlier this year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis described the First Step Act as a “huge, huge mistake.” (He’d voted for an early version of it while in Congress.)

In our current environment, an ambitious initiative like the First Step Act seems impossible. Only the most commonsense proposals for improving the system stand much of a chance. But they exist, and one such idea has been gaining attention recently: reinvigorating the parole process so more prisoners who have already served years for their crimes and no longer pose a threat to public safety might be able to go free. How many prisoners fit those criteria is hard to say, but Ben Austen, a Chicago-based journalist, reports that approximately 165,000 inmates older than 55 are in American prisons, many of them sentenced for violent crimes committed in their youth. In his new book, Correction, he makes a case for giving them a way out.

Correction centers on the experiences of two Black men doing time for murder. One evening in 1971, Michael Henderson, an 18-year-old welder, was hanging out in front of a lounge in East St. Louis, Illinois. Richard Schaeffer, a high-school student, had been driving around with some friends; the group stopped Henderson and asked if he’d buy them beer. He did and then demanded a tip. When they refused, Henderson produced a gun, shooting as the kids tried to speed away. Schaeffer was killed. Henderson turned down a plea deal and was convicted, sentenced to 100 to 200 years behind bars.

The year before Schaeffer’s murder, 1970, two Chicago police officers, James Severin and Anthony Rizzato, were ambushed and killed as they walked through the Cabrini-Green housing projects, shot with a rifle at long range before they’d had the chance to draw their weapons. After an intense manhunt, the police arrested Johnnie Veal, a 17-year-old gang member, along with a janitor named George Clifford Knights. Someone reported that they’d heard Veal speak about his role in the killing. Narrowly escaping the death penalty, Veal got 100 to 199 years.

Given the life span of human beings, these sound like irrational, gratuitous sentences. What interests Austen about them is that they were handed down during a period when sentences were often indeterminate: However big the numbers pronounced by a judge, a prisoner could be released at whatever point a parole board decided that he’d been punished enough and had been rehabilitated.

Indeterminate sentencing was an invention of the progressive era. Although the practice gave prison authorities tremendous discretion, it may have had the paradoxical effect of reducing the amount of time prisoners would in fact serve, in part because it created an incentive for them to abide by prison rules and participate in rehabilitative programs.

In the early 1970s, however, indeterminate sentencing came under sharp attack. Echoing the complaints of prisoners radicalized during the ’60s, legal scholars charged that parole-board members—often political appointees with no special expertise—were incompetent at best, and vindictive and racist at worst. These criticisms gained traction, and in 1976, the state of Maine became the first mover in a trend toward the end of “discretionary parole.” In the ’80s and ’90s, victims’-rights advocates and law-and-order types came at parole from the other direction, favoring prison terms with less opportunity for early release that would at least have the benefit of “truth in sentencing.”

States would still use “supervised parole”: After serving a statutorily defined minimum term, prisoners could be let out under the supervision of a parole officer before the end of their sentence, if they’d earned so-called good-time credits inside. Yet there was much less flexibility in the process.

[Read: The forgotten tradition of clemency]

Illinois abolished indeterminate sentencing in 1978. But inmates such as Henderson and Veal, who’d been sentenced before then, remained governed by the old rules. Austen got to know the two men well. He paints a vivid portrait of what it’s like to be incarcerated for decades and have one’s fitness for freedom continually assessed, a dynamic that may be loaded with particular meaning and complexity for Black inmates.

Henderson owned up to his responsibility for Richard Schaeffer’s death; Veal maintains his innocence in the Chicago police murders. (Austen suggests that he was wrongly convicted.) Regardless, although neither was a saint in prison, especially in their early years, both eventually decided to make something positive of their lives.

Henderson became an expert tailor. He stopped smoking and took to running laps in the recreation yard, the exercise an opportunity for meditation and introspection. He counseled other prisoners on staying out of trouble and sought to mend frayed relationships with his family.

While surviving several years of near solitary confinement, Veal discovered reading. He was drawn to books that provided solace and insight. Later, he learned to play the saxophone and flute, mentored and protected younger inmates, and developed a political consciousness.

For both men, going up for parole every few years only to be turned down again and again was excruciating, the process marked by irrationality and unfairness. (For example, prisoners aren’t always represented by lawyers in parole-board hearings.) But the prospect that, at any of those hearings, the work they’d done to better themselves might be recognized and rewarded also served as a powerful incentive toward self-actualization.

