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Election

Democrats Deserved to Lose

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2024 › 11 › election-2024-liberal-loss › 680591

By electing Donald Trump again, the American electorate has made a bad decision, one that will expose our country to unreasonable risks in areas from foreign policy to public health. Fiscal policy will get worse—budget deficits will become even larger, keeping interest rates high, and programs that provide health care to the poor and elderly are likely to be trimmed back to finance tax cuts for rich people. Abortion rights are likely to be further restricted by a hostile administration that uses the powers of the FDA and the Department of Justice to make abortion harder to provide. And we’ll have another four years under Trump’s exhausting, mercurial, and divisive leadership, making our politics nastier and stupider.

I wish the election had gone the other way. I am annoyed. That said, when Trump won eight years ago, I was much more than annoyed. I was really upset and shocked. This time is different, because Americans have been through this before, and I expect we’ll get through it again. But it’s also different because there’s a big part of me that feels Democrats deserved to lose this election, even if Trump did not deserve to win it.

I write this from New York City, where we are governed by Democrats and we pay the highest taxes in the country, which doesn’t mean we receive the best government services. Our transportation agencies are black holes for money, unable to deliver on their capital plans despite repeated increases in the dedicated taxes that fund them, because building a subway line here costs four times as much per mile as it does in France, and because union rules force the agency to overstaff itself, inflating operating costs. Half of bus riders don’t pay the fare, and MTA employees don’t try to make them. Emotionally disturbed homeless people camp out on the transit system—the other day, I was on a bus where one shouted repeatedly at another passenger that he was a “faggot.” And even though police are all over the place (at great taxpayer expense), they don’t do much about these disturbances, and I can’t entirely blame them since our government lacks the legal authority to keep troubled people either in jail or in treatment. The city cannot stop people from shoplifting, so most of the merchandise at pharmacies is in locked cabinets. A judge recently said the city can’t even padlock the illegal cannabis stores that have popped up all over the place—that’s apparently unconstitutional, and so years into what was supposed to be the “wokest” legal cannabis regime in the country, our government still can’t figure out how to make sure that people who sell weed have a license to do so, even though they’ve done that with regard to alcohol forever.

[Read: The ‘stop the steal’ movement isn’t letting up]

Ever since the COVID shutdowns, Democrats here have stopped talking very much about the importance of investing in public education, but the schools remain really expensive for taxpayers even as families move away, enrollment declines, and chronic absenteeism remains elevated. Currently, we are under a state-court order to spend billions of our dollars to house migrants in Midtown hotels that once housed tourists and business travelers. Housing costs are insane because the city makes building anything very hard—and visiting here is really expensive, too, partly because so many hotels are now full of migrants, and partly because the city council made building new hotels functionally illegal. And as a result of all of this, New York is shedding population—the state will probably lose three more congressional districts in the next reapportionment. And where are people moving to? To Sun Belt states, mostly run by Republicans, where building housing and growing the economy is still possible.

Meanwhile, the voters of New York have just adopted an equal-rights amendment to the state constitution, which was put on the ballot by the Democrat-controlled state legislature. One effect of this amendment is to create a state constitutional right to abortion. Of course, abortion was already legal in New York, and a state constitutional provision will not override any new federal laws or regulations that Republicans might impose with their new control in Washington. This is exactly the sort of brain-dead symbolism that exemplifies the Democrats who rule our state: They pat themselves on the back for a formalistic, legal declaration of the rights of the people who live here, and meanwhile, people of all races and identities flee New York for other, officially less “inclusive” places where they can actually afford a decent quality of life.

I am unfortunately a Democrat, but as someone who lives in a place that is governed very badly by Democrats, I can easily understand why “Can you imagine what incompetent, lunatic shit those people will do if they get control of the government?” would fall flat as an argument against Republicans. It doesn’t surprise me that the very largest swings away from Democrats in this post-COVID, post–George Floyd, post-inflation election occurred in blue states. The gap between Democrats’ promise of better living through better government and their failure to actually deliver better government has been a national political problem. So when Republicans made a pitch to change all this (or even burn it all down), it didn’t fall flat.

