By Ross Barkan

Donald Trump has sat all week in his box at the Republican National Convention with a detached, almost beatific smile on his face. This might be because many of the speakers said he was blessed by God, that it was divine intervention which made the would-be assassin’s bullet miss. He may look this way because one of his handpicked federal judges, Aileen Cannon, has dealt a possible deathblow to the classified documents indictment, the one that would, if it ever saw a trial, probably stick. He may be exulting in his ludicrously good fortune. Bankruptcies, sex scandals, a felony conviction, massive civil judgments, and an ear-flaying bullet have not stopped him. Here he is, 78 years old, the Republican nominee for president for the third consecutive time. It is hard to imagine any politician has been loved as fervently as Trump has by those who support him. Come to Milwaukee, to this convention, and you will see the real, live sanctification of a human being.

A delegate led the convention in applause while wearing an enormous cardboard Trump mask on his face. Others, from Alabama, donned baseball jerseys with “Trump 24” on the back. A man, in full Uncle Sam regalia, sang about stolen elections to the tune of “All About That Bass” as Peter Navarro, freshly sprung from prison, waved to his adoring fans at the Hyatt Regency, where the military stands guard. Merch is for sale everywhere. Biden’s face, superimposed on the Chef Boyardee logo, could end up a favorite. It reads Chef Boy Are We Fucked.

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One thought kept trilling through my brain all week: They are incredibly confident Trump is going to win in November. Everyone here is giddy for the future, like fans of a team that just ran away with the division and is now ready for the first playoff game.

Of course they have reason to be. Polls show Trump with a durable and burgeoning lead, as Biden’s disastrous debate performance further erodes his support in battleground states. Life, certainly, is miserable for Democrats right now. Democratic elites, who spent two years pretending Biden’s advanced age wasn’t a problem, now want to dump him but don’t quite know how.

I have one note of caution, though: All of this is starting to feel a lot like 2016, only in reverse. When I covered the 2016 Democratic convention in Philadelphia, virtually every Democrat who attended was certain that Hillary Clinton was going to be the next president. Trump had won a fractured primary in unprecedented fashion, and there were plenty of prominent Republicans who wanted nothing to do with him. Ted Cruz spoke at the convention in Cleveland but didn’t offer an endorsement. Other Republicans openly fretted about a landslide or the very destruction of the GOP itself. Clinton was going to win and it was only a matter of by how much. 

Some of that same certainty, even smugness, is on the Republican side now. Democrats, meanwhile, are behaving like the 2016 GOP, actively shirking their nominee. This doesn’t mean Biden, or anyone else, will come from behind and defeat Trump. He faces enormous headwinds, beginning with his age. The Democrats’ inability to win rural states means they are at a disadvantage in the Electoral College, making the Trump 2016 trick—losing the popular vote but winning the Electoral College—effectively impossible. The assassination attempt on Trump has convinced many pundits that he has locked up the election; he is a survivor, he is indomitable, and that photograph is already iconic. 

Persuasion

The Fire Next Time

During Donald Trump’s first term, the military faced multiple challenges from its commander-in-chief. Trump and his staff tried to drag the military into partisan politics, positioning uniformed personnel at campaign events and the 2020 GOP convention…

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2 years ago · 78 likes · 9 comments · Kevin Carroll

What is the counter-argument? Well, it’s that the election is still going to be very close and, beyond the Fiserv Forum in downtown Milwaukee, Trump remains alienating and unpopular. Kamala Harris—or anyone else who, in theory, replaces Biden—will be in a similar position. 

The Trump GOP is simultaneously savvier than it appears, and plenty toxic still. They have eaten away at the Democrats’ working class support in the same manner as other right-populist parties around the world. They’ve denounced, repeatedly, mass migration, intuiting that black and Spanish-speaking Americans do not feel much solidarity with immigrants illegally crossing the border. They have downplayed, as much as possible, their furious opposition to abortion, following the lead of Trump himself, who is against a federal abortion ban. They’ve ditched, in rhetoric, their supply-side dogma, embracing a vice presidential candidate in J.D. Vance who is skeptical of corporate power and willing to partner with Democrats to cap the price of insulin, regulate railroads, and halt corporate consolidation. Milton Friedman was nowhere near this Republican convention.

Still, the Republicans are not as dominant as they could be. In Milwaukee, as I imbibed the speeches and the harangues, I considered all that would seem deranged to the median voter. Peter Navarro, fresh out of prison, ranted about the “lawfare jackals.” Matt Gaetz and others rehashed the tired shtick about there having been only two genders when Trump was president. Ron DeSantis fumed, again, about the “woke mind virus.” Just as so many Democrats throughout the 2010s and early 2020s behaved like all politics was waged on Twitter, Republicans remain relentlessly online, convinced their obsessions over stolen elections, the alleged martyrs of Jan. 6, and eliminating trans rights are shared by the broader electorate.

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The loudest boos came at the mention of the name Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan Democratic district attorney who had successfully tried Trump. The greatest cheers, naturally, were for Trump himself, for his subdued appearances in the box, his light fist pumps, his waves to the crowd. Many of the speakers, ludicrously, claimed America was in far better shape four years ago, when the pandemic was raging. (2020 is the new 2019, perhaps.) On the convention floor, delegates waved convention signs that read “Mass Deportation Now!” in Trump font. If there were no Electoral College, and Republicans had to become a majority party to win, they would be incentivized to behave differently. It is possible, come November, the Republicans will manage to win at least half the vote for the first time in 20 years. But if they do, it will be thanks to Democratic frailty, not any grand yearning for the Trump project. 

I wondered, too, why Trump wanted all of this so badly. He will only get another four years as president. He is not, literally, the American Hitler, and he lacks the competency to cow the military, the FBI, the CIA, and the many Democrat-run states to establish whatever version of fascism MSNBC and The New Republic believe he is after. He longs for power and attention, and perhaps that’s enough for him. Just as Democrats believe Trump will smash up the republic for good if he wins in the fall, Republicans perceive this election in existential terms—Trump’s base earnestly thinks another four years of Biden or another Democrat will reduce the nation to some lawless, burnt-out wasteland, Alvin Bragg and Dr. Fauci and the East Coast/West Coast Marxists teaming up to force through a Great Leap Forward, American-style. It won’t happen, of course, just as elections will be held in 2028 if Trump slogs through it all and gets sworn in as the 47th president. He’ll be in his eighties, like Biden, a diminished patriarch hoping to forestall the inevitable. He’s frail, too. 

Ross Barkan is a novelist and journalist. His next novel, Glass Century, will be published next year and he’s working on a book for Verso about the contemporary political situation. His Substack is Political Currents.

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By Brendan Ruberry.

Three years ago, then-Governor Andrew Cuomo signed into legislation a bill legalizing the recreational consumption and purchase of marijuana in New York state. And today, the Big Apple can safely be described as a stoner’s paradise—without exception, weed is cheap, potent, and easy to find. 

In East Williamsburg the transformation could not be starker. When school is in session, you can find clusters of uniformed teenagers lighting up at the corner of Grand Street and Bushwick Avenue before crossing the street for class, and then again after the bell rings in the afternoon. Like teenagers anywhere, they chase each other up and down the avenue hollering and talking shit, tramping on the colorful spent baggies which now seem to make up an additional layer of topsoil in the city.

Where they and everyone else get their hands on it is one of New York’s great open secrets: Like almost all of the city’s neighborhoods, East Williamsburg is home to a dozen or more “weed bodegas.” And like everywhere else in New York, despite legalization, the vast majority of East Williamsburg’s dispensaries are operating illegally—the byproduct of a bonanza several years in the making.

From the moment the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act passed the governor’s desk in 2021 until very recently, just about anyone with a folding table, a few jars and an out-of-state connection could roll up to Washington Square Park in Manhattan’s East Village and start their own small business—completely unencumbered by regulations, taxes, or the condition that weed sold in New York be New York-grown. These entrepreneurs named any price they liked and faced zero downside. In the summers of 2022 and 2023, nearly every public park in NYC seemed to feature such ad-hoc cannabis markets, and much of the packaging bore California labels with names like “Trump OG” (Fuck your feelings!) or “Sleepy Joe OG” (You won’t even remember what country you are in!).

What’s extraordinary is that, at first, police appeared to pull back entirely from prohibiting illicit sales. The black market exploded as a result: Illegal smoke shops quickly outnumbered legal dispensaries, by one estimate, 20-to-1. This past January, a joint investigation published by THE CITY and New York Magazine counted 34 dispensaries within a few blocks of one another on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Just one of them had been granted a license by NYC’s Office of Cannabis Management. Shops which had previously sold only smoking paraphernalia seemed to vertically integrate overnight. Almost the first thing in the morning, in the heart of downtown Manhattan, I was propositioned in the middle of a crosswalk by kids no older than 16 flashing me the contents of their duffle bags. Adding insult to injury, illegal stores often have much more attention-grabbing promotional displays and signage, utterly out of compliance with state regulations which, with an eye toward curb appeal and shielding young people from the allure of bright colors, require more sedate and refined aesthetics.

Lack of enforcement meant legitimate operators were crowded out entirely and opportunists flourished, while all of the touted benefits to society which legalization ought to have delivered—safe and legal marijuana; a transparent, regulated industry; and large additional tax revenues—remained largely hypothetical. 

New Yorkers were left scratching their heads, asking how on earth did we get here?

New York did the right and sensible thing in legalizing marijuana for recreational use, not only to bring it under the tax umbrella but because, as Americans learned with alcohol long ago, people are going to use it anyway and regulation would help them do it safely and without recourse to the underworld of middlemen. If the drug’s loudest proponents can sometimes enter the realm of self-parody in touting its benefits to mankind (or in minimizing its possible harms) it’s certainly less harmful than booze and even boasts a number of medicinal applications—from its therapeutic qualities to its use as an appetite enhancer for patients undergoing weight loss from illness or chemotherapy. And, perhaps most importantly, full legalization was democratic, having for years been widely favored by an American public that witnessed firsthand the ruinous effects of the war on drugs.

But when it comes to fostering the growth of an entire legal industry from scratch, the devil’s in the details, and New York’s governing authorities have persistently ignored the details that matter in favor of a headlong, unrealistic strategy that ignores consumer welfare, public safety, and the rights of business owners.

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Opening such a business is difficult enough: doing it the right way is, as a rule, very expensive. Legal fees, contractors, inventory, taxes, not to mention some of the highest storefront rents in the world—combined, these expenditures can and do very easily run into the millions of dollars before a single gram of bud finds its way to a customer.

Though it’s difficult to identify a single aspect of New York’s legal weed rollout that was well planned or well executed, the legislature committed an egregious own goal with its decision to steer the first available licenses to the previously “justice-impacted,” or those with prior cannabis-related convictions.

