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The Choice Republicans Face

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2024 › 04 › the-choice-republicans-face › 678221

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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.

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.

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?

Explore all of our newsletters here.

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.

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Did Kristi Noem Just Doom Her Career?

found 30 Apr The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2024 › 04 › did-kristi-noem-just-doom-her-career › 678237

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American voters have never been more polarized—except, perhaps, when it comes to the shared belief that shooting a puppy is wrong. Has Kristi Noem’s admission of such an act doomed her political future?

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

David Frum: “The plot to wreck the Democratic convention” America lost the plot with TikTok. Touch screens are ruining cars. Will Americans ever get sick of cheap junk?

The Shot Read ’Round the World

Say this for Kristi Noem: She has an eye for literary detail.

The South Dakota governor is one week out from the publication of her new book, No Going Back (more on that title later). On Friday, The Guardian reported on one of the anecdotes Noem shares with her readers. In the book, the governor recalls the day she realized that her puppy, Cricket, had crossed the line from poorly behaved menace to, well, a problem that needed solving. Noem led Cricket to a gravel pit. Then she pulled the trigger. “It was not a pleasant job,” the governor writes. “But it had to be done.”

It’s the phrase gravel pit that stands out most—imagery fit for a Cormac McCarthy novel. Typically, campaign books don’t scream “literature.” They’re more or less marketing tools meant to showcase a politician’s character and leadership skills. Noem likely believed that recounting this saga (in addition to a story about killing a goat) would serve as a testament to her courage and her rural bona fides, endearing her to millions of potential voters. Instead, Noem publishing these sentences may one day be remembered as the gravest mistake of her career.

The backlash has been swift. Beyond Democrats and liberals seizing on the moment, even some Republicans and conservatives have offered condemnations. “Omg - now my blood is boiling,” the right-leaning social media influencer Catturd told his 2.4 million followers on X. “Remember, I’m a country boy who lives on a ranch. There’s a huge difference between putting an old horse down who is suffering, than shooting a 18 month dog for being untrainable.” In reality, Cricket appears to have been 14 months old. According to The Guardian, the puppy had attacked other animals, and Noem maintains she decided to put the dog down because it showed “aggressive behavior toward people by biting them.”

With some scandals, members of the American public have notoriously short memories, or at least they may be more inclined to forgive. But certain images never leave the collective psyche—especially when they involve dogs. This fundamental truth transcends politics. Michael Vick was one of the most dazzling NFL quarterbacks of the past quarter century, but you probably remember him first and foremost as the dog-fighting guy. The act of shooting a dog, as Noem did, is, for some, impossible to stomach. (Though once a dog has attacked a human, that calculus changes for others.) Canine execution was once the dark joke of the January 1973 death-themed issue of National Lampoon, the cover of which featured a man holding a revolver against a floppy ear along with the warning “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog.” (The pup in question, Mr. Cheeseface, looks bewildered.)

What is it about dogs, in particular, that tugs at our core? In a recent essay for The Atlantic, Tommy Tomlinson, the author of the new book Dogland, offered his own unique admission: “By any measure, I loved my mom more than our dog. If I could bring one back, I’d pick her 100 times out of 100. So why, in the moment of their passing, did I cry for him but not for her?” Many dogs, even the bad ones, are seen as unimpeachable. Elected officials, not so much.

Noem is (was?) considered to be among former president Donald Trump’s top prospects for a 2024 running mate. Now she’ll have to fight to escape being branded the woman who once killed her own puppy. Many people seem to want her to express some form of contrition. On Friday, Noem posted a screenshot of the Guardian article, writing, “We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm.” Then she plugged her book. “If you want more real, honest, and politically INcorrect stories that’ll have the media gasping, preorder ‘No Going Back.’”

Yesterday, with the online fervor still raging, Noem released a second statement, standing by the idea that shooting the puppy, rather than, say, putting it up for adoption, was the “right” thing to do. “I can understand why some people are upset about a 20 year old story of Cricket, one of the working dogs at our ranch, in my upcoming book—No Going Back,” her statement read. “The book is filled with many honest stories of my life, good and bad days, challenges, painful decisions, and lessons learned … Whether running the ranch or in politics, I have never passed on my responsibilities to anyone else to handle. Even if it’s hard and painful. I followed the law and was being a responsible parent, dog owner, and neighbor. As I explained in the book, it wasn’t easy. But often the easy way isn’t the right way.”

