The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books

To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school, Rose Horowitch wrote in the November 2024 issue.

I’m an English teacher at a private college-preparatory school, and much of “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” sounded familiar. My students, too, now struggle to read long texts. Unaddressed in this apt article, though, are changes to the broader high-school context in which reading for homework now occurs. Today, students with elite college aspirations have extracurricular schedules that demand as much—if not more—time than school itself. These commitments are necessary, in their eyes, to gain admission to selective institutions. As a result, teachers face considerable pressure from not only students but also parents and school administrators to limit homework time—no matter if the assignment is a calculus problem set or Pride and Prejudice. In combination with considerably slower rates of reading and diminished reading comprehension, curtailed homework time means that an English teacher might not be able to assign more than 10 to 15 pages of relatively easy prose per class meeting, a rate so excruciatingly slow, it diminishes one’s ability to actually grasp a novel’s meaning and structure. I see how anxious and drained my students are, but I think it’s important for them to experience what can grow from immersive reading and sustained written thought. If we want students to read books, we have to be willing to prioritize the time for them to do so.

Anna Clark
San Diego, Calif.

As a professor, I agree with my colleagues who have noticed the declining literacy of American students at elite universities.

However, I am not sure if the schools are entirely to blame. In American universities, selection is carried out by admissions offices with little interest in the qualities that faculty might consider desirable in a college student. If faculty members were polled—something that has never happened to me in my 20-year career—I’m sure we would rank interest and experience in reading books quite highly.

Admissions decisions in the United States are based on some qualities that, however admirable, have little or nothing to do with academic aptitude. In contrast, at Oxford and Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, undergraduate admissions are typically conducted by the same academics who will teach those students. Most personal statements primarily consist of a discussion of which books the student has read and what they learned from them. Students are then expected to discuss these books in more detail in an interview. When considered alongside the undergraduate selection process, the decline in literacy among American undergraduates is totally understandable.

Ione Fine
Psychology Professor, University of Washington
Seattle, Wash.

Having taught English in a public school for 32 years, I am not surprised that colleges and universities are discovering that incoming students lack the skill, focus, and endurance to read novels. Throughout my career, primarily teaching ninth graders, I fostered student readership not by assigning novels for the whole class to read, but rather by allowing students to select young-adult books that they would read independently in class. Thousands of lifelong readers were created as a result.

Ten years ago, however, my district administration told me that I could no longer use class time for independent student reading. Instead, I was to focus on teaching skills and content that the district believed would improve standardized-test scores. Ironically, research showed that the students who read more books scored significantly better than their classmates on standardized reading tests.

I knew that many students were unlikely to read at home. So I doubled down: I found time for students to read during the school day and repurposed class time to allow my students to share their ideas; to question, respond, and react along with their peers. The method was so successful that the district adopted my approach for seventh through ninth grade, and I published a university-level textbook preparing teachers to create similar communities of readers in their own classrooms.

Whole-class novels just aren’t working: Some students will always be uninterested in a teacher’s choice, and perceive the classics as irrelevant and difficult to comprehend. But allowing students to select their books can help them fall in love with reading.

Michael Anthony
Reading, Pa.

I am an educator of 16 years living in New Hampshire. “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” reflects a lot of what I’ve seen recently. But a large piece of the puzzle is public-school budgets. A major reason novels have been removed from curricula is money: Many districts cannot afford to purchase a book for every student, especially in the upper grades. Typically, districts will buy a “class set” of novels, about 20 to 30 books—that’s it. The books must be used during the English blocks for instruction and reading time. There are not enough books for students to take home and read; if they are reading them only in their class block, a novel will take months and months to finish. I knew of one district that would have teachers make copies of entire novels to share with their students; they’d take turns on copy duty to pull it off. I wish I could teach more complete novels, because students love it. But districts need budgets large enough to buy books for everyone.

Meaghan Kelly
Rumney, N.H.

When teaching my college history courses, I have polled my students to see how many have ever read a book cover to cover. Sometimes, only a few students would raise their hand.

I inquired because I always gave them the option to read a book instead of writing a 10-page research paper. They then would have a one-on-one, hour-long discussion with me about the book they’d selected. Students who chose that option generally had a good experience. But one student shines bright in my mind. In truth, I didn’t remember him well—but he stopped me at an alumni function to say thank you. He had taken my class the second semester of his senior year to fill an elective, and he had chosen to read David McCullough’s 1776. He’d devoured the book—and he’d loved our discussion. He told me that the assignment had changed his life: Up to that point, he had never read a whole book. Since that class, he has read two or three books a month, and now has hundreds of books in his own library. He assured me that he would be a reader for the rest of his life.

