In just three weeks, President Donald Trump has exploded long-standing U.S. foreign policy and sided with Russia against Ukraine and the rest of NATO. He sent American diplomats to open negotiations with Russian counterparts—without inviting Kyiv to participate. He falsely blamed Ukraine for starting the war with Russia, and echoed the Kremlin line by calling Ukrainian President Zelensky a “dictator.” Then, in a press conference on Monday, Trump declined to say the same of Putin. “I don’t use those words lightly,” he told a reporter.

Most Republicans strongly condemned Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and have voted on multiple occasions to send the country military aid. But with their party’s leader back in the White House, many of them have grown quiet. Are any GOP lawmakers willing to say, in plain terms, what is true?

I reached out to all 271 Republican members of the House and Senate to find out, asking each of them two straightforward questions: Did Russia invade Ukraine? And is Putin a dictator? So far, I have received 19 responses.

Some members were unambiguous: “Yes and yes,” a spokesperson for Senator Susan Collins of Maine replied in an email. “Vladimir is undisputedly an enemy of America and a dictator,” read part of the statement from the office of Representative Jeff Hurd of Colorado.

Others chose to send excerpts of previous non-answer statements or links to past TV interviews rather than answer either “yes” or “no.” A spokesperson for the GOP’s House leader, Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, replied only with a readout of Johnson’s praise for Trump’s deal-making prowess. A spokesperson for Senator Ted Cruz of Texas replied with a link to an interaction with ChatGPT in which the chatbot noted that Cruz had in 2022 acknowledged Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and did in 2020 call Putin a dictator. (Still, no straightforward “yes” from Cruz today.)

The House Foreign Affairs Committee, chaired by Representative Brian Mast of Florida, opted to stake out a position that seemed different from Trump’s: The panel posted a screenshot of our questions on X, with the caption: “ON THE RECORD: Russia invaded Ukraine & Putin is a dictator. But that doesn’t mean our European allies shouldn’t match Russian military spending & recruitment.” (Another post referred to our questions as “BS.”) The Atlantic followed up to ask whether this statement represented Mast’s personal view, but received no further response.

Others refused to answer entirely: “Does the Atlantic believe we’re here to answer gotcha questions to advance narrow opinion journalism?” Jonathan Wilcox, communications director for Representative Darrell Issa of California, said in an email.

In fact, it is clearly in the public interest to know how elected officials, particularly those who make decisions about national security, regard foreign powers that have long positioned themselves against the United States. And it is also clearly in the public interest for citizens to know if their representatives’ views have shifted on who is—or is not—a foreign adversary.

What follows is the full list of responses from every Republican member of Congress. It will be regularly updated with any additional responses.

Lawmakers Who Answered the Questions

Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska: A spokesperson pointed to a statement on X from Bacon on February 19, in which he said: “Putin started this war. Putin committed war crimes. Putin is the dictator who murdered his opponents. The EU nations have contributed more to Ukraine. Zelensky polls over 50%. Ukraine wants to be part of the West, Putin hates the West. I don’t accept George Orwell’s doublethink.”

Representative Michael Baumgartner of Washington: “The Congressman expressed all his thoughts on the Russia-Ukraine War to the Spokane-Review on February 19. He was very clear that Russia and Vladimir Putin were the aggressors of the war in Ukraine,” a spokesman said, adding this link.

Senator Susan Collins of Maine: “As Senator Collins has said multiple times, yes and yes,” a spokesperson said.

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas: A spokesperson shared this link, pointing to earlier statements the senator had made about Putin and the Ukraine war.

Senator John Curtis of Utah: A spokesperson pointed to Curtis’s bipartisan resolution supporting Ukraine and a February 25 interview on KSL NewsRadio, in which Curtis said, “Ukraine was invaded by a dictator.”

Representative Julie Fedorchak of North Dakota: “Yes, Vladimir Putin and Russia invaded Ukraine and yes, he is a dictator,” the representative told me. “This war has cost countless lives and destabilized the world. I believe President Trump has the strength and leadership to bring peace and restore stability in a way that puts America’s interests first.”

Representative Jeff Hurd of Colorado: “Did Russia invade Ukraine? Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was an unprovoked act of war. Russian President Vladimir Putin is a dictator? Vladimir is undisputedly an enemy of America and a dictator. It is dishonorable and wrong not to stand up against the tyranny of Putin,” a spokesperson said.

Representative Young Kim of California: “Yes to both,” a spokesperson said.

Representative Brian Mast of Florida: A spokesperson for Mast sent a link to a post on X from the House Foreign Affairs Committee calling The Atlantic’s inquiry “BS” and declaring it would cancel its subscription to our magazine. “ON THE RECORD: Russia invaded Ukraine & Putin is a dictator. But that doesn’t mean our European allies shouldn’t match Russian military spending & recruitment. Europe must realize that for our alliance to be the strongest in history, America needs a Europe that can hold its own.”

Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska: A spokesperson sent a link to a statement in which the senator said that Russia launched an “unprovoked war on Ukraine.” The spokesperson added: “And yes, she does believe that Vladimir Putin is a dictator.”

Representative Austin Scott of Georgia: “Russia invaded Ukraine and is the aggressor in this war,” the representative told me. “Putin is a dictator who has invaded Ukraine multiple times—this war would end today if he would pull his troops back into Russia.”

Senator Todd Young of Indiana: “Yes and yes,” a spokesperson said.

