The Atlantic

Fall Is in the Air, Part II

2026-11-02T13:11:37-05:00

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Fall foliage is seen in Burlington, Maine, on October 13, 2026.

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A statue of a deer is silhouetted against the autumnal foliage reflected on Loch Faskally in Pitlochry, Scotland, on November 2, 2026.

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A red squirrel sits alert amid a carpet of autumn leaves at Rakowicki Cemetery on October 30, 2026, in Krakow, Poland.

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Barnacle geese fly above the RSPB Mersehead Reserve on the Solway Firth, after migrating from their breeding grounds in the Svalbard Archipelago, in Southerness, Scotland, on October 17, 2026.

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Kings Mountain is seen over the Matanuska River on October 14, 2026, near Chickaloon, Alaska.

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Raindrops cover fall leaves in Denver on October 14, 2026.

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Autumn foliage brings warm shades of yellow, orange, and red to the parks and promenades of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, on October 19, 2026.

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Colorful autumn leaves in Toronto, Ontario, seen on October 25, 2026.

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A view of the historic Rakotzbrucke, a 19th-century bridge built with basalt stones, at Kromlau Rhododendron Park in Kromlau, Germany, on October 28, 2026. Surrounded by trees in yellow, orange, and red autumn colors, the arched bridge forms a complete circle with its reflection on the lake surface.

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Golden rice terraces, seen in Longji Town on October 16, 2026, in Guilin, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China.

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Beech, hornbeam, oak, and maple leaves in yellow, red, brown, and green tones cover the trees around the lakes at Yedigöller National Park on October 28, 2026, with the arrival of autumn in Bolu, Turkey.

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A stray cat walks on fallen leaves at a park in Ankara, Turkey, on October 18, 2026.

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A Lakeside & Haverthwaite Railway steam train runs along the River Leven near Newby Bridge in England’s Lake District on October 29, 2026.

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Visitors enjoy a water slide above red and yellow foliage at Hongye Shiyan Scenic Area in the district of Boshan, Zibo, in China’s Shandong province, on November 1, 2026.

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Water flows down Big Poe Creek on an autumn day in Woodward, Pennsylvania, on October 14, 2026.

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A red stag walks through brush at sunrise in Richmond Park on October 19, 2026, in London.

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A farmer harvests corn at a farm in northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province on October 15, 2026.

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Water flows down the Contoocook River, passing the colorful foliage of trees and a covered bridge, on October 15, 2026, in Henniker, New Hampshire.

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A view of Mount Siguniang (Four Sisters Mountain) Scenic Area in Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture, in China’s Sichuan province, seen on October 26, 2026

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Colorful leaves, seen in the Wuhlheide park in Berlin, on October 29, 2026

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A narrow path winds through a forest, seen on a sunny autumn day in Treplin, Germany, on November 1, 2026.

The States Where Democrats Have the Most to Gain

2026-11-02T11:55:21-05:00

David Crowley had every reason to exalt as he bounded into a campaign rally at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater on Thursday. The night before, the Milwaukee County executive’s hometown Brewers won the World Series for the first time in their 56-year existence. A new poll released the same day found Crowley to be in a strong position to make his own history next week, by becoming the first Black governor of Wisconsin. But it was an even bigger potential victory that prompted Crowley, wearing a Brewers pullover and sneakers the color of Wisconsin cheddar, to declare to the crowd: “This is where I get a little giddy!”

Democrats in Wisconsin have begun to imagine that they can not only retain the governorship but also capture control of both chambers of the state legislature for the first time since 2008. “Think about what we’re going to be able to do with that,” Crowley told the crowd of students who cheered the possibility. Such a sweep would cap a remarkable comeback for Democrats in Wisconsin, a swing state at the presidential level where, until recently, Republicans have maintained a tight grip on the legislature. Unified government would allow Democrats to undo a raft of conservative policies first enacted by former Governor Scott Walker and reverse years of budget cuts imposed by GOP lawmakers.

The Democrats’ drive for a trifecta in Wisconsin is part of a broader effort to take maximum advantage of what seems to be one of their most favorable national electoral environments in decades. They have a chance to win full control in states including Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota while cutting into Republican majorities in many others. “We’re looking at what could be a generational shift in state legislative power,” Heather Williams, the president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, told me.

Sweeps at the state level could yield more immediate policy changes than even Democratic victories in the battle for control of Congress, because a split federal government would likely result in legislative gridlock during President Trump’s final two years in office. Full Democratic control in more states could also upend the nationwide redistricting wars, giving the party fresh opportunities to counter Trump’s red-state gerrymandering push.

[Read: Redistricting isn’t going as Republicans planned]

For years, Republicans devoted far more attention and money to state legislative races than Democrats did. In 2010, that focus paid off when a GOP wave during President Obama’s first term not only swept Republicans into the House majority but helped them flip 20 state legislative chambers across the country.

Democrats have spent years playing catch-up, trying—occasionally in vain—to convince a donor base obsessed with presidential politics that spending money on cheaper but less sexy downballot races is a more cost-effective investment. That message is finally getting through. In early 2019, I wrote about an organization called Future Now, one of a constellation of Democratic groups that formed with a focus on building state-level power in the aftermath of Trump’s first win. At the time, Future Now was hoping to spend about $10 million to help Democrats flip state legislative races in 2020. The group has since changed its name to the States Project, and it has raised $100 million to spend this year. “So we’ve made a lot of progress,” its co-founder Daniel Squadron told me. But he noted that Republicans are still outspending Democrats in many states, which could limit the party’s gains: “I do believe that we are leaving seats on the table.”

Nowhere has the Democrats’ renewed focus on state power proved more consequential than in Wisconsin, where a years-long drive to loosen the GOP’s stranglehold on the legislature has resembled a slow-motion game of dominoes. A decade ago, Republicans held the governorship and near-supermajorities in the legislature. In 2018, Tony Evers narrowly ousted Republican Governor Scott Walker, and that same year, Democrats began chipping away at the conservative majority on the state supreme court through a series of judicial elections that drew tens of millions of dollars in spending from both sides. In 2023, liberals won a majority on the court, which soon overturned the Republican-drawn legislative map after ruling that its jumble of disconnected territory violated the state constitution. New district lines took effect for the 2024 election, and even though Trump narrowly carried Wisconsin over Kamala Harris, Democrats picked up seats in the state Senate and assembly. Those wins, in turn, put them in position to seek a trifecta this year.

Wisconsin Democrats kept gaining momentum as 2026 began. The new, fairer legislative maps prompted a slew of longtime Republican incumbents to retire rather than face much tougher reelection bids. And they attracted stronger Democratic candidates, such as Trevor Jung, the 30-year-old director of transit for Racine, a deindustrialized city on the shores of Lake Michigan. Jung, who previously served on Racine’s city council, is campaigning for an open state-Senate seat that could determine which party holds the majority.

“This is the tipping point,” Jung told me last week. We were sitting inside the local Democratic headquarters, where a cardboard cutout of a smiling Barack Obama behind a podium served as a reminder of the party’s last, brief run of dominance in Wisconsin. (Obama carried the state by nearly 14 points in 2008, a landslide by Wisconsin standards that helped Democrats win majorities in the legislature as well.) When I asked Jung whether he would have run in the old version of his district, which contained less of Racine and more deep-red rural areas, he laughed in a way that suggested the question was a bit foolish. “No,” he replied. “That is how bad these gerrymandered maps were. It was crazy.”

Jung has been the beneficiary of good fortune before. Born in Krasnodar, a Russian city across the Black Sea from Crimea, he was a 2-year-old orphan when a gay hairstylist looking to start a family in Racine flew almost halfway across the world to adopt him. Had he grown up as part of the underclass in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Jung reflected, “I very much would have been part of the war machine now.”

Instead, he was raised in a blue-collar section of Racine, and when he returned to the city after studying urban affairs in college, he saw the effect of years of austerity budgets imposed by the GOP-controlled legislature. Cuts in state funding have forced local governments across Wisconsin to hold repeated referenda to raise property taxes just to keep schools open and maintain municipal services, including police departments. “There has just been a concerted effort from legislative Republicans to go after areas that Democrats live in,” Jung said, “so that they don’t have the political power of a growing, successful population. That has been their approach.”

That has continued, he said, even though Wisconsin has had, in Evers, a Democratic governor for the past eight years. Evers has described himself as “the goalie,” using his veto power to hold back the Republican legislature. With majorities in the assembly and the Senate, Jung argued, Democrats would be able to play offense instead of defense.

Jung told me he’s been volunteering for Democratic campaigns since Obama’s first election—when he was 12 years old—and that the vibe he’s encountered while knocking doors this time is distinct from years past. “People are just so sick of the way that politicians have treated voters, with the way that government has been ineffective, with the drama and the craziness out of Washington,” Jung said. When he tells people he’s a Democrat, often the response is I’m going Democrat this year. “You hear the words this year, and you catch it, and you’re like, ‘Okay. This is interesting,’” Jung said.

State legislative campaigns have traditionally been low-budget operations, a contest of which candidate can knock on more doors and turn out more voters. But as spending on these races has surged, they’re beginning to resemble hard-fought congressional campaigns, complete with dueling negative ads on TV. Republicans are running ads calling Jung “Tricky Trevor” and accusing him of campaigning on the public dime while serving as Racine’s transit director (a charge that Jung laughed off).

About a half hour’s drive north of Racine, I met with Dan Bukiewicz, the longtime mayor of Oak Creek, who is running to flip a Republican-held seat in the state assembly. As in Racine, the GOP incumbent decided not to seek another term. Bukiewicz is, at 61, a generation older than Jung, but they’re both campaigning on their experience in local government and, along with most Democrats across the country, addressing voter angst about affordability. “Everybody’s upset about rising costs,” Bukiewicz said. “People are screaming for change.”

[Read: Going hungry in Trump’s economy]

Independent analysts believe the party is poised to pick up the two seats they need to capture Wisconsin’s state Senate. They need to gain five in the assembly, but a good night tomorrow could get them there. As they seek the trifecta, Democrats are focusing on proposals that could have a direct impact on voters’ lives—lowering health-care and child-care costs, lowering gas prices, and boosting funding for schools. They’re talking less about an issue that gives national stakes to the Wisconsin elections: redistricting. The state is perhaps the most closely divided in the nation; five of the past seven presidential elections here have been decided by less than a percentage point. But thanks in part to a Republican-drawn gerrymander, the GOP controls six out of Wisconsin’s eight House seats.

Because of court challenges, the legislature may have to revisit Wisconsin’s congressional map no matter which party controls the majority next year. But if Democrats control the legislature and the governor’s office, some in the party want to redraw the lines right away and thrust Wisconsin into the nationwide redistricting war that Trump launched in red states last year. “We have congressional maps that are gerrymandered,” Greta Neubauer, the Democratic assembly leader who is in line to become speaker if the party wins the majority, told me. “We would be looking at the maps and considering whether to redraw them.” Crowley was more circumspect; he told me that he wants to see the court cases play out before deciding whether to redistrict.

Other factors could complicate the debate. A large enough Democratic wave tomorrow might overcome the GOP’s attempt to fortify its majority through gerrymandering, and that could dampen Trump’s interest in expanding the battle to other states. And in Wisconsin, Democratic victories in two competitive House races would create an even split of the state’s congressional delegation, making it harder to argue that the current maps are unfair.

When I asked Devin Remiker, the Democratic Party chair in Wisconsin, about this scenario, he joked that he didn’t “want to count my congresspeople before they’re elected.” He and the party as a whole are trying to guard against overconfidence heading into Tuesday’s elections—both in Wisconsin and across the country. They’ve been burned by overly rosy polls before. Still, Remiker couldn’t quite help himself. “In Wisconsin, usually we’re some version of cautiously or nauseously optimistic,” he told me. “But this year, I will drop the qualifier and say that I’m optimistic.”

The Time is Right for a ‘Great Books’ Revival

2026-11-02T09:00:00-05:00

In 1970, the poet, educator, and architect June Jordan posed the following question during a middle-school graduation speech in Ocean Hill, Brooklyn: “Where are the central, required courses that will teach us our real heritage of heroes and heroines, rebellion, and loving accomplishment?”

Questions like this are at the forefront of my mind lately. Like Jordan, I’m a writer who teaches students of all ages. As a literature professor at MIT, I’m working to develop Great Books programming—inspired by her dream of what a general curriculum might look like—that centers the history, poetics, and philosophy of science. Toward that end, I spent the past summer talking to physicists, poets, political scientists, materials-science engineers, and high-school teachers in English and robotics about the literary works that shaped their lives. You’ll recognize some of the authors whose names emerged from those conversations. Homer, Hansberry, Virgil, Whitman, Dickinson, and Dewey all made appearances. So did Melville and Morrison, Douglass and Du Bois. The central theme of our list was invention—the dance between the examined life and the art of self-creation. A number of these colleagues and friends are now working with me to build a program that will live at MIT but also be available to the general public: a set of living documents and dynamic conversations, open access, available to all.

What we are trying to do is not just help ground students—the large majority of them scientists and engineers in training—in a humanistic research program, but to identify irreplaceable ideas during a time of accelerated change. In the world beyond campus, each day brings news about the dangers and wonders of artificial intelligence: that it will lead to economic abundance, the end of a range of life-threatening diseases, and the light-speed distribution of human knowledge around the globe. At the same time, reports warn of declining rates of literacy and damage to our working memories, the potential for mass job loss, and possibly much worse. Why many people have stopped reading, or no longer see the beauty or necessity of it, is one matter. But the question of why reading—especially reading that challenges and surprises us—is presently indispensable is another. How might timeless works of art, literary and otherwise, help prepare each of us for this new world?

Every educational reform has to meet its particular moment. And the cultural turn toward artificial intelligence is only part of what makes this project timely: In my view, we need a renewed emphasis not just on the arts and humanities as such, but on making meaningful connections between humanistic thinking and technological development. We need to clarify, often and in public, why the pursuit of scientific knowledge matters in the first place, as well as what we actually want pathbreaking new technologies to offer us. Just as important, we must equip young people with the tools they need to navigate a social and political landscape that is growing more hostile toward the core premises of higher learning and scientific research.

My sense of the transformative power of literature didn’t come from the academy. It is an inheritance, largely from my great-grandmother. She was born 30 years after the abolition of slavery, lived into the 1980s, and ultimately shaped my mother’s approach to education. The beauty of reading, she told her, of what you learn and preserve in your mind, is that it can never be stolen. It is yours the way little else in this life is yours. A reader is never entirely alone; the text opens a portal between friends and strangers, the dead and the living. Amid a nationwide crisis in education—and a parallel crisis of transcendent meaning and social belonging—my sense is that this is a crucial time to return to works that help us practice patience, astonishment, and deep attention to the details of the world around us. This work, if it is effective, will not only beautify our days. It will also make us more courageous, imaginative, and free.

There has never been broad agreement on exactly what constitutes a core curriculum. Its history in the United States is marked by a series of debates that continue into the present. The “Yale Report of 1828” reflects this reality: After describing the foundation of a “thorough education” for college students, the document identifies the “two great points to be gained in intellectual culture” as “the discipline and the furniture of the mind.” For its authors, the imagination of a young person was akin to a physical space that demanded a particular kind of structure, and adornment.

[Read: Stop meeting students where they are]

This report is conscious, from its first pages, of the new possibilities offered by science education; one early passage describes visiting Yale alumni who “express their surprise” at the fact that, since they’ve graduated from an institution once primarily devoted to religious education, “whole sciences have, for the first time, been introduced.” Anticipating the criticisms their version of the core curriculum may face, the authors pose a rhetorical question: “But why, it may be asked, should a student waste his time upon studies that have no immediate connection with his future profession?” Their answer, like the query itself, seems prescient today: “Every thing throws light upon everything.” Little more than a century later, another Great Books curriculum, at St. John’s College, likewise incorporated the sciences into its sprawling vision: Its four-year reading list included “classic works in philosophy, literature, political science, psychology, history, religion, economics, math, chemistry, physics, biology, astronomy, music, language, and more.”

Columbia University has had a core curriculum since 1919. Wanting to know why it continues to resonate with students today, I called a colleague, Roosevelt Montás. A Columbia alumnus, he directed its Center for the Core Curriculum for a decade. Last year, Montás became an endowed professor at Bard College, which has a first-year Great Books seminar; as part of his new position, he travels across the country speaking with other institutions about their visions of what a Great Books program should look like. Montás has an expansive sense of the promise and power of a core curriculum, incorporating widely accepted classics—by Milton, Shelley, et al.—into a larger, universal syllabus, a gathering of ancient and contemporary authors who enhance our understanding of what it means to be human across time and space.

When we spoke, Montás interwove the story of his life into this larger vision: Arriving in New York from the Dominican Republic at 12 years old; learning English alongside other first-generation students in Queens; choosing Columbia because it was “the most selective school that I could get to on the subway.” Once there, Montás was immediately struck by the creative resources that the Columbia Core offered him. The program is grounded primarily in foundational texts from around the world that are studied across two years. The first year focuses on epic poetry, fiction, religious literature, and drama: from the Epic of Gilgamesh to The Aeneid, and on through the King James Bible, Dante and Shakespeare, Austen and Woolf. The second year explores philosophy and politics, beginning with Plato and concluding with the works of Frantz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, and others. While pursuing his Ph.D. at Columbia, Montás went on to teach these classes to a new generation of students who, like him, sought not just historical knowledge, or higher meaning, but common ground.

The set of programs we are working to establish at MIT—ones that bridge the sciences and the humanities and reach beyond campus—has its precedents. In 1917, an MIT literature professor named Frank Aydelotte worked as a writing consultant at AT&T, leading seminars for its younger employees to help improve their writing and communication skills. That same year, he published a book titled English and Engineering: a primer for educators interested in sharing the wonders of literature with STEM-focused students. Almost 60 years later, MIT established the Mario Umana Harbor School for Science and Technology, a high school where working-class kids from East Boston met astronauts, programmed computers, and learned to fly airplanes (the syllabus for this particular course began with a bit of Greek mythology—the story of Daedalus, Icarus, and their experiments in aviation science).

More recently, I have found inspiration in Concourse, an interdisciplinary learning community at the institute where students can take a unique set of classes, and share meals and communal space for a year. Based on the vision of two engineering professors, Concourse was meant, as its name suggests, to be a place where the sciences and humanities overlapped. The founding group of faculty held its first seminar, “From Earth to Moon: Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy,” in 1970 and welcomed its first cohort of 35 students the next year. More than half a century later, Concourse hosts almost twice that number. Anne McCants, a history professor who recently led Concourse, told me that the original program aimed to provide “a more complete education,” one in which students would study celestial mechanics in the morning and “read Galileo in the afternoon.” It was not, she clarifies, built around “a Great Books curriculum,” but rather “a curriculum that cares about books that are great.” Not a program built around a rigid canon, then, but one dedicated to an ever-evolving collection of illuminating works.

[Read: What the freshman class needs to read]

On the reading list we are now building—our curriculum that cares about books that are great—you’ll find Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower, Tracy K. Smith’s poetry collection Life on Mars, and “A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence,” written by a group of mathematicians and engineers that included John McCarthy, the man who coined the term artificial intelligence in the 1950s. Our work brings to mind the philosopher Richard Rorty’s essay “The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature,” in which he wrote: “We should cheerfully admit that canons are temporary, and touchstones replaceable. But this should not lead us to discard the idea of greatness.”

Rorty’s essay serves as the conclusion to his 1998 book, Achieving Our Country. The collection’s title comes from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which closes with a call to “change the history of the world.” In a moment when stories proliferate about the end of literacy, and the end of higher education as a reasonable aim of everyday people, the chance to work with students from around the world, who bring their own visions of the good and the beautiful into the classroom, gives me hope. It reminds me that the future is open, and that the materials we need to shape it are all around us; they call from the past in verse and image, painting and film, sculpture and song. This process of passing cherished knowledge from generation to generation is the keystone of our shared enterprise: the protection and preservation of what makes us human, and what brings worth and wonder to our lives. We—and this is a capacious “we,” meant to include millions of us—are stewards of this precious continuity.

These timeless containers of human wisdom and experience are for everyone, no matter your background or professional aspirations. They belong to us all: to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Ralph Waldo Ellison alike. And not unlike Ellison—who interpolates the words of Herman Melville in the first pages of his 1952 classic, Invisible Man—I am interested in an approach to reading and teaching in which canonization does not serve as a hermetic seal, shielding a work from contact, but rather as an occasion for new interpretations, riffs, and reimaginings. This is the project we now take up together: using all the instruments we have available to us as readers and writers, engineers and artisans, scientists and poets, to find our way into these texts. And to build another world from what we find there.

The Protect College Sports Act Isn’t Enough

2026-11-02T08:00:00-05:00

Within the past 20 years, college athletes have carved out more privileges, not by negotiating with their coaches or the schools for which they play, but by taking advantage of the legal system. In the courtroom, players have won the right to earn money off their image; obtained freedom of movement, allowing them to transfer between programs without penalty; and seen the creation of a revenue-sharing system allowing them to be paid directly by schools. As the legal defeats have piled up, the NCAA has spent millions lobbying Congress to try to claw back some authority. Now the organization’s efforts may have finally paid off: In late September, the Senate passed the Protect College Sports Act (PCSA), a bipartisan bill that its supporters hope will bring some needed stability to college sports. Now, the bill moves to the House of Representatives, which will reconvene after the midterm elections.

Since 2020, more than 40 bills aimed at establishing consistent national guidelines for college-sports programs have been introduced to Congress. But the PCSA is the one that’s advanced the furthest. As one might expect for a meaty piece of legislation, the bill addresses some issues and leaves others untouched. Despite its ambition, though, the PCSA isn’t significant enough to fix the problems within college sports; instead, its main outcome would be tipping the balance of power back in the NCAA’s favor.

College sports are more popular, and generate more revenue, than ever before. But the lack of unvarying guidelines about how the product should be constructed has created disarray regarding a number of subjects. One of many examples: In June, the NCAA passed new eligibility rules allowing athletes to play five seasons over five years. (Under the previous rules, athletes could compete for four seasons over the span of five years and were allowed a redshirt season for injuries or other atypical circumstances.) But the new rules are already being challenged in a class-action lawsuit brought by Division I players who played during the 2022–23 season and graduated this year. The players, some of whom already have begun to play professionally, claim they are owed a retroactive fifth season of eligibility, because the recent rule changes caused them to miss out on name, image, and likeness (NIL) opportunities, the recently adopted policy that allows players to monetize themselves.

This sort of legal confusion explains a common complaint about the college-sports system: that it has now overcorrected. In contrast to the recent past, when colleges never paid players other than covering tuition, a competition to lure sought-after athletes has now ignited across programs; starting quarterbacks in the Big Ten and the Southeastern Conference might easily draw up to $3 million each in NIL deals. The push to build championship rosters has universities trying to outdo one another; some upper-echelon college-football programs are spending anywhere from $40 million to $55 million to field an elite squad. Ohio State, which is expected to challenge for a national championship this season, reportedly has the most expensive team in college football at about $50 million.

To some, this is just capitalism at work. College athletes generate billions in revenue for the NCAA; why shouldn’t they reap the rewards from their labor? Spending money to maintain a top program is no different from what happens across professional sports, where some athletes may earn hundreds of millions of dollars. However, decision makers believe that the gaps of inequity between schools are only widening, leaving many programs unable to keep up financially with the new landscape. Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington, a Democrat who co-authored the PCSA alongside Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, released a report noting the explosive rise in college-sports spending. According to cited data, 94 percent of all Division I programs spend more money than they earn. From 2005 to 2023, recruiting costs went up by 322 percent; over the same time period, coaching salaries spiked 370 percent.

[Read: How to fix the mess of college sports]

But the only spending addressed in the PCSA deals with how much athletes are paid. Although the legislation would more than double the amount of revenue that schools can currently share with the players, the NCAA and Congress will decide player value by introducing hard restrictions on compensation. In theory, this might prevent a never-ending competition to secure a player’s services, but limits have failed before at stopping money from finding its way to athletes. A side effect might be the exacerbation of an underground economy where players are paid under the table by well-connected boosters—the same economy that the legalization of player pay was meant to disrupt. In light of reports that the College Football Playoff may expand its annual playoff field to 24 teams, it seems as if the college power brokers want it both ways—to be able to freely capitalize on their sport’s market value while limiting the rights of the players to do the same.

The PCSA would also give the NCAA a limited antitrust exemption, which would allow the organization to adopt business practices that normally would be viewed as illegal and anti-competitive. Major League Baseball has an antitrust exemption, but it also has a collective-bargaining agreement in place with the players, which sets agreed-upon rules about compensation, player conduct, and much more. Because the NCAA doesn’t have that, the organization would effectively stem the litigation that has allowed the players to develop their leverage. “First and foremost, one of our largest concerns is that you’re giving a serial antitrust violator an antitrust exemption,” Brandon Copeland, the executive director and a co-founder of Athletes.org, an advocacy organization that represents more than 5,000 college players, told me. “They have done nothing to prove they deserve that authority over people again.”

If schools are in such financial peril, what they’re willing to pay for the top coaches tells a different story. In most states, a college coach is the highest-paid public employee in the state. The 15 highest-paid coaches in college football each make more than $10 million a year. Nobody forced the University of Southern California to give its current head coach, Lincoln Riley, a $70 million buyout, should he be fired before his contract lapses. Colleges are hot to spend on facilities too: Nobody forced the University of Illinois to spend $20.9 million on the biggest jumbotron in college-football history, and costs weren’t an issue for Northwestern, which just opened a stadium that cost more than $800 million.

So despite what the overwhelming Senate victory might suggest, the proposed legislation has plenty of detractors. The NAACP, Congressional Black Caucus, the AFL-CIO, and Athletes.org are among the organizations that have strongly voiced their opposition. The NAACP has gone a step further and accused lawmakers of using this legislation to institute a modern-day version of “sharecropping.” Because Black athletes make up over a third of college basketball and football players, the organization sees the hard cap on player earnings as a civil-rights issue.

“The crisis is pretty simple,” Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut told me. “Athletes have started to get rights. They have power, and coaches and athletic directors and the sports-industry CEOs do not like that, because now they have pressure to share the $14 billion in revenue that the college-sports industry makes with the most valuable participants in the college-sports industry: the players.” Murphy and fellow Democratic Senator Cory Booker filed an amendment to the PCSA that would have capped coaches’ salaries at $5 million a year. The amendment failed 47–52, but that so many supported Booker and Murphy’s efforts showed that some lawmakers at least recognize the hypocrisy of limiting athletes while leaving coaches alone.

Some elements of the bill do address the current issues. For example, under this legislation, an athlete could transfer once without losing eligibility; after that, they would have to sit out for a season when they transferred, with a few exceptions for extraordinary circumstances. This system will prevent players from hopping around from program to program in search of the best deal—a fair shake, because part of the appeal of college sports is watching players develop in the same place over time. At the same time, coaches can still come and go as they please; the only thing the bill addresses, in that regard, is that it prevents football coaches from leaving for another job during the season. Boiled down, the players would lose their ability to maximize their value in a competitive marketplace, while the adults would keep theirs.

One of the bill’s most prominent supporters is Nick Saban, who won seven national championships before retiring as head coach of the University of Alabama in 2024. Saban, now an ESPN college-football analyst, was a key figure in lobbying President Trump and Congress to intervene. “I think a lot of the issues that we have right now could be resolved in this bill, if people would get on board with it,” Saban said before this college-football season began. “This bill is not perfect, but it’s better than everything else, and it’s certainly 100 times better than what we have now, and it probably solves 80 percent of the problems.”

Does it? While no piece of legislation can ever be perfect, a bill that mainly codifies the NCAA’s authority—while undercutting the players who have built the sport into a multibillion-dollar powerhouse—lends some credence to the NAACP’s analogy. After slavery, sharecropping was supposed to provide Black Americans a pathway to financial freedom. Instead, it became an oppressive system where the landowners controlled the resources and Black farmers had no means to protect themselves. Yes, it’s an extreme example, but the truth is that the PCSA doesn’t fundamentally change anything—it keeps the system as the power brokers want it to be.

DOJ’s Try-Anything Approach

2026-11-02T07:32:56-05:00

In the run-up to the 2024 election, Donald Trump complained that Special Counsel Jack Smith’s detailed overview of the evidence against him in the January 6 case constituted “Election Interference.” The Department of Justice had a policy of not taking any potentially influential action so soon before an election, Trump rightly noted in a social-media post, and Smith, Trump argued more debatably, had just violated those rules.

Trump seems a great deal less worried about DOJ’s propriety now. Over just the past few weeks, DOJ has sued multiple states challenging their election processes, charged more than 100 people with alleged voter fraud, and launched a barrage of criminal charges and investigations against Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar, former FBI Director James Comey, and other figures hated by MAGA. Smith’s 2024 preelection filing was not actually election interference—but these last-minute schemes certainly seem to fit that description.

