For museums and their public, Impressionism is the Goldilocks movement: not too old or too new, not too challenging or too sappy; just right. Renaissance art may baffle with arcane religious symbolism, contemporary art may baffle on purpose, but put people in a gallery with Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Camille Pissarro, and explanatory wall texts feel superfluous. Eyes roam contentedly over canvases suffused with light, vibrant with gesture, and alive with affable people doing pleasant things. What’s not to love?

Famously, of course, Impressionism was not greeted with love at the outset. In 1874, the first Impressionist exhibition was derided in the press as a “vexatious mystification for the public, or the result of mental derangement.” A reviewer called Paul Cézanne “a sort of madman, painting in a state of delirium tremens,” while Berthe Morisot was privately advised by her former teacher to “go to the Louvre twice a week, stand before Correggio for three hours, and ask his forgiveness.” The very term Impressionism was born as a diss, a mocking allusion to Monet’s shaggy, atmospheric painting of the Le Havre waterfront, Impression, Sunrise (1872). Few people saw affability: In 1874, the term commonly applied to Monet and his ilk was “intransigent.”

Impressionism’s rom-com arc from spirited rejection to public rapture informs our fondness for the pictures (plucky little underdogs), and has also provided a lasting model for avant-gardism as a mechanism of cultural change. We now take it for granted that young mavericks should team up to foment new ways of seeing that offend the establishment before being vindicated by soaring auction prices and long museum queues. For most of history, however, that wasn’t the way things worked. Thus the 1874 exhibition has acquired legendary status as the origin point of self-consciously modern art.

Its 150th anniversary this year has been celebrated with numerous exhibitions, most notably “Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment,” organized by the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris, and the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C. (where it is on view until January 19, 2025). Given the masterpieces that these museums could choose from, this might have been an easygoing lovefest, but the curators—Sylvie Patry and Anne Robbins in Paris, and Mary Morton and Kimberly A. Jones in Washington—have delivered something far more intriguing and valuable: a chance to see what these artists were being intransigent about, and to survey the unexpected turns that art and politics may take in a polarized, traumatized time and place.

Nineteenth-century French history was messy—all those republics, empires, and monarchies tumbling one after the other—but it contains a crucial backstory to Impressionism, often overlooked. In the 1860s, France was the preeminent military and cultural power on the continent. Paris was feted as the most sophisticated, most modern, most beautiful of cities, and the Paris Salon was the most important art exhibition on the planet. Then, in 1870, some fatuous chest bumping between Emperor Napoleon III (nephew of the original) and Otto von Bismarck set off an unimagined catastrophe: By the spring of 1871, mighty France had been vanquished by upstart Prussia, its emperor deposed, its sublime capital bombed and besieged for months. When France sued for peace, Paris rebelled and established its own new socialist-anarchist government, the Commune. In May 1871, the French army moved in to crush the Commune, and the ensuing week of urban warfare killed tens of thousands. In the nine months between the start of the siege in September and the destruction of the Commune in May, perhaps as many as 90,000 Parisians died of starvation and violence.

These events and their impact on French painters are detailed in the art critic Sebastian Smee’s absorbing new book, Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism. His main focus is on the star-crossed not-quite-lovers Morisot and Édouard Manet, but nobody in this tale escaped unscathed. Morisot was in the city through the bombardment, the famine, and the street fighting; Manet and Degas volunteered for the National Guard; Pierre-Auguste Renoir served in the cavalry. Some of their most promising peers were killed. Everyone saw ghastly things.

[From the April 1892 issue: Some notes on French Impressionism]

And yet nothing about Degas’ ballerinas practicing their tendus or Renoir’s frothy scene of sophisticates out on the town suggests recent experience with terror, starvation, or climbing over dead bodies in the street, though they were painted when those events were still fresh. The Boulevard des Capucines, where the first Impressionist show took place, had been the site of “atrocious violence” in 1871, Smee tells us, but in 1874, Monet’s painting of the street is limpid with light and bustling with top hats and hansom cabs. If most fans of Impressionism remain unaware of its intimacy with the horrors of what Victor Hugo dubbed “l’année terrible,” it’s because the Impressionists did not picture them.

Like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s unbarking dog, this suggests an absence in search of a story, and indeed, “Paris 1874” ultimately leaves one with a sense of why they chose to turn away, and how that choice helped set a new course for art. The standard version of Impressionism—the one most people will come through the door with—has, however, always emphasized a different conflict: the David-versus-Goliath contest between the young Impressionists and the illustrious Salon.

With more than 3,000 works displayed cheek by jowl, the 1874 Salon was nearly 20 times the size of the first Impressionist show, and attracted an audience of about half a million—aristocrats, members of the bourgeoisie, workers with families in tow. (Of the latter, one journalist sniffed: “If he could, he would even bring his dog or his cat.”) Presided over by the nation’s Académie des Beaux-Arts, an institution whose pedigree went back to Louis XIV, the Salon was allied with the state and had a vested interest in preserving the status quo. The Impressionists, wanting to preside over themselves, had founded their own organization—the Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, etc.—with a charter they adapted from the bakers’ union in Pissarro’s hometown.

“Paris 1874” is built from these two shows. With a handful of exceptions (mainly documentary photographs of the shattered city), the art on the walls in Washington now was on the walls in Paris then. (Identifying the relevant works to select from was no small achievement, given the 19th-century catalogs’ lack of images or measurements, and their penchant for unhelpful titles like Portrait.) Labels indicate which exhibition each artwork appeared in, beginning with the Salon’s medal-of-honor winner, Jean-Léon Gérôme’s L’Éminence Grise (1873), alongside Monet’s celebrated and pilloried Impression, Sunrise.

L’Éminence Grise (1873), Jean-Léon Gérôme (© 2024 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

The two paintings might be mascots for the opposing teams. Impeccably executed, the Gérôme is an umbrous scene in which Cardinal Richelieu’s right-hand monk, François Leclerc du Tremblay, descends a staircase as the high and mighty doff their caps. The fall of light is dramatic and convincing, the dispatch of color deft, the actors choreographed and costumed to carry you through the action. Every satin ribbon, every curl of Baroque metalwork seems palpable.

Beside it, the Monet looks loose and a bit jangly. The muted gray harbor flits between solidity and dissolution. The orange blob of a sun and its shredded reflection are called into being with an almost militant economy of means. And somehow, the painting glows as if light were passing through the canvas to land at our feet. The Gérôme is a perfect portal into another world. But the Monet is a world. More than just displaying different styles, the pictures embody divergent notions of what art could and should do.

Impression, Sunrise (1872), Claude Monet (© Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris / Studio Christian Baraja SLB)

For 200 years, the Académie had defined and defended visual art—both its manual skill set (perspective, anatomy, composition) and its intellectual status as a branch of rhetoric, conveying moral ideals and building better citizens. (L’Éminence Grise is, among other things, an engaging lesson in French history: When Cardinal Richelieu was the flashy power behind the throne of Louis XIII, the somber Capuchin friar was the “gray eminence” behind the cardinal.) Such content is what made “fine art” fine and separated painters and sculptors from decorators and cabinetmakers.

This value system had stylistic consequences. Narrative clarity demanded visual clarity. Figuration ranked higher than landscapes and still lifes in part because human figures instruct more lucidly than trees and grapes. Space was theatrical and coherent, bodies idealized, actions easily identified. Surfaces were smooth, brushstrokes self-effacing. This is still what we mean by “academic art.”