Lawmakers Who Responded But Did Not Directly Answer the Questions

Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas: A spokesman provided a link to an interview with Piers Morgan in which Crenshaw cautioned against returning to a pre-World War II order allowing “dictators to conquer other countries and take their stuff.”

Representative Warren Davidson of Ohio: A spokesperson said the representative declined to comment.

Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa: “Like all Americans, Ernst wants to see an end to Putin’s unjust war that has cost far too many lives,” a spokesperson said

Representative French Hill of Arkansas: A spokesperson did not address the question of whether Putin is a dictator, but sent a link to an Arkansas PBS interview in which the representative said, “this war was started by Vladimir Putin,” and that “Ukraine has to be at the table” for any peace deal

Representative Darrell Issa of California: A spokesperson said, “Does the Atlantic believe we’re here to answer gotcha questions to advance narrow opinion journalism?”

Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana: A spokesperson sent over Johnson’s recent comments during this week’s GOP leadership press conference about Trump’s dealmaking skills and his desire for peace in Ukraine, but did not answer either question directly.

Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama: A spokesperson did not answer directly but sent a link to an interview with Newsmax, in which the senator said, “President Trump is not a Putin apologist. He just wants to get the war over with.”

Senate Republicans Who Have Not Responded

Jim Banks
John Barrasso
Marsha Blackburn
John Boozman
Katie Britt
Ted Budd
Shelley Moore Capito
Bill Cassidy
John Cornyn
Tom Cotton
Kevin Cramer
Mike Crapo
Steve Daines
Deb Fischer
Lindsay Graham
Charles Grassley
Bill Hagerty
Josh Hawley
John Hoeven
Jon Husted
Cindy Hyde-Smith
Ron Johnson
Jim Justice
John Neely Kennedy
James Lankford
Mike Lee
Cynthia Lummis
Roger Marshall
Mitch McConnell
Dave McCormick
Ashley Moody
Jerry Moran
Bernie Moreno
Markwayne Mullin
Rand Paul
Pete Ricketts
James Risch
Mike Rounds
Eric Schmitt
Rick Scott
Tim Scott
Tim Sheehy
Dan Sullivan
John Thune
Thom Tillis
Roger Wicker

House Republicans Who Have Not Responded

Robert Aderholt
Mark Alford
Rick Allen
Mark Amodei
Jodey Arrington
Brian Babin
James Baird
Troy Balderson
Andy Barr
Tom Barrett
Aaron Bean
Nick Begich
Cliff Bentz
Jack Bergman
Stephanie Bice
Andy Biggs
Sheri Biggs
Gus Bilirakis
Lauren Boebert
Mike Bost
Josh Brecheen
Rob Bresnahan
Vern Buchanan
Tim Burchett
Eric Burlison
Ken Calvert
Kat Cammack
Mike Carey
John Carter
Earl Buddy Carter
Juan Ciscomani
Ben Cline
Michael Cloud
Andrew Clyde
Tom Cole
Mike Collins
James Comer
Eli Crane
Jeff Crank
Eric Rick Crawford
Monica De La Cruz
Scott DesJarlais
Mario Diaz-Balart
Byron Donalds
Troy Downing
Neal Dunn
Beth Van Duyne
Chuck Edwards
Jake Ellzey
Tom Emmer
Ron Estes
Gabe Evans
Mike Ezell
Pat Fallon
Randy Feenstra
Brad Finstad
Michelle Fischbach
Scott Fitzgerald
Brian Fitzpatrick
Charles Chuck Fleischmann
Mike Flood
Vince Fong
Virginia Foxx
Scott Franklin
Russell Fry
Russ Fulcher
Andrew Garbarino
Brandon Gill
Carlos Gimenez
Craig Goldman
Tony Gonzales
Lance Gooden
Paul Gosar
Sam Graves
Mark Green
Marjorie Taylor Greene
Morgan Griffith
Glenn Grothman
Michael Guest
Brett Guthrie
Harriet Hageman
Abe Hamadeh
Mike Haridopolos
Pat Harrigan
Andy Harris
Mark Harris
Diana Harshbarger
Kevin Hern
Clay Higgins
Ashley Hinson
Erin Houchin
Richard Hudson
Bill Huizenga
Wesley Hunt
Brian Jack
Ronny Jackson
John James
Dusty Johnson
Jim Jordan
David Joyce
John Joyce
Thomas Kean
Mike Kelly
Trent Kelly
Mike Kennedy
Jennifer Kiggans
Kevin Kiley
Brad Knott
David Kustoff
Darin LaHood
Nick LaLota
Doug LaMalfa
Nicholas Langworthy
Robert Latta
Michael Lawler
Laurel Lee
Julia Letlow
Barry Loudermilk
Frank Lucas
Anna Paulina Luna
Morgan Luttrell
Nancy Mace
Ryan Mackenzie
Nicole Malliotakis
Celeste Maloy
Tracey Mann
Thomas Massie
Michael McCaul
Lisa McClain
Tom McClintock
Richard McCormick
Addison McDowell
John McGuire
Mark Messmer
Daniel Meuser
Carol Miller
Mary Miller
Max Miller
Mariannette Miller-Meeks
Cory Mills
John Moolenaar
Barry Moore
Blake Moore
Riley Moore
Tim Moore
Nathaniel Moran
Greg Murphy
Troy Nehls
Dan Newhouse
Ralph Norman
Zach Nunn
Jay Obernolte
Andrew Ogles
Bob Onder
Burgess Owens
Gary Palmer
Scott Perry
August Pfluger
Guy Reschenthaler
Hal Rogers
Mike Rogers
John Rose
David Rouzer
Chip Roy
Michael Rulli
John Rutherford
Maria Elvira Salazar
Steve Scalise
Derek Schmidt
David Schweikert
Keith Self
Pete Sessions
Jefferson Shreve
Michael Simpson
Adrian Smith
Christopher Smith
Jason Smith
Lloyd Smucker
Victoria Spartz
Pete Stauber
Elise Stefanik
Bryan Steil
Greg Steube
Dale Strong
Marlin Stutzman
Dave Taylor
Claudia Tenney
Glenn GT Thompson
Thomas Tiffany
William Timmons
Mike Turner
David Valadao
Jefferson Van Drew
Derrick Van Orden
Ann Wagner
Tim Walberg
Randy Weber
Daniel Webster
Bruce Westerman
Roger Williams
Joe Wilson
Tony Wied
Robert Wittman
Steve Womack
Rudy Yakym
Ryan Zinke

