A close friend—someone whom I’ve always thought of as an optimist—recently shared his theory that, no matter what time you’re living in, it’s generally a bad one. In each era, he posited, quality of life improves in some ways and depreciates in others; the overall quotient of suffering in the world stays the same.

Whether this is nihilistic or comforting depends on your worldview. For instance, plenty of Americans are currently celebrating the outcome of the recent presidential election; many are indifferent to national politics; many others are overwhelmed with anger and despair over it. Looking at the bigger picture, I think the upsides of contemporary life—antibiotics, LGBTQ acceptance, transcontinental FaceTime—outweigh the horrors more often than not. I’ll also concede that this decade comes with a continuous drip of bad news about ghastly acts of violence, erosion of human rights, and climate disaster. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a 2023 Gallup poll found that rates of depression in the United States have hit a record high.

What can people turn to when the itch to burn everything down, or to surrender to hopelessness, feels barely suppressible? I agree with the novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge that there is power in “naming reality”—in telling, and writing, the truth about what’s happening around us. For those who are despondent about Donald Trump’s victory and feel unable to make a difference, reading might be a place to start. This doesn’t necessitate cracking open textbooks or dense political tracts: All kinds of books can provide solace, and the past few decades have given us no shortage of clear-eyed works of fiction, memoir, history, and poetry about how to survive and organize in—and ultimately improve—a broken world.

Reading isn’t a panacea. It’s a place to begin and return to: a road map for where to go from here, regardless of where “here” is. Granted, I am perhaps more comfortable than the average person with imperfect solutions. As a clinical pharmacist, I can’t cure diabetes, for example, but I can help control it, make the medications more affordable sometimes, and agitate for a better health-care system. Similarly, these seven books aren’t a cure for rage and despair. Think of them instead as a prescription.

Which Side Are You On, by Ryan Lee Wong

Wong’s novel opens with a mother picking up her son from the airport in a Toyota Prius, her hands clutching the wheel in a death grip. Wry, funny moments like this one animate Wong’s book about the dilemma of trying to correct systemic problems with individual solutions. It’s 2016, and spurred by the real-life police shooting of Akai Gurley, 21-year-old Reed is considering dropping out of Columbia University to dedicate himself to the Black Lives Matter movement. Reed wants nothing more than to usher in a revolution, but unfortunately, he’s a lot better at spouting leftist talking points than at connecting with other people. Like many children, Reed believes that his family is problematic and out of touch. His parents, one a co-leader in the 1980s of South Central’s Black-Korean Coalition, the other a union organizer, push back on his self-righteous idealism. During a brief trip home to see his dying grandmother, Reed wrestles with thorny questions about what makes a good activist and person. Later, in the Prius, Reed’s mother teaches him about the Korean concept of hwabyung, or “burning sickness”—an intense, suppressed rage that will destroy him if he’s not careful—and Reed learns what he really needs: not sound bites but true connection. Wong’s enthralling novel is a reminder that every fight for justice is, at heart, a fight for one another.

Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, by Rebecca Solnit

Solnit’s short manifesto about the revolutionary power of hope is a rallying cry against defeatism. She begins by critiquing the progressive tendency to harp on the bleakness of societal conditions, insisting that despair keeps oppressive systems afloat. Hope and joy, by contrast, are essential elements of political change, and celebrating wins is a worthy act of defiance against those who would prefer that the average person feel powerless. Originally published in 2004 after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and updated in 2005 and 2016, Hope in the Dark provides modern examples of gains on race, class, environment, and queer rights. That said, this is not a feel-good book. It does not sugarcoat, for instance, the fact that we are headed toward ecological disaster. And if you look up the latest figures on the gender wage gap, you’ll find that they’ve hardly budged from those cited by Solnit years ago. Still, her deft logic and kooky aphorisms (“Don’t mistake a lightbulb for the moon, and don’t believe that the moon is useless unless we land on it”) have convinced me that to give up hope is to surrender the future. Fighting for progress can be exhausting and revelatory, full of both pain and pleasure. Solnit insists that doing so is never a waste.

[Read: Trump won. Now what?]

Women Talking, by Miriam Toews

The inspired-by-true-events premise of Toews’s seventh novel is literally the stuff of nightmares. In a remote Mennonite colony, women who have suffered mysterious attacks in the night learn that they’ve been drugged and raped by several men from their community. One woman is pregnant with her rapist’s child; another’s 3-year-old has a sexually transmitted infection. The novel takes place in the aftermath of the discovery, just after the men have been temporarily jailed. They are set to be bailed out in two days, and the colony’s bishop demands that the victims forgive them—or else face excommunication and be denied a spot in heaven. The women meet in secret to decide what to do: Comply? Fight back? Leave for an outside world they’ve never experienced? Even against this harrowing backdrop, Toews’s signature humor and eye for small moments of grace make Women Talking an enjoyable and healing read. The women’s discussions are both philosophical (they cannot read, so how can they trust that the Bible requires them to forgive the men?) and practical (if they leave, do they bring their male children?). Any direction they choose will lead to a kind of wilderness: “When we have liberated ourselves,” one woman says in a particularly stirring moment, “we will have to ask ourselves who we are.”

Good Talk, by Mira Jacob

Jacob’s graphic-memoir-in-conversations took major guts to write. It begins like this: The author’s white in-laws throw their support behind Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and her otherwise loving family toes the edge of collapse. Good Talk is a funny and painful book-length answer to questions from Jacob’s 6-year-old son, who is half Jewish and half Indian, about race, family, and identity. Jacob, who was raised in the United States by parents who emigrated from India, gorgeously illustrates her formative experiences, touching on respectability politics, colorism within the Indian community, her bisexuality, and her place in America. She refuses to caricaturize the book’s less savory characters—for example, a rich white woman who hires Jacob to ghostwrite her family’s biography and ends up questioning her integrity and oversharing the grisly details of her 2-year-old’s death from cancer. Jacob’s ability to so humanely render the people who cause her grief is powerful. My daughter is too young to ask questions, but one day, when she begins inquiring about the world she’s inheriting, I can tell her, as Jacob told her son, “If you still have hope, my love, then so do I.”

[Read: Hope and the historian]

The Twenty-Ninth Year, by Hala Alyan

Startling, sexy, and chaotic, The Twenty-Ninth Year is a collection of poems narrated by a woman on the verge—of a lot of things. She’s standing at the edge of maturity, of belonging as a Palestinian American, of recovery from anorexia and alcoholism. It’s a tender and violent place, evoked with images that catch in the throat. The first poem, “Truth,” takes the form of a litany of confessions: “I broke / into the bodies of men like a cartoon burglar”; “I’ve seen women eat cotton balls so they wouldn’t eat bread.” That Alyan is a clinical psychologist makes sense—her poems have a clarity that can’t be faked. Dark humor softens the blow of lines such as “I starved myself to starve my mother” and “Define in, I say when anyone asks if I’ve ever been in a war.” She reckons with the loneliness of living in exile and the danger of romanticizing the youthful conviction that there is something incurably wrong with you. A shallow read of the collection might be: I burned my life down so you don’t have to. But I return to the last line of the book: “Marry or burn; either way, you’re transfiguring.” There is always something to set aflame; more optimistically, there is always something left to salvage. The Twenty-Ninth Year is, in the end, a monument to endurance.

Riot Baby, by Tochi Onyebuchi

If you’re sick of books described as “healing” or “hopeful,” look no further than Riot Baby. Onyebuchi’s thrilling 2020 novella asks just how far sci-fi dystopias are from real life. Kev, a Black man born during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, California, spends much of his 20s in prison after a botched armed robbery. His sister, Ella, has more supernatural problems: She sees the past and the future and, when fury takes over, can raze cities to the ground—yet she could not protect her brother from the violence of incarceration. When Kev is paroled and a new form of policing via implantable chips and pharmaceutical infusions brings “safety” to the streets of Watts, Ella understands that the subjugation of her community is not a symptom of a broken system; rather, it is evidence of one “working just as designed,” as Onyebuchi put it in an interview. Ella must make a wrenching choice: fight for a defanged kind of freedom within such a system or usher in a new world order no matter the cost. In real life, too often, you cannot control your circumstances, only your actions. But you may find relief in reading a book that reaches a different conclusion.

[Read: When national turmoil becomes personal anxiety]

Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993, by Sarah Schulman

This 700-plus-page history of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power’s New York chapter is, I promise you, a page-turner. Schulman and the filmmaker Jim Hubbard, who were both in ACT UP New York, interviewed 188 members over the course of 17 years about the organization’s work on behalf of those living with HIV/AIDS—“a despised group of people, with no rights, facing a terminal disease for which there were no treatments,” Schulman writes. Part memoir and part oral history, Let the Record Show is a master class on the utility of anger and a historical corrective to chronicles that depict straight white men as the main heroes of the AIDS crisis. In reality, a diverse coalition of activists helped transform HIV into a highly manageable condition. “People who are desperate are much more effective than people who have time to waste,” Schulman argues. ACT UP was known for its brash public actions, and Schulman covers not just what the group accomplished but also how it did it, with electrifying detail. There can be no balm for the fact that many ACT UP members did not survive long enough to be interviewed. There is only awe at the way a group of people “unable to sit out a historic cataclysm” were determined to “force our country to change against its will,” and did.

At its best, a presidential biopic can delve into the monomaniacal focus—and potential narcissism—that might drive a person to run for the White House in the first place. That’s what Oliver Stone did in 1995’s Nixon, dramatizing the 37th president’s downfall with the exhilarating paranoia of the director’s best work. Though guilty of some fact-fudging, Stone retained empathy for Richard Nixon’s childhood trauma and lifelong inferiority complex, delivering a Shakespearean tragedy filtered through a grim vision of American power. As Nixon (played by a hunched, scotch-guzzling Anthony Hopkins) stalks the halls of a White House engulfed by scandal, and stews with jealousy at the late John F. Kennedy, the presidency never seemed so lonely.

A presidential biopic can also zoom in on a crucial juncture in a leader’s life: Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln explored its protagonist’s fraught final months, during which he pushed, at great political risk, for a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery. Spielberg’s film was captivating because it didn’t just re-create Lincoln’s famous speeches, but also imagined what the man was like behind the scenes—in backroom dealings, or in contentious confrontations with his wife, Mary Todd. Like its 1939 predecessor, Young Mr. Lincoln, the film wisely limits its scope; focusing on a pivotal period proves a defter approach than trying to capture the full sprawl of a president’s life, a task better left to hefty biographies.

And then there’s a movie like this year’s Reagan, the Ronald Reagan biopic starring Dennis Quaid. Reagan is a boyhood-to-grave survey of the 40th president’s life and administration, with a chest-beating emphasis on his handling of the Cold War that blurs the line between biopic and Hollywood boosterism. Filmed with all the visual panache of an arthritis-medication commercial, the movie is suffocating in its unflagging reverence for its titular hero. In its portrayal of Reagan’s formative years, secondary characters seem to exist primarily to give mawkish pep talks or to fill the young Reagan’s brain with somber warnings about the evils of communism. “God has a purpose for your life, something only you can do,” his mother tells him after he reads scripture at church. Later, in college, he is disturbed by a speech from a Soviet defector, who visits a local congregation and lectures wide-eyed students that they will not find a “church like this” in the U.S.S.R.

Unlike Lincoln, the film seems incapable of imagining what its protagonist was like in private moments or ascribing any interior complexity to him. Even his flirty exchanges with his wife, Nancy, feel like they were cribbed from a campaign ad. “I just want to do something good in this world,” he tells his future spouse on a horseback-riding date. “Make a difference.” The portrayal isn’t helped by the fact that the 70-year-old Quaid is digitally de-aged and delivers his lines in a tinny imitation of the politician’s voice. A bizarre narrative device further detaches the audience from Reagan’s perspective: The entire movie is narrated by Jon Voight doing a Russian accent, as a fictionalized KGB agent who surveilled Reagan for decades and is now regaling a young charge with stories of how one American president outsmarted the Soviet Union.

They say history is written by the winners. But sometimes the winners like to put on a bad accent and cosplay as the losers. Yet despite heavily negative reviews, Reagan remained in theaters for nearly two months and earned a solid $30 million at the box office, playing to an underserved audience and tapping into some of the cultural backlash that powered Donald Trump’s reelection. The film’s success portends a strange new era for the presidential biopic, one in which hokey hagiography might supplant any semblance of character depth—reinforcing what audiences already want to hear about politicians they already admire.

In retrospect, Lincoln, with its innate faith in the power of government to do good, was as much a product of the “Obamacore” era—that surge of positivity and optimism that flooded pop culture beginning in the early 2010s—as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway smash Hamilton. But the arrival of the Trump era threw cold water on those feel-good vibes, and since Lincoln, presidential biopics have largely failed to connect with crowds. Two lightweight depictions of Barack Obama’s young adulthood arrived in 2016, but neither reckoned with his complicated presidency. In 2017, Rob Reiner delivered the ambivalent and uneven LBJ, which sank at the box office and made little impression on audiences. Meanwhile, Martin Scorsese developed and seemingly abandoned a Teddy Roosevelt biopic.

In development for more than a decade, Reagan emerges from a more plainly partisan perspective. Its producer, Mark Joseph, once called The Reagans, the 2003 TV movie starring James Brolin, “insulting” to the former president. Though Reagan director Sean McNamara expressed hope that his film would unite people across political lines, its source material, The Crusader, is a book by Paul Kengor, a conservative who has written eight books about Reagan and who presently works at a right-wing think tank. And its star, Dennis Quaid, is among Hollywood’s most prominent Trump supporters. In July, Quaid appeared on Fox News live from the Republican National Convention, proclaiming that Reagan would help Americans born after 1985 “get a glimpse of what this country was.”     