Most visitors confronting the opening wall at the National Gallery will know which painting they’re supposed to like—and it’s not the one with the fawning courtiers. Impressionism is universally admired, while academic art is sometimes treated as the butt of a joke. Admittedly, Jean Jules Antoine Lecomte Du Nouÿ’s huge, body-waxed Eros with surly cupids is easier to laugh at than to love, but most of the academic art on view strives, like the Gérôme, for gripping plausibility. You can see the assiduous archaeological research that went into the Egyptian bric-a-brac pictured in Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s pietà The Death of the Pharaoh’s First-Born Son (1872), or the armor of the sneaky Greeks descending from their giant gift horse in Henri-Paul Motte’s starlit scene of Troy.

[From the July 1900 issue: Impressionism and appreciation]

Today these pictures look like film stills. It’s easy to imagine Errol Flynn dashing up Gérôme’s stairs, or Timothée Chalamet brooding in the Alma-Tadema gloom. Perhaps the reason such paintings no longer move audiences the way they once did is that we have actual movies to provide that immersive storytelling kick. What we want from painting is something different—something personal, handmade, “authentic” (even when we aren’t quite clear what that means).

It’s a mistake, though, to assume that this impulse was new with Impressionism. Beginning in the 1840s, concurrent with the literary “Realism” of Stendhal and Honoré de Balzac, Realist painters turned away from the studio confections of the Académie and began schlepping their easels out into the weather to paint en plein air—peasants toiling in fields, or fields just being fields. Visible brushstrokes and rough finish were the price (or certificate of authenticity) of a real-time response to a real world. These were aesthetic choices, and in turn they suggested political viewpoints. In place of explicit narratives valorizing order, sacrifice, and loyalty, Realist art carried implicit arguments for social equality (“These plain folk are worthy of being seen”) and individual liberty (“My personal experience counts”).

The Salon was the Académie’s enforcement mechanism: In the absence of anything like today’s gallery system, it represented the only practical path for a French artist to establish a reputation. Yet for decades it flip-flopped—sometimes rejecting Realist art, sometimes accepting it and even rewarding it with prizes. Manet, considered a Realist because of his contemporary subjects and ambiguous messaging, had a famously volatile history with the Salon. In 1874, Degas explained the rationale behind the Société Anonyme in these terms: “The Realist movement no longer has to fight with others. It is, it exists, it needs to show itself on its own.”

But nothing in 1874 was quite that simple. A room at the National Gallery is given over to art about the Franco-Prussian War, both academic and Realist. All of it appeared in the Salon. The contrast is instructive: The elegant bronze by Antonin Mercié, conceived (prematurely) as a monument to victory, was altered in the face of actual events and titled Glory to the Vanquished. Although the naked soldier in the clasp of Victory has breathed his last, arms and wings still zoom ecstatically skyward and draperies flutter. He is beautiful even in death. The corpses laid out on the dirt in Auguste Lançon’s Dead in Line! (1873), dressed in the uniforms they were wearing when they fell, are neither naked nor beautiful. Their skin is gray, and their fists are clenched in cadaveric spasm. In the background, troops march by, officers chat, and a village burns. There is no glory, just the banality of slaughter. Unlike Mercié, Lançon had been at the front.

Dead in Line! (1873), Auguste Lançon (© Département de la Moselle, MdG1870&A, Rebourg)

Here also is Manet’s quiet etching of women queuing at a butcher shop in Paris as food supplies dwindled. Black lines, swift and short, capture a sea of shining umbrellas above a snaking mass of black dresses, at the back of which you can just make out the faint lightning-bolt outline of an upthrust bayonet. It’s a picture with no argument, just a set of observations: patience, desperation, rain.

In “Paris 1874,” a model of curatorial discretion, the art is allowed to speak for itself. Visitors are encouraged to look and guess whether a given work appeared in the Salon or the Société before checking the answer on the label. One quickly finds that applying the standard checklist of Impressionist attributes—“urban life,” “French countryside,” “leisure,” “dappled brushwork”—is remarkably unhelpful. The dog-walking ladies in Giuseppe De Nittis’s Avenue du Bois de Boulogne (1874, Salon) sport the same complicated hats, fashionable bustles, and acres of ruched fabric as Renoir’s The Parisian Girl (1874, Société). Charles-François Daubigny’s The Fields in June (1874, Salon) and Pissarro’s June Morning in Pontoise (1873, Société) are both sunny summer landscapes laid out with on-the-fly brushwork. Both sides did flowers.

As for the celebration of leisure, the Salon seems to have been full of moony girls lounging around and people entertaining fluffy white lapdogs, while the artists we now call Impressionists were paying much more attention to the working world. The glinting light of Pissarro’s Hoarfrost (1873, Société) falls on an old man trudging down a road with a large bundle of wood on his back. The backlit fug of Impression, Sunrise was probably smog—the admirably informative exhibition catalog alerts readers to Stendhal’s description of the same vista, “permeated by the sooty brown smoke of the steamboats.” Pictured at labor, not at play, Degas’ dancers stand around splayfooted, bored and tired, adjusting their shoe ribbons, scratching an itch. Even the bourgeois family outing in Degas’ transcendently odd At the Races in the Countryside (1869, Société) is focused on work: Together in a carriage, husband, wife, and dog are all transfixed by the baby’s wet nurse, doing her job. As for the scenes of mothers and children, it is possible that later observers have overestimated the leisure involved.

Hoarfrost (1873), Camille Pissarro (© Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt)

Jules-Émile Saintin’s Washerwoman (1874, Salon) is assertively a picture of urban working life, but in an entirely academic mode. The scene is “modern” in the same way that Alma-Tadema’s pharaoh was ancient, time-stamped by an array of meticulously rendered accessories. But the Alma-Tadema at least had the gravitas of tragedy. Saintin is content with smarm: He arranges his working girl awkwardly in the street, grinning coquettishly at the viewer while twirling a pole of white linens and hoisting her skirt to give a peek of ankle—the eternal trope of the trollop.

[Read: Why absolutely everyone hates Renoir]

Then there is art so wonderful and so peculiarly modern, it seems unfair that it went to the Salon. In contrast to Saintin’s washerwoman, Manet’s The Railway (1873) is reticent to the point of truculence. Against the backdrop of an iron railing, a little girl stands with her back to us, watching the steam of a train below, while next to her, a poker-faced young woman glances up from the book and sleeping puppy in her lap to meet our gaze. A bunch of grapes sits on the stone footing of the fence. The emotional tenor is ambiguous, the relationships between woman, child, dog, grapes, and train unclear. Everything is perfectly still and completely unsettled. Why was this at the Salon? Manet believed that appearing there was a necessary career move and declined to join in the Société event.

The Railway (1873), Édouard Manet (Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art)

He had a point. The Société chose, in its egalitarian zeal, to have no jury and to give space to anyone who paid the modest membership fee. The exhibit ended up even more of a grab bag than the Salon, so alongside some of the most adventurous and lasting art of the 1870s, you got Antoine Ferdinand Attendu’s conventional still-life pile of dead birds, and Auguste Louis Marie Ottin’s marble head of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the great master of hard-edged Neoclassicism, made more than 30 years earlier.

One function of “Paris 1874” is to debunk the tale of the little exhibition that could. The “first Impressionist exhibition,” it turns out, wasn’t all that Impressionist (only seven of its 31 participants are commonly categorized as such). Many artists took part in both shows simultaneously, prioritizing career opportunities over stylistic allegiance. (Not only was organized avant-gardism not a thing before 1874; it appears not to have been a thing in 1874.) As for those famously annoyed reviews, the catalog explains that they came from a handful of critics who specialized in being annoyed, and that most of the modest attention the Société show received was neutral or even friendly. Impression, Sunrise was “barely noticed.” Just four works sold. Goliath wandered off without a scratch, and David went broke.

