Back in Little League, I used to think I was a pretty good baseball player. I hit a bunch of home runs and thought I could play in the majors—until about seventh grade. That’s when I stepped to the plate against a pitcher from Warren Jr. High School who could throw a curveball.

His first pitch appeared to be coming straight for my head. I hit the dirt and then peeked up just in time to see the ball break perfectly over the plate. Humbling! The umpire called it a strike, a bunch of Warren players laughed at me, and I would eventually go on to become one of those writers who uses too many sports analogies.

Embarrassing as that was, the decisiveness of my defeat dealt a fast end to my delusional diamond dreams. I never learned to hit a curveball but did take a tidy lesson from the experience: When life offers clarity, take the gift.

Democrats should take the gift.

If nothing else, the party’s electoral battering last week should provide a clarity that Democrats clearly lacked before. They were shocked by the results. I knew a bunch who were indeed predicting a rout, but with Kamala Harris doing the routing. “This could be glorious,” a Democratic operative friend said to me last weekend after the now-ingloriously wrong Des Moines Register poll that showed Harris leading Trump by three points in deep-red Iowa was released. Trump wound up winning the state by 13 points.

At minimum, the prevailing sentiment was that the election would be very close. Pundit consensus seemed to place the race at the cliché junction of “razor-thin” and “wafer-thin” (personally I thought it would be “paper-thin,” but then, I was an outlier). The contest, many predicted, might take many days to call. Election lawyers swarmed battleground states. I don’t recall speaking with more than one or two Democrats in the final weeks who foresaw the ultimate beatdown the party suffered.

Then came the knee-buckling curveball that electorates have a knack for throwing.

“We at least have some precision here with this result,” Democratic Representative Debbie Dingell of Michigan told me. “There’s really no ambiguity in what voters said, at least at the presidential level.” This can save time and focus the collective mind on the larger problems that confront Democrats.

No one is debating whether it would have helped if, say, Bad Bunny had endorsed Harris sooner. In other words, last week’s drubbing was not conducive to small-bore second-guessing; no use dwelling in the margins when the margins are, in fact, so conclusive.

This was not the case after the defeat that Democrats suffered at Trump’s hand eight years ago. That election was much closer. It lent itself to strategic quibbling (“if only Hillary Clinton had spent more time in Wisconsin”), numeric hypotheticals (“if only X number of votes in X number of states had swung the other way”), and systemic laments (damn Electoral College). All of this amounted to the political equivalent of In any other ballpark, that’s a home run.

And it distracted from—even muddled—whatever lessons that loss could have provided.

Partly as a result, Democrats engaged in no real reckoning after 2016. Essentially they became a party that defined itself in opposition to Trump, just as Republicans have been defined in submission to him. This probably made sense for Democrats in the short term. Trump’s presidency, his post-presidency, and the lame knockoffs that he inspired gave Democrats plenty of material to work with. They enjoyed good midterm results (2018, 2022) and picked Joe Biden as a winning stopgap candidate in 2020.

Unfortunately for Democrats, Biden never got the “stopgap” memo. The obstinate octogenarian insisted on running again until it was way too late for someone else to enter, putting Harris and her party in a terrible position.

Bewildered Democrats are casting blame, and Biden seems to be catching the most. But the recriminations will subside soon enough, and the faster Democrats can embrace the clarity of this moment, the better.

“This has more of a feel of wiping the slate clean,” Pete Giangreco, a Democratic campaign strategist, told me. “Sure, you can maybe argue whether Josh Shapiro as the running mate could have helped with Pennsylvania, but who cares? It wouldn’t have mattered. It makes it easier to focus on what matters.”

Dingell says that what matters most—and what the 2024 results expose—is that working-class voters, across racial lines, are put off by the Democratic Party. This should be apparent not just from the defeats of last Tuesday but also the successes. She mentioned two of her Democratic House colleagues who have been elected and reelected in treacherous swing districts: Jared Golden of Maine, who holds a slight edge (about 700 votes) in one of the few races in the country that has yet to be called, and Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who appears to have narrowly retained her rural Washington State district, and who has criticized national Democratic leaders for their inattention to working-class voter concerns.

