For almost two years now, the world’s biggest tech companies have been at war over generative AI. Meta may be known for social media, Google for search, and Amazon for online shopping, but since the release of ChatGPT, each has made tremendous investments in an attempt to dominate in this new era. Along with start-ups such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity, their spending on data centers and chatbots is on track to eclipse the costs of sending the first astronauts to the moon.

To be successful, these companies will have to do more than build the most “intelligent” software: They will need people to use, and return to, their products. Everyone wants to be Facebook, and nobody wants to be Friendster. To that end, the best strategy in tech hasn’t changed: build an ecosystem that users can’t help but live in. Billions of people use Google Search every day, so Google built a generative-AI product known as “AI Overviews” right into the results page, granting it an immediate advantage over competitors.

This is why a recent proposal from the Department of Justice is so significant. The government wants to break up Google’s monopoly over the search market, but its proposed remedies may in fact do more to shape the future of AI. Google owns 15 products that serve at least half a billion people and businesses each—a sprawling ecosystem of gadgets, search and advertising, personal applications, and enterprise software. An AI assistant that shows up in (or works well with) those products will be the one that those people are most likely to use. And Google has already woven its flagship Gemini AI models into Search, Gmail, Maps, Android, Chrome, the Play Store, and YouTube, all of which have at least 2 billion users each. AI doesn’t have to be life-changing to be successful; it just has to be frictionless. The DOJ now has an opportunity to add some resistance. (In a statement last week, Kent Walker, Google’s chief legal officer, called the Department of Justice’s proposed remedy part of an “interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America’s global technology leadership,” including the company’s “leading role” in AI.)

[Read: The horseshoe theory of Google Search]

Google is not the only competitor with an ecosystem advantage. Apple is integrating its Apple Intelligence suite across eligible iPhones, iPads, and Macs. Meta, with more than 3 billion users across its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, enjoys similar benefits. Amazon’s AI shopping assistant, Rufus, has garnered little major attention but nonetheless became available to the website’s U.S. shoppers this fall. However much of the DOJ’s request the court ultimately grants, these giants will still lead the AI race—but Google had the clearest advantage among them.

Just how good any of these companies’ AI products are has limited relevance to their adoption. Google’s AI tools have repeatedly shown major flaws, such as confidently recommending eating rocks for good health, but the features continue to be used by more and more people simply because they’re there. Similarly, Apple’s AI models are less powerful than Gemini or ChatGPT, but they will have a huge user base simply because of how popular the iPhone is. Meta’s AI models may not be state-of-the-art, but that doesn’t matter to billions of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp users who just want to ask a chatbot a silly question or generate a random illustration. Tech companies without such an ecosystem are well aware of their disadvantage: OpenAI, for instance, is reportedly considering developing its own web browser, and it has partnered with Apple to integrate ChatGPT across the company’s phones, tablets, and computers.

[Read: AI search is turning into the problem everyone worried about]

This is why it’s relevant that the DOJ’s proposed antitrust remedy takes aim at Google’s broader ecosystem. Federal and state attorneys asked the court to force Google to sell off its Chrome browser; cease preferencing its search products in the Android mobile operating system; prevent it from paying other companies, including Apple and Samsung, to make Google the default search engine; and allow rivals to syndicate Google’s search results and use its search index to build their own products. All of these and the DOJ’s other requests, under the auspices of search, are really shots at Google’s expansive empire.

As my colleague Ian Bogost has argued, selling Chrome might not affect Google’s search dominance: “People returned to Google because they wanted to, not just because the company had strong-armed them,” he wrote last week. But selling Chrome and potentially Android, as well as preventing Google from making its search engine the default option for various other companies’ products, would make it harder for Google to funnel billions of people to the rest of its software, including AI. Meanwhile, access to Google’s search index could provide a huge boost to OpenAI, Perplexity, Microsoft, and other AI search competitors: Perhaps the hardest part of building a searchbot is trawling the web for reliable links, and rivals would gain access to the most coveted way of doing so.