The notable presidential biopics of the past were prestige pictures that at least tried to appeal to a wide swath of the moviegoing public, across political spectrums. Even 2008’s W., Stone’s spiritual sequel to Nixon—inferior by far, and disappointingly conventional in its biographical beats—is hardly the liberal excoriation many viewers might have expected from the director; it was even criticized for going too easy on George W. Bush. Released during the waning months of his presidency, when Bush-bashing was low-hanging fruit for audiences, the film portrays the 43rd president as a lovable screwup with crippling daddy issues. As Timothy Noah argued in Slate at the time, “W. is the rare Oliver Stone film that had to tone down the historical record because the truth was too lurid.”

Instead, new entries like Reagan and Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, the more nuanced film, reflect the market demands of a more fragmented moviegoing public—and reality. Rarely do two movies about the same era of American history have so little audience overlap. Set from 1973 to 1986, The Apprentice portrays Trump (Sebastian Stan) as a young sociopath-in-training, dramatizing his rise to business mogul and his relationship with mentor Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), a Svengali of capitalist chicanery molding a monster in his own image. In the most shocking scenes, the film depicts Trump brutally raping his wife, Ivana, and undergoing liposuction surgery. (Ivana accused Trump of rape in a 1990 divorce deposition, then recanted the allegation decades later. Trump’s campaign has called the movie a “malicious defamation.”) The film, in other words, gives confirmation—and a sleazily gripping origin story—to those who already believe Trump is a malevolent con man and irredeemable misogynist. It knows what its viewers want.

[Read: How the GOP went from Reagan to Trump]

So, seemingly, does Reagan, which shows its protagonist primarily as the Great Communicator who tore down that wall. But as the Reagan biographer Max Boot recently wrote, “the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union were primarily the work of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev—two consequences of his radically reformist policies … Reagan did not bring about Gorbachev’s reforms, much less force the collapse of the Soviet Union.” Reagan resists such nuance, hewing instead to a predictable hero’s narrative. Soviet leaders are swathed in visual clichés: grotesque men sipping vodka in cigar-filled rooms.

Meanwhile, the film renders Reagan’s domestic critics without sophistication or dignity. As Matthew Dallek chronicles in his book The Right Moment, Reagan spent much of his 1966 campaign to become California’s governor sensationalizing and condemning marches protesting the Vietnam War at UC Berkeley, and later called for a “bloodbath” against the campus left. In the film, we see Reagan, as the state’s governor, calling in the National Guard to crack down on Berkeley protesters, but we never learn what these students are protesting; Vietnam is scarcely referenced. (A nastier incident, in which Reagan-sent cops in riot gear opened fire on student protesters and killed one, goes unmentioned.)

A less slanted film might have interrogated the conflict between Reagan’s anti-totalitarian Cold War rhetoric and his crackdown on demonstrators at home. It might also have reckoned with the president’s devastating failure to confront the AIDS epidemic, a fact the movie only fleetingly references, via a few shots of ACT UP demonstrators slotted into a generic montage of Reagan critics set to Genesis’s “Land of Confusion.” But Reagan remains tethered to the great-man theory of history, in which Reagan single-handedly ended the Cold War, preserved America’s standing in the world, and beat back lefty Communist sympathizers. A match-cut transition, from a shot of newly retired Reagan swinging an axe at his ranch to young “wallpeckers” taking axes to the Berlin Wall in 1989, literalizes the message for grade-school viewers: The Gipper brought down the wall himself. It’s not that the movie is too kind to Reagan—but by flattening him in this way, it robs him of the conflicts and contradictions that made him a figure worth thinking about today.

In this way, too, Reagan forms a curious contrast to Nixon. A central message of Stone’s film is that even if Nixon had wanted to end the Vietnam War, he was powerless to act against the desires of the deep state (or “the beast,” as Hopkins’s Nixon calls it). In a defining scene, a young anti-war demonstrator confronts the president. “You can’t stop it, can you?” she realizes. “Because it’s not you. It’s the system. The system won’t let you stop it.” Nixon is stunned into stammering disbelief.

Indeed, Stone’s trilogy of films about U.S. presidents (JFK, Nixon, and W.) all reflect some paranoia about the dark forces of state power. (The unabashedly conspiratorial JFK suggests that Kennedy was eliminated by the CIA and/or the military-industrial complex because he didn’t fall in line with their covert objectives.) They are stories of ambitious leaders whose presidencies were hijacked or truncated by forces beyond their comprehension—movies whose villains are shadowy figures operating within the bowels of the U.S. government. It’s not just Stone’s view of state power that makes his films more interesting; it’s that he takes into account forces larger than one man, regardless of that man’s own accomplishments.   

Reagan’s vision of the institution is more facile. Its hero is endowed with near-mythical power to end wars and solve domestic woes; its villains are as clearly labeled as a map of the Kremlin. The film’s simplistic pandering vaporizes complexity and undercuts the cinematic aims of a presidential biopic. It’s a profitable film because it instead adheres to the market incentives of modern cable news: Tell viewers what they want to hear, and give them a clear and present enemy.     

In his 2011 book, The Reactionary Mind, the political theorist Corey Robin argues that the end of the Cold War had proven unkind to the conservative movement by depriving it of a distinct enemy. For today’s GOP, a good adversary is hard to find—in the past few years, its leaders have grasped around haphazardly in search of one: trans people, Haitian immigrants, childless women. (And, as always, Hillary Clinton.) In Reagan, though, the world is much simpler: There’s an evil empire 5,000 miles away, and a California cowboy is the only man who can beat it. It’s a flat narrative fit for one of his old B movies.

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When Americans went to the polls last week, they wanted cheaper food. Groceries really are more expensive than they used to be, and grocery costs are how many Americans make sense of the state of the economy at large. In September, Pew Research Center reported that three-quarters of Americans were “very concerned” about them. And this month, many of those people voted for Donald Trump, the candidate who touted his distance from the economic policy of the last four years, and who promised repeatedly to lower prices.

But two of Trump’s other big promises—mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and more restrictive trade regulations—would almost certainly raise food prices, economists told me. American-grown staples would get more expensive owing to a domestic labor shortage, and imported foods would too, because they would be subject to double-digit import taxes. This cause-and-effect dynamic “could be my final exam,” Rachel Friedberg, who teaches “Principles of Economics” at Brown University, told me. “It’s just very straightforward principles of economics.”

The main issue is labor. American farming depends on undocumented workers; if the Trump administration were to enact “the largest deportation operation in American history” and deport every undocumented immigrant living in the United States, somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of the people who plant our crops and pick our fruit would leave the domestic workforce. Proponents of immigration enforcement typically say these jobs could be taken by documented or American-born workers. But the farm industry is already in a prolonged labor crisis, and undocumented immigrants tend to be willing to work for less money—that’s why employers hire them, even though it’s illegal. Fewer workers means higher wages means higher prices, straight up.

[Read: Trump signals that he’s serious about mass deportation]

Some farms might be able to get by shorthanded, at least for a little while. Some might embrace technology more quickly, investing in automated systems that could help fill the labor gap. But that would take time, and as David Anderson, a Texas A&M University agricultural economist, told me, “You gotta get the cows milked and fed every day.” America’s agricultural system relies on hands and feet, arms and legs, day in and day out.

If the Trump administration does, in fact, deport millions of people, produce prices would likely increase the most, Bradley Rickard, an agricultural economist at Cornell University, told me in an email, because “labor represents a significant share of total costs.” Prices would probably go up quickest and most dramatically for the crops that are most labor-intensive to harvest: strawberries, mushrooms, asparagus, cherries. So would those for the foods farmed in California, which grows three-quarters of the fruit and nuts, and a third of the vegetables, produced domestically, and is home to about half of the country’s undocumented agricultural workers.

Mass deportations would also drive up prices for dairy and meat, whose industries have also been in a labor shortage, for at least the past half decade. According to a 2022 analysis from the American Immigration Council, which advocates for immigrants and seeks to shape immigration policy, a scarcity of workers led the median wage in the dairy and meat sectors to increase 33.7 percent from 2019 to 2022, and prices to rise between 4.5 and 7 percent. In 2015, Anderson and some colleagues conducted a survey on behalf of the dairy industry and found that eliminating immigrants from the sector would reduce production, put farms out of business, and cause retail milk prices to increase by about 90 percent.

Anderson’s study is 10 years old, and assumed a total loss of all immigrant labor, documented and undocumented. Last week, he told me that he has no reason to believe the dynamic wouldn’t hold to a lesser degree if a smaller amount of the workforce were deported now. “We wouldn’t be able to produce all the stuff that we do today. Less production means less supplies,” he said, “and less supplies means food prices would go up.”

Immigration policy affects food that is grown domestically. But about 15 percent of the American food supply is imported, including about 60 percent of fresh fruit, 80 percent of seafood, 90 percent of avocados, and 99 percent of coffee. Our reliance on, or taste for, imported goods has ticked up steadily over the past few decades, as we have become accustomed to Italian olive oil and raspberries in winter. On the campaign trail, Trump proposed taxing these—and all—imported goods, in an attempt to raise domestic production and to reduce the deficit. If his plan goes through, Chinese imports—which include large amounts of the fish, seafood, garlic, spices, tea, and apple juice we consume—would be subject to 60 to 100 percent tariffs. All other imports would be subject to 10 to 20 percent tariffs. Those taxes would be passed onto consumers, especially in the short term, as domestic production ramps up (if it can ramp up), and especially if undocumented immigrants are simultaneously leaving the workforce. “There’s no safety valve,” Marcus Noland, the executive vice president and director of studies at the nonpartisan think tank Peterson Institute for International Economics, told me. “If you start deporting people, it’s not like you can import the product and make up for it if you have these tariffs.”

[Read: The immigration-wage myth]

We all need food to live, and all food needs to come from somewhere. The process by which it makes it to our plate is complicated, resource-intensive, and subject to the vagaries of policy, weather, disease, and labor supply. The system does not have a large amount of slack built into it. If sticker-shocked milk fans start gravitating toward other drinks, those prices will also go up. If California’s berry industry is squeezed by a labor shortage, and the market for imported berries is squeezed by tariffs, berries will cost more.

And although farms are the biggest employer of undocumented workers, these workers are also a major part of the mechanism that processes, butchers, cooks, and delivers our food, from the sprawling poultry-processing plants of the South to the local fried-chicken place. The restaurant industry—which employs more than 800,000 undocumented immigrants, according to a Center for American Progress analysis—is already struggling to fill jobs, which is driving higher prices; even a small reduction in the workforce would increase operating costs, which will almost definitely result in either restaurants closing or costs being passed onto eaters.

The immigration and tariff policies, in other words, would affect all the food we eat: snacks, school lunches, lattes, pet food, fast food, fancy restaurant dinners. People will not stop eating if food gets more expensive; they will just spend more of their money on it.

Trump’s team proposed deportations and tariffs as a way to fix America’s inflation-addled economy. But voters are unlikely to be comforted by what they see over the next few years. Toward the end of our call, I asked Friedberg if she could see any scenario under which, if the new administration’s policies are enacted, prices don’t go up. “No,” she said, without pausing. “I am extremely confident that food will get more expensive. Buy those frozen vegetables now.”

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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Jen Balderama, a Culture editor who leads the Family section and works on stories about parenting, language, sex, and politics (among other topics).

Jen grew up training as a dancer and watching classic movies with her mom, which instilled in her a love for film and its artistry. Her favorites include Doctor Zhivago, In the Mood for Love, and Pina; she will also watch anything starring Cate Blanchett, an actor whose “ability to inhabit is simply unmatched.”

The Culture Survey: Jen Balderama

My favorite blockbuster film: I’m grateful that when I was quite young, my mom started introducing me to her favorite classic movies—comedies, romances, noirs, epics—which I’m pretty sure had a lasting influence on my taste. So for a blockbuster, I have to go with a nostalgia pick: Doctor Zhivago. The hours we spent watching this movie, multiple times over the years, each viewing an afternoon-long event. (The film, novelty of novelties, had its own intermission!) My mom must have been confident that the more adult elements—the rape, the politics—would go right over my head, but that I could appreciate the movie for its aesthetics. She had a huge crush on Omar Sharif and swooned over the soft-focus close-ups of his watering eyes. I was entranced by the landscapes and costumes and sets—the bordello reds of the Sventitskys’ Christmas party, the icy majesty of the Varykino dacha in winter. But I was also taken by the film’s sheer scope, its complexity, and the fleshly and revolutionary messiness. I’m certain it helped ingrain in me, early, an enduring faith in art and artists as preservers of humanity, especially in dark, chaotic times. [Related: Russia from within: Boris Pasternak’s first novel]

My favorite art movie: May I bend the rules? Because I need to pick two: Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love and Wim Wenders’s Pina. One is fiction, the other documentary. Both are propelled by yearning and by music. Both give us otherworldly depictions of bodies in motion. And both delve into the ways people communicate when words go unspoken.

In the Mood for Love might be the dead-sexiest film I’ve ever seen, and no one takes off their clothes. Instead we get Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung in a ravishing tango of loaded phone calls and intense gazes, skin illicitly brushing skin, figures sliding past each other in close spaces: electricity.