DOJ began its election offensive months ago, pressuring states to hand over sensitive voter information. So far, this effort has failed utterly in court: Every one of the more than two dozen courts that hav ruled on the issue has rejected the Justice Department’s argument. DOJ, though, had other ideas. In mid-October, the department sued California and Alaska over their election-administration decisions. California, DOJ argued, risked sending out mail ballots to as many as 20,000 potential noncitizens who might illegally vote; Alaska, the department claimed, risked confusing voters by allowing the Independent Senate candidate Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. to appear on the ballot alongside Republican Senator Daniel S. Sullivan. (The New York Times reported this past week that Democratic operatives had been involved in encouraging Daniel J. Sullivan to run.) At first, DOJ asked the court to block certification of the Alaska Senate race if Senator Sullivan loses, but it later requested that Alaska somehow set apart ballots cast for either Sullivan. Never mind that the federal government had no obvious authority to bring either the California or the Alaska lawsuit; that the department was suing at the last minute; that other states had already shown DOJ’s tally of supposed noncitizen voters to be unreliable; that there is no feasible way for California or Alaska to segregate particular ballots; or that the Alaska Supreme Court had already considered, and rejected, arguments against allowing the other Daniel Sullivan on the ballot.

“I’m the one that said do it,” Trump told reporters of the Alaska lawsuit. After the Times’ reporting about Democratic involvement in Daniel J. Sullivan’s campaign, Trump posted that the party had engaged in “VOTER FRAUD” and wrote that the Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola should not be allowed to run. Despite Trump’s suggestion, however, the development does not affect DOJ’s lawsuit in the state. Even accepting DOJ’s suggestion that it can sue over potential voter confusion regarding the two Daniel Sullivans, the election-law expert Rick Hasen writes, the question of “why voters might face confusion over the two Dan Sullivans” is “irrelevant” to that of whether the confusion itself is legally actionable.

Yesterday, the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska dismissed DOJ’s lawsuit on the grounds that the Justice Department “provides no workable plan” for how election officials could segregate ballots for Daniel J. Sullivan “in a manner that would preserve voter secrecy.” The government has indicated that it plans to appeal.

[Paul Rosenzweig: Using the power of the government to win elections]

DOJ has likewise encountered legal setbacks in California. On October 28, Judge David Carter of the Central District of California rejected the Justice Department’s request to segregate ballots from supposed noncitizens in the state. Twice, an appeals court has refused to force California to comply. Rather than backing down, though, DOJ sent out grand-jury subpoenas to California election officials, raising the prospect of criminal prosecutions. (In an additional twist, a judge ruled this week that the lead federal prosecutor apparently conducting the investigation was illegally serving in the role, although that order has been stayed to allow DOJ to appeal.) State election officials across the country received letters from DOJ warning them of potential criminal liability for violating election law, Votebeat reported on Friday. And more civil lawsuits may be coming. Last week, DOJ wrote to Washington State authorities claiming that it had identified 400 alleged noncitizens registered to vote in the state—which might indicate a windup to a case against Washington as well.

Along with badgering states about their voter rolls, DOJ has sought to combat supposed noncitizen voting through criminal charges against the voters themselves. A recent Washington Post analysis found that DOJ has charged 180 people with illegal voting since January 2025, and 130 of those cases have been filed since September 2026. In mid-October, federal authorities in California conducted dramatic arrests of 28 people on charges relating to allegedly voting or registering to vote illegally. On Thursday, DOJ posted photographs of handcuffed defendants in similar illegal voting cases in North Carolina, their faces blurred.

The actual numbers of supposed unlawful votes are minuscule compared with the total number of votes cast in those states—consistent with expert estimates that illegal voting is extraordinarily rare and does not sway election results. Analysts with the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, however, suggest that this cascade of news from DOJ about alleged noncitizen voting reflects “a larger strategy of creating an attention-grabbing spectacle to foster a false perception of widespread fraud ahead of the midterm elections.” This might be a useful way to understand the California and Alaska lawsuits too. Even if DOJ does not win in court, it can seed the idea among Trump’s supporters that the election results can’t be trusted, whether because of illegal votes or Democratic trickery.

[From the October 2026 issue: The election deniers’ long game]

And then there are the attacks on Trump’s enemies. On October 12, federal agents searched the home of Omar, who is up for reelection Tuesday—reportedly as part of an investigation into alleged immigration fraud regarding her naturalization as a citizen after her family moved to the U.S. from Somalia. On October 22, DOJ announced an indictment of Louise Lucas, a Democratic state senator in Virginia, on charges related to her family’s cannabis business. (The investigation of Lucas reportedly began under the Biden administration, but Justice Department alumni have raised questions about the decision to bring a criminal case weeks before Election Day.) The next day, DOJ unveiled opaque and procedurally bizarre charges against two former FBI officials over allegations that they had lied to Congress during 2023 testimony. In court hearings this week overseen by Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui, an FBI agent who signed off on the charges acknowledged that he had received direct pressure from agency leadership to move forward with the case, which some in his office viewed as a “witch hunt,” he said.

At those hearings, another DOJ official stopped by to notify Faruqui that the department had failed to secure an indictment in another case—which turned out to be an attempted prosecution of Cassidy Hutchinson, a former Trump White House aide who testified before the House January 6 Committee. This past week also saw a third attempt by DOJ to charge Comey, this time over an alleged leak to The New York Times in 2016. This prosecution is likely to be short-lived, simply because the incident in question happened too long ago. DOJ took a shortcut to charging Comey first, without securing an indictment from a grand jury, and the statute of limitations has arguably already expired.

These investigations and prosecutions don’t directly affect the mechanics of elections. But, like DOJ’s other actions, they provide grist for MAGA influencers online—in this instance, to remind them of their vendettas against the Democrats and the deep state, and perhaps to encourage them to turn out to vote for Republicans. “This crackdown on the weaponization of government is ongoing right now,” Dan Bongino, the podcaster and former FBI co–deputy director, said last week on his show. He went on, mockingly, “If you want this fraud, political violence, and political weaponization to continue, vote blue. The Democrats are for you.” DOJ’s activity might also frighten people and dissuade them from turning out to vote: The presence of DOJ poll monitors, a normal part of the government’s election-season work, has raised anxieties among election officials because of the department’s politicization.

Attorney General Todd Blanche has heatedly rejected the suggestion that DOJ might be seeking to place a finger on the scale of the upcoming election. “That is crazy,” he scoffed on CNN when asked by Dana Bash whether the Justice Department was “laying the groundwork” for “a situation where President Trump tries to overturn the election.” But in a podcast interview earlier this month with the conservative New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, Blanche dismissed what he termed the “lie” of DOJ independence. “I work for President Trump,” he said. The department’s recent actions leave little doubt as to which of these statements to believe.

America Can’t Afford an AI Recession

2026-11-02T07:30:00-05:00

Over the past several days, as Donald Trump has flown across the country to rally Republican voters in contested midterm races, he has returned again and again to a version of the same point: “I had the greatest economy in the history of our country in my first term,” as the president told crowds in Michigan. “This term is going to blow it away.”

To the extent Trump can claim the economy as a strength, what he’s mostly talking about is the biggest infrastructure build in American history. The five largest AI-data-center companies, including Amazon and Google, are on track to spend $900 billion on AI in 2026, roughly as much as they did in the previous three years combined. Just two AI chipmakers accounted for one-third of growth in corporate profits this past quarter, while as of September, AI stocks accounted for nearly half of growth in the S&P 500 in 2026. Depending on how you count, AI investments might already make up more than 8 percent of the nation’s GDP.

[Read: ]Welcome to the valley of pain

Then there’s the rest of the economy, which is, if not struggling, at least confusing. AI has been pushing up the stock market for years, but the scale of financial expenditures is beginning to frighten investors, prompting a recent tumble. Gas and grocery prices are rising, while wages are largely flat or falling. There are tariffs and a miserable housing market. Unemployment is low, but at the same time, many Americans aren’t looking for work and job growth is slow. Consumer spending is strong, but that’s due in no small part to AI doubling the value of people’s stock portfolios since roughly the launch of ChatGPT. For years we’ve spoken of AI as a “boom,” describing explosive growth in one industry. It is more correct to speak of the entire market as the AI economy.

Meanwhile, there’s real anxiety around the products these AI companies are selling. AI-powered hacks have brought about a cybersecurity apocalypse. OpenAI and Anthropic, the two companies whose futures the U.S. economy rests on, are losing control of their own agents and warning that these bots could end the world. The AI industry appears to be heading in two different directions—one financial, the other technological. Combined, their effect is to induce a sort of dependency: to bring about so much rapid change that AI becomes impossible for us to quit.

The AI build-out was always big, but of late it has become gargantuan. Silicon Valley is committed to pushing as much money, human talent, electricity, concrete, and land toward AI as possible. The scope of the investment is staggering, estimated to be a bigger portion of GDP than the railroad boom and interstate highway system were, combined. Anthropic’s public offering next month could be the largest ever, perhaps valuing the company at $2 trillion. According to a recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Anthropic already has up to $807 billion in future contractual obligations for AI infrastructure to pay and expects “expenditures to increase significantly.” For reference, U.S. defense spending was $954 billion in 2025. The biggest cloud companies, similarly, have nearly $3 trillion in contractual obligations already on the books, and will soon surpass $1 trillion in annual spending. Earnings reports last month showed that many of these companies—Meta, Google, Amazon—are already losing money because of their AI investments, which is stunning given that they all generate hundreds of billions of dollars a year in revenue.

The role the AI industry has claimed for itself is in essence that of a central bank, managing the economy and issuing money to keep it afloat. The tremendous costs of data centers require the economy to run hot. AI firms need their customers to have money on hand in order to sustain meteoric revenue growth. But, according to at least one analysis, the AI industry’s cash-flow projections dwarf the far more modest ones of its biggest customers, raising the question of who’s going to fund AI’s continued development. Similarly, a robust stock market is necessary to attract more investors. And more wealth all around makes it easier for Meta, Google, and the like to issue debt to fund more data centers; this summer, foreign investors purchased more bonds from U.S. companies than from the federal government. So those same firms keep putting money into the flywheel: Nvidia, for instance, is dumping tens of billions of dollars into data centers used by distressed cloud companies that will, in turn, spend that money to buy Nvidia chips. It’s very possible the U.S. economy would be in a recession, or at least stagnant, without the AI boom. But it’s almost certain that there would be no AI build-out if the economy were to flail.

Another way to think of the AI industry’s role in the broader economy is as a parasite, starving the rest of the organism. There are historic precedents for this: In 1959, for instance, oil companies in the Netherlands discovered enormous natural-gas reserves in the North Sea. The Dutch natural-gas industry grew rapidly—as did the nation’s GDP—but at the expense of other industries, including manufacturing, which withered. Today, in the U.S., profit margins are soaring at the biggest tech companies but flat for the rest of the S&P 500. Data-center construction is booming, but all other private construction is in free fall. The only source of private investment contributing to GDP growth is tech, according to an analysis by Pacific Investment Management Company. Meanwhile, the boom in demand for chips, natural gas, and construction materials driven by data-center build-outs is helping drive up inflation and make everyday life still more unaffordable. Silicon Valley is thriving, as are many broad macroeconomic indicators, but if you scratch beneath the surface, you’d find the finances of many Americans floundering.

And what’s it all for? A large part of the reason for the step change in AI spending this year has been the rise of agents—programs, such as Claude Code and Muse, that write software and take complex actions on users’ behalf. Over the past few months, these products have caused chaos. Agents are being used by hospitals to charge more for health care and gaining unauthorized access to bank accounts. Hackers are breaching those hospitals, as well as governments, utilities, and financial instutions—recently pulling off perhaps the biggest cyberheist ever, draining billions from the crypto exchange Binance—and threatening the stability of the internet as we know it. That’s not to mention the ways the AI boom has, for years now, left classrooms a mess, driven up carbon emissions, and polluted the internet with slop. The strongest part of the American economy is also seemingly the most wasteful and destructive.

The societal benefits of AI are largely either vague or delayed. A wave of AI-discovered drugs has yet to hit pharmacies. The technology has yet to solve climate change, as top executives including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang have claimed it will do. Economy-wide data do not show clear signs of AI-driven productivity gains.

The AI industry is conscious of the dissonance between their economic and technological ambitions and the mess their products are making. This fall, in an interview with The New York Times’ Ezra Klein, Huang likened the cost of developing the technology to surgery: “They’ve got to cut you open to save you. They’ve got to inflict an enormous amount of pain and suffering on you so that they can save you. And so I think AI’s kind of like that.” In the meantime, thank Nvidia for your 401(k) doing very well.

A year ago, there was a sense that the AI boom had put the American economy in a sort of “benevolent hostage situation.” Now the industry seems to be holding not just the American economy but our entire society hostage: Nvidia, Google, and the like had better succeed financially, or there go your savings. Anthropic and OpenAI had better succeed in their battle against AI-powered hacks, or there goes the internet. The technology had better be used to devise new carbon-free technologies, personal tutors for every kid, and widely available mental-health resources. There’s a perverse way in which even strident AI critics may be forced to cheer on some version of this industry: The only thing more destructive than the AI boom might be a crash.

Can You See What Holds This Painting Together?

2026-11-02T07:30:00-05:00

Jackson Pollock became famous after an article ran in Life magazine under the headline, “Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?” The headline, accompanied by indelible photos of the artist and his work, invited two types of responses: You must be kidding and If he is, wow—things are about to get interesting.

That was August 1949. By the early ’60s, Pollock was no longer around, but modern art in America had indeed become interesting. Money was rolling in. Collectors competed for the latest groundbreaking work. The public’s interest was piqued. So Life commissioned an article on another artist, Roy Lichtenstein. The headline it ran under, with Lichtenstein’s approval, was: “Is He the Worst Artist in the U.S.?”

Life published the profile in 1964, a couple years after Lichtenstein’s first exhibition of Pop-style paintings at Leo Castelli’s New York gallery. That show made a cause célѐbre of Lichtenstein. It included painted reproductions of a magnified comic-strip scene (Blam) and radically distilled, deadpan renderings of a washing machine, a turkey, an engagement ring, and a laughing cat (later acquired by Andy Warhol).

Once the Life article was published, Lichtenstein’s prices shot up. Controversy fueled his fame. Some people, such as the critic Otto Hahn, praised his work for imbuing “monstrously tasteless imagery” with “tragic, anonymous grandeur.” Others thought him a copycat and questioned whether he was an artist at all.

The Castelli show has been faithfully duplicated, down to the lighting fixtures and parquet floor, inside “Roy Lichtenstein: Like New,” an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Organized by the Whitney curator Meg Onli and the artist Alex da Corte, it’s the first retrospective devoted to Lichtenstein in New York in 33 years.

Today, Lichtenstein’s distinctive visual idiom—comic-book brevity given the high-art treatment—is as synonymous with postwar Pop art as Warhol’s soup cans and celebrity screen prints. His Ben Day–like dots and speech bubbles are copied onto bedsheets, handbags, Band-Aids, and billboards. The Whitney show is an opportunity to ask whether the paintings themselves hold up in the face of this 65-year storm of reproduction and commerce. Any answer is going to be moderated by irony, precisely because the paintings gained their original frisson by looking like commodities and copies.

Lichtenstein’s zippy humor is suggested by his embrace of the Life article headline. It’s clear from other stories too. In 1965, for instance, the artist and his future wife, Dorothy Herzka, showed up at a Halloween party dressed as Warhol and Edie Sedgwick. It was a good gag—both visually (look at the photo and you could swear it was them) and conceptually: Warhol and Lichtenstein were by then the two leading figures of the growing Pop-art movement and well known for their interest in duplication.

[Read: Why is Warhol still so famous?]

Like Warhol, Lichtenstein was savvy about how, after Pollock, the currency of notoriety operated in America’s art world. While the Life profile was being prepared, he painted the hilarious Image Duplicator. It shows a cartoon villain—surely a coded self-portrait—in close-up, his evil blue eyes, blond eyebrows, and red mask overlaid by a speech bubble: WHAT? WHY DID YOU ASK THAT? WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT MY IMAGE DUPLICATOR?

Lichtenstein was not just being droll. He was fascinated by the implications of duplication. In 1961, he made two near-identical portraits showing a generic man wearing a bow tie. He titled one Portrait of Allan Kaprow and the other Portrait of Ivan Karp. But in reality, Kaprow and Karp, both friends of Lichtenstein, looked nothing alike. What, he seemed to be asking, is gained when we duplicate or mechanically reproduce something, and what is lost?

Jason Lowrie and Yvonne Tnt / BFA.com

Installation view of “Roy Lichtenstein: Like New”

The Whitney show’s title comes from another peculiar exercise in duplication: a 1962 pencil drawing titled Like New. The work, for all its modesty, is at once funny and slyly philosophical, and a reminder that Lichtenstein was as much a conceptualist and minimalist as a Pop celebrant.

Lichtenstein made Like New during his breakthrough years, when he rendered common objects—an electrical cord, a hot dog, a notebook, a tire—in a style borrowed from mass-media reproductions. (“I’m never drawing the object itself,” Lichtenstein explained. “I’m only drawing a depiction of the object—a kind of crystallized symbol of it.”)

Like New shows two grids, side by side. The wall label says they represent window screens, but they’re really just pencil lines forming tight grids. The taut verticals and horizontals on the left are broken near the center, their loose ends turning wavy and stray, like the strings of a tennis racket smashed over a pole. The screen on the right has been restored to its immaculate, unified state—like new.

Was Lichtenstein mocking America’s dream of repair? Was he questioning the ability of consumer society to “make it new”—to restore order and harmony and fix what was broken? These questions feel too big for such a humble work. The Second World War, though, was not so far in the past. Lichtenstein, who had been drafted into the Army in 1943 and deployed to Europe, was discharged in 1946. Fifteen years later, the economy was booming and households were filling with products. But the new consumerism, Lichtenstein seemed to suggest, was a fragile scrim over a moral and spiritual void.

Decades earlier, between the world wars, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke had lamented to a friend the loss of a depth of meaning that he associated with handmade objects passed down from one generation to the next, each with its own history of use, care, and repair. “Now, from America,” he complained, “empty indifferent things are pouring across, sham things, dummy life.”

Lichtenstein, almost 40 years later, was conscious not just of objects pouring out of factories but also of the way that people’s desire for such objects was manufactured by advertising. He wanted to portray, he said, “the lack of sensibility, the lack of refinement, the kind of immediate, not contemplative answer that society keeps giving us.” Portraying is crucially different from critiquing: Lichtenstein’s paintings deliberately lacked signs of “sensibility.” They were as vacant and affectless as a showroom washing machine. But they may be more contemplative than they appear.

Lichtenstein, who loved to read Scientific American, was fascinated by systems of visual perception. As a student at Ohio State University, he had been heavily influenced by Hoyt Sherman, a fine-arts professor who taught classes in perceptual training. (Along with co-curating the show, Da Corte, one of the most compelling artists working today, has created a short film about Sherman, casting himself as the professor, which is screening in the show’s opening gallery.)

The secret of visual perception, for Sherman, had nothing to do with the thing you were looking at. Instead, as Lichtenstein explained, it was about “building a unified pattern of seeing.” To develop perceptual skills, Sherman would place students in a dark room that he called a “flash lab.” He would abruptly turn the lights on and off and, after the room returned to darkness, make students draw what they had seen. He was teaching them to find unities, to register what it is that holds the visual field together.

[Read: The artist who ripped up the rules of drawing]

Outside of the flash lab, the surest way for an artist to achieve unity on paper or canvas is to convert the visual field into units of, for instance, cross-hatching, dashes, or dots. But when you convert visual phenomena into a system of fungible units, something is gained and something lost. The world becomes, as Da Corte suggests in the exhibition catalog, like a sponge, or like Swiss cheese: conceptually unified but slightly less substantial than it had been.

Is anything about this sounding familiar?

Jason Lowrie and Yvonne Tnt / BFA.com

Installation view of “Roy Lichtenstein: Like New”

In 1966, Lichtenstein compared his dots to digital technologies, suggesting that his paintings possessed a “data information quality.” Two years later, he began work on a series of five panels inspired by Claude Monet’s more than two dozen paintings of Rouen Cathedral from the early 1890s. Lichtenstein’s gambit was to reduce Monet’s thickly encrusted, opalescent paint to two-color combinations of mechanical dots. The resulting patterns, up close, seem abstract and insubstantial. At a distance, however, they resolve, like Monet’s paintings, into the cathedral facades.

Cezanne famously said of Monet that he was “only an eye—but, my God, what an eye.” What Sherman and then Lichtenstein understood was that we are never “only an eye.” Eyes are attached to brains and bodies, which continually mediate raw perception. (When we open our eyes, the brain’s first task is to overturn a law of optics: The flow of images coming in through the eyes is upside down.)

We see the world, moreover, through a changing set of conventions. Human technologies—from oil paint and printmaking to photography and the computer—all establish new conventions that affect how we perceive the world. These conventions can be useful, even delightful; but they act like veils between us and reality, often hardening into clichés, tired from overuse.

Modernism’s project was to see the world afresh by disrupting convention and stripping away clichés. As technologies advanced, modern artists sensed something broken about our connection to reality. They wanted to establish less secondhand ways of perceiving. Many of their attempts were concerned with fixing what was broken and reestablishing a sense of spiritual wholeness.

[Read: The marriage that captures a high point of American art]

Lichtenstein’s interest in Monet was far from arbitrary. The Impressionists—the first modernists—had disrupted traditional pictorial conventions by dispensing with drawing, tone, narrative, and expression and funneling all the many facets of perception through a single lens: colored light. This was how they established their new, reparative unity.

After them, Georges Seurat and his pointillist followers unified their pictures by converting Impressionist light into a scientific system of atomized color relations. Piet Mondrian—another modernist Lichtenstein thought hard about—took this principle further. He converted the visible world into a grid, a binary system of rectilinear divisions of space and primary colors.

Lichtenstein shared the early-modernist impulse to “make it new.” But he was working in an era marked by rampant consumerism and accelerating technologies of reproduction. These technologies had long prehistories, going back to intaglio and halftone printing, which built up images with sophisticated patterns of dots, and then to such innovations as the Ben Day dot system, invented in 1879 by Benjamin Henry Day Jr., and later adapted by Lichtenstein.

Another technology, the Xerox machine, was released in 1959. When, two years later, Disney made One Hundred and One Dalmatians, this new image duplicator helped replicate animators’ drawings, and soon, according to Da Corte, scores had lost their jobs. Handmade drawing was replaced by mechanical reproduction.

Of course, one way to contend with technology’s veils is to tear them down. Pablo Picasso was thinking along these lines when he described his pictures as “a sum of destructions.” Another way is simply to draw attention to them—perhaps by repeating them over and over, as when you repeat a word until it becomes absurd or takes on an entirely different meaning.

Lichtenstein’s project was more in the second category. Through sustained visual panache and persistent, peppy wit, he helped mid-century America see itself. There’s a reason his work slides happily into the key of today: The conventions and technologies governing our reality have only become more fungible, the answers to our questions more standardized and ironed out. If his proliferating dots create a scrim of reality analogous to Swiss cheese, he sensitizes us to the holes—perhaps with what Elias Canetti had in mind when he wrote: “The hopeful things in any system are the things that have been left out.”

The Racism Scam

2026-11-02T07:00:00-05:00

Faced with flagging numbers over an unpopular and unnecessary war in Iran, inflation exacerbated by tariffs, lawless immigration enforcement, and corruption, Republicans have gone back to basics for their closing message: stoking hatred against minority groups.

The Michigan Senate campaign between the Republican Mike Rogers and the Democrat Abdul El-Sayed has been particularly ugly. Rogers has accused El-Sayed—without any evidence—of being “bought off by the Muslim Brotherhood.” At a recent rally, J. D. Vance said El-Sayed harbored “anti-white racial hate,” and President Trump called him a “jihadist” who would need to go through a “metal detector” to enter the Senate. The only time in recent memory that the Senate was subject to political violence, it is worth noting, is when Trump himself incited an attack on it.

This kind of rhetoric has spilled over into Ohio, where Republican Senator Bernie Moreno asked at a rally whether El-Sayed knew that “Jesus came here for our salvation.” The Founding Fathers were committed to religious freedom, and embedded no religious test for public office in the Constitution. That’s actually good news for Republicans, because their nominee for governor of Ohio is Vivek Ramaswamy, who is Hindu.

Republican attacks elsewhere have also focused on vulnerable minorities. The Iowa Republican Ashley Hinson has accused her Democratic opponent, Josh Turek, of voting “to allow government employees to help their kids change their gender at school and keep it secret from the parents.” Anti-trans ads are a GOP staple in Texas, where Republicans backing the Senate candidate Ken Paxton have tried to turn allegations of corruption and infidelity into a positive by attacking the Democrat James Talarico’s masculinity. Also in Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott, who’s in a close race with the Democrat Gina Hinojosa, has accused his Catholic opponent of supporting “Sharia law.” On Halloween, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins posted a fake costume for a “SNAP fraudster,” complete with handcuffs and piles of “taxpayers cash,” that was little more than a racist stereotype about Black people.

[David A. Graham: Islamophobia is Trump’s closing midterm gambit]

All of this has coincided with Trump’s usual race-baiting about immigration. Pointing to unrest in France, the president posted on his social network that “the immigration of people from an entirely different world, people with hatred in their hearts, has shattered that once great country.” The idea that there was no history of violent protest in France before immigrants got there is—well, let’s say you have to know very little about France to believe that one. Still, the message is pretty clear: If you let people who aren’t white into your country, you will get riots. Trump made himself even clearer at a rally in Kansas, saying, “Dumocrats are the party of anti-Western, Marxist, and hostile Third World migrants.”

Overt bigotry is nothing new for Trump or the Trump-era Republican Party. One reason the GOP is betting the House and Senate on this approach working is that the electorate has not rebuked it often or forcefully enough. Republicans didn’t draw the line when Trump called Somalis “garbage” or when he slandered Haitian immigrants as pet eaters. (When former President Obama said Trump made the White House look like “Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory,” however, that was outrageous—“super elitist,” according to Vance.)

Put simply, bigotry remains a large part of American politics because some American voters like it, and many others do not find it disqualifying. If Republicans thought this kind of talk was politically ineffective, they would not engage in it.

[From the June 2019 issue: An oral history of Trump’s bigotry]

MAGA has historically bet on white identity politics to mobilize white voters in large enough numbers to give Republicans an insurmountable advantage in the Senate and Electoral College. To this end, right-wing candidates have tried to make fears of minority groups as salient as possible every election cycle, even if it requires senseless conspiracy theories. In 2024, Trump won over more Black and Hispanic voters than in the past, making it seem as if the one weakness in that strategy—that nonwhite voters would be repelled by it—could be surmounted. (That year was a particular economic environment, however, and it’s possible Republicans overinterpreted those results as a more profound endorsement than they really were.)

But at this point, Americans should recognize this campaign for the cynical gambit that it is. Trump’s scapegoating has not solved any problems. It has not brought down inflation or the cost of living; it has not raised wages or led to greater job growth. The only winners of the Trump administration are his family members, whose wealth has grown since he took office, and industries that have enjoyed favorable regulatory decisions or lavish tax cuts. For those at the top, bigotry provides a justification for unearned advantages—while for those at the bottom, it can serve as an explanation for life’s disappointments. One thing it can’t do, though, is provide the broad-based prosperity Trump promises.

At the turn of the 19th century, the populist Tom Watson wrote that Black and white laborers were “kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism that enslaves you both.” Tragically, Watson later abandoned this insight—he became an arch racist and anti-Semite. The bigger tragedy is that more than a century later, a major political party is still trying to make this scam work.

The Push to Lead the Working Class Without Workers

2026-11-02T07:00:00-05:00

One day over the summer, Morris Katz slouched into our booth at a diner in Brooklyn Heights, removed his backwards baseball cap, and stuffed a Zyn pouch into his mouth. He took out his iPhone (no case, gaping crack down the back) and put it face down on the table. Then, while claiming, “I never do this,” he plunked a Hershey’s Kiss into his espresso. The 27-year-old political strategist and Zohran Mamdani confidant was ready to speak.

Katz believes that the Democratic Party is beholden to billionaire oligarchs and is out of touch with the economic issues that working people care about. The world has worsened for most Americans, and he thinks Democrats are afraid to name the culprits. “You can’t tell someone they’re getting fucked and not tell them who’s fucking them,” Katz said. He loathes politicians who seek incremental change. The party, he says, needs to run outsiders who promise to blow up a corrupt system.

Katz is articulate (profane, but articulate), confident, and podcast-ready. When it comes to his day job, making campaign ads, even Katz’s critics concede that he is a generational talent. He made his name on Mamdani’s New York City mayoral campaign. David Axelrod became a mentor. Other campaigns across the country couldn’t wait to hire him.