But debunking is a short-lived thrill. The real rewards of “Paris 1874” lie in the rising awareness one gets walking through the galleries of a new signal in the noise, a set of affinities beyond either the certainties of the Académie or the earthy truths of Realism, and even a hint of how the unpictured traumas of 1870–71 left their mark. We know about the highlights to come (Monet’s water lilies at Giverny are hanging just down the hall), but there is something much more riveting about the moment before everything shifts into focus. By contrast, later Impressionist shows (there were eight in all) knew what they were about. The standard checklist works there. In 1874, it wasn’t yet clear, but you can begin to see a kind of opening up, a sideways slip into letting light be light and paint be paint.

As the Salon-tagged items demonstrate, the battle over subject matter had abated by 1874. Myths and modernity were both admissible. The shift that followed had less to do with what was being painted than how. The most frequent complaint about Impressionist art concerned style—it was too “sketchy.” The preference for loose brushwork, the disregard for clean edges and smooth gradients, was seen as slapdash and lazy, as if the artists were handing in early drafts in place of a finished thesis. More than one painting in the Société show was compared to “palette scrapings.”

Now we like the slap and the dash. We tend to see those independent-minded brushstrokes as evidence not of diminished attention, but of attention homing in on a new target—a fresh fascination with the transitory fall of light, at the expense, perhaps, of the stable object it falls on. Like a shape seen in the distance, sketchiness has the power to suggest multiple realities at once. Monet’s dark-gray squiggle in the Le Havre water might be a rock or a boat; certainly it is a squiggle of paint. Emphasizing the physicality of the image—the gloppiness of the paint, the visible canvas below—calls attention to the instability of the illusion. Step backwards and it’s a harbor; step forward and it’s bits of colorful dried goo.

At the Races in the Countryside (1869), Edgar Degas (© 2024 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

Sketchiness wasn’t the only means of undermining pictorial certainty. Degas never went in for fluttering brushstrokes or elusive edges, but his Ballet Rehearsal (1874) is scattered with pentimenti—the ghosts of a former foot, the trace of an altered elbow, the shadow of a male observer removed from the scene. He had sketched the dancers from life, but then used and reused those drawings for years, reconfiguring them like paper dolls, exactly the way an academic artist might go about peopling a crowd scene. The all-important difference is that Degas shows how the trick is played. In At the Races in the Countryside, the carriage and family are placed so far down and to the right that the nose and shoulder of one of the horses fall off the canvas, as if the painting were a snapshot whose taker was jostled just as the shutter clicked. It’s a way of calling attention to the bucket of artifice and conventions on which painterly illusion depends. This is art being disarmingly honest about being dishonest.

What this fledgling Impressionism puts on offer, distinct from the works around it, is a kind of gentle disruption or incompleteness—a willingness to leave things half-said, an admission of ambiguity, not as a problem to be solved but as a truth to be treasured. Nowhere is this more compelling than in Morisot’s The Cradle (1872). A portrait of the artist’s sister Edma watching her sleeping daughter, it takes a soft subject—mother and child, linen and lace—and girds it with a tensile framework of planes, taut lines, and swooping catenaries. Look beyond the “femininity” and you can see the first steps of the dance with abstraction that would dominate 20th-century painting from Henri Matisse to Richard Diebenkorn. At least as astonishing, though, is the neutrality and distance of the expression on Edma’s face. It might be exhaustion, or reverie, or (because before her marriage, she too had been a gifted professional painter) dispassionate study. Think what you will.

The Cradle is not harrowing or angst-ridden. It doesn’t picture unpleasantness. But when Smee writes of Morisot’s pursuit of “a new language of lightness and evanescence—a language based in close observation, devoid of rhetoric or hysteria,” he’s talking about a response to 1870–71. Both the right-wing empire and the left-wing Commune had ended in pointless, bloody, self-inflicted tragedies. The survivors, at least some of them, had learned to mistrust big ideas. An art about nothing might seem a strange defense, but the act of paying attention to what is rather than what should be—to the particular and ephemeral rather than the abstract and eternal—could be a bulwark against the seductions of ideology.

Resistance, of necessity, adapts to circumstance. In China during the Cultural Revolution, when message-laden art was an instrument of the state, artists belonging to the No Name Group took to clandestine plein air painting in the French mode precisely because it “supported no revolutionary goals—it was hand-made, unique, intimate and personal,” the scholar and artist Chang Yuchen has written. “In this context nature was less a retreat than a chosen battlefield.”

I used to think that Impressionism’s just-rightness was simply a function of time’s passage—that its inventions had seeped so deeply into our culture that they felt comfy. But although familiarity might explain our ease, it doesn’t fully explain Impressionism’s continued hold: the sense that beyond being nice to look at, it still has something to say. The more time I spent in “Paris 1874,” the more I cooled on the soft-edged moniker “impressionist” and warmed to the bristlier “intransigent.” It was a term often applied to unrepentant Communards, but the most intransigent thing of all might just be refusing to tell people what to think.

The contemporary art world, like the world at large, has reentered a period of high moral righteousness. Major institutions and scrappy start-ups share the conviction that the job (or at least a job) of art is to instruct the public in values. Educators, publicists, and artists work hard to ensure that nobody gets left behind and nobody misses the point. But what if leaving the point unfixed is the point?

Whether all of this would have developed in the same way without the violence and disillusionment of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune is impossible to know. But there are worse lessons to derive from trauma than these: Take pleasure in your senses, question authority, look around you. Look again.

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “The Dark Origins of Impressionism.”

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Heading into the presidential election, voters voiced concerns about many issues: abortion, housing, the war in Gaza, immigration. But the one that really resonated at the polls had long dogged the Biden administration, appearing over and over as the top concern on voters’ minds: the economy. In the end, abortion—much as Democrats tried—wasn’t the policy issue that defined the race. Instead, millions of Americans cast their vote based on fear and anger about the state of the economy—all stoked by Donald Trump, who claimed that he was the only one who could solve America’s problems.

On Tuesday, Americans unhappy with the status quo rebuked the current administration for COVID-sparked inflation, following an anti-incumbent pattern that is playing out in elections worldwide. As my colleague Annie Lowrey wrote this week, the “everyday indignity” of heightened food prices, in particular, haunted and enraged American voters even after inflation cooled meaningfully from its 2022 peaks. Though the economy improved by many measures under President Joe Biden, the message from Democrats that you’re doing fine didn’t land—and even seemed patronizing—to Americans who saw high prices all around them. And as Annie noted, although wages have outpaced inflation in recent months, “people interpret wage gains as a product of their own effort and high costs as a policy problem that the president is supposed to solve.”

Trump’s proposals on the economy were frequently incoherent; he scapegoated immigrants for Americans’ financial woes and made promises about tariffs that economists said would lead to higher prices. Still, voters said consistently that they felt that Trump was the right person to handle the economy (even as Kamala Harris started to close in on Trump’s lead on the issue), perhaps because of nostalgia for a pre-pandemic economy that’s unlikely to return. For all the criticism Harris faced early in her campaign for not issuing clearer policy proposals (she ultimately did), Trump was the one whose appeal was rooted largely in “vibes”: He brought heavy doses of hateful culture-war rhetoric to the race, spreading false and dangerous messages about transgender people, blaming immigrants for societal ills, and smearing women, including Harris.