It was one of the most gratifying moments of my career. I hope more teachers, professors, and parents give their students a chance to learn what this student did—that books are one of the great joys in life.

Scott Salvato
Mooresville, N.C.

Rose Horowitch replies:

Anna Clark’s letter builds on an idea that I hoped to convey in the article: that the shift away from reading full books is about more than individual students, teachers, or schools. Much of the change can be understood as the consequence of a change in values. The professors I spoke with didn’t think their students were lazy; if anything, they said they were overscheduled and frazzled like never before, facing immense pressure to devote their time to activities that will further their career. Under these circumstances, it can be difficult to see how reading The Iliad in its entirety is a good use of time. Acknowledging this reality can be disheartening, because the solution will not be as simple as changing curricula at the college, high-school, or middle-school level. (And as several of these letters note, changing curricula isn’t all that straightforward.) But letters like Scott Salvato’s are a hopeful reminder of the power of a good—full—book to inspire a student to become a lifelong reader.

The Atlantic Behind the Cover

In this month’s cover story, “How the Ivy League Broke America,” David Brooks describes the failure of the United States’ meritocracy, created in part by James Conant, the influential president of Harvard from 1933 to 1953. Conant and like-minded reformers had hoped to overturn America’s “hereditary aristocracy of wealth”; instead, they helped create a new ruling class—the so-called cognitive elite, selected and credentialed by the nation’s top universities. For our cover image, the artist Danielle Del Plato placed the story’s headline on pennants she created for each of the eight Ivy League schools, which have been instrumental in shaping and perpetuating America’s meritocracy.

— Paul Spella, Senior Art Director

Corrections

Due to an editing error, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” (November) misstated the year Nicholas Dames started teaching Literature Humanities. He began teaching the course in 1998, not 1988. “What Zoya Sees” (November) misstated where in Nigeria Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi and her husband, Sunny, have a home. Their home is in Ngwo, not Igwo.

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “The Commons.”

In what will probably be the warmest year in recorded history, in a month in which all but two U.S. states are in a drought, and on a day when yet another hurricane was forming in the Caribbean, Donald Trump, a climate denier with a thirst for oil drilling, won the American presidency for a second time. And today, delegates from around the world will begin this year’s global UN climate talks, in Baku, Azerbaijan. This UN Conference of Parties (COP) is meant to decide how much money wealthy, high-emitting nations should channel toward the poorer countries that didn’t cause the warming in the first place, but the Americans—representing the country that currently has the second-highest emissions and is by far the highest historical emitter—now can make no promises that anyone should believe they would keep.

“We know perfectly well [Trump] won’t give another penny to climate finance, and that will neutralize whatever is agreed,” Joanna Depledge, a fellow at the University of Cambridge and an expert on international climate negotiations, told me. Without about a trillion dollars a year in assistance, developing nations’ green transitions will not happen fast enough to prevent catastrophic global warming. But wealthy donor countries are more likely to contribute if others do, and if the U.S. isn’t paying in, other large emitters have cover to weaken their own climate-finance commitments.

In an ironic twist for a president-elect who likes to villainize China, Trump may be handing that nation a golden opportunity. China has, historically, worked to block ambitious climate deals, but whoever manages to sort out the question of global climate finance will be lauded as a hero. With the U.S. stepping out of a climate-leadership role, China has the chance—and a few good reasons—to step in and assume it.

The spotlight in Baku will now be on China as the world’s biggest emitter, whether the country likes it or not, Li Shuo, a director at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said in a press call. The Biden administration did manage to nudge China to be more ambitious in some of its climate goals, leading, for example, to a pledge to reduce methane emissions. But the Trump administration will likely shelve ongoing U.S.-China climate conversations and remove, for a second time, the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, which requires participants to commit to specific emissions-reduction goals. Last time around, Trump’s withdrawal made China look good by comparison, without the country necessarily needing to change course or account for its obvious problem areas, like its expanding coal industry. The same will likely happen again, Alex Wang, a law professor at UCLA and an expert on U.S.-China relations, told me.

China is, after all, the leading producer and installer of green energy, but green energy alone is not enough to avoid perilous levels of warming. China likes to emphasize that it’s categorized as a developing country at these gatherings, and has fought deals that would require it to limit emissions or fork over cash, and by extension, limit its growth. But with the U.S. poised to do nothing constructive, China’s position on climate looks rosy in comparison.