Austen would prefer that America rely far less on imprisonment to deal with those who have broken the law. But the conclusion he draws is that if we’re going to have prisons, we should dramatically expand eligibility for parole, make the parole-decision process more transparent and fair, and boost our investment in rehabilitation (he favors a Scandinavian prison model that includes vocational training and mental-health care). That way, more inmates could have a shot at one day regaining their freedom.

Correction is smart and well reported. Austen is deft at interweaving policy and narrative, and he has an ethnographer’s eye for the social drama of parole hearings. Injustices and hypocrisies abound in our penal system, and Austen does good work in unearthing them. If the book has a weakness, it’s that Austen—like many contemporary writers on criminal-justice reform—sometimes seems to be writing more for his fellow progressives than for the centrists and conservatives who actually need convincing.

Consider an important claim he makes in arguing for an expansion of parole eligibility: that for most offenses, 20 years in prison should be the maximum punishment. Criminological research shows that sentences longer than 20 years have no additional deterrent benefit. Two decades behind bars is a harsh penalty. And keeping prisoners beyond that is extraordinarily expensive, especially as their medical-care costs mount later in life—yet another reason, Austen says, that we need “a carceral system focused not on vengeance and permanent punishment but on the possibility of everybody going home.”

These are all reasonable points, likely to resonate with lefty readers who find the very idea of prison abhorrent (with the caveat that prison abolitionists may wish that Austen had gone further with his critique). But readers with different moral sensibilities may think that some crimes are so heinous and destructive to the social order that the appropriate punishment is lifetime incarceration without the possibility of parole, if not death. They may also believe that we should therefore focus our energies on preventing these crimes, so that the double tragedy of a victim being injured or killed and the offender losing his freedom can be averted.

In many states, enough people take a position roughly like this to doom any political attempts at meaningful parole reform for violent offenses. (Almost two-thirds of Americans believe that the death penalty is the appropriate penalty for a crime such as murder.) What would be required to bring them on board?

Probably not what the book offers. Austen aims to convince primarily by making readers feel sympathy for and invested in Henderson and Veal’s fate, which is revealed before the last page. This is an admirable goal given that the incarcerated are often dehumanized. But many opponents of parole expansion won’t find Henderson and Veal to be sympathetic figures. Even if they did, you can feel sympathy for what people are going through because of their life choices without concluding that society should spare them those consequences.

Part of the problem is that Austen never takes his opponents seriously as interlocutors. When he writes about a debate program at Stateville Correctional Center, outside Joliet, where in 2018 the participants considered whether Illinois should bring back discretionary parole, he outlines only the “pro” argument. (The debaters themselves never took the negative side, deciding in the end, perhaps for strategic reasons, that the debate should be about how to reinstate discretionary parole, not whether.) When people who would presumably disagree with Austen’s proposals appear in the book, they’re cast as biased and reactionary. This is the treatment he gives to the Chicago police officers and members of James Severin’s family who showed up in protest to every one of Veal’s parole hearings.

Yet had Austen approached parole opponents with the same openness he extended to Henderson and Veal, he might have learned something valuable.

[Read: What prison takes away]

Is the motivation of such people truly to make sure that crime victims are never forgotten, as many of the Chicago police officers intimated? Then could they be persuaded by the argument that you honor those victims better by taking the money saved through parole reform and funneling it into local law enforcement, to help prevent future crimes? Alternatively, could you resurrect the argument that worked so well before the passage of the First Step Act, namely that lifetime incarceration means lifetime government benefits—shelter, food, medical care—at taxpayer expense?

Could you argue that, with relatively high levels of substance abuse among American adults, it won’t be long until just about everyone knows somebody locked up for making the worst mistake of their life, and wouldn’t it be good if redemption were possible for them too? Maybe the Chicago police officers who came to Veal’s parole hearings had someone like that in their families. Or maybe that was true for other Chicago police officers who didn’t come and who might not have been as hostile to the idea of second chances. That would have been a powerful story to tell.

David Dagan and Steven Teles’s research on the First Step Act shows that minds can be changed regarding criminal justice, even amid polarization. But it requires that you engage creatively and on their own terms with the worldviews you’re trying to shake loose.

The Supreme Court’s upcoming decision about the most common pharmaceutical used for medication abortions may be just the beginning of the political battle over the drug.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal of lower-court rulings that would severely reduce access to mifepristone. The Court’s acceptance of the case marked a crucial juncture in the legal maneuvering over the medication.