[Read: Google already won]

The Justice Department seems to recognize that the AI war implicates and goes beyond search. Without intervention, Google’s search monopoly could give it an unfair advantage over AI as well—and an AI monopoly could further entrench the company’s control over search. The court, attorneys wrote, must prevent Google from “manipulating the development and deployment of new technologies,” most notably AI, to further throttle competition.

And so the order also takes explicit aim at AI. The DOJ wants to bar Google from self-preferencing AI products, in addition to Search, in Chrome, Android, and all of its other products. It wants to stop Google from buying exclusive rights to sources of AI-training data and disallow Google from investing in AI start-ups and competitors that are in or might enter the search market. (Two days after the DOJ released its proposal, Amazon invested another $4 billion into Anthropic, the start-up and OpenAI rival that Google has also heavily backed to this point, suggesting that the e-commerce giant might be trying to lock in an advantage over Google.) The DOJ also requested that Google provide a simple way for publishers to opt out of their content being used to train Google’s AI models or be cited in AI-enhanced search products. All of that will make it harder for Google to train and market future AI models, and easier for its rivals to do the same.

When the DOJ first sued Google, in 2020, it was concerned with the internet of old: a web that appeared intractably stuck, long ago calcified in the image of the company that controls how billions of people access and navigate it. Four years and a historic victory later, its proposed remedy enters an internet undergoing an upheaval that few could have foreseen—but that the DOJ’s lawsuit seems to have nonetheless anticipated. A frequently cited problem with antitrust litigation in tech is anachronism, that by the time a social-media, or personal-computing, or e-commerce monopoly is apparent, it is already too late to disrupt. With generative AI, the government may finally have the head start it needs.

Donald Trump will never face federal criminal charges for trying to corrupt the 2020 presidential election, the fundamental democratic procedure. Nor will he ever face consequences for brazenly removing highly sensitive documents from the White House, refusing to hand them back, and attempting to hide them from the government.

Special Counsel Jack Smith, representing the Justice Department, today filed to dismiss charges in the two federal cases he was overseeing against Trump. Smith effectively had no choice. Trump had promised to fire him and end the cases as soon as he took office on January 20. (The president-elect reportedly plans to fire not only Smith but also career attorneys who were assigned to his team.)

In both cases, these were crimes that only a president could commit: No one else could have attempted to remain in office by the same means, and few people could have made off with boxes full of these documents. And only a president-elect with nearly unlimited resources could have gotten away with them.

[Read: The Trump-Trumpist divide]

Trump pulled off this legal trick with a simple and effective strategy of running down the clock until being reelected president. Traditionally, defendants have had two ways to beat a rap. They could convince a judge or jury that they didn’t do the crime, or at least that there isn’t enough evidence to prove they did. Or they could look for a way to get sprung on a technicality. Faced with a choice between A and B, Trump chose option C: weaponize the procedural protections of the American justice system against itself.

The problem is not that these protections exist. They are a crucial part of ensuring fairness for all defendants. But just as he has done in other circumstances, Trump sniffed how the things that make the American system great can also be cynically exploited. If you have sufficiently deep pockets and very little shame, you can snow a case under procedural motions, appeals, and long shots, enough to slow the case to a crawl. And in Trump’s case, delay was a victory—not because he could put it off indefinitely, but because he will soon be president again, with the Department of Justice under his authority.

The strategy was not without risks. His claims of presidential immunity drew scoffs from many legal scholars, as well as judges on the first two levels of the federal court system. But the Supreme Court took as long as possible before issuing a ruling substantially agreeing with Trump—the majority included three Trump-appointed justices plus a fourth whose wife was deeply involved in the election-subversion effort.

Even then, the strategy relied on Trump winning the presidential election, which was not a sure bet. Had he lost, the cases would likely have continued, and he might well have lost those. The documents case, though not as grave as Trump’s attack on the basic fabric of the Constitution, was clear-cut in its facts. And in the only criminal case against Trump that did go to a jury—widely viewed as the most tenuous case against him—he was quickly convicted. (Sentencing in that case is now indefinitely paused, also because of Trump’s election.)