Pina is Wenders’s ode to the German choreographer Pina Bausch, a collaboration that became an elegy after Bausch died when the film was in preproduction. Reviewing the movie for The New York Times in 2017, the critic Gia Kourlas, whom I admire, took issue with one of Wenders’s choices: In between excerpts of Bausch’s works, her dancers sit for “interviews,” but they don’t speak to camera; recordings of their voices play as they look toward the audience or off into the distance. Kourlas wrote that these moments felt “mannered, self-conscious”; they made her “wince.” But to me, a (highly self-conscious) former dancer, Wenders nailed it—I’ve long felt more comfortable expressing myself through dance than through spoken words. These scenes are a brilliantly meta distillation of that tension: Dancers with something powerful to say remain outwardly silent, their insights played as inner narrative. Struck by grief, mouths closed, they articulate how Bausch gave them the gift of language through movement—and thus offered them the gift of themselves. Not for nothing do I have one of Bausch’s mottos tattooed on my forearm: “Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost.”

An actor I would watch in anything: Cate Blanchett. Her ability to inhabit is simply unmatched: She can play woman, man, queen, elf, straight/gay/fluid, hero/antihero/villain. Here I’m sure I’ll scandalize many of our readers by saying out loud that I am not a Bob Dylan person, but I watched Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There precisely because Blanchett was in it—and her roughly 30 minutes as Dylan were all I needed. She elevates everything she appears in, whether it’s deeply serious or silly. I’m particularly captivated by her subtleties, the way she turns a wrist or tilts her head with the grace and precision of a dancer’s épaulement. (Also: She is apparently hilarious.)

An online creator I’m a fan of: Elle Cordova, a musician turned prolific writer of extremely funny, often timely, magnificently nerdy poems, sketches, and songs, performed in a winning low-key deadpan. I was tipped off to her by a friend who sent a link to a video and wrote: “I think I’m falling for this woman.” The vid was part of a series called “Famous authors asking you out”—Cordova parroting Jane Austen, Charles Bukowski, Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe (“Should I come rapping at your chamber door, or do you wanna rap at mine?”), Dr. Seuss, Kurt Vonnegut, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce (“And what if we were to talk a pretty yes in the endbegin of riverflow and moon’s own glimpsing heartclass …”). She does literature. She does science. She parodies pretentious podcasters; sings to an avocado; assumes the characters of fonts, planets, ChatGPT, an election ballot. Her brain is a marvel; no way can AI keep up.

Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: Lego Masters Australia. Technically, we found this one together, but I watch Lego Masters because my 10-year-old is a Lego master himself—he makes truly astonishing creations!—and this is the kind of family entertainment I can get behind: Skilled obsessives, working in pairs, turn the basic building blocks of childhood into spectacular works of architecture and engineering, in hopes of winning glory, prize money, and a big ol’ Lego trophy. They can’t churn out the episodes fast enough for us. The U.S. has a version hosted by Will Arnett, which we also watch, but our family finds him a bit … over-the-top. We much prefer the Australian edition, hosted by the comedian Hamish Blake and judged by “Brickman,” a.k.a. Lego Certified Professional Ryan McNaught, both of whom exude genuine delight and affection for the contestants. McNaught has teared up during critiques of builds, whether gobsmacked by their beauty or moved by the tremendous effort put forth by the builders. It’s a show about teamwork, ingenuity, artistry, hilarity, physics, stamina, and grit—with a side helping of male vulnerability. [Related: Solving a museum’s bug problem with Legos]

A poem that I return to: “Joint Custody,” by Ada Limón. My family is living this. Limón, recalling a childhood of being “taken /  back and forth on Sundays,” of shifting between “two different / kitchen tables, two sets of rules,” reassures me that even though this is sometimes “not easy,” my kids will be okay—more than okay—as long as they know they are “loved each place.” That beautiful wisdom guides my every step with them.

Something I recently rewatched: My mom died when my son was 2 and my daughter didn’t yet exist, and each year around this time—my mom’s birthday—I find little ways to celebrate her by sharing with my kids the things she loved. Chocolate was a big one, I Love Lucy another. So on a recent weekend, we snuggled up and watched Lucille Ball stuffing bonbons down the front of her shirt, and laughed and laughed and laughed. And then we raided a box of truffles.

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

How the Ivy League broke America The secret to thinking your way out of anxiety How one woman became the scapegoat for America’s reading crisis

The Week Ahead

Gladiator II, an action film starring Paul Mescal as Lucius, the son of Maximus, who becomes a gladiator and seeks to save Rome from tyrannical leaders (in theaters Friday) Dune: Prophecy, a spin-off prequel series about the establishment of the Bene Gesserit (premieres today on HBO and Max) An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth, a novel by Anna Moschovakis about an unnamed protagonist who attempts to find—and eliminate—her housemate, who was lost after a major earthquake (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by Raisa Álava

What the Band Eats

By Reya Hart

I grew up on the road. First on the family bus, traveling from city to city to watch my father, Mickey Hart, play drums with the Grateful Dead and Planet Drum, and then later with the various Grateful Dead offshoots. When I was old enough, I joined the crew, working for Dead & Company, doing whatever I could be trusted to handle … Then, late-night, drinking whiskey from the bottle with the techs, sitting in the emptying parking lot as the semitrucks and their load-out rumble marked the end of our day.

But this summer, for the first time in the band’s history, there would be no buses; there would be no trucks. Instead we stayed in one place, trading the rhythms of a tour for the dull ache of a long, endlessly hot Las Vegas summer.

Read the full article.

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The huge dust storm - also known as a haboob - limited visibility and left many residents in the dark.

Donald Trump will begin his second term as president the same way he began his first—with Republicans controlling both the House and Senate.

The GOP scored its 218th House-race victory—enough to clinch a majority of the chamber’s 435 seats—today when CNN and NBC News declared Republicans the winner of two close elections in Arizona. How many more seats the Republicans will win depends on the outcome of a few contests, in California and elsewhere, where ballots are still being counted. But the GOP’s final margin is likely to be similar to the four-seat advantage it held for most of the past two years, when internal division and leadership battles prevented the party from accomplishing much of anything.

Such a slim majority means that the legislation most prized on the right and feared by the left—a national abortion ban, dramatic cuts to federal spending, the repeal of Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act and Joe Biden’s largest domestic-policy achievements—is unlikely to pass Congress. “I don’t think they’re even going to try on any of those things,” Brendan Buck, who served as a top aide to former Speaker Paul Ryan during Trump’s first term, told me.

[Daniel Block: The Democrats’ Senate nightmare is only beginning]

Trump’s biggest opportunity for a legacy-defining law may be extending his 2017 tax cuts, which are due to expire next year and won’t need to overcome a Senate filibuster to pass. He could also find bipartisan support for new immigration restrictions, including funding for his promised southern wall, after an election in which voters rewarded candidates with a more hawkish stance on the border.

In 2017, Trump took office with a 51–49 Republican majority in the Senate and a slightly wider advantage in the House—both ultimately too narrow for him to fulfill his core campaign promise of axing the ACA. Next year, the dynamic will be reversed, and he’ll have a bit more of a cushion in the Senate. Republicans gained four seats to recapture the majority from Democrats; they now hold a 53–47 advantage, which should be enough to confirm Trump’s Cabinet picks and judicial nominees. The impact on the Supreme Court could be profound: Trump named three of its nine members during his first term, and should Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who are both in their 70s, retire in the next two years, he would be responsible for nominating a majority of the Court.

Yet on legislation, Republicans will be constrained by both the Senate’s rules and the party’s thin margin in the House. Republicans have said they won’t try to curtail the Senate’s 60-vote threshold for circumventing a filibuster. “The filibuster will stand,” the outgoing Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, declared on the day after the election. But he’ll be only a rank-and-file member in the next Congress. McConnell’s newly elected successor as party leader, Senator John Thune of South Dakota, reiterated his commitment to the legislative filibuster after winning a secret-ballot election for the role.

How many votes are needed to pass bills in the Senate won’t mean much if Trump can’t get legislation through the House, and that could be a far more difficult proposition. The two speakers during the current Congress, Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson, each had to rely on Democrats to get major bills passed, because the GOP’s majority proved too thin to govern. With Trump’s backing, Johnson should have the votes to stay on as speaker when the new Congress convenes in January. (When Trump addressed House Republicans today in Washington, the speaker hailed him as “the comeback king” and, NBC News reported, the president-elect assured Johnson he would back him “all the way.”)

But the Republican edge could be even narrower next year if Democrats win a few more of the final uncalled races. Trump’s selection of Representative Elise Stefanik of New York to serve as United Nations ambassador and Representative Mike Waltz of Florida to serve as national security adviser could deprive Republicans of two additional seats for several months until voters elect their replacements. (Senator Marco Rubio’s expected nomination as secretary of state won’t cost the GOP his Florida seat, because Governor Ron DeSantis can appoint an immediate replacement.)

[Read: Elise Stefanik’s Trump audition]

Still, the GOP has reason to hope for a fruitful session. During Biden’s first two years in office, House Democrats demonstrated that even a small majority could produce major legislation. They passed most of Biden’s agenda—though the Senate blocked or watered down some of it—despite having few votes to spare. And Trump exerts a much tighter grip on his party than Biden did on congressional Democrats. Unlike during Trump’s first term, few if any Republicans hostile to his agenda remain in the House. His decisive victory last week, which includes a likely popular-vote win, should also help ensure greater Republican unity.

“I think we will have a much easier time in terms of getting major things passed,” predicts Representative Mike Lawler of New York, whose victory in one of the nation’s most closely watched races helped Republicans keep their majority. “The country was very clear in the direction it wants Congress and the presidency to go.”

Trump might even hold sway over a few Democrats on some issues. Because Trump improved his standing almost everywhere last week, the House in January will include many Democrats who represent districts that he carried. Two House Democrats who outran their party by wide margins, Representatives Jared Golden of Maine and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington State, refused to endorse Kamala Harris, while several candidates who more fully embraced the party’s national message underperformed. Nearly all Democratic candidates in close races echoed Trump’s calls for more aggressive action to limit border crossings, which could yield the new president additional support in Congress for restrictive immigration legislation.

[Mike Pesca: The HR-ification of the Democratic Party]

Like most House Republicans, Lawler endorsed Trump, but he ran on a record of bipartisanship and told me he’d be unafraid to defy the president when he disagreed. As a potential swing vote in a narrow majority, he could have more influence over the next two years. Lawler told me Monday that the GOP should heed the voters’ call to focus on issues such as the economy, border security, tax cuts, and energy production. Pursuing a national abortion ban, he said, would be “a mistake.” And Lawler serves as a reminder that enacting legislation even in an area where Republicans are relatively unified, like tax cuts, could be difficult: He reiterated his vow to oppose any proposal that does not restore a costly deduction for residents of high-tax states such as New York and California—a change that Trump supports but many other Republicans do not.

Trump showed little patience for the hard work of wrangling votes during his first term. Now he’s testing his might on Capitol Hill—and displaying his disdain for Congress’s authority—even before he takes office. Though he didn’t endorse a candidate to succeed McConnell, he urged all of the contenders to allow him to circumvent the Senate by making key appointments when Congress is in recess. After he won, Thune wouldn’t say whether he’d agree. Trump apparently wants the ability to install nominees—Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services?—who can’t win confirmation by the Senate.

“The Trump world does not give a damn about normal processes and procedures and traditions and principles of the prerogatives of certain chambers,” Buck, the former GOP aide, said. “They just want to do stuff.” The fight could be instructive, an early indication that no matter how much deference the new Republican majority is prepared to give Trump, he’ll surely still want more.

Photographs by Jeff Brown

Until a couple of years ago, Lucy Calkins was, to many American teachers and parents, a minor deity. Thousands of U.S. schools used her curriculum, called Units of Study, to teach children to read and write. Two decades ago, her guiding principles—that children learn best when they love reading, and that teachers should try to inspire that love—became a centerpiece of the curriculum in New York City’s public schools. Her approach spread through an institute she founded at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and traveled further still via teaching materials from her publisher. Many teachers don’t refer to Units of Study by name. They simply say they are “teaching Lucy.”

But now, at the age of 72, Calkins faces the destruction of everything she has worked for. A 2020 report by a nonprofit described Units of Study as “beautifully crafted” but “unlikely to lead to literacy success for all of America’s public schoolchildren.” The criticism became impossible to ignore two years later, when the American Public Media podcast Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong accused Calkins of being one of the reasons so many American children struggle to read. (The National Assessment of Educational Progress—a test administered by the Department of Education—found in 2022 that roughly one-third of fourth and eighth graders are unable to read at the “basic” level for their age.)

In Sold a Story, the reporter Emily Hanford argued that teachers had fallen for a single, unscientific idea—and that its persistence was holding back American literacy. The idea was that “beginning readers don’t have to sound out words.” That meant teachers were no longer encouraging early learners to use phonics to decode a new word—to say cuh-ah-tuh for “cat,” and so on. Instead, children were expected to figure out the word from the first letter, context clues, or nearby illustrations. But this “cueing” system was not working for large numbers of children, leaving them floundering and frustrated. The result was a reading crisis in America.

The podcast said that “a company and four of its top authors” had sold this “wrong idea” to teachers and politicians. The company was the educational publisher Heinemann, and the authors included the New Zealander Marie Clay, the American duo Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, and Calkins. The podcast devoted an entire episode, “The Superstar,” to Calkins. In it, Hanford wondered if Calkins was wedded to a “romantic” notion of literacy, where children would fall in love with books and would then somehow, magically, learn to read. Calkins could not see that her system failed poorer children, Hanford argued, because she was “influenced by privilege”; she had written, for instance, that children might learn about the alphabet by picking out letters from their surroundings, such as “the monogram letters on their bath towels.”

