Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s movement has repeatedly been written off as a farce, a stunt, a distraction. Now Donald Trump has nominated him to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, where, if confirmed, he’ll oversee a life-and-death corner of the federal government.

RFK Jr.’s operation had been building toward this moment for months. On August 23, Kennedy suspended his independent presidential bid and endorsed Trump after what he described as “a series of long, intense discussions” that proved the two were ideologically aligned. Almost immediately, the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement was born, as was a super PAC of the same name.

The group’s near-term goal was simple: persuade Kennedy’s coalition to vote for Trump. His former national field director, Jeff Hutt, became one of the MAHA PAC’s leaders, and throughout the fall, in his phone calls and meetings with Kennedy supporters, he kept hearing the same message: If RFK Jr. couldn’t become president, he should zero in on health reforms.

[John Hendrickson: The first MAGA Democrat]

“HHS is the place where they wanted Mr. Kennedy to be,” Hutt told me last night. He fully expects Kennedy to be confirmed. Hutt and his team have set up a “war room” and are identifying which senators will support the HHS nomination, and which will need coaxing. Either through standard procedure or via a recess appointment (an idea Trump has teased), Hutt said he was confident that Kennedy will land the job.

Kennedy was offered such a significant position—and will have such a “big rein,” as Hutt put it—because Trump returns favors. In 2016, Trump courted Christian voters by dangling the prospect of appointing conservative judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade. This year, Trump spent the final months of the election wooing the MAHA bros. How many Kennedy supporters actually voted for Trump is unclear, but Hutt and others I spoke with believe that Trump’s victory is partially on account of the RFK Jr. brigade showing up. “He got behind them, and he got elected,” Hutt said of Trump.

Kennedy’s acolytes are elated that he will have such a prominent position in the administration. In my conversations with former Kennedy volunteers and others in his orbit this week, I heard some skepticism as to whether he’ll actually be able to accomplish a revolution inside a sprawling government bureaucracy. But for now, Kennedy’s champions are hopeful that he’ll catalyze policy changes that would lead to a “healthier” society—even if they don’t all agree on what that means.

In late September, at a festival of “free thinkers” in Washington, D.C., where RFK Jr. was the star attraction, Mike Patton, a former campaign volunteer who lives in Florida, told me he was unsure about whether he could bring himself to vote for Trump after all the work he’d done for Kennedy.

This week, Patton told me that, in the end, he and his wife each wrote in Kennedy’s name on their ballot. He is happy that Kennedy is ascending to a place of power, and excited that Trump has promised to give Kennedy authority over health matters, but he’s dismayed that Trump apparently wants to keep him away from areas involving fossil fuels and renewable energy. Patton isn’t sure what Kennedy might be able to accomplish within Trump’s administration. The idea of fighting all manner of chronic diseases with cleaner food and water is a pillar of the MAHA movement. But this will be an uphill battle. “Even when he was campaigning, he was saying he was going to make a drastic reduction in chronic disease in his four years, and I can’t wrap my head around how you can make a measurable difference [that quickly],” Patton told me. “But he seems confident, and Bobby seemed confident before. So, pop some popcorn.”

Another Kennedy supporter, Jennifer Swayne, who served as his campaign’s Florida volunteer coordinator, told me she somewhat reluctantly voted for Trump. Swayne is the mother of a child with autism, and she believes that mothers like herself are searching for answers—that’s partly what drew her to Kennedy. “We want to know what's causing this,” she said of autism. “We want to prevent other moms from having to go through this.” She said she would define success for Kennedy’s HHS tenure as removing “dangerous products off the market” and holding drug manufacturers accountable for adverse effects and chemical dependency.

[Yasmin Tayag: ‘Make America healthy again’ sounds good until you start asking questions]

When I asked Hutt how he’d gauge Kennedy’s success, he had a range of ideas. “The amount of money flowing through government into corporations would be dramatically reduced. Government would be out of a lot of things, like health care. We would take the middleman out of a lot of things. We would have government agencies whose sole purpose is to publish and report facts and numbers in ways that educate the American people, not to convince them one way or the other of something,” he said. He envisioned Kennedy ushering in an era of more family farms, of citizens gardening and growing their own food. “I guess that's really what it looks like: sort of a health revolution, in a sense,” he said. “Nobody’s ever asked me that question before.”

In announcing the nomination, Trump echoed Kennedy’s core campaign messaging: “Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health.” Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation and one of the key people behind Project 2025, said in a statement that Kennedy’s nomination “sends a clear message to our failed public health establishment,” and that under Trump and Kennedy, “Americans will be in control of their health, not the commissars of three-letter health agencies.”

Many questions surround the HHS nomination, none more significant than whether Kennedy would use his authority to block or recall certain vaccines. Kennedy has spent years sowing doubt about their safety. In the early 2000s, he helped popularize the unproven theory of a link between vaccines and autism. More recently, he was an influential opponent of the COVID vaccines and accompanying mandates. Now he’s poised to inform drug policy at the highest level.

Kennedy’s spokesperson did not respond to my request for comment last night as to whether, as HHS secretary, RFK Jr. would move to outlaw any existing vaccines, and referred me to his victory-lap post on X, which did not mention the topic. Tony Lyons, who founded a different Kennedy super PAC, American Values 2024, said in a text message: “Bobby has said very clearly that he’s not going to take away anyone’s vaccines.” If, hypothetically, we faced another pandemic during Trump’s second term, I asked Lyons, would Kennedy stand in the way of a vaccine-development project such as Operation Warp Speed? Lyons didn’t offer a clear answer. “[Kennedy] believes in robust, transparent and independent science, rather than corporate science propped up by censorship and propaganda,” he wrote.

In my conversations with Kennedy’s supporters, I heard a lot about “medical freedom” and “personal choice,” but no one mentioned the word ban. Kennedy stiff-arms the “anti-vax” label, and his allies steadfastly maintain that he’ll use his position to scrutinize vaccine science—but not to institute a vaccine moratorium for the greater population.

[Benjamin Mazer: The sanewashing of RFK Jr.]

Perhaps the clearest way to understand Kennedy’s HHS aim is to listen to his musings on “corporate capture”: the idea that government agencies are overly influenced by the companies within the industries they’re supposed to be regulating. This is a long-standing liberal complaint, which Kennedy has built up to the status of a conspiracy theory. (Anthony Fauci, for instance, has not personally profited off of vaccines, as Kennedy has claimed.) His top-line goal is to sever the relationships between corporations and the federal government, but he has yet to explicitly state how he’ll do that. Reforming fast food may be his biggest source of tension with Trump. The future 47th president didn’t just serve fries at a (closed) McDonald’s as a campaign stunt; he seems to genuinely love Mickey D’s, while Kennedy sees it as a scourge—the antithesis of MAHA. But that’s just one company. Hutt conceded that his team faces a challenge in persuading senators from agricultural-heavy states to support the sort of reforms Kennedy is promising: fewer food chemicals, an emphasis on regenerative soil.

And some of what Kennedy speaks of accomplishing is well beyond his reach. For instance, he has called for removing fluoride from our drinking water—something even Republican dentists oppose. But such a change could occur only at the local level, not the federal level. In New York City, for example, Mayor Eric Adams has said he will follow the fluoridation recommendations of city and state health departments.

As Trump prepares to take office again, Kennedy remains a confounding presence: He’s a dreamer, but he’s destructive. Kennedy was never going to win the White House, but he’s now, at last, on his way to Washington. And we all have to live with it.

In his 2023 Netflix comedy special, Selective Outrage, Chris Rock identified one of the core contradictions of the social-justice era: “Everybody’s full of shit,” Rock said, including in the category of “everybody” people who type “woke” tweets “on a phone made by child slaves.”

I was reminded of that acerbic routine while reading Musa al-Gharbi’s new book, We Have Never Been Woke. Al-Gharbi, a 41-year-old sociologist at Stony Brook University, opens with the political disillusionment he experienced when he moved from Arizona to New York. He was immediately struck by the “racialized caste system” that everyone in the big liberal city seems to take “as natural”: “You have disposable servants who will clean your house, watch your kids, walk your dogs, deliver prepared meals to you.” At the push of a button, people—mostly hugely underpaid immigrants and people of color—will do your shopping and drive you wherever you want to go.