He was on a vertical trajectory through much of 2026. One of his biggest victories came in June, when his client Graham Platner defeated Maine Governor Janet Mills in the state’s Senate primary. Then everything imploded. Platner dropped out of the race following a cornucopia of scandals, involving everything from Nazi tattoos to rape allegations. Katz was ridiculed, and Democrats seemed to recognize the risk they’d taken in entrusting a crucial Senate race to someone too young to remember September 11.

But Katz remains a force in Democratic politics heading into the midterms. Fight Agency, the firm where Katz is a partner, was set up to support progressive outsiders running for office. Katz seeks out candidates who can be credible populist messengers. Whether they are in fact members of the working class—Platner relied on money from his wealthy parents well into adulthood—matters less to him than whether they come across that way. They need to look the part: beards, Carhartt, and tattoos (except Nazi ones) are a plus. And they must be charismatic public speakers, both in front of a crowd and mediated through an iPhone. The ads that Katz makes aren’t subtle. Recent spots for Brian Poindexter, an ironworker running for Congress in Ohio, feature the candidate playing football, driving a forklift, and promising that he wants to “go build stuff,” not think about politics. Other Katz clients weld, farm, and fix heavy machinery on-screen.

Katz, it should be said, does not weld, farm, or fix heavy machinery. He is a child of urban privilege. More on that in a minute.

Pointedly missing from Katz’s vision is the idea that Democrats need to move to the center on social issues. Katz believes that if Democrats fully embrace confrontational economic populism, they will make cultural moderation unnecessary, because voters care more about material concerns. A class war, in other words, will trump the culture war. In one recent Katz-produced ad, Gina Hinojosa, running to unseat Governor Greg Abbott in Texas, tells the camera, “They want to run an entire campaign saying that I’m too woke. Let’s roll. I plan to spend an entire campaign focused on the fact that working people are too broke.”

Katz’s clients have been successful in intra-party contests in some deep-blue areas, including New York City. One Katz candidate and Mamdani ally, Claire Valdez, is a former Columbia University union worker who supports abolishing ICE and promises to invest in “queer and trans liberation.” She defeated the handpicked successor of the retiring incumbent in her primary this summer, and is the overwhelming favorite to win the general election. She’ll be representing parts of northern Brooklyn and western Queens in Congress come January.

Winning over voters outside Brooklyn and Brooklyn-like regions is another story. Fight Agency’s candidates have so far struggled in purple states.They perform best with a growing cohort of young, highly educated, downwardly mobile voters—not coincidentally, the kind of voters most likely to hold progressive views on both economic and cultural issues. Katz’s candidates correctly sense that people want representatives who will fight against the establishment, Axelrod told me. “But progressive politicians and their supporters, consultants, and strategists have to recognize that it’s hard to lead a working-class movement if the working class isn’t following,” he said.

Katz believes that he will be vindicated. And he has held on to a surprising amount of power following the Platner fiasco. He is working for something like 12 candidates and two super PACs (he told me he’d have his assistant follow up with the exact numbers because he couldn’t remember them; she said it changes so often that she can’t provide a full list), while informally helping Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate campaign in Michigan. Katz, or at least Katzism, could determine whether Democrats win or lose in the midterms. The question of whether Katz has unlocked a formula for winning back working-class voters, or is instead speaking to the disenchanted sons and daughters of the upper-middle class—people like him—has therefore become a matter of national importance.

Like many professional economic populists, Katz comes from a privileged background. His grandfather Harry Jay Katz was heir to a hosiery fortune and an infamous Philadelphia playboy. His mother is a successful children’s-book author; his father is a screenwriter and producer whose credits include the John Leguizamo comedy The Pest. As a kid growing up in Tribeca—an actual working-class neighborhood, a very long time ago—Katz thought he would write plays or films himself one day.

Much of his political education seems to have come from movies. A favorite is Angels With Dirty Faces, about the divergent paths of two boys who attempt to rob a train car. One evades the police and later becomes a priest; the other is caught, embarks on a life of crime, and is executed by the state. Katz quoted the last line to me: “All right, fellas, let’s go and say a prayer for a boy who couldn’t run as fast as I could.” The moral of the film, he said, was that “there is a randomness to who gets to succeed and who doesn’t.”

Other political lessons came on the job. During the pandemic, he dropped out of Skidmore College to manage Erica Smith’s campaign for a North Carolina congressional seat. Katz, who was 21 at the time, cast himself in the role of experienced political operator, telling people he was 23 to seem more credible. He met Rebecca Katz (no relation), who would later hire him at Fight Agency. In hindsight, they laugh about how clueless he was. But to others, he appeared preternaturally self-assured. When the Democratic strategist Adam Jentleson called him to offer advice and assistance, Katz instead lectured him on how to court working-class voters. Jentleson was aghast. “There’s nothing in his background that struck me as offering him any additional insight into how to win working-class people,” Jentleson told me. “It was like, Why should I listen to this kid?” (The relationship between Katz and Jentleson, whose consulting firm caters to more moderate candidates, has only deteriorated since then. Katz said that the story was “fabricated,” and that he had asked Jentleson for advice and explained his campaign plan.)

[Jonathan Chait: The crisis for Democrats in Michigan]

Katz accompanied Smith on a tour of all 100 counties in North Carolina. People in the counties that went for Trump had the same problems as reliably blue voters, Katz realized. But they didn’t want to hear about the Green New Deal or any other progressive hobbyhorses. Over time, he revised Smith’s stump speech to focus on her personal story instead of her policies. As the primary neared, Katz felt confident in his candidate’s chances. Then AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group, spent more than $2 million attacking Smith and boosting her primary-election opponent. Smith ended up losing. Katz insists that if AIPAC hadn’t gotten involved, she would have won.

He became convinced that elites were distorting democracy by thwarting the will of the people. He brought this belief to congressional campaigns for Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman (who won), New York’s Jamaal Bowman (who lost), and Nebraska’s Dan Osborn (who lost in 2024 and is running again). But he would probably still be merely another young ad maker if not for Zohran Mamdani.

In 2024, Mamdani—then a barely known state-assembly member—asked Katz to coffee. Within two minutes, Katz thought Mamdani could be the next mayor. He helped create Mamdani’s launch video, in which the young candidate dedicated his campaign to working-class New Yorkers and promised, “We can afford to dream.” From the start, Katz was unlike other members of the team. Staffers often rope family and friends into appearing as extras in campaign ads. For Mamdani’s first television commercial, when an extra dropped out at the last minute, Katz found a replacement in Mimi O’Donnell, the longtime girlfriend of the late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman—Katz’s godfather. Katz took colleagues out for steak dinners with seafood towers and martinis, sometimes expensing the bill and sometimes paying himself, one told me. The waiters always recognized him.

Mamdani’s campaign became famous for its use of direct-to-camera video to connect with voters. When the candidate entered the race, he was polling in the single digits. But he flooded social media with clips that appeared spontaneous and relatable, helping them go viral. In one, he talked about how inflation had increased the cost of street-cart chicken. In July 2025, he won the primary by 12 points. Katz got much of the credit. One profile of the strategist, published in Vanity Fair, praised him for “helping engineer Mamdani’s rise.” He’s been called a “wunderkind” more times than he can count.

In fact, Katz didn’t make any of the viral social-media videos. He advised on communication strategy, but stepped in to make Mamdani’s television ads only once the candidate had the funding and name recognition to pay for them. Fate had also helped Mamdani hugely by giving him a pathologically flawed opponent, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. The wunderkind narrative therefore rankles some of his former colleagues. I spoke with a number of Mamdani-campaign staffers—all of whom requested anonymity to avoid jeopardizing their career—who took issue with how much credit Katz got. “Enough with this guy,” one said.

The staffers seemed confused by how Katz had come to be seen as responsible for the mayor’s success. But perhaps it shouldn’t have been surprising. Katz’s day job involves portraying privileged candidates as paragons of the working class. A similar logic might explain his own trajectory: The smooth-talking consultant who claims he knows how to win over skeptical voters gets credit for it—regardless of the underlying reality.

Katz thought he had his next coup with Graham Platner. Katz helped persuade him to run for Senate in Maine and helped make his launch video. The video is warm-hued, set against sun-dappled Maine-waterfront backdrops. In it, the candidate does kettlebell swings, farms oysters in a stained sweatshirt, chops wood, and declares that “the enemy is the oligarchy; it’s the billionaires who pay for it, the politicians who sell us out.” The video received more than 2.5 million views within 24 hours.

But almost immediately, incriminating details emerged about Platner’s past. First came the discovery of offensive Reddit posts, then the revelation that he had a Nazi symbol tattooed on his chest. Katz was playing a leadership role but was unprepared for the responsibility, according to his former colleagues on the Platner campaign. “It felt like there were no adults in the room,” one of them told me. “He’s a decent person and quite smart, but taking on roles that he doesn’t have experience in doing.” Katz would be better off if he spent less time talking to reporters, the colleague said. (In our interviews, Katz insisted he doesn’t want media attention.)

Platner ran as an insurgent challenging Governor Mills, Chuck Schumer’s preferred choice. While Mills ran as a conventional Democrat, Platner supported Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, and ending aid to Israel. Even with his vulnerabilities, he easily won the primary. Polling suggested that voters saw Platner—a tattooed, mustachioed guy with a deep voice—as relatively moderate, despite his policy positions.

To Katz, those polls vindicated his theory of politics: As long as a candidate runs on economic populism and can credibly play the role of the blue-collar outsider, voters will follow. But how Platner would have fared in the general election is unknowable; after the primary, he began sliding in the polls. In July, Politico published the account of a woman who accused Platner of raping her. Platner denied the allegation. Two days later, he dropped out of the race.

[Tyler Austin Harper: The contradictions of Troy Jackson]

Katz has been severely criticized for the Platner episode. In the Los Angeles mayoral race, one candidate has been attacked for working with Katz. Hundreds of members of the Democratic Socialists of America signed a letter accusing Katz of having “appropriated the American working class’s burgeoning desire for authentic champions.” They asked that DSA-aligned politicians disavow him. The media discourse frustrates him, he told me; he never asked to be cast in the role of the Democrats’ savior. “It’s like, This guy thinks he’s such a fucking genius, and look at him now. I never said that. Like, you guys said that!”

Mamdani has kept Katz on as one of his closest advisers. And Katz is already talking about how he’ll apply the lessons he learned in Maine. “Obviously I fucked up with Graham, and there are, like, a million things I would do differently now,” he said. In hindsight, he says the Reddit posts should have been the red line that forced Platner to drop out of the race. I asked Katz what that line should be in the future. “It’s a little bit like, you know it when you see it,” he said. (He had, of course, just missed a red line when he saw it.)

Katz still believes in his theory of politics. After all, he said, if establishment Democrats are so smart, why do Republicans control the White House and both houses of Congress? And now he has plenty of chances to show that Katzism offers a viable alternative. Katz spends much of his time flying across the country to shoot ads for his midterm candidates. These include Randy Villegas (a Bernie Sanders–endorsed former teacher running to flip a congressional seat in California) and Donavan McKinney (a DSA member who ousted the incumbent Democrat in a safely blue Michigan congressional district). Some of the ads resemble short films more than campaign spots. A recent video for Gina Hinojosa features clips of the candidate talking about her choice to continue a pregnancy even after doctors told her the baby would not survive outside the womb—a subtle and somewhat un-Katzian gesture toward cultural moderation. (“There is room for cultural moderation in a district-specific, state-specific way,” Katz allowed when I mentioned the ad.) His influence is strongest in New York, where he works for three Mamdani-backed candidates who are all but certain to win congressional seats in November.

But his candidates still have yet to prove that they can attract the working-class voters Democrats need to win back. In his Senate race, Fetterman did best in traditionally Democratic areas—college towns, urban areas, and highly educated suburbs. In working-class areas, he performed significantly worse than the moderate, suit-wearing Josh Shapiro, who won the governor’s race in a landslide. (Since his election, Fetterman has become one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate.) Mamdani dominated in neighborhoods with a high proportion of young people, renters, and college graduates. In Bushwick and Prospect Heights, for example, he beat Cuomo by nearly 70 points, while Cuomo won in heavily working-class Staten Island. In Michigan’s primary, El-Sayed won in precincts where people had higher education levels but lower incomes. Katz seems to have an uncanny ability to speak to a population that grew up accustomed to a comfortable lifestyle and now doubt whether they’ll have what their parents did. But his efforts to reach the working class seem to instead reflect a Brooklyn Democrat’s idea of blue-collar voters.

I asked Katz about his outsider candidates appealing mostly to people inside the Democratic tent. First, he disputed the premise of the question. Then he suggested that his candidates’ struggles are the result of being outspent on TV. But he was confident that working-class voters will come around eventually. “There’s just a challenging reality that some of this takes work and time,” he said. “It takes a lot of months, a lot of years, to establish fundamental realignments. And what’s occurring is a fundamental realignment. And it might not happen in two months or six months or one cycle, but it’s happening.”

Katz’s views reflect a common theory among anti-establishment candidates and consultants on the left and the right. He believes that supermajorities of the population want the same things that he does. The problem, as he sees it, is that billionaires are distracting voters with culture-war issues and preventing working-class people from hearing the populists’ message.

Voters do not in fact agree with progressive Democrats on everything. In much of the country, the working class in particular believes that the Democratic Party is out of touch with their values on issues including immigration, DEI policies, and gender. The idea that Democrats can win back the ground they’ve lost to the GOP during the Trump era without addressing that weakness head-on is far-fetched. (It’s not for nothing that the strongest Trump-state electoral overperformers this cycle, based on polling, are moderates, such as Roy Cooper in North Carolina and Mary Peltola in Alaska. El-Sayed, by contrast, appears to be an underperformer. A recent poll gave Michigan’s establishment-Democratic candidate for governor a 12.4-point lead, compared with just a 2.5-point lead for El-Sayed.) And if they don’t become competitive in more places, then they won’t have the political power to pass the kinds of populist reforms that Katz so badly wants to see—a fact that Katz acknowledges. “What defines the vision is a desire for real power that can fundamentally change the trajectory we’re currently on,” he said. “What that requires is winning a lot of hard elections in a lot of places and making those in positions of power better.”

Recent polls suggest that Democrats have as much as a nine-point advantage on the generic ballot. In that environment, even weak candidates who lack broad appeal could win. The real way to evaluate Katz’s candidates will be to compare their margin of victory with the overall results.

[Marc Novicoff: How the polls could be wrong again]

I asked Katz if there was anything that could convince him that his approach is wrong—that progressive candidates really do need to moderate on certain social issues to win hard contests. He seemed confused by the question. “I don’t necessarily have an easy, like—that’s what we have elections for.”

I tried again. What if El-Sayed does not win in Michigan, and voters say that’s because he seems too close with Hasan Piker, the Communist-sympathizing Twitch streamer? Would that change your perspective?

“I think Abdul is going to win,” he said.

I waited, and Katz kept riffing. “I think about politics a lot like sports, in the sense that anyone who’s trying to be good at the job watches a lot of tape.” Just as coaches add new wrinkles to their offense during the offseason, he’ll review the midterm results and make changes for 2028.

It was a convenient way to avoid answering the question. So I asked what he’s learned from this midterm cycle, one in which a scandal-plagued populist candidate has already dropped out and others are polling worse than their moderate-Democrat peers.

“Well, I want to see what happens in November,” Katz replied.

As the election approached, Katz and I kept in touch, and he began to joke more frequently about leaving politics. He said it so often that I started to wonder if he was serious. Yes, he spends much of his time writing scripts and staging scenes—as he’d always intended—but he seems miserable. Katz assured me that he really was just kidding and has no plans to find a new line of work. Depending on how the midterms go, he might want to reconsider.

*Illustration Sources: Adam Gray / Bloomberg / Getty; Angelina Katsanis / AFP / Getty; Eleanor Dearman / Fort Worth Star-Telegram / Tribune News Service / Getty; Joe Raedle / Getty.

The Backlash to Corruption Is Going Global

2026-11-02T07:00:00-05:00

Nicole Irvin voted for Donald Trump three times because she thought he had business savvy and appreciated that he was politically incorrect. “I like his roughness,” she told me. I met her in the parking lot of a Walmart Supercenter in Levittown, Pennsylvania, a planned suburban community in the state’s First Congressional District, a midterm battleground. She used to get her news from the right-wing commentator Candace Owens, and she cried when Charlie Kirk was killed last year. Lately, though, she has tuned out the GOP’s messaging because it is so discordant with her own experience.

She had just paid $10 for a phone charger—her son had broken her old one—and recalled when she paid half that much. “I asked the lady, ‘Is there any clearance section?’” The cost was significant because Irvin, who works at a tire-repair company, lives paycheck to paycheck. Meanwhile she sees politicians protecting their own wealth, and she can’t remember the greed ever being so blatant as under Trump. “They all make deals with each other,” she said.

Corruption is topping voter concerns in recent polls, dominating Democratic messaging, and forcing Republicans to play defense in red states. If that marks a sharp shift from recent American elections, in which such allegations have played a relatively minor role, it mirrors a growing global trend. Around the world, a backlash against corruption has roused voters and undercut populist, right-wing politicians. Now it may play a decisive role in the midterm elections.

I first noticed this in Hungary earlier this year. Viktor Orbán, an ally of President Trump and a model for his MAGA movement, was ousted in April after 16 years in power. I asked his former political director, Balázs Orbán—who is not related to the former prime minister—whether he saw parallels between the campaign that cost his boss his job and the contest that could end Republican control of Congress. Like Trump, the long-serving prime minister had confronted corruption accusations in previous elections, but won anyway. “Why is that?” Orbán asked me. “It’s because of the economy. If people feel the economy is going in a good direction, they say, ‘Okay, there are some rich people, but we are also doing well.’” As Orbán sees it, these were the terms of a basic social contract. “The problem right now is that since people don’t feel that they are doing well, they want politicians to keep the social agreement: that if we suffer, we should suffer together.”

The effects of this backlash could be equally dramatic in the United States, where perceptions of government corruption hit a record high this year, according to Gallup. On this metric, the U.S. now outpaces most other advanced economies. If MAGA meets the same fate in the midterms as other entrenched right-wing parties have around the world, it would suggest that history is moving in a new, and unpredictable, direction. The end of the Cold War brought the spread of Western-style liberal democracy. Then, in the 2010s, nationalism, authoritarian populism, and crony capitalism—features of Vladimir Putin’s Russia—surged in popularity, as the historian Timothy Snyder has argued. In Hungary and Serbia, countries that lie at the seam of East and West, the balance has now tipped back toward liberal democracy. The same could happen this autumn in America.

As global wealth disparities widen, a common dynamic keeps playing out in nation after nation. Nearly two years of student-led anti-corruption protests in Serbia helped dislodge the country’s strongman leader, Aleksandar Vučić, in elections last weekend. In Brazil, voter discontent with seedy politics may have worked in the incumbent’s favor. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva beat back a challenge from Flávio Bolsonaro, who is being investigated for alleged money laundering and tax evasion. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might hold on to power after messy coalition talks, but he was weakened by long-standing accusations of bribery and fraud. Anti-corruption demonstrations in India have rattled that country’s nationalist strongman leader, Narendra Modi, after more than 12 years in power.

It’s not hard to understand why the ostentatious behavior of political elites would be more galling during a cost-of-living crisis. The three most important issues to voters in Hungary, according to opinion research, were cost of living and inflation; public services, including health care and education; and corruption and governance. “The government is there to benefit the authoritarian leader’s friends,” a retired butcher I met outside Budapest told me, “and we all pay the price.” By the end of Orbán’s tenure, his son-in-law and childhood best friend had become among the richest men in the country. The opposition party, which won a supermajority in Parliament and put its leader, Péter Magyar, in the prime minister’s office, framed corruption as a form of theft. “The money that is stolen,” Magyar argued, should be funding pensions and child-welfare services.

Candidates in the United States are trying to make a similar connection. “We have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis,” James Talarico, the Democratic Senate candidate in Texas, has said. Jon Ossoff, the Democratic incumbent in Georgia, has put it this way: “Prices soar while the president rakes in billions.” The people around Trump have also done well. Look no further than his youngest son, the 20-year-old Barron, a college student whose estimated net worth stands at about $150 million, mostly derived from the family’s cryptocurrency company. The president’s own net worth is estimated to have grown by about $2.7 billion since the start of his second term, and is up to approximately $7 billion.

[Read: The watchdogs are barking themselves hoarse]

As in Hungary, corruption has moved to the top of the agenda for Americans. A recent Fox News poll found that government corruption drew the most concern among voters, above inflation and gas prices. And it’s changing voters’ minds. Irvin, the Pennsylvania voter, isn’t planning to cast a ballot at all on Tuesday. Her abstention, given her past voting habits, is a loss for the Republican incumbent, Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, a former FBI agent.

Perhaps sensing the potency of the corruption issue, Fitzpatrick has tried to use it against his Democratic challenger, Bob Harvie, a county commissioner. Campaign signs just beyond the Walmart parking lot allege that Harvie voted to give himself a pay raise. (In 2022, the bipartisan county board approved small cost-of-living adjustments for county officials, set to take effect after the next election.) Fitzpatrick’s campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Harvie, a former social-studies teacher, recently held his ninth town hall. Consistently, the two main issues raised by voters have been costs and corruption, he told me. “People are finally lashing out against a government that isn’t working for them,” he said. The pain is especially acute now because residents have just gotten their first shipment of heating oil. The pattern at campaign events is for voters to ask him about their “astronomical” heating bill, and then the very next question will be: How are we going to change Washington and stop this corruption?

[From the October 2026 issue: MAGA is making the world safe for corruption]

I asked Orbán, who badly wants the Republicans to win, what the party could do to tamp down voter concerns. Perhaps, I suggested, the president could try to minimize grift or the appearance of it. After all, he’s building a gilded ballroom while average diesel prices exceed $6 a gallon. Orbán laughed. “My advice would be to attack the Democrats,” he said. “They are trying to portray themselves as moderates, but they are not honest.”

That’s the approach that many Republicans are taking. The problem is that a similar strategy already failed in Hungary.

Gabby Deutch and Madison Hahamy contributed reporting.

Haley Stevens Is Sending the Wrong Message

2026-11-01T16:18:01-05:00

Updated at 6:16 p.m. ET on November 1, 2026

Haley Stevens nearly won the Democratic nomination for Senate in Michigan in August, then immediately endorsed the winner, Abdul El-Sayed. She has spent the months since then vacillating, expressing doubts about his campaign while maintaining her support. But last week, her fiancé said that he intends to vote for El-Sayed’s opponent, Mike Rogers, and now she has followed, endorsing the Republican just two days before the election.

Stevens’s dramatic reversal met with immediate cries of opportunism or political stupidity. But Stevens seems instead to be following through on a principled objection to El-Sayed’s rhetoric and associations that threaten the state’s Jewish population. The trouble is that her application of those principles is misguided, undermining the values she claims to uphold. Before this weekend, Stevens could credibly accuse El-Sayed of overlooking the bigotry of his allies out of political expedience. Now she, too, is guilty of that very sin.

I grew up in West Bloomfield, Michigan, a heavily Jewish suburb of Detroit, and have many friends and family who still live in the state. Every Jewish Michigander I know has serious concerns about El-Sayed. Their issue is not only that he refuses to accept Israel’s right to exist; it’s that he elevated anti-Zionism into the centerpiece of his primary campaign, treating the Israel lobby as the singular force lying behind every economic and political problem afflicting America.

During the campaign, he has energized an activist cohort whose rhetoric habitually goes beyond mere criticism of Israel, or even anti-Zionism, and extends into conspiratorial anti-Semitism. He campaigned with Amir Makled, a candidate for the University of Michigan’s Board of Regents who had reposted some of Candace Owens’s anti-Semitic tweets. More notorious, he attached himself to Hasan Piker, a Marxist-Leninist who has repeatedly employed anti-Semitic rhetoric. When a network of anti-Israel protesters was charged with plotting to intimidate local Jews, El-Sayed questioned the indictment, telling reporters, “It’s a lot more about what you’re advocating for that gets you indicted or not indicted, rather than what you did.”

El-Sayed has made some concessions to the Jewish community. He apologized for his response to a terrorist attack on a Jewish nursery school (“hurt people hurt people”), which he acknowledged minimized the pain felt by the attack’s targets. But for the most part he has tried to strike a very careful balance, assuaging liberal Jews without alienating any elements of his anti-Zionist base. After the left-wing media personality Cenk Uygur released an advertisement blaming Israel for the cost of groceries, Stevens demanded he renounce it. El-Sayed took days to reply, finally stating, “I do not agree with the contents of that ad,” without describing it as offensive.

As the American left has grown more fixated on Gaza, it is becoming more common for progressive organizations and cultures to treat Zionism in any form—including liberal Zionism that harshly criticizes Israel’s government—as a racist ideology, and to ostracize anybody who refuses to renounce it. American Jews rationally fear that El-Sayed is not only willing but eager to import this norm into the Democratic Party, functionally excluding the overwhelming majority of the Jewish population.

Jewish Democrats who have a defter touch than Stevens have tried to work through their reservations, with little success. Josh Whinston, a rabbi in Ann Arbor, wrote an op-ed in the Detroit Free Press conveying his fears about El-Sayed’s rhetoric and political alliances, and El-Sayed’s apparent lack of interest in allaying them. Whinston wrote that he has “said, again and again, that there is a way forward together that does not ask him to abandon his values. He has not yet responded.” Jordan Acker, a Michigan regent whose home was vandalized in the middle of the night by anti-Israel activists, told The New Yorker, “My top issue is the safety of my children, and nothing I’ve heard from the El-Sayed campaign suggests they take that seriously at all.”

Both Whinston and Acker, despite their reservations about El-Sayed, have ruled out endorsing Rogers. Stevens did too, before abruptly reversing course after El-Sayed disinvited her from a preelection unity rally. This decision by El-Sayed, which undercuts the most essential function of a unity rally, is characteristic of his preference for refusing to break ranks with his most left-wing, fanatically anti-Zionist supporters. Whether or not you agree with El-Sayed’s ethic—I do not—one must acknowledge that he is willing to follow it even at some risk to his chances of winning. In this way, El-Sayed, like Stevens, appears to care more about putting his own stamp on the Democratic Party than defeating the Republicans.

Stevens seems to have principles as well. The trouble is that her principled opposition to religious and ethnic intolerance does not extend to Muslim and Arab communities.

During the same period of time that El-Sayed has been winking at a political movement inflected with anti-Semitism, he has been targeted by a political message that is not merely inflected with racism but saturated with it. Donald Trump has made hysterical attacks on El-Sayed, such as “I’m here to keep a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member from becoming a United States senator,” and accused him of planning to impose Sharia law, among other wild charges. Rather than use his first name, he has sneeringly called El-Sayed “Muhammed,” as if to erase all doubt that his objection is not to any position El-Sayed has taken but to his religion.

Rogers has not repudiated any of this rhetoric. Instead, he has charged El-Sayed with refusing to condemn the Muslim Brotherhood, even after El-Sayed did precisely that.

Perhaps the party of Trump is so deeply corrupted by racism that hoping a Republican would renounce it is absurd, like asking a shark to apologize for mauling a swimmer. But Stevens is not a Republican or a Trump supporter. And she has thrown herself behind Rogers without making any demands of him.

Tolerance cannot be the ethical rationale for doing so. It’s impossible to construct any standard of behavior toward religious minorities that El-Sayed fails but Rogers passes.

And so, whatever message Stevens imagines she is conveying, it is not what is coming across. Perhaps she is expressing a less than exalted notion—Nobody puts Haley Stevens in a corner—lashing out in humiliated defiance of El-Sayed for marginalizing her in the campaign’s final days. Or, even worse, she is communicating that prejudice against Jews is unacceptable but prejudice against Muslims and Arabs is not.

This article originally misidentified Josh Whinston as Josh Whinton.

Trump Searches for a Fall Guy to Blame for Iran

2026-11-01T14:16:17-05:00

Updated at 5:43 p.m. ET on November 1, 2026

President Trump is deciding whether a resumption of strikes in Iran will finally deliver the victory he has already claimed he’s achieved. He also has two other questions to answer closer to home: Who gets the blame for a war his advisers assured him would end well before the midterms? And can he trust those same advisers when they tell him that the new plan will succeed where previous plans have failed?

For weeks, Trump has been contemplating a renewal of hostilities aimed at forcing Iran to negotiate, and advisers told us that a new round of attacks could come soon after Tuesday’s midterms. Trump has also been questioning allies about the job performances of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, two outside advisers close to Trump told us. Hegseth and Caine have been two of Trump’s key counselors on the war. In its earliest stages, they were also among the most publicly optimistic about its prospects—although they haven’t held a press conference since May. Trump often solicits opinions from a kitchen Cabinet of friends outside his administration before making any personnel moves.

[Read: Trump’s gamble to end the Iran war]

Hegseth is not a popular figure in much of the White House. Some close to Trump suggested to us that the defense secretary has not been honest about the state of the war, which he consistently paints in rosy terms to keep Trump happy. “Hegseth is good at telling the president what he wants to hear,” said one of the outside advisers. Sean Parnell, a Pentagon spokesperson, told us in a statement that “Secretary Hegseth always provides the President and White House senior leaders the full operational picture,” calling any suggestion otherwise “dead wrong.”