Right before Election Day, Ross Douthat wrote a column for The New York Times that left me quite uneasy. It was about the campaign signs he was seeing all over New Haven that read Harris-Walz 2024: Obviously. Douthat started with a point that’s almost tautological: Because the election appeared close, by definition neither candidate was the obvious choice. And he looked at why the decision would not be obvious to so many voters, writing:

Let’s take one last survey of why some waverers might not yet be sold on Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, by returning to where this all began: The world of 2016, when Americans normally disinclined to vote for liberals were first informed that there was no other reasonable choice … the promise was that even if you disagreed with liberalism’s elites on policy, you could trust them in three crucial ways: They would avoid insanity, they would maintain stability, and they would display far greater intelligence and competence than Trump and his hangers-on.

Many voters believe these promises were broken. Of course, the most politically significant aspect of the instability has been post-COVID inflation—a global problem that has taken out incumbent governments of the right and left all over the world. Inflation is mostly not Democrats’ fault, though they did exacerbate it by overstimulating the economy with the American Rescue Plan, and then they failed to focus early enough on inflation as the key economic problem of this administration.

To be precise, the ARP, passed in early 2021, constituted an unnecessary $2 trillion stimulus that mostly produced inflation rather than real GDP growth. Then, throughout 2022, even as inflation started to bite, Democrats were still looking for every way they could find to spend as much money as possible to satisfy interest-group constituencies. Even the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which was supposed to reduce inflation by reducing the deficit, is currently increasing the deficit by tens of billions of dollars a year and, if left unchanged, will continue to do so through 2027. The deficit reduction does not begin until 2028, far too late to be politically relevant for Joe Biden’s Democrats.

The other big destabilizer is the migrant crisis, which was born out of this administration’s fecklessness—Biden rapidly reversing Trump’s immigration executive orders upon entering office without any plan for controlling the border and apparently without realizing that migrants are smart, and will be more likely to come if you make clear that coming very likely means they will get to stay. (A failure to consider incentives is a running theme when Democrats fail.) Democrats did not pivot to enforcement until far too late—and not until after Texas Governor Greg Abbott made the crisis a blue-state issue by bussing migrants here en masse to fill Democrats’ hotels and consume Democratic budgets.

On the “insanity” front, Douthat cites the political movement in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, responses to COVID, and trans-youth medicine—all areas where liberals’ moral fervor has caused them to lose sight of whether the ideologically driven courses they had taken were actually producing the intended positive effects. Democrats know they paid a price for “Defund the police” and they have mostly learned their lesson, or at least they will now, because several high-profile “progressive” prosecutors lost their blue-city posts this week. On the COVID restrictions, Democrats have not really reckoned with how off-putting a lot of the busybody moralizing was, but this issue will likely simply fade with time.

As for trans issues, I have been skeptical about their political salience—although I don’t believe that Lia Thomas belonged on the Penn women’s swim team, I also can’t imagine casting a vote based on my views about that story. But Kamala Harris’s 2019 declaration to the ACLU that she would have the government pay for gender-affirming surgeries for prisoners and people held in immigration detention became a major attack line against her in this campaign. That’s because it highlights several problems with the party’s image all at once: Here was the Democratic nominee, bowing to pressure from interest groups to look for ways to spend your tax dollars on the most bespoke concern of a criminal, or of a noncitizen who isn’t even supposed to be here, before thinking about you and your interests. But the truly grim irony about the political cost of this promise is that, of course, the federal government that only got seven electric-vehicle-charging stations built in two years has performed zero transgender surgeries on detained migrants. That’s the Democrats in a nutshell: the party that promises trans surgeries for undocumented immigrants but doesn’t deliver them.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: What the left keeps getting wrong]

And all of this is why I think Democrats’ approach to the cost-of-living issues that have dominated this campaign has fallen so flat. The Democratic argument is, more or less, “look at all my programs”—all of the things I’m going to have the government do to make life easier for you. In some cases, they have a clear track record to run on: The Affordable Care Act has gotten more popular over time, and the expanded subsidies that reduce the premiums most Americans pay to buy individual plans on the exchanges have increased enrollment. But mostly, I think Americans look around at how it goes when the government actually tries to help, and they have a healthy skepticism about how helpful the government is really going to be, and about whether the benefits are really going to flow to them. Democrats are making too many promises; they have tried to do a zillion different things and done them badly at great expense, as was the approach with the moribund Build Back Better Act. They instead need to pick a few things for the government to do really well, with a focus on benefits to the broad public rather than to the people being paid to provide the services.