In Hanford’s view, it was no surprise if Calkins’s method worked fine for wealthier kids, many of whom arrive at school already starting to read. If they struggled, they could always turn to private tutors, who might give the phonics lessons that their schools were neglecting to provide. But kids without access to private tutors needed to be drilled in phonics, Hanford argued. She backed up her claims by referencing neurological research into how children learn to read—gesturing to a body of evidence known as “the science of reading.” That research demonstrated the importance of regular, explicit phonics instruction, she said, and ran contrary to how American reading teachers were being trained.

Since the podcast aired, “teaching Lucy” has fallen out of fashion. Calkins’s critics say that her refusal to acknowledge the importance of phonics has tainted not just Units of Study—a reading and writing program that stretches up to eighth grade—but her entire educational philosophy, known as “balanced literacy.” Forty states and the District of Columbia have passed laws or implemented policies promoting the science of reading in the past decade, according to Education Week, and publishers are racing to adjust their offerings to embrace that philosophy.

Somehow, the wider debate over how to teach reading has become a referendum on Calkins herself. In September 2023, Teachers College announced that it would dissolve the reading-and-writing-education center that she had founded there. Anti-Lucy sentiment has proliferated, particularly in the city that once championed her methods: Last year, David Banks, then the chancellor of New York City public schools, likened educators who used balanced literacy to lemmings: “We all march right off the side of the mountain,” he said. The New Yorker has described Calkins’s approach as “literacy by vibes,” and in an editorial, the New York Post described her initiative as “a disaster” that had been “imposed on generations of American children.” The headline declared that it had “Ruined Countless Lives.” When the celebrated Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker shared an article about Calkins on X, he bemoaned “the scandal of ed schools that promote reading quackery.” Queen Lucy has been dethroned.

“I mean, I can say it—it was a little bit like 9/11,” Calkins told me when we spoke at her home this summer. On that day in 2001, she had been driving into New York City, and “literally, I was on the West Side Highway and I saw the plane crash into the tower. Your mind can’t even comprehend what’s happening.” Two decades later, the suggestion that she had harmed children’s learning felt like the same kind of gut punch.

Calkins now concedes that some of the problems identified in Sold a Story were real. But she says that she had followed the research, and was trying to rectify issues even before the podcast debuted: She released her first dedicated phonics units in 2018, and later published a series of “decodable books”—simplified stories that students can easily sound out. Still, she has not managed to satisfy her critics, and on the third day we spent together, she admitted to feeling despondent. “What surprises me is that I feel as if I’ve done it all,” she told me. (Heinemann, Calkins’s publisher, has claimed that the Sold a Story podcast “radically oversimplifies and misrepresents complex literacy issues.”)

The backlash against Calkins strikes some onlookers, even those who are not paid-up Lucy partisans, as unfair. “She wouldn’t have been my choice for the picture on the ‘wanted’ poster,” James Cunningham, a professor emeritus of literacy studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. Indeed, over the course of several days spent with Calkins, and many more hours talking with people on all sides of this debate, I came to see her downfall as part of a larger story about the competing currents in American education and the universal desire for an easy, off-the-shelf solution to the country’s reading problems.

The question now is whether Calkins is so much a part of the problem that she cannot be part of the solution. “I’m going to figure this out,” she remembered thinking. “And I’m going to clarify it or I’m going to write some more or speak or do something or, or—fix it.” But can she? Can anyone?

On the last day of the school year in Oceanside, a well-to-do town on Long Island, everyone was just delighted to see Lucy Calkins. The young Yale-educated principal of Fulton Avenue School 8, Frank Zangari, greeted her warmly, and at the end of one lesson, a teacher asked for a selfie.

The lessons I saw stressed the importance of self-expression and empathy with other viewpoints; a group of sixth graders told me about the books they had read that year, which explored being poor in India and growing up Black in 1960s America. In every class, I watched Calkins speak to children with a mixture of intense attention and straightforward challenge; she got down on the floor with a group learning about orcas and frogs and peppered them with questions about how animals breathe. “Could you talk a minute about the writer’s craft?” she asked the sixth graders studying poetry. “Be more specific. Give examples,” she told a fourth grader struggling to write a memoir.

With her slim frame, brown bob, and no-nonsense affect, she reminded me of Nancy Pelosi. “I can’t retire; I don’t have any hobbies,” I overheard her saying to someone later.

School 8 showed the strengths of Calkins’s approach—which is presumably why she had suggested we visit it together. But it also hinted at the downsides. For generations in American public education, there has been a push and pull between two broad camps—one in which teachers are encouraged to directly impart skills and information, and a more progressive one in which children are thought to learn best through firsthand experience. When it comes to reading, the latter approach dominates universities’ education programs and resonates with many teachers; helping children see themselves as readers and writers feels more emotionally satisfying than drilling them on diphthongs and trigraphs.

This tension between the traditionalists and the progressives runs through decades of wrangling over standardized tests and through most of the major curricular controversies in recent memory. Longtime educators tick off the various flash points like Civil War battlefields: outcome-based education, No Child Left Behind, the Common Core. Every time, the pendulum went one way and then the other. “I started teaching elementary school in 1964,” says P. David Pearson, a former dean at the Berkeley School of Education, in California. “And then I went to grad school in, like, ’67, and there’s been a back-to-the-basics swing about every 10 years in the U.S., consistently.”

The progressives’ primary insight is that lessons focused on repetitive instruction and simplified text extracts can be boring for students and teachers alike, and that many children respond more enthusiastically to discovering their own interests. “We’re talking about an approach that treats kids as competent, intellectual meaning makers, versus kids who just need to learn the code,” Maren Aukerman, a professor at the University of Calgary, told me. But opponents see that approach as nebulous and undirected.

My time at School 8 was clearly intended to demonstrate that Units of Study is not hippie nonsense, but a rigorous curriculum that can succeed with the right teachers. “There’s no question in my mind that the philosophy works, but in order to implement it, it takes a lot of work,” Phyllis Harrington, the district superintendent, told me.

School 8 is a happy school with great results. However, while the school uses Calkins’s writing units for all grades, it uses her reading units only from the third grade on. For first and second grades, the school uses Fundations, which is marketed as “a proven approach to Structured Literacy that is aligned with the science of reading.” In other words, it’s a phonics program.

Calkins’s upbringing was financially comfortable but psychologically tough. Both of her parents were doctors, and her father eventually chaired the department of medicine at the University at Buffalo. Calkins’s mother was “the most important, wonderful person in my life, but really brutal,” she told me. If a bed wasn’t made, her mother ripped off the sheets. If a coat wasn’t hung up, her mother dropped it into the basement. When the young Lucy bit her fingernails, her mother tied dancing gloves onto her hands. When she scratched the mosquito bites on her legs, her mother made her wear thick pantyhose at the height of summer.

The nine Calkins children raised sheep and chickens themselves. Her memories of childhood are of horseback riding in the cold, endless hand-me-downs, and little tolerance for bad behavior.

That is why, Calkins told me, “nothing that Emily Hanford has said grates on me more than the damn monogrammed towels.” But she knows that the charge of being privileged and out of touch has stuck. Her friends had warned her about letting me into her home in Dobbs Ferry, a pretty suburb of New York, and I could see why. Her house is idyllic—at the end of a long private drive, shaded by old trees, with a grand piano in the hallway and a Maine-coon cat patrolling the wooden floors. Calkins has profited handsomely from textbook sales and training fees, and in the eyes of some people, that is suspicious. (“Money is the last thing I ever think about,” she told me.)

She became interested in reading and writing because she babysat for the children of the literacy pioneer Donald Graves, whose philosophy can be summarized by one of his most widely cited phrases: “Children want to write.” Even at a young age, she believed in exhaustively prepared fun. “I would plan a bagful of things I would bring over there; I was the best babysitter you could ever have,” she said. “We would do crafts projects, and drama, you know, and I would keep the kids busy all day.”

When Calkins was 14, Graves sent her to be a counselor at a summer camp in rural Maine. She remembers two kids in particular, Sophie and Charlie. Sophie was “so tough and surly, and a kind of overweight, insecure, tough kid,” but she opened up when Calkins took her horseback riding and then asked her to write about it. Charlie loved airplanes, and so she asked him to write about those. The experience cemented her lifelong belief that children should read and write as a form of self-expression.

After graduating from Williams College in 1973, she enrolled in a program in Connecticut that trained teachers to work in disadvantaged districts. She read everything about teaching methods she could find, and traveled to England, where a progressive education revolution was in full swing.

Calkins returned to America determined to spread this empowering philosophy. She earned a doctorate at NYU, and, in 1986, published a book called The Art of Teaching Writing. Later, she expanded her purview to reading instruction.

At the time, the zeitgeist favored an approach known as “whole language.” This advocated independent reading of full books and suggested that children should identify words from context clues rather than arduously sounding them out. Progressives loved it, because it emphasized playfulness and agency. But in practice, whole language had obvious flaws: Some children do appear to pick up reading easily, but many benefit from focused, direct instruction.

This approach influenced Calkins as she developed her teaching philosophy. “Lucy Calkins sides, in most particulars, with the proponents of ‘whole language,’ ” The New York Times reported in 1997. Her heavyweight 2001 book, The Art of Teaching Reading, has only a single chapter on phonics in primary grades; it does note, however, that “researchers emphasize how important it is for children to develop phonemic awareness in kindergarten.”

The author Natalie Wexler has described Calkins’s resulting approach, balanced literacy, as an attempt to create a “peace treaty” in the reading wars: Phonics, yes, if you must, but also writing workshops and independent reading with commercial children’s books, rather than the stuffier grade-level decodable texts and approved extracts. (Defenders of the former method argue that using full books is more cost-efficient, because they can be bought cheaply and used by multiple students.) “If we make our children believe that reading has more to do with matching letters and sounds than with developing relationships with characters like Babar, Madeline, Charlotte, and Ramona,” Calkins wrote, “we do more harm than good.”

Sentences like that are why critics saw balanced literacy as a branding exercise designed to rehabilitate old methods. “It was a strategic rebadging of whole language,” Pamela Snow, a cognitive-psychology professor at La Trobe University, in Australia, told me. Even many of Calkins’s defenders concede that she was too slow to embrace phonics as the evidence for its effectiveness grew. “I think she should have reacted earlier,” Pearson, the former Berkeley dean, told me, but he added: “Once she changed, they were still beating her for what she did eight years ago, not what she was doing last month.”

For the first decades of her career, Calkins was an influential thinker among progressive educators, writing books for teachers. In 2003, though, Joel Klein, then the chancellor of the New York City public schools, suddenly mandated her workshop approach in virtually all of the city’s elementary schools, alongside a separate, much smaller, phonics program. An article in the Times suggested that some saw Klein as “an unwitting captive of the city’s liberal consensus,” but Klein brushed aside the criticisms of balanced literacy. “I don’t believe curriculums are the key to education,” he said. “I believe teachers are.” Now everybody in the city’s public schools would be “teaching Lucy.”

As other districts followed New York’s lead, Units of Study became one of the most popular curricula in the United States. This led, inevitably, to backlash. A philosophy had become a product—an extremely popular and financially successful one. “Once upon a time there was a thoughtful educator who raised some interesting questions about how children were traditionally taught to read and write, and proposed some innovative changes,” the author Barbara Feinberg wrote in 2007. “But as she became famous, critical debate largely ceased: her word became law. Over time, some of her methods became dogmatic and extreme, yet her influence continued to grow.”

You wouldn’t know it from listening to her fiercest detractors, but Calkins has, in fact, continuously updated Units of Study. Unlike Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, who have stayed quiet during the latest furor and quietly reissued their curriculum with more emphasis on phonics last year, Calkins has even taken on her critics directly. In 2019—the year after she added the dedicated phonics texts to Units of Study—she published an eight-page document called “No One Gets to Own the Term ‘The Science of Reading,’ ” which referred dismissively to “phonics-centric people” and “the new hype about phonics.” This tone drove her opponents mad: Now that Calkins had been forced to adapt, she wanted to decide what the science of reading was?

“Her document is not about the science that I know; it is about Lucy Calkins,” wrote the cognitive neuroscientist Mark Seidenberg, one of the critics interviewed in Sold a Story. “The purpose of the document is to protect her brand, her market share, and her standing among her many followers.”

Talking with Calkins herself, it was hard to nail down to what extent she felt that the criticisms of her earlier work were justified. When I asked her how she was thinking about phonics in the 2000s, she told me: “Every school has a phonics program. And I would always talk about the phonics programs.” She added that she brought phonics specialists to Columbia’s Teachers College several times a year to help train aspiring educators. (James Cunningham, at UNC Chapel Hill, backed this up, telling me, “She was certainly not wearing a sandwich billboard around: DON’T TEACH PHONICS.”)

But still, I asked Calkins, would it be fair to say that phonics wasn’t your bag?

“I felt like phonics was something that you have the phonics experts teach.”

So where does this characterization of you being hostile toward phonics come from?

“Hopefully, you understand I’m not stupid. You would have to be stupid to not teach a 5-year-old phonics.”

But some people didn’t, did they? They were heavily into context and cueing.

“I’ve never heard of a kindergarten teacher who doesn’t teach phonics,” Calkins replied.