With additional research and reporting by Amogh Dimri, Marc Novicoff, Gisela Salim-Peyer, and Annie Joy Williams.

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They don’t make Washington scandals like they used to. Consider the tale of Representative Wilbur Mills and Fanne Foxe. In October 1974, Mills, a powerful Arkansas Democrat who led the Ways and Means Committee, was pulled over in D.C. while driving with his lights off. Foxe, a stripper, leapt out of the car and into the Tidal Basin, the shallow reservoir next to the Jefferson Memorial; she had to be fished out by police. The two had apparently had a physical altercation—they had bruises and scratches—though neither was charged. Mills was initially able to weather the next few weeks and win reelection in November, but after showing up drunk at a Foxe performance later that month, he was forced to relinquish his leadership of Ways and Means and didn’t seek reelection.

Now consider the circumstances in which another Representative Mills finds himself. The similarities are striking; the differences are alarming.

Last Wednesday, police responded to a call about an alleged assault at an apartment in D.C., where Cory Mills, a Florida Republican and strong Donald Trump ally, resides. A police report obtained by News4, a local NBC affiliate, stated that a 27-year-old woman there had what appeared to be “fresh” bruises. The report described her as Mills’s “significant other,” though he is married and the 27-year-old is not his wife. She also allegedly, according to the document, “let officers hear [Mills] instruct her to lie about the origin of her bruises.” Mills denies any wrongdoing and told Politico yesterday, “Both myself and the other individual said that what they’re claiming took place never took place and that’s been reported multiple times.”

Things got stranger: The woman recanted her story and now says there was no physical abuse. D.C. police provided the media with a second report saying officers responded but there was no probable cause for arrest, and then a third report saying police are investigating the incident. They are also, according to News4, investigating their own handling of the matter. Police sent a warrant to the local prosecutor’s office, but it has not been signed—in effect, a refusal to take up the case.

Because Washington, D.C., is not a state, it doesn’t have a typical local district attorney. Instead, it has a federal prosecutor, a position currently filled by the Missouri attorney and failed Republican congressional candidate Ed Martin. After the 2020 elections, Martin was deeply involved in Stop the Steal efforts, and after the January 6 riot, he represented defendants and sat on the board of a group that raised money for the families of people imprisoned for their roles. Trump appointed him acting U.S. attorney at the start of his term, and has since nominated him to fill the role permanently.

In an X post yesterday, Martin described the staff of the U.S. Attorney’s Office as “President Trumps’ lawyers.” This is not, in fact, the statutory role of U.S. Attorney’s Offices—they serve the federal government, not the person of the president—but Martin very clearly approaches the job that way.

After taking over the U.S. Attorney’s Office in January, he fired attorneys who were involved in January 6 cases—line prosecutors who were simply doing their jobs by bringing cases about overt crimes—and launched an internal investigation into January 6 prosecutions. He has boasted about standing up against the Associated Press, which he said refuses “to put America first” by not adopting Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.”

Even while doing his best to support people involved in an actual violent assault on the Capitol, Martin has been sending letters to Democratic members of Congress threatening to investigate them for the standard, though overheated, language they’ve used in reference to Elon Musk and Supreme Court justices. Yet somehow, Martin’s office apparently doesn’t have any interest in pursuing a fairly straightforward assault allegation, including claims of inducing an alleged victim to lie.

Why not? The U.S. Attorney’s Office did not immediately respond to questions about why the warrant wasn’t signed. But investigating a Republican member of the House would make life more difficult for the president and his allies on Capitol Hill. Speaker Mike Johnson is trying to ram a politically volatile spending bill through with his minuscule House majority. Some members have already indicated that they may vote against the bill because of proposed cuts to Medicaid. Losing Mills for any reason would make the task harder. Republicans have already paused the confirmation of Representative Elise Stefanik to be the ambassador to the United Nations in order to maintain their numbers.

This delicate moment also shows why, without action from prosecutors, Mills may not go anywhere. So lurid a story used to be a death knell for a career, but politicians have learned that they can gut out most sex scandals if they are sufficiently shameless. President Bill Clinton pioneered the path, Senator David Vitter and Governor Mark Sanford perfected it, and Trump represents its apotheosis. Wilbur Mills was forced to step down by fellow Democrats—not only because of the scandal but because it was politically expedient: A younger, more liberal group of Democrats was tired of conservative southerners blocking their priorities. Political expedience is also why Republicans are less likely to push Cory Mills out anytime soon.