The defense chief has also sought to burnish his standing with the president by pursuing those suspected of leaking to the press, one of the worst transgressions on Trump’s list of personnel offenses. Last week, Hegseth abruptly fired one of the Joint Staff’s most senior officers, Army Lieutenant General Brett Sylvia, the director of planning. Officials who work for Hegseth said Sylvia failed lie-detector tests related to the disclosure of information to reporters. Sylvia hasn’t commented and couldn’t be reached.

Hegseth had ordered Sylvia to undergo at least three polygraphs as part of a broader leak investigation after news reports earlier this year described White House conversations and details about the shortage of munitions caused by the Iran war, the officials told us. Hegseth has decided that the Joint Staff, which reports to Caine, has a problem with leaks, a contention that Caine has not forcefully pushed back on, officials told us. Hegseth’s self-portrayal to Trump allies as having the president’s back resonates with a commander in chief who, since his first term, has suspected senior Pentagon officials of insufficient loyalty.

The White House spokesperson Anna Kelly, in a statement to us, gave an endorsement of Hegseth and Caine, praising their work in reshaping the Pentagon and declaring that “President Trump and everyone at the White House have full confidence in both Secretary Hegseth and General Caine, who are fully aligned with the President’s mission.”

Caine has appeared largely out of the loop over the alleged misdeeds of one of his own senior staff. When The Atlantic first reported that Sylvia was out, the Joint Staff issued a prewritten statement that thanked Sylvia for his “32 years of distinguished service to our nation.” Caine then learned additional details from the secretary’s team about what exactly had led to Sylvia’s dismissal, while Hegseth returned from a trip from Asia, the officials told us. Hours later, Caine’s office issued a new statement that said the original “did not appropriately reflect the full circumstances.” The Joint Staff said in a statement that the chairman offers “his best military advice and recommendations, along with all associated risks” but “does not publicly discuss these necessarily private conversations with civilian leadership.” That confidentiality protects service members “who are endangered by unacceptable unauthorized disclosures,” the statement added.

As the war has dragged on, Trump’s anger has risen over the conflict’s damage to Republicans’ midterm chances. A realization has set in at the White House that Trump is unlikely to pull out another remarkable political comeback in the midterms. The House appears gone, and the Senate may be too. Trump has raged in recent weeks that his messaging is not breaking through, and he now believes that the Iran war is at least in part to blame for his political predicament, the two advisers and an official told us. Not one to take responsibility himself, Trump is searching for a scapegoat, and has focused on those who had told him that a war with Iran would be quick and decisive.

Hegseth and Caine were both at the White House last week to present Trump and Vice President Vance with a series of options designed to create the conditions for Trump to declare victory. Admiral Brad Cooper, the top commander at U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for the military’s Middle East operations, was also at the White House last week. Trump now has to decide whether those options, and the advisers who offered them to him, are capable of bringing about a better outcome.

The military options before the president represent a series of unpalatable choices, current and former defense officials familiar with the plans told us. They give the president the chance to order strikes that would last a few hours, a few days, or several weeks. The president could also opt to maintain the U.S. naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz while dangling the threat of a return to action. Or he could walk away.

Advocates for a resumption of strikes believe that the economic pressure campaign is working and that additional military activity would force Tehran to the negotiating table. A lengthy campaign would target Iran’s defenses, as in the war’s early days, before the U.S. shifted its strikes to concentrate on Iranian forces around the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s infrastructure could be hit. The U.S. is expected to argue that the military is targeting infrastructure that serves both civilian and military purposes. But civilians would still be at risk. And such attacks could violate international humanitarian law. Another scenario calls for a days-long campaign against Iran’s nuclear program.

[Read: Trump is preparing for a long war]

Many within the administration expect that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose political fate remains uncertain after Israel’s election, would support a resumption of strikes, given his enthusiasm for the war and his belief that it would help him retain power.

Even a devastating campaign, though, might not induce concessions from Tehran. The regime could survive the attacks and celebrate its resilience after absorbing another round of U.S. firepower. After the U.S. and Israel staged a weeks-long campaign that began in late February, subsequent short strikes have only hardened Iranian resolve and prompted Tehran to lash out at U.S. assets and allies in the region. And any strike campaign would further deplete munitions stockpiles.

“If those strikes don’t work, you’ve now sort of exposed the limits of those strikes,” Michael Cohen, the director of an initiative at the Stimson Center think tank that studies whether U.S. military interventions justify their costs. “You keep hitting them and they don’t back down. So what are you going to keep doing? Keep escalating?”

Some in Trump’s orbit hope even the threat of strikes would nudge Iran back to negotiations, though that strategy has failed many times before. Last Sunday, Vance sent a letter to Mohsen Rezaei, Iran’s security chief. He proposed a resumption of direct peace negotiations, stressing that Iran’s nuclear program would have to be addressed from the outset. Vance did not say what, if anything, Tehran would get in return. The international mediators who delivered the letter pushed for a meeting later this week, around the time Trump is expected to decide on the resumption of military operations.

None of the military options appears to address threats from Iran’s proxies in the region, principally the Houthis in Yemen, who have recently launched attacks on Saudi Arabia. Eliminating those proxies was one of Trump’s stated goals for the war. New strikes also could drive oil prices higher, imposing further economic costs on the United States and its allies. One official told us that Trump’s recent turn against Ukraine was in part motivated by his desire for more Russian energy to reach international markets and offset the impact of possible U.S. military action in the Middle East. Tehran also gets a say; retaliation could escalate the conflict.

Legislators have been briefed on parts of the plans. Some were unimpressed. Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, described what he had seen as “insane.” “It will lead to devastating escalation, and the likely destruction of our commitment to the rule of law,” Murphy said last week at the Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank.

Trump has not yet given the order to resume strikes, the outside advisers and the administration official told us. If he does, he could keep the decision closely held until the last moment. In the run-up to the war, the White House didn’t inform its closest allies or seek the input of senior administration officials at the Departments of Energy and Commerce, who might have flagged the economic damage that would result from Iran’s seizure of the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for global energy supplies.

At the Pentagon, planning for a possible resumption of the war is now taking place amid renewed angst over Hegseth’s purge of senior commanders. He has fired or forced out more than two dozen generals and admirals. Commanders often say their job is to keep drama away from the troops so they can focus on the mission. But Sylvia’s firing and the accusations against him prompted another round of intense chatter over what happened, who might be next, and the message the firing was intended to send. Some officials at the Pentagon told us they suspect Hegseth was seeking to weaken the Joint Staff’s standing as the president assesses what the war has wrought. Hegseth in the past has not been shy about passing the buck for the outcome of a war he promoted. Earlier this year, he reportedly told Trump at Camp David that Deputy Secretary Stephen Feinberg was responsible for the munitions shortages. (Feinberg remains in the job.)

Parnell, the Pentagon spokesperson, said Hegseth is committed to “promoting the right senior military officers to leadership positions and retiring those who are unwilling to effectively serve the only person in government elected by the whole of the American people: President Donald J. Trump.” (Service members take an oath to defend the Constitution rather than pledging allegiance to a president.)

[Read: Another top general is out at the Pentagon]

A devastating night for Republicans on Tuesday won’t necessarily reduce the chances of a resumption of hostilities, despite the war’s political toxicity. In the 2006 midterms, Democrats gained 31 seats in the House and six in the Senate, taking control of both chambers of Congress for the first time since 1994, a result widely interpreted as a repudiation of President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. Immediately after the election, Bush blamed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for the losses and forced him out. Two months later, Bush ordered a surge of forces that ushered in one of the war’s deadliest periods.

An SNL Sketch to Make Airlines Feel Ashamed

2026-11-01T13:39:16-05:00

For many travelers, flying has become an indignity to endure rather than an experience to enjoy. Seats are more cramped than ever; flight delays are becoming normalized; somehow, airlines have invented an even worse version of Economy. (Welcome to Basic!) Perhaps most unsettling, though, is the unpredictability of other people on board.

Videos of unhinged passengers attempting to open the plane door midair, fighting over reclining seats, shouting slurs, or otherwise disrupting flights have become routine viewing online. This fall, a first-class passenger on an American Airlines flight became violent; he was duct-taped to his seat while the plane made an emergency landing so he could be arrested. Social media tends to make extreme behavior seem more common than it is—although perhaps not in this case: FAA data show that the number of incidents involving unruly fliers has risen sharply since 2019.

On last night’s Saturday Night Live, hosted by Inde Navarrette, a layered spoof imagined how a major airline might finally address the stubborn issue of problem passengers in a way that would still benefit its bottom line. In the sketch, a Delta spokesperson, played by Ashley Padilla, acknowledged that these incidents are ticking up. No traveler, she said, should have to deal with a volatile seat neighbor. Padilla then proposed a solution: Delta Disruptive, “a new section of the plane exclusively for crazy people,” available “on all domestic flights within Florida.” This new airline class, she promised brightly, would welcome fliers who refused to sit in their assigned seat, as well as those who insist on smoking, Disney adults who want to chug beers, and passengers yelling their theories about the Illuminati to the entire cabin.

Delta Disruptive, Padilla pledged, would provide a space for the “basic, inconsiderate a-hole” as well as the “paranoid lunatic” endangering everyone on board, with a four-inch-thick slab of plexiglass separating it from the rest of the plane. In one testimonial, a passenger played by Mikey Day approvingly noted that the section didn’t make him check his bag, which was clearly never going to fit in the overhead compartment. Scenes depicting growing anarchy showed one passenger rolling a joint and another insistent about licking the toes of a man clipping his toenails in his seat. But don’t worry, Padilla said: To ensure that nothing spun too out of control, the section would be staffed by the “toughest, gayest ex–Spirit Airlines employees who have seen much worse.” One flight attendant, played by Kenan Thompson, threw a man’s “comfort iguana” out of the plane after it wouldn’t stop biting people.

[Read: The only thing worse than Spirit Airlines]

The sketch animated the hellish experience of, say, sitting next to an inappropriate passenger who won’t stop yelling about shadow people. But its deeper and more cynical humor came from slyly hinting at how airlines have evaded recognizing their own complicity in the deterioration of the flying experience. Not that Padilla—whose brittle cheeriness clearly masked an exasperation lurking under the surface—acknowledged any of this. Rather, she saw the ongoing issue of unruly in-flight behavior as yet another opportunity to make a buck. “You see, Delta didn’t want to deal with the constant problems these passengers create, but we still wanted their money,” she confessed.

This moment of candor reflects the way that real-life air carriers squeeze money out of every possible scenario on board. On many airlines, even a modicum of comfort now comes at a premium—wanting to travel with a carry-on, for instance, or just drinking a glass of water—a circumstance that may be helping push travelers over the edge, especially as inequality in the air mirrors a sense of economic injustice on the ground. Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal reported that airlines are reducing the size of economy cabins to make room for expensive lie-flat seats and rows with a few more inches of leg room, giving these companies still more opportunities to charge passengers extra. Additionally, soaring jet-fuel costs, exacerbated by the war with Iran, have caused airfare prices to spike an average of 23 percent since January, according to recent federal data.

[Read: Airlines are just banks now]

Even those who want nothing more than to reach their destination with zero frills may not be safe from price squeezes. A lawsuit filed earlier this year alleged that JetBlue gathered passenger data to set different prices for airfare based on personal information. Passengers who can’t trust their airline are less likely to trust anyone they encounter on their flights—including other passengers. It would take more than a plexiglass partition to solve that problem.

Inside the Plan to Send 1,000 DOJ Monitors to the Polls

2026-11-01T12:15:00-05:00

For more than 60 years, the Department of Justice has sent its attorneys and staff to polling places across the country to ensure that Americans can vote free of discrimination or intimidation. They’ve watched to see if Black voters were illegally hindered in any way, if those who use a wheelchair or walker could get into facilities, and if those who couldn’t read the ballot for any reason—blindness, lack of English proficiency, or simply not having the skill—had help. Officials selected locations that had had problems in the past or where people had reported concerns.

When the feds would show up in the Tucson area of Arizona, where Spanish speakers and retirees are as numerous as the cacti dotting the Sonoran Desert, local officials considered the monitors partners in protecting the right to vote. But ahead of the primary election this past July, when Pima County Elections Director Constance Hargrove learned that DOJ was sending six representatives—most of whom were criminal prosecutors—she became worried. Would they just witness the vote, as in years past, or were they planning to gather evidence to later try to undermine the results? Would they know the basic rules? She told DOJ’s coordinator during a phone call: “Remind them that they cannot take a gun or weapon into the vote centers.”

On Primary Day, the monitors’ activities seemed normal, Hargrove told us. But she’s still concerned about the plan to send 1,000 of them to polling locations in every state for Tuesday’s election. The number itself is “a tall order,” Hargrove told us, as most previous administrations—Republican and Democratic—have detailed far fewer. And then there’s this department’s track record on elections. DOJ under President Trump has taken up his years-long quest to prove that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. Officials have seized ballots in Georgia, gathered material from Arizona, and questioned election officials in Wisconsin—but still have not found evidence of the widespread voter fraud the president has alleged. In recent days, DOJ reminded all state election officials to preserve materials from their elections.

“I’m not going to freak myself out before Election Day, or my poll workers, or the voters,” Hargrove said. She has reminded workers to follow their training should the monitors—or anyone else—be disruptive: “You can always call 911.”

Her concerns and suspicions are widely shared among the dozen-plus local and state election officials we spoke with across the country. Some worry that a long-standing program created during the civil-rights era to prevent intimidation, particularly of nonwhite voters, could be used as an extension of the administration’s attacks on the democratic process. The officials also said they fear that monitors could misinterpret what they see and then share incomplete or inaccurate information with DOJ that could be used to undermine the results.

Kiersten V. Pels, a Justice Department spokesperson, strenuously objected to these concerns in a written response to our questions about the program. Pels noted that the election officials we spoke with did not cite an example of “a single voter who was intimidated by a Justice Department monitor.” Should local officials see monitors acting improperly, Pels said, they should report them to DOJ.

“The Department has monitored elections for decades, under administrations of both parties. Monitors observe. They do not interfere with voting, and they follow state rules on polling place access,” Pels wrote. “Every monitor has the same role: to observe for potential violations of federal law and report concerns to the Department. The Department will review those concerns after Election Day and act where appropriate.”

This year’s program is overseen by Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, who has described monitors as a way “to increase voter confidence, to troubleshoot problems.” Dhillon’s critics have noted her ties to prominent election deniers and her support of legislation limiting mail-in voting. Her division, meanwhile, has sued dozens of state election officials, seeking—so far unsuccessfully—access to voter rolls containing partial Social Security numbers and other sensitive information. The suits are part of a nationwide search for noncitizens who might be illegally voting. “We see a problem, frankly, with some election officials refusing to clean up their voter rolls and knowingly allowing noncitizens, for example, to stay on the voter rolls,” she told Bloomberg. “This is a federal crime.” In a July post on X, Dhillon described the monitor program as aimed at ensuring equal access to the ballot, as it has in the past. But, she said, it will also help make sure that no American’s vote is “cancelled out by someone who shouldn’t be voting.” (Voting by noncitizens is extremely rare, analysis after analysis has found.) Pels, the DOJ spokesperson, told us that its monitors “will not be questioning voters about their citizenship status at the polls.” But Pels added that “if our monitors uncover evidence of such crimes while monitoring, we will use it.”

[Read: The election deniers’ long game]

The Justice Department has recruited criminal prosecutors to participate as monitors. Their inclusion overturns a longtime practice of not using those who have the power to charge people with crimes, and has raised questions about how the Justice Department might use their observations, particularly in places central to criminal investigations into the 2020 election, such as Arizona and Georgia. A former DOJ Civil Rights Division official, who requested anonymity to speak with us out of fear of professional retaliation, told us that previous administrations “never sent prosecutors, because we never wanted to do anything that might scare people.” Pels told us that monitors will not identify themselves as prosecutors.

Eric Neff, the acting chief of the Civil Rights Division’s Voting Section, said in a sworn declaration released as part of ongoing litigation that no FBI or ICE employees would serve as monitors. However, employees from the Federal Bureau of Prisons; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and the Drug Enforcement Administration would be involved—a departure from long-held norms, three former DOJ attorneys told us. Pels said that their inclusion is “not new policy” and that they are “not being sent as law enforcement.”

To try to understand how the monitors might act on Tuesday, we looked at how they operated during the primaries. Although they watched without incident in many states, that wasn’t the case in deep-red Wyoming. On Primary Day in August, two monitors showed up at a Cheyenne polling place and asked the poll workers “highly unusual” questions that were outside their purview, including about how electronic poll books were acquired and whether they could see the tabulators, according to one local official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of safety concerns. Pels said the monitors’ questions were “routine” and disputed that they’d asked about the procurement of equipment. The local official told us that workers described the monitors as “very assertive,” and that they walked around “like they owned the place.” She added: “If you’re not expecting big, tall, beefy men, it could be rattling.”

Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon, a Republican, criticized the monitors’ activities at a public meeting, explaining that just as he doesn’t like the idea of the federal government “taking our guns,” he also dislikes the notion of it “taking our votes.” Pels told us that the Justice Department disagreed “with the public framing” that the monitors were “‘aggressive’ or did anything improper,” and said that Dhillon “had a cordial meeting” after the primary with the governor, the state attorney general, and a county election clerk.

[Read: The supporters urging Trump to declare martial law for the midterms]

We submitted roughly 200 public-records requests to states, counties, cities, and towns over the past several weeks, seeking to learn more about DOJ’s plan and the people carrying it out. Those records, along with our conversations with election officials, reflected that nearly all of the monitors’ visits during the primaries were professional. Some monitors asked poll workers about their training; some talked with voters outside polling locations. DOJ coordinated with local officials, advising when the monitors would arrive and what they could expect from them. A DOJ lawyer recently wrote to the lieutenant governor of Utah with an assurance that the program would run “the same way as in the past,” according to correspondence that we obtained. “Monitors follow all rules of the state and jurisdiction. Monitors dress in business casual clothing. No uniforms or pins identifying as DOJ are allowed.”

But a meeting a few days ago between DOJ and Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, reflected fears that this year’s election won’t be business as usual. During the conversation, which state officials told DOJ they were recording, Fontes asked why he should believe that the monitors are working in a nonpartisan manner, given the department’s recent lawsuit seeking to decertify Alaska’s Senate results if the Democratic candidate wins, according to audio of the meeting we reviewed. “It’s pretty patently obvious that a lawsuit filed based on a political outcome puts the department in a compromised position,” Fontes told the DOJ attorneys, who said they are sending roughly 20 monitors to the Phoenix area, plus more around the state. The DOJ officials replied that the monitors are, and would, remain nonpartisan. Fontes also asked if the monitors could be called to testify about their observations in court—as witnesses. Neff, the acting chief of DOJ’s Voting Section, responded that such a “speculative” scenario would be “assessed on a case-by-case basis.” Pels, the DOJ spokesperson, told us that this stance is “nothing new” and not newsworthy. “That’s how the law works,” she said.

States can decline to let the monitors into polling sites and instead require them to stand outside at a distance. Some red states have a history of doing so, such as Missouri and Florida, which banned monitors during the 2022 midterms. Hennepin County, in Minnesota, asked monitors to stay 100 feet away from one voting location during the August primary election and will do so again on Tuesday. One video in August captured a local election judge debating with two men dressed in polo shirts about how close they could get. “I’m assuming you don’t want to interfere with our ability to check for your compliance with federal law,” one of the monitors told the judge.

Most of the monitors’ names and assigned locations are not publicly known, but through our public-records requests, and from research conducted by Democracy Forward, a legal nonprofit, we identified some of the more than 80 monitors who were sent to polling locations during the primaries. Among the DOJ employees sent to monitor the primary were: Chris Gardner, who represented the Fulton County Republican Party in 2024 as it supported an election-board member who sued after refusing to certify the results of that year’s primary; Joseph Voiland, who represented the Trump campaign when it tried to overturn the 2020 election results in Wisconsin; and Alexander Keely, now a senior adviser to Dhillon, whose Republican National Lawyers Association member profile says he served as a “Trump 47 Election Integrity Captain” for a Pennsylvania county in 2024. DOJ did not respond to questions about whether these employees would serve as monitors on Tuesday, and Pels stressed in a statement that all monitors go through the same training.

In Arizona’s Maricopa County, local officials were alarmed when we described to them in July the biographies of some of the monitors assigned to their county for the primary, including a DOJ violent-crime-section chief, a federal prosecutor who specializes in public-corruption criminal probes, and a man who pleaded guilty in 2016 to crimes involving unauthorized computer intrusions after hacking two election websites in Florida. David Levin spent 20 days in prison for those crimes. Levin did not respond to our requests for comment, but he has previously claimed that he had been attempting to show the Florida county its own security vulnerabilities and called his actions “one of the bigger mistakes I’ve made in my life.”

[Read: The election system wasn’t built for this]

Records show that Maricopa County officials told DOJ last week they would not allow Levin to monitor their elections. The county attorney’s office, led by a Republican, also asked DOJ to commit in writing that it “will not send any election monitors to Maricopa County whom the DOJ knows has a felony conviction of any kind, or a conviction for any election-related criminal offense, in any state in the Union.”

Pels told us on Saturday that Levin is “no longer with the department” and “will not be a monitor on Election Day.” She said that DOJ hired and trained “qualified individuals to serve our country in a non-partisan manner” and that staff are expected to carry out their duties ethically and legally, “no exceptions.”

Internal DOJ materials we reviewed show that monitors have been trained to focus on voter-access laws—and not to interfere with the election. At least two longtime attorneys in the Civil Rights Division’s Voting Section are helping coordinate the monitors, emails show. Former DOJ officials told us their involvement, and that of other career attorneys who have prior experience with the program, makes them confident in it.

Although 1,000 monitors is an unusually high number, the country has close to 100,000 polling locations, and millions of people vote by mail in the weeks before Election Day. The deployment is unlikely “to actually change voters’ experiences in very many places,” Anna Baldwin, a former monitor who is now the voting-rights-litigation director at the Campaign Legal Center, told us.

Still, the election officials we spoke with said they have been fielding questions from staff, poll workers, fellow officials, and voters who are worried about the federal presence. One Boston official told us that time normally devoted to the nuts and bolts of preparing to run an election has been spent fielding questions from poll volunteers such as, What would you do if the federal government intervenes in your election in some way? Boston’s election administrators have developed new procedures, such as assigning workers to take an inventory of ballots, should federal agents seize them. In Wisconsin, election clerks have been “getting hundreds of emails” from voters and advocacy groups, asking what the plan is if federal law enforcement shows up, a state election official said at a public meeting.

[Read: The real threat of election interference]

Isaac Cramer, the executive director of the Charleston County Board of Elections, in South Carolina, said he’s worried that the monitors may intensify anxieties at the polls. “When you hear DOJ is coming,” he told us, “I think that can bring some fear. It can bring questions.” When monitors went to his county for a primary runoff this summer, false conspiracy theories immediately sprang up online.

Many city and county clerks told us that in all likelihood, the monitoring won’t interfere with their ability to fairly and accurately run the election. But the precautions they’ve had to take, and the questions they’ve had to answer, show how a program meant to protect the right to vote is being seen as a way to undermine it.

The MAGA Reckoning Arrives

2026-11-01T11:00:18-05:00

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In the first months of Donald Trump’s first term, as one moral outrage followed another, I often found myself repeating, in conversation, a seven-word phrase: Where there’s no bottom, there’s no bottom. However bad things got, they were bound to get worse. That applied above all to Trump, but also to his party, which was fusing with him.

We’ve since seen endless examples of what “no bottom” looks like. The latest is an ad from Vivek Ramaswamy, who is running for governor of Ohio. It features the estranged mother of Ramaswamy’s opponent, Amy Acton, calling her daughter a liar about her childhood and urging Ohioans not to vote for her.

Here is what we know about that childhood. In 1978, when Acton was 12, her stepfather, Cledith Arthur, was indicted for raping her. He fled to Pennsylvania, where he died as a fugitive in 2004. Acton and her brother were removed from their mother’s custody, and she has not spoken with her mother since. Her mother, Donna Arthur, stayed married to the man charged with raping her daughter until he died.

The Ramaswamy campaign pledged to spend $4 million to air the ad on television and online. Some Republicans objected; Ohio’s current governor, Mike DeWine, called the ad “deeply, deeply troubling.” But the two most important Republicans in the country, Trump and Vice President Vance, defended it. Trump called it “very powerful” and wrote, “Who wouldn’t use such an Ad? I would, it’s called, ‘hitting pay dirt.’” Vance said he was “a little bit disgusted”—not by the ad but by the Republicans “whining” about it.

This is what family values look like to Republicans in the Trump era.

As a young conservative in the 1980s, among my formative influences were Gertrude Himmelfarb and Irving Kristol, Allan Bloom and Leon Kass, James Q. Wilson and William J. Bennett, Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus, and Michael Novak. I was especially shaped by George Will’s 1983 book, Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does, which argued that statecraft is inherently “soulcraft,” the cultivation of public spirit and moral sensibilities. These thinkers shared the conviction that self-government depends on what Kristol called “republican virtue.”

They believed, too, that norms are fragile and that the membrane separating civilization from barbarism is thin. Character and conscience need to be cultivated. Public discourse either elevates or degrades, moving us away from or closer to a will-to-power ethic. The conduct of leaders, including political leaders, is educative. And when deviancy becomes widespread, we grow used to it. It was a Democrat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who coined the phrase defining deviancy down, by which he meant that a society overwhelmed by destructive behavior lowers its standards rather than confronting it.

None of this means that conservatives, or the Republican Party, were paragons of virtue. These thinkers and those who were influenced by their work often fell short of what they preached. But their aspirations were ennobling, and some of them lived lives that matched their words.

Today the American right is not merely indifferent to character formation; it is in the business of character deformation. It takes pride in its transgressiveness. The Ramaswamy ad embodies the “no bottom” ethic of the Trump-era GOP, and its wickedness comes in layers.

Cruelty and coarseness have momentum, but they also have limits. Political leaders who relentlessly push brutality do lower a nation’s standards, at least for a time. But if we’re fortunate, they also awaken its conscience. The revulsion comes first, almost physical, like bile rising in the throat. It is what Kass, in a different context, called “the wisdom of repugnance.”

The reckoning follows.

The anti-MAGA reckoning may have finally begun, though much later than it should have. Trump has lost most of the country. His hold on his own base is weakening; its members, like everyone else, are suffering because of the staggering incompetence of the president. And many of those who continue to support Trump are exhausted. In Ohio, a GOP poll shows that the Ramaswamy ad is backfiring. Axios reports that by a 2-to-1 ratio, those who said they were familiar with it said it made them more likely to vote for Acton.

But Ohio alone won’t be enough. A true repudiation of the politics of savagery will require a rebuke from voters in every region of America. It should come, and in a good society it would.

The Republican Party, after all, is led by a man found liable for sexually abusing a woman and then defaming her. The president has rallied behind an ad featuring a mother who, rather than stand by her 12-year-old daughter, sided with the man charged with raping the girl. Trump mocked the murder of one critic and openly cheered the death of another. He has called his political opponents “vermin,” said immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” disparaged Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries,” and mocked a disabled reporter. His misogyny is undisguised; so is his bigotry. As president, he has enriched himself and his family by billions of dollars. He swoons over dictators while treating Canada as an enemy. He lies and distorts reality on a scale that was once unimaginable. He incited a violent attack on the Capitol in an effort to overturn an election. The list goes on. No American president has matched Trump’s limitless corruption or his cruelty.

The election, and especially the reelection, of Donald Trump caused me, for the first time in my life, to question the fundamental decency of America. I could not understand how anyone, especially my co-religionists, could look at such a squalid figure and vote for him, let alone support him enthusiastically. How could they defend his indecency time after time after time? Doesn’t partisanship have limits? Don’t honor and integrity matter? Isn’t Trump’s peculiar form of madness an obvious disqualifier?

For tens of millions of Americans—more than 77 million in 2024 alone—the answer has been no. That stain is now a permanent part of the American story. But the story isn’t over. We can move beyond this grotesque chapter to something better, though the path won’t be smooth. Even if Democrats sweep the midterms, Trump will still be president, and his closing act will likely involve trying to tear the country apart. We can’t allow him to do that. We need to get to the other side of this era with our institutions, our bonds to one another, and our commitment to justice and the rule of law intact, and then begin the work of reclaiming American ideals. A wipeout of the party of Trump on Tuesday would be an awfully helpful step in that direction.

I Thought I’d Left Authoritarianism Behind

2026-11-01T10:00:00-05:00

Late in the summer of 1984, I met my dying father for what I thought would be our last lunch together. We’d chosen one of his favorite restaurants in downtown Brno, the capital of Moravia in what was then Communist Czechoslovakia. The ceiling fans spun sluggishly in the air; the clatter of plates echoed off the marble walls and high ceilings; cigarette smoke curled above tables where men spoke in whispers.