“I think we just need to go out and learn and listen for a while,” Dingell told me.

First, listen to the results: They were not close. Trump won all seven battleground states and the popular vote; made big gains with Black and Hispanic voters, as well as with young people; and even polled 52 percent of white women. Republicans took the Senate and kept the House.

As it turned out, Democrats were much closer to delusion than the reality that voters would impose. So, by all means, digest the postmortems, posit the theories, and engage in the various “conversations we need to have” that Democrats and pundits keep prescribing. Better yet, skip those.

“Here’s what we know: We don’t know anything,” Jon Stewart said on The Daily Show on Election Night. “We’re going to make all kinds of pronouncements about what this country is, and what this world is, and the truth is we’re not really going to know shit.”

There is a simple humility in that, something to sit with back in the dugout.

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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.

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

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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

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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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Riders perform during a freestyle motocross show at the EICMA exhibition motorcycle fair in Rho, Italy. (Luca Bruno / AP)

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How should the women who didn’t vote for Trump go about their lives, knowing that a majority of Americans voted not just against their immediate health and well-being, but for a candidate who actively sidelined and maligned people like them? After months and months of watching Donald Trump and his band of bros belittle Kamala Harris and all women generally—the childless, the childbearing, and the post-childbearing—55 percent of male voters supported him, according to CNN’s exit polls. So did 45 percent of female voters. What are the other women—those who feel that they’re living in a nation that is hostile to their very existence—to do?

The answer is something different from what they did the last time.

In 2016, when Hillary Clinton’s loss sent thousands of women into the streets of Washington, D.C., with their signs and their pussy hats, many assumed that the sexism Clinton had experienced was a bug of the Trump era. That if women banded together, expanded their notion of feminism to include experiences across race and class, and fought back, they could change things.

[Read: How Trump neutralized his abortion problem]

And in some ways, they did. That collective strength laid the foundation for the #MeToo movement in 2017. More women ran for office, and won, in the 2018 midterms than ever before. But the ground has shifted in the intervening years.

Sexism, it turned out, was not a bug but a feature of the Trump years. Misogyny certainly appears to come naturally to Trump, but it was strategically amplified—through surrogates and messaging—to attract supporters, particularly younger men of all races. Elon Musk’s political-action committee even put out an ad referring to Harris as “a big ole C-word”—and Communist was only one of its intended meanings. Trump has always been good at exploiting the ugliest aspects of America, and the growing isolation and rightward drift of young men was a perfect target.

American men are lonely—in 2021, 15 percent were likely to say they had no close friends, up from 3 percent in 1990. They are also more likely to not be in a relationship: In 2022, six in 10 men under 30 were single. In a 2023 survey of men ages 18 to 45, a majority agreed with the statement “No one really knows me.” Many find solace online, where they consume their news on Reddit and X and soak up content from influencers such as Andrew Tate, Adin Ross, and Joe Rogan. The content, like its creators, is often blatantly misogynistic.

Many of these young men apparently see Trump—with his microphone-fellating pantomime and his crowds chanting the word bitch—as presidential. He spoke to young men, in a voice they recognized. More than half of men ages 18 to 29 voted for him.

But Trump didn’t just pick up support from young men; he picked up support from almost every group. For many older white men, and the many, many Latino men who broke for Trump—well, the misogyny may have seemed macho. And what about his female supporters? Representative Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to run for president, wrote in 1970 that “women in America are much more brainwashed and content with their roles as second-class citizens than Blacks ever were.” This remains true today. No matter the number of marches women hold or memes they post online about sisterhood, many women are unswayed: 53 percent of white women (and a growing percentage of Latinas) voted for Trump. Women can enforce patriarchy just as well as men, as the “trad wives” on the internet have demonstrated.

Many had hoped that as president, Harris would have reached across not just the political aisle, but the gender divide. In her concession speech yesterday, she listed women’s rights as one cause among many, speaking of the need for women to “have the freedom to make decisions about their own body,” for schools to be safe from gun violence, “for the rule of law, for equal justice.”