Because this is America, the reading debate has become a culture war. When Sold a Story came along in 2022, it resonated with a variety of audiences, including center-left education reformers and parents of children with learning disabilities. But it also galvanized political conservatives. Calkins’s Units of Study was already under attack from the right: In 2021, an article in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal titled “Units of Indoctrination” had criticized the curriculum, alleging that the way it teaches students to analyze texts “amounts to little more than radical proselytization through literature.”

The podcast was released at an anxious time for American education. During the coronavirus pandemic, many schools—particularly in blue states—were closed for months at a time. Masking in classrooms made it harder for children to lip-read what their teachers were saying. Test scores fell, and have only recently begun to recover.

“Parents had, for a period of time, a front-row seat based on Zoom school,” Annie Ward, a recently retired assistant superintendent in Mamaroneck, New York, told me. She wondered if that fueled a desire for a “back to basics” approach. “If I’m a parent, I want to know the teacher is teaching and my kid is sitting there soaking it up, and I don’t want this loosey-goosey” stuff.

Disgruntled parents quickly gathered online. Moms for Liberty, a right-wing group that started out by opposing school closures and mask mandates, began lobbying state legislators to change school curricula as well. The reading wars began to merge with other controversies, such as how hard schools should push diversity-and-inclusion programs. (The Moms for Liberty website recommends Sold a Story on its resources page.) “We’re failing kids everyday, and Moms for Liberty is calling it out,” a co-founder, Tiffany Justice, told Education Week in October of last year. “The idea that there’s more emphasis placed on diversity in the classroom, rather than teaching kids to read, is alarming at best. That’s criminal.”

Ward’s district was not “teaching Lucy,” but using its own bespoke balanced-literacy curriculum. In the aftermath of the pandemic, Ward told me, the district had several “contentious” meetings, including one in January 2023 where “we had ringers”—attendees who were not parents or community members, but instead seemed to be activists from outside the district. “None of us in the room recognized these people.” That had never happened before.

I had met Ward at a dinner organized by Calkins at her home, which is also the headquarters of Mossflower—the successor to the center that Calkins used to lead at Teachers College. The evening demonstrated that Calkins still has star power. On short notice, she had managed to assemble half a dozen superintendents, assistant superintendents, and principals from New York districts.

“Any kind of disruption like this has you think very carefully about what you’re doing,” Edgar McIntosh, an assistant superintendent in Scarsdale, told me. But he, like several others, was frustrated by the debate. During his time as an elementary-school teacher, he had discovered that some children could decode words—the basic skill developed by phonics—but struggled with their meaning. He worried that parents’ clamor for more phonics might come at the expense of teachers’ attention to fluency and comprehension. Raymond Sanchez, the superintendent of Tarrytown’s school district, said principals should be able to explain how they were adding more phonics or decodable texts to existing programs, rather than having “to throw everything out and find a series that has a sticker that says ‘science of reading’ on it.”

This, to me, is the key to the anti-Lucy puzzle. Hanford’s reporting was thorough and necessary, but its conclusion—that whole language or balanced literacy would be replaced by a shifting, research-based movement—is hard to reconcile with how American education actually works. The science of reading started as a neutral description of a set of principles, but it has now become a brand name, another off-the-shelf solution to America’s educational problems. The answer to those problems might not be to swap out one commercial curriculum package for another—but that’s what the system is set up to enable.

Gail Dahling-Hench, the assistant superintendent in Madison, Connecticut, has experienced this pressure firsthand. Her district’s schools don’t “teach Lucy” but instead follow a bespoke local curriculum that, she says, uses classroom elements associated with balanced literacy, such as the workshop model of students studying together in small groups, while also emphasizing phonics. That didn’t stop them from running afoul of the new science-of-reading laws.

In 2021, Connecticut passed a “Right to Read” law mandating that schools choose a K–3 curriculum from an approved list of options that are considered compliant with the science of reading. Afterward, Dahling-Hench’s district was denied a waiver to keep using its own curriculum. (Eighty-five districts and charter schools in Connecticut applied for a waiver, but only 17 were successful.) “I think they got wrapped around the axle of thinking that programs deliver instruction, and not teachers,” she told me.

Dahling-Hench said the state gave her no useful explanation for its decision—nor has it outlined the penalties for noncompliance. She has decided to stick with the bespoke curriculum, because she thinks it’s working. According to test scores released a few days after our conversation, her district is among the best-performing in the state.

Keeping the current curriculum also avoids the cost of preparing teachers and administrators to use a new one—a transition that would be expensive even for a tiny district like hers, with just five schools. “It can look like $150,000 to $800,000 depending on which program you’re looking at, but that’s a onetime cost,” Dahling-Hench said. Then you need to factor in annual costs, such as new workbooks.

You can’t understand this controversy without appreciating the sums involved. Refreshing a curriculum can cost a state millions of dollars. People on both sides will therefore suggest that their opponents are motivated by money—either saving their favored curriculum to keep the profits flowing, or getting rich through selling school boards an entirely new one. Talking with teachers and researchers, I heard widespread frustration with America’s commercial approach to literacy education. Politicians and bureaucrats tend to love the idea of a packaged solution—Buy this and make all your problems go away!—but the perfect curriculum does not exist.

“If you gave me any curriculum, I could find ways to improve it,” Aukerman, at the University of Calgary, told me. She thinks that when a teaching method falls out of fashion, its champions are often personally vilified, regardless of their good faith or expertise. In the case of Lucy Calkins and balanced literacy, Aukerman said, “If it weren’t her, it would be someone else.”

Jeff Brown for The Atlantic

One obvious question about the science of reading is, well … what is it? The evidence for some kind of explicit phonics instruction is compelling, and states such as Mississippi, which has adopted early screening to identify children who struggle to read—and which holds back third graders if necessary—appear to be improving their test scores. Beyond that, though, things get messy.

Dig into this subject, and you can find frontline teachers and credentialed professors who contest every part of the consensus. And I mean every part: Some academics don’t even think there’s a reading crisis at all.

American schools might be ditching Units of Study, but balanced literacy still has its defenders. A 2022 analysis in England, which mandates phonics, found that systematic reviews “do not support a synthetic phonics orientation to the teaching of reading; they suggest that a balanced-instruction approach is most likely to be successful.”

The data on the effects of specific methods can be conflicting and confusing, which is not unusual for education studies, or psychological research more generally. I feel sorry for any well-intentioned superintendent or state legislator trying to make sense of it all. One of the classrooms at Oceanside School 8 had a wall display devoted to “growth mindset,” a fashionable intervention that encourages children to believe that instead of their intelligence and ability being fixed, they can learn and evolve. Hoping to improve test scores, many schools have spent thousands of dollars each implementing “growth mindset” lessons, which proponents once argued should be a “national education priority.” (Some proponents also hoped, earnestly, that the approach could help bring peace to the Middle East.) But in the two decades since growth mindset first became ubiquitous, the lofty claims made about its promise have come down to earth.

Keeping up with all of this is more than any teacher—more than any school board, even—can reasonably be expected to do. After I got in touch with her, Emily Hanford sent me seven emails with links to studies and background reading; I left Calkins’s house loaded down with units of her curricula for younger students. More followed in the mail.

Even the most modest pronouncements about what’s happening in American schools are difficult to verify, because of the sheer number of districts, teachers, and pupils involved. In Sold a Story, Hanford suggested that some schools were succeeding with Units of Study only because parents hired personal tutors for their children. But corroborating this with data is impossible. “I haven’t figured out a way to quantify it, except in a very strong anecdotal way,” Hanford told me.

Some teachers love “teaching Lucy,” and others hate it. Is one group delusional? And if so, which one? Jenna and Christina, who have both taught kindergarten in New York using Units of Study, told me that the curriculum was too invested in the idea of children as “readers” and “writers” without giving them the basic skills needed to read and write. (They asked to be identified only by their first names in case of professional reprisals.) “It’s a piece of shit,” Christina said. She added: “We’re expecting them to apply skills that we haven’t taught them and that they aren’t coming to school with. I’ve been trying to express that there’s a problem and I get called negative.” Jenna had resorted to a covert strategy, secretly teaching phonics for up to 90 minutes a day instead of the brief lessons she was instructed to provide.

But for every Jenna or Christina, there’s a Latasha Holt. After a decade as a third- and fourth-grade teacher in Arkansas, Holt is now an associate professor of elementary literacy at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where she has watched from the sidelines as the tide turned against Calkins. “The dismantling of this thing, it got to me, because I had taught under Units of Study,” she told me. “I’ve used it, and I knew how good it was. I had lived it; I’ve seen it work; I knew it was good for kids.”

Aubrey Kinat is a third-grade teacher in Texas who recently left her position at a public school because it decided to drop Units of Study. (The school now uses another curriculum, which was deemed to align better with the science of reading.) Suddenly, she was pushed away from full novels and toward approved excerpts, and her lessons became much more heavily scripted. “I felt like I was talking so much,” she told me. “It took the joy out of it.”

For many school boards facing newly politicized parents who came out of the pandemic with strong opinions, ditching Lucy has had the happy side effect of giving adults much more control over what children read. Calkins and some of her dinner guests had suggested that this might be the true reason for the animus around independent reading. “I do start to wonder if this really is about wanting to move everybody towards textbooks,” Calkins said.

Eighteen months after her series launched, Hanford returned in April 2024 with two follow-up episodes of Sold a Story, which took a less polemical tone. Unsurprisingly so: Calkins had lost, and she had won.

The science of reading is the new consensus in education, and its advocates are the new establishment. It is now on the hook for the curriculum changes that it prompted—and for America’s reading performance more generally. That is an uncomfortable position for those who care more about research than about winning political fights.

Some of the neuroscience underpinning Sold a Story was provided by Seidenberg, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. (He did not respond to an interview request.) Since the series aired, he has welcomed the move away from Units of Study, but he has also warned that “none of the other major commercial curricula that are currently available were based on the relevant science from the ground up.”

Because the usefulness of phonics is one of the few science-of-reading conclusions that is immediately comprehensible to laypeople, “phonics” has come to stand in for the whole philosophy. In a blog post last year, Seidenberg lamented that, on a recent Zoom call, a teacher had asked if they needed to keep teaching phonemic awareness once children were good readers. (The answer is no: Sounding out letters is what you do until the process becomes automatic.) Seidenberg now worried that the science of reading is “at risk of turning into a new pedagogical dogma.”

Hanford has also expressed ambivalence about the effects of Sold a Story. She compared the situation to the aftermath of No Child Left Behind, a George W. Bush–era federal education initiative that heavily promoted a literacy program called Reading First. “It became focused on products and programs,” Hanford told me, adding that the ethos turned into “get rid of whole language and buy something else.” However, she is glad that the importance of phonics—and the research backing it—is now more widely understood, because she thinks this can break the cycle of revolution and counterrevolution. She added that whenever she talks with lawmakers, she stresses the importance of continuing to listen to teachers.

What about her portrait of Calkins as rich, privileged, oblivious? Forget the monogrammed towels, I told Hanford; there is a more benign explanation for Calkins’s worldview: Everywhere she goes, she meets people, like the teachers and children in Oceanside, who are overjoyed to see her, and keen to tell her how much they love Units of Study.

But Hanford told me that she’d included the towels line because “the vast majority of teachers, especially elementary-school teachers, in America are white, middle-class women.” Many of these women, she thought, had enjoyed school themselves and didn’t intuitively know what it was like to struggle with learning to read and write.

Reporting this story, I was reminded again and again that education is both a mass phenomenon and a deeply personal one. People I spoke with would say things like Well, he’s never done any classroom research. She’s never been a teacher. They don’t understand things the way I do. The education professors would complain that the cognitive scientists didn’t understand the history of the reading wars, while the scientists would complain that the education professors didn’t understand the latest peer-reviewed research. Meanwhile, a teacher must command a class that includes students with dyslexia as well as those who find reading a breeze, and kids whose parents read to them every night alongside children who don’t speak English at home. At the same time, school boards and state legislators, faced with angry parents and a welter of conflicting testimony, must answer a simple question: Should we be “teaching Lucy,” or not?

No matter how painful the past few years have been, though, Calkins is determined to keep fighting for her legacy. At 72, she has both the energy to start over again at Mossflower and the pragmatism to have promised her estate to further the cause once she’s gone. She still has a “ferocious” drive, she told me, and a deep conviction in her methods, even as they evolve. She does not want “to pretend it’s a brand-new approach,” she said, “when in fact we’ve just been learning; we’re just incorporating more things that we’ve learned.”

But now that balanced literacy is as unfashionable as whole language, Calkins is trying to come up with a new name for her program. She thought she might try “comprehensive literacy”—or maybe “rebalancing literacy.” Whatever it takes for America to once again feel confident about “teaching Lucy.”

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “Teaching Lucy.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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A note from Tom:

As we were about to publish this newsletter, Donald Trump announced that he has asked the Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, a military veteran who has no experience in leading large organizations and no serious background as a senior leader in national-security affairs, to be his secretary of defense. This is exactly the kind of unqualified nomination that I was warning could be looming after this first group of nominees were announced—and it explains why Trump is determined to bypass the U.S. Senate to get some of his nominees confirmed. I will have more to say about Hegseth soon.

So far, the new Trump administration has a chief of staff, a “border czar,” and a national security adviser; all three are White House positions controlled by the president. Donald Trump has also reportedly named six people to senior positions that require Senate confirmation: secretary of state, United Nations ambassador, secretary of homeland security, secretary of defense, CIA director, and administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. (He has also chosen an ambassador to Israel.) His first picks are neither very surprising nor very impressive, but this is only the beginning.