But however the high court rules, pressure is mounting inside the GOP coalition for the next Republican president to broadly use executive authority at the Food and Drug Administration and the Justice Department to limit access to mifepristone and to reduce what abortion opponents call “chemical abortion.”

“Chemical abortion will be front and center and presented front and center by the pro-life movement if there is a Republican president,” Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life of America, told me. “There is going to be a lot of action we want to see taken.”

The possibility of new executive-branch restrictions on abortion drugs, which are now used in a majority of all U.S. abortions, underscores the stakes over abortion in the 2024 presidential election. Even if Donald Trump or another Republican wins back the White House next year, they might not have enough votes in Congress to pass a nationwide ban on the practice. But through executive action, the next GOP president could unilaterally retrench access to mifepristone in every state, however the Supreme Court decides the current case. Multiple former FDA officials and advocates on both sides of the issue told me that through regulatory and legal actions by the FDA, the Justice Department, or both, the next Republican president could impose all the limits on access to mifepristone that anti-abortion groups are seeking in the lawsuit now before the high court.

[Read: Abortion is inflaming the GOP’s biggest electoral problem]

“The FDA is a highly regulated space, so there are a lot of hoops they would have to jump through,” Jeremy Sharp, the FDA’s deputy commissioner for policy planning, legislation, and analysis during part of Barack Obama’s second term, told me. “But if they got a commissioner in there that was ideologically motivated, and if they changed the staff leadership, then there’s a lot they could do before anybody could get in the way and stop them.”

The growing Republican focus on using executive-branch authority against abortion access marks a new front in the broader political confrontation over reproductive rights. While Roe v. Wade was in place, the social conservative movement was focused overwhelmingly on trying to reverse the nationwide right to abortion and “wasn’t zoned in on this issue” of federal regulatory authority over abortion drugs, Hawkins noted.

Medication abortion involves two drugs: mifepristone followed by misoprostol (which is also used to prevent stomach ulcers). From 2000 through 2022, almost 6 million women in the U.S. used mifepristone to end a pregnancy, according to the FDA. In all those cases of women using the drug, the agency has recorded only 32 deaths (including for reasons unrelated to the drug) and a little more than 1,000 hospitalizations. The risk of major complications has been less than half of 1 percent.

Neither of the past two Republican presidents acted against the drugs administratively or even faced sustained pressure from social conservatives to do so. The FDA initially approved mifepristone for use in abortion during the final months of Bill Clinton’s presidency, in 2000. But during Republican President George W. Bush’s two terms, the FDA made no effort to rescind that approval.

During Obama’s final year, the FDA significantly loosened the restrictions on usage of the drug. (Among other things, the agency reduced the number of physician visits required to obtain the drugs from three to one; increased from seven to 10 the number of weeks into a pregnancy the drugs could be used; and permitted other medical professionals besides physicians to prescribe the drugs if they received certification.) During Trump’s four years, the FDA did not move to undo any of those decisions.

But the right’s focus on abortion drugs has significantly increased since Trump left office. According to Hawkins, one reason is that the COVID pandemic crystallized awareness of how many abortions are performed remotely with the drugs, rather than in medical settings. Even more important may have been the decision by the six GOP-appointed Supreme Court justices in 2022 to overturn Roe. By fulfilling the top goal of anti-abortion activists, that decision both freed them to concentrate on other issues and raised their ambitions.

In one measure of that growing zeal, social conservative groups and Republican elected officials have pushed back much harder against Joe Biden’s attempts to expand access to mifepristone than they did against Obama’s moves. Under Biden, the FDA has eliminated the requirement for an in-person visit to obtain mifepristone; instead it allows patients to get a prescription for the drug through a telehealth visit and then receive it through the mail. The FDA under Biden has also allowed pharmacies that receive certification to dispense the drug.

As I wrote earlier this year, the paradox is that Biden’s rules will be felt almost entirely in the states where abortion remains legal. Almost all red states have passed laws that still require medical professionals to be present when the drugs are administered, and, even though the FDA allows their use through 10 weeks of pregnancy, the drugs cannot be prescribed in violation of state time limits (or absolute bans) on abortion.

Shortly after last November’s midterm election, an alliance of conservative groups sued in federal court to overturn not only Biden’s measures to ease access to the drug but also the changes approved in 2016 under Obama, and even the decision under Clinton in 2000 to approve the drug at all.