The idea was simple, maybe a little too simple: Before legalization, the laws surrounding marijuana were unfair, even draconian. Enforcement was wildly uneven, and otherwise law-abiding, peaceful individuals were classed as felons for possessing, using, and selling cannabis in small amounts, their lives upended as a result.

Spurred by a virtuous impulse, the “equity” plan’s prospects for success were immediately dampened by the fact that those with prior convictions from the war on drugs are not always willing or able candidates for opening and maintaining successful small businesses—especially in an industry fraught with onerous rules and regulations owing to the continuing federal prohibition on cannabis.

Already slow in the way that government bureaucracy can be, the licensing process was quickly hampered en toto by lawsuits brought by those who argued, not without reason, that they had been unjustly excluded from the process—including a veteran’s group and already-operating medical dispensaries with the existing capacity to expand into the recreational market. A judge’s halt then forestalled hundreds of applications, even in cases where approval had already been granted and stores were just days from opening.

Meanwhile, City Hall had yet to reckon with what would happen when marijuana became widely legal for personal use while even into the second and third year of the new paradigm only a few dozen legal dispensaries had opened to service a city of more than 8 million people.

Without a legal industry that could stand on its own two feet, entrepreneurs—including immigrant store owners, peripatetic hustlers, sophisticated networks of shadow retailers on bicycles, and even, one presumes, those formerly incarcerated for selling weed—took advantage of police pull-back and filled a gaping hole in the market. And it went on like this for years, during which time neither City Hall nor Albany had given anyone reason to believe that the consequences of starting one’s own illicit operation could possibly outweigh the benefits.

The message that city government and law enforcement was sending to these entrepreneurs was unmistakable: For now, at least, what you’re doing is A-OK. 

That is, until “Operation Padlock to Protect.”

A few months ago, against the backdrop of a public increasingly frustrated by the ubiquitous smell of pot, the glare of neon, and a tsunami of weed-kitsch overtaking its streets—not to mention some illicit stores’ proximity to schools and places of worship—Mayor Eric Adams announced a new crackdown, this time with the support of the city Sheriff’s office.

“Padlock” would feature a level of beefed-up enforcement that previous efforts at tamping down the illegal supply had lacked: Law enforcement now had the authority to conduct wide-ranging inspections and—per its name—lock down unlicensed businesses on the spot for a period of up to one year.

These new sweeping powers were granted in response to the overwhelming political need for authorities to get the situation under control, or at least to give the appearance of doing so. In May, hundreds of shops were raided by the police, dozens shut down and millions of dollars handed out in fines, with at least half a dozen violators arrested—some for merely asking to see a court order before allowing the police to search.

But once again, for reasons that aren’t quite clear, New York ballsed it up. Operation Padlock failed to be consistent, cracking down on some illegal establishments rather than others. This past week, I stepped into a weed bodega north of Tompkins Square Park where I was immediately greeted by a smiling man seated behind the counter. Asked about the crackdown, he calmly confirmed what I had felt to be true upon entering: that he was operating without a license, that many stores around him were, and that there was little apparent difference between those who had been shut down permanently (including those with legal representation who were counter-mobilizing against the city at that very moment) and those who continued to operate.

His store, among others, had been spared by the first months’ sweeps. Padlock’s vaunted dragnet, it seemed, had just plain missed. “Fingers crossed,” he said.

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With “Padlock to Protect,” New York seems to have achieved the impossible: Its new legal weed regime, rife with errors both self-inflicted and eminently foreseeable, has combined the worst of all worlds—the heavy-handed enforcement of the bad old days; a fledgling legal industry that has been handicapped by bad policy right out of the gate; and multiple illegal establishments avoiding the law, ensuring more minors have easier access to high potency weed than ever. The black and gray-market business is booming while severe legal penalties once again fall upon those least able to bear them.

Surely, there must be a better way.

If New York can’t be competent in its roll-out, then it can at least be consistent. Unlicensed shop owners should not fall within a coin flip’s chance of either being overlooked by the law (or even granted a license on the sly, as happened to one bodega earlier this year) or fined and sent to jail. Many of them would not be selling weed in the first place if not for an egregiously bungled rollout. Allowed to sell to the public for years without serious interruption, sellers can be forgiven for mistaking the city’s profound inaction for its tacit approval. They ought to be brought into compliance and licensed or, in the event of their refusal or incapacity, shut down indefinitely. Criminal charges and jail time ought to be spared for only the most egregious repeat offenders. 

In its haste to clean up a mess of its own making and to placate a furious public, authorities have instead turned the enforcement dial to eleven, running roughshod over the rights of business owners while, in all likelihood, inflicting precisely the kind of harm that the equity-focused rollout was meant to ameliorate in the first place. The public should not be forced to swallow the blatant hypocrisy that the overwhelming force currently being directed at working class, often immigrant business owners is merely another effort designed to “better support the legal cannabis market by allowing justice-impacted cannabis business owners to thrive.” 

In his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce’s fictional alter-ego, Stephen Dedalus, asks: “What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?” In the three years since New York legalized weed, the city has made exactly that trade-off.

Brendan Ruberry is Production Editor and Podcast Producer at Persuasion.

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By Amy S. F. Lutz.

Earlier this year, UCLA Medical School was exposed by Washington Free Beacon reporter Aaron Sibarium as the paradigmatic exemplar of DEI run amok. It’s hard to imagine how Saturday Night Live could skewer this discourse more savagely than by simply quoting verbatim from a guest lecture given to students by “poverty scholar” Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia: a prayer (with students urged to drop to their hands and knees) to “Mama Earth”; the rejection of the “crapatalist lie…[of] private property”; the dismissal of medicine as “white science.” Is there anything more to be said about the appropriateness of content like this in a mandatory course for first-year medical students other than just… no?

And that’s the real harm of such programming—not that it’s performative, or divisive, or completely irrelevant to the education of tomorrow’s doctors, although it is all those things. It’s that this rhetoric obscures urgent issues at the intersection of race and medicine, while alienating many potential allies who could, and should, help address them.

Historically, black people have borne a disproportionate share of the burden of American medical instruction and research, their bodies subjected to involuntary exhibition, dissection, and experimentation. The most well-known example of such exploitation is the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Conducted by the United States Public Health Service from 1932-1972, this project charted the course of untreated syphilis in almost 400 black men from Macon County, Alabama. The subjects were never told they had syphilis (they believed they had “bad blood”) and treatment was actively withheld, even after penicillin was widely adopted as a cure post-World War II. Ultimately, more than 120 men died of syphilis or complications from it, 40 of their wives developed the disease, and almost 20 babies were born with it.

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Tuskegee rightly remains a touchstone in our collective memory, a common explanation for the current distrust more than half of black Americans feel for the medical profession. But that reasoning might let today’s healthcare system off the hook too easily. Dr. Karen Lincoln, a professor of social work at the University of Southern California, believes that Tuskegee is a useful scapegoat that diverts attention from contemporary problems reported by black patients, including patronizing attitudes, the minimization or dismissal of symptoms and needs, and medical and pharmaceutical “deserts” that make accessing care extraordinarily challenging.

Unsurprisingly, these findings translate into significant health disparities. Black adults are 60% more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes than non-Hispanic white adults, and more than three times as likely to be diagnosed with end-stage renal disease. Hypertension is also much more common in black populations; one New York City study reported prevalence rates of almost 30% for non-Hispanic white adults compared to close to 45% for black adults. And while white people are more likely to be diagnosed with most cancers, black people are more likely to die from them, a finding largely attributed to the later stage of diagnosis in black patients.

Many health differences can be at least partially attributed to the significant black-white income gap (the median black household wealth is about a tenth of that of the median white household). But not all can. Maternal and infant morbidity and mortality is much higher for black mothers and babies, even controlling for income. A 2023 study using California data found that the richest black mothers experienced more infant mortality than the poorest white mothers. (Maternal mortality was similar between these two groups, despite the significant difference in resources.)

It’s hard to imagine a serious argument that tomorrow’s physicians shouldn’t be invested in ameliorating these disparities. But it’s even harder to imagine a serious argument that leading them in chants of “Free, free Palestine”—as happened at UCLA—will improve the health of a single person.

The answer is not to take politics out of medicine, as some critics have proposed. It’s an impossible goal anyway. Politics and health are inexorably intertwined, from the control of reproductive care, to the regulation (or lack thereof) of toxic substances like lead or DDT, to access to essential medications (remember “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli, who hiked the cost of an antiparasitic drug by 4000% in 2015?). Stripping medical school curricula of anything remotely resembling social policy in favor of an exclusive focus on “fundamental knowledge of disease processes,” as Dr. Stanley Goldfarb called for in a 2019 Wall Street Journal op-ed, would itself be a political statement, excluding from some of our most important debates exactly those experts best equipped to speak to the health impacts of such policies. It would also result in an impoverished medical education, since as much as 80% of our health is shaped by social determinants.

Although the backlash against UCLA has been dismissed as a “right-wing and Republican project” motivated by “racism,” such accusations skirt the key question exposed by all the media coverage—which isn’t, fundamentally, whether racial disparities in health should be taught in medical schools. A 2020 survey by the American Medical Association’s Accelerating Change in Medical Education Consortium found that 64% of their member institutions were already prioritizing social determinants of health in their curricula, and called for “dedicated action” to expand this to all medical schools. The fundamental question is how? How should medical educators, and the physicians they train, approach these complex and persistent problems?

The same way, I hope, that they approach everything else. We depend on our physicians to use evidence-based processes in the research and treatment of illness: to generate actionable and falsifiable hypotheses based on current knowledge, to use those findings to shape interventions, and to be willing to change these strategies based on whether or not they work. Reducing or, hopefully, one day eliminating healthcare disparities requires the same empirical approach.

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And that work is being done. One promising development is the emergence of new participatory research models that invite community engagement with the design and implementation of research that directly affects them. Perhaps medical schools should solicit such community input in their curricula development. My hypothesis? That black patients from underserved neighborhoods don’t actually want their future physicians spending their limited classroom hours being lectured about settler colonialism or how to spell “womxn” with an x—that social justice, for them, would mean treating their urgent and specific healthcare needs with the rigor they deserve.

Amy S.F. Lutz is a historian of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and Vice President of the National Council on Severe Autism.

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By Quico Toro.

For weeks, pundits have been speculating that France’s snap legislative election could blow up in President Emmanuel Macron’s face—and boy did it. Only it’s blown up in a way nobody expected. Instead of the much-feared far right victory, the election will probably force the centrist president into an awkward coalition with the left, an exercise likely to leave both sides badly bruised.

Macron had called the snap poll long before he was legally mandated to, following the far right’s surprise win in last month’s European election. Then, Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigrant National Rally had stunned Paris by coming first in France, with 31% of the vote. Macron reacted by dissolving the legislature three years ahead of schedule and calling a snap poll, seemingly to shock French voters into rethinking.