No such repair will happen under a second Trump administration, for the obvious reason that division benefits him. Misogyny helps disempowered men feel empowered. After Trump’s victory, the right-wing activist Nick Fuentes tweeted: “Your body, my choice. Forever.” It really is a man’s world now.

The situation isn’t hopeless, but it may require new tactics. The time for thumping on our chests and railing against the patriarchy might be past. The protests that felt so powerful in 2016 may have backfired to some extent, by causing the people women most needed to listen to their message to tune them out instead. But women can’t simply retreat, either—their lives and futures depend on it.  

The answer is engagement: soft diplomacy in everyday life. “We will continue to wage this fight in the voting booth, in the courts, and in the public square,” Harris said in her speech. But “we will also wage it in quieter ways.”

Start easy: Thank the men in your life who supported Harris; thank them for trusting and respecting women and believing that they can lead. It seems small, but millions of men apparently don’t feel that way, so let’s encourage the ones who do.

[Listen: Are we living in a different America?]

For mothers and aunties of young men and boys: You may not be able to control what they are reading on the internet, but you can combat it, through conversation and counterprogramming.

And most important, women who voted against Trump should talk honestly with the men in their lives—their cousins and fathers and colleagues and friends—who voted the other way. Talk to them about women’s lives and values. Better yet, enlist other men to help you. One reason fewer Black men drifted toward Trump than Latino men is because, in the months leading up to the election, on social media and in private conversations and at church, many Black people talked honestly about the importance of valuing women. They addressed voters’ hesitance about female leadership directly, by discussing the long history of excellent Black female leaders. Minds can be molded by the internet and its algorithms, yes, but minds can be changed by conversations as well. As Harris reminded everyone, “You have power.”

Despite what many say, the modern woman doesn’t need a man. But women’s lives can certainly be improved by men not hating them.

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“If [X candidate I hate] wins this election, I will leave the country” is a sentiment we’ve heard from a few politically outspoken celebrities in recent presidential-election cycles. They never seem to follow through on the promise, though. That’s because it probably isn’t really a promise, but rather a defense against an emotion that humans truly hate: disappointment. They are soothing themselves with a strategy to neutralize anticipated feelings of impotence and frustration if the dreaded event comes to pass.

So if your preferred candidate lost on Tuesday night, you might be enduring that terrible emotion. Some people suffer from the malady so badly that they may be diagnosed with a condition popularly known as “post-election stress disorder.”

Even if all of this seems exaggerated, you probably do dread some source of disappointment in your life. Perhaps it involves your career, your education, or your romantic relationship. If so, you are very likely acting in a way that protects you from this deep and painful emotion; some research has found that disappointment can be associated with post-traumatic stress disorder. Understanding this phenomenon can help lower the fear of your own emotions, however, and help you make decisions leading to better outcomes. That may even help you avoid making a silly public promise to leave America.

[Read: What to watch if you need a distraction this week]

As two scholars described it recently in the Annual Review of Anthropology, disappointment is “the messy, friction-filled, and unsatisfying gap between lived experiences and expectations that have not come to pass.” The feeling is similar to regret, in that it involves a past event that didn’t turn out the way you had hoped. But whereas regret involves wishing you had done something differently, disappointment does not necessarily involve your decision-making agency. Because of this distinction, psychologists writing in the journal Cognition and Emotion find that regret more often leads to self-reproach, in contrast with the usual unhappiness associated with disappointment, which comes from a sense of powerlessness.

For example, you might vote for a candidate and regret it (that is, reproach yourself for doing so). But if the candidate for whom you voted loses, that can also give you a sense that you have no say over how you are governed—that’s where the powerlessness comes in.

The above research casts additional light on the psychological dimension of this difference between regret and disappointment. If a person disappoints you, that typically results in your feeling anger. But if an outcome is the disappointment, that is usually accompanied more by sadness.