My father looked thinner than I’d remembered him. Cancer had hollowed his cheeks and deepened the furrows at his eyes. But it wasn’t only illness that appeared to weigh on him. He seemed lost in his thoughts—haunted, perhaps, by more than his failing body.

I had invited him because I carried a secret. As the waiter set down our favorite dish—broiled trout with herb butter and country potatoes—I looked around to make sure that no one was sitting close enough to overhear us. Then, my hands trembling slightly, I leaned in and told him that I was planning to defect.

For years I had lived in fear. A close friend of mine from architecture school had been found dead under suspicious circumstances. Many of those close to him believed that thugs from the StB—the regime’s secret police—had murdered him after he’d refused to spy on a relative in Rome who’d been labeled an “enemy of the state.” It was clear that to protect the authoritarian regime, the government would kill even innocent people who refused to collaborate. I could not breathe inside that system any longer. I was ready to risk everything to escape.

[Read: Authoritarians are great at propaganda—until they’re not]

I braced for my father’s reaction. I expected anger, or for him to enumerate a litany of horrors that might await me if I were caught. I could end up in jail for years, and then would be blacklisted by the regime from jobs, housing, educational opportunities, and more. Our entire family, including my father, despite a spotless political career, could also be punished. He studied me for what felt like an eternity. When he finally spoke, his voice was calm, almost tender. “I understand,” he said. “And I support you.”

After another long silence, he leaned forward, lowering his voice so that the waiter could not hear. As it turned out, he had his own secret. For decades, he said, he had lived a double life—outwardly a loyal Communist, but in actuality a spy for the West. The man I knew as a gentle gardener, an enthusiastic party member, and a dutiful bureaucrat had been risking his life to undermine the regime that he’d pretended to serve.

He spoke of clandestine meetings in parks and hotel bars in faraway countries, of documents copied and smuggled, of narrow escapes when he suspected that his cover was blown. He had never told anyone before me—not even my mother. She had despised the Communists and had eventually divorced him because she believed that he had become one of them. He let her go without explanation. He knew that to reveal the truth would have endangered her, my sister, and me.

For my father, unburdening himself of his secret was an act of release; for me, the moment was a revelation. Until then, I had regarded my father as an inscrutable man shaped by the compromises of totalitarian life. Now I was finally seeing the moral steel beneath the surface. His calm was not complacency; it was discipline. His loyalty was camouflage. My father was an idealist who had risked everything for the hope of restoring freedom that had been lost—and that I, too, was seeking.

Sitting motionless in that dining room, the restaurant seeming to fade around me, I realized that my father’s confession was also a farewell. He knew that, once I fled, we might never meet again. Soon I would begin my journey to a new homeland, one where, I was convinced, I would be able to leave the authoritarianism of my past behind me.

My father had been born in free Czechoslovakia between the two world wars, into a country that was proud of its democracy and culture. But in February 1948, everything had changed. The Communist Party, riding the wave of Soviet triumph over the Nazi occupation, engineered a coup. The new regime followed the dictator’s playbook to the letter, replacing competent officials with loyal sycophants; censoring the independent media and flooding the public with propaganda; seizing control of the courts, military, and police; and quickly dividing the nation into “us” and “them.”

By the time I was born, about a decade later, totalitarianism had saturated the very air we breathed. At school, we memorized slogans about the wisdom of the party and the danger of “imperialist enemies within and abroad.” Neighbors whispered carefully in stairwells, or spoke in code; even family members sometimes informed on one another. The price of a careless remark could be a job, a degree, or one’s freedom.

Most people survived by performing obedience. If you wanted your child to study at a university, you joined the party. If you wanted a promotion at work, you kept your opinions to yourself and publicly embraced party doctrine. You’d play along, while watching memorials being built to honor the supposed successes of the Communist Party and its leaders. Morality was privatized and discreet; in the public forum, cruelty replaced compassion.

Yet beneath the gray conformity were pockets of resistance—underground artists, writers, comedians, and other brave humanitarians who dared to reveal the truth. It turned out that my father had been part of that hidden resistance. His rebellion took a quieter form, but one that could have cost him his life. Each secret mission, meeting with operatives, or report that he passed on was a courageous act of faith that someday the truth would prevail and democracy would return.

[Jonathan Chait: The ‘resistance’ won]

I followed his example in my own way. A few days after my lunch with my father, I packed a small rucksack, concealed $60 and a copy of my new architecture-school diploma in a hollowed-out book, and took a train to a popular beach resort on the Adriatic coast, in what was then Yugoslavia; my official story was that I was going on vacation with a couple of friends. My plan was simple, and desperate: to slip through the Julian Alps into Italy, crossing at a high pass known only to some local climbers I’d befriended years ago.

The climb was brutal. Loose shale crunched under my boots. Morning mist veiled the peaks. A breeze carried the scent of pine and the sound of distant cowbells from the valleys below. When I finally reached the ridge, more than 8,000 feet high, I looked back toward Czechoslovakia—toward the only life I had known. With tears running down my cheeks, I said a quiet goodbye to my family, my girlfriend, my language, and my country. I believed that I would never see any of it again.

Hours later, in the darkness of the summer night, exhausted, I stumbled into a local police station on the Italian side of the border and asked for political asylum. The next day, I was welcomed into a refugee camp an hour south of Rome. An official asked me which country I wished to emigrate to. Without hesitation I answered: “America.” It was more than a destination for me. It was a symbol—the beacon of democracy, the far shore of moral clarity.

I have now lived in the United States for more than four decades. I became a citizen in 1990. I have built a successful career as an architect, raised a son, paid taxes, voted, argued, believed. For much of that time, the rule of law felt solid beneath my feet; facts were facts; the idea of freedom was unshakable. I loved this country not because it was perfect but because it aspired to be governed with integrity and accountability.

I’ll never forget the pride I felt in 1987, still a new émigré to America, listening to President Ronald Reagan as he stood at the Brandenburg Gate and challenged Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” Two years later, when the wall crumbled, the moment felt like not just Europe’s liberation but the fulfillment of a promise that America had made to the world, and to people like me: We are committed to supporting and defending democratic movements and values around the globe. After decades in the private sector, I joined the State Department in 2010, to serve my adopted country. What I write next reflects only my own opinions, and not those of my employer.

I now feel the chill of the authoritarianism that I fled long ago. Over the past 10 years, the rise of Donald Trump, and the movement that coalesced around him, have brought back a vocabulary that I never wanted to use again: propaganda, purge, cult of personality. Early on in this transformation, I told myself that any comparison to Communist Czechoslovakia was hyperbole. America had strong institutions, a free press, an independent judiciary and Congress, and checks and balances embedded in the Constitution.

But slowly, almost imperceptibly, the ground began to shift. To anyone who has lived under dictatorship, the pattern is instantly recognizable. Dictators start by instilling fear. They exploit uncertainty to manufacture loyalty. They promise safety in exchange for obedience. And when facts threaten their authority, they destroy the very idea of truth. With this comes ideological cleansing, show trials, the silencing of independent media. Lenin did this in 1918. Mussolini and Hitler refined it in the 1930s. Stalin’s puppet president in Czechoslovakia, Klement Gottwald, followed the script in 1948. The packaging—the slogans, uniforms, actors—change depending on the setting, but the choreography is always the same.

In the United States, we have now heard the language of fear—fear of immigrants, of “globalists,” of red or blue neighbors, of friends or coworkers who think differently. The old trick of inventing an “enemy from within” has resurfaced. Loyalty is valued over competence and expertise. In Trump’s second term, national institutions of justice and law enforcement have become tools of injustice, violence, and oppression. Lies have been normalized, and truth has become negotiable or, at times, transactional.

Members of the Trump administration have branded judges who rule against the president as partisan and, in some cases, called for their impeachment. The government has justified unlawful deportations and even the killings of defenseless citizens in Minneapolis. The presence of armed National Guardsmen and ICE agents in American cities and towns sends a clear message of political intimidation. Even the military, once seen as apolitical, has been drawn into the partisan theater. Minority and immigrant communities bear the heaviest weight, their very existence recast as a threat to national identity.

At the same time, the administration has gone after dissenters. Journalists who question the administration’s blatant lies have been personally attacked as “stupid” and vilified as “fake news.” Independent outlets have been banned from the Pentagon and the White House. Comedians and artists who have dared to satirize the powerful have found their work censored or quietly defunded. Universities have been smeared as indoctrination camps, and billions of dollars in federal grants have been canceled or paused to pressure these institutions to align with the administration’s political agenda. Scientists have been ordered to stop their research or have opted to leave the country. Meanwhile, the Trump administration allows blatant corruption that benefits the loyal few. Each of these acts, taken alone, might seem like an overreach; together they form a deliberate strategy by the current administration to diminish democratic checks and wield absolute power.

In Communist Czechoslovakia, the party controlled not only information but also imagination. It decided what words could mean. Obedience was redefined as patriotism; questioning the party was considered treason. These days, I hear that same semantic drift in phrases including real Americans, enemies of the people, and even vermin, a term with a dark history.

What worries me the most is not Trump himself or those who do his bidding, but rather the willingness of so many ordinary citizens to look away. I remember how my neighbors in Brno, decent but weary, learned to ignore the lies, the quiet knocks on the door at night, the disappearances. Their lives were comfortable enough not to take any risks. Over time, their silence became complicity. I see the same fear-driven behavior creeping into Americans’ daily lives, which allows for the jaws of totalitarianism to close tighter.

I am not naive. The United States today is not Czechoslovakia in 1948. Its democratic institutions are older, its civil society more resilient. In a couple of days, Americans will have the chance to exercise their right to vote, and many will head to the polls. But this is why the warning signs matter so much now. Once complacency and fear take hold in a population, democracy’s defenses erode from within.

Each generation must decide what freedom is worth. For my father, it was a life of secrecy and great personal risk. For me, it was exile. But courage in our current situation doesn’t need to be this dramatic. Courage is the quiet refusal to surrender one’s conscience. It is the scientist who keeps publishing data after being told to stop, the teacher who still assigns banned books, the neighbor who protects the vulnerable instead of denouncing them. It is not staying silent when facing injustice or witnessing corruption. It is participating in organized and peaceful public protests. It is protecting and exercising all of our constitutional rights—including the right to speak (and write) freely under the First Amendment. It is voting.

[Steven Levitsky: The new authoritarianism]

When I think of my father in that smoky restaurant, I remember his composure—the steadiness of a man who knew that he had chosen correctly even if history might never vindicate him. He never sought recognition. His satisfaction was simple: The truth, he hoped, would eventually come out. And it did. He bravely battled his illness long enough to watch democracy restored in Czechoslovakia. I was able to return and see him again after the Velvet Revolution, when he was in the final stages of his struggle with cancer.

I sometimes imagine what he would say if he could see America now, in the year of its 250th birthday. I think he would remind me that democracy is not inherited but practiced every day. In America, we still have a choice between democracy and authoritarianism. And we must each make a firm decision about the role we will play as citizens.

The window for that choice, however, is narrowing. The Trump administration could be emboldened by the midterm results, especially if the elections don’t go its way, and its attacks on democratic institutions could become more difficult to roll back. January 6, 2021, was a sloppy, desperate attempt at election interference by an uncoordinated mob without military support. Imagine how a similar scenario would play out now, when the Trump administration is stocked with loyalists, and the military and justice system are so thoroughly politicized.

And yet, I still believe in the renewal of American ideals. History records how democracies fall, but also how they rise again. From Prague’s Wenceslas Square to Berlin’s wall to Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, progress has always begun with those who have joined together to say, simply, Enough. When I crossed the Julian Alps four decades ago, I thought I was running toward freedom. In truth, I was carrying it within me.

Is Radicalism the Answer?

2026-11-01T09:00:00-05:00

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As we enter the midterm elections, Americans seem ready to move on from the Trump era, but there remains great disagreement about what should come next and how we might achieve it. The intellectual historian and law professor Samuel Moyn is among those who believe that liberals have become too timid about driving social, political, and economic change. If the Trump era was in part a response to the failures of centrist moderation, as Moyn suggests, then we may need something more radical to get us out of it. David Brooks is one of those centrist moderates, chastened by the many examples when radical change has led to tragic outcomes—including the example of Donald Trump himself. In this week’s episode, David and Moyn discuss emancipation, fallibility, and the disagreement beneath the disagreement.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Brooks: People are fed up. They’re sick of the establishment and the people who’ve been running things. They want change, and they want change now. When people like me are in the middle of this kind of emotional climate, all our alarm bells start going off.

We’re all the product of our times, and I grew up in the age of the Cold War. It was an age when all sorts of exhilarating beginnings led to blood-drenched culminations. The lesson I drew from all this is that moving fast and breaking things is not the way to go.

I became suspicious of people who wanted to burn everything to the ground and start over. I became, in other words, a moderate—the kind of guy who favors constant but incremental reform.

But let’s face it, the moderates of the center right and the center left have not exactly produced heaven on Earth. Instead, problems ranging from climate change, inequality, the federal debt have just festered. So maybe something more radical is needed.

That’s why I’m eager to talk to Sam Moyn. Sam teaches at the law school here at Yale, but in his heart, he’s an intellectual historian. He writes and thinks about the ideas behind our politics.

Sam and I are both liberals. We’re both members of the intellectual tradition that values democracy, individual freedom, and the free exchange of ideas. We oppose the authoritarianism that seems to be creeping in from both right and left. But Sam and I are different flavors of liberals. I’m the more moderate kind, chastened by the scars of history, cautious about instant radical change, and more inclined to steady reform.

I’m curious to know which of us is right about the current moment. Is it me, the incrementalist? Or is it Sam, who’s a little more transformational? That’s why I’m pleased to welcome Sam Moyn to The Permanent Questions.

Samuel Moyn: Thanks for having me.

Brooks: Oh, it’s a pleasure. I’ve been reminding people that you and I are both liberals. We both share the same broad philosophy, but I think we have different flavors of liberalism, and I want to get into that. I thought I’d spend a few minutes just describing where my world comes from, and then I’m going to ask you where your world comes from.

I was a Democratic Socialist in college. I was a revolutionary. I would’ve been with Bernie and Zohran and all those people. And I was assigned a book called Reflections on the Revolution in France by this guy Edmund Burke.

And he was like, “The world’s really complicated. You should be careful about what you think you can change, and therefore move incrementally—gradually, slowly, constantly, but incrementally.”

I hated that book, and I wrote up a whole bunch of papers of what an idiot this guy Edmund Burke was. So then I go out in the world and I work on the South and West Side of Chicago as a journalist, and two of the places I covered are housing projects called Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes.

They were designed by planners and University of Chicago sociologists. They tore down the old neighborhoods, they put up these high-rises, and they didn’t bother to talk to the people in the neighborhoods.

When they tore down what they thought were rickety old buildings, they tore out the systems of social support the neighbors had built for themselves. By the time I got there, they were hellscapes. Crime, gangs had taken over. They’d made life worse for the people in those neighborhoods. And I’m like, “Holy crap, that guy Edmund Burke, he might’ve been right.”

Conservatism in the Burkean sense—or, as I would call it for the sake of our conversation, “moderation”—is basically based on two ideas in my view. One is that social change is really hard, and you could be wrong. Therefore, you should move incrementally so you can adjust.

So I go off into my journalism career, and one of the best things I ever covered in my life was the end of the Soviet Union. And I’m there one day in Moscow, and Boris Yeltsin, who was the democratically elected president of Russia, this old Soviet regime, as a last-gasp effort to stay alive, staged a coup.

All these tanks rolled into Moscow. And I interviewed a woman in that crowd, a 93-year-old lady named Valentina Kosieva, and I asked her about her life. She’d nearly been executed by the Reds in the civil war after the revolution in 1917. Every bad thing that happened in Soviet history happened to her.

And then the final story I’ll tell is I was covering the Middle East about the same time in mid-’90s, and I’m at the home of Shimon Peres, who was prime minister then. And it was a big celebratory dinner with about 50 or 60 people, and I’d say 40 percent of them were Palestinian negotiators on the Oslo Peace Process, 40 percent of them were Israeli negotiators, and the other 20 percent were people like me— pundits and scholars.

The atmosphere in that room was so warm because these men, mostly men, had been through years of negotiation, and they thought they had crossed the line, and we were gonna have a two-state solution. We were gonna have peace. It was a time people forget: If you lived in Gaza, you could fly on a Palestinian airline to a Palestinian airport holding a Palestinian passport.

We were on our way to nationhood, and Yasser Arafat vetoed the deal. And in the ensuing years, the moderates who were doing the Oslo Peace Process got displaced by extremists of both the Israeli side, the thugs who are settlers, and then the Hamas thugs. And basically, theocratic fascism took over on both sides.

And so these experiences confirmed in me the idea that I’m a moderate. I believe in slow and incremental change because you could be wrong. That’s my story. That’s how I came to believe what I believe.

Moyn: Well, I’ve just had a much less interesting life than you, it sounds like.

I love that we’re starting with thinking about ourselves as different kinds of liberal, because I think a lot of folks who know about both of us would say neither of us is a liberal. You’re a conservative and I’m a leftist.

From my youth, I was impressed by liberalism as something that could emancipate people. Starting with myself. I’m from Missouri. My father was an aircraft mechanic, and my mother was a kindergarten teacher, and I went to public schools.

I went to university locally, and I read books that basically said, “Modern times is about a new chance for human beings.” Who’s been in charge? Maybe they were moderates, but mainly patriarchs, priests, presidents, and they told everyone what to do and what not to do. Then something changed, and more people than ever got a chance to come from nothing and go wherever their dreams might take them.

Now, I was a child of the ’90s. I’m slightly younger than you, and I went to university in 1990. Of course, that was the end of history, and there were a lot of ideas about how simple it would be to realize universal freedom and equality, not just in this country but on a global scale. Part of that was the idea that there’d be some simple process to get old warring Israelis and Palestinians in the same room and to agree to stuff.

All of that proved really shortsighted. We could go back and think about what people got wrong in the ’90s. Because I agree there was a lot. I’m with you that we need a certain amount of caution. I’d call it fallibilism, and everyone ought to be a fallibilist. I might be wrong about stuff. But that can’t mean if we’re liberals, that we give up on emancipation. We keep our eyes on the prize. And then we have a pettier debate about: What’s the right way to get it?

I think a lot of people, and you kinda narrated this, were impressed even before the ’90s by a kind of neoconservative view that the state can mess up, and maybe we ought not to be as interventionist as we once thought.

The trouble is, and this was something liberals have thought all the way back, that you can also suffer from not enough intervention. Because it’s not as if getting rid of the state leaves everyone free and equal. That’s the kinda libertarian view, not the liberal view.

And so I think we’re in a moment when many of us are appreciating something I’ve long believed in since I was a Democratic Socialist, more or less from the beginning, and never changed my mind, which is that sometimes we need to correct the state and keep it at bay, but sometimes we need more of it, ’cause there are other sources of oppression than the state.

Brooks: You used that word emancipation. I want to ask you: What do you mean by that?

Moyn: I think the great thing about liberalism is that it promised emancipation, and it’s why I’m a liberal.

Some people would say it was only the first philosophy of emancipation in modern times, because there was a second that came along, socialism, and you already talked about the dark side of socialism. But actually liberals helped invent socialism, so maybe there was only one framework for emancipation, and it was this liberal one that said we had too much authority and oppression in the past, and we should lift that oppression so that more people in more ways can live the lives they choose.

Emancipation just means you don’t have to do what those authorities say. You get to decide.

Brooks: As you’re trying to advance the cause of emancipation, how do you think about the epistemological problem? Epistemology is a fancy word for how we know things, basically.

James C. Scott wrote a book called Seeing Like a State, which had a huge influence on me. It’s about why a lot of international development projects fail.

And he tells a story in there that symbolizes, I think, his whole worldview, which is: There were these German guys who wanted to improve the efficiency of their timber industry. So what they did is they looked at the forest and they said, “Well, there are these nice trees we can use, and there’s all this other crap called underbrush.

”What’s this crap doing here? Let’s clear it out and let’s plant our trees in straight rows so it’ll be efficient.” And it worked for a few years, and then the trees started dying, and because they were German, they invented some new word for forest death.

The problem was the underbrush was not just crap. It was stuff necessary for the survival of the forest. And so Scott’s point of view is that planners, in order to plan for the future, have to simplify reality to make it legible to them. And when they simplify reality, they end up cutting out stuff that’s essential.

As you’re doing action, how do you think about that problem?

Moyn: I think it’s a balance of risks. I totally accept the view that there can be mistakes that people make. They might not be aware of just how much wisdom there is accumulated over time. And that no planner could reproduce that on the fly, especially if it’s just one person or a small elite. These are views that do come from Burke, and they were revived very famously by neoliberals like Friedrich Hayek.

I guess the trouble is that tradition’s a mixed bag, and what we’ve accumulated could be a lot of mistakes. We both love an even older thinker, Aristotle. He said things like “Tradition is often old people repeating the same mistakes.” So we need some winnowing process.

I think you’d have to agree with this, especially if we’re fallibilists. We have to say, “Tradition can be wrong.” Once in a while, the planners could sweep away something that needed to be swept away. And so I hope that there could be a kind of care in our relation to the authority we assume in the present to make changes, maybe even big changes.

A lot of oppression needed to be swept away. Surely the fact that old men ruled for all those millennia, men ruled over women, fathers over children, didn’t deserve the deference that you’re suggesting we give it, because it was oppressive. We have to sweep away some stuff. Then we’re in a little debate about: Well, how do we know when? When do we take the risk that we might clear out something valuable along the way? We probably differ not on that, but I think we should have more self-confidence to sweep more stuff away sooner. You want to maybe defer more often to the status quo.

We could each be right some of the time. It would depend. But if we’re going to be liberals, at the end of the day, what we care about is not the continuity of our traditions, but whether people are free.

Brooks: Even I would admit, moderation doesn’t work when the situation is fundamentally oppressive. So on race in America, I’m not a moderate.

I understand that radicals shift the Overton window and make it possible for moderates to come in and do things. That would be a division of labor I could live with, because I’m really suspicious of concentrated power, like our founders. To do change, you have to have concentrated power to some degree. You do that—first of all, people get corrupted by power. And in the second case, power attracts psychopaths.

This is literally what I saw in the Soviet Union. All the democratic revolutionaries; they were the first one to get the guillotine. And I literally ran into gangsters who were running every place I went—small land, square, wherever you went.

So the problem of execution is still the problem of execution, even in a case where you think, Oh wow, the civil rights movement had to happen, the suffragette movement had to happen.

You’ve still got the problem of power. So how do you think about concentrated power?

Moyn: Well, I agree, but we shouldn’t obsess just about state power.

We agree that apartheid was bad whatever country it was in. If there were formal arrangements like Jim Crow laws in our country that said there’s enforced hierarchy, we both agree we need to get radical and sweep it away. The question is what comes next.

After Reconstruction in our country, Jim Crow was put in place, but what was also put in place was the authority of whites over Blacks in private arrangements, including in the economy. There are so many examples of this.

If we don’t like the Soviet Union—and I don’t either, just to be absolutely clear—what if we end up with oppressors in the market? Elon Musk: Is he someone who wields a lot of power over not just the two of us, but millions? Absolutely. Was he ever elected? No. Would it be a terrible thing—and he would agree with this—if we had a Soviet tyranny that Zohran Mamdani or anyone else instituted in this country? Absolutely. But just getting rid of state oppression leaves us with all the other oppression.

I think liberals over modern times learn mainly to insist that state oppression isn’t the only kind. One of the best things that happened in the history of liberalism was that they learned that markets could breed new hierarchies and oppression. If that’s not clear right now—when we’re in a second Gilded Age with extraordinary inequalities the likes of which didn’t exist in our lifetimes until the present moment—then I guess I don’t know what you mean by anti-authoritarianism.

If we’re consistently anti-authoritarian and hate the oppressors of the world, then we should hate them when they run states and their crackpots and madmen, and when they run businesses and tell us what to do in the workplace, and lord their ill-gotten gains over us. Because that’s hierarchy too.

Brooks: When you mention Elon Musk, I instinctively feel, Yeah, those guys have too much power. But on the other hand, I can buy a Tesla or I can not buy a Tesla. I can be involved somehow by SpaceX or not be involved, and Neuralink, or even X, which is the most addictive of them. So what does emancipation from Elon Musk look like?

Moyn: It could involve constraints on market power. Of course you’re absolutely right that in some very abstract sense a market is a place you voluntarily participate. But that’s really not true, because the mass of human beings are forced into the market. They don’t have a lot of market power, and they can’t negotiate for a wage. They can’t argue over the price of eggs. They just have to accept it.

When it comes to tech bros, you can say, “Well, I don’t have to have an iPhone in my back pocket.” But you and I both do, and everyone does, even some of the poorest among us. So we’re all hostage to these hierarchies in real life.

Then the question is: What do we do about it? I see two very broad solutions. One is to constrain the powerful, and one is to empower the weak, and I think we should do a little of both.

But that would have to take place by messing with our economy using the state, with all the risks it entails and all the caution that I think you’re right to say we should exercise. The alternative would be doing nothing and leaving the powerful in charge of our lives.

Brooks: Let me ask you a question about human nature. One of my favorite sayings is from Immanuel Kant: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing is made.”

I’m in the crooked-timber school. Are you less in the crooked-timber school? How do you view human nature?

Moyn: I think it’s malleable. Or that’s the hope. Around the time of Kant, there was the French Revolution, which we can get into, and one famous episode in that period is when someone asks what human nature is, and the response comes, “Whatever we choose to make it.”

I can see how that would be absolutely bone-chilling to you because that would presume that there’s some single person or tiny elite that could just decree some experiment on all of us. On the other hand, we know that almost everything about us is produced by our environment.

I think there are some enduring features. We’re ultimately animals. Aristotle understood that. Modern biologists insist on it. But as far as I can see, the way societies organize changes what people think and how they act more or less completely.

So I would have to be, in contrast to you, in the school of thought that says, “We have to run an experiment.” We’re running one now about who we’re going to be individually and collectively. The question is: What’s a better experiment than the one we’re running now?

Brooks: This is why ideas really matter, why I really love intellectual history, because you just said something that did chill my bones, which was that human nature is what we can make it. And I associate that belief, fairly or not, with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Is that fair?

Moyn: Sure. Very fair.

Brooks: Rousseau was sort of an inspiration for the French Revolution, and my guy Burke was a fierce critic of the French Revolution. So we’re getting at it.

I’m a Burkean because I share the Burkean view of human nature, which I take to be the biblical view as well, that we are not blank slates. We have certain innate weaknesses for libido dominandi, the urge to dominate, resentment, fear, anger. Those things are built in here.

On the other hand, every human I’ve ever met has certain desires for goods.

We want to belong. We want love and friendship. We want respect. We want to be admired by the people whose admiration is worth having. We want meaning. Every person I’ve ever met wants to lead a life of significance and meaning. We want competence. You look at a kid out on the playground just learning the skateboard—they wanna get better at the skateboard.

These, to me, are inborn elements of human nature, and you’ve just got to respect it. And so you’ve gotta understand the sins that people have and also the blessings they offer. That really constrains how you think society could be ordered.

I’m a believer the American Revolution was a way more successful revolution because the people who did it had an acute awareness of sin, and they were like, “We’re not gonna start over.” They were rich landowners for a lot of them. And so they said, “We’re just gonna change the political order, but the social order, that’s too deep. And we’re gonna live out of the traditions of British rule.” They thought they were extending those traditions, not breaking from them. And the French Revolution, on the other hand, they wiped everything out from the beginning, and as a result, they soon got a reign of terror.

Edmund Burke said, “You know what’s gonna happen? They’re gonna fall into anarchy, and they’re gonna go for a strong man.” And along, a couple decades later, comes Napoleon.

That’s my telling of that period in the late 18th century. What’s your telling?

Moyn: First, I want to say that I get why one would have a bias for a fixed view of human nature. The reason I don’t share it is that when we look back at all those centuries and millennia of oppression, the same idea of a fixed human nature was the rationale for the oppression. Why could women—who got the vote not that long ago—why did they have to suffer under patriarchy all of that time? Well, because of the way men are and the way women are and so forth. That was definitely a rationale for chattel slavery, because there were claims about the way white people are and the way Black people are.

I come with a kind of default skepticism about such claims because they need to be stress-tested. And what’s significant about modern history—and this would include American history, not just the French Revolution—is that some people stood up and said, “What if we checked how much oppression we absolutely require because of an enduring human nature?” And the answer, on both sides of the Atlantic, was a lot less than people from millennia had thought.

Brooks: Just on this human nature question, if you measure the capacities of men and women, of whites and Blacks, you see that the idea that one is mentally or otherwise inferior is just wrong. So that was a stress test.