France’s one-of-a-kind two-round legislative election—which whittles down the field between rounds, but can still leave many candidates competing in the final run-off—is hard to forecast. After the far right again topped the first round on June 30, many of Macron’s own centrists felt forced into a tactical alliance with the left to try to block the National Rally, with some centrist candidates who had come in third agreeing to drop out in favor of the left, and some third-place left candidates doing the same reciprocally for the center. The tactic worked, and the result—foreseen by no one—was a legislature with the left as the largest group, the centrists second, and the far right languishing in third place.

Keen-eyed readers will already have noticed an anomaly. By convention, we talk about the French far right, but the left is exempted from adjectival abuse: it’s never the far left, just la gauche: the left. It’s a telling choice: an implicit way of conveying that while all reasonable people agree that the extremists on the right are beyond the pale, the left is still presentable in polite company.

But how presentable is this left bloc that will presumably now get to govern France in coalition with the ever-so-presentable—though obviously past his sell-by-date—centrist president?

Well, as inevitably happens with left-wing movements, there’s a bit of everything in the coalition that campaigned this election as the New Popular Front: from the zombified remnants of the once-powerful, relatively moderate Socialist Party (remember François Hollande?) to a gaggle of environmental groups to what remains of French communism. The biggest party in this space, though, is unquestionably Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) and its ascendancy over this space is clearly down to Mélenchon’s own charismatic leadership. In fact, Mélenchon probably has more say than any single other person over who becomes France’s next prime minister. What kind of leader is he, exactly?

One former advisor, speaking to Politico, described him as “a scale model of a charismatic dictator,” luxuriating over his explosive temper and sporadic excursions into conspiracy theorizing. With political roots in France’s Trotskyist movement, Mélenchon has an undoubted soft spot for dictatorial figures, which has seen him bounce between bouts of softness for Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad. In his own words, he was reduced to tears at a rally for the dictator who forced me out of my own country, Hugo Chávez. 

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Mélenchon’s party ran on a program that makes Bernie Sanders look like some kind of milquetoast Third Way type. La France Insoumise’s platform calls for a “tax revolution” that translates into much heavier taxes and much, much more intrusive state regulation across the board. Mélenchon fancies himself a moderate because he’s backed off of the proposal he touted back in 2017 for 100% marginal tax rates for incomes above 400,000 euros: the top rate of income tax he proposes now is just 90%. (Lest you worry he’s gone soft, inheritances beyond 12 million euros would still be taxed at 100%.) It takes a particular kind of political mind to look at France’s sclerotic, low-growth, hyper-regulated economy and conclude that the solution is higher taxes and more intrusive regulation.

Mélenchon wants France out of NATO. He wants a vastly reduced EU too, vowing to simply disobey EU law when he judges that to be in France’s national interest. His gut reaction, upon hearing that Putin had annexed Crimea back in 2014, was to justify Russian aggression and declare the problem solved (though he has since corrected course and condemned Russian aggression in an uncharacteristically mealy-mouthed manner).

You can’t, of course, be a proper left-wing lunatic if you’re not at least a little anti-Semitic, and here the war in Gaza has given Mélenchon all the rope he needs to hang himself. His strident support for Palestinian statehood has often been made in terms coded with anti-Semitism, such as the time he accused a French Jewish lawmaker of “camping in Tel Aviv” for going there to express her solidarity with the Jewish victims of the October 7th attack. In fact, Mélenchon has avoided apportioning direct blame to Hamas for those attacks, and invariably deflects questions about the events that started the wars into occasions for attacking Israel. On the topic of recent anti-Semitic attacks against French Jews, Mélenchon minimized the issue, calling anti-Semitism “residual” in France and “absent” from pro-Palestinian rallies. Mélenchon’s visceral support of the Palestinian cause often seems tinged with the kind of anti-Semitic dog-whistling Jews know only too well how to spot, leaving some in the bizarre position of siding with the National Rally as the lesser of two evils. Indeed 92% of French Jews see France Unbowed as furthering an anti-Semitic agenda.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon is, today, the second most powerful person in France. He is, by any reasonable estimation, a far-left extremist. He publicly espouses ideas that, if put into practice, would destroy France’s economy and probably tank the Euro. His comfort around, and admiration for dictators (so long as they are of the left-wing kind) is a matter of record.

So why won’t the press affix the richly deserved “far-” to his sobriquet? The decisions owes something, I suspect, to Mélenchon’s single correct view: his unabashed championing of “créolisation”—the blending away of racial and cultural differences between white French people and French people of color. On this, Mélenchon echoes a consensus elite view for once, in ways that contrast with the most hateful aspects of the xenophobic National Rally. He gets good mileage from this, and he should: he’s right.

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But Mélenchon’s forward-looking racial instincts are only a small part of the reason his version of “left” escapes the “far-” qualifier. The decision obviously owes much more to the commentariat’s own left-wing proclivities, and the chattering classes’ difficulty seeing anyone “on their side” as being precisely as objectionable as those on the other. Jean-Luc Mélenchon leads a movement for the kind of brain-dead statism that has ruined plenty of countries in the past, and will ruin France if he’s allowed to determine its future direction. Yet this is the path the French have chosen for their government. God help them.

Quico Toro is a contributing editor at Persuasion. He writes about climate policy on his Substack 1% Brighter.

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By Luke Hallam.

On the surface, the story of the British election is simple.

After 14 years of chaotic Tory rule—a period in which the country was governed by five different prime ministers, from David Cameron to Rishi Sunak—Britain was desperate for change. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won a decisive majority in Parliament yesterday in large part because support for the Conservatives collapsed. It was one of those inevitable pendulum swings that everyone knew was coming.

We Brits like to see ourselves as fundamentally different from our European neighbors. Our politics is generally less volatile, less prone to extremes. Not for us the fractured electoral landscape of a country like France, where a raft of parties on the far left and the far right has destroyed Emmanuel Macron’s majority in the Assemblée nationale. We have a first-past-the-post system that makes it hard for small or ideologically extreme parties to succeed. Even when the electoral pendulum takes a big swing, it follows a predictable pattern, and has done for 100 years: from Labour to the Conservatives, or (as was the case this time around) from the Conservatives to Labour.

Scratch beneath the surface, however, and the story gets more complicated. Indeed, this election may mark the moment when British politics, which has gradually become more European over the past decade or so, went fully continental.

Consider these three facts.

First, while Labour won a resounding majority, Britons have never been more put off by the two major parties. Sixty years ago, Labour and the Conservatives received almost 90% of the vote between them; this year, they got 57%, their lowest combined share of the vote since Labour first emerged as an electoral force over a century ago. The Labour Party won the third largest majority of any party in the past 100 years, with 63% of all seats in the House of Commons. But it accomplished this feat despite winning a relatively small share of the popular vote, 34%.

Second, voters are increasingly willing to search for alternatives to the two main parties, including the Green Party on the left and the Liberal Democrats in the center. The main beneficiary of this vote-switching, however, was a right-wing populist party whose politics follows a blueprint familiar from the continent. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK won over four million votes, or about 14 percent of the total, topping the record previously set by its predecessor, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), in 2015.

Farage ran on promises to cut taxes and scrap net-zero environmental targets. But his most important pledges were on immigration: He promised to withdraw Britain from the European Convention on Human Rights, to halt entirely the resettling of refugees, and to freeze “non-essential” immigration in order to save jobs and protect Britain’s “culture, identity and values.” While, in another peculiar consequence of the first-past-the-post system, the 14 percent of the popular vote Farage earned will only give it five seats, it marks the first time that a party on the ideological right of the Conservatives has gained a real foothold in Parliament.1

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Ironically, Reform’s success was also a big reason for the good fortunes of Labour and the Liberal Democrats—who only managed to take so many seats off the Tories because Reform split the right-wing vote. Farage will attempt to build on this success, and could even conceivably stage a hostile takeover of the Conservative Party down the line. Anyone who still believes that the rise and rise of a party like France’s National Rally couldn’t happen in the UK needs to think again.

Third, the young are no longer reliably progressive. Britain and America have of late been relative outliers, in that young voters in these countries were overwhelmingly left-wing, even while similarly young voters in Germany and France increasingly voted for far-right parties. According to some recent polls, this no longer appears to be the case. Over one in five voters below 25 were planning to vote for Reform according to one recent poll; another poll showed that the party are second among 16 and 17 year olds, way ahead of the Conservatives. While Labour came top among young voters, young people who are right wing are now far more likely than their parents to be very right wing.

Combined, these three trends show that although Britain has left the European Union, our politics is no longer so different from the volatile, ideologically diffuse spectacle we often see on the continent.

There are, nonetheless, good reasons for Brits to be cautiously optimistic. The election result is a chance to solve many of the problems—chronic underinvestment, stagnant wages and desultory productivity growth—that makes this island (as Sam Kriss argued in a polemical article in our pages yesterday) feel so crummy right now. As cautious as Keir Starmer often appeared on the campaign trail, it’s likely that he’ll now pursue major reforms aimed at tackling these problems.

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But, to me, the best news from yesterday’s election is that British voters are so much more changeable than those in many other democracies. Two years ago, Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson was musing about remaining in power until the 2030s; but, fed up with the incompetence of the Tories, millions of swing voters were willing to jump ship, delivering a decisive change in government.

That so many voters are willing to change their minds is a good thing for democracy: The system only works when voters’ allegiance to a particular party or leader does not become tribal; when their support is conditional on a government delivering real results—and abstaining from doing stupid shit. In this regard, the contrast with the United States, where both Democrats and Republicans now appear to have a stranglehold over their respective voters, is stark.

Luke Hallam is senior editor at Persuasion.

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By Sam Kriss.

British people hate happiness. You will not understand this country or its politics unless you first understand the deep vein of misery that runs through absolutely everything we do. We wallow in it. It’s why we eat that slop; it’s why we live in such ugly houses. The prevailing opinion on this island is that the absolute best and most wonderful time in our entire history was when all our major population centers were being bombed by the Luftwaffe. Most of all, though, we love to be disappointed. 

Every time spring limps into a grey and tepid summer, we’re secretly thrilled. Finally! Something to complain about! And this understanding should help to explain why there’s no institution more fundamentally British than the crap winter theme park. Every year, somewhere in this country, there’s another fiasco. The promotional materials promised an enchanted forest full of leaping reindeer, ice skating on a frozen lake, full-size polar bears, a little gingerbread market with warm lights among the snowy roofs—so you cram your family into the car and trundle off to some muddy field near an industrial estate in Buckinghamshire, and you tell yourself it’s because it would be nice to experience a bit of magic, just for once, but then you arrive, and it turns out the enchanted forest is a few half-dead saplings strung with fairy lights, the ice-skating rink is a square of white plastic, the winter market charges £6 for a styrofoam cup of hot chocolate, and the sole reindeer is skinny and shivering in its cage, pacing and pacing through the mud churned with deer shit and a few flecks of straw, looking at you with the rolling, haunted eyes of an animal that doesn’t understand why it’s not already dead. This happens every year, but we keep going to these things. We hunger for it. The misery; the baffled tantrums of our children. We feed on their tears. 