Even though Trump was president just four years ago, he framed himself as the candidate of change, whereas Harris was pegged as the status-quo candidate and struggled to differentiate herself from Biden. Harris, of course, is not the incumbent president. But she was an imperfect messenger on the economy. Even as she started releasing more detailed economic-policy proposals, which included tackling price gouging and making housing more affordable, she was still the governing partner of a president whom voters blamed for inflation—a president whose policies she did not seem willing to openly break with. Trump seized on that dynamic, framing her as a continuation of the current administration and surfacing clips of Harris defending Bidenomics.

Democrats, meanwhile, tried to center abortion rights. When Harris took over for Biden, some pundits saw the issue as a strength for her. It was reasonable for Democrats to think appeals on abortion could work, Jacob Neiheisel, a political-science professor at SUNY Buffalo told me: In 2022, emphasizing abortion proved a decisive issue for Democrats in the midterm elections (though, he noted, it actually helped Democrats only in specific parts of the country—just enough to fend off a midterms “red wave”). But this time around, the economy mattered more: CNN national exit polling found that only 14 percent of voters said abortion was their top issue, compared with more than 30 percent who said that about the economy. And Trump, it seemed, managed to muddle the message on abortion enough that many voters didn’t view him as patently anti-abortion (even as Democrats emphasized that he was responsible for the fall of Roe v. Wade). More than a quarter of women who supported legal abortion still chose Trump, according to exit polling.

Fears about the future of democracy were also at the top of voters’ minds more commonly than abortion, according to CNN exit polling: 34 percent of voters said it was their top issue, suggesting that the Harris campaign’s rhetoric about the existential threats posed by Trump did have some effect on voters’ perceptions. My colleague Ronald Brownstein noted today that in national exit polling, 54 percent of voters agreed that Trump was “too extreme,” “but about one in nine voters who viewed Trump as too extreme voted for him anyway.”

For nearly a decade now, Trump has felt like the dominant figure in American politics. But as David Wallace-Wells noted in The New York Times yesterday, a Democrat has been president for 12 of the past 16 years. Democrats, he argues, for a generation now have been “the party of power and the establishment,” with the right becoming “the natural home for anti-establishment resentment of all kinds—of which, it’s now clear to see, there is an awful lot.” Ultimately, much of the dynamic in this race came down to whether voters were hopeful or fearful about their and their country’s future. When people have the choice to “vote hopes or vote fears,” Neiheisel said, “fears tend to override.”

Related:

What swayed Trump voters was Bidenomics. Why Biden’s team thinks Harris lost

Today’s News

In a speech about Trump’s electoral victory, President Biden urged Americans to “bring down the temperature” and promised a peaceful transfer of power. Special Counsel Jack Smith has been speaking with Justice Department officials about how he can end the federal cases against President-elect Donald Trump, in accordance with the department’s policy against prosecuting sitting presidents. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz fired his finance minister yesterday, ending his coalition government. Scholz pledged to hold a confidence vote, which will likely lead to early elections in March.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: In 2015, David A. Graham wrote about America’s dire lack of talented and experienced politicians. Almost a decade later, Stephanie Bai spoke with him to ask how much of his argument has held up, and how much has changed. The Weekly Planet: A tiny petrostate is running the world’s climate talks—again, Zoë Schlanger writes.

More From The Atlantic

Triumph of the cynics Democrats actually had quite a good night in North Carolina. What the left keeps getting wrong

Evening Read

Sources: Israel Sebastian / Getty; Scharvik / Getty.

America Has an Onion Problem

By Nicholas Florko

Onions have an almost-divine air. They are blessed with natural properties that are thought to prevent foodborne illnesses, and on top of that, they undergo a curing process that acts as a fail-safe. According to one analysis by the CDC, onions sickened 161 people from 1998 to 2013, whereas leafy greens sickened more than 7,000. Onions haven’t been thought of as a “significant hazard,” Susan Mayne, the former head of food safety at the FDA, told me.

Not anymore.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Illustration by Matt Chase

Read. These seven books will grab your attention and make you put down your phone.

Listen. In the first episode of Autocracy in America, Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev look at how lies prime a society for a fall.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present, surface delightful treasures, and examine the American idea.

“It’s very easy to get jaded about politics today … Poll after poll shows a dyspeptic public that hates Congress, disdains politics, and has little faith in government to fix anything.” This observation, which could’ve been written today, was made by the Atlantic staff writer David A. Graham in February 2015, in a story about America’s dire lack of talented and experienced politicians. He traced this problem back to 1955, when former Senator Joseph S. Clark Jr. wrote in The Atlantic that “we have too much mediocrity in the business of running the government of the country.”

During this election cycle, voters and pundits alike grumbled about the options before them. A 2023 survey of American adults found that 84 percent of respondents think there is a leadership crisis in the U.S. government. Early exit polling from CNN revealed that 64 percent of Trump voters feel dissatisfied or angry with “the way things are going” in the United States. I spoke with David recently to ask him how much of his argument has held up a decade later, and how much has changed.

A Governance Problem

Stephanie Bai: In 2015, you wrote about the issue of mediocrity in politics—specifically, how our politicians don’t seem to be the best and brightest minds that our populace has to offer. Almost a decade later, how do you think that argument has aged?

David A. Graham: The problem is much, much worse. Shortly after this article was published, Donald Trump started running for president. I think he’s a good example of some of the things I wrote about before: He is very good at running for office, but a disaster in terms of governing because he doesn’t understand how the system works.

He’s also worsened a lot of the issues that I was thinking about then. His second term may produce a renaissance in hard-right political thought, and it will likely also accelerate most of the governance problems we see now. We’ve seen an exodus of experienced, serious policy makers who are disgusted with the state of things. They know they can’t get anything done, and they think that some people in Congress are kind of clowns. So instead of getting better people in office, we’re getting brain drain.

Stephanie: What do you think needs to be done to retain the talent in politics?

David: It feels like a vicious cycle. I mean, who wants to be a politician right now? It must take a lot of ego, and a lot of masochism. As long as you have Marjorie Taylor Greene as one of the most prominent members in Congress, you’re not going to attract people who are more serious and can instill a better culture.

One precedent we could look at is the post-Watergate moment, when there was a huge loss of faith in the government. You saw a crop of young Democrats who ran for office with big dreams of reform, and many of them stuck around for a very long time in Congress as serious policy makers. Maybe our current political crisis will produce something like that. But Watergate was a more contained crisis of the executive branch; what we see now is dysfunction across the legislative and executive branches, which is harder to break out of.

Stephanie: That reminds me of a recent story you wrote about politicians in Ohio, in which you noted that some local leaders “find their paths to higher office blocked by the country’s hyper-partisanship.”

David: If you look at the people working in local offices, it’s often a different kind of politician. When I talked to mayors in Ohio for this story, something that came up repeatedly was how often they spend time on things that are not especially partisan. Paving roads is nonpartisan. Cleaning up after storms is nonpartisan. These are things that have to get done. The question is: How do people like that rise higher?

The best-case scenario I heard is that if you have really good mayors who are schooled in that pragmatic, consensus-building style, maybe as they move up the political ladder, you’ll see an improvement in our political culture. But that outcome remains to be seen, because they usually end up in these hyper-partisan statewide races—which are hard to win without becoming hyper-partisan.

Stephanie: Do you think this election has upended or complicated any conventional wisdom about what makes a politician successful?