Such findings tend to focus on what psychologists call “disconfirmed expectancies,” meaning a difference between what you think will or should happen and what actually happens. This involves the neuromodulator dopamine, which governs both rewards and the anticipation of rewards in our brains.

How this works: Imagine that at about 11 a.m., your stomach growls and you think about lunch. Your mind goes to a turkey sandwich you enjoyed last week from a local deli, which gives you a response from dopamine neurons to elicit anticipation and make you form a plan to go there at noon. If, when you arrive and get the sandwich, it is just what you expected, you get no additional dopamine response. But if the sandwich is even more delicious than you remembered, you will get an extra neurochemical spritz, which teaches you to come back again. But if the deli is closed, God forbid, your dopamine response will drop, making you feel mildly depressed—or, in a word, disappointed.

The mechanism no doubt evolved to teach us the most efficient way to accumulate rewards such as food and mates, and avoid wasting time and energy on fruitless activities. In ancient times, this reward system would keep you coming back again and again to a water hole where prey was easy to find. But if those animals caught on and stopped showing up, you would have a couple of disappointments and lose interest.

The most psychologically painful disappointments are those in which the hope of reward contrasts most sharply with the actual outcome. The closed deli involves a minor dopamine dip from which you’ll probably recover in minutes. But if, say, you truly expect your beloved to propose marriage and instead they skip town on you, the dopamine deficit will be a lot more severe and harder to endure—perhaps leading to a period of anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure that is characteristic of dysregulated dopamine levels and clinical depression.

Disappointment is especially severe for optimists: They predict outcomes that are above average, and much better than any negative occurrence. This means that they tend to have bigger “disconfirmed expectancies” than non-optimists. Writing in the journal Emotion in 2010, two psychologists studied how students felt before and after receiving exam results. They found that people with more optimistic expectations did not feel better than their peers beforehand, but did on average feel worse after learning their scores, because the optimists tended to be further from reality.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Schopenhauer’s advice on how to achieve great things]

Our lives are filled with uncertain outcomes, often involving the things we care about most deeply. To have any positive expectations means that disappointment is part of life. This has led some thinkers to conclude that the only answer is pessimism. The 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer famously made this case when he argued that “we generally find pleasure to be not nearly so pleasant as we expected, and pain very much more painful.” One conclusion from that: Expect nothing good ever, or even expect the worst, and you will never be disappointed.

Then again, Schopenhauer was well known for being a miserable person, so that may not be the best strategy. Better, I believe, to maintain hope amid life’s uncertainties—but to distinguish hope from optimism. Many people use the terms almost interchangeably, but they are different. Optimism involves an element of prediction—as we just saw, expecting a good outcome in a way that may be borderline delusional. Hope involves a belief that even if a disappointing result to a situation occurs, you can do something to improve that outcome—in the words of one team of researchers on the subject, “having the will and finding the way.” Because of this, as I have written, hope is far superior to optimism where happiness is concerned.

Hope does not require that you make any prediction at all about what might happen. It simply asks that you believe that whatever happens, you will have the ability to make circumstances better and you can give some thought to what that action might be.

In an odd way, this is halfway what people are doing when they announce a plan to leave America if the wrong candidate wins the election. But the contemplated action—leaving home and going into exile—is foolish and extreme; much better would be to say, “If the bad guy wins, I will be disappointed, but regardless of the disappointment, I will work as much as I can to make things around me better.” The same is true for other letdowns in life. If you’re yearning for a big promotion, don’t predict whether you will or won’t get it. Just be honest with yourself that you hope for the reward, and think logically about what constructive action you can take if, in fact, you are passed over.

In addition, because disappointment is part of the useful neurobiological learning process that you’ve inherited for your evolutionary fitness, look for the valuable lessons of a setback. The psychiatrist Carl Jung believed that when we are disappointed, we can actually choose between bitterness and wisdom—the latter being “the comforter in all psychic suffering.”

The problem with the leave-the-country approach is that it succumbs to bitterness instead of looking to learn. The same goes for a disappointment such as a bad breakup. The bitter response is “I’ll never date again.” A wise response is to figure out how to avoid getting entangled in future with a person who shares your ex’s problematic traits (that jerk).