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Which is why these grand failures are slowly colonizing the rest of the year. This year, Glasgow made international news with a Willy Wonka “Chocolate Experience,” which promised all the usual wonder and enchantment but actually consisted of a basically empty warehouse decorated with some AI-generated posters and staffed by actors who’d memorized fifteen pages of AI-generated nonsense. A few summers ago, a London council spent £6 million on an artificial hill in Hyde Park, which was supposed to be a big shaggy mass of trees and wildflowers, rising miraculously out of the ground, with incredible views of the city from the top. I went. The actual hill was a pile of scaffolding covered in green fabric and dead grass, with views of a building site. It was one of the most miserable experiences of my life. I left feeling secretly very pleased.

Maybe this is a coping strategy, a way of dealing with our long post-imperial decline, but I’m not so sure. Nearly a century ago, when the British Empire was at its widest, when our cities were prosperous and still unbombed, when our industry flooded the markets and our navies ruled the waves—back then, Evelyn Waugh could end a book on the savagery and squalor of the rest of the world with a nightmarish scene in a London restaurant. If you want savagery and squalor, he writes, “Why go abroad? See England first. Just watch London knock spots off the Dark Continent.” I think we’ve just always been like this. Something in the greyness of this island. The ground is wet and the soil is dark: it’s great for plants, various forms of duckweed and moss; it makes you want to be a plant yourself. When the Romans came here two thousand years ago, they discovered that the Britons spent most of their time wallowing in swamps. Herodian: “Most of Britain is marshland because it is flooded by the continual ocean tides. The barbarians usually swim in these swamps or run along in them, submerged up to the waist. Of course, they are practically naked and do not mind the mud because they are unfamiliar with the use of clothing.” Cassius Dio: “They can endure hunger and cold and any kind of hardship; for they plunge into the swamps and exist there for many days with only their heads above water.” Nothing’s changed. We don’t mind being cold or hungry, we love it in fact, just so long as we’re also up to our necks in filth.

Anyway, over the past decade and a half, we have done everything in our power to turn Britain into a country-sized version of the miserable seasonal theme park. You probably know the headline news. Back in 2008, British GDP per capita was roughly equal with the United States; now it’s barely half. We have the worst-performing economy in the G7. In other European countries, even the ones that aren’t doing so well, productivity has still grown, but in the UK it’s flatlined: we’re working, but all that toil isn’t getting us anywhere. What all this actually looks like is a country slowly overwhelmed by its own grot. Most towns in Britain haven’t seen any kind of prosperity since the Blair years. Crap public sculpture, paid for by the Millennium Fund, built to celebrate some local industry that no longer exists. Some lingering shopping center built from green glass and shiny brick, which was very modern back in 1998 but is now mostly inhabited by junkies. Everything is like this. The hospitals are still open, but they can’t always reliably treat the sick: Nearly 300 people are dying needlessly every week because of overcrowding in emergency wards. We still have schools, police, social workers, all the institutions of a civilized society, but none of them have the resources to actually do their jobs. So they make cosmetic interventions while our children stab each other to death. The UK currently has two steelworks, but both are shutting down their blast furnaces. When that happens, Britain, birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, will be the only country in the G20 without the ability to produce its own steel from raw materials. Meanwhile, pretty much every river in England is polluted with vast quantities of human shit. We sold off the water utilities to private firms and now they’re going bust; dumping the sewage is cheaper than treating it. In 2023, the privatized water companies poured raw sewage into our waterways nearly 1,300 times a day.

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It’s only in the last few years that the rest of the world has started to understand just how badly we’re doing. Friends in other countries started asking if I was ok, if I was surviving out there. Do you have any idea what it’s like to be pitied by a Belgian? I think they imagined my country was experiencing some kind of social collapse. Desperation, riots, breakdown of all order… But it wasn’t. In America, where things aren’t nearly so bad, a big chunk of the population has gone half-feral. Armed and lunatic, channeling some bullshit they read online into acts of random violence. But we’ve not gone feral. There’s been no large-scale civil unrest. Everywhere you go, people are calmly, quietly getting on with their lives, buying sandwiches, taking the bus. There’s a TV show called Gogglebox where you watch other people watching TV; it’s very popular. Our political debates are about banning dog breeds and the definition of the word “woman.” We pretend everything’s normal, while every day we get a little bit poorer. Why would we start acting out? This is exactly what we wanted all along.

Since 2010, every general election—and there have been a lot of them—has ended up delivering a Conservative-led government. Much of what’s happened to this country is a direct product of the Tory fixation on various forms of austerity: the large-scale destruction of our civic infrastructure on the understanding that you can make a country richer by making the people who actually live in it poor. Critics on the left tend to see austerity as a form of class warfare. Disciplining labor, reducing its share, so capital can realize greater profits. As always, critics on the left vastly overestimate the rationality of capital. In 2010, when the Conservatives took power, corporate profits were in a significant slump at 10.1%. The current figure is 9.6%. Nobody’s making any money from this. Nobody actually benefits. It’s just our limitless appetite for suffering and misery, expressed as an economic policy.

But the Tories’ time is finally up. There’s a general election happening today, and unless there’s some kind of miracle, they’re going to suffer one of the biggest defeats in Western political history. They’re currently on track to lose more than 200 seats in Parliament; the smart MPs are all standing down instead of having to suffer the indignity of being voted out. But it’s not because there’s any particular enthusiasm for the Labour Party. Keir Starmer, the bland, businesslike leader who looks like a piece of ham that’s been plumped up with water injections, is promising a lot and nothing at all at the same time. He will halt the decline, he will stop this island slowly sinking into the sea, he will beat back the rot rising out of the swamps that used to be our home, he will make the economy grow again. He will also do it without reversing any of the recent Conservative budgets, and while maintaining strict limits on state spending. He’ll get his chance, but I don’t think it’s because anyone’s genuinely optimistic that he can pull it off. If voters have turned on the Tories, it’s because the party has finally become so ramshackle, so crawling with loonies and losers, that nobody could possibly expect anything from them any more. Now it’s Labour’s turn to disappoint us. 

Sam Kriss writes from London. Read more at Numb at the Lodge.

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By Tom Ginsburg.

On Monday, the Supreme Court capped off its bombshell term with an attack on the rule of law. In Trump v. United States, the Court articulated a broad new law of immunity for ex-presidents that will significantly impede accountability and invite corruption. While some immunity for a president is a good idea, the breadth of immunity created by the Court goes too far, and we may soon feel the consequences.

In 2023, when a grand jury convened by Special Counsel Jack Smith charged Trump with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, the ex-president and his lawyers responded by claiming that a president has absolute immunity for all actions taken while in office. This was the central issue that we needed an answer to in Trump v. United States. In answering it, the Court laid out a three-part framework for approaching claims of immunity.

First, it ruled that for actions in the core zone of the presidency’s constitutional powers, ex-presidents have absolute immunity from prosecution. This would cover things like the veto power, the pardon power, and the power of recognizing foreign governments. 

Second, for actions in which presidents exercise powers according to law, but which do not fall within core constitutional powers, the Court ruled that ex-presidents have presumptive immunity. This is not an absolute immunity, but a functional one, and it means they are immune if their actions are determined to be official. The Court described this zone in expansive language.

Third, for purely private actions, the Court ruled that there is no immunity. Because the distinction between official and unofficial action is a factual one, the Supreme Court remanded Trump’s case back to lower courts for further hearings, in order to decide whether his alleged actions regarding the 2020 election were official or not. But this almost certainly delayed the case until after the November election. If Trump wins, he’ll end the case upon taking office in January.

Why is the Court’s judgment worrying?

On its face, the basic distinction between official and unofficial acts makes sense. Other countries’ courts, notably the UK House of Lords in the prosecution of Chilean ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet, have made a similar distinction between official and unofficial acts. But the UK notably declined to create any category of absolute immunity. The Supreme Court therefore articulated a broader standard than recognized in international law.

The Supreme Court also acknowledged that some of Trump’s alleged actions may not merit immunity. The president has no constitutional role in communicating with state officials about the election process, for example, and so potentially could be subject to judicial process. But the Court also stated that in communicating with federal officials or the public, the president is presumptively immune. Thus, Smith’s allegations concerning Trump pressuring Mike Pence to overturn the election result, or inciting the January 6 mob, cannot be part of the basis of a prosecution.

Another problem arises with what the Supreme Court said in remanding the case back to lower court. In trying to draw a line between official and unofficial conduct, the Court instructed, lower court judges cannot inquire into presidential motives. Nor can official acts be considered in evidence in inquiries into the motives for allegedly unofficial conduct. This means that investigating presidential misconduct will be much more difficult in the future, as any evidence relating to official acts will be inadmissible.

Under these standards, how far could a president go without facing punishment? The dissenting opinion by Justice Sotomayor made much of the threat that a president may be able to sell presidential pardons without facing consequences. This is hardly a far-fetched scenario. Remember Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich, whose wife had made substantial donations to Clinton charities and to Hillary’s Senate campaign? The opinion in Trump v. United States practically invites such behavior.

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Abuse of the pardon power is hardly the worst of it, though, since a pardon is an individual-level action that rarely if ever impacts the national interest. Suppose, hypothetically, that a future president invokes his commander-in-chief power to cut off arms to Ukraine, and then recognizes Russian sovereignty over the Donbas, all in open exchange for a large deposit to his business bank accounts. Since these actions clearly fall within the core of the constitutional power of the presidency, they would be immune from legal investigation or punishment. Similarly, under the Court’s standards, the president could order his Attorney General to engage in specific prosecutions of his political enemies, or else be fired. The Court has essentially authored a how-to-guide for the use of public power for private gain, allowing the president to abuse their powers.

This all raises the stakes of presidential elections and the importance of character as a key quality in choosing candidates. But does it mean the end of the Republic?

Probably not. Ultimately, the rule of law depends not on one man, but the actions of those around the president. Presidential immunity does not extend to his supporters, who might still be prosecuted for obeying a patently illegal order, even if the leader issuing it can maintain immunity. Our system of federalism is a protector of liberty in this regard. Even if a president now enjoys broad personal immunity from both federal and state prosecutions, his helpers are potentially punishable in 51 different jurisdictions, so there is the ever-present chance of local accountability. Other consequences of misconduct can follow as well. Defendants who are lawyers can lose their ability to practice law: The provisional disbarment by the California Bar of Trump lawyer John Eastman is an example of a serious downstream consequence that can affect the calculus of sycophants.