But if you stress-test the idea that human beings all have an urge to dominate, I don’t quote Michel Foucault very often, but he said that we all have a little inner fascist inside, and that’s the one thing with Foucault I agree with. That’s actually proved by rigorous intellectual work. To use error to disprove truth is not a good extension of what we learn from error.

Moyn: Fair enough, but we’re in an ongoing experiment. In my way of thinking, for most of the history we know about, oppression was the rule and freedom rare. Then we tweaked a few things. It seems like your view is basically: That was a long time ago and we’re done. And my view would be: We just got started, just a few days ago.

When did women even enter the workforce? Do we have a racial income and wealth gap right now, even though we’ve abolished formal apartheid? So even on race and gender, it seems like early days, and then there are a lot of other things like class that we could get into.

On the French Revolution, obviously it didn’t go perfectly. But just if we compare, the American Revolution appears to be some very principled ideas in the name of a tax revolt that retains slavery—does nothing to challenge a lot of other kinds of inequalities.

I think America lucked out, because it didn’t have the same kind of old regime to overthrow. The revolution took place very far away from pretty much all the other powerful states. Compare the French Revolution, which was much more radical, but part of that was a good thing. It birthed the first ideas that women should be equal. Olympe de Gouges very famously propounded a declaration of the rights of women and citizen. Jews were emancipated from one day to the next. They had an old regime to face down, which had formally assigned people to second-class citizenship, and they thought that had to be swept away.

Mistakes were made, but in fairness, the whole rest of Europe declared war on the French revolutionaries because it was an existential threat to the monarchy that prevailed everywhere. So America had this backwater good fortune to start something. It set up a time bomb that later went off in the 1860s.

Many of the ideas in the French Revolution lit the world on fire. Would we have a decolonized world without the French Revolution? Because that was really the model for humanity under empire the world over.

So I wouldn’t idolize either the American or French Revolution, but I also think it’s a mistake to say, “The American Revolution was the good one.” What about the slaves? What about the women? Et cetera.

Brooks: I have a shallow question. The shallow question is there’s a magazine in America now called The Jacobin. I don’t know if you’ve ever written for The Jacobin.

Moyn: I have. It’s just Jacobin.

Brooks: So the Jacobins were the people who ran the Reign of Terror and did all the guillotining, and I think they killed 12,000 people. Why would you name your magazine Jacobin? It’s like a finger in your eye, like conservatives saying, “Oh, we’re gonna call our magazine the Gestapo.” So that’s my shallow question.

Moyn: It gets us into this really disturbing and exciting feature of our time, which is that a lot of people have concluded that the centrist moderates—and you’ve self-ID’d in that direction—that they’ve failed. You’re seeing new radicalisms on both ends of the political spectrum.

Now, Jacobin. First of all, the Jacobins did a lot of different things. They killed some people, but the American revolutionaries expelled tens of thousands of loyalists. Some people died in the American Revolution, not just combatants. But sure, there were some mistakes made.

If you were to survey the writers and readers of Jacobin, it’s just some Socialists, mostly Democratic Socialists. There might be some Communists in the mix there, but they’re always going to be fringe ideas. But it is super interesting that what in the Cold War would have been a kind of death knell for a publication, to name it after terrorism, became possible in our time. That’s just a testament to the failure of centrism.

After the ’90s, my defining political experience was in 2016 when I brought my young daughters, young at that time, up to New Hampshire from Cambridge, Mass, where I was living, and I got them to canvas for Bernie with me. Almost everyone we met said, “I’m voting for Bernie or Trump. I just can’t decide which.” That’s why I wasn’t shocked that badly later on in that year when Trump won. I mean, I was as blindsided as everyone else. But it was an amazing thing because it showed the appetite out there for new ideas, and if they weren’t gonna come from the left, they were gonna come from the right.

The populists in American history have been very hard to locate on the political spectrum. Thomas Jefferson, 1800, Andrew Jackson, above all FDR, who was the most popular politician in the 20th century, won the most crushing elections, the candidate of the white working man, just like Donald Trump later.

Many people would insist that Roosevelt was on the left and would not be sure what to say about Jackson and Jefferson. Certainly they’ve been seen as kind of champions of the working people.

We could have had a contest of Bernie versus Trump in 2016, in which it would’ve been populist against populist. We may need a counter populism of the left in order to finally get what centrists like you say they want, which is finally to contain Donald Trump after decades of betrayal when these working people became so incensed about business as usual.

Brooks: We have different diagnoses of how the establishment screwed up and who the establishment is maybe. So a lot of people would look at me, New York Times, The Atlantic, Yale—

Moyn: You are the establishment ...

Brooks: I am the establishment. I don’t deny that.

But I’m disgusted with the establishment. I’m an establishmentarian who’s disgusted by the establishment. I ask myself this question. Back in, say, the postwar era, the establishment was just a bunch of white guys, and you or I would not have had much chance of entering it, let alone women, Blacks, a zillion other people. Yet that establishment created the postwar international order, created the World Bank, created NATO, the Marshall Plan.

Then in the ’60s—starting in the ’50s, really—we made life more fair. People like you and I had a better shot, and lots of other people had a better shot. We’ve harvested—if I can use that word crudely—so much more talent in our society. We have more talent in this country than ever before.

Our establishment gets in. We’re the best and the brightest. We’re so smart. We get into Yale and University of Chicago, and what do we get? Vietnam, Watergate, the financial crisis, Iraq. I’m not sure any of our institutions are actually working better than they were when the talent pool was like this. Why is that?

The story I would tell is: Those old white guys had a lot of problems, and I would find them repugnant to be around in many ways, but they tried not to be insular. They had a sense of, “I’m gonna serve in the military and get to know my fellow Americans, and I’m gonna have a sense of noblesse oblige, what I owe to the country.” George H.W. Bush would be the model of that.

I would say that the current establishment—of which I’m a part, and I think you are too—we’re insular, cocooned. We’ve rigged the college admissions game so our kids have huge advantages to get in. We’ve rigged the media. Of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NBC, CBS, all the mainstream organizations, somebody did a study, 55 percent of the employees, editorial employees, went to the same 32 elite schools.

There are no Trump people in the mainstream media. There are no Trump people in the cultural powers. There are none in the big nonprofits. A lot of people look at what this establishment has done and say, “These people have rigged the game. They look down upon me. In fact, they don’t even know I’m there, and they’re incompetent to boot.”

That’s my story. It’s not a story that the problem is necessarily the corporate elite. The whole professional elite has sort of divorced themselves from the rest of society. That’s not a left-right problem, frankly. It’s an educated class, non-educated class problem. Do you share that basic diagnosis, or is your diagnosis a little different?

Moyn: I share a lot of it. Another one of my formative experiences—in the same year, 2016—was going to a Harvard cocktail party of faculty after Trump won. I remember vividly the contempt one person in particular, I won’t name her, expressed toward basically everyone I grew up with. And actually proposed that it would be better if the enlightened elites who had more power on the coast just seceded from the country and abandoned the red states to their fate.

I remember feeling viscerally furious because, like, what about everyone I know and what about me? I feel like I had so many opportunities that people I knew in Missouri didn’t get or take advantage of. But if I’d been in a different country, I’d have had to live a completely different life.

So I do agree that our elites have failed, especially in the kind of culture of meritocracy we’ve created—when the receipts show that these very best and brightest have done a pretty poor job, and that’s been true for a while.

But it’s not either/or. There is an elite that’s a class elite. A lot of people are upset in their jobs, and they’re facing the affordability crisis that now liberals and conservatives insist that we talk about.

I would have said that the biggest mistakes elites have made, if we’re going to do the hit list, would be too many wars that failed. You supported some of those. And too much economic liberalism without sticking to political liberalism and the kind of emancipatory perspective I’m championing in this conversation. The effect of that was that what had made America great, which was a kind of managed capitalism that spread the wealth fairly, got destroyed in favor of what we call the neoliberal era.

That has meant stagnation, not just in an affordability crisis lately, but since the 1970s for a lot of people. I think Donald Trump is just the revenge of ordinary people against those two biggest mistakes. I agree totally that they then went on to see that the real winners were not just traditional elites, but those meritocratic elites who did happen to get into Yale and just departed from the American experiment in the name of living in their own bubble. I agree with that part, but it can’t be separated from these other mistakes, and I think the mainstream is completely implicated in those mistakes too.

Brooks: I always say Donald Trump is the wrong answer to the right question.

You mentioned the Iraq War indirectly. This was clearly the most serious mistake I made in my intellectual life.

I want to tell you why I made it. As I’ve indicated, I was a foreign correspondent in the ’90s. I watched the end of the Soviet Union, and it really was an evil empire. I watched the liberation of Central and Eastern Europe. Then they sent me to South Africa, and I watched the end of apartheid. Then they sent me to the Middle East, and I thought I was watching Middle East peace.

There was all this progress, and you remember that moment. I thought, “Why should it just be in Europe and South Africa? Let’s do it in the Middle East.” I would say that I betrayed my core belief, which is: Change is really hard.

In my view, the Iraq War showed the Burkean position is the right one. That we had no clue what was going on in there. It was arrogance. It was intellectual arrogance. Would you tell a different story about why the Iraq War went wrong?

Moyn: I wouldn’t. I think that’s very honorable to say that as a Burkean, you abandoned that perspective at that moment. Because it was the most messianic, transformative planned politics that you can imagine, that you would use the state, precisely the state, to transform the world.

And yet, the liberal has to say that there was a kernel of truth in this neoconservative view that you represented at that time, which is that liberals believe that everyone everywhere is entitled to their shot at freedom.

I think maybe what we got confused about, and I lived through it too, is that the Soviet Union unraveled. You can argue that Ronald Reagan’s policies and the arms race and so forth primed that result, but it was really as a result of people in the streets and the dissolution of the regime, and for economic reasons, and so forth and so on.

It’s not like we ever invaded Communist countries. One time we tried, Vietnam; it didn’t go well. So the Iraq War was, I agree, a big mistake. I made a version of that in my own benighted youth when I worked on human rights and humanitarian intervention, thinking that human rights could be spread at the point of a gun.

A similar kind of mistake, I think less grievous. But it led, among other things, when the Democrats were in charge of our foreign policy, to regime change in Libya, which has not gone well.

I think maybe the question then is; What’s the alternative? It can’t be the abandonment of the hope that we can find ways of spreading freedom worldwide. It’s just that the means chosen proved counterproductive in the extreme.

Brooks: So some of the question is: How do you judge? And for this, I will go back to my hero, Isaiah Berlin, who wrote a book called The Sense of Reality.

Basically, for him, judgment was what he called a sense of reality, an awareness. In my view, when the left goes wrong, it goes wrong for two reasons: It’s overly rationalistic, it thinks it can use social science data to figure out society, and it’s overly materialistic. It emphasizes the economic stuff, but ignores a lot of the spiritual and cultural stuff that also make up those neighborhoods in Chicago.

For Berlin, and for me, there are a lot of different ways of knowing. Some of it is rationalistic, but some of it is emotional. We use our moral sentiments, we use our imagination, we use our intuition. And judgment is using all the faculties.

Moyn: You know, I honestly agree with all of that. It goes back to Aristotle again, who insists that you need prudence or practical wisdom in order to be an ethical actor, let alone a political one.

When we look out at who’s made a big difference politically, they’ve always had this ability, which you’re describing, to judge the situation and exploit opportunities to avoid the biggest risks, and that’s not gonna be asking the Harvard faculty what to do. I mean, that may have been a mistake in Vietnam. But that doesn’t mean we should just ask the first thousand names in the phone book of Cambridge, Mass, either.

But I agree with you that certain gifted individuals can make breakthroughs or keep us safe at a scary moment because they have judgment. In Berlin’s case, my beef with him really is that he redefined liberalism in terms of freedom from the intrusion, above all, by the state. When he knew well—and I praise him on this point, that folks like John Stuart Mill, who preceded him, thought the point of liberalism was to make our lives creative and interesting. We might need the state to achieve that. And it’s not about equality; it’s about the right kind of freedom.

So Berlin’s interesting because part of having this understanding of judgment is also appreciating the self-contradictions that you might be a part of yourself.

Brooks: I got out of college, and I worked for a time at National Review with Bill Buckley, and then The Washington Times. I hit all the right-wing spots. Then I was named, at age 25, the book review editor of The Wall Street Journal, which was crazy at that age. But I knew who my heroes were, and they were people around a magazine called Partisan Review.

A small magazine, but very influential and very powerful. They were called Cold War liberals, these people. And it wasn’t only them. George Orwell wrote for it, W.H. Auden wrote for it—they had big names.

And by the time I got to them, they were in their 80s. So there was a guy named William Phillips, who was editor of the Review. There was a woman named Diana Trilling, who was the widow of Lionel Trilling. There was a playwright named Lionel Abel. There was a philosopher named Sidney Hook. And there was a historian who I knew the best—I knew Sidney Hook a little—called Gertrude Himmelfarb, who was known as Bea Kristol because she was married to Irving Kristol.

And so they were the Cold War liberals, and they were my heroes. You wrote a book criticizing my heroes. Tell us about that argument.

Moyn: First off, back when you were a book review editor, neither you nor they were liberals anymore. They had evolved from Cold War liberalism to neoconservatism. Himmelfarb not least, with her husband. I strongly believe that she co-founded the movement with him. That’s why I did a whole chapter on her, really emphasizing how close she was to someone like Reinhold Niebuhr in her youth when she, as a young Jewish woman, championed the civilizational virtues of a kind of very Orthodox Christianity.

I think what happened to liberalism is that it was emancipatory. In the middle of the 20th century, the folks that you worshiped kind of abandoned—

Brooks: Admired. “Worship” is a little—

Moyn: Well, okay. They abandoned liberalism as it had been forged up to that point.

That’s because they—very understandably—in the 1940s, after the Weimar Republic had collapsed and the wartime alliance uniting our country with the Soviet Union had come undone and the Cold War had begun, they said the real problem is the left and in particular a left that takes over the state and tramples freedom.

That was a very reasonable conclusion at that time. The trouble is, I think that in the shuffle, the reason to be a liberal in the first place got lost. So Berlin redefines freedom, so it’s no longer an emancipatory thing in which the state might have to get involved, but something that is really anti-statist and that’s gonna serve, in the long run, economic liberals—we call them neoliberals—pretty well.

Although Berlin hated Hayek, nonetheless, the Cold War liberals like Berlin kind of propound a theory of what freedom is that’s very close to the anti-statist views of someone like Hayek. Not to mention James Scott, who also was influenced by Hayek later on.

And then there’s this idea that liberals from the beginning have that it’s not just that the point of life is to be emancipated to make it your own, but that we might have to think about history as something that provides us more and more freedom over time.

Because the Soviets made so many claims that they were the vanguard of history, the Cold War liberals said, “No, we should think in the way David Brooks would end up thinking, that we’re basically sinful and there are just strict limits on human possibilities.” But that means that you’re not a liberal anymore because you’re saying there are just limits to what we can ask for, how much emancipation we can hope for.

In the end, these folks end up ditching liberalism. I think the results speak for themselves because those Cold War liberals did become neoconservatives, many of them. We don’t know what Lionel Trilling would have done, and his wife Diana famously says he wouldn’t have joined Irving Kristol and Bea Himmelfarb and the rest.

But we know what those who lived did. And I believe there’s also a parallel story to tell about how the Cold War liberals accidentally paved the way for neoliberalism.

Brooks: I would tell a different story. We’re going to trace the story from FDR to neoliberalism. The neocons, the people I knew, they grew up, a lot of them went to City College, where my grandfather went, and they were all Marxists. They were all communists. And so they’re on the left.

Then they grow up and they look at what’s happened to the ideas they believed in. It led to mass murder, on a massive scale. If I would fault your book, it would be you were—you show them reacting, but you don’t show as much what they were reacting to, which was the Gulag.

Moyn: Fair enough.

Brooks: And so they have that experience. They were all Democrats back in the ’50s. They were all still Democrats. They’re champions of the Great Society. They start a magazine, Irving Kristol does, called The Public Interest, and the first issue of that magazine, they say, “We now understand how to make a government work. We have all the scientific tools. We’ve got the data. It’s all gonna work.”

So that’s in the ’60s, and it doesn’t work. You look at the 1970s—inflation’s at 15, unemployment’s at nine, violent crime triples, divorce rates triple, like social chaos. And they think, “We got this wrong too.”

And then the third thing that happens: They were poor kids from Brooklyn, and they knew they had made it because their parents were bourgeois and valued hard work, education, and self-discipline. Along come the hippies, who don’t value those things and say, “Bourgeois, those people are boring, empty, soulless.”

This generation takes a look at those three things and says, “What the heck? We gotta rethink.” It’s not only them, it’s all of society. All of society takes a look at what I’ve just described, and in 1980 they say: Ronald Reagan.

That begins what you call neoliberalism. I don’t believe that’s a thing. I think when you use the word neoliberal, you’re conflating into one neat story Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale, who were not the same thing.

Moyn: Not at all.

Brooks: You’re conflating Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. And the people who get maddest at the phrase “neoliberal” are the moderate Democrats who say, “We were not part of that party. We were different.” They called themselves New Democrats, and they were more centrist, but they were more centrist precisely because the whole country had shifted to the right.

So I don’t like the phrase “neoliberal” for two reasons: It assumes that everybody was Milton Friedman, which was not the case, and it tells a neat story where everything went wrong in that neoliberal era, which we’re now trying to replace.

What do you think of the story I just told?

Moyn: Well, it’s oversimplified and misleading. Here’s why. The word neoliberal, which used to be marginal, is now very mainstream. Even centrists adopt it to describe what’s happened to our country. It isn’t the view that everyone believed the same thing.

The standard view is that there are these orders. There was a New Deal order, and it was so powerful that even though the Democrats founded it, the Republicans were forced to play along. Dwight Eisenhower became a supporter of the welfare state, such as it was. The same argument is then made about the replacement of the New Deal order by the neoliberal order, that what the Reagan Revolution wrought—and absolutely Jimmy Carter started it—then leads Bill Clinton to redefine the goals of the Democratic Party.

It’s a fact that some of the old Republicans, like Richard Nixon, were way to the left of Democrats until very recently, until the coming of Bernie Sanders, very precisely. That’s because these anti-statist views—that basically said the state is so prone to mistake that we should abandon it and let private ordering take its place—proved hegemonic across the aisle.

Now we’re seeing that you can have too much anti-statism if it paves the way to Donald Trump. And I suspect that on both sides of the partisan spectrum we’re seeing a kind of backlash against the backlash. That’s why you see, not just on the left, people reclaiming the state. You see common good conservatism and all kinds of arguments about the role the government should play in trade and industrial policy—Oren Cass’s ideas about what a conservative economics should look like. So neoliberalism is being broadly abandoned, on both sides of the aisle, because it was hegemonic on both.

Brooks: The story you tell that the conservatives were sort of the sun party and the Democrats were the moon party—there’s a lot of truth to that.

I mean, Teddy Kennedy sponsored deregulation regulations in the 1970s. So my question is: What was so bad about that era? From the 1980s to, let’s say, 2010—I’m going to conveniently say 2008—we had the greatest reduction in poverty in world history. We had the greatest rise of longevity in world history, the greatest reduction of global inequality in world history. We had growth rates. We had longevity increases.

I’m not saying there were not problems in the ’80s and ’90s, most especially with the working class. But it doesn’t strike me as the worst period on Earth. Times change, and problems change, and people move on. I’m for moving on. I’m not going back to where Milton Friedman was. But what was wrong with that period?

Moyn: Well, first of all, there’s a lot to what you say. I’m not claiming that there was just an evil time and nothing good happened. A lot of the facts you reported followed from a very particular policy to integrate China into the global economic system, because that’s where you see the anti-poverty succeeding.

But basically, I don’t think it’s gonna be credible to say, “There was an era and it felt good and some good things happened, and then everything changed in a new era where we have to rethink.” Because when we rethink, what we learn is that the first era made possible the second era. So then we have to revisit: What did we get wrong, precisely in the ’90s, when I think we both thought a lot of problems had been solved.

I think everyone is in the position, having lived through the end of history, of realizing it wasn’t over, and that’s because of mistakes made when we thought it was.

Brooks: I was a really enthusiastic Reagan-Thatcher kind of person ’cause I thought our core problem back then was dynamism. We were stagnating. And we needed somebody to increase economic dynamism. They offered, I thought, a plausible thing, and I think they succeeded.

Starting in 2003, I look around and think, Our core problem is not dynamism anymore. That’s just a fact. Our core problem is inequality. And so I called up all my old conservative economist friends and said, “Well, what are our conservative ideas on inequality?”

They’re like, “I really haven’t done much work on that.”

So I would just say the problems have changed. And this is where I’m gonna ask you a question. Inequality’s still obviously a problem. Since I’ve talked in terms of balances, in what way are we out of whack? When historians look back on 2026, what’s the core problem that society needed to address?

Moyn: I’m just trying to broaden your diagnosis, and the diagnosis has something to do with elite misrule. In your view, and I share it, there’s a meritocratic elite that doesn’t have the goods, and mainly uses its elite status to lord over ordinary people, and is contemptuous of them, and then is appalled and shocked when they vote for some Neanderthal.

I just want to say, it turns out that elite misrule has many facets, and cultural predominance is just one. There’s also economic predominance. More and more people are voting because of their perception of their economic situation.

Now, in global history, and especially compared to stagnant European economies, America is often seen to be doing rather well, even right now. But I think people’s everyday experience is that they are living paycheck to paycheck. They are in so-called bullshit jobs that they don’t want, and are underpaid for the work as prices rise, and that’s why this affordability meme has been so successful.

It’s not that there’s some obvious fix to that in a global economy. But we can see the way in which the policy choices made way back when by conservatives and liberals led to not just a cultural elite but an economic elite. That’s the story that was, once again, very marginal and is now mainstream of the 1 percent and the increasing economic inequality.

Last, you look at foreign policy. Both parties have been warlike and don’t have a lot to show for it. Donald Trump, sadly, was able to claim to be a kind of peace candidate, #EndEndlessWars. That was credible to 70 to 80 million Americans in two big elections. Now, of course, he’s thrown it all away by being just as warlike as those he attacked.

Those are three examples of elite failure, and I don’t see how we can just stick with one.

Brooks: I can’t help asking you—when I lived in Europe in the early ’90s, America was richer than the European countries, but not by a lot. Now, America’s significantly richer. It’s, like, 30 percent higher. Countries like France, Germany, UK, they’ve got GDP per capita lower than Mississippi.

So as a person of the right, or center right, I have a story to tell that they overregulated. What story do you tell to explain that?

Moyn: Might be true. They have made an existential choice to have a superior welfare state. Insofar as that involves a much higher taxation, they may have paid a price.

On the regulatory front, it’s a big claim you’re making, and it just seems like we’d have to check it out. I’m not saying it’s wrong, but I’m not as confident as you that it’s right. The question is: Can we have regulatory regimes of the kind that Richard Nixon was for—great environmentalist and so forth—that are not impeding growth but actually create new forms of growth, like green energy?

If that’s what the Europeans are for, maybe there’s a way of doing it that would have a different outcome.

Brooks: I’m gonna promote a grand compromise that I hope can bring us together.

I’m about to solve all our polarized problems.

Moyn: Wonderful.

Brooks: I call it the Sweden Compromise. The Scandinavians figured out a way to have successful societies, and that way is to have a pretty generous welfare state. But it’s also the only way you can afford a generous welfare state if you have free market policies.

So people think they’re sort of socialist. They are not. The Heritage Foundation has this index of economic freedom. Heritage Foundation, very right-wing. They measure tax rates, regulation, all that, and Denmark, Sweden, all Scandinavian countries, way above the U.S., way more free market.

They have low corporate taxes. They have no wealth tax. They have no minimum wage. Sweden has school vouchers. In Denmark, for example, if you lose your job, you get support for two years, but there are almost no regulations governing when somebody can get fired from a job. So they’ve basically made the decision, lots of free market on the supply side and lots of welfare state on the demand side.

I could live with that compromise that the Scandinavian countries have arrived at, maybe with a smaller government than they have. But on the whole, I’d be willing to support a more generous welfare state if you would give me the engines of growth.

I say that because I think in the age of AI, we need a lot of job growth. There’s going to be a lot of turnover. Some jobs are going to be destroyed. So we have to create tasks for people to do. You need a lot of economic dynamism. And so that’s my compromise. How does that sound to you?

Moyn: I’d potentially take it. But I think we would have to consider whether everything they’ve done is portable to other places. They don’t have the history of race. They do share our newfound immigration restrictionism, which is a way of, in their view in the Nordic countries, of keeping the social basis for solidarity.

That just doesn’t seem available to us, and it’s probably a good thing, because I’m sure both of us think that the diversity of the United States, including from immigrant waves, has been, at times, to its benefit and maybe could be again. But that’s just a big difference that might make it very difficult to achieve the compromise even if we agreed with it.

But I’m personally for growth, because I think we need to balance dynamism and care. I do think we should have a broader definition of creativity that doesn’t just associate it with economic enterprise and with growth in our wealth. But it’s not as if we can disregard those questions.

Where we might differ slightly is I think there’s a genuine question with the rise of AI whether we should keep working, or how big a part of our lives work needs to be or is going to be. John Maynard Keynes, the great economist back in the day, said, “We’re about to solve the economic problem, which will leave us with the big problem, which is how do we spend our lives when we don’t have to provide the means of our subsistence?”

AI might be setting up a world in which we finally do face that question. It might make it scarier because not having a lot to do can lead people to make big mistakes. But it’s not as if just planning to replace jobs is the obvious answer to current events.

Brooks: On that note of agreement, Sam Moyn, it’s been a real pleasure having a conversation with you.

Thank you for coming on The Permanent Questions.

Moyn: Thanks for having me.

Brooks: All political visions are based on a conception of human nature. What are people like?

For Sam, they’re pretty malleable. For me, they’re not so malleable. I think that human beings are beautifully made and deeply broken. We differed on all sorts of things, but it all went down to that original disagreement about the idea of what is a human. And there’s a great Talmudic scholar idea: Find the disagreement under the disagreement. I think that in this conversation, we found the disagreement under the disagreement, and that’s an illuminating thing to do.

Thanks so much for joining us for this week’s conversation with Sam Moyn.

This podcast is produced by The Atlantic and made possible by support from Yale University. New episodes of The Permanent Questions come out on Sundays. You can subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube page, Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to support this work and the work of my colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

See you next week.

I Was Lucky to Be Alive. But I Missed Being Pretty.

2026-11-01T08:00:00-05:00

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When I was 22, I moved to New York City to be a bar-mitzvah motivator. I’d dreamed about this job ever since I’d discovered that it was a job—drunk on gummy candy at my cousin’s bar mitzvah in New Jersey, crushing on a man in leather pants pumping his fist to Ke$ha, thinking, Adults can do that for a living?

When I came across the audition listing, I’d been trying to be an actor while working a 5 a.m.–11 p.m. gig schedule of catering, babysitting, and staffing a SoulCycle front desk. I was desperate to be a performer, and the ad was for “Outgoing and Attractive Dancers for High-End Events,” ideally “model/cheerleader/club-goer” types. I figured I could be any of those things if I tried hard enough.

I sent in my headshot and showed up at a rehearsal studio, where I sweated furiously with at least 50 others for more than three hours, Pitbull’s “Fireball” bellowing from the speakers. Almost all were professional dancers; almost all were women. Two men stood at the front of the room, calling us up to perform solo; they made cuts, then more cuts, then invited those of us who booked the job back for a training the following week.

Ninety percent of the bar or bat mitzvahs took place outside the city, at country clubs and sports stadiums in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Westchester. We were not reimbursed for the Metro North tickets we had to buy to get there, or the 1 a.m. Ubers we’d have to take from Nyack to Brooklyn because the trains had stopped running. We had to buy all-black outfits, and then all-white outfits. We were stuffed into too-tight shorts and cheerleader costumes, fed cold chicken fingers, touched and flirted with, and tipped handsomely. We stole the mints and floss and hairspray from the bathrooms. We danced feverishly, deliriously, before thrashing crowds of middle schoolers, and doled out Brooklyn Nets jerseys and light-up plastic sunglasses to the tune of “Blurred Lines.” Every party felt like a boutique fitness class, a wedding on steroids, and a four-hour rave for children.

[Ellen Cushing: Americans need to party more]

And I loved it. I loved the energy that it required, the music, the adrenaline. But mostly I loved being seen. No matter what happened in the real world, I could stand on a podium in a flash of white lights, looking like the love child of a camp counselor and a prostitute, and feel the desire of a surging crowd. I had never been paid to be beautiful before. I was embarrassed by how much I relished it.

In Judaism, a bar mitzvah marks the transition from childhood to adulthood. Party planners hire motivational dancers to ensure that the party looks adequately “lit” for the parents who paid for it, but also to be a bridge between the teens and the adults. We stood bravely in that gap between generations, learning TikTok dances and the verses of ’90s hip-hop. We were old enough for the kids to think we were cool and young enough for the adults to think they still might be. “We’re going for fantasy,” our boss told us. Eighty percent of a motivational dancer’s job was looking good. The rest was the ability to make everyone in the room feel like they could grow up and stay young forever.