[Arthur C. Brooks: Jung’s five pillars of a good life]

I wrote this column to soothe anyone who might be suffering from postelection disappointment, and to provide a better way to cope. But perhaps you aren’t disappointed: Maybe your candidate won, and you’re elated right now. That can also be an opportunity for wisdom—if you choose to take it.

Today you taste victory, but remember: Defeat is just around the corner, because that’s how life works. Reflect on this truth, and take the opportunity to show some grace to the neighbors and family members whose candidate lost and who are disappointed—because they’re feeling today the way you will surely feel tomorrow. Think of this as a chance to time travel, and bring a bit of kindness to comfort your future disappointed self.

On August 18, 2020, Americans marked the 100-year anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment and of women’s right to vote. The next day, Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic nomination for her current role, vice president of the United States. The consonance punctuated an already historic candidacy: Harris was the first woman of color to seek that office on a major-party ticket. She acknowledged the moment’s gravity at the beginning of her acceptance speech, thanking Fannie Lou Hamer, Shirley Chisholm, Mary McLeod Bethune, and many of the other women whose paths had led to the ground she broke that evening.

Harris now seeks to go further still, aiming for the U.S. presidency. But the history-making possibilities of her campaign have been easy to overlook, in large part because of the man Harris faces in her bid. Donald Trump, so ignorant of the past and so careless about the future, is a present-tense kind of candidate. The history he has brought to his fight for a second term—the attempt to overturn an election; the promises of deportations and retributions and violence; the racism; the misogyny; the incompetence, lies, and fraud; the assault; the boast that he has grabbed women “by the pussy”; the installation of judges who have grabbed away women’s rights—has imbued the 2024 contest with a sense of latent emergency. His flaws, as so often happens, have become someone else’s problem.

If the Democrats’ 2020 campaign was a “battle for the soul of America,” its 2024 counterpart has been a battle for the national body: the policies and practicalities that allow the country to function as a democracy. An opponent whose party is “Republican” but whose posture is “dictator” turns talk of history-making into a luxury. Harris rarely mentions her gender or race on the campaign trail. Her recent ads, MSNBC noted, have described her childhood primarily in terms of class. During the nomination speech she delivered at the Democratic National Convention in August, Harris briefly described her background—her South Asian mother, her Jamaican father—but focused on her career as a prosecutor. (The most conspicuous mention of history-making came from Hillary Clinton, whose speech acknowledged the structural integrity of “the highest, hardest glass ceiling.”) As Vox’s Constance Grady put it, “A woman is running for president and has decent odds of making it. She just seems to think her chances of being the first woman president are better as long as she never, ever talks about it.”

[Read: Kamala Harris’s ambition trap]

That reticence may well be good strategy. Clinton’s 2016 loss chastens strategists still: once bitten by the Electoral College, twice shy. And the brevity of Harris’s campaign—Joe Biden’s decision to step down in July left her just over three months at the top of the ticket—has required her to triage her messaging. “Well, I’m clearly a woman,” Harris told NBC News’s Hallie Jackson. Better, she suggested, to spend the time she had telling voters what they might not already know. “My challenge,” she said, “is the challenge of making sure I can talk with and listen to as many voters as possible and earn their vote.”

You could read Harris’s disinclination to talk about history-making as, in its own way, historic. She is campaigning to become the president, full stop, no other qualifier required. This doesn’t mean she has not focused on traditionally feminist priorities—reproductive freedom and care-related policies are at the center of her campaign messaging. She just hasn’t made her identity an explicit part of her pitch. This is a notable departure from the era of “I’m with her.” Progress can be exhilarating. It can also be condescending. (After Biden promised early in his 2020 campaign that he would name a woman as his running mate, the satirical website Reductress offered a headline that neatly captured the resulting discourse: “Biden Says VP Pick Is Between Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and a Beautiful Lady Ostrich.”)