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The rule of law is a complex ideal that depends in large part on a public perception that no one is above the law. If a president seeks to overturn the system of government, or otherwise abuse their powers, it will now be even more critical for those around him to think twice before going along. What is needed for such people is a cold hard calculus, in which the probability of successfully disrupting democracy is lower than that of facing consequences before the courts or other authorities later on. In the wake of Trump v. United States, the calculus of the people in a president’s inner circle may mean the difference between the success and failure of a constitutional coup.

Tom Ginsburg is the Leo Spitz Professor of International Law at the University of Chicago.

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By Joseph Stieb.

The trauma of the Trump years has struck historians as much as anyone. They have had to reconsider the American political tradition, seeking out the strains and threads that made an apparent aberration like Trump possible.

David Austin Walsh, a postdoctoral associate at the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism, argues in his new book, Taking America Back, that the right’s Trumpian turn did not represent a decisive break with conservatism’s past but was an outgrowth of the comfortable place extremism had enjoyed on the right for nearly a century.

Walsh seeks to debunk the narrative of anti-Trump conservatives and some of their liberal allies that Trump engineered a “hostile takeover” of the GOP and conservatism.

According to the “Never Trump” narrative, responsible 20^th century conservatives like Ronald Reagan and National Review editor William F. Buckley Jr. distanced themselves from “lunatic fringe” forces like the John Birch Society and open racists and anti-Semites. Trump’s triumph, in this view, fundamentally changed the nature of the GOP and conservatism.

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But Walsh contends that the far right and the mainstream were more intertwined than the hostile takeover story admits. He uses the term coined by Buckley to trace the rise of the “right-wing popular front,” a loose network of conservatives that included white nationalists, anti-Semites, extreme anti-New Dealers, and other kooks. Walsh contends that mainstream conservatives were more than happy to harness the energy of radicals in their quest to remake American politics. The crazies were always part of the coalition, and in the 2010s they took over the asylum completely, an outcome that Walsh and others have argued reflects the deep-seated radicalism of the modern right.

Taking America Back orients readers towards appreciating the importance of racist, illiberal, and anti-democratic forces in American political history. The writing is much more engaging than most academic work.

But the argument has significant problems. Most importantly, it defines responsible conservatism out of existence, leaping from the claim that mainstream conservatives never fully purged the far right to the idea that there was little meaningful difference between these groups. Claims like “in the early 2010s, conservatives and the far right were synonymous” speak to the overreach of this argument; Mitt Romney, after all, won the GOP nomination in 2012.

Walsh sets his sights on Buckley’s claim that he purged irresponsible kooks from conservatism, including the Birchers and Russell Maguire, the anti-Semitic editor of the right-wing magazine American Mercury. While this is well-trodden ground, Walsh ably shows that Buckley’s purges were usually tactical and partial rather than principled and absolute. In other words, you had to step way over the line into outright anti-Semitism, racism, or conspiracism to get excommunicated.

But when he did break with the extremists, Buckley did so in ways that preserved mainstream conservatism’s appeal to a popular base. For example, he directed his ire toward the fever-dreaming Robert Welch, the head of the John Birch Society, rather than the rank-and-file of Birchers, whom he still wanted as National Review readers. Buckley’s condemnation of Welch came years after the Birchers had been spreading insane claims like Dwight Eisenhower being a secret communist.

Walsh makes a solid case that Buckley hesitated to “punch right” in ways that would upset the right-wing popular front. Still, he is oddly resistant to the idea that Buckley nevertheless policed the boundaries of conservatism and rendered certain ideas and people beyond the pale. He did break from The American Mercury, the Birchers and others for outright fascism and racism.

The argument also struggles with the problem of “responsible conservatism.” Walsh uses this term without defining it clearly, even though one of his goals is to question its existence. The issue might be the term “responsibility” itself, as no form of conservatism is responsible for some on the left.

But the contrasts between Trump and the earlier mainstreams of the GOP and conservatism suggests that responsible conservatism did exist. Republican presidents in this era talked the conservative talk but governed far more pragmatically, accepting the basic tenets of the New Deal and civil rights while trying to limit their scope. Apart from Nixon, they did not subvert the bedrock principles of American democracy, particularly the transfer of power after elections. It is impossible to imagine Trump, the architect of January 6, writing to Biden the way that George H.W. Bush wrote to Clinton in 1993: “Your success now is our country’s success. I am rooting for you.”

Far-right elements like paleoconservatives and white nationalists often felt alienated from the dominant conservatism, preferring anti-immigrant, anti-trade, non-interventionist, and sometimes overly racist politics. As Matthew Dallek puts it in his recent study of the Birchers, “the differences between these ultraconservatives and what I will call the mainstream right were real and substantive,” including “explicit racism, anti-interventionism versus internationalism, conspiracy theories, and a more apocalyptic, violent, anti-establishment mode of politics.”

This coalition started to show cracks in the 1990s as the glue of the Cold War receded and this old right returned under figures like Patrick Buchanan. But even then, the GOP continued to choose mainstream presidential candidates, and neoconservative influence over domestic and foreign policy skyrocketed, to the great chagrin of figures like Buchanan. On issues like the Iraq War and globalization, the neocons and the Buchananites remained divided.

A related problem with Walsh’s argument is that the far right today sees Trump as an ally in ways that it did not for previous Republicans, whom they viewed as moderate squishes. The political scientist George Hawley noted in a 2016 book that “white nationalists are some of the most bitterly anti-Republican ideologues I have come across.” This changed with the MAGA ascendancy. As white nationalist David Duke said in 2016: “I represent the ideas of preserving this country and the heritage of this country, and I think Trump represents that as well.”

Longitudinal studies by political scientists offer further evidence that formerly extreme viewpoints have become more normal in the GOP over time. In the phenomenon of “asymmetric polarization,” both parties have moved toward the ideological poles, but Republican legislators have moved rightwards more dramatically. A party once stocked with moderate conservatives like John Warner now features Josh Hawley types as the new median. This trend helps explain why the GOP capitulated to Trump, but it also suggests that a more centrist conservatism held sway in the party for much of recent history.

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A more balanced version of Walsh’s argument might look like this: The lunatic fringe was not as fringe as mainstream conservatives like to believe, but the conservative movement and the GOP still made efforts to keep them from seizing the reins of power. They played a dangerous game, trying to maintain control while harnessing the voting strength of the “radical undercurrent” in the base.

The fringe’s attempts to take over failed until the early 2010s, showing the resiliency of mainstream conservatism. Trump seized control of the party both because of longer-term historical forces like the global resurgence of nationalist populism and contingent factors such as the crowded GOP primary field and the choices of party elites. Upon winning the presidency, he challenged positions that had been dominant in conservatism for a half-century, including free trade and commitment to NATO, while bringing nativism, white nationalism, and conspiracism into the mainstream in unprecedented ways.

Joseph Stieb is a historian and Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College.1

A version of this article was originally published by The UnPopulist, our editorial partner.

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Tonight’s debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump turned out to be deeply consequential. It made amply apparent what many have suspected for a long time: Biden is simply no longer fit to be the Democratic nominee. For the good of his country, and his own well-being, he must open the field for someone else. Here are two first attempts at grappling with the implications of a momentous night, from Quico Toro and Sam Kahn. - Yascha

Quico Toro: Biden Cannot Continue To Run

Fifteen minutes into the presidential debate, I found myself shaking: stunned by a political meltdown nothing had prepared me for. I imagine millions of us who’ve feared a second Trump term had the same realization at the same time. 

As I’m living outside the United States at the moment, I had paid relatively little attention to the campaign before the debate. Which means I came to it like many swing voters probably did, expecting the kind of dreary, indecisive draw presidential debates usually turn into. 

Without giving it much thought, I’d assumed the line about Biden being too old was mostly a Republican talking point, an attack line blown out of all proportion to score cheap campaign points. I’d expected rough parity in the senility-stakes. What we saw was… not that. 

In one painful exchange early on, Biden tried to explain his position on Medicare before spluttering. “We've been making sure we are able to make every single person eligible what I've been able to do with the Covid, excuse me, everything we have to do with... look... I finally beat Medicare…”

“I really don't know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don't think he knows what he said either,” Trump answered. 

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What we just witnessed was the collapse of any pretense that Joe Biden can effectively lead the United States through January 2025, let alone January 2029. Seeing the president stumbling incoherently through half-forgotten answers, jumbling his millions and billions and trillions in his now paper-thin, geriatrically-inflected whisper, then staring into space during Trump’s answers with the vacant look of a long-term care-home resident, my overwhelming urge was to protect him, to jump in somehow and rescue him from the grotesque act of elder abuse he was being subjected to.

Not, of course, that Trump did anything beyond the usual firehose of nonsense and lies. It’s just that what was actually said last night mattered little next to what it revealed about the mental fitness of the sitting president. Trump came across as an older adult with a normal level of cognitive functioning for his age. Biden came across as someone in need of round-the-clock care, able to produce short bursts of relatively coherent political rhetoric before sputtering into foggy incoherence.

That Joe Biden, this Joe Biden, isn’t actually running the Executive Branch of the United States is entirely obvious. The best pitch that can be made for him now is that he’s being kept around the way a German president is, an ornamental figurehead rolled out to cut ribbons and sign bills, while younger, more capable people run the country. In the kind of crisis that demands actual capable leadership, the guy who can string three coherent sentences together but not four is just not going to cut muster. 

Looking forward to November, it is clear that the Joe Biden we all just saw just isn’t a plausible presidential candidate. America is not Germany. Americans expect their president to take charge. Biden can’t. We all saw he can’t. There’s no point pretending otherwise. If there are any reserves of sanity left in the Democratic party, its senior leaders, starting with Barack Obama, will now persuade Joe Biden to spare himself the indignity of being dragged through a campaign he’s not up to, one that would very likely end up with a humiliating November defeat that would once again leave a dangerous, authoritarian narcissist in charge of the country.

Once it is clear that Biden is willing to step away from the nomination, Democrats can then figure out the next steps. They could settle for a good, old-fashioned brokered convention. Or they could call for a consultative, one-day, all-state primary that gives regular voters a say in picking the next candidate. (If Britain and France can organize unanticipated national legislative elections in a matter of weeks, surely the Democrats can manage something similar.) Or they can figure out some other creative solution.

But one thing is now clear: letting a once great senator who richly deserves to spend his remaining years in the company of his grandchildren be dragged to a humiliating and hugely consequential defeat wouldn’t just be political suicide for the Democratic Party. It wouldn’t just be an act of cruelty against an American patriot who is not to blame for what time has done to his synapses. It would be an historic mistake that would leave American democracy in the hands of the kind of demagogue the Founders always warned us about.

Quico Toro is a contributing editor at Persuasion. He rants about climate policy on his Substack 1% Brighter.

Sam Kahn: How Could Democrats Ever Let It Get So Far? 