Although I think Harris should have picked Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate, I don’t think choosing him would have changed the outcome. But Shapiro is a popular swing-state governor who will be a front-runner for the 2028 nomination. And Shapiro’s signature policy achievement is rebuilding a highway underpass. There is a lesson here: When government focuses on its core responsibilities and delivers on them quickly, efficiently, and with a laser focus on making sure people can go about their lives as normal, the voters reward that. You don’t need a grand vision; you need to execute.

Winning the next federal election is important. For that reason, it is important that Democrats get the voters to believe they deserve to win that election. They have two years to work on it before the midterms.

This article was adapted from a post on Josh Barro’s Substack, Very Serious.

The Strategist Who Predicted Trump’s Multiracial Coalition

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2024 › 11 › trump-black-latino-voters-interview › 680588

“For all his apparent divisiveness,” wrote the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, “Trump assembled the most diverse Republican presidential coalition in history and rode political trends that will prove significant for decades to come.” That statement neatly describes Donald Trump’s sweeping electoral victory this week. But Ruffini wrote it more than a year ago.

Even though Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, he dramatically improved his performance that year among Black and, especially, Latino voters compared with 2016. According to Ruffini’s 2023 book, Party of the People, this was no fluke. American politics was undergoing a fundamental reordering in which the old dividing lines of race and wealth were being supplanted by new ones, namely education and trust in institutions. The ties that once bound low-income and nonwhite voters to the Democratic Party, he argued, were breaking. “If this trend continues,” Ruffini wrote, “it would mean the birth of a new party system, replacing the old twentieth-century class divide between the parties.”

Then came 2024. We don’t yet have precise data on how different groups voted, but the geographic swings make certain conclusions unavoidable. Trump made gains everywhere on Tuesday, but the places where he improved the most compared with 2020 were heavily nonwhite counties that have overwhelmingly supported Democrats for decades. Miami-Dade County, which is majority-Hispanic, voted for the Republican candidate for the first time since 1988; Baldwin County, Georgia, which is 42 percent Black, went red too. In 2016, Hillary Clinton carried the 97 percent–Latino Starr County, Texas, by 60 points. In 2024, Trump won it by 16 points.

In Ruffini’s view, the Democratic Party can no longer take the votes of nonwhite Americans for granted. “I think if they want to win back some of these voters,” he told me, “Democrats need to stop presenting themselves solely as the defenders of American institutions and instead as a party committed to change.”

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Rogé Karma: On Election Day, you wrote on X that “the FDR coalition is being dismantled piece by piece and being reassembled in Donald Trump’s GOP.” That’s a pretty provocative statement. So tell me what you were actually seeing in the data on Tuesday that made you think that was happening.

Patrick Ruffini: I often cringe a little bit when this is described primarily in terms of a “racial realignment.” In many ways, it’s a racial de-alignment, because the parties are realigning on educational lines.

If you look at a place like South Texas, which is very heavily Hispanic, Democrats were winning by 50, 60 points in 2012. And now we are at a point where it’s not just trending red but objectively red. You look at a place like Miami-Dade County, Florida, obviously home to a lot of Hispanics—Trump won it by 11 points.

But I think the more interesting county to me was Osceola County, outside of Orlando, a heavily Puerto Rican community. There was obviously a lot of focus on Puerto Rican voters in the closing days of the campaign because of the joke told at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. But Trump actually wins that county, which is unheard of. And if you believe the exit polls, then there’s evidence that this is happening with Black voters and Asian voters as well.

So when I use the term FDR coalition, I’m referring to a lot of groups that have a lot of disparate interests. To me, that has been the character of the Democratic Party for decades. You have groups who are not necessarily ideologically aligned on everything but can all find a home in this big tent. And you’re seeing that more and more in the Republican Party now. Since 2016, educated white voters have shifted left but every other group has shifted right. That was only enough for a near win for Trump in 2020, but this time it was enough for a popular majority in the country.