No Going Back’s subtitle—The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward—is the exact sort of phrase you expect to read in a studied politician’s carefully curated treatise. Many of these books are often quite rote, devices meant to serve as the starting point of a national campaign. A lot of them, but not all of them, are bland by design. Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father is perhaps the most notable exception to the rule, but there are others. Jason Kander, once seen as an heir to Obama’s Democratic Party, published a memoir in 2018 about his time serving in Afghanistan and working in state politics that largely fit the political-book mold, right down to the title: Outside the Wire: Ten Lessons I’ve Learned in Everyday Courage. But four years later, he returned with a second memoir, Invisible Storm, showcasing edges of his life that he had sanded down in his first outing. The result was an honest and radically candid look at the depths of his PTSD.

Typically, but not always, political books are produced with the help of a ghostwriter. Noem’s publisher did not respond to my request for comment as to whether Noem used one.

This morning, I called the journalist Maximillian Potter, who collaborated with Senator John Hickenlooper of Colorado on his political memoir, The Opposite of Woe, and served as an editorial consultant on the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s memoir, The Power of One. (Potter is also the co-author of an Atlantic investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct by the Hollywood mogul Bryan Singer.) He was careful to note that the Guardian report may not include the chapter’s full context; still, Noem has not refuted any of the details. What stood out most to Potter was how Noem, according to the report, writes that she “hated that dog.” “I’ve never heard anyone refer to a pet or an animal with hate. As a collaborator, that’s the word I would have discussed,” Potter told me. “I think part of a ghost or a collaborator’s job on projects like this is to not discourage the author from sharing their truth; it’s to be a thought partner and help them think through what it is they’re really trying to say.”

Potter also brought up an old political idiom, often attributed to Robert F. Kennedy (senior), later popularized by Chris Matthews: “Hang a lantern on your problem.” Maybe that’s what is really going on here. In the book, Noem reportedly notes that a construction crew watched her kill both the puppy and the goat. Perhaps, as her national profile grows, and as potential vetting for Trump’s VP gets under way, Noem sought to get in front of any potentially damaging story that might emerge through opposition research. (Her chief of communications did not respond to my request for an interview.)

Noem is midway through her second term as governor, and she’s ineligible for a third. No Going Back was supposed to be a prelude to her next chapter. Trump even blurbed it: “This book, it’s a winner.” But if he doesn’t pick Noem for VP, her new book’s title may have prophesied the end of her political story.

Today’s News

A federal appellate court ruled that state-run health-care plans cannot exclude gender-affirming surgeries. Columbia University began suspending students who stayed in the pro-Palestinian encampment on campus grounds past the deadline issued by the university. A series of severe tornadoes hit parts of the South and the Midwest over the weekend, killing at least four people in Oklahoma.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: One simple key to joy doesn’t exist, Isabel Fattal writes. There are some subtler truths about American happiness.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Paramount Pictures / Everett Collection

The Godfather of American Comedy

By Adrienne LaFrance

Somewhere in the hills above Malibu, drenched in California sunshine and sitting side by side in a used white Volkswagen bug, two teenage boys realized they were lost … This was the early 1960s, and the boy driving the car was Albert Einstein—yes, this really was his given name, years before he changed it to Albert Brooks. Riding shotgun was his best friend and classmate from Beverly Hills High School, Rob Reiner.

Brooks had inherited the car from one of his older brothers, and he’d made it his own by removing the handle of the stick shift and replacing it with a smooth brass doorknob. After several failed attempts to find the Pacific Coast Highway, which would take them home, Brooks and Reiner came upon a long fence surrounding a field where a single cow was grazing. Albert “stopped the car and he leaned out the window and he said, ‘Excuse me, sir! Sir?’ and the cow just looked up,” Reiner told me. “And he said, ‘How do you get back to the PCH?’ And the cow just did a little flick of his head, like he was flicking a fly away, and went back to eating.” Without missing a beat, Albert called out, “Thank you!” and confidently zoomed away. “I said, ‘Albert, you just took directions from a cow!’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but he lives around here. He knows the area.’ ”

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