His co–campaign manager Susie Wiles will make White House history by becoming the first female chief of staff. People around Trump seem relieved at this appointment, but she’ll likely be saddled with Stephen Miller as a deputy, which could get interesting because Miller apparently has a tendency to get out of his lane. (According to a book by the New York Times reporter Michael Bender, Miller attended a tense meeting that included Trump, Attorney General Bill Barr, and General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. As the nation’s leaders debated what to do, Miller interjected and said that America’s major cities had been turned into war zones. General Milley, Bender writes, turned to Miller, pointed at him, and said: “Shut the fuck up, Stephen.”)

The rest of the appointments are unsurprising, given the limited pool of Republicans willing to serve in another Trump administration. (Some Trump loyalists such as Senator Tom Cotton have reportedly declined a role in the administration, likely protecting their future for the 2028 GOP race to succeed Trump.) Marco Rubio, who sits on the Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees in the Senate, was a reasonable choice among the Trump coterie to become America’s top diplomat as secretary of state.

Likewise, Representative Mike Waltz of Florida is a reasonable choice for national security adviser—but again, that’s in the context of the now-smaller universe of national-security conservatives in politics or academia willing to work for Trump at this point. He is a veteran, and like Rubio, he has served on relevant committees in Congress, including Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Waltz may be a credible voice on national security, but he was also a 2020 election denier. He pledged to oppose certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 win and signed on to an amicus brief supporting a Texas lawsuit to overturn the election. He changed his mind—but only after the events of January 6.

Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, meanwhile, was bound to be rewarded for her loyalty. Although Vice President–elect J. D. Vance took the gold in the race to replace the disowned Mike Pence, Stefanik was a comer even by the standards of the sycophantic circle around Trump, and so she’ll head to the United Nations, a low-priority post for Trump and a GOP that has little use for the institution. A former member of Congress from New York, Lee Zeldin (who was defeated in the 2022 New York governor’s race) will head up the EPA, another institution hated by MAGA Republicans, thus making Zeldin’s weak—or strong, depending on your view—legislative record on environmental issues a good fit for this administration.

This afternoon, Trump announced that John Ratcliffe will serve as CIA director. Ratcliffe previously served as director of national intelligence and will now be in a post that is functionally subordinate to his old job. Ratcliffe is a reliable partisan but an unreliable intelligence chief. The most baffling move Trump has made so far is the appointment of South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem to lead the Department of Homeland Security. Noem served four terms in Congress and is in her second as governor. She has very little relevant experience, especially as a government executive. (South Dakota might be a big place, but it’s a small state; DHS has more than 260,000 employees, making it a bit more than a quarter the size of the entire population of Noem’s home state.) DHS is a giant glob of a department—one I have long argued should never have existed in the first place and should be abolished—that has seeped across the jurisdictional lines of multiple institutions and, unlike some other Cabinet posts, requires someone with serious leadership chops.

DHS will also be central to some of Trump’s most abominable plans regarding undocumented immigrants—and, potentially, against others the president-elect views as “enemies from within.” (The “border czar” Trump has named, Tom Homan, once falsely implied that some California wildfires were worsened by an undocumented immigrant.) In that light, Noem is perfect: She is inexperienced but loyal, a political lightweight with no independent base of support or particularly long experience in Washington, and she can be counted on to do what she’s told. She will be no John Kelly or Kirstjen Nielsen, her confirmed predecessors at DHS, both of whom were on occasion willing to speak up, even if ineffectively.

This first passel of nominees should gain Senate confirmation easily, especially Rubio. (Sitting members of the chamber usually have an easier time, as do people who have close associations with the Senate.) And given Trump’s history and proclivity for mercurial and humiliating firings, few of them are likely to be very long in their post, and are probably better than the people who will later replace them.

But that in itself raises a troubling question. If Trump intends to nominate these kinds of fellow Republicans, why is he insistent that the new Senate allow him to make recess appointments?

For those of you who do not follow the arcana of American government, Article II of the Constitution includes a provision by which the president can make appointments on his own if the Senate is in recess and therefore unable to meet. The Founders didn’t think this was a controversial provision; sometimes, presidents need to keep the government running (by choosing, say, an ambassador) even when the Senate might not be around—a real problem in the days when convening the Senate could take weeks of travel. Such appointments last until the end of the next legislative session.

For obvious reasons, the Senate itself was never a big fan of a device—one that presidents routinely used—that circumvents constitutional authority to confirm executive appointments, especially once the practice got out of hand. (Bill Clinton made 139 recess appointments, George W. Bush made 171, and Barack Obama made 32.) The Senate’s response was basically to be wilier about not declaring itself in recess even when there’s no one around, and when President Obama tried to push through some of these appointments in 2012, the Supreme Court sided with the Senate.

Now Trump wants to bring back the practice. The obvious inference to draw here is that after some fairly uncontroversial nominations, he intends to nominate people who couldn’t be confirmed even in a supine and obedient Republican Senate. Perhaps this is too clever, but I am concerned that this first pass is a head fake, in which Trump nominates people he knows are controversial (such as Zeldin) but who are still confirmable, and then sends far worse candidates forward for even more important posts. Kash Patel—a man who is dangerous precisely because his only interest is serving Trump, as my colleague Elaina Plott Calabro has reported—keeps bubbling up for various intelligence posts.

“Ambassador Elise Stefanik” and “EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin” might not be great ideas, but they are not immediate threats to U.S. national security or American democracy. “CIA Director John Ratcliffe,” by contrast, is cause for serious concern. If Trump is serious about his authoritarian plans—the ones he announced at every campaign stop—then he’ll need the rest of the intelligence community, the Justice Department, and the Defense Department all under firm control.

Those are the next nominations to watch.

Related:

Trump signals that he’s serious about mass deportation. Stephen Miller is Trump’s right-hand troll. (From 2018)

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The HR-ification of the Democratic Party Anne Applebaum: Putin isn’t fighting for land in Ukraine. Genetic discrimination is coming for us all.

Today’s News

The judge in Trump’s hush-money criminal case delayed his decision on whether Trump’s conviction on 34 felonies should be overturned after his reelection. A federal judge temporarily blocked a new Louisiana law that would have required the display of the Ten Commandments in all public classrooms, calling the legislation “unconstitutional on its face.” Louisiana’s attorney general said that she will appeal the ruling. The Archbishop of Canterbury announced his resignation. An independent review found that he failed to sufficiently report the late barrister John Smyth, who ran Christian summer camps and abused more than 100 boys and young men, according to the review.

Evening Read

Illustration by Mark Pernice

AI Can Save Humanity—Or End It

By Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Craig Mundie

The world’s strongest nation might no longer be the one with the most Albert Einsteins and J. Robert Oppenheimers. Instead, the world’s strongest nations will be those that can bring AI to its fullest potential.

But with that potential comes tremendous danger. No existing innovation can come close to what AI might soon achieve: intelligence that is greater than that of any human on the planet. Might the last polymathic invention—namely computing, which amplified the power of the human mind in a way fundamentally different from any previous machine—be remembered for replacing its own inventors?

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Good on Paper: A former Republican strategist on why Harris lost Trump’s “deep state” revenge The great conspiracy-theorist flip-flop The two Donald Trumps “Dear James”: How can I find more satisfaction in work?

Culture Break

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Watch. These 13 feel-good TV shows are perfect to watch as the weather gets colder.

Read. “The first thing you need to know about the writer Dorothy Allison, who died last week at 75, is that she could flirt you into a stupor,” Lily Burana writes.

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In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victorious reelection bid, Democrats are searching for an explanation of Kamala Harris’s loss in order to begin rebuilding for the future. So it goes every election cycle—a loss, a scramble for causality, and competing narratives begin to set.

Just one week out from Election Day, there are multiple dissenting and overlapping arguments being made to try to make sense of the results. In 2016, many Democrats believed that Trump’s attack on trade policies was core to his victory. As a result, the Biden-Harris administration pursued Trump-like policies on trade, none of which seem to have made a significant difference in increasing the union vote share, reducing Trump’s likelihood of victory, or stemming the flow of working-class voters out of the Democratic Party.

Now, again, various parts of the Democratic coalition are seeking to define the party’s loss. But what do we actually know about why the Democrats were defeated? There are still theories forming, but on today’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with the former Republican strategist and current host of The Bulwark Podcast, Tim Miller about the postelection narratives jockeying for power.

“But for those of us who do have a belief that there’s something kind of special about the American system and that have revered America, that understand that America is flawed and has made mistakes, that still is a unique experiment in the world. That “America is an idea” type of thing. The idea is pretty dim at this point,” Miller argued.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Jerusalem Demsas: In the aftermath of a bruising electoral loss, the losing party begins participating in a well-worn democratic tradition: slinging takes about what happened.

This is democracy! When the voters send a dissatisfied response, the messy work of recalibration requires parsing the signal from the noise.

Were voters mad because of a global inflationary environment that no Democrat could dig their way out of? Did they want to see specific breaks between Harris and Biden on policy? Were they frustrated by a candidate they saw as too left on cultural issues?

There are data points in favor of many different theses. Here’s where I’d put my stake in the ground, with the caveat that we still don’t have a complete analysis on subgroup dynamics, or even a final vote count on all the races:

First, incumbents worldwide were facing tough election odds. Electorates were frustrated by the COVID inflationary years and were clearly seeking change. In Australia, Sweden, the Netherlands, France, and beyond, ruling coalitions lost power across the political spectrum.

Second, I don’t think Kamala Harris was ever going to be a great candidate. After Biden’s disastrous debate effort in late June and it seemed he might be pressured to drop out, I wrote an article calling on Democrats not to coronate their vice president, and pointing to key vulnerabilities she displayed and the value of an open democratic process.

Figuring out how much of this is in the campaign’s control—would it really have mattered that much if she’d gone on Joe Rogan’s podcast?—or figuring out what this means for America’s two political parties will take months, if not years. As you’ve heard on this podcast, I’m still arguing about what 2016 really meant on trade and immigration.

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas, I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. As a disclaimer, I worked for the Harris primary campaign in 2019 before becoming a journalist, and my guest today, Tim Miller, is a political strategist who was Jeb Bush’s 2016 communications director on his presidential campaign. He’s been an anti-Trump conservative since then and is the host of The Bulwark Podcast.

Today we’re going to talk through some of these inchoate narratives and debate which ones we think are likely to hold water.

[Music]

Demsas: Tim, welcome to the show.

Tim Miller: Hey Jerusalem. What’s happening?

Demsas: Well, we’re recording this six days after Election Day. And—as you have seen on Twitter, and I’m sure in your various interviews—the takes are already coming in very, very hot. And this is a show where we often look at narratives that have already baked, and kind of look at the research and data behind how these narratives formed and what truth is there and what sorts of things have gotten ahead of themselves.

But we’re in an interesting moment right now where we’re seeing very important narrative formation happen in real time. In the aftermath of an election, everyone’s scrambling to define what happened in order to maybe wrest control of the future of the party from an ideological perspective or just a pure power perspective. And so we’re seeing a bunch of people arguing about why Trump won and why Harris lost in a time where there’s a bunch of unknowns. So we’re going to go through a few of these different narratives that are coming up.

But Tim, right off the bat, I wanted to ask you: What’s your perception of why Trump won and Harris lost?

Miller: I’m going to preempt my answer by saying that I think that uncertainty is important in this moment, and that false certainty can lead to some very mistaken and disastrous results. I say this from experience, having worked on the Republican autopsy in 2013, when the conventional wisdom congealed very quickly that Republicans, in order to win again, needed to moderate on immigration and cultural issues to appeal more to Hispanics and women. And not only was that wrong, but the person that became the nominee and then the president used that autopsy for toilet paper and went exactly the opposite direction.

It also always didn’t also work out in Trump’s favor. In 2022, the conventional wisdom was that Trumpism was badly hurt and that Ron DeSantis was ascendant. Right? So anyway, in the week after the election, bad takes abound.

Demsas: [Laughs.]

Miller: That said, my answer is, I’m open to a variety of different things that the Democrats might have to do, among them being maybe nothing and watch Trump self-implode. Might be as simple as that. That said, the one thing that I think is certain that the Democrats need to reflect on when it comes to this question of why Trump won and why Harris lost—it’s that the Democratic message is not landing outside of a particular demographic of middle- to upper-income, college-educated, not particularly religious, urban- and suburban-dwelling white Americans, in addition to Black women, right? Those are the demos that the Democrats are doing well with, that Kamala Harris grew her share with from last time, at least in the case of college-educated women. And I think that the Democrats are doing a very poor job of communicating to people in all of those other demographics.

On what they need to do, I’m very open to various possibilities about whether it’s about affect or vibe or policy or whatever. But I’m certain that there is—fair or unfair, there’s a perception that the Democrats don’t care about these other demographics, particularly working-class demographics, particularly working-class men. And that they did not offer them something that was more appealing than the nostalgia and promises of gold bullion that they got from Donald Trump. And so we can hash through all the different theories about why that was. But I think the fact that what happened—you can’t argue with.

Demsas: Yeah. I think that that’s very descriptively true. But I guess what I would want to know from you is do you feel like there are specific things that Democrats have done that tipped the scales against them? I think that what you’re outlining here is very sound. There’s a difference between why Harris may have lost and what the Democrats need to do going forward to be a more electorally relevant party at the presidential level. And so from your perspective, though, is there something about the Democratic argument around the economy or other issues that you think was particularly relevant this time around?