Karma: The data here are still preliminary, but let’s say you’re right and we are indeed experiencing this racial depolarization. I think the big question is why. One way of viewing it, as you do, is as a continuation of this broader educational realignment in our politics. But another way of looking at it is we’re in the midst of a global anti-incumbent backlash. Ruling parties in countries all over the world are losing left and right, mostly driven by what you once described to me as a “post-COVID inflationary malaise.”

[Rogé Karma: Age isn’t Biden’s only problem]

Ruffini: I think you’re completely right. Absolutely this was an election about the economy. Absolutely it was a change election. But underlying it is a divide in the electorate that has been building for a while now.

I’m not even sure I’d describe it as strictly educational sorting. What happened in 2020—and I think what we’ll continue to see in 2024—is an ideological sorting. Lots of nonwhite voters identify ideologically as conservatives but historically have tended to vote for Democrats anyway. That started to change in 2020. You had data suggesting that Hispanic conservatives, Asian American conservatives, Black conservatives moved by about 35 to 40 points toward Trump. I think that tells us that politics is sorting on an ideological axis.

And I think the reason that’s happening is because the forces that have long kept certain racial and racial-identity groups within the Democratic fold are no longer binding them to the Democratic Party. I think you have large numbers of folks in these groups who are temperamentally not on board with what they perceive to be the race-and-gender identity politics of the left. And that’s very problematic, potentially, for Democrats.

Karma: This is one of the big themes of your book: Democrats have alienated working-class voters of color by moving far too far to the left on issues around race and gender identity. But it seems to me that Democrats really learned their lesson from 2020. Kamala Harris ran way to the right on immigration. She talked about the importance of having a strong military. She played up her background as a prosecutor. She hardly mentioned race. And yet we saw even bigger shifts than we did in 2020. How do you explain that?

Ruffini: Harris ran a very clinically competent campaign. Speaking as a Republican, I was pretty concerned that she was going to successfully erase the taint associated with the Biden policies. I think it was clear she was trying to pivot the party in a more moderate direction on these issues.

But as the campaign wore on, she was unable to articulate how she would be different from Biden. And Trump got more and more effective at painting her as an extremist. He ran ads saying things like “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you,” in the voice of a Black man. Sometimes campaigns are not just about what you say about yourself. Campaigns are about how the opposition is able to define you.

The big problem for Democrats is there’s a powerful lingering perception that they are too progressive on some of these issues. And I don’t think anything short of an act of full-on repudiation is going to change that. Some kind of decisive action to distance themselves from that agenda—a kind of modern Sister Souljah moment. And Harris didn’t have any of those.

Karma: I’m interested in what you think that kind of moment would look or sound like. Because one critique I think you could make of her campaign is that you can take moderate positions all you want, but what really tells voters you are serious is when you pick fights with your own side. And she didn’t really do that. She wasn’t getting in fights with the immigration groups or the racial-justice groups. And in areas where she did get into fights, like the corporate-price-gouging proposal, she pretty quickly backed down.

Ruffini: I would put it almost exactly in those terms, because obviously conflict and controversy can be incredibly clarifying for voters. When the differences are subtle, voters are not necessarily going to get the message.

Karma: But there is an area where the difference between the parties isn’t so subtle, and that’s on economics. Nonwhite voters are much more likely to vote their material interests and prioritize economic issues. And when you look at where the two parties stand on those issues, Democrats have embraced a very progressive, redistributive economic agenda. That’s included these huge investments in clean-energy and manufacturing jobs. Lowering prescription-drug prices. Expanding the child tax credit in a way that slashes child poverty. Meanwhile, Trump has sort of gone in the other direction: He’s promising huge corporate-tax cuts and joking with Elon Musk about firing striking workers. Wouldn’t you think that kind of difference would make working-class voters more likely to vote Democratic, not less?

[Rogé Karma: Trump isn’t even pretending anymore]

Ruffini: It’s true that nonwhite working-class voters in general are much more materialist. I simply just don’t think that those policies that you mentioned actually register in the same way as the underlying state of the economy. Maybe sometime down the road these things will bear fruit and Democrats will get credit for these programs. But the economic issue that matters most for voters right now is inflation. And that’s poisonous for the Democratic Party.