My order of blame.

1. Joe Biden himself, obviously. In his political career, Biden’s strength has been in leading from the heart and having a certain merrily-we-go-along sense of civic responsibility. Maybe it’s not completely true, but I’ve always liked the idea that he decided to run for president out of a sense of outrage after Charlottesville. But after four years in office, that civic responsibility has betrayed him. Somewhere inside himself, the canny career politician must have known that his role was to staunch the bleeding of the first Trump administration—get elected in 2020 and then turn the leadership of the party over to somebody else. But he got greedy and had the usual inertia of older politicians—he simply didn’t want to give up power. The result was a complete inability to reckon with his age or with his obvious deficits in a one-on-one matchup with Trump.

2. The spin circle around Biden that refused to engage in any real talk about his age. I was horrified earlier this spring to read that Biden and his senior advisors simply didn’t believe in poll numbers. The direction the spin took was to imagine that the pollsters and liberal media were somehow out to get Biden, and were fixating on his age—while Biden had a unique channel to ordinary Americans and swing voters. That was always wishful thinking—Biden had never been that popular— but the debate puts that narrative  completely to rest. Biden’s poll numbers are low not because of anybody’s spin but because the American people aren’t totally spinnable. They can see how much he struggles to get to the ends of sentences, they can see his mind is drifting off. It’s almost impossible to imagine anyone—no matter who he was up against—actually wanting four more years of Biden and his obvious mental deterioration. 

3. The media pundits who allowed themselves to get wrapped up in the campaign’s spin. Throughout 2023, virtually no one in mainstream media was brave enough to pose “the question” of whether Biden’s age made him unfit as a candidate. A wave of pundits in early 2024 started to break through and to impose some basic sanity, but then with a better-than-expected State of the Union, the spin cycle began again, and major media outlets seemed somehow convinced that it was possible to work around the candidate, to sort of pretend that Biden wasn’t there and just attack Trump. A particularly egregious form of spin held that Trump was just as old and senile as Biden. It was almost possible to believe that if one looked at written transcripts of their speeches, but not when the two of them debated. Trump is clearly comparatively sharp. Biden just doesn’t have it anymore. No amount of spin can alter that. 

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There are very few silver linings from a fiasco like tonight’s debate, but if there is one, it’s that there is still time for Biden to step down. The primary calendar is a late imposition in U.S. party politics. A sitting president can throw their support to the convention and let the convention decide, as was done for over a century. It’ll be hard to coalesce around a candidate and give them enough running room to catch Trump by November. But Trump is also a very vulnerable candidate—his answers on abortion, on January 6, on NATO, were all terrible. Any normal candidate would have been able to take him to task, and watching Biden debate was like watching a basketball team miss layup after layup. 

Within a few moments of the debate ending, there may well be an attempt to spin this again, but it’s just not going to work. Too many Americans saw Biden and his obviously diminished capacities. This is an emergency. He cannot continue to run. The Democrats will lose and the country will suffer greatly from a second Trump term. There is no alternative to stepping down. 

Sam Kahn is an associate editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack Castalia.

The opinions presented here reflect the views of the authors, not those of Persuasion.

Follow Persuasion on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.

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By Bethany McLean.

In early June, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the face of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, testified in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability. It was an ugly and mostly pointless scene. The testimony bogged down in a partisan debate about the origins of the virus, and America’s yawning divides were on display, with Democrats falling all over themselves to defend Fauci and Republicans attacking him as the devil incarnate. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) even refused to call Fauci “doctor.” Instead, in a display of playground bullying that speaks to our modern lack of civility, she insisted on referring to him as “mister.” 

But the real tragedy was in the lost opportunity that the hearing represented. There really are plenty of questions to be asked about America’s response to COVID-19. And Dr. Fauci was at the center of much of our response. It’s increasingly clear that our government didn’t know what it was doing—how could anyone, at least in the early months?—but also that public health officials and our political leaders refused to learn as the pandemic ground on, instead disseminating favored narratives with more and more vehemence. “Follow the science” became a mantra for all good people—unintentionally ironic given that there was never much science. The cost couldn’t be higher: a total breakdown in trust in government. 

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Of course, one of the big unanswered questions is how lockdowns became our strategy. There was no precedent, no study that showed that lockdowns would save lives. Yes, for centuries, infected people had been quarantined in their homes, where they would either recover or die, but that’s very different than locking down an entire city. The West, desperate and afraid, more or less just copied China’s draconian policy, one that the World Health Organization called “unprecedented in public health history.” Early on, in March 2020, Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, told The Washington Post that “these kinds of lockdowns are very rare and never effective.” And yet, by the summer of 2020, it was hard to find a virtuous person who wasn’t patting themselves on the back for “staying safe” at home (albeit while having essential workers deliver Amazon goodies and meals).

The initial rationale, which was to protect hospital capacity, made some degree of sense in hard-hit areas of the country. But as it became clear that most hospitals in most places were not overwhelmed, the rationale shifted to abolishing COVID-19 entirely. Many of the country’s biggest cities continually reimposed lockdowns whenever there was an uptick in COVID cases—not just telling people to shelter in place, but also closing small businesses and restaurants, outlawing sports events and social gatherings, and shutting down in-school learning. Even in the face of evidence that this was not influenza—healthy children were not likely to die from the virus, nor, according to multiple studies, were schools hotbeds of transmission—schools remained closed. Ultimately, less than 20% of schools offered full-time classroom instruction during the fall 2020 semester. 

The basic questions went not only unanswered—but unasked. What would happen when restrictions were lifted? Could you make a highly contagious respiratory disease go away once it was widely seeded through the population? Who needed to be protected the most? Was the collateral damage from lockdowns worth the cost? Those who did ask such questions were shamed, accused of not caring about human life.

There can be no better example of how debate was stifled, and of the role Dr. Fauci played in stifling it, than the Great Barrington Declaration. In October 2020, three scientists, Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff, Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta, and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya, signed an open letter calling for the “focused protection” of high-risk populations such as the elderly or those with pre-existing medical conditions, while allowing other people to function as normally as possible. Although thousands of scientists eventually signed the declaration, there was virtually no public debate—because public health officials wouldn’t allow it. When Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) through 2021, heard about the GBD, he promptly sent an email to Dr. Fauci. “This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists … seems to be getting a lot of attention … There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises,” Dr. Collins wrote. “Is it underway?” he asked. It was indeed. The press dutifully followed the lead of Drs. Collins and Fauci; eventually, Facebook even censored mentions of the Great Barrington declaration. 

We don’t know the precise details of how discussion of the GBD was shut down—i.e. of how it came to be that suppression of the topic was so uniform across news media and social media. It’s important that we understand that process better. 

Because here we are. If there’s a convincing case—not just an assertion—to be made that lockdowns saved a significant number of lives, no one has yet made it. On the contrary. In the summer of 2022, The Lancet published a study comparing the COVID infection rate and death rate. It concluded that “SARS-CoV-2 infections and COVID-19 deaths disproportionately clustered in U.S. states with lower mean years of education, higher poverty rates, limited access to quality health care, and less interpersonal trust—the trust that people report having in one another.” These sociological factors appear to have made a bigger difference than lockdowns, which were “associated with a statistically significant and meaningfully large reduction in the cumulative infection rate, but not the cumulative death rate.” 

If the benefits were debatable, the costs were immense. Even putting aside the lost livelihoods, the sky-high national debt resulting in part from the two huge spending packages passed by President Trump and by President Biden in order to cope with the effect stay-at-home orders had on the economy, the increase in mental health issues, and on and on, by far the biggest cost was born by those whom we were all supposed to protect—children. The Annie E. Casey Foundation just published a white paper about the unprecedented declines in student math and reading proficiency brought on by the pandemic. Reading and math scores plummeted. Six indicators of child well-being worsened between 2019 and 2022, including educational achievement and the child and teen death rate. The child and teen death rate also remained elevated in 2022, with 17.0 deaths per 100,000 children and adolescents, compared to 14.7 in 2019.

Dr. Fauci has been asked in various fora whether he regrets his advocacy of lockdowns. “Sometimes when you do draconian things, it has collateral negative consequences … on the economy, on the schoolchildren,” he conceded during the 2022 Atlantic Festival. But, he added, “The only way to stop something cold in its tracks is to try and shut things down.” Except it was never possible to stop COVID cold, unless you kept people locked in their own individual boxes forever. Given the cost of lockdowns, wouldn’t it be worth understanding how the rationale shifted from protecting the hospitals to doing the impossible?

If lockdowns are the most dramatic example of how what was held out to be science actually was not scientific at all, there were many others. Masks, for instance. Maybe they protect individuals. But do mask mandates work? Meta-analysis has found no evidence that they do. The rule that we had to be six feet apart, the sad remnants of which you still see in many public places? “It sort of just appeared,” Fauci said during a preliminary interview for the congressional hearing, adding that he “was not aware of any studies” that supported it. The incoherent way in which already unscientific rules were enforced, like allowing diners to take off their masks while eating, but insisting that they put them on to walk to the restroom? Or forcing toddlers to wear masks? Or refusing to recognize the basic facts of how COVID was being transmitted, instead closing parks and shaming people for going to the beach, while sending the less well-off back into cramped, poorly ventilated apartments? How did all of this happen?

It may always have been too late to figure out COVID-19’s origins, given China’s determination to resist inquiries. But if there were a possibility early on, then that too was stymied, because you weren’t allowed to ask. “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots,” New York Times health and science reporter Apoorva Mandavilli tweeted in 2021, reflecting the general view in polite progressive society. Public health officials, including Dr. Fauci, demeaned anyone who dared to raise the idea. “Dr. Fauci Throws Cold Water on Conspiracy Theory That Coronavirus Was Created in a Chinese Lab” was one typical headline. But, as unredacted e-mails have shown, NIH scientists close to Fauci gave credence to the hypothesis in conversations amongst themselves. In his congressional testimony, Fauci conceded that there “has not been definitive proof one way or the other” of COVID-19’s origins. Then why couldn’t the question be raised in public?

The vaccine was a marvelous accomplishment, a triumph of both science and of the industrial mobilization needed to produce a vaccine in massive quantities. And yet, even that triumph was undermined by the same intertwined forces of public health and the mainstream media. People were forced to be vaccinated under the theory that vaccinated people didn’t transmit. “This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” said then CDC head Rochelle Walensky in the summer of 2021, reflecting the belief that only unvaccinated people were getting and spreading COVID-19. But her views reflected wishful thinking, not science. No one knew whether vaccinated people transmitted, because transmission was not an end point of the vaccine’s clinical trials, as both drug company executives and the FDA had acknowledged. Even as data emerged that healthy young men might face more risks from the vaccine than they did from COVID-19 itself, there was a refusal to acknowledge that vaccination could be a matter of personal choice. Today, the U.S. is an outlier in continuing to push boosters on everyone over five years old, regardless of the underlying risk factors. Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at the University of Pennsylvania, has worried about the effect incoherent recommendations will have on people’s willingness to get vaccines that are actually needed.