[Read: A tiny petrostate is running the world’s climate talks]

By cutting off its contributions to international climate finance, the U.S. also will give China more room to expand its influence through “green soft power.” China has spent the past five years or so focused on the construction of green infrastructure in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, Wang said. Tong Zhao, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Reuters that China expects to be able to “expand its influence in emerging power vacuums” under a second Trump term. Under Biden, the U.S. was attempting to compete in the green-soft-power arena by setting up programs to help clean-energy transitions in Indonesia or Vietnam, Wang noted. “But now I suspect that those federal efforts will be eliminated.”

[Read: Why Xi wants Trump to win]

Most experts now view the global turn toward solar and other clean energy as self-propelled and inevitable. When Trump first entered office, solar panels and electric vehicles were not hot topics. “Eight years later, it is absolutely clear that China dominates in those areas,” Wang said. China used the first Trump administration to become the biggest clean-tech supplier in the world, by far. The Biden administration tried to catch up in climate tech, primarily through the Inflation Reduction Act, but even now, Shuo told me, Chinese leaders do not see the U.S. as a clean-tech competitor. “They have not seen the first U.S.-made EV or solar panel installed in Indonesia, right?” he said. “And of course, the U.S. lagging behind might be exacerbated by the Trump administration,” which has promised to repeal the IRA, leaving potentially $80 billion of would-be clean-tech business for other countries—but most prominently China—to scoop up. In all international climate arenas, the U.S. is poised to mostly hurt itself.  

[Read: How Trump's America will lose the climate race]

More practically, Baku could give China a chance to negotiate favorable trade deals with the EU, which has just started to impose new carbon-based border tariffs. But none of this guarantees that China will decide to take a decisive role in negotiating a strong climate-finance deal. Climate finance is what could keep the world from tipping into darker and wholly avoidable climate scenarios. But news of Trump’s election is likely to lend COP the air of a collective hangover. EU countries will surely assume a strong leadership posture in the talks, but they don’t have the fiscal or political might to fill the hole the U.S. will leave behind. Without surprise commitments from China and other historically begrudgingly cooperative countries, COP could simply fail to deliver a finance deal, or, more likely, turn out a miserably weak one.

The global climate community has been here before, though. The U.S. has a pattern of obstructing the climate negotiations. In 1992, the Rio Treaty was made entirely voluntary at the insistence of President George H. W. Bush. In 1997, the Clinton-Gore administration had no strategy to get the Kyoto Protocol ratified in the Senate; the U.S. has still never ratified it.

But although President George W. Bush’s administration declared Kyoto dead, it in fact laid the groundwork for the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement survived the first Trump term and will survive another, Tina Stege, the climate envoy for the Marshall Islands, told me. The last time Trump was elected, the EU, China, and Canada put out a joint negotiating platform to carry on climate discussions without the United States. That largely came to nothing, but the coalition will now have a second chance. And overemphasizing U.S. politics, Stege said, ignores that countries like hers are pressing on with diplomatic agreements that will determine their territories' survival.

Nor is the U.S. defined only by its federal government. Subnationally, a number of organizations cropped up in the U.S. during Trump’s first administration to mobilize governors, mayors, and CEOs to step in on climate diplomacy. These include the U.S. Climate Alliance (a bipartisan coalition of  24 governors) and America Is All In: a coalition of 5,000 mayors, college presidents, health-care executives, and faith leaders, co-chaired by Washington State Governor Jay Inslee and former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, among other climate heavy hitters. This time, they won’t be starting from scratch in convincing the rest of the world that at least parts of the U.S. are still committed to fighting climate change.

When delegates of the world gather in Baku, Azerbaijan, next week for the most important yearly meeting on climate change, their meetings will overlook a reeking lake, polluted by the oil fields on the other side. This city’s first oil reservoir was built on the lake’s shores in the 19th century; now nearly half of Azerbaijan’s GDP and more than 90 percent of its export revenue come from oil and gas. It is, in no uncertain terms, a petrostate.

Last year, too, the UN Conference of Parties (COP) meeting was a parade of oil-state wealth and interests. Held in the United Arab Emirates, the conference included thousands of oil and gas lobbyists; its president was an executive of the UAE’s national oil company. Baku’s COP president, Azerbaijan’s ecology and natural-resources minister, is also an ex-executive of its oil company.