Karma: We’ve really only seen this shift among nonwhite voters in the past two election cycles. How much of this is a product of just Donald Trump himself? And would these same shifts still hold in a future where a non-Trump figure was at the top of the Republican ticket?

Ruffini: That’s the big question, because I think, in many ways, Trump ran the perfect campaign that was optimized to exactly this coalition.

Karma: Okay, I have to stop you there. Because, if anything, I think the liberal perspective is that Trump ran a way more unhinged campaign. A way more dark, xenophobic campaign. Alongside some super gimmicky things like serving french fries at McDonald’s. So what about his campaign do you think was so good at breaking through?

Ruffini: In response to the McDonald’s thing, you had some Democrats saying, “That’s crazy. That looks weird. The garbage-truck thing backfired.” But that’s the opposite of how it played. Trump was masterful in this election at crafting these images and these contrasts between him and Kamala Harris, where she was very cautious and scripted. And you’ve got that versus somebody like Trump, who is able to go on Joe Rogan and mix it up and just shoot from the hip for hours.

Look, elections are not clinical exercises of people evaluating competing sets of policy proposals and making rational decisions. They are, in a sense, popularity contests and image-making contests. And something remarkable Trump did was, through the Musk endorsement and the podcast appearances and the UFC matches, he was able to bootstrap his own version of pop culture. And he was able to project that forward as something that voters in his target groups could gravitate toward.

I think that was fundamental. And I think that very few Republicans or Democrats understand how to do it well.

Karma: What advice would you give to Democrats who are dismayed by this election, by the fact that they’re losing so many of their core voters, and want to reverse that trend?

Ruffini: I think the thing they can do to best respond to it is take a page out of Bill Clinton’s playbook. On the one hand, he openly repudiated some of the toxic tendencies within the party. But I think fundamentally what he did was, he was able to address himself as a change agent. People outside the political system don’t like Washington. And I think, unfortunately for the Democrats, their position right now, especially on these issues of democracy and upholding institutional norms, is just completely the opposite temperamentally of where most Americans are when it comes to institutions in Washington, D.C., and Beltway politics.

Karma: Say more on that. It seems pretty clear that at its core, the college-versus-noncollege divide is really a high-trust-versus-low-trust-in-institutions divide. Why are Democrats losing those low-trust voters, and can they do anything about it?

Ruffini: I understand why Democrats are so focused on the need to preserve democracy. Obviously, that’s a message a lot of people can agree with. But think about somebody who is disaffected, angry, who dislikes everything about traditional politics. When they hear that, they immediately think that this is a pro-system party. That this is a party that doesn’t share the dislike and distrust they have—maybe not of institutions generally but of Washington, D.C., in particular. And so I think it was a big mistake for Kamala, in the final days of her campaign, to pivot back to defending democracy with Liz Cheney at her rallies.

Barack Obama was a change candidate. Bill Clinton was a change candidate. I think if they want to win back some of these voters, Democrats need to stop presenting themselves solely as the defenders of American institutions and instead as a party committed to change.

Taxonomy of the Trump Bro

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2024 › 11 › taxonomy-of-the-trump-bro › 680608

This story seems to be about:

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.

The MAGA hats were flying like Frisbees. It was two weeks before Election Day. Charlie Kirk, the Millennial right-wing influencer, had been touring college campuses. On this particular Tuesday, he’d brought his provocations to the University of Georgia. Athens, where the school’s main campus is located, is an artsy town in a reliably blue county, with a famed alternative-music scene. (R.E.M., the B-52s, and Neutral Milk Hotel are among the many bands in the city’s lore.) But that afternoon, the courtyard outside the student center was a sea of red, with thunderous “U-S-A!” chants echoing off the buildings. Kirk had arrived on a mission: to pump up Gen Z about the return of Donald Trump. He was succeeding.

I was standing in the back of the crowd, watching hundreds of young guys with their arms outstretched, hollering for MAGA merch. Once a stigmatized cultural artifact, the red cap is now a status symbol. For a certain kind of bro, MAGA is bigger than politics. MAGA makes you manly.