He contrasts that with the “podunk” working-class environment he’d left behind, where “the person buying a pair of shoes and the person selling them are likely to be the same race—white—and the socioeconomic gaps between the buyer and the seller are likely to be much smaller.” He continues: “Even the most sexist or bigoted rich white person in many other contexts wouldn’t be able to exploit women and minorities at the level the typical liberal professional in a city like Seattle, San Francisco, or Chicago does in their day-to-day lives. The infrastructure simply isn’t there.” The Americans who take the most advantage of exploited workers, he argues, are the same Democratic-voting professionals in progressive bastions who most “conspicuously lament inequality.”

[Read: The blindness of elites]

Musa sees the reelection of Donald Trump as a reflection of Americans’ resentment toward elites and the “rapid shift in discourse and norms around ‘identity’ issues” that he refers to as the “Great Awokening.” To understand what’s happening to American politics, he told me, we shouldn’t look to the particulars of the election—“say, the attributes of Harris, how she ran her campaign, inflation worries, and so on,” but rather to this broader backlash. All of the signs were there for elites to see if only they’d bothered to look.

One question We Have Never Been Woke sets out to answer is why elites are so very blind, including to their own hypocrisy. The answer al-Gharbi proposes is at once devastatingly simple yet reaffirmed everywhere one turns: Fooled by superficial markers of their own identity differences—racial, sexual, and otherwise—elites fail to see themselves for what they truly are.

“When people say things about elites, they usually focus their attention on cisgender heterosexual white men” who are “able-bodied and neurotypical,” al-Gharbi told me, in one of our conversations this fall. Most elites are white, of course, but far from all. And elites today, he added, also “increasingly identify as something like disabled or neurodivergent, LGBTQ.” If you “exclude all of those people from analysis, then you’re just left with this really tiny and misleading picture of who the elites are, who benefits from the social order, how they benefit.”

Sociologists who have studied nonwhite elites in the past have tended to analyze them mainly in the contexts of the marginalized groups from which they came. E. Franklin Frazier’s 1955 classic, Black Bourgeoisie, for example, spotlighted the hypocrisy and alienation of relatively prosperous Black Americans who found themselves doubly estranged: from the white upper classes they emulated as well as from the Black communities they’d left behind. By analyzing nonwhites and other minorities as elites among their peers, al-Gharbi is doing something different. “Elites from other groups are often passed over in silence or are explicitly exempted from critique (and even celebrated!),” he writes. And yet, “behaviors, lifestyles, and relationships that are exploitative, condescending, or exclusionary do not somehow become morally noble or neutral when performed by members of historically marginalized or disadvantaged groups.”

When al-Gharbi uses the word elite, he is talking about the group to which he belongs: the “symbolic capitalists”—broadly speaking, the various winners of the knowledge economy who do not work with their hands and who produce and manipulate “data, rhetoric, social perceptions and relations, organizational structures and operations, art and entertainment, traditions and innovations.” These are the people who set the country’s norms through their dominance of the “symbolic economy,” which consists of media, academic, cultural, technological, legal, nonprofit, consulting, and financial institutions.  

Although symbolic capitalists are not exactly the same as capitalist capitalists, or the rest of the upper class that does not rely on income, neither are they—as graduate students at Columbia and Yale can be so eager to suggest—“the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged.” The theorist Richard Florida has written about a group he calls the “creative class,” which represents 30 percent of the total U.S. workforce, and which overlaps significantly with al-Gharbi’s symbolic capitalists. Using survey data from 2017, Florida calculated that members of that creative class earned twice as much over the course of the year as members of the working class—an average of $82,333 versus $41,776, respectively.

Symbolic capitalists aren’t a monolith, but it is no secret that their ruling ideology is the constellation of views and attitudes that have come to be known as “wokeness,” which al-Gharbi defines as beliefs about social justice that “inform how mainstream symbolic capitalists understand and pursue their interests—creating highly novel forms of competition and legitimation.”

Al-Gharbi’s own path is emblematic of the randomness and possibility of membership in this class. The son of military families on both sides, one Black and one white, he attended community college for six years, “taking classes off and on while working,” he told me. There he was lucky to meet a talented professor, who “basically took me under his wing and helped me do something different,” al-Gharbi said. Together, they focused on private lessons in Latin, philosophy, and classics—subjects not always emphasized in community college.

Around that time he was also going on what he calls “this whole religious journey”: “I initially tried to be a Catholic priest, and then I became an atheist for a while, but I had this problem. I rationally convinced myself that religion was bullshit and there is no God, but I couldn’t make myself feel it.” Then he read the Quran and “became convinced that it was a prophetic work. And so I was like, Well, if I believe that Muhammad is a prophet and I believe in God, that’s the two big things. So maybe I am a Muslim.” Soon after, he changed his name. Then, just when he was getting ready to transfer out of community college, his twin brother, Christian, was killed on deployment in Afghanistan. He chose to go somewhere close to his grieving family, the University of Arizona, to finish his degree in Near-Eastern studies and philosophy.

The same dispassionate analysis that he applies to his own life’s progress he brings to bear on America’s trends, especially the Great Awokening. He traces that widespread and sudden movement in attitudes not to the death of Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown, nor to Black Lives Matter or the #MeToo movement, nor to the election of Donald Trump, but to September 2011 and the Occupy Wall Street movement that emerged from the ashes of the financial crisis.

“In reality, Occupy was not class oriented,” he argues. By focusing its critique on the top 1 percent of households, which were overwhelmingly white, and ignoring the immense privilege of the more diverse symbolic capitalists just beneath them, the movement, “if anything, helped obscure important class differences and the actual causes of social stratification.” This paved the way for “elites who hail from historically underrepresented populations … to exempt themselves from responsibility for social problems and try to deflect blame onto others.”

[Read: The 9.9 percent is the new American aristocracy]

Al-Gharbi is neither an adherent of wokeism nor an anti-woke scold. He would like to both stem the progressive excesses of the summer of 2020, a moment when white liberals “tended to perceive much more racism against minorities than most minorities, themselves, reported experiencing,” and see substantive social justice be achieved for everyone, irrespective of whether they hail from a historically disadvantaged identity group or not. The first step, he argues, is to dispel the notion that the Great Awokening was “some kind of unprecedented new thing.”

Awokenings, in al-Gharbi’s telling, are struggles for power and status in which symbolic capitalists, often instinctively and even subconsciously, leverage social-justice discourse not on behalf of the marginalized but in service of their own labor security, political influence, and social prestige. He does not see this as inherently nefarious—indeed, like Tocqueville and many others before him, he recognizes that motivated self-interest can be the most powerful engine for the common good. Al-Gharbi argues that our current Awokening, which peaked in 2021 and is now winding down, is really the fourth such movement in the history of the United States.

The first coincided with the Great Depression, when suddenly “many who had taken for granted a position among the elite, who had felt more or less entitled to a secure, respected, and well-paying professional job, found themselves facing deeply uncertain futures.”

The next would take place in the 1960s, once the radicals of the ’30s were firmly ensconced within the bourgeoisie. “The driver was not the Vietnam War itself,” al-Gharbi stresses. That had been going on for years without protest. Nor was the impetus the civil-rights movement, gay liberation, women’s liberation, or any such cause. “Instead, middle-class students became radical precisely when their plans to leave the fighting to minorities and the poor by enrolling in college and waiting things out began to fall through,” he argues. “It was at that point that college students suddenly embraced anti-war activism, the Black Power movement, feminism, postcolonial struggles, gay rights, and environmentalism in immense numbers,” appropriating those causes for their own gain.

If this sounds familiar, it should. The third Awokening was smaller and shorter than the others, stretching from the late ’80s to the early ’90s, and repurposing and popularizing the Marxist term political correctness. Its main legacy was to set the stage for the fourth—and present—Awokening, which has been fueled by what the scholar Peter Turchin has termed “elite overproduction”: Quite simply, America creates too many highly educated, highly aspirational young people, and not enough high-status, well-paid jobs for them to do. The result, al-Gharbi writes, is that “frustrated symbolic capitalists and elite aspirants [seek] to indict the system that failed them—and also the elites that did manage to flourish—by attempting to align themselves with the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged.” It is one of the better and more concise descriptions of the so-called cancel culture that has defined and bedeviled the past decade of American institutional life. (As Hannah Arendt observed in The Origins of Totalitarianism, political purges often serve as jobs programs.)  

