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More than 200 years ago, Alexander Hamilton defied partisanship for the sake of the country’s future; if he hadn’t done so, American history might have taken a very different course. Today, Republicans face the same choice.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The Trumpification of the Supreme Court “No one has a right to protest in my home.” Columbia University’s impossible position

A Red Line

Alexander Hamilton loathed Thomas Jefferson. As rivals in George Washington’s Cabinet, the two fought over economics, the size and role of government, and slavery. They disagreed bitterly about the French Revolution (Jefferson was enthralled, Hamilton appalled). Hamilton thought Jefferson was a hypocrite, and Jefferson described Hamilton as “a man whose history … is a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the country.”

But starting in late 1800, Hamilton broke with his fellow Federalists and provided crucial support that put Jefferson in the White House. He was willing to set aside his tribal loyalties and support a man whose policies he vigorously opposed—a choice that saved the nation from a dangerous demagogue but likely cost him his life.

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” Mark Twain probably never said. The quote’s attribution is apocryphal, but the point seems apt, because about 220 years later, Republicans face the same choice Hamilton did. They now have to decide whether felony charges, fraud, sexual abuse, and insurrection are red lines that supersede partisan loyalty.

Alexander Hamilton’s red line was Aaron Burr, whom he regarded as a dangerous, narcissistic mountebank and a “man of extreme & irregular ambition.” Burr was Jefferson’s running mate in the 1800 election, in which he defeated the Federalist incumbent John Adams. But under the original Constitution, the candidate with the most electoral votes became president, and the second-place finisher became vice president. Bizarrely, Jefferson and Burr each got 73 electoral votes, and because the vote was tied, the election was thrown to the House, which now had to choose the next president. Many Federalists, who detested and feared the idea of a Jefferson presidency, wanted to install Burr instead.

The result was a constitutional crisis that threatened to turn violent. “Republican newspapers talked of military intervention,” the historian Gordon Wood wrote in Empire of Liberty. “The governors of Virginia and Pennsylvania began preparing their state militias for action. Mobs gathered in the capital and threatened to prevent any president from being appointed by statute.”

Hamilton was faced with a difficult choice. He was a leading figure among Federalists; Jefferson was the leader of the faction known as Democratic-Republicans. And the 1790s were a historically partisan era. Yet “in a choice of Evils,” Hamilton wrote, “Jefferson is in every view less dangerous than Burr.” Washington, in his Farewell Address (which Hamilton helped draft and which Donald Trump’s lawyers misleadingly quoted this week), sounded the alarm about the growing partisan factionalism that he thought was tearing the country apart. Political parties, he said, could become “potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.” Hamilton was convinced that Aaron Burr was exactly the sort of cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled man that Washington had warned against.

Even though Jefferson was “too revolutionary in his notions,” Hamilton was willing to swallow his disagreements, because Jefferson was “yet a lover of liberty and will be desirous of something like orderly Government.” In contrast, “Mr. Burr loves nothing but himself—thinks of nothing but his own aggrandizement—and will be content with nothing short of permanent power in his own hands.”

Defying his fellow Federalists, Hamilton waged a vigorous and ultimately successful campaign to derail the scheme to install Burr. Jefferson was elected president on the 36th ballot after a group of Federalist congressmen flipped their votes for Burr, choosing to abstain instead.

Hamilton’s career in politics, already badly damaged by scandal, was effectively over. Burr, who became vice president, never forgave Hamilton, and on July 11, 1804, he fatally shot Hamilton in a duel in Weehawken, New Jersey. Burr was charged with murder but served out his term as vice president, immune from prosecution. Three years later, he was arrested and charged with treason after he allegedly plotted to seize territory in the West and create a new empire. He was acquitted on a technicality, and fled the country in disgrace.

But for Hamilton’s willingness to defy partisanship, American history might have taken a very different course.

Like Hamilton, we live in an age of fierce loyalties that make crossing party lines extraordinarily difficult. If anything, it is even harder now, especially for Republicans living with social pressures, media echo chambers, and a cult-like party culture compassed round, in the words of John Milton. Many public figures in the GOP have shown that they cannot break free of partisanship even in the face of rank criminality.

For example: Former Attorney General Bill Barr and New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu acknowledge Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, and his culpability in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. But both men have said they would vote for Trump. Sununu has said that he would do so even if Trump is convicted of multiple felonies, suggesting that his crimes would be less important than his political differences with the Democrats. Former Vice President Mike Pence has said he would not endorse Trump, but he has also ruled out voting for Joe Biden.