[​​Read: Why Trump might just roll to the presidential nomination]

In April 2023, Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee and abortion opponent, ruled almost entirely for the plaintiffs, striking down the Biden and Obama regulations and the FDA’s original approval of the drug. In August, a panel of three Republican-appointed judges on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Kacsmaryk’s ruling overturning the Obama and Biden regulatory changes. But the panel, by 2–1, ruled that it was too late to challenge the drug’s original approval.

The Supreme Court along the way blocked the implementation of any of these rulings until it reached a final decision in the case, so mifepristone has remained available. In its announcement earlier this month, the Court agreed to hear appeals to the Fifth Circuit decision erasing the Obama and Biden administrations’ regulatory changes but declined to reconsider the circuit court’s upholding of mifepristone’s original approval. Those choices have raised hopes among abortion-rights activists that the Court appears inclined to reverse the lower court’s ruling and preserve the existing FDA rules. “We are very hopeful this is an indicator the Court is not inclined to rule broadly on medication abortion and they are concerned about the reasoning of the decisions [so far],” said Rabia Muqaddam, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, a group that supports legal abortion.

But the legal process has shown that even a Supreme Court decision maintaining the current rules is unlikely to end the fight over mifepristone. The reason is that the proceedings have demonstrated much broader support in the GOP than previously for executive-branch action against the drug.

For instance, 124 Republicans in the House of Representatives and 23 GOP senators have submitted a brief to the Supreme Court urging it to affirm the Fifth Circuit’s ruling overturning the Obama and Biden actions on mifepristone. “By approving and then deregulating chemical abortion drugs, the FDA failed to follow Congress’ statutorily prescribed drug approval process and subverted Congress’ critical public policy interests in upholding patient welfare,” the Republican legislators wrote. Republican attorneys general from 21 states submitted a brief with similar arguments in support of the decision reversing the Obama and Biden administrations’ regulatory actions.

In another measure, a large majority of House Republicans voted last summer to reverse the FDA’s decisions under Biden that expanded access to the drugs. Though the legislation failed when about two dozen moderates voted against it, the predominant support in the GOP conference reflected the kind of political pressure the next Republican president could face to pursue the same goals through FDA regulatory action.

Simultaneously, conservatives have signaled another line of attack they want the next GOP president to pursue against medication abortions. In late 2022, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion that the Postal Service could deliver the drugs without violating the 19th-century Comstock Act, which bars use of the mail “to corrupt the public morals.” That interpretation, the opinion argued, was in line with multiple decisions by federal courts spanning decades that the law barred the mailing of only materials used in illegal abortions.

Conservatives are arguing that the next Republican administration should reverse that OLC ruling and declare that the Comstock Act bars the mailing of medications used in any abortions.

The fact that both Kacsmaryk and Circuit Court Judge James Ho, also appointed by Trump, endorsed that view in their rulings on mifepristone this year offers one measure of the receptivity to this idea in conservative legal circles. As telling was a letter sent last spring by nine GOP senators to major drug-store chains warning that they could be held in violation of the Comstock Act not only if they ship abortion drugs to consumers but even if they use the mail or other freight carriers to deliver the drugs to their own stores.

Trump and his leading rivals for the 2024 GOP nomination, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, have avoided explicit commitments to act against medication abortions. But all of these efforts are indications of the pressure they would face to do so if elected. Hawkins said that anti-abortion groups have chosen not to press the candidates for specific plans on regulatory steps against mifepristone but instead intend to closely monitor the views of potential appointments by the next GOP president, the same tactic signaled by the senators in their letter to drug-store chains. “It will make for probably the most contentious fight ever over who is nominated and confirmed” for the key positions at the FDA and other relevant agencies, Hawkins told me.

Stephen Ostroff, who served as acting FDA commissioner under both Obama and Trump, told me that future Republican appointees would likely find more success in reconsidering the regulations governing access to mifepristone than in reopening the approval of the drug altogether this long after the original approval. Even reconsidering the access rules, he predicts, would likely ignite intense conflict between political appointees and career scientific staff.

“I think it would be challenging for a commissioner to come in and push the scientific reviewers and other scientific staff to do things they don’t think are appropriate to do,” Ostroff told me. “You’d have to do a lot of housecleaning in order to be able to accomplish that.” But, he added, “I’m not saying it is impossible.”

In fact, political appointees under presidents of both parties have at times overruled FDA decisions. Kathleen Sebelius, the Health and Human Services secretary for Obama, blocked an FDA ruling allowing the over-the-counter sale of emergency contraception to girls younger than 17; the Biden White House has delayed an FDA decision to ban the sale of menthol cigarettes, amid concerns about a possible backlash among Black voters.