Why? That’s a question that needs answering.

The problems with our COVID-19 response went deeper than incoherent, unscientific public health mandates. If the global financial crisis of 2008 started a mistrust of capitalism, the pandemic exacerbated it. For instance, despite what we say about the importance of small business to our economy, people saw that when push came to pandemic-era shove, small businesses suffered while big business benefitted, both from the largesse of the Federal Reserve and from a lockdown policy that closed small operators and left big ones open. Again, why? Is there a way to make sure that doesn’t happen in the future?

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We also saw the downsides of a healthcare system in which capitalism often runs amok. Nursing homes, which have been infiltrated by private equity and run solely for their bottom lines, were death traps in the pandemic. If we had a hospital system in this country, instead of an incoherent, uncoordinated mishmash, then there might not have been overrun hospitals, because it would have been possible to transfer patients from one overwhelmed hospital to another one with beds. If we hadn’t outsourced manufacturing of essential goods like masks and gowns to China, then maybe there wouldn’t have been such a mad scramble for PPE. Shouldn’t this make us think more deeply about how critical infrastructure should be managed?

It turns out that our world is more fragile than we’d wanted to believe. The fragility isn’t just because a pandemic can happen, out of the blue. It’s because our institutions, from capitalism to public health, also rely upon trust, and trust itself is fragile. It breaks easily. So it needs to be cherished and protected. But doing that requires humility, an ability to say “I don’t know,” or “I was wrong,” along with an ability to tolerate uncomfortable questions—all things that we refused to do in the pandemic. It requires a willingness to look at the way our systems work and be honest about who benefits, and who gets hurt, and think about how to change things if we don’t want the same thing to play out again. “Trust, not information, was the key,” wrote Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at Princeton, in a recent New York Times column. “But just when it was needed most, some of the officials in charge of our Covid response undermined it.” As she pointed out, once people lose trust in institutions, they become more open to conspiracy theories. 

If there is a way back, it has to begin with a hard look at the past.

Bethany McLean is a contributing editor at Business Insider and Vanity Fair. She's the co-author of three books: Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, All the Devils are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis and The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind.

Follow Persuasion on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.

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By Matt Johnson.

Last November, the writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali published an essay titled “Why I am now a Christian”—an inversion of Bertrand Russell’s 1927 lecture “Why I am not a Christian.” A peculiar aspect of Hirsi Ali’s conversion—at least as she described it in her essay—is that it’s more of a political statement than a religious affirmation. She said very little about the doctrines of Christianity. She didn’t mention the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. While she briefly discussed her personal spiritual struggles, the piece was almost entirely focused on what she views as the social and political benefits of religion.

Hirsi Ali says a recommitment to Christianity is necessary to confront three threats to Western civilization: Chinese and Russian authoritarianism, the “rise of global Islamism,” and the “viral spread of woke ideology.” Similar arguments are made by the author and anti-woke intellectual Jordan Peterson, who believes the West will descend into a postmodern dystopia without the unifying narratives and values of the Judeo-Christian tradition. According to the conservative pundit Douglas Murray, meanwhile, the collapse of “grand narratives” such as the “explanations for our existence that used to be provided by religion” made the citizens of Western democracies the “first people in recorded history to have absolutely no explanation for what we are doing here, and no story to give life purpose.” And in a recent essay, the “heterodox” podcaster Konstantin Kisin described himself as a “lapsed atheist” who believes religion is “useful and inevitable.” Kisin laments the “lack of meaning and purpose that our post-Christian societies are suffering from.”

Despite the steady secularization of Western societies over the past several decades (or perhaps because of it), arguments like this are becoming increasingly common. A growing cadre of intellectuals think the decline of religious belief has created a moral and spiritual vacuum, which has been filled with surrogate religions like wokeness and political extremism. They believe there’s a crisis of meaning in Western societies as people scramble to fill the “God-shaped holes” in their lives with other objects of worship. They argue that a renewed commitment to the Judeo-Christian tradition is the only way to restore a sense of social solidarity and shared purpose—and perhaps even save the West.

The journalist Ed West describes this growing phenomenon as “New Theism,” which argues “not that religion is true, but that it is useful, and that Christianity made the West successful.” The idea that Christianity is an immovable pillar of Western civilization is one of the reasons nonbelievers like Murray embrace Christianity. West says the historian Tom Holland is “perhaps the most influential of the New Theists.” Holland is a prominent advocate of the view that Western civilization is a Christian inheritance—and that the West should return to its Christian values and identity. Hirsi Ali cited Holland’s book Dominion in her essay, arguing that Western civilization was “built on the Judeo-Christian tradition.” This is a bedrock belief among New Theists. Peterson describes the Bible as the “foundational document of Western civilization.” Holland declares: “To live in a Western country is to live in a society that for centuries—and in many cases millennia—has been utterly transformed by Christian concepts and assumptions.” Murray says “the idea of rights” and the “dignity of the individual … come from the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

It’s true that Christianity has been a formative influence in the development of Western institutions. The Catholic Church played a major role in institutionalizing the rule of law throughout Europe, as it constrained monarchs with an authority outside themselves. In his 2014 book Political Order and Political Decay, Francis Fukuyama suggests that China’s lack of a transcendental religion is one reason it “never developed a body of law that stood outside the positive enactments of the emperor.” Monotheistic religion is a powerful source of group cohesion which facilitated the establishment of large and diverse modern states. Christianity is also a universal religion, which supports the idea that all human beings have certain inalienable rights.

However, the New Theists present a one-sided history of Christianity and its role in the creation of the modern secular state. For example, Hirsi Ali declares that “all sorts of apparently secular freedoms—of the market, of conscience and of the press—find their roots in Christianity.” But one reason secular countries like the United States have robust legal protections for freedom of conscience and expression is the Enlightenment tradition of resistance to Christian domination.

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Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire challenged the authority of scripture, religious dogmatism, and the power of the Catholic Church. Baruch Spinoza rejected the idea of God as a transcendent supreme being, resisted supernatural beliefs, and made the case for religious pluralism and tolerance. In his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Spinoza said the state should hold sway over religion and argued for a rational interpretation of scripture. David Hume relentlessly challenged the moral and metaphysical claims of religion. While there were gradations of belief and unbelief among Enlightenment thinkers, a core aspect of Enlightenment thought was criticism of religion. And no wonder: the Enlightenment was in large part a response to centuries of religious oppression, dogma, and violence in Europe.

There’s a straight line from Enlightenment humanism to the liberal rights and freedoms lauded by the New Theists. Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, for instance, was a product of Enlightenment rationalism and skepticism. Jefferson noted that religious beliefs are arrived at by “reason alone” and condemned the “fallible and uninspired men [who] have assumed dominion over the faith of others.” He attacked the “tyrannical” religious persecution that was the norm in Europe for so long. He declared that “our civil rights have no dependance on our religious opinions.” The Virginia Statute laid the foundation for the First Amendment, which combines the right to free speech and assembly with freedom of conscience. Jefferson frequently criticized Christianity, and he was joined by other Founders like Thomas Paine—whose series The Age of Reason advocated deism over Christianity (particularly its role in politics); rejected miracles and superstition; and argued that the Bible wasn’t divinely inspired.

New Theists emphasize the role of Christianity in the creation of liberal democratic institutions, but ignore the influence of Voltaire, Spinoza, Hume, and other major Enlightenment critics of religion whose ideas permeate the secular democracies that exist today. Holland writes that “humanists, no less than Jews or Christians, are indelibly stamped” by the Judeo-Christian tradition. But the reverse is also true. Today’s religious believers (Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and so on) in Western societies enjoy the freedom of conscience and expression which are hard-fought legacies of opposition to religious tyranny during the Enlightenment.

This is a point the New Theists refuse to concede. In fact, they go beyond historical claims and insist that atheists don’t believe what they say they believe. To Peterson, morality is impossible without religion. Here’s how he addresses any atheist who tries to live an ethical life without God: “You’re simply not an atheist in your actions.” If you want to see true atheism, he says, look no further than Nazism and Stalinism. Holland declares that humanists are merely plagiarizing Christianity: “If there is a single wellspring for the reverence they display towards their own species,” he writes, “it is the opening chapter of the Bible.”

New Theists have a paternalistic attitude toward their increasingly secular fellow citizens. They insist that genuine irreligious belief invariably leads to social collapse, and they claim that morality itself is the exclusive provenance of Judeo-Christian thought.

But the New Theists aren’t just making descriptive claims about the historical significance of Christianity—they’re also making a case for how liberal democracies should function. According to Holland, one reason we will soon see a “changing of the global guard” from the West to emerging powers like India is the West’s unwillingness to affirm that it is a Christian civilization (never mind that the godless CCP is the West’s main rival). In a 2020 essay, Holland argued that the shift away from secularism in India and Turkey is a sign that the West is no longer able to “market its culturally conditioned assumptions as universal.” Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalism, he argued, is a return to the country’s “primordial characteristic of Hindutva: the qualities that for millennia had defined it as Hindu through and through.” Meanwhile, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is “engaged in a mighty effort to redeem Turkey from secularism, and restore it to the embrace of its Islamic past.” The West, the implication goes, should follow suit.

If Holland is correct that the future belongs to religious essentialists like Modi and Erdoğan, it will be a dark turn for humanity. Amid the Hindu and Islamic revivals in India and Turkey, religious persecution has surged in both countries. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom observes that “violence against religious minorities” has spiked in Turkey. India’s 200 million Muslims have long faced discrimination and disproportionate levels of communal violence, and a recent law passed by Modi’s government grants a path to citizenship for some members of religious groups from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan—but excludes Muslims (the law would never be deemed constitutional in the secular United States). Modi often makes inflammatory and bigoted statements about Muslims, even as levels of prejudice and violence against them rise.

Politically, it’s also unclear what a Judeo-Christian “revival” would mean. Even Christians can’t agree on what it means to live in “one nation under God.” Some American Christians think the United States should close its borders and embrace ethno-nationalism, others want to welcome more immigrants and emphasize the universalist message of Jesus Christ. Some want tax cuts, others want a larger social safety net. Some believe the United States should abandon Ukraine, others want to confront Russia. There are hundreds of millions of Christians in the United States—and over 2 billion in the world—and their faith is no guarantee of one political position or another. During the Civil War, both warring parties believed they had God on their side. The motto of the Confederacy was “Deo Vindice,” which means “God will vindicate.” There are ample Biblical justifications for slavery, but abolitionists such as Sojourner Truth, John Brown, and Frederick Douglass were Christians who condemned the way their faith had been used to perpetuate the slave trade. Even during the United States’ greatest national trauma, Christianity wasn’t a source of solidarity—if anything, it was a force multiplier.