The book is a necessary corrective to the hackneyed discourse around wealth and privilege that has obtained since 2008. At the same time, al-Gharbi’s focus on symbolic capitalists leaves many levers of power unexamined. Whenever I’m in the company of capitalist capitalists, I’m reminded of the stark limitations of the symbolic variety. Think of how easily Elon Musk purchased and then destroyed that vanity fair of knowledge workers formerly known as Twitter. While some self-important clusters of them disbanded to Threads or Bluesky to post their complaints, Musk helped Trump win the election. His PAC donated $200 million to the campaign, while Musk served as Trump’s hype man at rallies and on X. Trump has since announced that Musk will be part of the administration itself, co-leading the ominously named Department of Government Efficiency.

Al-Gharbi’s four Great Awokenings framework can sometimes feel too neat. In a review of We Have Never Been Woke in The Wall Street Journal, Jonathan Marks points out a small error in the book. Al-Gharbi relies on research by Richard Freeman to prove that a bust in the labor market for college graduates ignited the second Awokening. But al-Gharbi gets the date wrong: “Freeman’s comparison isn’t between 1958 and 1974. It’s between 1968 and 1974”—too late, Marks argued, to explain what al-Gharbi wants it to explain. (When I asked al-Gharbi about this, he acknowledged the mistake on the date but insisted the point still held: “The thing that precipitated the massive unrest in the 1960s was the changing of draft laws in 1965,” he said. “A subsequent financial crisis made it tough for elites to get jobs, ramping things up further.” He argued it was all the same crisis: an expanding elite “growing concerned that the lives and livelihoods they’d taken for granted are threatened and may, in fact, be out of reach.”)

Despite such quibbles, al-Gharbi’s framework remains a powerful one. By contrasting these periods, al-Gharbi stressed to me, we can not only understand what is happening now but also get a sense of the shape of wokenesses to come. As he sees it, “the way the conversation often unfolds is just basically saying wokeness is puritanism or religion,” he explained. “They think Puritanism sucks, or religion sucks,” he continued. But just saying that “wokeness is bad” is not “super useful.”

Indeed, one of the primary reasons such anti-woke reactions feel so unsatisfactory is that wokeness, not always but consistently, stems from the basic recognition of large-scale problems that really do exist. Occupy Wall Street addressed the staggering rise of inequality in 21st-century American life; Black Lives Matter emerged in response to a spate of reprehensible police and vigilante killings that rightfully shocked the nation’s conscience; #MeToo articulated an ambient sexism that degraded women’s professional lives and made us consider subtler forms of exploitation and abuse. The self-dealing, overreach, and folly that each of these movements begat does not absolve the injustices they emerged to address. On the contrary, they make it that much more urgent to deal effectively with these ills.

[Musa al-Gharbi: Police punish the ‘good apples’]

Any critique of progressive illiberalism that positions the latter as unprecedented or monocausal—downstream of the Civil Rights Act, as some conservatives like to argue—is bound not only to misdiagnose the problem but to produce ineffective or actively counterproductive solutions to it as well. Wokeness is, for al-Gharbi, simply the way in which a specific substratum of elites “engage in power struggles and struggles for status,” he said. “Repealing the Civil Rights Act or dismantling DEI or rolling back Title IX and all of that will not really eliminate wokeness.”

Neither will insisting that its adherents must necessarily operate from a place of bad faith. In fact, al-Gharbi believes it is the very sincerity of their belief in social justice that keeps symbolic capitalists from understanding their own behavior, and the counterproductive social role they often play. “It’s absolutely possible for someone to sincerely believe something,” al-Gharbi stressed, “but also use it in this instrumental way.”

Having been born into one minority group and converted to another as an adult, al-Gharbi has himself accrued academic pedigree and risen to prominence, in no small part, by critiquing his contemporaries who flourished during the last Great Awokening. He is attempting to outflank them, too, aligning himself even more fully with the have-nots. Yet his work is permeated by a refreshing awareness of these facts. “A core argument of this book is that wokeness has become a key source of cultural capital among contemporary elites—especially among symbolic capitalists,” he concedes. “I am, myself, a symbolic capitalist.”

The educated knowledge workers who populate the Democratic Party need more of this kind of clarity and introspection. Consider recent reports that the Harris campaign declined to appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast in part out of concerns that it would upset progressive staffers, who fussed over language and minuscule infractions while the country lurched toward authoritarianism.

Al-Gharbi’s book’s title is drawn from Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, which famously argued for a “symmetrical anthropology” that would allow researchers to turn the lens of inquiry upon themselves, subjecting modern man to the same level of analytical rigor that his “primitive” and premodern counterparts received. What is crucial, al-Gharbi insists, “is not what’s in people’s hearts and minds.” Rather the question must always be: “How is society arranged?” To understand the inequality that plagues us—and then to actually do something about it—we are going to have to factor in ourselves, our allies, and our preferred narratives too. Until that day, as the saying about communism goes, real wokeness has never even been tried.

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

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

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

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

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Music]

Demsas: Tim, welcome to the show.

Tim Miller: Hey Jerusalem. What’s happening?

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

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

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

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

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

Demsas: [Laughs.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Demsas: Yeah.

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

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

[Music]

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

[Break]

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

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

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

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

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

Demsas: [Laughs.]

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

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

Demsas: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Tim, always our last and final question.

Miller: Okay.

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

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

Demsas: Idea could be good.

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

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

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

Changing times: not good.

Demsas: Four hundred electoral votes for whoever does this.

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

Demsas: Oh, yeah.

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

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

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

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

Demsas: Yeah, exactly.

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

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

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

Demsas: [Laughs.]

Miller: I’m just joking.

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

Miller: Thank you, Jerusalem.

[Music]

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

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

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

One of the mysteries of this election is how the Democrats approached polling day with a set of policies on gender identity that they were neither proud to champion—nor prepared to disown.

Although most Americans agree that transgender people should not face discrimination in housing and employment, there is nowhere near the same level of support for allowing transgender women to compete in women’s sports—which is why Donald Trump kept bringing up the issue. His campaign also barraged swing-state voters and sports fans with ads reminding them that Kamala Harris had previously supported taxpayer-funded gender-reassignment surgery for prisoners. The commercials were effective: The New York Times reported that Future Forward, a pro-Harris super PAC, found that one ad “shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it.” The Harris campaign mostly avoided the subject.

Since the election, reports of dissent from this strategy have begun to trickle out. Bill Clinton reportedly raised the alarm about letting the attacks go unanswered, but was ignored. After Harris’s loss, Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts went on the record with his concerns. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that,” he told the Times. The recriminations go as far as the White House, where allies of Joe Biden told my colleague Franklin Foer that the current president would have countered Trump’s ads more aggressively, and “clearly rejected the idea of trans women competing in women’s sports.”

One problem: Biden’s administration has long pushed the new orthodoxy on gender, without ever really explaining to the American people why it matters—or, more crucially, what it actually involves. His officials have advocated for removing lower age limits for gender surgeries for minors, and in January 2022, his nominee for the Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson, refused to define the word woman, telling Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, “I’m not a biologist.”

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: What the left keeps getting wrong]

On sports—an issue seized on by the Trump campaign—Biden’s White House has consistently prioritized gender identity over sex. Last year, the Department of Education proposed regulations establishing “that policies violate Title IX when they categorically ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity just because of who they are.” Schools were, however, allowed to limit participation in specific situations. (In April, with the election looming, this part of the Title IX revision was put on hold.) Harris went into the campaign tied to the Biden administration’s positions, and did not have the courage, or strategic sense, to reject them publicly. Nor did she defend them.  

The fundamental issue is that athletes who have gone through male puberty are typically stronger and faster than biological females. Rather than contend with that fact, many on the left have retreated to a comfort zone of claiming that opposition to trans women in women’s sports is driven principally by transphobia. But it isn’t: When trans men or nonbinary people who were born female have competed in women’s sports against other biological females, no one has objected. The same season that Lia Thomas, a trans woman, caused controversy by swimming in the women’s division, a trans man named Iszac Henig did so without any protests. (He was not taking testosterone and so did not have an unfair advantage.) Yet even talking about this issue in language that regular Americans can understand is difficult: On CNN Friday, when the conservative political strategist Shermichael Singleton said that “there are a lot of families out there who don’t believe that boys should play girls’ sports,” he was immediately shouted down by another panelist, Jay Michaelson, who said that the word boy was a “slur,” and he “was not going to listen to transphobia at this table.” The moderator, Abby Phillips, also rebuked Singleton, telling him to “talk about this in a way that is respectful.”