Many legal and regulatory experts closely following the issue believe that a Republican president’s first target would be the FDA’s decision to allow mifepristone to be prescribed remotely and shipped by mail or dispensed in pharmacies. To build support for action against mifepristone, a new FDA commissioner also might compel drug companies to launch new studies about the drug’s safety or require the agency’s staff to reexamine the evidence despite the minimal number of adverse consequences over the years, Sharp told me.

Faced with continuing signs of voter backlash on efforts to restrict abortion, any Republican president might think twice before moving aggressively against mifepristone. And any future attempt to limit the drug—through either FDA regulations or a revised Justice Department opinion about the Comstock Act—would face an uncertain outcome at the Supreme Court, however the Court decides the current case. The one certainty for the next GOP president is that the pressure from social conservatives for new regulatory and legal action against mifepristone will be vastly greater than it was the most recent two times Republicans controlled the executive branch. “We want all the tools in the tool kit being used to protect mothers and children from these drugs,” Hawkins told me. Amid such demands, the gulf between the FDA’s future decisions about the drug under a Republican or Democratic president may become much wider than it has been since mifepristone first became available, more than two decades ago.

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

Question of the Week

How much time did you spend with peers in adolescence, and what effect did that have on the rest of your life? (Anecdotes illustrating how you spent that time and in what era are especially welcome.)

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

Conversations of Note

Among Gen Xers, 60 percent say they spent most or all of their teen years hanging out in person with friends. The figure for Gen Zers is 40 percent. Among Gen Xers, 76 percent say they had a boyfriend or girlfriend at some point as a teenager. The figure for Gen Zers is 56 percent.

Those survey data are from a new American Enterprise Institute report on “Generation Z and the Transformation of American Adolescence.” Other data points of interest: “Gen Z is also significantly less likely than older generations to have regularly attended religious services, worked a part-time job, or consumed alcohol, pot, or cigarettes for at least part of their teenage years. Similarly, teenage participation in competitive sports and outdoor activities, such as hunting and scouting, is on the decline, though athletic participation among young women outpaces the oldest generations.”

The authors conclude that “Gen Z stands apart socially.”

The Role of Technology

Jonathan Haidt argues that technology is affecting girls and boys in Gen Z differently:

Back when I was focused on anxiety and depression as the dependent variables, the story of technology (as the independent variable) seemed to be a story that was mostly about girls. But once I read an early draft of Richard Reeves’s book Of Boys and Men, I realized that I had been focused on the wrong dependent variables. For boys and young men, the key change has been the retreat from the real world since the 1970s, when they began investing less effort in school, employment, dating, marriage, and parenting …

Zach Rausch and I have constructed a timeline of the digital revolution and shown how at every step—from the first personal computers in the 1970s through the early internet in the 1990s and the rise of online multiplayer games in the 2000s—the virtual world sent out a siren song that sounded sweeter, on average, to boys than it did to girls. Why? Among the most consistent and largest of all psychological sex differences is the “people vs. things” dichotomy. On average, boys are more attracted to things, machines, and complex systems that can be manipulated, while girls are more attracted to people; they are more interested in what those people are thinking and feeling.

In Persuasion, Freya India argues that Instagram and other social-media apps are harming girls. She imagines a hypothetical girl born in 1999 who was a pre-teen when Instagram was introduced:

Back then it was fairly benign: a platform to share pretty sunsets and candid pictures with friends. A few years in, the editing app FaceTune arrives (launched in 2014), and everyone on your feed starts to look perfect. You start editing yourself—smoothing your skin, reshaping your nose, restructuring your jaw. By the time you’re 16, your Instagram face is very different from your natural face, which you’ve come to despise.

And then the algorithms are introduced: your feed is no longer chronological but customized. Instagram now serves you not just photos of the friends you follow but of “influencers”—beautiful women from all over the world, selecting the ones that make you feel the most insecure. Soon you get ads to fix your flaws: Botox; fillers; Brazilian Butt Lifts! By the time TikTok comes out you’re 18, and your feed tracks you even faster. Hate your nose? Try this editing app. Not enough? Try this video editing app. Want it in real life? Nose jobs near you! Suddenly you’re in your 20s and you’ve transformed your style, your face, maybe even your body. And yet you are still insecure. You still hate how you look. And every day your feeds flash on with This is your sign to get a nose job!, The earlier you start Botox the better!, Get ready with me for a Brazilian butt lift! For many girls, this rewiring of their self-image, this pressure to alter their appearance, happened without them realizing it. It was gradual. Subtle. Drip-fed.