But in Attorney General Merrick Garland, Trump drew the ideal foil. The man overseeing the two cases against Trump is obsessive about proceduralism. His view was that the best way to restore the justice system, and the Justice Department, after the first Trump presidency was to do everything precisely by the book, no matter how long it took. It took quite a while—Smith was not appointed until November 2022, two months after the paperwork coup began and three months after the FBI seized documents at Mar-a-Lago. By the time Smith brought charges, in summer 2023, the timeline was tight, either for verdicts soon enough to inform voters or to avoid dismissal if a Republican won the presidential election.

This was the problem with Garland’s calculation: It may have temporarily restored the proper function of the Justice Department, but it didn’t win back public approval, nor did it really benefit the Justice Department in court. Garland appointed Smith as special counsel after Trump entered the presidential race, so as to create an appearance of insulation from politics. Little good that did: The Trump-appointed judge Aileen Cannon delivered a blatantly political ruling throwing the case out because she deemed the appointment unconstitutional.

[David Frum: A good country’s bad choice]

Most important, Garland’s attention to detail meant the system failed to do the basic work of holding accountable someone who had committed serious crimes in plain sight. And partly because of that, Trump will soon return to the White House with the power and intention to destroy all the independence and careful procedures that Garland took such pains to protect.

Not only that, but the Justice Department will be led by the lawyers who developed Trump’s strategy. His new nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, spoke outside his trial in New York and defended him in his impeachments. His appointees for deputy attorney general and principal associate deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, represented him as defense lawyers. D. John Sauer, who argued the immunity case at the Supreme Court, will be solicitor general, the fourth-ranking post at DOJ.

The lack of accountability for January 6 is an affront to the Constitution. But the lesson that Trump will take from charges being dropped, along with the immunity ruling, is that the system is not capable of holding him accountable for most rules that he violates. The affronts will continue.

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 the almost three weeks since his victory in the presidential election, Donald Trump has more or less completed nominations for his Cabinet, and he and his surrogates have made a flurry of announcements. The president-elect and his team have spent much of November baiting and trolling their opponents while throwing red meat to the MAGA faithful. (Trump, for example, has appointed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to a nonexistent “Department of Government Efficiency,” an office whose acronym is a play on a jokey crypto currency.) And though some of Trump’s nominees have been relatively reasonable choices, in recent days Trump has put forward a handful of manifestly unqualified and even dangerous picks, reiterated his grandiose plans for his first days in office, and promised to punish his enemies.

We’ve seen this before. As I warned this past April, stunning his opponents with more outrages than they can handle is a classic Trump tactic:

By overwhelming people with the sheer volume and vulgarity of his antics, Trump and his team are trying to burn out the part of our brains that can discern truth from fiction, right from wrong, good from evil … Trump isn’t worried that all of this will cause voters to have a kind of mental meltdown: He’s counting on it. He needs ordinary citizens to become so mired in moral chaos and so cognitively paralyzed that they are unable to comprehend the disasters that would ensue if he returns to the White House.

Neither the voters nor the members of the U.S. Senate, however, should fall for it this time. Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University has written that the most important way to resist a rising authoritarian regime is not to “obey in advance”—that is, changing our behavior in ways we think might conform to the demands of the new ruling group. That’s good advice, but I might add a corollary here: People should not panic and exhaust themselves in advance, either.

In practice, this means setting priorities—mine are the preservation of democracy and national security—and conserving mental energy and political effort to concentrate on those issues and Trump’s plans for them. It’s important to bear in mind as well that Trump will not take the oath of office for another two months. (Such oaths do not matter to him, but he cannot grab the machinery of government without it.) If citizens and their representatives react to every moment of trollery over the coming weeks, they will be exhausted by Inauguration Day.

Trump will now dominate the news cycle almost every day with some new smoke bomb that is meant to distract from his attempts to stock the government with a strange conglomeration of nihilistic opportunists and self-styled revolutionaries. He will propose plans that he has no real hope of accomplishing quickly, while trying to build an aura of inevitability and omnipotence around himself. (His vow to begin mass deportations on his first day, for example, is a logistical impossibility, unless by mass he means “slightly more than usual.” He may be able to set in motion some sort of planning on day one, but he has no way to execute a large-scale operation yet, and it will be some time before he has anywhere to put so many people marked for deportation.)