A few Democrats, such as Colin Allred, a Senate candidate in Texas, attempted to counter Republicans’ ads by forcefully supporting women’s right to compete in single-sex sports—and not only lost their races anyway, but were attacked from the left for doing so. In states such as Texas and Missouri, the political right is surveilling and threatening to prosecute parents whose children seek medical treatments for gender dysphoria, or restricting transgender adults’ access to Medicaid. In this climate, activists believe, the Democrats should not further jeopardize the rights of a vulnerable minority by legitimizing voters’ concerns. “Please do not blame trans issues or trans people for why we lost,” Sam Alleman, the Harris campaign’s LBGTQ-engagement director, wrote on X. “Trans folks have been and are going to be a primary target of Project 2025 and need us to have their backs now more than ever.”

During the race, many journalists wrote about the ubiquity—and the grimness—of the Trump ads on trans issues, notably Semafor’s David Weigel. But at the time, I was surprised how dismissive many commentators were about their potential effect, given the enormous sums of money involved. My theory was that these ads tapped into a larger concern about Democrats: that they were elitists who ruled by fiat, declined to defend their unpopular positions, and treated skeptics as bigots. Gender might not have been high on voters’ list of concerns, but immigration and the border were—and all the same criticisms of Democratic messaging apply to those subjects, too.

Not wishing to engage in a losing issue, Harris eventually noted blandly that the Democrats were following the law on providing medical care to inmates, as Trump had done during his own time in office. On the integrity of women’s sports, she said nothing.

[Read: Why Biden’s team thinks Harris lost]

How did we get here? At the end of Barack Obama’s second term, gay marriage was extended to all 50 states, an achievement for which LGBTQ groups had spent decades campaigning. In 2020, the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County found that, in the words of conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, “an employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law.” Those advances meant that activist organizations, with large staffs and existing donor networks, had to go looking for the next big progressive cause. Since Trump came to power, they have stayed relevant and well funded by taking maximalist positions on gender—partly in reaction to divisive red-state laws, such as complete bans on gender medicine for minors. The ACLU, GLAAD, the Human Rights Campaign, and other similar groups have done so safe in the knowledge that they answer to their (mostly wealthy, well-educated) donors, rather than a more diverse and skeptical electorate. “The fundamental lesson I hope Dem politicians take from this election is that they should not adopt positions unless they can defend them, honestly, in a one-on-one conversation with the median American voter, who is a white, non-college 50-yr-old living in a small-city suburb,” the author (and Atlantic contributing writer) James Surowiecki argued last week on X.

Even now, though, many Democrats are reluctant to discuss the party’s positions on trans issues. The day after Moulton made his comments, his campaign manager resigned in protest, and the Massachusetts state-party chair weighed in to say that they “do not represent the broad view of our party.” But Moulton did not back down, saying in a statement that although he had been accused of failing “the unspoken Democratic Party purity test,” he was committed to defending the rights of all Americans. “We did not lose the 2024 election because of any trans person or issue. We lost, in part, because we shame and belittle too many opinions held by too many voters and that needs to stop.”

Gilberto Hinojosa, the chair of the Texas Democrats, faced a similar backlash. He initially told reporters, “There’s certain things that we just go too far on, that a big bulk of our population does not support,” but he quickly walked back the comments. “I extend my sincerest apologies to those I hurt with my comments today,” Hinojosa said. “In frustration over the GOP’s lies to incite hate for trans communities, I failed to communicate my thoughts with care and clarity.” (On Friday, he resigned, citing the party’s “devastating” election results in the state.)

The tragedy of this subject is that compromise positions are available that would please most voters, and would stop a wider backlash against gender nonconformity that manifests as punitive laws in red states. America is a more open-minded country than its toughest critics believe—the latest research shows that about as many people believe that society has not gone far enough in accepting trans people as think that it has gone too far. Delaware has just elected the first transgender member of Congress, Sarah McBride. But most voters think that biological sex is real, and that it matters in law and policy. Instructing them to believe otherwise, and not to ask any questions, is a doomed strategy. By shedding their most extreme positions, the Democrats will be better placed to defend transgender Americans who want to live their lives in peace.

X has always had a Nazi problem. I’ve covered the site, formerly known as Twitter, for more than a decade and reported extensively on its harassment problems, its verification (and then de-verification) of a white nationalist, and the glut of anti-Semitic hatred that roiled the platform in 2016.

But something is different today. Heaps of unfiltered posts that plainly celebrate racism, anti-Semitism, and outright Nazism are easily accessible and possibly even promoted by the site’s algorithms. All the while, Elon Musk—a far-right activist and the site’s owner, who is campaigning for and giving away millions to help elect Donald Trump—amplifies horrendous conspiracy theories about voter fraud, migrants run amok, and the idea that Jewish people hate white people. Twitter was always bad if you knew where to look, but because of Musk, X is far worse. (X and Musk did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)

It takes little effort to find neo-Nazi accounts that have built up substantial audiences on X. “Thank you all for 7K,” one white-nationalist meme account posted on October 17, complete with a heil-Hitler emoji reference. One week later, the account, which mostly posts old clips of Hitler speeches and content about how “Hitler was right,” celebrated 14,000 followers. One post, a black-and-white video of Nazis goose-stepping, has more than 187,000 views. Another racist and anti-Semitic video about Jewish women and Black men—clearly AI-generated—has more than 306,000 views. It was also posted in late October.

Many who remain on the platform have noticed X decaying even more than usual in recent months. “I’ve seen SO many seemingly unironic posts like this on Twitter recently this is getting insane,” one X user posted in response to a meme that the far-right influencer Stew Peters recently shared. It showed an image of Adolf Hitler holding a telephone with overlaid text reading, “Hello … 2024? Are you guys starting to get it yet?” Peters appended the commentary, “Yes. We’ve noticed.” The idea is simply that Hitler was right, and X users ate it up: As of this writing, the post has received about 67,000 likes, 10,000 reposts, and 11.4 million views. When Musk took over, in 2022, there were initial reports that hate speech (anti-Black and anti-Semitic slurs) was surging on the platform. By December of that year, one research group described the increase in hate speech as “unprecedented.” And it seems to only have gotten worse. There are far more blatant examples of racism now, even compared with a year ago. In September, the World Bank halted advertising on X after its promoted ads were showing up in the replies to pro-Nazi and white-nationalist content from accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers. Search queries such as Hitler was right return posts with tens of thousands of views—they’re indistinguishable from the poison once relegated to the worst sites on the internet, including 4chan, Gab, and Stormfront.

The hatred isn’t just coming from anonymous fringe posters either. Late last month, Clay Higgins, a Republican congressman from Louisiana, published a racist, threatening post about the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, saying they’re from the “nastiest country in the western hemisphere.” Then he issued an ultimatum: “All these thugs better get their mind right and their ass out of our country before January 20th,” he wrote in the post, referencing Inauguration Day. Higgins eventually deleted the post at the request of his House colleagues on both sides of the aisle but refused to apologize. “I can put up another controversial post tomorrow if you want me to. I mean, we do have freedom of speech. I’ll say what I want,” he told CNN later that day.

And although Higgins did eventually try to walk his initial post back, clarifying that he was really referring to Haitian gangs, the sentiment he shared with CNN is right. The lawmaker can put up another vile post maligning an entire country whenever he desires. Not because of his right to free speech—which exists to protect against government interference—but because of how Musk chooses to operate his platform. Despite the social network’s policy that prohibits “incitement of harassment,” X seemingly took no issue with Higgins’s racist post or its potential to cause real-world harm for Springfield residents. (The town has already closed and evacuated its schools twice because of bomb threats.) And why would X care? The platform, which reinstated thousands of banned accounts following Musk’s takeover, in 2022—accounts that belong to QAnon supporters, political hucksters, conspiracy theorists, and at least one bona fide neo-Nazi—is so inundated with bigoted memes, racist AI slop, and unspeakable slurs that Higgins’s post seemed almost measured by comparison. In the past, when Twitter seemed more interested in enforcing content-moderation standards, the lawmaker’s comments may have resulted in a ban or some other disciplinary response: On X, he found an eager, sympathetic audience willing to amplify his hateful message.

His deleted post is instructive, though, as a way to measure the degradation of X under Musk. The site is a political project run by a politically radicalized centibillionaire. The worthwhile parts of Twitter (real-time news, sports, culture, silly memes, spontaneous encounters with celebrity accounts) have been drowned out by hateful garbage. X is no longer a social-media site with a white-supremacy problem, but a white-supremacist site with a social-media problem.