David: One thing that I’ve been thinking about is the role of people such as Elon Musk, who has discovered that by owning X, contributing a ton of money to Trump, and controlling systems that are necessary to the federal government, like SpaceX, he can give himself something like political power without ever having to run for office. When our political systems start to slide toward dysfunction, people like Musk can emerge, and they can find ways to have a lot of power over citizens but not face any kind of accountability.

Read David’s 2015 story here.

Tuesday evening, while waiting for national election results to come in, I dropped by the victory party for Mark Robinson, the North Carolina Republican nominee for governor. It was, as you might expect, a strange scene.

Robinson, the lieutenant governor, had become persona non grata among most other Republicans in September, when a CNN report revealed his bizarre posts—about slavery, being a “Black Nazi,” transgender porn, and more—on the porn site Nude Africa. He was no longer invited to attend rallies for the Donald Trump campaign, his fundraising dried up, and his campaign was left for dead.

The party, held on the top floor of a skyscraper in Raleigh, was pointedly separate from other North Carolina GOP festivities. Some 60 or 70 supporters crammed into a small room in a private club watching Fox News. It was a more diverse crowd than any other Republican gathering I’ve ever attended, and nearly everyone was decked out in Robinson gear. I noticed only one piece of Trump swag, and a wide range of other fashion choices. A younger Black man wore a satin jacket with red-sequin embroidery; an older white guy wore a white tuxedo jacket, complete with bow tie, over a red Mark Robinson T-shirt.

Polls in North Carolina closed at 7:30 p.m. ET. Just a few minutes later, Fox News projected that the Democrat Josh Stein, the current state attorney general, would beat Robinson. I expected to hear jeers or a murmur or feel some deflation in the room, but nothing happened. I started wondering if I’d misread, but no: Fox repeated the call several times in the next few minutes, and eventually someone changed the channel to Spectrum News. I asked some attendees what they made of the news, and was told over and over that they had hope that the call was premature.

[David A. Graham: The great, disappearing Trump campaign]

This was not exactly a denial, and around 9, Robinson took the stage and conceded the race. “The window of opportunity for us to win this race is closing quick, folks,” he said. “Doesn’t seem like it’s going our way tonight. But it’s always going our way. Whether people want it to or not, people of faith know it’s going to go the right way, because we’ve read the back of the book. We know how this all comes to an end.” He barely alluded to the scandals that had sunk his campaign, saying, “It’s not about the lies; it’s not about the half-truths.” Soon, attendees began streaming out, clutching handfuls of campaign signs and hats.

It was a fittingly weird start to a weird night in North Carolina politics. The Old North State delivered a series of results that show why national Democrats have been so hopeful about flipping it, while likely discouraging them from trying again for some time.

Trump won the state in the presidential election. Kamala Harris received both a smaller percentage of the vote than President Joe Biden did four years ago and (in unofficial results) a smaller absolute number of votes. That all happened despite a massive campaign infrastructure and get-out-the-vote operation, especially as compared with the Trump campaign. In the deep-red counties where Harris had hoped to cut into Republican margins, she barely managed to move the ball or else lost ground. National Democrats poured money into the state, and once again, it broke their hearts.

Down the ballot, however, North Carolina Democrats had a good night. Stein beat Robinson by almost 15 points. That matches with some of the public polling on the race, but most insiders seemed to expect a margin closer to the high single-digits. The Democrat Rachel Hunt flipped the lieutenant governor’s seat. Jeff Jackson held off Dan Bishop for attorney general; no Republican has won the seat since the 19th century. Secretary of State Elaine Marshall won another term. For superintendent of public instruction, Mo Green beat Michele Morrow, who attended the January 6, 2021, rally and called for Barack Obama’s execution. In a heartbreaker for Democrats, state-supreme-court justice Allison Riggs appears to have lost her seat narrowly, but in the state legislature, Democrats broke a veto-proof Republican supermajority. U.S. Representative Don Davis eked out a win in northeastern North Carolina.

[David A. Graham: Mark Robinson is testing the bounds of GOP extremism]

One lesson from this is that North Carolina really is a purple state, as the political scientist Chris Cooper describes in a new book. Voters are happy to elect Democrats at the state level; they just don’t want them in the White House or the U.S. Senate. (The last election North Carolinians selected a Democrat for either was in 2008.)

Across the country, the election looks similar—more a repudiation of national Democrats, and especially the Democratic candidate for president, than a rejection of Democratic policy priorities. (I argued yesterday that Trump’s simple message on the economy is what carried him to victory.) Harris made abortion a centerpiece of her campaign and lost, but voters in seven states passed ballot referenda protecting abortion rights—some in blue states, but also in purple and red states including Arizona, Nevada, and Montana. Missouri voters overturned an abortion ban. And 57 percent of Floridians supported a ballot issue, a number that nonetheless fell short of the 60 percent required for passage. A majority, but not the requisite supermajority, of Floridians also voted to legalize recreational cannabis use. Even in U.S. Senate races, Democratic candidates ran ahead of Harris in almost every competitive contest. (Florida was the odd race out.)

That mixed result is also a mixed message for Democrats trying to figure out where the party goes from here. Having a reasonably popular policy platform is theoretically good news for them, but that isn’t much use if they can’t win the offices required to institute or defend those policies. But with little real power in Washington for the next two years, they’ll have plenty of time to think about the conundrum.

Earlier this fall, one of Joe Biden’s closest aides felt compelled to tell the president a hard truth about Kamala Harris’s run for the presidency: “You have more to lose than she does.” And now he’s lost it. Joe Biden cannot escape the fact that his four years in office paved the way for the return of Donald Trump. This is his legacy. Everything else is an asterisk.

In the hours after Harris’s defeat, I called and texted members of Biden’s inner circle to hear their postmortems of the campaign. They sounded as deflated as the rest of the Democratic elite. They also had a worry of their own: Members of Biden’s clan continue to stoke the delusion that its paterfamilias would have won the election, and some of his advisers feared that he might publicly voice that deeply misguided view.

Although the Biden advisers I spoke with were reluctant to say anything negative about Harris as a candidate, they did level critiques of her campaign, based on the months they’d spent strategizing in anticipation of the election. Embedded in their autopsies was their own unstated faith that they could have done better.

One critique holds that Harris lost because she abandoned her most potent attack. Harris began the campaign portraying Trump as a stooge of corporate interests—and touted herself as a relentless scourge of Big Business. During the Democratic National Convention, speaker after speaker inveighed against Trump’s oligarchical allegiances. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York bellowed, “We have to help her win, because we know that Donald Trump would sell this country for a dollar if it meant lining his own pockets and greasing the palms of his Wall Street friends.”

[David A. Graham: What Trump understood, and Harris did not]

While Harris was stuck defending the Biden economy, and hobbled by lingering anger over inflation, attacking Big Business allowed her to go on the offense. Then, quite suddenly, this strain of populism disappeared. One Biden aide told me that Harris steered away from such hard-edged messaging at the urging of her brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer. (West did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) To win the support of CEOs, Harris jettisoned a strong argument that deflected attention from one of her weakest issues. Instead, the campaign elevated Mark Cuban as one of its chief surrogates, the very sort of rich guy she had recently attacked.

[Annie Lowrey: Voters wanted lower prices at any cost]

Another Bidenland critique takes Harris to task for failing to navigate the backlash against identity politics. Not that Harris ran a “woke” campaign. To the contrary, she bathed herself in patriotism. She presented herself as a prosecutor, a friend of law enforcement, and a proud gun owner. But she failed to respond to the ubiquitous ads the Trump campaign ran claiming that Harris supports sex-change operations for prisoners. She allowed Trump to create the impression that she favored the most radical version of transgender rights.