Trump often speaks about “law and order,” but he’s also made very clear that this means law and order only for some—those who disagree with him, or those whom he finds obnoxious. Those who are on his side receive leniency, even if they have committed a violent assault against the Capitol. The U.S. Attorney’s Office ignoring this case while harassing Democratic members of Congress is one very pure expression of this impulse. Meanwhile, Trump is interested in seizing greater control of Washington’s governance. “I think we should take over Washington, D.C.—make it safe,” he said last week. For whom?

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Ed Koch was angry—and perhaps a bit embarrassed. It was the spring of 1986, and his Parks Department had wasted millions of taxpayer dollars trying to rehabilitate Central Park’s Wollman Rink. At the height of the crack epidemic, the ice-skating facility’s closure hardly represented the worst of New York’s problems. But the Parks Department’s ineptitude fed a notion that the city was fundamentally ungovernable. A mayor famous for cheekily asking New Yorkers “How am I doing?” appeared not to be doing very well at all.

The trouble had begun six years earlier, when the happy little attraction near the Plaza Hotel was abruptly closed for repairs. Having constructed the rink during the go-go years following the Second World War, the city then let it decay. To cut costs, the Parks Department started to explore the possibility of replacing its clunky brine-based refrigeration system with Freon, which was purported to cost $20,000 less a year to operate. So, in 1980, city hall ordered the rink shut down, the pipes beneath it torn out, and the whole system uprooted to make way for a $4.9 million replacement that was to take less than three years to complete.

This essay has been adapted from Marc J. Dunkelman’s new book, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—And How to Bring It Back.

The project quickly went sideways. After ripping up the old system, a contractor installed 22 miles of new pipe for the Freon. But when that initial phase was completed, the department had yet to secure a contractor to pave over the new piping. For more than a year, it was exposed to the elements; flooded by an underground stream; and, according to subsequent investigations, subjected to stray electric currents. When, in 1982, pavers were finally hired, engineers underestimated how much concrete would be required to cover the pipes. Rather than call for more, the pavers diluted the insufficient supply. Then, to protect the delicate piping, they chose not to deploy vibration machines typically used to collapse air pockets in concrete. The result was predictable. When the job was done, the ice on the surface melted. The rink simply didn’t work.

The mayor seemed to have little choice but to order the Parks Department to begin anew. To rip up the piping. To abandon the new technology. To revert to the traditional refrigeration system. That, of course, would require the department not only to close Wollman for another two years but to add another $3 million to the taxpayers’ tab. The whole thing was looking like an unmitigated public-relations disaster until, almost by the grace of God, Koch received an unexpected reprieve: A local developer offered to step in and make things right.

[Read: Privatization is changing America's relationship with its physical stuff]

In an unusual arrangement, Koch cut a deal to pay the developer to take control of the rink project, complete it for a fee, and hand it back to the city. “If it costs less, we’ll pay less,” the mayor explained when some questioned the wisdom of trusting someone outside government to do something that would typically have been handled by a public authority. “If it costs more, he’ll pay.”

Lost in the focus on the city’s incompetence was a more nuanced reality. More than 60 years earlier, the New York state legislature had passed a law designed to prevent mayors (and the machine bosses who controlled them) from throwing municipal construction gigs to politically connected contractors. At the time, progressives in both parties rightly presumed that the state was rife with graft—that construction companies were bribing municipal officials to secure contracts at inflated prices. Wicks Law had aimed to solve the problem by requiring cities to hire, separately, the lowest-bidding general construction, plumbing, electrical, heating, and ventilation contractors on any municipal project slated to cost more than $50,000. Mayors were prohibited from hiring general contractors. As a result, Ed Koch’s Parks Department was legally prohibited from hiring a single firm to deliver a project on time and on budget.

Fortunately for Koch, his collaboration with the outside developer was a huge success. The project cost less than the original estimate—$750,000 less—and the rink opened ahead of the holiday season. But from a public-relations perspective, the developer’s success just seemed to highlight city hall’s incompetence. The Parks Department, as columnists and reporters liked to remind the public, had wasted six years and $13 million on a project the private sector managed to complete in six months and at roughly a sixth of the cost. Asked about the lesson learned from the whole episode, the developer responded: “I guess it says a lot about the city.” The government was fundamentally incompetent. The municipal bureaucracy was a nightmare. Even liberal New Yorkers, many of whom reviled President Ronald Reagan, would have been tempted to nod along to his famous quip that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”

Not long thereafter, a reporter traipsed over to Central Park to interview members of the public. A local man enjoying a skate was asked his impressions of the rigmarole. “Anybody who can get anything done right and done on time in New York is a bona fide hero,” the skater replied. And it’s probably safe to say the developer would have agreed. His name, as it happens, was Donald Trump.

Roughly a century before the fiasco in Central Park, the Progressive movement was launched to address the same perception of government incompetence. City halls around the country, caught in the grip of rapacious political machines, simply couldn’t get things done—mayors and governors couldn’t build sewer and water lines, couldn’t maintain parks and school systems, couldn’t manage the nation’s messy transition from farm to factory. Progressivism emerged to stand up a system that would work. But the reformers drawn into the movement were torn between two ideas about how to turn things around. Some, adopting a perspective that would come to be associated with Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, believed that the key was returning power to the individuals and small businesses that had defined 19th-century life. Others, many of whom would align themselves with Theodore Roosevelt, took the opposite view, having grown convinced that imbuing bigger, more robust bureaucracies with new power—public-service commissions and public authorities, for example—was the only realistic way to overcome the power wielded by the political hacks and charlatans then dominating American life.