Optimistically, handing influence over this conference to the UAE, and now Azerbaijan—states whose interests are, in many ways, opposed to its aim—means that leaders who depend on fossil fuels must face the costs of burning them. As host this year, Azerbaijan’s job will be to broker an agreement that secures billions—possibly trillions—of dollars from wealthy countries to help along the green transition in poorer countries. Developing nations need these funds to set ambitious climate goals, the next round of which are due in February 2025. A failed COP could set off a chain reaction of failure. The world is gambling that a country that’s shown a bare minimum of commitment to this entire process can keep us all on a path to staving off catastrophic warming.

Baku came to host COP by process of elimination. Hosting duties rotate among regions of the world; this year is Eastern Europe’s turn. Russia nixed the possibility of any European Union country, leaving only Armenia and Azerbaijan standing. Armenia retracted its bid after Azerbaijan agreed to release 32 Armenian service members from prison. (Armenia freed two Azerbaijani soldiers in exchange.)

In many ways, Azerbaijan is an extremely unlikely candidate. Joanna Depledge, a fellow at the University of Cambridge and an expert on international climate negotiations, has followed all 29 years of COP so far, and told me that Azerbaijan has “been pretty much off the radar since the beginning.” The country has hardly ever spoken during previous negotiations, and is not part of any of COP’s major political coalitions, she said. The Paris Agreement requires that, every five years, each country must lay out how it will reduce emissions in a Nationally Determined Contribution plan; Azerbaijan is “one of the very few countries whose second NDC was weaker than the first,” Depledge said. To Steve Pye, an energy-systems professor at University College London, having a petrostate host a climate meeting presents an unambiguous conflict of interest. The country has been clear that it’s looking to ramp up gas exports and has made “no indication” that it wants to move away from fossil-fuel dependency, he told me. That’s an awkward, even bizarre, stance for the entity in charge of facilitating delicate climate diplomacy to hold.

Still, in some ways, Azerbaijan “could be seen as an honest broker” in the finance negotiations, because it is neither a traditional donor country nor a recipient of the funds under negotiation, Depledge said. Azerbaijan, for its part, says it intends to “enable action” to deliver “deep, rapid and sustained emission reductions … while leaving no one behind.”

The whole point of COP is to bring diverse countries together, Depledge said; global climate diplomacy cannot move forward without petrostates on board. Last year’s COP, in Dubai, resulted in the first global agreement to transition away from fossil fuels, and was seen as a modest success. To run COP, Azerbaijan will be forced to reckon with global climate change directly; its team will have to listen to everyone, including the countries most ravaged by climate change today. That’s bound to have an impact, Depledge thinks. Ultimately, Azerbaijan will also need to adapt to a post-oil economy: The World Bank estimates that the country’s oil reserves will dwindle by mid-century. And, since being chosen to host, it has joined a major international pledge to limit methane emissions, as well as announced that its third NDC (unlike its previous one) will be aligned with the Paris Agreement’s goals—although it has yet to unveil the actual plan.  

COP also gives Azerbaijan a chance to burnish its image. After Armenia withdrew its hosting bid, Azerbaijan branded this a “peace COP,” proposing a worldwide cease-fire for the days before, during, and after the meeting. An army of bots have been deployed on X to praise Azerbaijan just ahead of the talks, The Washington Post reported. Ronald Grigor Suny, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Michigan who has written extensively about Azerbaijan, told me that he views the country’s hosting exercise as an elaborate propaganda campaign to sanitize the image of a fundamentally authoritarian and oil-committed nation—a place that last year conducted what many legal and human-rights scholars considered an ethnic-cleansing campaign in one of its Armenian enclaves. “This is a staging of an event to impress people by the normality, the acceptability, the modernity of this little state,” he said. But hope for any peace-related initiatives, including a peace deal with Armenia, is already dwindling. Climate and geopolitical experts have called the whole thing a cynical PR stunt, and Amnesty International reports that the country, which Azerbaijani human-rights defenders estimate holds hundreds of academics and activists in prison, has jailed more of its critics since the COP presidency was announced.

Azerbaijan will still need to broker a real climate deal by the end of the event for it to be declared a success. Failure would be deeply embarrassing and, more pressingly, dangerous for the planet. The world is on track for up to 3.1 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100, and total carbon-dioxide emissions in 2030 will be only 2.6 percent lower than in 2019 if countries’ current NDCs are followed, according to new analysis. Keeping to a 1.5 degree Celsius warming limit would require a lowering of 43 percent over the same time period, which many scientists now say is out of reach. Keeping warming below the far more catastrophic 2 degree limit now will take far faster and more decisive action than the slow COP process has historically produced.