MAGA, as this week affirmed, is also not an aberration. At its core, it remains a patriarchal club, but it cannot be brushed off as a passing freak show or a niche political sect. Donald Trump triumphed in the Electoral College, and when all the votes are counted, he will likely have captured the popular vote as well. Although it’s true that MAGA keeps growing more powerful, the reality is that it’s been part of mainstream culture for a while. Millions of Americans, particularly those who live on the coasts, have simply chosen to believe otherwise.

Democrats are performing all manner of autopsies, finger-pointing, and recriminations after Kamala Harris’s defeat. Many political trends will continue to undergo examination, especially the pronounced shift of Latino voters toward Trump. But among all the demographic findings is this particular and fascinating one: Young men are more conservative than they used to be. One analysis of ​​AP VoteCast data, for instance, showed that 56 percent of men ages 18–29 supported Trump this year, up 15 points from 2020.

Depending on where you live and with whom you interact, Trump’s success with young men in Tuesday’s election may have come as a shock. But the signs were there all along. Today, the top three U.S. podcasts on Spotify are The Joe Rogan Experience, The Tucker Carlson Show, and The Charlie Kirk Show. All three hosts endorsed Trump for president. These programs and their massive audiences transcend the narrow realm of politics. Together, they are male-voice megaphones in a metastasizing movement across America. In 2023, Steve Bannon described this coalition to me as “the Tucker-Rogan-Elon-Bannon-combo-platter right.” Trump has many people to thank for his victory—among them men, and especially young men with their AirPods in.

Trump can often be a repetitive bore when speaking in public, but one of his more interesting interviews this year was a conversation with dude-philosopher Theo Von. As my colleague Helen Lewis wrote, Trump’s “discussion of drug and alcohol addiction on Theo Von’s This Past Weekend podcast demonstrated perhaps the most interest Trump has ever shown in another human being.” (Trump’s older brother, Fred Trump Jr., died of complications from alcoholism at the age of 42.) Similarly, five days before the election, Trump took the stage with Carlson for a live one-on-one interview. The two bro’d out in an arena near Phoenix, and that night, Trump was especially freewheeling—and uncharacteristically reflective about the movement he leads. (Trump looks poised to win Arizona after losing it in 2020.)

It’s not just one type of talkative bro who has boosted Trump and made him more palatable to the average American. Trump has steadily assembled a crew of extremely influential and successful men who are loyal to him. Carlson is the preppy debate-club bro. Rogan is the stoner bro. Elon Musk is the tech bro. Bill Ackman is the finance bro. Jason Aldean is the country-music bro. Harrison Butker is the NFL bro. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the crunchy-conspiracist bro. Hulk Hogan is the throwback entertainer bro. Kid Rock is the “American Bad Ass” bro. And that’s hardly an exhaustive list. Each of these bros brings his own bro-y fandom to the MAGA movement and helps, in his own way, to legitimize Trump and whitewash his misdeeds. Some of these men, such as Kennedy and Musk, may even play a role in the coming administration.

My colleague Spencer Kornhaber wrote this week that Democrats are losing the culture war. He’s right, but Trumpism extends even beyond politics and pop culture. I’ve been thinking a lot about that day I spent at the University of Georgia. Students I spoke with told me that some frat houses off campus make no secret of their Trump support, but it seemed less about specific policies and more about attitude. That’s long been the open secret to Trump: a feeling, a vibe, not a statistic. Even Kirk’s “free speech” exercises, which he’s staged at colleges nationwide for a while now, are only nominally about actual political debate. In essence, they are public performances that boil down to four words: Come at me, bro! Perhaps there is something in all of this that is less about fighting and more about acceptance—especially in a culture that treats bro as a pejorative.

These Trump bros do not all deserve sympathy. But there’s good reason to try to actually understand this particular voting bloc, and why so many men were—and are—ready to go along with Trump.