The tension between these two ideas—Brandeis’s Jeffersonian impulse to push power down and Roosevelt’s Hamiltonian impulse to push it up—became the most consequential divide within Progressivism. Faced with the pernicious influence of monopolistic corporations, for example, the two camps were at odds over whether to prioritize efforts to break up trusts, thereby enabling competition from below, or to subject corporate behemoths to more stringent regulation from above. The Jeffersonians scored a handful of major victories before the First World War, including breaking up monopolies such as Standard Oil. But in the decades that followed, Progressivism’s Hamiltonian impulse came to predominate, advancing the notion that big, powerful government was the key to doing big, important things. The New Deal was defined by an alphabet soup of robust bureaucracies empowered to wield enormous authority—the Social Security Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Tennessee Valley Authority among them. And while the Jeffersonian impulse did not fade entirely—Wicks Law was passed in the 1920s—the Progressive project largely sought to empower what many would come to call the “establishment.”

[From the March 1940 issue: America can build]

Then, in the shadow of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, the teeter-totter tipped back across its fulcrum. The upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s—the civil-rights movement, Vietnam, the counterculture, an environmental reawakening, second-wave feminism, Watergate—soured reformers on the very establishment they’d helped erect. Rather than empower centralized institutions, they would now endeavor to rein them in, placing guardrails around various power brokers and giving voice to the ordinary people the establishment ignored. The movement became culturally averse to power. Over the past half century, that Jeffersonian impulse to check authority—to return influence to the meek among us—has become progressivism’s abiding priority. And rarely do those inside the movement register that, entirely apart from the influence of conservatism, these two warring impulses cut in separate directions.

The saga at Wollman Rink encapsulates the underlying dynamic. Wicks Law had been passed with good intentions—a Jeffersonian check on municipal corruption. Mayor Koch had wanted the Parks Department to restore the rink for good reason—here was a Hamiltonian bureaucracy endeavoring to serve the public. Combined, however, progressivism’s two impulses served to render government incompetent. And the resulting gridlock wasn’t just a black eye for public institutions. It cleaved an opening for a figure like Trump.

Over the past half century, progressivism’s cultural aversion to power has turned the Democratic Party—purportedly the “party of government”—into an institution that almost instinctively seeks to cut government down. Progressives are so fearful of establishment abuse that reformers tend to prefer to tighten rather than loosen their grip on authority. The movement discounts whatever good the government might do in service of ensuring that it won’t do bad. And that’s driven well-intentioned reformers to insert so many checks into the system that government has been rendered incompetent.

Conservatism, of course, hasn’t been helpful in making government more effective. But for progressives, that reality can quickly become a distraction. They can’t control the MAGA agenda—but they can offer a more palatable alternative. If the progressive agenda is going to have a chance—if government is going to be given the leash required to combat inequality, to solve poverty, and to fight prejudice—progressives will first need to convince voters that government is capable of delivering on its promises. At present, progressives are too inclined to cut public authority off at the knees. And that’s why they so often feel like they can’t win for losing. Their cultural aversion to power renders government incompetent, and incompetent government undermines progressivism’s political appeal.

America can’t build housing. We can’t deploy high-speed rail. We’re struggling to harness the promise of clean energy. And because government has failed in all these realms—because confidence in public authority has waned through the years—progressives have found it difficult to make a case for themselves.

Nothing seems to work. And for all the efforts Democrats make to invest in the future—the bipartisan infrastructure law, the Inflation Reduction Act—progress too often remains a version of Charlie Brown’s football. Reformers tout an achievement, but then a housing plan is abandoned after local opposition, a high-speed rail line is shelved for exorbitant costs, or an offshore wind farm is blocked by local fishermen. Often enough, both sides in any given debate—those who want to change things and those who fear that change will be destructive—are well intentioned. But the movement’s inability to resolve its conflicting impulses has turned progressive policy making into what drag racers call “warming the tires.” A driver steps on the brake and the accelerator at the same time. The wheels spin. The tires screech. But the car remains in place.

The political effect of the ensuing paralysis has been profound. In the early 1960s, nearly four in five Americans professed trust in Washington to “do what’s right.” By 2022, that figure had fallen to one in five. Progressives have been arguing for decades that power can’t be trusted—that government is captured by moneyed interests; that it lines the pockets of the powerful few; that it is a tool of white supremacists, xenophobes, sexists, and worse. No one can deny that centralized power can be used for ill. But even given that reality, attacking government turns out to be, for progressives, a ham-handed way of convincing ordinary people that government should be empowered to do more to pursue the public interest.

Ordinary people who experience the morass of inept bureaucracy will, like the New Yorkers frustrated with Mayor Koch’s inability to restore Wollman Rink, be tempted to turn to someone with the individual moxie to get the job done. That was Donald Trump’s appeal in the mid-1980s, and he employs the same basic rationale as an iconoclastic politician on the national stage. But it’s not just that unrepentant Jeffersonianism doesn’t work. Ordinary people aren’t monolithically averse to power. They don’t want public authority abused, but they know that progress is impossible without leadership. And insofar as the subtext of contemporary progressive ideology is that anyone wielding power is in the wrong, the movement alienates itself from voters who might otherwise support its agenda.