Even if this COP ends in success, Pye, who has worked on the UN Environment Program’s Production Gap Report, notes that, without follow-through, what happens at the conference is merely lip service. Once the spotlight of COP was off it, the UAE, for instance, returned more or less to business as usual; this year, the state oil company increased its production capacity. Then again, the UAE is investing heavily in clean energy, too, following a maximalist approach of more of everything—much like the theory that President Joe Biden has followed in the United States, which recently became the world’s biggest oil producer and gas exporter even as Biden’s domestic policies, most notably the Inflation Reduction Act, have pushed the country toward key climate goals.

Perhaps more than Baku’s leadership, the outcomes of the U.S. election will set the tone for the upcoming COP. News of a second Trump presidency would likely neutralize any hope for a strong climate finance agreement in Baku. In 2016, news of Trump’s election arrived while that year’s COP was under way in Marrakech, to withering effect. America’s functional absence from climate negotiations marred proceedings for four years. Wherever COP is held, American willingness to negotiate in good faith has the power to make or break the climate deals. Put another way, it’s still possible to save the world, if we want to.   

Everything about the staging of Kamala Harris’s “closing argument” rally Wednesday night on the White House Ellipse seemed designed to frame the upcoming election as a referendum on democracy. Flanked by American flags and surrounded by banners that screamed FREEDOM, the Democratic nominee delivered her speech against the same backdrop that Donald Trump used on January 6 when he addressed the crowd that went on to storm the Capitol.

“So look,” Harris said about halfway through her speech. “In less than 90 days, either Donald Trump or I will be in the Oval Office …”

Scattered shouts of You will! You will! echoed from the audience near the stage. In my conversations with Harris supporters afterward, their confidence seemed authentic. To a person, everyone I talked with believed they were on the verge of victory—that Harris would defeat the “wannabe dictator” once and for all, pull America back from the brink, and save the world’s oldest democracy from descending into facism.

Then I would ask a question they found dispiriting: What if she doesn’t?

It’s a question that’s been on my mind for months. We are in a strange and precarious political moment as a country: With four days left in one of the closest presidential races in history, supporters of both campaigns seem convinced that they are going to win—and that if they don’t, the consequences for America will be existential.

Trump and his allies have already clearly signaled what they will do if he loses: Claim victory anyway, declare the election rigged, and engage in another conspiracy to overturn the result, whether by litigation, extra-Constitutional arm-twisting, or even violence. The pressure campaign is unlikely to work; as Paul Rosenzweig noted in The Atlantic, none of the officials overseeing vote tabulation in battleground states is a partisan election denier. Still, this full-frontal assault on the validity of the election represents an ongoing threat.

If Harris loses, the response from her coalition would almost certainly be less dramatic and damaging; unlike Trump, she has committed to accepting the result. But as the election nears and panic over Trump’s authoritarian impulses reaches a fever pitch in certain quarters, I’ve begun to worry that prophecies of democratic breakdown following a Trump reelection could become self-fulfilling. What happens to America if Harris voters have fully internalized the idea that democracy is on the ballot, and then “democracy” loses?

In 2016, Trump’s surprise victory was met with a groundswell of small-d democratic energy. There were marches in the streets, and record-breaking donations to the ACLU, and waves of grassroots organizing. Subscriptions surged at newspapers committed to holding the new administration to account; books about combating tyranny became best sellers. The energy wasn’t contained to the liberal “resistance” movement. Conservative expats launched their own political groups and publications. As my colleague Franklin Foer recently wrote, the warnings of impending autocracy in America at the time “helped propel a spirit of loud, uncompromising opposition to Trump.”

That energy contributed to record-high turnout in the 2020 election, when Trump was defeated. To many people outside the MAGA coalition, Joe Biden’s victory represented a triumphant climax in the narrative of the Trump era. And had the one-term, twice-impeached president simply receded into a Mar-a-Lago exile, the story might have ended with a tidy civic moral: An aspiring authoritarian was vanquished in the most American way possible—at the ballot box. Democracy wins again.