Biden, allies say, never would have let such attacks stand. He would have clearly rejected the idea of trans women competing in women’s sports. Of course, he never staked out that position in his presidency. But it’s true that Harris avoided the issue, rather than rebutting it, despite the millions of dollars poured into those attack ads. And in the end, those ads very likely implanted the notion that Harris wasn’t the cultural centrist she appeared to be.

A sour irony haunts Biden aides. In the coming months, Trump will use executive power and unified control of Washington to wreck many of the administration’s proudest accomplishments. But the ones he doesn’t wreck, he will claim as his own. Biden helped build the foundations for economic growth, with the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act, and the infrastructure bill. Because the investments enabled by all three of those bills will take years to bear fruit, Biden never had the chance to reap the harvest. Despite Trump’s opposition to those pieces of legislation, the benefits of those bills could bolster his presidency. Biden will have passed along his most substantive legacy as a gift to his successor.

The political scientist Wilson Carey McWilliams once observed that alienation is not the loss of an old homeland, but the discovery of a new homeland that casts the former in a more dismal light. Today, the country indeed looks alien. The America many of us believed we knew now appears stranger in retrospect: The anger and resentment we may have thought was pitched at a simmer turned out to be at a rollicking boil. And one of liberals’ most cherished shibboleths from 2016—that Trumpism is a movement for aggrieved white men—unraveled in the face of a realignment that saw the GOP appear to give birth to a multiracial working-class movement. A second Trump presidency is the result of this misjudgment.

There is plenty of blame to go around, and much of it will be directed at Kamala Harris. Rightly so. Her campaign strategy was often confounding. Harris gambled on suburban-Republican support, which she tried to juice by touring with Liz Cheney and moving right on the border, a strategy that many warned was questionable. Meanwhile, in her quest to bring these new conservative voters into the Democratic fold, Harris neglected many of the voters the party has long relied on. She took far too long to reach out to Black men—despite a year’s worth of polling that said she was losing their support—and when she finally did, she had little to offer them but slapdash policies and half-baked promises. It was the same story for Hispanic men. Despite polling showing Donald Trump increasing his Hispanic support, Harris largely ignored the problem until a month before Election Day, when she stitched together a condescending last-minute “Hombres con Harris” push. As for Arab American voters, she and her surrogates couldn’t be bothered to do much more than lecture them.

[David A. Graham: What Trump understood, and Harris did not]

The results speak for themselves: Trump won a stunning victory in a heavily Black county in North Carolina and carried the largest Arab-majority city, Dearborn, Michigan. Early exit polls suggest that he doubled his Black support in Wisconsin and won Hispanic men by 1o points. Meanwhile, Harris’s scheme to run up the score in the suburbs plainly failed to bear fruit: She underperformed Biden’s numbers with these voters. Simply put, almost nothing about the Harris game plan worked. But as easy as it is to play Monday-morning (or rather, Wednesday-morning) quarterback—and her dubious campaigning provides plenty of material to work with—the reality is that Harris was probably doomed from the jump.

The reason is that she had an 81-year-old albatross hanging around her neck: Joe Biden. When Biden got into the 2020 presidential race, he said he was motivated to defeat the man who blamed “both sides” for a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Five years later, Biden’s inability to see his own limitations handed that same man the White House once more. Nobody bears more responsibility for Trump’s reascension to the presidency than the current president. This failure lies at his feet.

Biden was supposed to be a one-term candidate. During his 2019 campaign, he heavily signaled that he would not run again if he won. “He is going to be 82 years old in four years and he won’t be running for reelection,” one of his advisers declared. Biden himself promised to be a “transition” candidate, holding off Trump for four years while making room for a fresh Democratic challenger in 2024. “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not anything else,” he said at a Michigan campaign event with Governor Gretchen Whitmer, one of those promising younger Democrats Biden was ostensibly making room for.

Of course, that’s not what happened. Scranton Joe, supposed paragon of aw-shucks decency, ultimately wouldn’t relinquish his power. He decided in the spring of 2023 to run for reelection despite no shortage of warning signs, including a basement-level approval rating, flashing bright red. He also ignored the will of the voters. As early as 2022, an overwhelming percentage of Democratic voters said they preferred a candidate other than Biden, and support for an alternative candidate persisted even as the president threw his hat back in the ring. This past February, one poll found that 86 percent of Americans and 73 percent of Democrats believed Biden was too old to serve another term, and another revealed that only a third of Americans believed that he was mentally fit for four more years.

The idea that Americans would vote for a man who they overwhelmingly thought was too old and cognitively infirm stretched reason to its breaking point. And yet Biden and his enablers in the Democratic Party doubled down on magical thinking. This was a species of madness worthy of King Lear shaking his fist before the encroaching storm. And like Lear, what the current president ultimately raged against was nature itself—that final frailty, aging and decline—as he stubbornly clung to the delusion that he could outrun human biology.

[Adam Serwer: There is no constitutional mandate for fascism]

Nature won, as it always does. After flouting the will of his own voters, after his party did everything in its power to clear the runway for his reelection bid, and after benefiting from an army of commentators and superfans who insisted that mounting video evidence of his mental slips were “cheap fakes,” Biden crashed and burned at the debate in June. He hung on for another month, fueling the flames of scandal and intraparty revolt and robbing his successor of badly needed time to begin campaigning. And yet when he finally did stand down, Biden World immediately spun up the just-so story that the president is an honorable man who stepped aside for the good of the country.

He did not stand down soon enough. The cake was baked. The powers that be decided the hour was too late for a primary or contested convention, so an unpopular president was replaced with an unpopular vice president, who wasted no time in reminding America why her own presidential bid failed just a few years before. The limitations of Harris’s campaign are now laid bare for all to see, but her grave was dug before she ever took the podium at the Democratic National Convention.

Harris could not distance herself from Biden’s unpopular record on inflation and the southern border. She could not distance herself from his unpopular foreign policy in the Middle East. She could not break from him while she simultaneously served as his deputy. And she could not tell an obvious truth—that the sitting U.S. president is not fit for office—when asked by reporters, and so she was forced into Orwellian contortions. If the worst comes to pass, if the next four years are as bad as Biden warned, if the country—teetering before the abyss—stumbles toward that last precipice, it will have been American democracy’s self-styled savior who helped push it, tumbling end over end, into the dark.

Ironically, it may have been Donald Trump’s discipline that won him a return trip to the White House.

The former and future president is infamous for his erratic approach to politics, which was on flagrant display in the past couple of weeks of the campaign. But Trump consistently offered a clear message that spoke to Americans’ frustration about the economy and the state of the country, and promised to fix it.

Throughout the campaign, Trump told voters that President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and undocumented immigrants were responsible for inflation, and that he would fix the problem. His proposals were often incoherent and nonsensical. For example, Trump promised to both whip inflation and also institute enormous tariffs, a combination nearly all economists agree is impossible. The mass deportation that Trump has promised would also likely drive up prices, rather than soothing the economy. But in a country where roughly three-quarters of Americans feel that things are on the wrong track, a pledge to fix things was potent.

[David Frum: Trump won. Now what?]

Trump may be the most negative mainstream candidate in American history. Observers including my colleague Peter Wehner have noted the contrast between Trump’s disposition and Ronald Reagan’s sunny optimism. But in a strange way, Trump does offer a kind of hope. It is not a hope for women with complicated pregnancies or LGBTQ people or immigrants, even legal ones. But for those who fit under Stephen Miller’s rubric that “America is for Americans and Americans only,” Trump promised a way out.