This is the crux of the political argument for rebalancing progressivism’s Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian impulses. The movement supports growing government so that it can take a stronger hand in protecting the vulnerable. But then progressives excoriate government as a captured tool of the patriarchy. Those of us who style ourselves progressive typically gloss over that tension for a simple reason: It’s awkward and confusing. Most progressives want to both empower government to combat climate change and curtail government’s authority over a woman’s right to choose. And squaring that circle is more intellectually difficult than standing strong against Trumpism, or calling out conservative bigotry, or attacking the figures eager to steer the country toward fascism. There’s no storming the barricades in support of a healthy balance between contradictory impulses. And so progressives typically retreat into reflexive anti-conservatism.

Criticizing your adversaries is not, in and of itself, a terrible political strategy. When the other side supports unpopular ideas—separating children from their parents at the border, limiting women’s bodily autonomy, stripping away environmental protections, cutting Social Security and Medicare—there’s little downside to drawing the public’s attention to its agenda. But for progressives, there’s danger in that appeal. A movement consumed by exasperation over how so many people could have voted for Trump, or supported his agenda, or excused his conduct after losing in 2020, will be less inclined to correct its own errors. If progressives put making government work not on the periphery of the movement’s agenda but at its center, voters might be less vulnerable to the sirens of the populist right.

[Read: The perception gap that explains American politics]

There is, of course, an authentic and powerful reason for progressives to worry about making government hum. A government that operates expeditiously—a public authority with fewer guardrails—will inevitably be used not only to serve progressive desires but to pursue conservative ends as well. Any change that would have made it easier for the Obama administration to identify well-intentioned “shovel ready” projects in 2009 and 2010, or for clean-energy companies to build transmission lines through Arkansas and Maine, or for developers to build affordable housing in New York and California, might well have opened the door for someone else to build a legion of coal-fired power plants or gentrify minority neighborhoods.

But that’s a risk progressives today need to take, a bargain they need to accept. A government too hamstrung to serve the public good will fuel future waves of conservative populism. Voters are drawn to figures like Donald Trump not because public authority is too pervasive, but because government can’t deliver. His refrain that the “deep state” has sold the ordinary citizen out—that insiders are constantly making “bad deals” on the nation’s behalf—lands, in no small part, because voters have witnessed the incompetence. Lionizing government and then ensuring that it fails is a terrible political strategy. The movement needs to change course not only because it’s bad policy, but because it’s bad politics as well.

That, in the end, is the best argument for full-circle progressivism. The Jeffersonian retrenchment, now more than 50 years old, has run its course. Today, the core obstacle to progressivism’s substantive success—to greater economic equality and prosperity, to more social justice and responsibility, to a more robust response to climate change, to more housing, to greater mobility—isn’t centralized power. It’s the absence of centralized power. Populism takes hold not when democracy works well, but rather when it doesn’t deliver. No amount of righteous sanctimony can substitute for the political benefits of making public authority serve the public interest. That should be the progressive movement’s north star.

This essay has been adapted from Marc J Dunkelman’s new book, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress--And How to Bring It Back.

One of the defining features of the social-justice orthodoxy that swept through American culture between roughly the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 to Hamas’s assault on Israel in 2023 was the policing of language. Many advocates became obsessed with enforcing syntactical etiquette and banishing certain words.

“Wokeness,” as it’s known, introduced the asymmetrical capitalization of the letter b in Black but not the w in white. It forced Romance languages like Spanish to submit to gender-neutral constructions such as Latinx. It called for the display of pronouns in email signatures and social-media bios. It replaced a slew of traditional words and phrases: People were told to stop saying master bedroom, breastfeeding, manpower, and brown-bag lunch, and to start saying primary bedroom, chestfeeding, workforce, and sack lunch. At the extreme, it designated certain words—such as brave—beyond redemption.

This was often a nuisance and sometimes a trap, causing the perpetual sense that one might inadvertently offend and consequently self-destruct. In certain industries and professions, wrongspeak had tangible consequences. In 2018, Twitter introduced a policy against “dehumanizing language” and posts that “deadnamed” transgender users (or referred to them by their pre-transition names). Those who were judged to have violated the rules could be banned or suspended.

Donald Trump promised that his election would free Americans from ever having to worry about saying the wrong thing again. He even signed an executive order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.” But a few weeks into his administration, we hardly find ourselves enjoying a culture of free speech and tolerance for opposing views. Almost immediately, the president did the opposite of what he’d promised and put together his own linguistic proscriptions. Most of the banned words related to gender and diversity, and this time the rules had the force of the government behind them.

“Fear that other words could run afoul of the new edicts led anxious agency officials to come up with lists of potentially problematic words on their own,” wrote Shawn McCreesh in The New York Times. These included: “Equity. Gender. Transgender. Nonbinary. Pregnant people. Assigned male at birth. Antiracist. Trauma. Hate speech. Intersectional. Multicultural. Oppression. Such words were scrubbed from federal websites.”

Plus ça change. The government itself determining the limits of acceptable speech is undeniably far more chilling and pernicious—and potentially unconstitutional—than private actors attempting to do so. But what is most striking about this dismal back-and-forth is how well it demonstrates that the illiberal impulse to dictate what can and cannot be said is always fundamentally the same, whether it appears on the right or the left.

An extraordinary number of conservatives have ignored and even delighted in their side’s astonishing hypocrisy. But a few consistent defenders of free speech have not gone along with what they see as the new “woke right.”