But of course the story didn’t end there. And the fact that, four years later, Trump is within a coin flip of returning to the Oval Office has created some dissonance in liberal America. Trump has, in his third campaign, been more explicit than ever about his illiberal designs. He has talked about weaponizing the Justice Department against his political enemies, replacing thousands of civil servants with loyalists, and revoking broadcast licenses for TV networks whose news coverage he doesn’t like.

Democrats have sought to warn voters about the threat that these actions would pose to democracy—sometimes dialing up the rhetoric in an effort to wake Americans to the peril. But the messaging seems to have had an unfortunate dual effect, deeply stressing out voters already inclined to believe it while largely failing to resonate with the undecided and politically disengaged. Last week, The New York Times reported on a memo circulated by the leading pro-Harris super PAC warning Democrats that persuadable voters weren’t being moved by messages that focused on the former president’s authoritarianism. “Attacking Trump’s fascism is not that persuasive,” the email read. Compared with 2020, fewer Americans are telling pollsters that they are highly motivated to vote, or that this is the most important election of their lifetime.

Within a certain segment of Harris’s base, though, the struggle against autocracy remains very much top of mind. And if you spend too much time online monitoring the discourse, as I do, you might come away with the impression that, for many, Election Day will be the decisive moment in the battle for American democracy. Some liberals are even making plans to leave the country if Trump wins. Biden’s son Hunter recently told Politico he was worried that Trump’s reelection would mean “losing our democracy to a fascist minority” and warned that a second Trump term “is potentially the end of America as we’ve known it.”

I’ve heard similar sentiments from my most anxious Harris-voting friends and family members. And I’ve wondered whether another Trump victory would spur in them the same spirit of post-2016 activism or send them spiraling into fatalism and disengagement.

On Wednesday night, Harris was careful in her speech not to wallow too much in the doom and gloom of an imperiled democracy. But she did take aim at her opponent’s illiberalism. She said that Trump was “out for unchecked power” and warned that if elected, he would enter the Oval Office with an “enemies list.” She alluded to the country’s birth in revolt against a “petty tyrant,” and described Americans who have fought over centuries to defend and promote democracy around the world. “They did not struggle, sacrifice, and lay down their lives only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms, only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant,” Harris declared to cheers.

In my conversations after the speech, many supporters, teary-eyed and high on adrenaline as Beyoncé’s “Freedom” still blared from the speakers, were understandably loath to talk about what they’ll do next week if their candidate loses. But they politely indulged me.

Alyssa VanLeeuwen, a mom from Maryland who brought her eighth-grade daughter to the rally, emitted a guttural agghh when I posed the question to her. “Democracy is absolutely on the line,” she told me. A Trump victory, she said, would mean a bleak and uncertain future for her daughter. “I’m scared. I’m terrified if that happens.”

When I asked her if she thought that fear would translate to disillusionment or activism, she paused to give it thought. “I think,” she said, “everybody’s going to go to battle again to try to fight for their neighbors.”

I spoke with another Harris supporter who asked me not to use her name (“My family could be targeted”). She, too, called the prospect of Trump’s reelection “terrifying.” She said that Trump would herald “the return of McCarthyism” as he used federal power to root out and punish his political enemies, and went on to lay out in vivid detail the various worst-case scenarios of a second Trump term. But when I asked her whether she thought American democracy itself might be destroyed, she said no. “We have 300 million people in this country,” she told me, “and I don’t think we would allow that.”

This attitude was shared by almost everyone I spoke with that night on the Ellipse. Some of them told me about friends, glued to cable news and doomscrolling on their phones, who might tend toward fatalism if Trump wins again. But the people I met—the kind who travel long distances and wait outside in the cold for hours to attend political rallies—were not thinking of Election Day as a singular make-or-break moment. They seemed to know that, no matter who wins, America will still be a democracy next week, and the week after that. Its preservation depends, in part, on not pegging its fate to the outcome of any one election.

Before leaving the Ellipse, I met Salome Agbaroji, a 19-year-old Harvard student who had traveled from Cambridge to see Harris speak. As a poet, she spends a lot of time thinking about the language that shapes our politics, and she told me she resents what she considers hyperbolic rhetoric in the media about the end of democracy. A professor had recently taught her the root of the Greek word for democracy—demos, meaning “people,” and kratia, meaning “rule.” The power of the people doesn’t disappear overnight just because the White House is occupied by an illiberal leader.

“I don’t think democracy lives in an institution,” Agbaroji told me. “Democracy lives in the people.” As long as people hold on to “that spirit, it will be hard to kill.”