Even former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who declared that Trump “is wholly unfit to be president of the United States in every way you think,” cannot bring himself to support the Democratic incumbent. We’re still waiting for Nikki Haley to say how she will vote in November.

So far, only Liz Cheney seems to be taking a position that rhymes with Hamilton’s choice two centuries ago. “There are some conservatives who are trying to make this claim that somehow Biden is a bigger risk than Trump,” she said. “My view is: I disagree with a lot of Joe Biden’s policies. We can survive bad policies. We cannot survive torching the Constitution.” Alexander Hamilton would, I think, approve.

Related:

Trump’s willing accomplice The validation brigade salutes Trump.

Today’s News

ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, released a statement yesterday asserting that it has no plans to sell the social-media app, in light of the potential national ban. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that the U.S. will give Ukraine additional Patriot missiles as part of a $6 billion aid package. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing. Blinken indicated that Chinese leaders had not made any promises about the U.S. demand that China cut its support for Russia’s defense industry.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: The author Adam Hochschild recommends books that vividly illustrate moments of great change. Atlantic Intelligence: As a technology, AI is “quite thirsty, relying on data centers that require not just a tremendous amount of energy, but water to cool themselves with,” Damon Beres writes. Work in Progress: Derek Thompson explores why it’s so hard to answer the question What makes us happiest?

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Evening Read

Tony Evans / Getty

We’re All Reading Wrong

By Alexandra Moe

Reading, while not technically medicine, is a fundamentally wholesome activity. It can prevent cognitive decline, improve sleep, and lower blood pressure. In one study, book readers outlived their nonreading peers by nearly two years. People have intuitively understood reading’s benefits for thousands of years: The earliest known library, in ancient Egypt, bore an inscription that read “The House of Healing for the Soul.”

But the ancients read differently than we do today. Until approximately the tenth century, when the practice of silent reading expanded thanks to the invention of punctuation, reading was synonymous with reading aloud. Silent reading was terribly strange, and, frankly, missed the point of sharing words to entertain, educate, and bond. Even in the 20th century, before radio and TV and smartphones and streaming entered American living rooms, couples once approached the evening hours by reading aloud to each other.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

Photo by my wife, J. F. Riordan

I’m hoping to spend some quality time this weekend with Auggie and Eli, who still think they are lapdogs. That’s me under there.

— Charlie

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Former Attorney General Bill Barr gave an interview to CNN on Friday to explain why he plans to vote for Donald Trump after previously denouncing him as unfit for office. Trump might be an unfit president, Barr conceded. Trump had only recently belittled Barr personally. But President Joe Biden might overregulate kitchen stoves, Barr complained, and faced with that dread possibility, Barr had to prefer Trump as the lesser evil.

Barr feels how he feels. But as a rational matter, he’s not thinking clearly. Even for a conservative Republican such as Barr, who wants to maximize power for conservative Republicanism, Trump is a choice that makes sense only if you have no long-term imagination at all. To see how wrong that choice is, consider a hypothetical: how much better Republicans’ political prospects would look today if the Electoral College had followed the popular vote in 2016 and Hillary Clinton had won the presidency that year. Back then, someone like Barr would have thought that outcome a catastrophe. But in retrospect imagine:

Alongside a President Clinton, voters in 2016 elected a 241–194 Republican House and a 52–48 Republican Senate. A President Clinton would probably not have signed as big a tax cut as President Trump did in 2017. Her regulators would not have been as friendly to the oil and gas industry as Trump’s were. But facing such strong Republican majorities in Congress, and with a popular-vote mandate of only 48 percent, she would have been limited in her ability to advance her own agenda.

Now look at what might have happened next. In the real-life elections of 2018, Republicans got badly beaten. They dropped 40 House seats in the highest-turnout off-year election since before World War I. In our hypothetical–President Clinton scenario, Republicans surely would have added seats to their House majority in 2018, while likely holding the Senate too. The party of the president almost always loses seats in a midterm, and that’s even more emphatically true when the party of the president has held office for three consecutive terms.

In 2020, when COVID struck, a President Clinton surely would have responded more competently and compassionately than Trump did. But the pandemic still would have been a bad experience for most Americans—doubly so if riots broke out in our alternate-history 2020 as they did in the real timeline. Republicans would have been well-positioned for a massive presidential comeback that fall, very possibly with the popular-vote majority they otherwise have not won since 2004.