The recurrent “crisis of meaning” is a natural externality in open societies—a consequence of the freedom and pluralism offered by liberalism, which can be destabilizing and make people feel like atomized individuals rather than members of a community. But the solutions to this problem are worse than the problem itself. The rise of populist nationalism and authoritarianism in the United States and Europe, for instance, is a reaction to what many citizens view as a rootless and bloodless form of politics in modern liberal societies. In the same way, a reversion to the Judeo-Christian tradition as the main source of national or civilizational solidarity isn’t a step toward some lost renaissance of cultural cohesion in the West. It’s a return to familiar forms of tribalism, prejudice, and dogma in a society that has become increasingly fractured.

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Building a liberal society that can accommodate many religious traditions, cultures, political movements, and conceptions of the good life is difficult, which is why the lure of a return to old ways and faiths will always hold some appeal—especially in an age of internal polarization and mounting external threats. But the only way to go back to those traditions is by sacrificing or diluting core aspects of liberalism that enabled diverse Western societies to flourish for so long in the first place. This is why our national solidarity must be built around values and institutions that transcend religion: democracy, pluralism, individual rights, free speech, and of course, freedom of conscience.

Matt Johnson is an essayist and the author of How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment.

Follow Persuasion on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.

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By Shalom Auslander.

As the election approaches and the words “division,” “friction” and “fractured” become ever more commonly used to describe the state of our union, we want to take a moment to thank everyone here at the Shit-Stirring Department for all your hard work. 

Thanks to your continued efforts and relentless negativity, any disagreements Americans have on issues large and small have been magnified into nearly insoluble problems. Together we have done an admirable job of convincing everyone that our differences are so vast as to be unbridgeable, and therefore any attempt to find consensus is futile and foolish. Most importantly, due to your hard work and dedication, consumption of media is at an all-time high, with hope itself at a long-time low. As we like to say here at the Department, “United We Stand; Divided We Profit.” People are terrified, angry, isolating themselves, doomscrolling, becoming paranoid and making everyone they know paranoid by sharing the videos, clips, headlines and polls that we here at the Shit-Stirring Department tirelessly emphasize. 

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But now for some troubling news. 

It appears that despite our best efforts, some national polls suggest that Americans are in agreement about many issues. The numbers are alarming: 

• 91% of Americans agree that we all have the right to equal protection under the law.

• 90% of Americans agree that we all have the right to freedom of speech.

• 84% of Americans agree with freedom of religion for all.

“So what?” you respond, much as we did when these numbers were brought to our attention. Who’s going to say they’re against freedom of speech, after all? But the numbers concerning politics are even more troubling: 60% of Americans agree that both Biden and Trump are too goddamned old to be president. 80% of Americans agree that elected officials don’t give a shit what people like them think. 70% of Americans agree that we pathetic ordinary people—i.e., not rich or famous—have too little influence over the decisions scumbag members of Congress make. The same depressing poll reveals that 63% of Americans agree that most or all politicians are whores—that they ran for office just to make money—and a whopping 85% of Americans agree that whatever made them run for office, it sure as shit wasn’t to serve the public.

Okay, sure, you say, everyone hates politicians. That’s hardly reason to worry that some sort of larger national consensus will emerge. What about the issues? What about good old abortion, huh? Nothing divides a nation so reliably as vaginas and embryos, right? 

Wrong.

In a Pew Research poll from May 13, 2024, two-thirds of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. That would be bad enough, but even more agree that life doesn’t begin at conception, and that moreover embryos should not be considered people with rights.  

It’s not easy reading, we know. Meanwhile, in a recent Gallup poll, 71% of Americans say they don’t give a shit who you marry, i.e., they support same-sex marriage. If we as a nation agree on gay marriage, what’s next? Guns? 

Yes.

A recent public opinion survey from Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions “found broad agreement among Americans for gun violence prevention policies—regardless of their political affiliation or whether or not they own guns.”

There’s no way to sugar coat this, folks. 64% of Americans agree that the gun thing is fucked up and we need stricter gun control laws. In a recent Fox News poll of all places, 87% of Americans agree on the need for background checks, 81% of Americans agree on the need to enforce existing gun laws, and 80% of Americans agree on the need to require mental health checks for people purchasing guns. 

When the nation begins to agree on guns, something has gone terribly wrong. 

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Are we not stirring enough shit? Do we need to stir shit in new, innovative ways? We have to ask ourselves the hard questions. Is there some terror we could be causing that we’re not? Or are people just beginning to doubt us, the Shit-Stirrers? 

According to recent Pew polls, yes, they are.

Two-thirds of U.S. adults say they’ve seen their own news sources report facts meant to favor one side. They’re calling bullshit on their own team. 78% of Americans agree that social media companies have too much power and influence in politics. 64% of Americans think social media has a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in the country today, so much so that 81% of American adults agree on the need for parental consent for minors to go anywhere near the deadly virus known as social motherfucking media.

Rest assured we have teams hard at work to discredit, bury or spin the polls mentioned here in as negative a light as possible. We will not take this agreement lying down. Fortunately, the pessimism we have worked so hard to create is on our side; many people, perhaps even some of you reading this, have been so trained to believe we don’t agree about anything that any suggestion we do will be met with immediate and furious skepticism. For so long have we dutifully shouted “Fire!” on this crowded planet that anyone shouting otherwise is deemed insane, or worse, a “foolish optimist,” the most devastating charge in all modernity. In the meantime, though, please continue using the word “divide” as often and in as many forms as possible, i.e., “divided nation,” “growing divide,” “unbridgeable divide,” etc. “Polarized” is a good one, and “dark times” is always good for a few clicks, too. 

In this difficult time of creeping consensus and common sense, we urge you to not give up on giving up. Together, we can drive this nation apart, perhaps even to a civil war, which will get us the clicks and reposts we are paid for. 

Because we care about the nation?

Because we care about the future?

Because we care about humanity? 

No. 

Because we don’t.   

Shalom Auslander is a novelist, short story writer, essayist and scriptwriter. He writes The Fetal Position on Substack, and his new memoir, FEH, will be available in July.

Follow Persuasion on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.

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By Alex Morey.

“College administrator tries to silence faculty critics” is hardly a new scenario. But the censors usually aren’t quite so upfront about it.

Enter Lawrence Bobo, a professor and Dean of Social Science at Harvard, who penned an op-ed in The Harvard Crimson last weekend arguing that faculty should be sanctioned when they criticize the university or prompt “external actors” like alumni or the media to do so.

“A faculty member’s right to free speech does not amount to a blank check to engage in behaviors that plainly incite external actors—be it the media, alumni, donors, federal agencies, or the government—to intervene in Harvard’s affairs,” Bobo writes.

Apparently, it’s unprofessional to criticize the university so badly that others suggest reforms—even if those criticisms are valid. This is particularly so for Harvard’s more famous faculty, with “well-earned notoriety that reaches far beyond the academy” which “opens to them much broader platforms for potential advocacy.” Bobo names economist Raj Chetty, historians Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Jill Lepore, and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker.

He writes:

Is it outside the bounds of acceptable professional conduct for a faculty member to excoriate University leadership, faculty, staff, or students with the intent to arouse external intervention into University business? And does the broad publication of such views cross a line into sanctionable violations of professional conduct?

Yes it is and yes it does.

There are many reasons why sanctioning faculty who speak out against the university is dangerous. Most obviously, it would gut their expressive rights to publicly criticize Harvard’s shortcomings or abuses, amounting to the kind of “professionalism” policy colleges routinely abuse to punish all manner of controversial student and faculty speech. An administrator need only deem speech unprofessional, and they’ve found a convenient loophole around their academic freedom and free speech policies.

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The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which defines professional values for faculty, would say that Bobo’s got it backwards. “Professors have a particular obligation to promote conditions of free inquiry and to further public understanding of academic freedom,” they write. In other words, not only should they not be silenced when freedom of inquiry is at stake—they have a special moral obligation to speak out.

What’s more, a gag order at one of the world’s most elite universities would have an outsized effect because, of course, Harvard has a disproportionate effect on our society. Recent Pew data shows that dozens of House members (9%) have at least one Harvard degree, while Harvard grads make up 13% of U.S. senators. Likewise, half of this century’s Supreme Court appointees have Harvard Law degrees; Harvard grads make up a disproportionate chunk of New York Times reporters; and the nation’s biggest corporate powerhouses—like Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, and McDonald’s—all put Harvard grads at the helm.

Bobo’s op-ed has given pundits a fresh opportunity to rehash the school’s recent “abysmal” free speech and academic freedom practices. This includes last fall’s disastrously hypocritical congressional testimony by then-President Claudine Gay, which set off a chain of events that would see her embroiled in a plagiarism scandal and ultimately resign.

Particularly vexing to free speech advocates is that a clear map to a better place is right there in Harvard’s policies. The university has had robust protections for free speech and academic freedom in place for decades, including the right of faculty to teach, research, and publicly discuss divisive topics. Harvard’s policies in this regard are gold-standard, even if administrators have struggled mightily in recent years to put them into practice. Efforts undergirded by the good folks at the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard—including the adoption of institutional neutrality, and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences abandoning DEI-related political litmus tests in hiring—have ignited fresh hope that Harvard can re-commit to fulfilling the promise of its excellent policies.

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It’s vital that Harvard builds on this progress. If the university wants to stop adding to its controversy list, it should welcome faculty criticisms. After all, they’re the people with perhaps the most incentive to see the institution succeed and are the best-positioned to know its shortcomings.

Consider those faculty Bobo’s op-ed names. What exactly did they say that would so “invite external interference” and “seriously harm the University and its independence?” Steven Pinker wrote a “A five-point plan to save Harvard from itself” in The Boston Globe last December, urging the university to simply follow its own policies on free speech, viewpoint diversity, and nonviolence. He also pushed for the adoption of institutional neutrality and doing away with DEI-related bureaucracies that have become synonymous with campus orthodoxies around issues of race and gender.

Folks like Pinker, if heeded, could save Bobo from himself. As The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf observed, his proposal might come back to haunt him rather quickly: “Bobo’s op-ed has incited me, an external actor, to publicly lament the subset of Harvard leaders who neither understand nor support free speech,” Friedersdorf wrote on X. “By his logic, I guess he needs to be sanctioned.” 

Point succinctly made.

But the icing on the multi-layered irony cake has to be Bobo’s response to The Crimson on Tuesday, in which he attempted to distance “the views in his op-ed from his official role” as a dean with disciplinary authority. Instead, he invoked his expressive right to share his views “as a member of the faculty.” 

Quite right. There’s another name for that: Academic freedom.

Alex Morey is a First Amendment attorney and journalist. She leads the Campus Rights Advocacy team at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

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