The candidate who has most directly acknowledged the historical nature of Harris’s candidacy has been, instead, her opponent. After “Sleepy Joe” stepped aside, Trump began auditioning insults with the frenzy of a Hollywood casting agent, suggesting by turns that Harris “happened to turn Black”; that she is “mentally impaired”; that she has the “laugh of a crazy person”; that she will be seen by world leaders as a “play toy”; that she’d traded sexual favors to propel her rise to power. In a rally held shortly after Biden left the race, Trump made a great show of mispronouncing the name of a politician who has been nationally famous for years—butchering “Kamala” more than 40 times over the course of a single speech. J. D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, tried to denigrate Harris by accusing her of membership in that shadiest of cabals: “childless cat ladies.”

Americans tend to talk about history’s march as a matter of physics: movements, momentum, progress, resistance. The language can imply that the advancement is inevitable, an arc that moves ever forward as it bends toward something better. It can, as such, mislead. Susan Faludi’s 1991 book, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against America’s Women, was premised on the fallacy, expressed repeatedly in the American media of the time, that feminism’s fights had by that point been, essentially, won. Clinton’s 2016 loss, and the many other kinds of losses that followed, served as a further rebuke: Gains can be ungained in an instant. Rights are inalienable, until they’re not.

Backlash was published the year before a record number of women ran for, and won, national office. Media outlets, in a fit of ahistorical optimism, dubbed it the “year of the woman.” What they might not have realized was that the “year of the woman” had already been proclaimed (as an analysis in Slate found) in 1966. And in 1968, 1984, and 1990. It would be declared again to describe the electoral results of 2008, 2010, 2016, 2018, and 2020.

History warns, in that way, against the easy comforts of “making history.” The progress and backlash that Faludi identified tend not to take turns—the one giving, the other taking away—but instead to crash together. The 2016 election failed to produce a woman president and in that sense preserved the status quo, but many more people voted for Clinton than for Trump, and this was its own bit of progress. Polls attempting to measure Americans’ opinions about a potential woman president have reflected a fairly steady increase in comfort since the idea was first tested, in the mid-1930s. But the endurance of such surveys—their treatment of a woman in the White House as a question to be debated, a disruption to be endured—is, itself, a concession.

[Read: Pop culture failed to imagine Kamala Harris]

Harris has had to contend with these tensions in her campaign. She has navigated them by emphasizing what her presidency might do rather than what it might mean. (“I am running,” she told CNN’s Dana Bash, “because I believe that I am the best person to do this job at this moment for all Americans, regardless of race and gender.”) Along the way, though, she has also navigated backlash in human form. Some of the enduring images of the 2016 debates captured Trump looming over Clinton, blithely and menacingly, belittling her not only with his words but with his movements. He has been attempting to do something similar to Harris, even from a distance: Take up her space. Get in her way. Put the whole thing on his terms. The moments when his campaign has seemed the most flummoxed, the most pessimistic, are the ones when everyone seems to be paying attention to her, not him.

Trump has a unique kind of gravitational pull—a way of forcing everything else into his orbit, however strongly it might resist. And he has brought those brute physics to the 2024 campaign. When Harris delivered her “closing argument” speech in Washington on October 29, the location chosen for the event was the same one Trump had used for the speech that preceded the January 6 insurrection. And the address did not merely evoke Trump; it discussed him. As she spoke, Harris emphasized the disparities between herself and her opponent. She warned of what a second Trump presidency could do to the country. She expressed her desire to “turn the page.” She emphasized the future she wants to prevent more than the history she herself wants to make.

This was the right speech, the rousing speech, the prudent speech—the speech Harris needed to deliver. In its message, though, the candidate who has argued that she is the “best person” for the presidency “regardless of race and gender” was consigned to the stereotypically feminine role: He acts, she responds. The man so accustomed to taking what he wants robbed her of her full moment, and the moment of its full meaning. Crises fix things to the present. They demand sacrifice for the sake of the future. In pursuing the presidency, Harris is “not concerned about being the first,” a campaign official said. “She’s concerned about making sure she’s not the last.”

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