The pervasive and nitpicky control of language is a crucial, but far from the sole, component of the woke-right movement. Like its antithesis on the left, the woke right places identity grievance, ethnic consciousness, and tribal striving at the center of its behavior and thought. One of the best descriptions I can find of it comes from Kevin DeYoung, a pastor and seminary professor, in a 2022 article called “The Rise of Right-Wing Wokeism.” DeYoung, reviewing a book on Christian nationalism in The Gospel Coalition, argues that the book’s “apocalyptic vision—for all of its vitriol toward the secular elites—borrows liberally from the playbook of the left.” It “redefines the nature of oppression as psychological oppression” and tells white and male right-wing Americans that they are the country’s real victims. But “the world is out to get you, and people out there hate you,” DeYoung warns, “is not a message that will ultimately help white men or any other group that considers themselves oppressed.”

Another hallmark of wokeness is an overriding impulse to contest and revise the historical record in service of contemporary debates. The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which reimagined this nation’s founding, was emblematic of this trend from the left. But similar attempts are happening on the right. Last summer, the amateur historian Darryl Cooper caused an uproar when he made the case, on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, that Winston Churchill was the real villain of World War II.

The compelled politesse of the left has been swapped out for the reflexive and gratuitous disrespect of the right. Representative Mary Miller of Illinois recently introduced Representative Sarah McBride, Congress’s sole transgender member, as “the gentleman from Delaware, Mr. McBride.” The activist Christopher Rufo, one of the most belligerent voices on the right, endorsed the move: “We are all tempted to be polite,” he wrote on X. “But complicity in the pronoun game is the opening ante for the entire lie. Once you agree to falsify reality, you have signaled your submission to the gender cult.”

Speaking of falsifying reality: The Trump administration seems to be devoting a remarkable amount of energy toward making sure people call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” In the White House press room last week, the administration went so far as to eject Associated Press reporters because the publication refused to alter its stylebook to comply with the change. “I was very up front in my briefing on Day 1 that if we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable,” the White House press secretary said. “And it is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the Gulf of America.” European exploration records have referred to El Golfo de México since the 16th century.

Trump supporters fell immediately into line. Representative Mike Collins of Georgia—in a gesture encapsulating the digital-political fusion that has come to define the woke right—tweeted trollingly, “Stop deadnaming the Gulf of America.”

Just as corporations genuflected at the altar of wokeness during and after the summer of 2020—posting their identical black squares on Instagram and Facebook and, in the case of Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and CBS Sports, pausing their content for a symbolic eight minutes and 46 seconds—some of the country’s most prominent companies have preemptively submitted to the woke right’s new power play. Google and Apple have both relabeled the Gulf of Mexico on their map apps with Trump’s risible neologism. And an NPR analysis of regulatory filings found that “at least a dozen of the largest U.S. companies have deleted some, or all, references to ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ and ‘DEI’ from their most recent annual reports to investors.”

Some state leaders are following in Trump’s footsteps. In January, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued the “Executive Order to Respect the Latino Community by Eliminating Culturally Insensitive Words From Official Use in Government”—a loquacious way to say she ordered state agencies to stop using the word Latinx. Others, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, were woke right avant la lettre. The 2022 Individual Freedom Law, paradoxically known as the “Stop WOKE” act—developed under Rufo’s guidance—imagines the state as one enormous, humid safe space. The legislation aggressively restricts speech in workplaces, K–12 schools, and public universities, and even encourages snitching on community members who dare to advance illicit perspectives.

All of these moves are ripe for mockery—and they deserve it. The scholar and provocateur James Lindsay gained a large online following in 2018 after he and two colleagues successfully placed a number of outrageously bogus papers in peer-reviewed academic journals focused on what Lindsay called “grievance studies,” including one text arguing that dogs engage in “rape culture” and another that rewrote Mein Kampf from a feminist point of view. Last year, Lindsay applied the same test to the woke right, cribbing 2,000 words from Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto and submitting them as a critique of liberalism to The American Reformer, a respected platform in conservative Christian media. The gag ran under the title “The Liberal Consensus and the New Christian Right.”

“What the Woke Right fundamentally don’t understand as they make their bid for power now, and why they’ll lose,” Lindsay wrote last week on X, “is that none of us want more ideological crazy stuff. We don’t want another freaking movement. We want to go back to our lives.” The obligation to call people aliens or unlearn the name of a body of water appears every bit as petty as the prohibition on describing boring things as “lame.” More than that, it amounts to a politics of brute domination, a forced and demoralizing expression of subservience that only a genuine fanatic could abide.

Voters in both parties are already signaling that the right’s woke antics are unattractive to them. When it comes to its edgelord in chief, Elon Musk, an Economist/YouGov poll found that the share of Republicans who say he should have “a lot” of influence has dropped significantly over the past three months, to 26 percent. Seventeen percent say they want him to have no influence “at all.” Over the past two weeks, Trump’s approval rating has fallen.

The truth is that most Americans bristle at wokeness from whichever direction it arrives. As the left is learning now, no victory can ever be final. The right’s illiberal zeal only creates the conditions for an equal and opposite reaction to come.

From inside the room, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation hearings felt at times more like an awards show than a job interview. While the health-secretary nominee testified, his fans in the audience hooted and hollered in support. Even a five-minute bathroom break was punctuated by a standing ovation from spectators and cheers of “We love you, Bobby!” There were some detractors as well—one protester was ushered out after screaming “He lies!” and interrupting the proceedings—but they were dramatically outnumbered by people wearing Make America Healthy Again T-shirts and Confirm RFK Jr. hats.

The MAHA faithful have plenty of reason to be excited. If confirmed, RFK Jr. would oversee an agency that manages nearly $2 trillion, with the authority to remake public health in his image. “He just represents the exact opposite of all these establishment agencies,” Brandon Matlack, a 34-year-old who worked on Kennedy’s presidential campaign, told me on Wednesday. We chatted as he waited in a line of more than 150 people that snaked down a flight of stairs—all of whom were hoping to get a seat for the hearing. Many of them were relegated to an overflow room.