Musk has certainly bent the social network to support his politics, which has recently involved joking on Tucker Carlson’s show (which streams on X) that “nobody is even bothering to try to kill Kamala” and repurposing the @america handle from an inactive user to turn it into a megaphone for his pro-Trump super PAC. Musk has also quite clearly reengineered the site so that users see him, and his tweets, whether or not they follow him.

When Musk announced his intent to purchase Twitter, in April 2022, the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein aptly noted that “Musk reveals what he wants Twitter to be by how he acts on it.” By this logic, it would seem that X is vying to be the official propaganda outlet not just for Trump generally but also for the “Great Replacement” theory, which states that there is a global plot to eradicate the white race and its culture through immigration. In just the past year, Musk has endorsed multiple posts about the conspiracy theory. In November 2023, in response to a user named @breakingbaht who accused Jews of supporting bringing “hordes of minorities” into the United States, Musk replied, “You have said the actual truth.” Musk’s post was viewed more than 8 million times.

[Read: Musk’s Twitter is the blueprint for a MAGA government]

Though Musk has publicly claimed that he doesn’t “subscribe” to the “Great Replacement” theory, he appears obsessed with the idea that Republican voters in America are under attack from immigrants. Last December, he posted a misleading graph suggesting that the number of immigrants arriving illegally was overtaking domestic birth rates. He has repeatedly referenced a supposed Democratic plot to “legalize vast numbers of illegals” and put an end to fair elections. He has falsely suggested that the Biden administration was “flying ‘asylum seekers’, who are fast-tracked to citizenship, directly into swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Arizona” and argued that, soon, “everywhere in America will be like the nightmare that is downtown San Francisco.” According to a recent Bloomberg analysis of 53,000 of Musk’s posts, the billionaire has posted more about immigration and voter fraud than any other topic (more than 1,300 posts in total), garnering roughly 10 billion views.

But Musk’s interests extend beyond the United States. This summer, during a period of unrest and rioting in the United Kingdom over a mass stabbing that killed three children, the centibillionaire used his account to suggest that a civil war there was “inevitable.” He also shared (and subsequently deleted) a conspiracy theory that the U.K. government was building detainment camps for people rioting against Muslims. Additionally, X was instrumental in spreading misinformation and fueling outrage among far-right, anti-immigration protesters.

In Springfield, Ohio, X played a similar role as a conduit for white supremacists and far-right extremists to fuel real-world harm. One of the groups taking credit for singling out Springfield’s Haitian community was Blood Tribe, a neo-Nazi group known for marching through city streets waving swastikas. Blood Tribe had been focused on the town for months, but not until prominent X accounts (including Musk’s, J. D. Vance’s, and Trump’s) seized on a Facebook post from the region did Springfield become a national target. “It is no coincidence that there was an online rumor mill ready to amplify any social media posts about Springfield because Blood Tribe has been targeting the town in an effort to stoke racial resentment against ‘subhuman’ Haitians,” the journalist Robert Tracinski wrote recently. Tracinski argues that social-media channels (like X) have been instrumental in transferring neo-Nazi propaganda into the public consciousness—all the way to the presidential-debate stage. He is right. Musk’s platform has become a political tool for stoking racial hatred online and translating it into harassment in the physical world.

The ability to drag fringe ideas and theories into mainstream political discourse has long been a hallmark of X, even back when it was known as Twitter. There’s always been a trade-off with the platform’s ability to narrow the distance between activists and people in positions of power. Social-justice movements such as the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter owe some of the success of their early organizing efforts to the platform.

Yet the website has also been one of the most reliable mainstream destinations on the internet to see Photoshopped images of public figures (or their family members) in gas chambers, or crude, racist cartoons of Jewish men. Now, under Musk’s stewardship, X seems to run in only one direction. The platform eschews healthy conversation. It abhors nuance, instead favoring constant escalation and engagement-baiting behavior. And it empowers movements that seek to enrage and divide. In April, an NBC News investigation found that “at least 150 paid ‘Premium’ subscriber X accounts and thousands of unpaid accounts have posted or amplified pro-Nazi content on X in recent months.” According to research from the extremism expert Colin Henry, since Musk’s purchase, there’s been a decline in anti-Semitic posts on 4chan’s infamous “anything goes” forum, and a simultaneous rise in posts targeting Jewish people on X.

X’s own transparency reports show that the social network has allowed hateful content to flourish on its site. In its last report before Musk’s acquisition, in just the second half of 2021, Twitter suspended about 105,000 of the more than 5 million accounts reported for hateful conduct. In the first half of 2024, according to X, the social network received more than 66 million hateful-conduct reports, but suspended just 2,361 accounts. It’s not a perfect comparison, as the way X reports and analyzes data has changed under Musk, but the company is clearly taking action far less frequently.

[Read: I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is]

Because X has made it more difficult for researchers to access data by switching to a paid plan that prices out many academics, it is now difficult to get a quantitative understanding of the platform’s degradation. The statistics that do exist are alarming. Research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that in just the first month of Musk’s ownership, anti–Black American slurs used on the platform increased by 202 percent. The Anti-Defamation League found that anti-Semitic tweets on the platform increased by 61 percent in just two weeks after Musk’s takeover. But much of the evidence is anecdotal. The Washington Post summed up a recent report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, noting that pro-Hitler content “reached the largest audiences on X [relative to other social-media platforms], where it was also most likely to be recommended via the site’s algorithm.” Since Musk took over, X has done the following:

Seemingly failed to block a misleading advertisement post purchased by Jason Köhne, a white nationalist with the handle @NoWhiteGuiltNWG. Seemingly failed to block an advertisement calling to reinstate the death penalty for gay people. Reportedly run ads on 20 racist and anti-Semitic hashtags, including #whitepower, despite Musk pledging that he would demonetize posts that included hate speech. (After NBC asked about these, X removed the ability for users to search for some of these hashtags.) Granted blue-check verification to an account with the N-word in its handle. (The account has since been suspended.) Allowed an account that praised Hitler to purchase a gold-check badge, which denotes an “official organization” and is typically used by brands such as Doritos and BlackRock. (This account has since been suspended.) Seemingly failed to take immediate action on 63 of 66 accounts flagged for disseminating AI-generated Nazi memes from 4chan. More than half of the posts were made by paid accounts with verified badges, according to research by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate.

None of this is accidental. The output of a platform tells you what it is designed to do: In X’s case, all of this is proof of a system engineered to give voice to hateful ideas and reward those who espouse them. If one is to judge X by its main exports, then X, as it exists now under Musk, is a white-supremacist website.

You might scoff at this notion, especially if you, like me, have spent nearly two decades willingly logged on to the site, or if you, like me, have had your professional life influenced in surprising, occasionally delightful ways by the platform. Even now, I can scroll through the site’s algorithmic pond scum and find things worth saving—interesting commentary, breaking news, posts and observations that make me laugh. But these exceptional morsels are what make the platform so insidious, in part because they give cover to the true political project that X now represents and empowers.

As I was preparing to write this story, I visited some of the most vile corners of the internet. I’ve monitored these spaces for years, and yet this time, I was struck by how little distance there was between them and what X has become. It is impossible to ignore: The difference between X and a known hateful site such as Gab are people like myself. The majority of users are no doubt creators, businesses, journalists, celebrities, political junkies, sports fans, and other perfectly normal people who hold their nose and cling to the site. We are the human shield of respectability that keeps Musk’s disastrous $44 billion investment from being little more than an algorithmically powered Stormfront.

The justifications—the lure of the community, the (now-limited) ability to bear witness to news in real time, and of the reach of one’s audience of followers—feel particularly weak today. X’s cultural impact is still real, but its promotional use is nonexistent. (A recent post linking to a story of mine generated 289,000 impressions and 12,900 interactions, but only 948 link clicks—a click rate of roughly 0.00328027682 percent.) NPR, which left the platform in April 2023, reported almost negligible declines in traffic referrals after abandoning the site.

Continuing to post on X has been indefensible for some time. But now, more than ever, there is no good justification for adding one’s name to X’s list of active users. To leave the platform, some have argued, is to cede an important ideological battleground to the right. I’ve been sympathetic to this line of thinking, but the battle, on this particular platform, is lost. As long as Musk owns the site, its architecture will favor his political allies. If you see posting to X as a fight, then know it is not a fair one. For example: In October, Musk shared a fake screenshot of an Atlantic article, manipulated to show a fake headline—his post, which he never deleted, garnered more than 18 million views. The Atlantic’s X post debunking Musk’s claim received just 28,000 views. Musk is unfathomably rich. He’s used that money to purchase a platform, take it private, and effectively turn it into a megaphone for the world’s loudest racists. Now he’s attempting to use it to elect a corrupt, election-denying felon to the presidency.