The attempt to build Trump into some kind of unstoppable political kaiju is nonsense, as the hapless Matt Gaetz just found out. For all of Trump’s bullying and bluster, Gaetz’s nomination bid was over in a matter of days. Two of Trump’s other nominations—Pete Hegseth for defense secretary and Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence—might be in similar trouble as various Republicans begin to show doubts about them.

Senator James Risch, for example, a hard-right conservative from deep-red Idaho and the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, declined over the weekend to offer the kind of ritualistic support for Hegseth and Gabbard that Trump expects from the GOP. “Ask me this question again after the hearings,” Risch said on Saturday. “These appointments by the president are constrained by the advice and consent of the Senate. The Senate takes that seriously, and we vet these.”

What Risch seems to be saying—at least I hope, anyway—is that it’s all fun and games until national security is involved, and then people have to get serious about what’s at stake. The Senate isn’t a Trump rally, and the Defense Department isn’t a backdrop for a segment on Fox & Friends.

Similar thinking may have led to Scott Bessent as Trump’s nominee to run the Treasury. Bessent would have been an ordinary pick in any other administration, but in Trump World, it’s noteworthy that a standard-issue hedge-fund leader—and a man who once worked for George Soros, of all people—just edged out the more radical Trump loyalist Howard Lutnick, who has been relegated to Commerce, a far less powerful department. Culture warring, it seems, matters less to some of Team Trump when real money is involved.

None of this is a case for complacency. Hegseth and Gabbard could still end up winning confirmation. The anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could take over at the Department of Health and Human Services. Meanwhile, reports have also emerged that Trump may move Kash Patel—the very embodiment of the mercenary loyalist who will execute any and every Trump order—into a senior job at the FBI or the Department of Justice, a move that would raise urgent questions about American civil liberties.

But Trump cannot simply will things into existence. Yes, “the people have spoken,” but it was a narrow win, and Trump again seems to have fallen short of gaining 50 percent of the popular vote. Just as Democrats have had to learn that running up big margins in California does not win the presidency, Republicans are finding yet again that electoral votes are not the same thing as a popular mandate. The Senate Republican conference is rife with cowards, but only a small handful of principled GOP senators are needed to stop some of Trump’s worst nominees.

The other reality is that Trump has already accomplished the one thing he really cared about: staying out of jail. Today, Special Counsel Jack Smith moved to dismiss the January 6–related case against him. So be it; if enough voters have decided they can live with a convicted felon in the White House, there’s nothing the rest of us can do about that.

But Trump returning to office does not mean he can rule by fiat. If his opponents react to every piece of bait he throws in front of them, they will lose their bearings. And even some of Trump’s voters—at least those outside the MAGA personality cult—might not have expected this kind of irresponsible trolling. If these Republican voters want to hold Trump accountable for the promises he made to them during the campaign, they’ll have to keep their heads rather than get caught up in Trump’s daily dramas.

Allow me to add one piece of personal advice for the upcoming holiday: None of the things Trump is trying to do will happen before the end of the week. So for Thanksgiving, give yourself a break. Remember the great privilege and blessing it is to be an American, and have faith in the American Constitution and the freedoms safeguarded within it. If your Uncle Ned shows up and still wants to argue about how the election was stolen from Trump four years ago, my advice is the same as it’s been for every holiday: Tell him he’s wrong, that you love him anyway, that you’re not having this conversation today, and to pass the potatoes.

Related:

Pam Bondi’s comeback Another theory of the Trump movement

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Revenge of the COVID contrarians The end of the quest for justice for January 6 Caitlin Flanagan on the Democrats’ billionaire mistake

Today’s News

Special Counsel Jack Smith filed motions to drop the federal election-subversion and classified-documents cases against Trump, citing a Justice Department rule against prosecuting sitting presidents. A California judge delayed the resentencing date for Lyle and Erik Menendez, the brothers imprisoned for killing their parents in 1989, to give the new Los Angeles County district attorney more time to review the case. The Israeli cabinet will vote tomorrow on a proposed cease-fire deal with Hezbollah, which is expected to pass, according to a spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli ambassador to the U.S. said on Israeli Army Radio that an agreement could be reached “within days” but that there remain “points to finalize.”