[Peter Wehner: Trump’s willing accomplice]

Whoever the new Republican president would have been, the GOP could have passed a big 2017-style tax cut in 2021—without having to cover for Trump’s alleged crimes. The post-COVID recovery—inflation in 2021 and 2022, followed by strong growth in 2023 and 2024—would then have put the Republican incumbent on the path to reelection in 2024.

“But what about the Supreme Court?” our Trump-skeptical Republicans might ask. Trump filled seats opened by the deaths of Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and by the resignation of Anthony Kennedy. Even if we suppose that Kennedy would not have resigned during a Clinton presidency, a President Clinton could have remade the Court majority in the liberals’ favor, as Trump did for conservatives.

But a President Clinton would not have had as much leeway on the Court as Trump did. Her nominees would have had to pass the Republican Senate. And if Roe v. Wade had been upheld under a Clinton-appointed majority, the politics might have played out better for Republicans, who have struggled in national and state elections since Roe’s overturning. So long as Roe was law, the anti-abortion position was good Republican politics. Instead, a generation of young women might be alienated from the Republican Party for the rest of their voting lives. Although some anti-abortion true believers would gladly pay the price, most Republicans are not anti-abortion true believers.

All told, victory for Clinton in 2016 would have left Republicans in a much better place in the 2020s—and without the shame and disgrace of complicity with Trump.

Now let’s think realistically about what 2024 could mean for Trump-wary Republicans.

If Trump wins in 2024, the country could plunge almost instantly into a political and constitutional crisis—especially if Democrats hold the Senate and win the House, but even if they don’t. A reelected Trump’s first priority will be to shut down all of the legal cases against him, including trials that have already begun. He’ll want to pardon himself if he has been convicted of any offenses. He’ll try to use presidential power to quash the half-billion dollars of civil judgments against him. Trump’s opponents will not passively submit to any of this. There will be upheaval, unrest, and very likely a third Trump impeachment trial.

A reelected Trump’s second priority will be to sell out Ukraine and bust up NATO. Eighty years of U.S.-led alliance structure will collapse, and the whole system of world peace and security will unravel—with who knows what consequences.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: The danger ahead]

A reelected Trump’s third priority will be to impose tariffs on China, triggering a global trade war. Consumer prices will rise, the stock market will tumble, and the world economy could slide into recession if not outright depression.

Alternatively, imagine if Joe Biden wins in November. A Biden reelection might well mean more regulation of stoves, as Bill Barr worried. Biden might do other things Barr would not like either, but even those things would be an improvement over the outlook of chaos from Trump’s attempt to overturn American law to save himself from prison. The 2017 tax cut would expire in a second Biden term, and might not be renewed. That said, President Bill Clinton signed a capital-gains tax in his second term as a cost of doing business. Biden is even more of a dealmaker.

Meanwhile, the path to Republican revival would open. Republicans could reasonably expect to score gains in the 2026 midterm elections. With Trump a three-time popular-vote loser, even his base would begin to perceive the failure of his corrupt and authoritarian leadership—and turn again to leaders whom Barr himself would much prefer to Trump or the Trump imitators who would proliferate if Trump somehow returns to power in 2025.

In Republican rhetoric, it is always five minutes to midnight. In 2011, future Speaker of the House Paul Ryan delivered a speech warning that the United States was fast approaching a “tipping point” that would “curtail free enterprise, transform our government, and weaken our national identity in ways that may not be reversible.” That way of thinking can justify extreme actions. If the choice really is between constitutional democracy on the one hand, and free enterprise and national identity on the other, that’s indeed agonizing.

But as the history of the Trump years shows, that choice is as phony as Bill Barr’s pretense of integrity. A Hillary Clinton presidency in 2016 would have left both free enterprise and national identity perfectly intact, with no worse consequences for conservatives than a four-year delay of a big tax cut and possibly the benefit of escape from their present predicament over abortion rights. A Biden reelection in 2024 will be annoying to conservatives in other ways. But compared with what Trump threatens?

Before choosing the “lesser of two evils,” Trump-skeptical Republicans must measure the choices accurately. Assessing clearly the recent past helps with that analysis. The Republican Party would today be healthier and more successful if it had lost the presidency in 2016. It will be healthier in 2032 if it loses in 2024.