Of course, Matlack and other RFK Jr. fans could be in for a letdown. Whether Kennedy will actually be confirmed as health secretary is still up in the air. There was less raucous cheering during the hearing on Thursday, as Kennedy faced tough questions from Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, whose vote could be decisive in determining whether Kennedy gets confirmed. But the realization of RFK Jr.’s vision for health care in America may not hinge on his confirmation. The MAHA movement has turned the issue of chronic disease into such a potent political talking point that people like Matlack are willing to trek from Pennsylvania to Washington, D.C., just to support Kennedy. Politicians across the country are hearing from self-proclaimed “MAHA moms” (and likely some dads too) urging them to enact reforms. They’re starting to listen.

Kennedy is best known as an anti-vaccine activist who spreads conspiracy theories. His more outlandish ideas are shared by some MAHA supporters, but the movement itself is primarily oriented around improving America’s diet and the health problems it causes us. Some of the ways MAHA wants to go about that, such as pressuring food companies to not use seed oils, are not exactly scientific; others do have some research behind them. Consider artificial food dyes, a major MAHA rallying cry. Multiple food dyes have been shown in animal studies to be carcinogenic. And although a candy-corn aficionado likely isn’t going to die from the product’s red dye, the additive is effectively banned in the European Union. (Kennedy claims that food dyes are driving down America’s life expectancy. There’s no evidence directly linking food dyes to declining human life expectancy, though one study did show that they cut short the life of fruit flies.)

Until recently, concerns over food additives, such as artificial dyes, were the domain of Democrats. In 2023, California became the first state in the nation to ban certain food additives: red dye 3, potassium bromate, brominated vegetable oil, and propylparaben. But now food-additive bans are being proposed in Donald Trump country, including West Virginia, Arkansas, and Kentucky. Some of the efforts, such as the Make Arkansas Healthy Again Act, are an explicit attempt to enact Kennedy’s agenda.

In other states, something a bit more Schoolhouse Rock is happening: The purported dangers of food ingredients are riling up Americans, who are then going to their lawmakers seeking change. Eric Brooks, a Republican state legislator in West Virginia, told me that he decided to copy California’s food-additive bill after being prodded by a constituent. “I said, Well, I don’t normally look out West, especially out to California, for policy ideas, to be honest with you,” he told me. “But once I had done the research and I saw the validity of the issue, I said, Okay.” Although his bill, which was first introduced in January 2024, did not move forward in the previous legislative session because, in his words, “there were bigger fish to fry,” Brooks hopes the national interest coming from the MAHA movement will motivate West Virginia legislators to take another look at the proposal.

Other red-state efforts to follow California’s lead have similarly not yet been passed into law, but the fact that the bills have been introduced at all signifies how motivated Republicans are on the topic. The MAHA moms may be enough to propel Kennedy to the job of health secretary. One Republican, Senator Jim Banks of Indiana, told Kennedy on Thursday that he plans to vote to confirm him because doing anything else “would be thumbing my nose at that movement.” Republicans are not only introducing bills to ban food additives; they’re also taking up Kennedy’s other MAHA priorities. Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders recently asked the federal government for permission to forbid food-stamp recipients in her state from using their benefits to buy junk food—a policy Kennedy has repeatedly called for.

Over the past two days, senators seemed shocked at just how loyal a following Kennedy has amassed. One pejoratively called him a prophet. MAHA believers I spoke with made clear that they want RFK Jr.—and only RFK Jr.—to lead this movement. Vani Hari, a MAHA influencer who goes by “Food Babe” on Instagram, told me that, if Kennedy fails to be confirmed, there “will be an uprising like you have never seen.”

But at this point, it seems that the movement could live on even without Kennedy. On Wednesday, the Heritage Foundation hosted a press gaggle with MAHA surrogates. Heritage, an intellectual home of the modern conservative movement, is now praising the banning of food dyes. This is the same pro-business think tank that a decade ago warned that should the FDA ban partially hydrogenated oils, trans fats that were contributing to heart attacks, the agency “would be taking away choices,” “disrespecting” Americans’ autonomy, and mounting “an attack on dietary decisions.”

Republicans have generally been a bulwark for the food industry against policies that could hurt its bottom line. Democrats and Republicans in Washington today seem more aligned on food issues than ever before. “When you have members on both sides of the aisle whose constituencies are now extremely interested in understanding fully what’s in their food products, it does shift the game a bit,” Brandon Lipps, a food lobbyist and a former USDA official under Trump, told me. After all, even Bernie Sanders, despite chastising Kennedy multiple times during this week’s confirmation hearings, professed his support for aspects of the MAHA movement. “I agree with you,” Sanders told Kennedy on Thursday, that America needs “a revolution in the nature of food.” During the same hearing, Cassidy said that he is struggling with Kennedy’s candidacy because, despite their deep disagreements on vaccine policy, on “ultra-processed foods, obesity, we are simpatico. We are completely aligned.”

Although MAHA has shown itself to be a unifying message, the real test will come down to the brass tacks of any political movement: passing actual legislation. How willing lawmakers—especially those with pro-business proclivities—will be to buck the status quo remains to be seen. Politicians have proved eager to speak out against ultra-processed foods; in that sense, MAHA is winning. But policy victories may still be a ways off.