Related:

Why Democrats are losing the culture war The right’s new kingmaker

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

What the left keeps getting wrong Conor Friedersdorf: The case for treating Trump like a normal president “You are the media now.” Why Netanyahu fired his defense minister

Today’s News

A federal judge granted Special Counsel Jack Smith’s request to pause the election-subversion case against Trump after his presidential victory. The Department of Justice charged three men connected to a foiled Iranian assassination plot against Trump. Trump named his senior campaign adviser Susie Wiles as his White House chief of staff. She will be the first woman to hold the role.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: AI-powered search is killing the internet’s curiosity, Matteo Wong writes. The Books Briefing: A century-old novel offers a unique antidote to contempt and despair, Maya Chung writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The Strange History Behind the Anti-Semitic Dutch Soccer Attacks

By Franklin Foer

Among the bizarrest phenomena in the world of sports is Ajax, the most accomplished club in the storied history of Dutch soccer … Ajax fans tattoo the Star of David onto their forearms. In the moments before the opening kick of a match, they proudly shout at the top of their lungs, “Jews, Jews, Jews,” because—though most of them are not Jewish—philo-Semitism is part of their identity.

Last night, the club that describes itself as Jewish played against a club of actual Jews, Maccabi Tel Aviv. As Israeli fans left the stadium, after their club suffered a thumping defeat, they were ambushed by well-organized groups of thugs, in what the mayor of Amsterdam described as “anti-Semitic hit-and-run squads.”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Josh Barro: Democrats deserved to lose. The limits of Democratic optimism The strategist who predicted Trump’s multiracial coalition The “Stop the Steal” movement isn’t letting up. Quinta Jurecic: “Bye-bye, Jack Smith.” Don’t give up on America.

Culture Break

Matt Wilson / Paramount

Analyze. The comedian-to-campaign-influencer pipeline has muddled the genre of political comedy, Shirley Li writes.

Read. In Miss Kim Knows, Cho Nam-Joo captures both the universality of sexism and the specificity of women’s experiences, Rachel Vorona Cote writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Seven Stories About Promising Medical Discoveries

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2024 › 11 › seven-stories-about-promising-medical-discoveries › 680603

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.

In today’s reading list, our editors have compiled stories about new and promising medical developments, including breakthroughs to treat lupus, a possible birth-control revolution, and a food-allergy fix that’s been hiding in plain sight.

Your Reading List

A ‘Crazy’ Idea for Treating Autoimmune Diseases Might Actually Work

Lupus has long been considered incurable—but a series of breakthroughs are fueling hope.

By Sarah Zhang

The Coming Birth-Control Revolution

An abundance of new methods for men could transform women’s contraception too.

By Katherine J. Wu

Why People Itch, and How to Stop It

Scientists are discovering lots of little itch switches.

By Annie Lowrey

A Food-Allergy Fix Hiding in Plain Sight

Why did it take so long to reach patients?

By Sarah Zhang

Bats Could Hold the Secret to Better, Longer Human Life

A team of researchers dreams of anti-aging, disease-tempering drugs—all inspired by bats.

By Katherine J. Wu

A Fix for Antibiotic Resistance Could Be Hiding in the Past

Phage therapy was once used to treat bubonic plague. Now it could help inform a new health crisis.

By Patience Asanga

The Cystic-Fibrosis Breakthrough That Changed Everything

The disease once guaranteed an early death—but a new treatment has given many patients a chance to live decades longer than expected. What do they do now?

By Sarah Zhang

The Week Ahead

Red One, an action film starring Chris Evans and Dwayne Johnson as members of an elite team tasked with saving Santa Claus (in theaters Friday) Season 6 of Cobra Kai, the final season about Johnny Lawrence, who reopens the Cobra Kai dojo, and his rivalry with Daniel LaRusso (part two premieres Friday on Netflix) Set My Heart on Fire, a novel by Izumi Suzuki about a young woman who finds a surprising relationship in the club and bar scene of 1970s Tokyo (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Alamy.

The Invention That Changed School Forever

By Ian Bogost

Some objects are so familiar and so ordinary that it seems impossible to imagine that they did not always exist. Take the school backpack, for example. Its invention can be traced to one man, Murray McCory, who died last month. McCory founded JanSport in 1967 with his future wife (Jan, the company’s namesake). Until JanSport evolved the design, a backpack was a bulky, specialized thing for hiking, used only by smelly people on mountain trailheads or European gap years. By the time I entered school, the backpack was lightweight and universal. What did anyone ever do previously?

They carried their books. Let me repeat that they carried their books.

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