I was good at all of it. I knew the young woman’s best secret, the one that every 13-year-old girl in the room was learning: that our most valuable currency is the performance of our youth and beauty. I trusted my body. If all else failed, it would not fail me.

When I was 25, I had a stroke.

“But you’re so young!” the ER nurses and the technicians and the pharmacists exclaimed. “What happened?!”

I don’t know what happened. Blood workups and imaging revealed a vertebral artery dissection: a small tear that caused a major ischemic stroke in my right cerebellum. On an October weekend, I traveled home to Washington, D.C., for what I thought would be a quick trip, and went walking with my family in a state park. My mother wanted me to try a new exercise she’d learned; I planked on a gentle hillside, craned my neck upward, and the world canted sideways. Unable to stand, I sat waiting for the spinning to subside, but it didn’t. A high-voltage pain shot up the right side of my skull; I felt like I’d been plugged into a DJ booth. Later, in the parking lot at Walgreens, where we’d stopped for some painkillers, I vomited. I figured it was an unusually bad migraine.

When the pain had not ceased a day later, I went to urgent care. The doctors shrugged and sent me to the ER. A CT scan revealed no brain bleed; the doctors shrugged and sent me home with my parents.

Three days later, I woke up at 2 a.m. feeling as if my skull had been cleaved in two. The pain was so intense, I could barely remember my name. My parents took me back to the ER, where doctors waited another day and a half before putting me in an MRI machine. Five days after the onset of the stroke, I was finally given a diagnosis. I wouldn’t be making it to any bar mitzvahs that weekend—or for a long time.

“We see strokes in young patients all the time,” one doctor told me. “All the time.” My neurologist had seen a 27-year-old firefighter. My hematologist mentioned a hockey player, happily on blood thinners and back in action. My parents’ primary-care physician mentioned someone successful at the Democratic National Committee. A stroke on vacation in Europe. A stroke in utero. There were stories, but no discernible pattern.

“Every patient is an n of 1,” my mother’s friend Andrea said one night at dinner. She had Stage 4 cancer. She laughed and took a sip of her wine as the candlelight threw shadows across her face. She meant that there is no certainty when it comes to our bodies and their failures, that everyone’s suffering is their own. Our bodies betray us. We might never know why. It’s not fair.

Andrea’s dead now. Hers was the wisest advice I’d receive.

Having a stroke is like aging 60 years over the course of a few days. I couldn’t walk or shower without assistance. I couldn’t make it from 9 a.m. to lunchtime without napping. My vision was blurry. My hair fell out. My mother drove me to PT, OT, and speech therapy with all of the geriatric patients, sometimes twice a day. I developed bilateral stress fractures in my feet because I couldn’t remember how to walk correctly, so I was fitted with a boot and a shoe lift. My body shook with violent, uncontrollable tremors, and I took handfuls of pills three times a day, checking them off on a clipboard. Mostly, I slept.

Getting sick strips life of its fantasy, like sheets pulled from a mattress for the wash. I had left one world—Susan Sontag’s “kingdom of the well”—for another, the “kingdom of the sick.” A neurological anomaly, I struggled to comprehend the severity of my illness. If I sat still, I could almost pretend to be the person I’d been a few weeks earlier. But if I tried to stand, or use a fork, the disguise disintegrated. I’m not well! I wanted to scream. And I may never be again.

I felt like I was inhabiting a poorly constructed human costume. My brain didn’t work. The steroids that I was prescribed had given me “moon face,” shifting fat deposits so I developed jowls, and cheeks that bulged like a chipmunk’s. It took weeks to remember what walking unassisted felt like, one foot in front of the other. Inching forward in line at the grocery store felt like making a left turn at a four-way intersection; walking to the mailbox felt like being the most stoned person at the party. I was furious at and ashamed of my disobedient body.

“How lucky are you, to be alive?! You’re a walking miracle,” everyone told me.

But I had been a performer whose job was to show others how easy it was to move, to be free. I missed the clarity of the bar mitzvahverse. I was lucky to be alive. But at first, all I wanted was to be pretty again.

I got better.

It’s been five years since the stroke. Eventually, I tapered off the steroids and the anticonvulsants. The tremors subsided, and then, finally, so did the moon face. I practiced touching my thumb to each of my fingers, balancing on one leg, then the other. I remembered that I had peripheral vision, and slowly learned to trust the space behind me again.

After four months with my parents, I moved back into my apartment in New York, feeling like an alien citizen in a strange city. Once, my nights were filled with coordinated dance moves and screaming teenagers. Now everything was so still. I watched sunsets bleed pink and violet from my Brooklyn rooftop. I moved slower, multitasked less. I started writing.

[From the June 2025 issue: The mother who never stopped believing her son was still there]

My stroke forced me to admit that I had spent the beginning of my adulthood basing my self-worth not on my intelligence or my resilience, but on the desire of strangers. Sick, I had to learn what I was to myself. This specific pain—this body’s miraculous failure—was unique, and that uniqueness had meaning. I had treated my body as if it existed to perform youth and beauty. Now my body does not signify anything. When I eat, or dance, or wear a bathing suit, I remind myself that my body has value beyond how it’s perceived—that its value lies in what it can do. This is what I wish I could tell those 13-year-old girls, but I’m not a bar-mitzvah motivator anymore.

Growing up is an asymmetrical story. It doesn’t really have an ending. Becoming goes on forever. I was sick, and now I am better, and I know that youth and beauty are unreliable narrators. When I’m tempted to punish myself for my body’s failures, for its refusal to be exactly what I want it to be, I try to remember that my job is not to be a body, and that my self-worth lies in the specificity and complexity of—if I may be so lucky—my long and healthy life.

The U.S. Is Bullying Europe Like Never Before

2026-11-01T07:15:00-05:00

At a dinner in Athens in March, Kimberly Guilfoyle, then the U.S. ambassador to Greece, made a statement that elegantly combined arrogance with menace. According to The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, Guilfoyle referred to the troubles of Romania’s governing coalition and, with Greek politicians in the room, took credit for its impending collapse: “We can do that to any country we want,” she said. “We can do that here.”

Guilfoyle was subsequently disgraced for a different reason: The Journal also obtained screenshots of messages she had sent to a Republican donor, asking him to deposit $100,000 in her American Express account. She and her lawyer denied everything, including the dinner conversation, but the screenshots were too much even for the Trump administration. She resigned.

If Americans were more exercised by her apparent greed, Europeans were appalled by her political boasts. Guilfoyle did seem to think she could influence the coalition politics of democratically elected European governments, all of them U.S. allies and members of NATO. More to the point, she isn’t the only Trump-administration official who has tried to do exactly that.

Americans once promoted democracy in Europe as a political system, and under that general understanding accepted all elected politicians of the center-left and center-right as legitimate. This administration and its adjacent business elite are now pursuing a different policy. In some cases, they promote the interests of parties that they believe to be ideologically aligned with the MAGA movement, including some that are openly pro-Russian. Other European political figures seem to have gained Washington’s blessing (or are trying to gain it) because they can promote commercial interests favored by someone close to the administration. In at least three cases, Americans have reportedly tried to persuade elected European leaders to dump their current coalition partners in favor of new ones more to the White House’s liking.

[Tom Nichols: Kimberly Guilfoyle broke Trump’s most important rule]

The clearest case is in Poland. I am married to Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, whose political party is the largest member of the current ruling coalition. But I am not revealing any special information; Polish media, including far-right media, have widely reported that President Trump strongly hinted to the leader of one of the coalition’s two other parties that he should switch sides.

The politician in question is Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz, the leader of the small, agrarian Polish People’s Party. He was in Washington, D.C., in the spring to attend a Medal of Honor ceremony for an American soldier who had saved the life of a Polish soldier in Afghanistan. Just after the event, which was organized by Polish activists with MAGA contacts, Kosiniak-Kamysz was taken aside by the president, who reportedly told him that he would be much better regarded in Washington if he left the government coalition: He should do a deal with Polish-nationalist and far-right parties instead. He didn’t follow Trump’s advice. (The Atlantic requested comment about the incident from the White House but has not yet received a response.)

This was not the first time the Trump administration had made its sympathies in Poland clear. During the Polish presidential-election campaign last year, the far-right candidate Karol Nawrocki visited Washington, where Trump endorsed his bid. After Nawrocki won, Trump repeatedly took credit for the victory, just as he and his entourage have taken credit for electoral victories in Latin America. Nevertheless, this latest story feels different. An American president asking a politician in an allied foreign country to change coalitions? Nothing like it has happened in Poland since the days when Soviet leaders decided which Polish Communists should rule.

Guilfoyle doesn’t have Trump’s power, but as his ambassador, she seemed unusually versed in the internal details of Romanian politics, even though she was posted to Athens. At the end of March, she appeared on a panel at a business conference in Bucharest and spoke about the “vertical gas corridor,” a pipeline system linking Greece, Romania, Ukraine, and other countries in southeastern Europe. Although she had no previous background in gas infrastructure, she became an enthusiast during her stay at the U.S. embassy in Greece. Indeed, Christos Marafatsos, a lobbyist for Aktor Group, a Greek company with interests in the pipeline system, frequently traveled with Guilfoyle, so much so, according to the Journal, that “some foreign officials mistook him for her chief of staff.” The CEO of Aktor was also at the Bucharest event, speaking just after Guilfoyle.

And during her event, Guilfoyle advocated for not just the construction of the infrastructure, but also the purchase of American liquefied natural gas; Aktor has an interest in both matters. Ilie Bolojan, the Romanian prime minister at the time, was a supporter of the pipeline project, he recently confirmed. But he was not interested in locking Romania into a gas-purchase contract, both because the price was not competitive and because Romania is gearing up to export its own gas.

Others were. On the same trip, Guilfoyle was also seen (and filmed) having dinner at an expensive restaurant in Bucharest with one of Bolojan’s coalition partners, Sorin Grindeanu, the leader of the Romanian Social Democratic Party, and several other Romanian politicians. One of those present, a former energy minister, was interested in buying American LNG and reportedly wrote to the prime minister and the president, calling for exactly that.

Over the next couple of months, Grindeanu’s Social Democrats would leave the ruling coalition and then join the Romanian far-right party in supporting a vote of no confidence in Bolojan’s liberal-centrist government, forcing him to resign. Grindeanu has denied emphatically that Guilfoyle or any other American influenced his decision. The leader of the Romanian far right, George Simion, a pro-Russian politician who has sought to build relations with MAGA influencers close to Trump, described himself as a “good friend” of Guilfoyle but also denied that she had affected the decision. Still, it’s not hard to see why some Romanians think she did.

One notable feature of the Romanian government’s collapse was its orchestration by two political parties, one ostensibly on the center-left, the other of the far right. By working together, they broke a so-called firewall, a long-standing determination to exclude political parties and leaders sympathetic to fascism from mainstream politics. The same firewall exists in Germany, where the conservative Christian Democratic Union runs the government with the center-left Social Democrats as a junior partner. Some German politicians believe that the Trump administration wants the CDU to break the firewall and form a coalition with the far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany) instead. AfD is openly pro-Russian, and some of its politicians have had neo-Nazi affiliations. For many Christian Democrats, members of a conservative party founded in the postwar era as a bulwark against extremism, joining with AfD is an almost unimaginable break with their values.

[Anne Applebaum: MAGA is making the world safe for corruption]

Rather than approaching CDU leaders directly, Trump has used his Truth Social account to promote AfD, publicly cheering the party’s victory in recent regional elections: “THEY ARE ON THE RISE,” he wrote, “and not going to take it anymore!” Elon Musk, the administration’s close ally and the Republican Party’s most significant donor, virtually attended an AfD event before the most recent Bundestag election. Because Musk’s X algorithm gives enormous weight to posts from his account, this amounted to a large, free promotion for AfD.

Several German politicians mentioned another incident, on which I have previously reported. Earlier this year, a group of legislators from various political parties came to Washington and arranged meetings at the Pentagon and State Department. According to a senior member of the CDU, they were told that only representatives from AfD and the CDU could enter the buildings; members of the Social Democratic Party, who are part of the government coalition, were not allowed. Neither were others. The CDU members declined to go at all. The party leadership understood the gesture as a message to them: The only partner we recognize is AfD.

This gesture demonstrated what is probably the Trump administration’s authentic contempt for German democracy. But it also revealed a deep contradiction in U.S. foreign policy. On the one hand, American officials encourage Europeans to build up their own military forces. Speaking at NATO headquarters last summer, Elbridge Colby, an undersecretary of defense, said that in the future, American allies should be “taking primary responsibility for Europe's conventional defense.” Germany, Poland, and Romania are all countries that have taken this request seriously.

But on the other hand, the same administration is directly promoting the fortunes of political parties and leaders who oppose defense spending, who favor Russia, or who do not promise to defend Europe or respect European borders. Alice Weidel, AfD’s co-leader, opposes offering military aid to Ukraine and also argues against defense cooperation with other European countries. The party’s co-chair Tino Chrupalla has called for the expulsion of American troops from Germany. George Simion, the leader of the Romanian far right, has in the past advocated for the restoration of Romania’s pre-1940 borders, including territory now in Ukraine. The Polish far right has lately begun repeating anti-European and anti-Ukrainian narratives of a kind that are now popular in both Washington and Moscow, undermining support for a unified European defense.

In effect, the administration is promoting European rearmament and European defense cooperation while simultaneously promoting politicians who oppose rearmament or defense cooperation. Across democratic Europe, the public and the politicians are confused. Once, Europeans generally believed that America promoted democracy—the political system, not particular parties—and staunchly opposed Russia and other authoritarian regimes. Now, it seems, Trump-administration officials have flipped the script. Some of them, like Guilfoyle, seem more interested in commercial deals than in security. Others seem to be pursuing dangerous goals. Does America want Europeans to build large armies—and then to break up European institutions and hand those armies over to nationalists? That policy was tried in the 20th century. It failed quite dramatically.

The Questions Adam Hamawy Won’t Answer

2026-11-01T07:00:00-05:00

The photograph, from April 1993, shows a burly sheikh sitting on a couch wearing a gray kaftan, a white-and-crimson turban, and black sunglasses. His beard is thick and white. Reporters crowd into his Jersey City tenement apartment, waiting to hear him speak.

Omar Abdel-Rahman—the man newspapers called the Blind Sheikh—by then had a reputation throughout the Muslim world as the religious leader of Egypt’s largest jihadist group. In 1981, his words inspired the assassins of President Anwar Sadat. His rhetoric could be unremitting, as in a speech in Brooklyn in early 1993: “We must be terrorists, and we must terrorize the enemies of Islam and frighten them and disturb them and shake the earth under their feet.” By spring of that year, law enforcement was investigating Abdel-Rahman’s possible involvement in at least two killings, including that of a prominent extremist rabbi. And that March, the FBI and foreign agencies had arrested several of Abdel-Rahman’s close followers, among them a man reported to be the sheikh’s part-time driver, on charges of helping carry out the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which killed six people but had aimed for far more.

Adam Hamawy, who will almost certainly represent New Jersey’s Twelfth Congressional District come January, was at the press conference in the sheikh’s apartment the day the photograph was taken. He has said that he went there to translate something for Abdel-Rahman. Hamawy had met Abdel-Rahman two years earlier and became something of an acolyte, going to mosques across New Jersey to hear him speak, visiting the sheikh at home, and traveling with him to an Islamist conference in Detroit, where Abdel-Rahman and other speakers held forth on the necessity of violent jihad. In that photo, a bearded young man who resembles Hamawy kneels in front of reporters, his eyes trained on Abdel-Rahman. I asked Hamawy’s campaign multiple times whether that man is the candidate; the campaign did not reply.

Najlah Feanny / Corbis / Getty

Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman speaks at a press conference in Jersey City, New Jersey, in April 1993.

Two months after that press conference, in June 1993, Abdel-Rahman would be arrested for plotting what would have been another catastrophic day of terrorism in New York City; the plan included blowing up two Hudson River tunnels and the United Nations, and assassinating the Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak. Hamawy would testify as a defense witness at Abdel-Rahman’s trial in 1995, and Abdel-Rahman would be convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Today, Hamawy is a plastic surgeon in Princeton, New Jersey. He won his 12-candidate Democratic primary with 28 percent of the vote. Because his district is deep blue, he is expected to easily win his general election in November. Much about his story surely registers to voters as admirable. He was an infant when his family immigrated from Egypt to Old Bridge, a town of about 50,000 at the time, located 35 miles south of New York City. He worked through college and medical school, went to Ground Zero to care for rescue workers, and served in Iraq as a U.S. Army combat surgeon. He restored bodies broken by war—including that of Tammy Duckworth, now a U.S. senator, who lost her legs when a rocket-propelled grenade hit her helicopter. She has credited Hamawy with saving her life.

Hamawy already has found a place on the Democratic Party’s left wing. Although he is an observant Muslim—on primary night, he led supporters in chants of “Allahu Akbar!” (God is greater)—he is, unlike some fellow believers, pro-choice and an advocate for LGBTQ rights. He is passionate in his support for Medicare for All and in his insistence that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have endorsed him. Hamawy himself has endorsed and appeared with the Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, and campaigned with the far-left streamer Hasan Piker, who once said that “America deserved 9/11.” Hamawy has also declined to commit to backing House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, saying that the Democratic congressional leadership is “failing to meet the moment.”

Throughout his campaign, Hamawy has not fully accounted for why, as a young man, he kept company with Abdel-Rahman and others in his circle. Perhaps Hamawy was merely young, curious, and hapless and did not fully buy into the sheikh’s ideas. Or perhaps he harbored beliefs that he has since renounced. Hamawy himself has provided little explanation. When asked during the primary about Abdel-Rahman, who died in 2017, and his terrorism conspiracy, Hamawy told NBC, “I absolutely regret, and I condemn, what happened.” At the same time, he dismissed reporting about his relationship with the sheikh, attributing it to “right-wing media” and adding, “It’s racist. It’s really anti-Muslim.”

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who presided over Abdel-Rahman’s terror trial as a federal judge, has called the sheikh “one of the world’s leading theologians of terrorism.” And Abdel-Rahman’s influence continued after his conviction: While serving out a life sentence in prison, the sheikh issued the fatwa that Osama bin Laden would use to justify the September 11 attacks.

In August, I spoke with Hamawy by phone for about an hour, and when he talked about health care or being a son of immigrants, he was expansive and friendly. But when I asked about the years when he drew close to Abdel-Rahman, he began to bob and weave—as he had in his testimony during the sheikh’s 1995 trial—and sometimes contradicted himself, even as he said that there was nothing of interest to be discovered.

“This characterization as a ‘relationship,’ I think, really misrepresents things,” he told me. He has repeatedly referred to the sheikh—who was in his 50s when Hamawy met him—as a “blind old man.” Hamawy noted his U.S. military service and his promotion to lieutenant colonel: “Clearly I was trusted by our government to be able to perform these services.” At one point, when I was pushing for more details, he bristled: “Clearly, clearly you have nothing else to talk about.” His spokesperson eventually ended the interview, and has not responded to multiple emails with additional questions.

Hannah Beier / The New York Times / Redux

Adam Hamawy and Hasan Piker at a campaign event in Trenton, New Jersey, in May

Hamawy described Abdel-Rahman in the early 1990s as akin to a religious celebrity. “This was a person who was really everywhere in New York and New Jersey,” he told me, at a time when there were “not many leaders” in the Muslim community. “He was someone who led prayers and was known for his recitation of the Quran.”

Abdel-Rahman was in fact known for far more. The jihadist group in Egypt for which he acted as the religious authority, Gama’a al-Islamiyya, employed deadly violence in an effort to establish extremist Islamic rule in Egypt. Abdel-Rahman had declared in sermons that Sadat, the Egyptian president, was an infidel. He was jailed after Sadat’s death, but judges acquitted him on charges that he had sanctioned it; they ruled that although he had told his followers they had a duty to kill wayward Muslim leaders such as Sadat, there was not enough evidence to prove that Abdel-Rahman had directed the assassination. In 1990, a follower of Abdel-Rahman’s, El Sayyid Nosair, assassinated the radical right-wing rabbi Meir Kahane, who had twice been convicted on terrorism-related charges, in New York City.

Hamawy has said that he first heard the sheikh give a talk in 1991 in Matawan, New Jersey, and in his telling, their meeting afterward was incidental. “I met him,” Hamawy told me, not offering much more detail, “like so many others.”

This understates the nature of their eventual relationship, by Hamawy’s own previous account. In 1995, when the legal team defending Abdel-Rahman in his federal terrorism trial called Hamawy to testify, he made a point of greeting the sheikh, and mentioned phone calls, travel, and visits with Abdel-Rahman. “I have seen him in, you know, speak at different mosques all over New Jersey,” Hamawy said, according to the trial transcript. “I have seen him in his home.” He mentioned seeing the sheikh at a school “several times.”

In November 1991, Abdel-Rahman was invited to speak at an Islamic conference in Detroit, and Hamawy joined him on the 13-hour drive there in a minivan, along with five other men. (Some of the details of Hamawy’s backstory were first reported by The Washington Free Beacon and Jewish Insider.) Hamawy described his decision to travel to Detroit as a sort of lark. “I was a last-minute carpool,” he said in our interview. “I’m a college student.” (He had graduated from Rutgers earlier that year.) “It’s a free ride to go somewhere. It wasn’t like I was following him.”

Yet Hamawy testified during the trial that in Detroit, some of the men from the van shared a hotel suite; Hamawy was in the same room as Abdel-Rahman. Hamawy attended the conference too, and listened to the sheikh’s speech about jihad and the speeches of other hard-line Islamists.

Lorenzo Vidino, who studies Islamic extremism and directs the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told me that it is highly unlikely that Abdel-Rahman and members of his inner circle would throw open a door to a random newcomer. “You have in Abdel-Rahman one of the two or three godfathers of radical jihad in the world,” Vidino said. “There’s no chance for an outsider to spend meaningful time in a minivan with the Blind Sheikh.” Earlier this year, Mukasey, the judge in the trial, wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “Mr. Hamawy was more than a casual traveling companion of Abdel Rahman.”

[From the November 2012 issue: My conversion will not be televised]

The conference the men attended was titled “Towards a Global Islamic Economy,” and under questioning by Abdel-Rahman’s lawyer during the trial, Hamawy said that the event was focused on the economy. He told the defense lawyer that he had never heard Abdel-Rahman talk about jihad in America. Nor, Hamawy said in reply to a question from the prosecutor, had he heard Abdel-Rahman talk about robbing banks or attacking military bases.

Then one of the prosecutors, Patrick Fitzgerald, commenced his cross-examination of Hamawy. Do you recall, he asked, if Abdel-Rahman talked about the Egyptian leader Mubarak in Detroit? “Not really,” Hamawy replied. Fitzgerald handed Hamawy a transcript of the sheikh’s speech from the conference and gave him a moment to read it. Then he rephrased his question more pointedly: Do you recall Abdel-Rahman that weekend talking about Mubarak as “the backstabber who became the loyal dog to America?” Hamawy, his memory apparently refreshed, responded: “Yes.”

Fitzgerald asked Hamawy if Abdel-Rahman had talked in his speech about jihad and the importance of conquering the land of the infidels. Hamawy quibbled about wording and definitions but conceded that Abdel-Rahman’s speech centered on “a struggle in the sake of God, yes. It was a jihad.” (Fitzgerald quoted from speeches of Abdel-Rahman’s several times in the trial, making clear what the sheikh meant by that word, jihad. For example: “If God, glory be to him, says do jihad, it means do jihad with the sword, with the cannon, with the grenades, and with a missile.”) Among the other speakers at the Detroit conference was Hassan al-Turabi, the leader of a repressive, violent Islamist movement in Sudan and a friend of Abdel-Rahman’s.

As the trial went on, the prosecutor burrowed in, asking if the sheikh had ever described America and Israel as enemies of Islam. Yes, Hamawy replied. Fitzgerald then asked if Hamawy had ever heard Abdel-Rahman say that Muslims have an obligation to carry out jihad against enemies of Islam. “Of course,” Hamawy replied. “That’s what he always talked about. He talked about jihad, you know.”

The successful prosecution of Abdel-Rahman and nine others hinged largely on the testimony of Emad Salem, an undercover informant for the U.S. government. Salem had infiltrated Abdel-Rahman’s circle, pretending to be a disaffected Egyptian special-forces soldier turned jihadist, and was one of the band who traveled in the van to Detroit. One day during that trip, Salem testified, Abdel-Rahman took the group, Hamawy included, back to the hotel suite. They sat on the floor, and Abdel-Rahman grilled Salem on his military knowledge: Do you know dynamite? Yes, Salem said. Did he know how to blow dynamite up? Again, Salem replied yes. Then Abdel-Rahman inquired about Salem’s skill as a shooter. “He ask [sic] me to turn my rifle to President Mubarak’s chest,” Salem testified.

Hamawy, in his testimony, denied ever witnessing such a conversation, though he noted that Salem frequently talked in front of the sheikh about his abilities with bombs. He said that he and the rest of Abdel-Rahman’s circle suspected that Salem might be working for Egyptian intelligence and trying to entrap the sheikh.

Salem was a complicated figure who had lied under oath in the past. The lead federal prosecutor in the trial, Andrew McCarthy, later referred to him as “the strangest, wiliest, most impossible, most infuriating pain in the ass I ever will know.” But McCarthy also called him “breathtakingly effective.” Salem managed to tape-record countless hours of his conversations with suspects (though he was not able to record the conversation in which he said the sheikh told him to turn his gun on Mubarak). Jurors judged Salem credible enough to convict 10 men on 48 of 50 charges. A federal appeals-court panel unanimously affirmed the verdicts.

There was, according to Salem, more talk of rifle shooting on the drive from Detroit back to New Jersey. One of Abdel-Rahman’s followers asked Salem if he could train him and other followers in rifle target practice. In code, the men called it “deer hunting.” This follower told Salem that he and other followers hadn’t gotten a chance to practice with rifles since Nosair, who had organized past trainings, had been arrested. Can we, the follower asked, go deer hunting with you? Salem agreed: “I said, ‘Sure, why not, we will do that.’”

Hamawy, who was in the van at that time, was not asked during the trial about that conversation, nor did he speak of it on his own.

Hamawy remained on friendly terms with the sheikh after the Detroit conference. In the summer of 1992, before Hamawy entered medical school, he and two friends took a pilgrimage to Mecca and visited Egypt and London; Hamawy also stopped in Jerusalem. When asked during the trial who had recommended his travel agent, Hamawy answered: “Sheikh Omar.” A friend of the sheikh, he said, accompanied the young men on their flight to London. There, Hamawy testified, they relied on yet another friend of the sheikh, a man who worked in an Islamic bookstore, who found them a youth hostel.

At least two of the men Hamawy and his friends met on that trip, including the bookstore worker, were suspected members of Gama’a al-Islamiyya, prosecutors said. When Hamawy and his friends returned to London on their way home, Hamawy testified, he made sure to call the bookstore worker and thank him for his hospitality. Hamawy was asked during the trial if he knew what Gama’a al-Islamiyya was and said that he had heard of it; asked if he knew any members of the organization, he said, “I assume that Sheikh Omar was, yes.”

Once Hamawy entered medical school, he saw less of Abdel-Rahman. The sheikh was very much in the news in 1993 as followers of his were being investigated for their role in the World Trade Center bombing. In April of that year, Hamawy called Abdel-Rahman. “I hadn’t been able to see Sheikh Omar that much,” he testified in the federal trial. “I had called him earlier that week and told him: ‘It is my spring break now. If you need anything, you can just give me a call.’” As it happened, the sheikh called and asked Hamawy to translate a document for him as he was getting ready to hold the press conference in his Jersey City apartment.

The generous explanation for Hamawy’s affiliation with Abdel-Rahman is youthful fascination. It’s not unusual for young people to be captivated by radical leaders, only to wise up and turn away as the years pass. The American left offers many such examples of this, from those attracted by Soviet Communism in the 1930s to those who embraced the violence of the Weathermen and the Black Panthers. Young socialist Iranians embraced Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979, only for many thousands to end up before his firing squads in years to come. In our interview, I asked Hamawy if there was something about Abdel-Rahman that spoke to him as a young man. Was he merely intrigued, or something like a true believer? He pushed back on my question.

“It wasn’t a personal relationship,” he said. “This is where reality and fiction is beginning to kind of diverge.”

In the course of his medical career, Hamawy has worked on missions of mercy in countries including Haiti, Sudan, Lebanon, and Syria; in 2024 and 2025, he spent several weeks at hospitals in Gaza. The details of two such missions raise additional questions.

By 1994, Yugoslavia had dissolved, and three of its republics—Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia—had descended into brutal ethnic and religious wars. About half of Bosnia’s roughly 4 million citizens were Muslim, and Bosnian Serb and Serbian military units carried out massacres and mass rapes against them. The suffering of Bosnia’s Muslims was a subject that consumed many millions of Muslims, and others, around the globe. Several witnesses in Abdel-Rahman’s federal trial testified that the sheikh and his followers spoke often of Bosnia and the duty of Muslims to fight jihad there.