To stay on X is not an explicit endorsement of this behavior, but it does help enable it. I’m not at all suggesting—as Musk has previously alleged—that the site be shut down or that Musk should be silenced. But there’s no need to stick around and listen. Why allow Musk to appear even slightly more credible by lending our names, our brands, and our movements to a platform that makes the world more dangerous for real people? To my dismay, I’ve hid from these questions for too long. Now that I’ve confronted them, I have no good answers.

In the final weeks of Kamala Harris’s campaign for president, her supporters have taken on a harrowing task: sorting out the thorny entanglements of politics and marriage. In late September, NBC reported that a viral trend of stochastic vote whipping saw women affixing stickers and sticky notes to places other women are likely to encounter privately: women’s restrooms, locker rooms, and the backs of tampon boxes. They all contained an appeal for the Harris-Walz ticket: “Woman to woman,” one read: “No one sees your vote at the polls! Vote for the women and girls you love!” Intimate little letters, meant to be read in secret with the promise of secrecy. Unlike typical campaign-season material, they arrive as whispers between friends.

But a new pro-Harris ad recently took the private movement public. Last month, the progressive evangelical group Vote Common Good produced a Harris-Walz video featuring Julia Roberts as narrator, saying: “In the one place in America where women still have a right to choose, you can vote any way you want and no one will ever know.” A woman is seen parting from her male partner to mark her ballot—and over the partition locks eyes with a second woman, about her age, who sends her a knowing smile. The first woman casts her vote for Harris and then reunites with her husband (a conservative, we gather, based on his patriotic hat) and assures him she made the right choice. She shares a private glance with the second woman as the two pat on their I Voted stickers. Last week, the Lincoln Project, a conservative anti-Trump PAC, tweeted a video along the same lines: Canny wife assures husband she’ll vote for Donald Trump, then catches the eye of a young woman voting for Harris and does the same.  

These invitations to quiet rebellion tend to lack a substantive pitch, though some of the grassroots messages allude to abortion rights. The point seems to be not persuading conservative women, but rather providing permission to women who are privately liberal to vote for Harris. In this micro-campaign, Democrats are guessing that some nominally conservative married women would vote for Harris so long as they were certain their vote would be kept secret. If they’re right, they have unearthed a new source of liberal votes formerly presumed lost to the left. But that’s a big if.

[Read: What the Kamala Harris doubters do not understand]

Conservatives have been predictably outraged by this narrative. “If I found out [my wife] was going to the voting booth and pulling the lever for Harris, that’s the same thing as having an affair,” the Fox host Jesse Watters seethed on air. “I think it’s so gross,” the right-wing activist and commentator Charlie Kirk told Megyn Kelly on her SiriusXM talk show. “I think it’s so nauseating where this wife is wearing the American hat, she’s coming in with her sweet husband who probably works his tail off to make sure that she can go and have a nice life and provide to the family, and then she lies to him saying, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m gonna vote for Trump,’ and then she votes for Kamala Harris as her little secret in the voting booth.” It is unsurprising that the same political faction obsessed with cuckoldry would see the ad through that particular lens. Watters and Kirk appear to have been provoked by the same themes: Implications of secrecy between spouses and domestic pluralism both undermine the right-wing preference for families as traditionally unified under the authority of a father. That, more than the specific candidates in play, seemed to account for much of the conservative backlash.  

The electoral prospects matter too, and both sides have the same interest in the votes of America’s tens of millions of married women. In this respect, conservatives have a historical advantage. A 2018 Pew Research Center survey of the 2016 electorate found that about half of validated voters (both men and women) were married, and that a majority of them—55 percent—supported Trump. After the 2020 presidential election, the American Enterprise Institute issued a report stating that 52 percent of married women had voted for Trump, compared with 56 percent of married men and 37 percent of unmarried women.

Again, what backers of Harris’s campaign seem to hope is that some of these married women are in fact quietly liberal, or at least liberal enough to vote for Harris against Trump. And there is a bit of evidence to that effect. A YouGov poll conducted at the end of October found that one in eight women have voted differently from their partners in secret. This is perhaps why CNN recently noted the rise of a Facebook group devoted to “wives of the deplorables,” who discuss their gradual alienation from their MAGA spouses. Prompted to describe how they came to oppose their husband’s politics in New York magazine, four women offered similar stories: Their marriage hadn’t been especially political in the beginning, but then their partner had been radicalized by right-wing media orbiting Trump. These anecdotes tease a broader phenomenon of women voters who find themselves at odds with their male partner.

The likelier scenario may be that women who have previously voted Republican are simply conservative. Marriage itself is associated with conservative politics. Right-leaning pundits speculate that a difference in values between the married and unmarried explains the gap. “We know that marriage is simply a higher priority for people with a more conservative worldview,” Peyton Roth and Brad Wilcox wrote for AEI, adding that “marriage may push men and women to the right.” An analysis of American and Australian voting patterns published in 2019 suggested that married white women lack a sense of “gender-linked fate,” or the notion that their fortunes are tied to those of their sex. The researchers pointed out that only 18 percent of married white women reported a sense of gender-linked fate, compared with 38 percent of single white women and 30 percent of divorced white women. “Women become more conservative and see themselves as less connected to other women over the duration of the marriage,” they concluded.

This micro-effort to get married women to support Harris is obviously  part of a much larger campaign for these voters. Whether this reaches dozens or thousands of women is unknowable, but in an election that could be decided by minuscule margins, a secret Harris-supporting wife is a reasonable target. Traditional matrimonial advice may hold that no secrets should exist between spouses, but perhaps the interests of democracy preempt the interests of domestic harmony. All is fair in love—and the voting booth.

Donald Trump’s presidency was mitigated by his ignorance, idleness, and vanity. Trump did not know how the office worked. He did not invest any effort to learn. He wasted much of his time watching daytime television.

Defeat in 2020—and Trump’s plot to overturn that defeat—gave him a purpose: vengeance on those who bested him.

A second Trump presidency will have a much clearer agenda than the first. No more James Mattis to restrain him, no more John Kelly to chide him, no more Rex Tillerson to call him a “fucking moron.” He will have only sycophants.

Trump has told the world his second-term plans.

He has vowed to round up and deport millions of foreign nationals. Because the removals will be slow—permissions have to be negotiated with the receiving governments, transportation booked, people forced aboard—Trump has spoken of building a national network of camps to hold the rounded-up immigrants. Deportation is a power of the presidency: Trump can indeed do all of this if he is determined to.

Trump has pledged huge increases in U.S. tariffs, not only on China but on friends and treaty partners, such as Mexico. Congress has historically delegated the president’s broad authority over trade. A restored President Trump will have the power to impose tariffs, and will also have the power to exempt industries and firms that bid for his favor.

Trump intends to shut down legal proceedings, state and federal, against himself. A friendly Supreme Court appears to grant him wide leeway to do so. He has promised to pardon people serving sentences for the attack on Congress on January 6, 2021. The president has the power to do that also. He has spoken of prosecuting people who donate to Democratic candidates and of retribution against media companies that criticize him. Although it’s uncertain how far the courts would let him succeed, Trump is seeking a stooge attorney general who will at least try to bring such prosecutions.

Trump ordered his allies in Congress to oppose further military aid to Ukraine and got his way for six deadly months. Trump chose as his running mate one of the GOP’s harshest critics of the Ukrainian cause. Trump boasts that he will end the fighting within weeks. That is code for forcing Ukraine to submit to Russia.

One of Trump’s former national security advisers, John Bolton, predicts that Trump would withdraw from NATO in a second term. Trump does not have to withdraw formally, however. NATO ultimately depends on the U.S. president’s commitment to upholding the treaty’s mutual-defense clause and assisting threatened NATO members. As president, all Trump has to do to kill NATO is repeat what he once said as a candidate: that unless they pay up, he won’t protect this or that ally from attack. No further action required; the deed is done.

Some Trump apologists put a gloss on his pro–Vladimir Putin instincts by arguing that abandoning Ukraine will somehow strengthen the U.S. against China. Really? China will be impressed by a United States that walked away from Ukraine’s successful war of self-defense against Russian aggression because the American president is infatuated with the Russian dictator?