Make Walls Stone Again

In The Atlantic, Hannah Kirshner notes that concrete has a big carbon footprint and argues for greater reliance on an older method:

Reviving dry stone walling would be better for the environment—as well as preserve aesthetically and culturally valuable scenery. But building more stone walls would mean relying on traditional craftsmanship over modern engineering. I thought of stone walling as an expensive antique building method until I spoke with Reo Kaneko, a civil engineer who over the past 14 years has become an advocate for this time-tested craft …

A concrete retaining wall can last about 50 to 100 years, after which the degraded material must be hauled away for recycling or disposal ... By some estimates, producing concrete releases nearly a pound of CO2 per pound of usable material; under the right conditions, stone for a wall can be gathered on-site or quarried nearby. The rocks can be used without cutting them into uniform shapes, limiting waste. And the life span of a dry stone wall is potentially hundreds of years, in part because a well-built wall can shift to some extent without buckling when it freezes and thaws, or even in an earthquake.

Join or Die

Prior to last night’s GOP-primary debate, Jim Geraghty of National Review offered advice to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley:

Another six weeks of attempting to trash the other is only going to increase the already-high odds of Trump’s becoming the nominee. So why not skip the mutually assured destruction-like dynamic, the fight to be the last non-Trump candidate standing, and work out a unity ticket?

The pair would probably work well together on a ticket and in a presidency. DeSantis–Haley, or Haley–DeSantis? Work it out amongst yourselves; as Dick Cheney can tell you, the vice presidency can be an extremely powerful office if you play your cards right. If you actually want to influence federal policy and let someone else be the lightning rod getting all the criticism, the vice presidency might actually be a more appealing office.

Provocation of the Week

The civil-rights-era hero Bayard Rustin has received overdue attention recently, partly thanks to a recently released Netflix biopic. On January 19, 1987, Rustin delivered a speech at Harvard University Chapel setting forth his views on how the struggle for Black equality should proceed. The nation did not take the approach he urged, but it still could. His analysis and recommendations, later published in The New Republic, included the following:

The old form of racism was based on prejudging all blacks as somehow inherently undeserving of equal treatment. What makes the new form more insidious is its basis in observed sociological data. The new racist equates the pathology of the poor with race, ignoring the fact that family dissolution, teenage pregnancy, illegitimacy, alcohol and drug abuse, street crime, and idleness are universal problems of the poor. They exist wherever there is economic dislocation and deterioration—in the cities, for example, dotting Britain’s devastated industrial north. They are rampant among the white jobless in Liverpool as well as among unemployed blacks in New York, And if the American underclass seems more violent, it is only because we, as a nation, are more violent.

The new forms of racism cannot be attacked frontally. Society will not combat the new racism, as has been naively suggested in the press, by asking people to be good or asking teachers to teach new courses on tolerance. Nor can it be attacked by adopting the strategy and tactics used so effectively by King in the 1960s. To combat bigotry and injustice today requires an analysis of structural changes in the economy … The technological revolution, automation, cybernation, and robots have taken jobs away from the poor and uneducated. And though some of these innovations create work, they do not create work for those without skills or, worse, those unable to attain them. Labor-intensive industries, which were prime vehicles for economic advancement for generations of white immigrants and black former slaves, have gone overseas, never to return.

To honor King we must look ahead, beyond the racial equality dream, to economic equity … The second phase of the revolution envisioned by King will require billions of dollars. But they are not dollars that will be spent on an exclusively black agenda. Continuing black economic progress and equal opportunity are not contingent on the government providing “special treatment” to blacks. Any preferential approach postulated along racial, ethnic, religious, or sexual lines will only disrupt a multicultural society and lead to a backlash. However, special treatment can be provided to those who have been exploited or denied opportunities if solutions are predicated along class lines, precisely because all religious, ethnic, and racial groups have a depressed class who would benefit.

Black economic progress is contingent upon the national economy performing well for all Americans. That can only happen if the federal government commits billions in resources to a comprehensive program that addresses this nation’s deteriorating economic position and the erosion of education and research and development. We need a national commitment to excellence in education and to federal vocational and job-training programs to help blacks and others enter an increasingly specialized and competitive job market, and to move on to new jobs when technological innovation eliminates old jobs.

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