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Climate negotiations at COP29 ended in a $300 billion deal that mostly showed how far the world is from facing climate change’s real dangers, Zoë Schlanger argues. The Wonder Reader: One of the most humbling parts of being alive is realizing that you might need to reconsider some long-held habits, Isabel Fattal writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Everyone Agrees Americans Aren’t Healthy

By Nicholas Florko

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is wrong about a lot of things in public health. Vaccines don’t cause autism. Raw milk is more dangerous than pasteurized milk. And cellphones haven’t been shown to cause brain cancer. But the basic idea behind his effort to “Make America Healthy Again” is correct: America is not healthy, and our current system has not fixed the problem.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

“Dear Therapist”: No one wants to host my in-laws for the holidays. The right has a Bluesky problem. The leak scandal roiling Israel What the broligarchs want from Trump

Culture Break

Everett

Watch. Every generation has an Oz story, but Wicked is the retelling that best captures what makes L. Frank Baum’s world sing, Allegra Rosenberg writes.

Try out. Group fitness classes aren’t just about exercise—they’re also a ridiculous, perfect way to make friends, Mikala Jamison writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I often tell people to unplug from the news. (Hey, I get paid to have opinions about national events, and yet I make sure to stop watching the news now and then too.) If you’d like a break that will not only get you off the doom treadmill but refresh and recharge you, allow me to suggest binge-watching the new Ted Danson series on Netflix, A Man on the Inside. It’s charming and funny, and it might bring a tear to your eye in between some laughs.

Danson plays a recently widowed retired professor who takes a job with a private investigator as the “inside man” at a senior-citizen residence in San Francisco. (As someone who watched the debut of Cheers 42 years ago, I feel like I’ve been growing old along with Danson through his many shows, and this might be his best role.) He’s tracking down a theft, but the crime isn’t all that interesting, nor is it really the point of the show: Rather, A Man on the Inside is about family, friends, love, and death.

My wife and I sometimes found the show almost too hard to watch, because we have both had parents in assisted living and memory-care settings. But A Man on the Inside never hurts—it has too much compassion (and gentle, well-placed humor) to let aging become caricatured as nothing but tragedy and loss. It is a show for and about families, just when we need something we can all watch over the holidays.

— Tom

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Those of us who first became politically homeless in 2016 have lately been in a quandary: We need to figure out who we are. If we are not to succumb to the Saruman trap—going along with populist authoritarians in the foolish hope of using them for higher purposes—then we had better establish what we stand for.

Labels matter in politics. They can also lose their meaning. There is, for example, nothing “conservative” about the MAGA movement, which is, in large part, reactionary, looking for a return to an idealized past, when it is not merely a cult of personality. Today’s progressives are a long, long way from their predecessors of the early 20th century—just invoke Theodore Roosevelt’s name at a gathering of “the Squad” and see what happens.

Even the terms left and right—derived, let us remember, from seating arrangements in the National Assembly during the early days of the French Revolution—no longer convey much. Attitudes toward government coercion of various kinds, deficit spending, the rule of law—neither party holds consistent views on these subjects. The activist bases of both Democrats and Republicans like the idea of expanding executive power at the expense of Congress and the courts. Both see American foreign policy in past decades as a tale of unremitting folly, best resolved by leaving the world to its own devices. Both brood over fears and resentments, and shun those who do not share their deepest prejudices.

[David Frum: A good country’s bad choice]

What is worse is the extent to which the MAGA- and progressive-activist worlds are more interested in destroying institutions than building them. Both denounce necessary parts of government (the Department of Justice on the one hand, police departments on the other); seek to enforce speech codes; threaten to drive those they consider their enemies from public life; and pursue justice (as they understand it) in a spirit of reckless self-righteousness using prosecution as a form of retribution. Neither group of wreckers, for example, would really like to see, let alone help rebuild, the great universities as politically neutral oases of education rather than incubators of their own partisans.