Miller: I think that, for starters, people were unhappy with the economy. And I don’t think that the Democrats presented a message to them about how they plan to change that for the better. But, again, I’m also not even really ready to concede that, with the exception of inflation being annoying and that broadly hurting people, the Democrats were hurt based on their economic argument. It might simply be cultural. It might be the way that they spoke, and having people feel like they weren’t being heard.

I think the Democrats in particular—I always want to immediately go to, What is the policy prescription that would have appealed? And I’m like, It’s possible that there wasn’t one.

Demsas: Yeah. An important backdrop that I think you’re alluding to here, as well, is that the inflationary environment was really, really bad for incumbents across the world, right? You’re kind of going into an election where the fundamentals are sort of rigged against incumbents because the inflationary episode was just really, really hard for people. I think one narrative that I’m seeing come up a lot is about campaign strategy. And this seems like something that’s going to be hashed out significantly. But I guess the question I have here is whether you think Harris could have won with a campaign run differently, even given the shortened timeline.

Miller: I’m giving another “I don’t know” answer to that question: I don’t know. I think that she, by all accounts, ran a strong campaign that was based on her strengths. And I think she had an undeniably dominating debate performance. They ran a nice convention. Her speeches were good. The messaging pivot, the launch was good. There wasn’t a lot of drama inside the campaign, right? There are other things that she isn’t particularly strong at. I don’t think that she is that great in unscripted moments. Sometimes she’s better than others.

And so then that’s the other thing that people come to, which is like, Oh, she should have done Rogan and all this. And I agree. I think she should have done more of those interviews, but they also weren’t really her strong suit. And I think that this was something that might’ve borne out had there been a longer primary, and maybe somebody else would have emerged. But that said, I don’t think so. I think Kamala Harris was going to emerge from a primary, no matter when Joe Biden dropped out.

And so I’m not saying, Oh, this was inevitable. Just give up. Life is pain. [Laughs.] That’s not really what I’m saying. Any specific thing that people are like, Oh, if this tactic had been different, that would have helped—I don’t really buy that. I mean, I think that broadly speaking, her having the ability to separate herself from the administration would have been helpful, and I think that was very challenging to do given the situation Joe Biden left her in and the time period that was left. And I think that it’s very likely that she might have separated herself from the administration more and still lost, and we would have been here on this podcast with people saying, Why did she distance? [Laughs.] You know what I mean? Why did she break up the Democratic coalition?

Demsas: Yeah. I mean, it’s funny. I think that, on the tactics, I’m sort of with you here. I was looking at some of the data analyses that are coming out now, and it looks like, at this point, given the data we have, while the national average from 2020 to 2024 shifts roughly six points, in battlegrounds, that number is going to end up closer to three points. And that speaks to campaign effects. That speaks to the fact that in battleground states where, again, the majority of the money is going, people are putting ads in battleground states, the campaign is putting rallies there, she’s visiting, they’re really working the press in those places to get her story and message out in a way that you’re not really going to do in a safe, Dem county in Illinois or something.

And so as a result, what they see is that the campaign effects were good on a tactical level. Their ads were persuasive. There’s evidence from Dan Rosenhack at The Economist that it looks like the campaign effects were more effective than Trump’s on things like—indicating things like ads and rallies were better for Harris.

I think on this kind of broader meta question that you kind of raised, right, about Harris as the nominee, I don’t think this is inevitable. I mean, I wrote an article on July 9th arguing that she was unlikely to be a good nominee and the party shouldn’t coronate her, and Nancy Pelosi to The New York Times—I don’t know if you saw this quote, after Harris’s loss—she says that she had expected that if the president were to step aside that there would be an open primary. And that maybe Kamala would have been stronger going forward if she’d gone through a primary and that the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, which made it impossible to have a primary at the time. But it sounds like you’re saying that you think that, regardless, this would not have really changed the game that much.

Miller: Yeah, I mean, I think that had Joe Biden followed the—you can argue whether it was a promise or whether it was an indication that he was going to be a one-term [president] and pass the torch. And had there been a two-year process, maybe Kamala Harris does not emerge. But, look, there are three things that I think of when I hear this counterfactual about what would have happened had it been a more open process. The first thing is, the Democrat—one of the things that the Democrats have a lot of baggage around is identity politics. I think it would have been very challenging for a Black woman to be passed over.

Demsas: But the Democratic primary voters did this in 2019, right? There was this argument being made, but they said, no, we care most about electability and they chose Joe Biden.

Miller: Right, that’s true. But Joe Biden had been the vice president in that case. Kamala Harris was the vice president. You already saw this on social media. I saw this on social media, and I was basically for Kamala but also, at the same time, was like, maybe I think it’d be healthy to have an open process. And I guess if you could wave a magic wand, I probably would want Shapiro, Whitmer. Because hopefully that would win two of the three states you need to win the presidency. And that just seems like a safer bet to me. That was my position: It was like pro-Kamala and/but. And I had hundreds of people calling me a racist over that.

So, I think that it would have caused a lot of turmoil within the party.

Now, again, in a longer, two-year process, is that a lot of heat that then just dies out after a while, and you settle on something that’s a little bit more electable and everybody gets behind it except for a few people who have hurt feelings? Maybe.

No. 2, an open process opens up Gaza [as a] wound and rips that apart even wider, and I think creates potentially even greater turmoil than she already was dealing with on that issue. And that’s cost her, frankly. And then No. 3 is then if the theory of the case is a more electable person with someone that could get more distance from the Biden-Harris administration, that assumes that the Democratic voters were looking for somebody to do that.

And that is really where the tension is here, Jerusalem, because if you look at the data, a majority of the Biden-Harris Democrats were basically happy with the administration, right? There were surely big parts of the Democratic coalition, particularly younger voters, particularly working-class Black and Hispanic voters, the types of people that they lost ground with, that were unhappy with the Biden administration. But I think that there was a plurality within the party that was not going to be for somebody—look at the response to Dean Phillips, not exactly the most talented candidate, but total rejection and mockery for somebody who ran trying to get distance from the Biden-Harris administration.

So I think it would have been very challenging to run as a candidate and get distance. So to me, it’s like if we lived in an imaginary world where identity politics wasn’t an issue, Gaza wasn’t an issue, and there was no backlash to distancing yourself from Biden, then certainly the Democrats could have come up with a stronger option.

We don’t live in an imaginary world. And I think that within the world that we live in, within all those constraints, I think it’s very challenging to see a situation where you end up with somebody stronger than Harris.

Demsas: Yeah, I mean, all those points I think are very well taken. And I think I’m seeing a lot of people make that argument of both Harris’s inevitability as the vice president, and also this sort of sense of It would have been a worse candidate. I do think that kind of my general belief is sort of, when you think you’re behind, you run a high-variance play. If you’re gonna lose anyway, you just kind of throw everything you can at the kitchen sink.

And on this kind of inevitability point, right, I think there is this burgeoning sense that Democrats were just repudiated across the board here. You kind of brought this up, this idea that Democrats do not have a good answer on economic issues or on the issues that Americans care about.

But I don’t know, how do you reconcile that with the clear ticket-splitting you see going on here? [Nebraska’s Dan] Osborne ran seven points ahead of the Harris ticket. [Montana Senator Jon] Tester ran seven points ahead of the ticket. Amy Klobuchar ran six points ahead. That’s just in the Senate. And in the House, we see over-performances from everyone from AOC to Jared Golden in Maine, who’s a much more moderate member of the Democratic coalition. Doesn’t that indicate at some level that candidate quality was important here and that there were other candidates that were much more electable?

Miller: For starters, running the presidential race is so far different from running a Senate or House race that it’s almost not even the same sport.

It’s literally like T-ball versus the major leagues. What people expect from their—I mean, nobody’s like, Oh man, does Amy Klobuchar have to go on Joe Rogan? Nobody watches Amy Klobuchar’s debates. Obviously it’s a little different in Montana, where you’re running a competitive race. But again, just the interest in Senate races is different. I think that the Democrats have a coalition that is perfectly durable and able to win nonpresidential elections. I think that this trade in the voters that has happened where the Democrats are picking up more high-trust, more middle- to high-income, more college-educated voters, and the Republicans are picking up more low-trust, more middle- to low-income, and less educated voters. As a trade, that accrues to Democrats benefits in off-year elections and midterms and special elections, just because it’s the type of person that shows up for those types of things, and it accrues to the Republicans benefit in presidential elections. So that’s not good when the Republicans are nominating Donald Trump, and the Republicans’ presidential nominee is an existential threat to the fabric of our republic. And so that’s a problem.

And so I agree that you can’t look at the data and say, oh, the Democratic brand is irreparably harmed. Like, no, the Democrats won. And a lot of these Senate races are going to end up very narrow minorities, in the House and the Senate, that they will probably be able to win back in the midterms, depending on what happens.

But I think that there are two things, which is, No. 1, the Democrats are not well suited to running presidential elections right now, in this media environment, and then No. 2 is that the Democrats have abandoned huge parts of the country where they are not viable. And that’s particularly problematic, given the Senate and Electoral College and the way that’s set up.

So okay, back to No. 1. Democrats are really good at running campaigns that are set pieces. They have professionals that are running these campaigns: the ads, the conventions, the speeches, the going to the editorial-board meetings, the 2004-type campaigns. And that’s how Senate and House campaigns are basically still run in most of the country, and even governor’s races, right? People just don’t care about those races at that deep of a level. But the presidential race is—the media environment around it is so different. I mean, people are consuming information about the presidential race on their TikTok, listening to sports talk, listening to their random podcasts that aren’t about sports at all that are cultural, on women’s blogs, at a school function, people are talking about it casually, you know what I mean?

I’m a parent, and obviously this is a little bit of selection bias since I’m in politics and people know that, but people don’t come up to me and ask me what I think about the House race in my district. Nobody’s mentioned Troy Carter to me at any events,, at any school functions or any of my kids’ sporting events.

Demsas: He’s got to get his name out there. [Laughs.]

Miller: And so the information environment is just a total category difference. And Trump and even J. D. Vance in certain ways were able to take advantage of that by running campaigns that are a little bit more unwieldy, that are better for viral clips, that are also better for sitting down for two hours and broing out with the Theo Von and talking about how you can’t even do coke in this country anymore because the fentanyl is in it, right?

She wasn’t doing any of that. And doing one of those interviews isn’t really the answer, right? It’s like, can you communicate in a way that feels authentic? It might be fake authenticity, but in a way that feels authentic to people in their Instagram Stories, in their TikTok, in their podcasts, whatever.

And Democrats are not producing a lot of candidates who I feel are good at that.

Demsas: But I think there’s also this broad concern that the media ecosystem itself is not producing convincing, progressive-sounding or left-leaning media personalities. There’s a 2017 AER study that I remember being very, very shocking to people when it first came out, right after Trump’s election in 2016. And there are a couple economists, they look at the effect of Fox News, and they find that watching Fox News for an additional 2.5 minutes per week increases the vote share by 0.3 percentage points. But watching MSNBC has essentially no effect, and they see that Fox News is actually able to shift viewers’ attitudes rightward. And they look at 2004 and 2008 and find that Republican presidential candidates’ share of the two-party vote would have been more than three points lower in 2004, and six points lower in 2008 without Fox News.

And so that’s something where I’m just like—there is something to the fact that the media ecosystem does not have that sort of targeted apparatus. But my usual belief about these sorts of things is that we’re discounting the fact that so much of the media is so liberal that Fox News can have this large effect because it I think stands out among a pack of more liberal institutions, but I am kind of surprised at MSNBC.

Miller: Yeah, I mean, as a person on MSNBC, did that study go on before I was a political contributor? I think it did. So we might need to update the study and have them focus on my hits and see if that changes anything.

I guess I want to noodle on that for a little bit. That does surprise me a little bit as well, but I would say this: I think that I’m less concerned. I think there’s a category of person out there, and maybe this is right, that is focused on Republicans have better propaganda outlets than the Democrats do.

Demsas: Yeah.

Miller: And maybe that’s true. I don’t know. So to me, then the question is, okay, what can be done? What is realistic in this media environment? And it goes back to this question of, can the Democrats speak more through using existing outlets or finding a candidate who has a compelling story in their own right, or compelling communication skills to figure out how to speak to people that don’t watch mainstream news?

And that’s just really what it comes down to. The Democrats are very good at talking to people that are high-information, high-engagement, high-education, middle-to-high-income, and offering persuasive arguments. I think that they’re not good at talking to anybody else. And Obama was good at that, and Clinton was good at that. And we’re in a totally different media environment now than we were back then. But I think that there’s still things that can be learned from that.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break, why the abortion-ballot-measure strategy didn’t pan out for the Harris campaign.

[Break]

Demsas: I want to pull us out of this media conversation here, because I think that there’s also this, let’s say things go a little bit differently—and again, the margins here are not very big—and Harris has won.

I think one of the big things we’d be hearing right now is that she won because of abortion, right? And looking at Election Night, you see a lot of wins for abortion. There are 10 states that have referendums on abortion policies, and seven of them win: New York, Maryland, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Montana, Missouri. And in Florida, where it loses, the threshold is 60 percent and it earns 57 percent, so it lost, but there’s clearly a majority in favor.

And, going in, I mean, especially after the midterms, there was a real feeling, kind of the big narrative that came out of those midterms was that abortion is the place where Democrats can clearly distinguish and can clearly win over Republican candidates, even in deeply Republican states, and especially in deeply purple states.

And I’m trying to think through this. What explains in your mind the sort of difference between how many voters were saying, Yes, I do have more liberal views on abortion; I’m willing to express those in these ballot measures; but no, I’m not going to then reward Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris for it?