Whatever theory Trump allies may confect, Trump himself made it clear in a July interview that Taiwan cannot count on him any more than Ukraine can. Trump conceives of the U.S. alliance system as a protection racket, not as an association of democracies. In his preelection interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan, Trump made the Mafia comparison explicit. He said of Taiwan and other allies: “They want us to protect, and they want protection. They don’t pay us money for the protection, you know? The mob makes you pay money, right?” A vote for Trump isn’t a vote for some Pacific-first strategy, however misconceived or addled. It’s a vote for international gangsterism. Trump feels most at home with dictators (including Xi Jinping, China’s president for life) and with client states, such as Saudi Arabia, that pay emoluments to him and to his family via their businesses.

Yet a second-term Trump will not travel a smooth path to autocracy at home and isolation from abroad. If Trump does return to the presidency, it will almost certainly occur after a third consecutive loss of the popular vote: by 3 million in 2016, 7 million in 2020, and who knows how many millions in 2024.

Since the end of the Cold War, a Republican candidate for president has won more votes than his Democratic counterpart exactly once, in 2004. Even so, the GOP has enjoyed three presidencies, and soon perhaps a fourth. Minority rule begins to look like not merely a feature of Republican administration, but actually a precondition for it. Trump Republicans may now insist, “We’re a republic, not a democracy.” But most Americans assumed that we were a democracy—and believe that, to the extent we’re not, we should be.

If a president who comes to office without a majority democratic mandate starts doing the radical things Trump wants to do—building detention camps, pardoning January 6 culprits, abandoning Ukraine—he’s going to find himself on the receiving end of some powerful opposition. A president hoisted into office by a glitch of the Electoral College cannot silence criticism by invoking his popular mandate. A president who has been convicted of felonies and who fires prosecutors in order to save himself from being convicted of even more is not well positioned to demand law and order.

Trump may forget, but his opponents will not, that he was the man who wrecked the country’s centuries-long record of a peaceful transition of power. That particular clock reset itself to zero in 2021. The American tradition is now shorter than those of Moldova and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, both of which have a record of peaceful transition of power stretching all the way back to 2019.

A second Trump administration will be even more of a snake pit of craziness, incompetence, and intrigue than the first was. Elon Musk will imagine himself to be the real power in the land: After all, he bought the presidency, didn’t he? Vice President J. D. Vance will scheme to shoulder aside an elderly Trump, whom he never respected. It’s amazing what a vice president can get done if he arrives at the office at six in the morning and the president doesn’t show up until nearly noon. The lower levels of the administration will see a nonstop guerrilla war between the opportunists who signed up with Trump for their own advantage and the genuine crackpots.

From the viewpoint of millions of Americans, a second Trump presidency would be the result of a foreign cabal’s exploitation of defects in the constitutional structure to impose un-American authoritarianism on an unwilling majority. It enrages pro-Trump America that anti-Trump America regards Trump and Vance as disloyal tools of Russian subversion—but we do, we have the evidence, and we have the numbers.

If Trump is elected again, world trade will contract under the squeeze of U.S. protectionism. Prices will jump for ordinary Americans. Farmers and other exporters will lose markets. Businesses will lose competitiveness as Trump tariffs raise the price of every input in the supply chain, including such basic commodities as steel and such advanced products as semiconductor chips.

As Americans quarrel over Trump’s extreme actions, the most prominent predators—Russia, China, and Iran—will prowl, seeking advantage for themselves in the U.S. turmoil. Ominously, Trump’s weakness may make great-power conflict more likely.

Putin, Xi, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un may imagine that because they can manipulate and outwit Trump, they can discount the United States entirely. China especially may misinterpret Trump’s dislike of allies as an invitation to grab Taiwan—only to trigger a U.S. reaction that may surprise China and Trump alike. Until such a desperate moment, however, former allies will look elsewhere for protection. As a French cabinet minister said, only days ago: “We cannot leave the security of Europe in the hands of the voters of Wisconsin every four years.”

Under a returned President Trump, the American century will come to a close, in the way darkly foreseen by a great 20th-century novel of Washington power, Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent, from 1959:

In his lifetime he had seen America rise and rise and rise, some sort of golden legend to her own people, some sort of impossible fantasy to others … rise and rise and rise—and then … the golden legend crumbled, overnight the fall began, the heart went out of it.

[McKay Coppins: This is not the end of America]

Trump’s ascent has driven many to wonder how U.S. politics became so polarized, so extreme. That question, so often repeated, is also profoundly misplaced. We all regularly encounter fellow Americans who hold views different from our own. Almost all of those encounters unfold with calm and civility.

The speech and behavior modeled by Trump are emulated by only his most fervent admirers, and even then only in safe spaces, such as on social media and at his rallies. The most pro-Trump employer in America would instantly fire any employee who talked about women, racial minorities, international partners, or people who lived in big cities the way that Trump does. An employee who told lies, shifted blame, exulted in violence, misappropriated other people’s property, blathered nonsense, or just wandered around vacantly as Trump does would be referred to mental-health professionals or reported to law enforcement.

Trump’s conduct is in fact so disturbing and offensive even to his supporters that they typically cope either by denying attested facts or by inventing fictional good deeds and falsely attributing them to him: secret acts of charity, empathy, or courtesy that never happened.

Trump’s political superpower has not been his ability to activate a small fan base. If that’s all he were able to do, he’d be no more a threat to American institutions than any of the other fanatics and oddballs who lurk on the edges of mainstream politics. Trump’s superpower has been his ability to leverage his sway over a cult following to capture control of one of the two great parties in U.S. politics. If all we had to worry about were the people who idolize Trump, we would not have much to worry about. Unfortunately, we also must worry about the people who see him as he is but choose to work through him anyway, in pursuit of their own goals.

For that reason, Trump’s rise has imposed a special responsibility upon those of us with backgrounds in conservative and Republican politics. He arose because he was enabled not just by people we knew but by people we also knew to despise him.

For that reason too, his rise has generated a fierce and determined internal refusal of a kind not seen before in presidential politics. “Never Trump” is both a label for the reaction of some of the most prominent Republicans, such as Mitt Romney and Dick Cheney, and a movement that has helped tip into the Democratic column congressional seats once held by George H. W. Bush, Newt Gingrich, Eric Cantor, and many other former party stalwarts. These did not use to be “swing seats” by any definition: Bush’s seat had been Republican-held for more than half a century until it went Democratic in 2018. Through the 2024 primaries, about one-fifth of Republicans voted against Trump to the very end, even after all of his opponents ended their campaigns.

Pro-Trump Republicans dismiss this internal refusal as unimportant. They also rage against the refusers as party traitors. I have felt that fury because I number among the refusers.

About two weeks ago, I received an email from a reader who demanded, not very politely, that I cease describing myself as a conservative if I did not support Trump’s return to the presidency:

I know a lot of you NeverTrumpers want to pretend otherwise, but the Trump presidency was a very conservative presidency, and a lot of policy objectives of the Conservative Movement were achieved in his presidency … There is never a conservative case for voting for a Democrat over a Republican due to the simple fact that in any given election (whether its federal or state or local), the Republican candidate is to the right of the Democratic candidate.

One lesson of the Trump years, however, is about how old concepts of “right” and “left” have fallen out of date in the Trump era. What was conservatism once? A politics of gratitude for America’s great constitutional traditions, a politics of free markets and free trade, a politics of American global leadership. This was the politics that excited me, as a very young man, to knock on doors for the Reagan-Bush ticket in the election of 1980.

Ronald Reagan liked to describe the United States as a “shining city on a hill.” As Trump closed his 2024 campaign, he derided the country as “the garbage can for the world.” In his first inaugural address, Reagan challenged the country “to believe in our capacity to perform great deeds.” He concluded: “And after all, why shouldn’t we believe that? We are Americans.” Trump instead condemns the United States as a “stupid country that’s run by stupid people.”

In 1987, Reagan traveled to Berlin, then still divided by the Iron Curtain, to urge the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” Three years later, Trump gave an interview to Playboy in which he condemned Gorbachev for not crushing dissent more harshly and praised the Chinese Communist Party for the murderous violence of Tiananmen Square:

When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength … Russia is out of control, and the leadership knows it. That’s my problem with Gorbachev. Not a firm enough hand.

Reagan saluted a common American identity bigger than party. In 1982, he honored the centenary of the birth of his great opposite number among 20th-century presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt:

Like the Founding Fathers before him, F.D.R. was an American giant, a leader who shaped, inspired, and led our people through perilous times. He meant many different things to many different people. He could reach out to men and women of diverse races and backgrounds and inspire them with new hope and new confidence in war and peace.