To call those made politically homeless by the rise of Donald Trump “conservatives” no longer makes sense. To be a conservative is to want to slow down or stop change and preserve institutions and practices as they are, or to enable them to evolve slowly. But in recent decades, so much damage has been inflicted on norms of public speech and conduct that it is not enough to slow the progress of political decay. To the extent that the plain meaning of the word conservatism is indeed a commitment to preservation, that battle has been lost, and on multiple fronts.

We certainly are not “progressives” either. We do not believe that progress is inevitable (and can be accelerated), or that history bends in a certain direction. Being on the right side of history is a phrase that sends chills down the spines of those of us who have a somewhat dark view of human nature. The notion that the arc of history bends inexorably toward justice died for many of us in the middle of the 20th century. Moreover, the modern progressive temper, with its insistence on orthodoxies on such specifics as pronouns and a rigid and all-encompassing categorization of oppressors and victims, is intolerable for many of us.

What we are is a kind of old-fashioned liberal—a point recently made by the former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky. Liberal is not an entirely satisfactory term, but given the impoverishment of today’s political vocabulary, it will have to do.

What does being a liberal mean, particularly in a second Trump term, when politics has become coarse and brutal and the partisan divide seems uncrossable?

It begins with a commitment to the notion of “freedom”—that is, a freedom that most suits human nature at its finest and requires not only the legal protection to express itself but a set of internal restraints based on qualities now in short supply: prudent good judgment, the ability to empathize, the desire to avoid unnecessary hurt, a large measure of tolerance for disagreement, an awareness that error awaits all of us. We agree with Alexis de Tocqueville, who argued in Democracy in America, that it is mœurs—mores or habits of belief or norms—and not laws alone that keep America free.

If this does not sound like a partisan political agenda, that is because it is not. It is, rather, a temperament, a set of dispositions rooted in beliefs about the challenges and promise of free self-government. It is an assertion of the primacy of those deeper values over the urgency of any specific political program, and reflects a belief that, ultimately, they matter more.

Cardinal John Henry Newman, whose early-19th-century writings shaped the idea of a liberal education, famously captured these qualities in his description of the product of such an education:

He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings for arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out loud. He has too much good sense to be affronted at insults, he is too well employed to remember injury … He is patient, forbearing, and resigned, on philosophical principles; he submits to pain because it is inevitable, to bereavement, because it is irreparable, and to death, because it is his destiny. He may be right or wrong in his opinion, but he is too clear-headed to be unjust … He knows the weakness of human reason as well as its strength, its province and its limits.

These qualities will, no doubt, seem otherworldly to many. They are not the stuff of which a vigorous political party will be built; they are easily mocked and impossible to tweet. They are more the stuff of statesmanship than politics. They will satisfy neither of our political parties, and certainly none of their bigoted partisans. They will not, at least in the short run, capture the imagination of the American people. They are probably not the winning creed of a political movement that can capture the presidency in 2028, or secure majorities in the House or Senate.

[Caitlin Flanagan: The Democrats’ billionaire mistake]

But principled liberals of the modern American type can exercise influence if they are patient, willing to argue, and, above all, if they do not give up. We can write and speak, attempt to persuade, and engage. Our influence, to the extent that we have it, will be felt in the long term and indirectly. It may be felt most, and is most urgently needed, in the field of education, beginning in the early years when young people acquire the instincts and historical knowledge that can make them thoughtful citizens. It is a long-term project, but that is nothing new: The struggle to eliminate formal discrimination on the basis of race and religion in public life took a very long time as well.

True liberals are short-term pessimists, because they understand the dark side of human nature, but long-run optimists about human potential, which is why they believe in freedom. At this troubled moment, we should neither run from the public square nor chant jeremiads while shaking our fists at the heavens. We need to be the anti-hysterics, the unflappable skeptics, the persistent advocates for the best of the old values and practices in new conditions. We need to persistently make our case.

Nor is this a matter of argument only. We need to be the ones who not only articulate but embody certain standards of behavior and thought. We may need the courage that the first editor of this magazine described as the willingness to “dare to be, in the right with two or three.” For sure, we should follow the motto that he coined for The Atlantic and be “of no party or clique.” If that means journeying in a political wilderness for a while, well, there are precedents for that. Besides, those who travel with us will be good company—and may be considerably more numerous than we now think.