“We’re going to help our country heal,” Trump said in remarks early this morning. “We’re going to help our country heal. We have a country that needs help, and it needs help very badly. We’re going to fix our borders, we’re going to fix everything about our country, and we’ve made history for a reason tonight, and the reason is going to be just that.”

You can contrast that with the message coming from Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, which was more outwardly hopeful but suffered from a serious, perhaps unfixable, flaw.

[Read: The night they hadn’t prepared for]

Harris won praise for her positive campaign message, especially in the immediate weeks after Joe Biden dropped out of the race and she became the nominee. Biden had spent months warning darkly about Trump’s threat to democracy, but Harris offered something more forward-looking—explicitly. “We’re not going back,” she told voters.

Harris promised to protect things like Social Security and Medicare, and warned that Trump would ruin everything that was great about America. This was a fundamentally conservative answer, coming from a Democratic Party that, as I wrote last year, has become strikingly conservative, but it came at a time when too many voters were disgusted with the status quo.

Democrats may have been slow to take seriously the economic pain of inflation. In its first two years, the Biden administration was single-mindedly focused on revving and restructuring the economy after COVID, and treated inflation more as a transitory annoyance than a long-term danger. But also, it seems to have concluded that it lacked a good answer to inflation. The administration argued with frustration that inflation was a worldwide trend, caused by COVID, and pointed out that inflation in the U.S. had dropped faster than in peer countries, and that the American economy was running better than any other. All of this was true and also politically unhelpful. You can’t argue people into feeling better with statistics.

[David A. Graham: The Democrats are now America’s conservative party]

In theory, the mid-summer switch from Harris to Biden gave Democrats a chance to reset. But Harris struggled to create distance from Biden. When she was offered chances to do so, she demurred. In early October, the hosts of The View asked her what she’d have done differently from the president, and she replied, “There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of—and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact, the work that we have done.” Republicans were delighted and made that a staple of attack ads and stump speeches.

Whether this was out of loyalty to her boss or some other impulse, it’s not clear that Harris would have been able to pull off a more radical switch. She was still the Democratic nominee, and voters around the world have punished incumbent parties in recent elections. Her coalition meant she couldn’t run an aggressively protectionist or anti-immigrant campaign, even if she had been so inclined. Her strategic decision to court centrist and Republican voters closed off moving very far to the left on economics, though past campaigns do not offer clear evidence that would have been a winner either. Besides, Democrats had a good empirical case that what they had done to steward the economy was very successful. They just had no political case.

In a bitter turn for Democrats, Trump will now benefit from their governing successes. If he truly attempts to, or succeeds at, speedily deporting millions of people or instituting 60 percent tariffs, he will drive inflation higher and wreck the progress of Biden’s term, but Trump’s own political instincts and the influence of many very wealthy people around him may temper that. Having clearly promised to fix the problem and vanquished his enemies, he’ll now be able to declare a swift victory.

Donald Trump has won, and will become president for the second time. Those who voted for him will now celebrate their victory. The rest of us need to prepare to live in a different America: a country where millions of our fellow citizens voted for a president who knowingly promotes hatred and division; who lies—blatantly, shamelessly—every time he appears in public; who plotted to overturn an election in 2020 and, had he not won, was planning to try again in 2024.  

Above all, we must learn to live in an America where an overwhelming number of our fellow citizens have chosen a president who holds the most fundamental values and traditions of our democracy, our Constitution, even our military in contempt. Over the past decade, opinion polls showed Americans’ faith in their institutions waning. But no opinion poll could make this shift in values any clearer than this vote. As a result of this election, the United States will become a different kind of country.

When he was last in the White House, the president-elect ignored ethics and security guidelines, fired inspectors general and other watchdogs, leaked classified information, and used the Department of Homeland Security in the summer of 2020 as if it were the interior ministry of an authoritarian state, deploying U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Coast Guard “troops” in American cities. Trump actively encouraged the January 6, 2021, insurrection at our Capitol. When he left the White House, he stole classified documents and hid them from the FBI.  

Because a critical mass of Americans aren’t bothered by that list of transgressions, any one of which would have tanked the career of another politician, Trump and his vice president–elect, J.D. Vance, will now try to transform the federal government into a loyalty machine that serves the interests of himself and his cronies. This was the essence of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and its architects, all Trump fans, will now endeavor to make it become reality. Trump will surely try again to dismantle America’s civil service, replacing qualified scientists and regulators with partisan operatives. His allies will help him to build a Department of Justice that does not serve the Constitution, but instead focuses on harassing and punishing Trump’s enemies. Trump has spoken, in the past, of using the Federal Communications Commission and the Internal Revenue Service to punish media organizations and anyone else who crosses him, and now he will have the chance to try again.

[Read: The Democrats’ dashed hopes in Iowa]

Perhaps the greater and more insidious danger is not political repression or harassment, but corruption. Autocratic populists around the world—in Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela—have assaulted institutions designed to provide accountability and transparency in order to shift money and influence to their friends and families, and this may happen in America too. This is not just a theoretical threat. As loyalists take over regulatory agencies, filling not only political but also former civil-service jobs, American skies will become more polluted, American food more dangerous. As a result of this massive shift in the country’s bureaucratic culture, Trump-connected companies will prosper, even as America becomes less safe for consumers, for workers, for children, for all of us.

American foreign policy will also reflect this shift toward kleptocracy. In his first term, Trump abused the powers of his office, corrupting American foreign policy for his personal gain. He pressured the Ukrainian president to launch a fake investigation of his political opponent; altered policy toward Turkey, Qatar, and other nations in ways that suited his business interests; even used the Secret Service to funnel government money to his private properties. In a second term, he and the people around him will have every incentive to go much further. Expect them to use American foreign policy and military power to advance their personal and political goals.  

There are many things a re-elected President Trump cannot do. But there are some things he can do. One is to cut off aid to Ukraine. The Biden administration has three months to drop all half-measures and rush supplies to Ukraine before Trump forces a Ukrainian surrender to Russia. If there’s anything in the American arsenal that Ukraine might successfully use—other than nuclear weapons—send it now, before it’s too late.

Another thing Trump can do is to impose further tariffs–and intensify a global trade war against not only China but also against former friends, partners, and allies. America First will be America Alone, no longer Ronald Reagan’s “city on a hill,” but now just another great power animated by predatory nationalism.

Around the world, illiberal politicians who seek to subvert their own democracies will follow America’s lead. With no fear of American criticism or reaction, expect harassment of press and political opponents in countries such as Mexico and Turkey to grow. Expect the Russian-backed electoral cheating recently on display in Georgia and Moldova to spread. Expect violent rhetoric in every democracy: If the American president can get away with it, others will conclude that they can too. The autocratic world, meanwhile, will celebrate the victory of someone whose disdain for the rule of law echoes and matches their own. They can assume Trump and Vance will not promote human rights, will not care about international law, and will not reinforce our democratic alliances in Europe and Asia.

But the most difficult, most agonizing changes are the ones that will now take place deep inside our society. Radicalization of a part of the anti-Trump camp is inevitable, as people begin to understand that existential issues, such as climate change and gun violence, will not be tackled. A parallel process will take place on the other side of the political spectrum, as right-wing militias, white supremacists, and QAnon cultists are reenergized by the election of the man whose behavior they have, over eight years, learned to imitate. The deep gaps within America will grow deeper. Politics will become even angrier. Trump won by creating division and hatred, and he will continue to do so throughout what is sure to be a stormy second term.