Miller: Well, a couple of things. No. 1, this tension has always existed as old as time, and it’s particularly existed as old as time in places like Florida. I did one of these, you know, time is a flat circle—

Demsas: [Laughs.]

Miller: I forget which election it was at this point, but it was like, how did the minimum-wage-increase ballot initiative in Florida pass at the same time that Ron DeSantis won by 18 points or whatever, whichever election that was.

And it’s like, voters are complicated. Voters have complex views. And so you see this as kind of just a common thing in voter habits. In this case, I think that there are a couple of complicating factors in addition. No. 1 was, Donald Trump muddied the waters on his views.

Demsas: Yeah.

Miller: And I think that Donald Trump’s whole brand and vibe—I know we’re getting outside of the data space that you like to be in, Jerusalem, but there’s a certain group of people that are like, Yeah, that guy’s not gonna ban abortion. You know what I mean? And there’s just some percentage of voters out there that that’s just it. He doesn’t come off like Ted Cruz on abortion. He comes off as different, because they assume that he paid for an abortion or whatever, that he doesn’t care about it, and that he’s not gonna—this isn’t gonna be what he’s focused on. There are going to be people that are pro-choice that prioritize their economic views or their nativist views, right?

So that is going to be some of it. I think less so in Florida, but more in Arizona. To me, I think that there is actually a strategic backfiring of having these ballot initiatives on the ballot almost gave some people an out to do both, right? People that did not like Kamala Harris or that were more center-right and said, Oh, okay, great, I can protect abortion in Arizona and also vote for Donald Trump. I can have my cake and eat it, too.

Demsas: Yeah, I mean, I think my read of it is more that when you think about the specific argument being made about abortion, it was largely, he’s to blame for all these horrible things that are happening to women in states that have made abortion inaccessible. And by he, I mean Trump is to blame for that. And also, you know, he appointed these Supreme Court nominees who overturned Roe v. Wade. But as a prescription for the future, I feel like there was not a real clear argument made to voters of how Kamala Harris is going to actually protect abortion.

But again, it all comes back to the overarching question, did voters view this as an abortion election? And it seems clear that they viewed it as an inflation election. That was the core thing that they were focused on. And I think that one thing that I’ve heard a lot is what this means for understanding America, right?

So after 2016, people were just, I think, in shock, and were saying, I can’t believe this is the country I live in. And again here I’m hearing the sort of question of, you know, this is a black mark on the conscience of America, that people would vote for someone who threatened to overturn the results of the 2020 election, who talks with such liberal disdain for women and immigrants.

Something someone said to me in 2016 was really interesting: If your entire perception of America would have shifted if a few hundred thousand people voted differently, maybe don’t completely change everything you believe about everyone. And to me, I think that this framing about Trump’s reelection means something really dark about all the people that voted for him doesn’t really sit well with me because it seems like people are voting based on cost of living. At the same time, too, I think they’re taking their signal from Democrats who, if they’d taken their own warnings about the threat of fascism or the threat to our institutions, I think would have behaved very differently over the past couple of years in trying to win.

Miller: Yeah. It doesn’t change my view of the American people, really, that there are good people and bad people everywhere, that we all have good and bad inside of us. I’ll say that what it does impact for me—and maybe this is wrong and maybe I’m raw and it’s six days out—but for those of us who do have a belief that there’s something kind of special about the American system and that have revered America, that understand that America is flawed and has made mistakes but still is a unique experiment in the world. You know, the “America is an idea” type of thing.

The idea is pretty dim at this point. And, to me, that is the change, having him win again, that I’m having trouble getting over. Mentally, it’s not that it makes me look poorly at my neighbors, but that we just might be at the end of the experiment and the sense that America is something different than Hungary or Switzerland or whatever, any country—you name the country.

It was the old fight with Republicans and Democrats during the Obama years, which is, Obama doesn’t think of America as any different than Belgium. Obama believes in Belgian exceptionalism. And that to me is kind of where I am. I think that we’re about to move into an era where America’s flaws, in addition to all of our existing flaws like gun violence and our history of racism, et cetera—the American system’s flaws look a lot more like what flaws look like in other countries.

There’s going to be oligarchy, kleptocracy, corruption. There’s no special sense that the huddled masses around the world are welcome here any more than they might be welcome anywhere else. They frankly are probably going to be welcome here less than they’re welcome in certain other places.

And so to me, that is what I see differently. I reserve the right to change my mind about that at some point, but that’s where I’m at right now.

Demsas: Yeah. I think in contrast to this large view about the American idea of maybe being different than we believed beforehand is this, I think, really popular take that’s picking up steam, which is about just Democrats need to moderate on cultural issues, whether it’s about immigration, or it’s the issue of trans women and girls in sports. They’re just too left of the median voter, and you don’t actually need to do a bunch else other than accept that people are where they are on those places and not go so far away from it.

The data point that’s kind of in favor of this, particularly on the trans-girls-in-sports one, is Kamala Harris’s leading super PAC, Future Forward, finds that the most effective, or one of the most effective, Trump ads is one of the “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you” ads. They find that it shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Trump’s favor after people watched it.

How relevant do you think that the Democratic Party’s leftward shift on cultural issues is to Harris’s loss? And I mean, there’s some people who I think are really making the claim that you could just really focus on this and you don’t need to make these kind of larger arguments about strategy or how we’re speaking to America on economic policy.

Miller: I don’t think that this was alone to account for Harris’s loss or even maybe the biggest thing to account for her loss. I think that she didn’t really respond to that ad in particular quite well, and that maybe that was a strategic mistake. I think her campaign—and she didn’t run like an overly “woke,” culturally left campaign. Ao the question is, did the Democratic brand on those issues drag her down? I think possibly.

To me, look, could Kamala Harris have squeaked out a victory this time while holding the same positions on trans issues had inflation been 20 percent better? Maybe. Probably. It was a clear victory for Trump, but it wasn’t, you know, Reagan ’84.

A couple of things changed, and had that one, the cultural stuff stayed static, could she have still won? Clearly. I mean, Biden won in 2020, when all of those issues were more high-salience, I think, than they were this time. Biden, not a Black woman—so maybe there’s something to that as well, that he was able to be a little bit more resilient against attacks on those issues.

So maybe that’s worth thinking about. I would say this, though. If the Democrats want to have 60 senators again ever, then yeah, they got to moderate on cultural issues. You know what I mean? There are two ways to look at this: Can Democrats still win elections by maintaining their views on everything? Yes. Are the Democrats giving away huge swaths of the country by not really even engaging with their concerns about the leftward shift of the party on a wide array of issues? Yeah, they are. I get the land-doesn’t-vote thing, I get it, but look at the map.

Demsas: [Laughs.] We’ve all seen the map.

Miller: The map is still the map, you know what I mean?

And Trump gained in all of those little red counties out there where it’s just land, all right? But he gained. There are a handful of people out there, and he got more of them, in every county. And the Democrats’, I think, choice to just say, Well, we’re just giving up on that and we’re just going to focus on the more dynamic parts of the growing parts of the country and, eventually, demographics are destiny and blah, blah, blah, that looks like a pretty bad bet today.

I’m not out here being like, yeah, you got to throw trans people or migrants under the bus for them to win. But certainly the cultural leftward shift has created a ceiling on Democratic support that I think has a negative effect for the party, but also for progress on a lot of those issues.

Demsas: Yeah. I think it’s obviously very up in the air here, how people are gonna take this mantle of how you should moderate, and I think that there’s bad and good ways that people can take this. And I think that there’s a level to which people—you don’t have to be throwing trans people under the bus. Maybe we need to figure out ways, whether it’s how Democrats responded to this with gay rights, where they talked about federalism a lot and made sure the country moved toward the issue before making it a national issue.

But I think the most important and damning thing that Democrats are clearly responsible for in the choices they have made is about the poor governance in blue cities and states. This is one of my hobbyhorses, but you see massive shifts, as you mentioned, in high-cost-of-living places that are heavily democratic, in New York and in California and in a lot of the Northeast. And I think it’s hard to see that as anything other than just a repudiation of Democratic governance and particularly the cost of living and the cost of housing in these places.

And so, to me, when you talked about the Democratic brand, I mean, when you’re in a cost-of-living election, yes, there are marginal effects on these cultural issues we’re talking about here. Yes, there are things that campaigns can do better. Yes, there are candidate effects. But if people are asking themselves, What does it look like, how does it feel to my pocketbook to live in a Democratically run state versus a Republican one? I feel like they’re being told a very clear story.

Miller: I think that that’s true. I’ve been ruminating on this a lot over the past week. I live in Louisiana, so there is the kind of emotional guttural response I have to this, which is, do you think Louisiana is being governed that well? Because I don’t.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, on cost, though, right? It’s cheaper, obviously, to have a house in Louisiana.

Miller: It’s cheaper to have a house in Louisiana because of the economic destruction of the state over the past couple of decades and the fact that everybody that grows up in parts of the state that’s not this corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge leave home. And a lot of people in these places leave home, too, looking for better economic opportunities. And that’s sad for the state.

That is my initial response, which is emotional, which is like, okay, sure. But why does Kamala Harris have to carry the baggage for the place I used to live—Oakland—but Donald Trump doesn’t have to carry the baggage for the hollowing out of big parts of Louisiana? That said, it’s true that it hurt the Democrats, right? And it’s also true that the Democrats have been badly managing these big cities. And if you just look at the numbers, suburban Democrats—and this could be a counterargument. Now, I’m going to really give you a galaxy brain, Jerusalem, to your original data point earlier that the three-point effect in the battleground states versus national speaks to a campaign effect? Maybe.

Maybe it also speaks to the fact that a lot of these battleground states are made up of places that have mixed governance and big suburbs where the Democrats are doing better. Democrats are doing better in suburban America because they know they’re not feeling the acute pain of governing issues that have plagued a lot of the big cities. And surely there are a couple of big cities in those seven swing states, but none of the ones you think of when you think of major disruptions, and that maybe that explains it and that the Republican gains were in a lot more of those places like that, Illinois, New Jersey, California. Anyway, just something to noodle on.

But I think that it is objectively true that Democrats are doing better in places that have not been plagued by some of these bad governing decisions on crime and on housing that we’ve seen for in Democratic cities, and the Democratic mayors and Democratic governors in blue states should fix that.

And it’s the No. 1 thing—the last thing I’ll say on this is—the No. 1 thing that comes to mind when I already hear stupid parlor-game stuff about 2028 and it’s like Gavin Newsom and J. B. Pritzker. And to me, the No. 1 thing Gavin Newsom and J. B. Pritzker need to do if they want to run in 2027 is make Illinois and California run better in the meantime. Otherwise, nothing against either of those two guys, but I think that they’re going to carry this baggage that you’re talking about.

Demsas: Well, I could go on about housing in blue states forever. And there’s an article popping, I think today, listeners, as you’re hearing about this, about why I think this was a big issue for the election.

But Tim, always our last and final question.

Miller: Okay.

Miller: What is something that you once thought was a good idea but ended up only being good on paper?

Miller: Oh, okay. Hold on. I wasn’t prepared for this. I misread the question. I thought it was an idea that was only good on paper that then ended up being not good on paper.

Demsas: Idea could be good.

Miller: No, no, no. I’ll come up with one where I’m wrong. I’m happy to bet where I’m wrong. I was just saying the ideas are endless on those.

Demsas: Oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something that you held, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Miller: An idea that I thought that was good on paper that ended up not being good on paper. Well, I guess I have to give the obvious answer to that question, sadly. I don’t get to rant about daylight savings time as I hoped to—an idea that was certainly good on paper in the 1800s or whenever they came up with it that’s no longer good. Falling back, that is. Permanent daylight saving time: good idea.

Changing times: not good.

Demsas: Four hundred electoral votes for whoever does this.

Miller: Yeah. The idea that I thought that was good on paper that is relevant to this podcast—because I literally put it on paper and wrote it—was the aforementioned 2013 GOP autopsy.

Demsas: Oh, yeah.

Miller: Well, how great! Compassionate conservatism. Republicans can diversify their party by getting softer on cultural issues and reaching out to the suburbs and reaching out to Hispanic voters and Black voters, criminal-justice reform, and that through criminal-justice reform and immigration reform and softening on gays, that Republicans can have a new, diverse electorate, and we can all move into a happy, bipartisan future.

That was a great idea on paper that backfired spectacularly, and now the Republicans have their most diverse electorate that they’ve had ever, I think, voting for Donald Trump after rejecting all of those suggestions that I put on paper. So there you go.

Demsas: As one vote of confidence for younger Tim, there are very many ways that history could have gone. I think that people often forget how contingent things are and how unique of a figure Trump is. And right now we’ve talked through a bunch of different ways that people are reading this moment, but there are a lot of ways that people can go, depending on what candidates do and say and how they catch fire and their charisma and what ends up being relevant in two years and in four years. So a little bit of sympathy for younger Tim.

Miller: I appreciate that. And that is true. Who the hell knows, right?

Demsas: Yeah, exactly.

Miller: Had Donald Trump not run that time and he decided he wanted to do some other scam instead, then maybe Marco Rubio is the nominee and those things do come to pass.

Demsas: [Laughs.] Yeah. If Obama doesn’t make fun of him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, we’re not even sitting here on this podcast.

Miller: Great job, Jon Lovett, or whoever wrote that joke.

Demsas: [Laughs.]

Miller: I’m just joking.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Tim. Thanks for coming on the show.

Miller: Thank you, Jerusalem.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.