Forty-two years later, Donald Trump describes his Democratic adversaries, including the most recent Democratic speaker of the House, as enemies “from within.” Trump also mused about using the National Guard and the U.S. military against “the enemy within.” He has repeatedly spoken of using state power to retaliate against politicians and journalists. As president, he pressed his attorney general to prosecute his critics and perceived adversaries. Privately, he often spoke and speaks of arresting and executing opponents, including General Mark Milley, the most senior member of the military who incurred his displeasure. He has endorsed proposals to haul former Republican Representative Liz Cheney before a military tribunal to be punished for voting for his impeachment.

Even if Trump is only partly successful in crushing dissent, the authoritarian direction in which he wishes to lead the country is unmistakable. Since 2021, Trump has bent the Republican Party to his will even more radically now than he did as president. Republicans have made their peace with Trump’s actions on January 6. They wrote tariffs into their 2024 party platform. They let Trump plunder party funds for his own legal defense, and then, because they were broke, turned over their get-out-the-vote operation to Elon Musk’s personal super PAC. The Republican Party has lost its immunity to Trump’s authoritarianism.

Trump himself has only become more vengeful and bloodthirsty. He told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2021 about his response to two impeachments: “I became worse.” This personal instinct will guide the entire administration, and that is the meaning of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which functions as Trump’s first-year operating plan (in part because Project 2025 is the only plan Trump’s got).

If you are inclined to vote for Trump out of some attachment to a Reaganite idea of conservative Republicanism, think again. Your party, the party that stood for freedom against the Berlin Wall, has three times nominated a man who praised the massacre at Tiananmen Square.

Forty years is a long time in politics. The four decades from 1924 to 1964 saw the Democratic Party evolve from one that nominated a segregationist and refused to condemn the Ku Klux Klan to the party that wrote and implemented the Civil Rights Act. Over a similar interval, the Republican Party has rotated from being one of freedom and enterprise to one of authoritarianism and repression. Yet many inside the Republican world and outside—including my email correspondent—insist on pretending that nothing has changed.

A few weeks ago, a researcher released a report that tallied political contributions by almost 100,000 executives and corporate directors at almost 10,000 firms from 2001 to 2022. The tally showed a pronounced trend away from Republican candidates and conservative causes. When reported in the media, the headlines pronounced that “CEOs Are Moving Left.” Are they? Or are they instead recognizing that the party of Trump and Vance has become virtually the opposite of the party of Reagan and Bush?

Consider this example: In his 1991 State of the Union address, Bush discerned an “opportunity to fulfill the long-held promise of a new world order, where brutality will go unrewarded and aggression will meet collective resistance.” Campaigning this year, Vance appeared at the Turning Point USA convention alongside the far-right broadcaster and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who announced: “We’re bringing down the new world order!”

Trump is opposed by almost every member of his first-term national-security team, and by his own former vice president; he has the support of the anti-vax crank Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the propagandist for Russian imperialism Tulsi Gabbard. Something revolutionary has happened inside the Republican Party: If you placed your faith and loyalty in Reagan and Bush’s party of freedom, you need to accept that the party of Trump and Vance has rejected your ideals, discarded your heroes, defiled your most cherished political memories. This GOP is something new and different and ugly, and you owe it nothing.

[Read: The Democratic theory of winning with less]

“I believe in America.” Those words open a great American movie, The Godfather. Although, in the film, those words pulse with heavy irony—they are spoken by an undertaker to a gangster as they together plot an act of revenge against a bigoted failure of American justice—they also pulse with power. We can recognize that there is so much to doubt about America, yet we believe in it all the same.

In 1860, Americans voted on whether to remain one country or to split over slavery. In 1964, Americans voted on whether to defend equal rights before the law. So also will the election of 2024 turn on one ultimate question: whether to protect our constitutional democracy or submit to a presidency that wants to reorder the United States in such a way that it will become one of the world’s reactionary authoritarian regimes.

Some rationalizers for Trump want to deceive you that you face an unhappy choice between two equally difficult extremes. That is untrue. One choice, the Trump choice, deviates from the path of constitutional democracy toward a murky and sinister future. The other choice allows the United States to continue its cautious progress along the lines marked by the Declaration of Independence and the Fourteenth Amendment toward the aspiration of a “more perfect union.”

If elected, Kamala Harris will be the first woman president: a dramatic breakthrough in U.S. history. Yet, in so many ways, her presidency will be constrained. She’ll almost certainly face a Republican-controlled Senate from the start; very possibly, a Republican House, too. Even if the Democrats somehow win a majority in a single chamber of Congress in 2024, they’ll almost certainly lose it in 2026. Besides a hostile Congress, she would also face adverse courts and a media environment in which a handful of ultra-wealthy owners can impose ever-stricter limits on what may be said and who will hear it.

Yet within these inevitable limitations, Harris offers one big idea: the equal right of the female half of the American people to freedom and individuality.

Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, American women have become the targets of a campaign of surveillance, policing, and control. In many places, they have lost the right to protect themselves from the consequences of sexual violence. A study in an American Medical Association journal estimates that some 65,000 rape-caused pregnancies a year are occurring in the 14 states where abortion is now banned. State governments have inserted themselves into the medical care of women who miscarry their pregnancies, restricting the treatment their doctors can offer—sometimes with permanent loss of fertility or worse as a result of the government’s order.

Some conservative states are weighing restrictions on the right of pregnant women to travel across state lines to seek abortions in more liberal jurisdictions. In a 2022 interview, Vance declared himself sympathetic to such authoritarian measures:

I’m sympathetic to the view that like, okay, look here, here’s a situation—let’s say Roe vs. Wade is overruled. Ohio bans abortion, in 2022 or let’s say 2024. And then, you know, every day George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately black women to get them to go have abortions in California. And of course, the left will celebrate this as a victory for diversity—that’s kind of creepy … And it’s like, if that happens, do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening?

In his 1960 book, The Conscience of a Conservative, Senator Barry Goldwater answered those who asked what he, as president, would do about this or that particular constituent interest. His words echo to this day: “I shall reply that I was informed their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.”

America’s main interest remains liberty. The election of 2024 will sway federal policy on a huge range of issues: climate change; economic growth; border security; stability on the European continent, in the Middle East, in the Indo-Pacific. Supreme above all of these issues, however, is preserving the right of the American people to govern themselves according to their constitutional rules.

Trump is not an abstract thinker. When he thinks about the presidency, he thinks about enriching himself, flattering his ego, and punishing his enemies. Yet, as he pursues his impulsive purposes, he is also advancing a bigger cause in which he has many more intelligent partners, and one that will outlast his political career. That cause is to rearrange the U.S. government so that a minority can indefinitely rule over the American majority.

As hemmed in as her presidency may be, Harris will also have a great cause to advance. Her cause will be what Lincoln’s was, and Roosevelt’s, and Reagan’s, too: to protect the right of the American majority to govern itself in defiance of domestic plutocrats and foreign autocrats. Every domestic-policy challenge—climate change, economic growth, budget deficits, border security—will follow from this prior question: “Government of the people, by the people, for the people—or government of some people, by some people, for some people?”

Voting has begun. This great ritual of American democracy reaches its climax on November 5. The right vote to cast in 2024 is both progressive and conservative: conservative because it conserves the great things Americans have already done together and progressive because it keeps alive the possibility of doing still greater things in the future. The near-term policy outlook matters far less than stopping a small cabal of sinister and suspect power-seekers from blocking forever the right of the American majority to do any great things at all.

In the immediate shock of Trump’s inauguration in 2017, I posted these words:

We are living through the most dangerous challenge to the free government of the United States that anyone alive has encountered. What happens next is up to you and me. Don’t be afraid. This moment of danger can also be your finest hour as a citizen and an American.

Over the succeeding four years of Trump’s term, I lived almost every day in a state of dread. Perhaps you did, too. Yet the American people proved equal to the work required of them. The guardrails shook, and in some places they cracked, yet when the ultimate test came, in January 2021, brave Americans of both great parties joined to beat back Trump’s violent attempted seizure of power.

Now here we are again. You are needed once more. Perhaps you feel wearier than you did seven years ago. Perhaps you feel more afraid today than you did then. Yet you must still find the strength to answer your country’s call. You can do it. We can do it. We believe in America.