[David A. Graham: The institutions failed]

My generation was raised on the belief America could always be counted upon to do the right thing, even if belatedly: reject the isolationism of America First and join the fight against Nazism; fund the Marshall Plan to stop communism; extend the promise of democracy to all people without regard to race or sex. But maybe that belief was true only for a specific period, a unique moment. There were many chapters of history when America did the wrong thing for years or decades. Maybe we are living through such a period now.

Or maybe the truth is that democracy is always a close-run thing, always in contention. If so, then we too must—as people in other failing democracies have learned to do—find new ways to champion wobbling institutions and threatened ideas. For supporters of the American experiment in liberal democracy, our only hope is education, organization, and the creation of a coalition of people dedicated to defending the spirit of the Constitution, the ideals of the Founders, the dream of freedom. More concretely: public civic-education campaigns to replace the lessons no longer taught in schools; teams of lawyers who can fight for the rule of law in courts; grassroots organizing, especially in rural and small-town America; citizens and journalists working to expose and fight the enormous wave of kleptocracy and corruption that will now engulf our political system.

Many of those shattered by this result will be tempted to withdraw into passivity—or recoil into performative radicalism. Reject both. We should focus, instead, on how to win back to the cause of liberal democracy a sufficient number of those Americans who voted for a candidate who denigrated this nation’s institutions and ideals.

David Lammy is on his first visit to the continent since he became foreign secretary.

Americans are headed to the polls today, to cast their ballots in a crucial election. People are anxious, hopeful, and scared about the stakes of the election and its aftermath. But this is not the only such electoral test that American democracy has faced. An earlier contest has much to say to the present.

The presidential election of 1800 was a crisis of the first order, featuring extreme polarization, wild accusations, and name-calling—the Federalist John Adams was labeled “hermaphroditical” by Republicans, and Federalists, in turn, warned that Thomas Jefferson would destroy Christianity. People in two states began stockpiling arms to take the government for Jefferson if necessary, seeing him as the intended winner. Federalist members of Congress considered overturning the election; thousands of people surrounded the Capitol to learn the outcome; and an extended, agonizing tie between Jefferson and Aaron Burr took 36 votes to resolve in the House of Representatives.

We’re not looking at a replay of the 1800 election; history doesn’t repeat itself. But two key components of that electoral firestorm are speaking loudly to the present: the threat of violence, and the proposed solution to the electoral turmoil after the contest’s close.

The unfortunate truth is that democratic governance is often violent. When the promises and reach of democracy expand, it almost always brings an antidemocratic blowback, sometimes including threats and violence. Black men gaining the right to vote during the Civil War was met with bluntly hostile threats, intimidation, and voter suppression during Reconstruction. The advancing demands for the civil rights of Black Americans in the 1960s led to vicious beatings and murders. In both eras, white Americans who felt entitled to power—and who felt threatened by the expanding rights and opportunities granted to racial minorities through democratic means—resorted to violence.

[Elaine Godfrey: The real election risk comes later]

At the end of the 18th century, the Federalists were the party of extreme entitlement. They favored a strong central government with the power to enforce its precepts and were none too comfortable with a democratic politics of resistance, protest, and pushback. They wanted Americans to vote for their preferred candidates, then step aside and let their betters govern.

When Jefferson and Burr—both Democratic Republicans—received an equal number of electoral votes, the Federalists were horrified. They faced the nightmare choice between Jefferson, a notoriously anti Federalist Republican, or Burr, an unpredictable and opportunistic politico with unknown loyalties. They largely preferred Burr, who seemed far more likely to compromise with the Federalists.

Tied elections are thrown to the House of Representatives to decide, with each state getting one vote. Given this chance to steal the election, Federalists inside and outside Congress began plotting—perhaps they could prevent the election of either candidate and elect a president pro tem until they devised a better solution.

Federalist talk of intervention didn’t go unnoticed. Governors in Pennsylvania and Virginia began to stockpile arms in case the government needed to be taken for Jefferson. This was no subversive effort; Jefferson himself knew of their efforts, telling James Madison and James Monroe that the threat of resistance “by arms” was giving the Federalists pause. “We thought it best to declare openly & firmly, one & all, that the day such an act [of usurpation] passed the middle states would arm.”

Ultimately, there was no violence. But the threat was very real—a product of the fact that Federalists felt so entitled to political power that they were unwilling to lose by democratic means. And losing is a key component of democracy. Elections are contests with winners and losers. Democracy relies on these free and fair contests to assign power according to the preferences of the American people. People who feel entitled to power are hostile to these contests. They won’t accept unknown outcomes. They want inevitability, invulnerability, and immunity, so they strike out at structures of democracy. They scorn electoral proceedings, manipulate the political process, and threaten their opponents. Sometimes, the end result is violence. In the election of 2024, this is the posture adopted by former President Donald Trump and his supporters. As in 1800, a steadfast sense of entitlement to power is threatening our democratic process.

The election of 1800 was just the fourth presidential contest in American history, and only the election of 1796, the first without George Washington as a candidate, had been contested. After the crisis of 1800, some people sought better options. Unsettled by the uproar of 1800, at least one Federalist favored ending popular presidential elections altogether. Thinking back to the election a few years later, the Connecticut Federalist James Hillhouse proposed amending the constitutional mode of electing presidents. The president should be chosen from among acting senators, he suggested. A box could be filled with balls—most of them white, one of them colored— and each senator who was qualified for the presidency would proceed in alphabetical order and pull a ball from the box. The senator who drew the colored ball would be president. Chief Justice John Marshall, who agreed that presidential contests were dangerous, declared the plan as good as any other.

Most people didn’t go that far, but Federalists and Republicans alike understood that the threat posed by fiercely contested partisan elections could be dire. Although the presidency had been peacefully transferred from one party to another, the road to that transfer had been rocky. Stockpiling arms? Threats of armed resistance? Seizing the presidency? The entire nation rocked by political passions, seemingly torn in two?

One Republican asked Jefferson in March 1801: What would have happened if there had been the “non election of a president”? Jefferson’s response is noteworthy. In that case, he wrote, “the federal government would have been in the situation of a clock or watch run down … A convention, invited by the republican members of Congress … would have been on the ground in 8 weeks, would have repaired the constitution where it was defective, and wound it up again.”

The political process would save the nation. A convention. Perhaps amending the Constitution. The solution to the crisis, Jefferson argued, lay in tried-and-true constitutional processes of government. As he put it, they were a “peaceable & legitimate resource, to which we are in the habit of implicit obedience.”

[David A. Graham: How is it this close?]

And indeed, that is the purpose of the Constitution, a road map of political processes. As Americans, we agree to abide by its standards or use constitutional and legal political means to change them. When people attack the Constitution—threaten it, ignore it, violate it—they are striking a blow to the constitutional pact that holds us together as a nation. We don’t often think about this pact, or even realize that it’s there—until it’s challenged.

Which brings us to the present. Today’s election presents a stark choice. Americans can either respect the basic constitutional structures of our government, or trample them with denial and lies. The Constitution is far from perfect. It needs amending. But it is our procedural starting point for change.

By voting, you are signaling your belief in this process. You are declaring that you believe in the opportunities presented by democracy, even if they sometimes must be fought for. Democracy isn’t an end point; it’s a process. This election is our opportunity to pledge our allegiance to that process—to the constitutional pact that anchors our nation. The choice is ours.