No evidence suggests that Abdel-Rahman encouraged Hamawy to go to Bosnia. But as a medical student, he was among those who wanted to help. In the summer of 1994, Hamawy told me, he reached out to the Bosnian Mission to the United Nations, and asked about volunteering. In a 1996 interview with The New Jersey Star-Ledger, he said that the mission had recommended that he reach out to Benevolence International, a charity with offices in several countries, including the United States and Bosnia. Hamawy spent his first week in Sarajevo and the next four in Zenica, a hill city about an hour away. As he described it to me, he stayed with two local doctors and spent his days going to the charity’s warehouse and delivering medical supplies to local clinics.

Zenica was a contested and violent place at that time. Jihadists who had fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan and the Russians in Chechnya were pouring into Bosnia. Zenica became the headquarters of the notorious brigade known as Odred El Mudžahid, or “The Jihadist Unit,” composed of foreign fighters from across the Middle East and Chechnya. A human-rights criminal tribunal later found that from 1993 to March 1994, the brigade had engaged in torture, looting, and massacres of Christian Croats and Serbs, soldiers and civilians alike, some of whom were beheaded; in January 1994, gunmen from the brigade had executed a British aid worker outside of Zenica. Much later, some commanders affiliated with the brigade were convicted of war crimes.

Benevolence International was an important player in that jihadist ecosystem. In the years after its incorporation in 1992, the charity provided medical assistance to impoverished Bosnian refugees. But during those same years, its guiding force was Osama bin Laden: According to the 9/11 Commission Report, Benevolence International’s office in Sarajevo was one of bin Laden’s “impressive array” of offices providing financial and technical support for terrorism.

After 9/11, the U.S. and Bosnia and Herzegovina investigated the group and raided several of its offices. They found many compelling links to al-Qaeda, including a photograph taken in Afghanistan in the late 1980s showing the Benevolence International director Enaam Arnaout and bin Laden holding rifles and a shoulder-fired rocket. They also discovered a handwritten letter in which bin Laden authorized Arnaout to sign on his behalf, and documents establishing that Arnaout had worked with members of al-Qaeda to purchase rockets, mortars, rifles, and bombs to distribute to fighter camps, including those of al-Qaeda. In 2002, Arnaout was indicted on charges of racketeering, money laundering, and concealing his terrorism ties, and the Treasury Department designated Benevolence a “financier of terror.” Arnaout pleaded guilty to illegally siphoning off charitable contributions to buy uniforms and other supplies for fighters in Bosnia and Chechnya, though as part of the plea agreement, prosecutors dropped the terrorism-related charges against him. (In 2005, a lawyer who had represented Benevolence International, Matthew J. Piers, wrote a defense of the organization in which he argued that the U.S. government’s investigation had caused its “malevolent destruction.”)

Hamawy told me that he knew nothing at the time about the group’s ties to al-Qaeda or its support for jihadist fighters. He simply believed that he was working with staff at what he told me was a UN-endorsed charity to deliver supplies to clinics overwhelmed with the sick and dying. (The UN did not keep a list of certified charities in Bosnia.) “I had no sense or even suspicion anything like that was happening,” he said. “To kind of imply that between my microbiology rotation and my psychiatry rotation, I was in the mountains acting as, like, you know, some nefarious player is, again, kind of ludicrous.”

When I spoke with Jeffrey Parsons, who led FBI anti-terror investigations for two decades and now works for the George Washington University Program on Extremism, he was inclined to believe Hamawy’s claim to ignorance about the specifics of the charity’s subterfuge. Al-Qaeda-linked charities often played a double game, and those on the medical side might have known little about the money and aid sluiced off for jihadists. Still, as with his ties to Abdel-Rahman, Hamawy’s apparent lack of curiosity is itself curious. “It is an interesting life choice,” Parsons told me. “He definitely went there willingly, and he was in a city and a charity that would become a core for big shots in al-Qaeda.”

[From the September 2026 issue: What happened to al-Qaeda?]

Decades later, in 2024 and 2025, Hamawy journeyed to Gaza for another medical mission as Israeli bombs fell around him. He worked at the European Hospital in 2024 and Nasser Hospital in 2025, and said that he was seared by the experience. The war there was more horrifying than any he had seen before, particularly for children, he told me.

He has been adamant in interviews that Hamas had no presence in or underneath these hospitals. He told me that as a surgeon he could walk anywhere, that he had a trained eye, and that he saw no signs of militants or weapons. In 2024, he told Jacobin magazine that he had not seen a single weapon at the European Hospital: “Not one rifle. Not one pistol. Not one grenade launcher. This was a completely benign civilian hospital with no tunnels underneath it.” ABC News asked him about Israeli and U.S. intelligence that Hamas gunmen had access to Nasser Hospital. “Their intelligence is just wrong,” Hamawy said. “In terms of operations and people, actually fighters that are actively in, that has not been observed by anyone that’s been in these hospitals over the last two years.”

Yet in the spring of 2025, the Israelis ordered staff and patients at the European Hospital to leave and bombed directly outside. Afterward, Israel said that its forces had found the body of Mohammed Sinwar, then the military leader of Hamas, in a tunnel that ran beneath the hospital emergency room. (His brother, Yahya Sinwar, had directed the October 7, 2023, invasion of southern Israel.) In January 2026, Doctors Without Borders suspended “non-critical” medical operations at Nasser Hospital, stating: “Our teams have reported the presence of armed men, some of them masked; intimidation; arbitrary arrests of patients; and a recent situation involving the suspected movement of weapons.” Israel and the U.S., as well as The New York Times, have found evidence of Hamas’s presence at another hospital in Gaza, al-Shifa. Last year, I spoke with medical personnel who had worked there and at other Gaza hospitals. “You knew Hamas was there; I went to meetings where this was made very clear,” one Doctors Without Borders staffer told me. “Doors were hidden. There were units you did not get into, that had armed guards at the door.”

I asked Hamawy about Sinwar’s death underneath the European Hospital. Hamas confirmed more than a year ago that the Israelis had killed Sinwar, and has not disputed that he died in that tunnel. The Israeli military also took a group of foreign reporters, including from The New York Times and NBC News, through the tunnel under the hospital to the bloodstained room where Israeli forces said Sinwar had died.

“I don’t believe anything until we have third-party observers on the ground,” Hamawy told me. “To take the word of the Israelis and not take the word of the Palestinians seems kind of, like, illogical.” The Israelis, he said, “show you pictures that, to my experienced eye, look at it and say, ‘Hey, something doesn’t look right about this picture.’”

The problem for Hamawy is that, in the past, his intuitions have proven quite fallible.

At one point in our interview, Hamawy said that my line of questioning about the sheikh was “trying to characterize me, like everyone else is characterizing me, as: ‘Oh my God, this man is a Muslim man who came in contact with someone who, again, you know, ended up, like, serving for crimes, for years that I have condemned.’”

I could find no public evidence that Hamawy had denounced Abdel-Rahman prior to his candidacy and the media’s unearthing of that history. More to the point, asking about that history is fair game. He owes a fuller explanation to his would-be constituents.

Perhaps voters simply are no longer paying attention to his campaign. Hamawy’s Republican opponent, Gregg Mele, has no money and even less mojo; he is a near-perpetual candidate in New Jersey who has yet to come close to winning a seat. Most reporters have stopped covering the race, other than to track Hamawy’s encounters with other Democratic politicians on the left. In August, he attended the annual Panamerican Congress, a meeting of left-wing leaders in the Americas, held this year in Uruguay. And he and another likely U.S. representative, Darializa Avila Chevalier of New York, served as keynote speakers at the annual gala of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington, D.C.

Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics, points out that New Jersey sits between two big media markets, New York City and Philadelphia, and remains an afterthought in both. “Political junkies to the side, a lot of people don’t know what’s going on,” Rasmussen told me about Hamawy’s race. “But you can count me as a person who thinks that there are really important questions left about his background.”

If we are to assume that Hamawy’s political coming of age included a turn away from men such as Abdel-Rahman, the puzzle is why he does not talk candidly about that change of heart, rather than continuing to insist that to ask such questions is hateful.

A Pro-Russia Strongman at Mar-a-Lago

2026-10-31T14:05:10-04:00

In the days after Tuesday’s midterm elections, luminaries of the MAGA movement will gather at Mar-a-Lago to turn their attention to 2028. Speakers will include a Cabinet secretary, the head of the Domestic Policy Council, and several members of Congress. Also present will be Milorad Dodik, the pro-Russia strongman who has bragged about spying on Americans and recently called Russian President Vladimir Putin “one of the most peace-loving leaders of our time.” Dodik is the de facto leader of Bosnia’s Serb population, concentrated in a political entity called Republika Srpska within Bosnia and Herzegovina. His push for secession risks reigniting bloody sectarian conflict in the Balkans.

Dodik’s travel plans were described to me by several people familiar with them. These people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preview nonpublic matters, said the details could change at the last minute. (His office did not respond to a request for comment.) But Dodik’s expected attendance reflects his reversal of fortune under the Trump administration, the success of a pricey foreign lobbying campaign, and a further alignment of American and Russian interests.

Republika Srpska paid two of Trump’s top political advisers, James Blair and Chris LaCivita, as consultants and brought them to the Serb-majority political entity within Bosnia and Herzegovina for elections earlier this month. (They later donated their earnings to Trump’s presidential library fund after news of the work became public and the president lashed out at them on Truth Social.) When his party won a decisive result, Dodik credited both Trump and Putin for their support. “If it had not been for Donald Trump’s magnificent victory,” Dodik told supporters after the favorable result, “we would probably be political corpses today.”

In 2022, the Biden administration sanctioned Dodik for what the Treasury Department called “graft,” “corruption,” and “bribery,” as well as threats to the stability of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Balkan nation where ethnic divisions catalyzed a brutal war from 1992 to 1995. The conflict climaxed in the genocide at Srebrenica, which until Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was the most horrific mass murder in Europe since World War II. Dodik, according to the U.S. government, had attempted to sabotage the accords that ended the war, the Dayton peace agreement. He was accused of creating parallel state institutions in the federated country’s Serb-majority entity and of denigrating other ethnic and religious groups, above all Muslim Bosniaks. Numerous family members, allies, and companies were eventually also sanctioned. Formerly Srpska’s president, Dodik was stripped of that position and banned from holding office for six years after being convicted by the Bosnian judicial system last year of flouting decisions by the international envoy overseeing the Dayton Accords. He has rejected those decisions as politically motivated and void of constitutional authority, and continues to exercise near-total control over Srpska’s institutions.

Since Trump returned to office last year, the Srpska government has unleashed millions of dollars on lobbyists in a bid to burnish Dodik’s image with the people around Trump. The strategy has been to portray him as a martyr in the American president’s image—a victim of legal maneuvering and a crusader for Christian values holding back what some Serbian nationalists characterize as a tide of Muslim influence. Among those whose services Dodik and his allies have tapped are Rudy Giuliani, the president’s former personal lawyer; Rod Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor who landed a pardon from Trump last year; and the firm employing Katie Wiles, the daughter of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.

[Read: The Trump family sparks a revolution in Albania]

In October 2025, the Trump administration dropped the sanctions. The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control did not offer a rationale, but the State Department had days earlier hailed several conciliatory steps taken by Srpska’s legislative body as the result of Washington’s efforts to “defuse the crisis in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” State Department officials also pushed for the resignation of the international envoy who had clashed with Dodik. Christian Schmidt, a conservative German politician who had taken up the role of high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2021, complied in May of this year, telling a German newspaper that he had come under “enormous and unexpected pressure from the U.S.”

Diplomats in the region as well as experts have viewed the Trump administration’s concessions to Dodik with significant alarm because of his avowed separatist aims and his explicit backing by Putin. Both Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina are candidates for European Union membership.

The event planned for next week at Mar-a-Lago is an offshoot of the Conservative Political Action Conference, a right-wing jamboree that has enlarged its international footprint in recent years. It’s called the CPAC Circle Retreat and Gala and is billed as a “Gathering of Visionaries.” The website makes explicit the event’s connection with the next presidential election, stating, “As midterm election results come in, we’ll discuss what they mean for the political landscape and the road to 2028.” Speakers include the secretary of labor and at least two U.S. senators, Mike Lee of Utah and Rick Scott of Florida. Eduardo Bolsonaro, the brother of Flávio Bolsonaro, the failed Brazilian presidential candidate who recently arrived in the U.S. to evade possible prosecution on allegations of money laundering and tax evasion, is another advertised speaker. When I asked Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union and CPAC’s host, about Dodik’s attendance, he told me, “We will have a very interesting group of donors and VIPs, but we won’t comment on who will be in attendance other than who the speakers will be.” He added that the “focus will be on America’s future heading into 2028.”

It’s not clear whether Trump will be at Mar-a-Lago during Dodik’s anticipated visit, but his presence there will take him into one of MAGA’s main nerve centers. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. During a visit to Washington earlier this year, Dodik had photo ops with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Karoline Leavitt, the then–White House press secretary.

Current and former U.S. officials told me that Dodik may feel pressure to achieve his aim of securing Srpska’s independence soon, given that Trump is likely to be friendlier to him than a potential Democratic successor after 2028. Tuesday’s election in the U.S. will help determine MAGA’s long-term political viability. No matter the result, Trump will have another two years to keep giving Dodik what he wants.

The Election Lies Are Already Starting on X

2026-10-31T10:59:00-04:00

Last weekend, Chaya Raichik, the popular right-wing influencer who goes by Libs of TikTok, made an ominous claim to her nearly 5 million followers on X. “In Minnesota, the USPS offices are inside mosques,” she wrote. “The people who handle mail-in ballots.. What are we doing America.” She reshared a 28-minute-long video of a man circling a brick building in Plymouth, Minnesota, and accosting postal workers inside. “It’s the Islamification of the United States,” the man says. “And we have to stop it.”

Almost everything about Raichik’s post is misleading. The post office is not “inside” a mosque; they are housed in different sections of the same building. And there’s no reason to believe that the shared real estate has anything to do with the integrity of elections. In situations like this, X’s crowdsourced fact-checking feature, called “Community Notes,” is supposed to help correct the record. Users propose disclaimers for popular posts they believe are inaccurate, and if other users agree, the disclaimer gets attached to the post. Sure enough, the day after Raichik’s post, someone suggested slapping the post with a Community Note to clarify the facts, citing and linking to articles by The Minnesota Star Tribune and Minnesota Public Radio. But the note was never publicly shown on X. As of yesterday, the video had more than 1.7 million views. (Raichik did not respond to a request for comment.)

Since Elon Musk bought X four years ago, the platform has been a petri dish for rumors and propaganda. Now, having weathered a liberal exodus to other platforms, X could play a central role in the midterm elections—especially if Republicans fare poorly. X has become the go-to place for MAGA supporters to hunt for examples of voter fraud, which could be used to cast doubt on results that don’t go Republicans’ way. President Trump has endorsed this crusade—he recently announced a $1 million bounty for voter-fraud tips that lead to a conviction.

Community Notes, which even some of Musk’s critics have praised as a worthwhile program, would seem to offer a bulwark against bogus claims of vote-rigging. It’s built around a clever idea: Each proposed note gets rated “helpful” or “not helpful” by users who have disagreed about related past notes. X publishes only the notes on which the users have reached a consensus. Yet even though X has expanded the feature, bringing in AI note writers to work alongside the human volunteers, it’s proving stubbornly incapable of addressing most election-related falsehoods. If Tuesday and the days afterward bring widespread claims of rigged results, expect many of them to originate on X.

Since Musk embraced Community Notes on X, crowdsourced fact-checks have gone from a niche experiment to the default on social media. After Trump’s reelection, Meta ditched its partnerships with professional fact-checking organizations in the U.S. in favor of its own version of Community Notes. (Meta still uses professional fact-checks in other countries.) YouTube and TikTok have adopted similar features. But X’s version is the most established, and it has served as the industry’s model. In some respects, it works quite well: The system routinely corrects misleading posts about topics such as sports, pop culture, and advertising.

[Read: We’re back to the actually internet]

The problem is that it’s rare for liberals and conservatives to agree on notes that touch on the most polarizing topics—meaning that fact-checks about politics and elections rarely get approved. That has had predictable effects on the motivation of the program’s volunteers, Mike Doris, a longtime contributor to Community Notes, told me. A group chat where active members share information and sources has become a “ghost town,” Doris said. Some have given up; he is close to doing the same.

While humans might get discouraged, bots do not. To scale up the program, X has opened fact-checking to AI, creating a purpose-built agent powered by Grok and inviting outside researchers to build AI fact-checking tools of their own. It might seem ironic that the same technology that can generate falsehoods at scale is now being used to catch them. Yet the bots are more prolific, and X says that notes proposed by AI are also more likely to win approval from the masses, perhaps because they’re trained to use neutral language and cite reputable sources. What started as an experiment last year has quickly become the norm: In May, an analysis by The Indicator’s Alexios Mantzarlis found that half of all Community Notes shown on X are now written by just eight bot accounts. This month, the Georgetown University social-media researcher Renée DiResta analyzed X’s public research and found that six of those eight are controlled by the platform itself.

This has led to a Cambrian explosion in the total number of Community Notes on X. But when it comes to politics, bots haven’t fixed the fundamental problem: Users on the left and the right just can’t find common ground. The proposed note for Raichik’s post about the post office attached to the mosque was, in fact, written by an AI agent, though not one of X’s. NewsGuard, a company that tracks misinformation, found that 93 percent of false claims about the midterms on X failed to receive a Community Note. (DiResta’s own AI fact-checking bot, she told me, has proposed 81 Community Notes; only one has been approved.)

In the weeks before the election, many of these unchecked posts have involved false claims about candidates. Fake videos targeting at least three Democratic Senate candidates have been linked to Russian disinformation campaigns. One starts with a shot of a real Cleveland local-news reporter, then cuts to fabricated footage describing nonexistent claims of sexual misconduct against the Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown by women who used to work for him. Darren Linvill, a Clemson University professor who researches foreign-interference campaigns, told me that X has taken down some of the accounts behind the posts, but the same group of influencers on the platform keeps amplifying new ones. Of the 37 viral false claims about the midterms identified by NewsGuard’s ongoing tracker, 22 started as X posts, and many of them spread to larger platforms from there. Not all of them target Democratic candidates: One debunked post claims that the Texas Republican Ken Paxton paid for a billboard that read, Pedos ain’t that bad.

Fact-checks were never a cure-all for social-media lies. Many conservatives distrusted mainstream fact-checking organizations, and some research has shown that Community Notes are more broadly believed. A spokesperson for X told me that the addition of AI note writers has roughly doubled the number of Community Notes published in the past year. X, Meta, and other social-media companies also have rules against certain types of election misinformation, which they enforce through other means. For instance, X said earlier this month that it suspended more than 13,000 accounts linked to foreign-influence campaigns, and at least one viral post showing the satirical Paxton billboard now carries a “manipulated media” label.

Still, the limits of crowdsourced fact-checking might become obvious in the days to come. AI bots in particular are likely to struggle to counter fast-flying fraud claims on Election Day, DiResta pointed out. “The AI does not know what is happening on the ground unless a human has written it somewhere retrievable,” she said. In 2020, the last national election when Trump was in the White House, the president’s claims that the election had been stolen gained traction on social media and helped fuel the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021. Back then, Twitter applied numerous fact-checks and warning labels to posts by Trump and his allies making unsupported claims that the vote had been rigged. It’s hard to envision the platform doing that this time around.

How the Midterms Could Test Trump

2026-10-31T10:25:57-04:00

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.

Tuesday’s midterm results could help determine what President Trump’s remaining two years in office will look like. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss this and more.

The upcoming elections may be “coming down to Republicans,” Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker, argued last night. It’s the “Republicans who believed Donald Trump when he said he was the president of no new wars, who believed Donald Trump when he said prices were going to come down on day one of his administration.”

Joining guest moderator Vivian Salama, a staff writer at The Atlantic, to discuss further: Peter Baker, a chief White House correspondent at The New York Times; Carrie Dann, the managing editor of the Cook Political Report; Glasser; and Asma Khalid, the co-host of The Global Story podcast on BBC News.

Watch the full episode here.

The ‘Cuteservative’ in Chief

2026-10-31T10:00:00-04:00

Inside a podcast studio at Turning Point USA’s headquarters last month, a former witch sat in a pink velvet armchair, telling Alex Clark about the demon that stalked her house. Even though this self-described witch, known on TikTok as @yourspiritualbigsis, had only ever used her powers for good, she believed that practicing sorcery had made her vulnerable to satanic forces. The demon—10, maybe 15 feet tall, whose face had “divots” for eyes—had tormented her, she said, until she spoke the name “Jesus” out loud and became a Christian.

Clark, whose Culture Apothecary is one of America’s top wellness podcasts, told her guest that she was going to ask “counter questions,” as she does with everyone she interviews. In this case: If the spells she was doing were technically producing good—helping people make money, get pregnant, pass a test—why is that evil? How can Christians tell whether someone has the spiritual gift of prophecy or they’re harnessing dark power? Clark wasn’t concerned about whether sorcery was real—“It is real,” she said—but when her guest brought up the occult sacrifice of babies procured through a sex-trafficking network supported by the government and Hollywood, Clark had no further questions.

This was just another day in the studio. Since 2024, when she launched her podcast with a mission to “heal a sick culture” and to do so “physically, emotionally, and spiritually,” Clark has welcomed a wild array of guests, united only by their willingness to contradict conventional wisdom and generally accepted facts. Listening to Culture Apothecary, you might hear a regenerative farmer recommend the subcutaneous fat of a “healthy, happy pig” as a miracle skin-care ingredient, a chiropractor talk about testing muscle strength using “homeopathically charged frequencies,” the self-described Christian nationalist Doug Wilson suggest spanking as a form of biblical discipline for children, or leaders in the “Make America Healthy Again” movement disavow vaccines and industrial agriculture.

On the podcast, Clark positions herself not as an expert but as a question-asking woman of the people. Depending on who you talk with—and I spoke with Clark’s colleagues, her critics, her close friends, her mom—she’s either a powerful force connecting everyday women to the GOP or an agent of chaos. She has been the Republican commentator posting bikini photos while her peers post pictures in cardigans and the single 33-year-old podcasting about child-rearing. By her own account, she is also the contributor at TPUSA, the late Charlie Kirk’s conservative organization, who causes the nonprofit the most trouble with the Trump administration.

Maggie Shannon for The Atlantic

Alex Clark and a former witch, known on TikTok as @yourspiritualbigsis, during a taping of her podcast, Culture Apothecary, in September

Clark grew up in an evangelical, conservative home in southern Indiana. After high school, she worked at Sephora and took classes at a community college, and planned to transfer to a four-year school for fashion merchandising and journalism. But then she started an internship at a Louisville, Kentucky, radio station, which led to a full-time job as an anchor and the unofficial Millennial-woman correspondent for a morning show. She had always loved pop culture and politics, and came to TPUSA in 2019 so that she could air her conservative views while discussing Dancing With the Stars. Even before Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump teamed up, she pivoted to podcasting about wellness because she thought that talking about organic food, herbal medicine, and suspicions about vaccines could bring more women into the GOP. When the MAHA movement came to Washington, Clark’s own profile rose, and soon she had the attention of some of the most powerful men in the country.

But recently, MAHA and MAGA have started to drift apart. MAHA is failing to draw hordes of voters to Republicans; the Trump administration has failed MAHA on many of the issues Clark cares about. As the rift widens, Clark is stretching to keep a foot on each side and figuring out, if she does have to choose one, how to take her audience of MAHA moms and conservative young women along with her.

Between tapings, Clark ate takeout from a seed-oil-free restaurant as she reviewed podcast transcripts and a spreadsheet of upcoming episodes, reacting to them with facial expressions worthy of a mime. Her team member took notes while she dictated episode titles (“He Was Gay, Then Everything Changed” and “Acetaminophen Before Age 4: What Parents Should Know”). The whole time, she exuded the energy of someone who had incredible gossip to share. The minute I stepped away to check out a rack of Culture Apothecary sweatshirts (Trust Farms, Not Pharma), Clark shrieked. “We’re all peeing our pants, screaming, crying, throwing up,” she said, her eyes wide and made even more dramatic by false lashes. Taylor Swift had just announced a new single. She looked for clues in Swift’s post and predicted that the music video would debut later that week at the MTV Video Music Awards. (She was right.)

Like many 30-something women, she is devoted to Taylor Swift, and, however unfiltered Clark can sometimes seem, like Swift, she aims to make every detail of her world matter. Her studio’s forest-green wallpaper includes illustrations of her preferred remedies for America’s ailing culture: raw milk, steak, butter, wildflowers, hair bows, the Bible. Her podcast-planning spreadsheet is in that same bespoke shade of green, which she developed with graphic designers. (She calls it “Forks, Washington,” after the town made famous in Twilight.) Even her off-the-cuff X posts can be seen as part of her brand—a girl speaking her mind, even if that includes insinuating that Candace Owens performed oral sex on Vladimir Putin. The ads she writes for the show might seem borderline nonsensical—in one ad for a clean-beauty company, for reasons that I do not understand, she includes a monologue about a taxidermied possum who wears a cheerleading uniform and is named Gerald—but according to Clark, that strategy tends to bring high returns for her sponsors. What listener is going to want to skip those?

Not the “Cuteservatives,” as Clark calls her fandom. They keep tabs on her personal life, too, and at the TPUSA Women’s Leadership Summit in June, she orchestrated an announcement for them. “There’s one thing I haven’t told you guys,” she said. The stage lights went out, and when they came back on, she was standing beside Vance Voetberg, the bespectacled author of the MAHA fitness Substack Running on Butter. On her finger was a diamond ring. “I’m engaged!” The crowd screamed. Later, on Instagram, she described him as her “‘BUTTER’ half.” She has since released a steady stream of content about their small summer wedding at his family home in rural Washington State: a recipe for the prosciutto butter they served, details about the outfits she picked for Voetberg and her maid of honor, and a two-hour interview with her new husband, in which she revealed that she walked down the aisle to Swift’s “You Are In Love” and gifted all of her guests a Jaspr, perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing air purifier in existence.

Maggie Shannon for The Atlantic

Clark and Caroline Lanier, a social-media admin, check out what was probably, if Clark’s obsessions are any indication, a post about Taylor Swift.

Clark is also, like Swift, a woman of distinct eras. For most of her life, she was focused not on health but pop culture. MTV was banned in her childhood home, but when she saw Britney Spears’s “I’m a Slave 4 U” music video at a sleepover, “I was absolutely mesmerized,” she said. She idolized Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Jessica Simpson. She was also so conservative “that she’d make Rush Limbaugh look like a liberal,” her high-school radio and TV teacher, Timothy Dench, told me.

She knew even then that she wanted an audience made up of young women. She dreamed about being a fashion writer at Teen Vogue or Seventeen, but got the job on a local radio show. Listeners knew her as a fast-food connoisseur and the “Chicken Nugget Princess”—she ate nuggets at least once a day and would peel off the skin, eat that, then turn to the meat. By 2019, she was co-hosting an Indianapolis morning show, but her superiors were telling her to stop bringing up politics on air and on Twitter. She imagined a show that would combine her passions for the GOP and for pop culture—“TMZ and Fox News if they had a baby,” she told me—and pitched it to Charlie Kirk at TPUSA as a way to show women that Republicans could be cool. POPlitics became TPUSA’s first show.

Clark’s wellness era started around 2020. She was skeptical of the COVID shot and never got it, and, after watching the Hulu series Dopesick, became convinced that Big Pharma’s misdeeds were the greatest true-crime story ever told. Practically overnight, she emptied out her fridge and began her transformation into someone who keeps a tiny vial of unrefined sea salt in her purse, sits in front of red light every day, and makes a morning smoothie with six different types of powder, glyphosate-free oats, aloe-vera juice, Cowboy Colostrum, collagen, creatine, strawberries, cherries, pineapple, peaches, and an entire avocado.

And she noticed that her audience was moving toward wellness with her. Whenever she had a guest on to talk about why, say, women should be suspicious of the pill, viewership spiked, so she met with Kirk about rebranding her show around health. “If we are the ones championing these issues, we will grab all the female voters,” she remembers telling him in July 2024. Two weeks before Culture Apothecary was scheduled to debut, she watched RFK Jr. endorse Trump live at a rally in Glendale, Arizona. The crowd was so electric it reminded her of Swift’s Eras Tour.

A month later, Clark got a standing ovation at the Capitol. Her speech at a Senate roundtable, on behalf of Millennial mothers outraged by food and pharmaceutical corporations harming their children, cemented her as MAHA’s big sister. Sponsors and listeners flocked to Culture Apothecary, and Clark, who now had the attention of both stay-at-home moms and powerful politicians, became the person most visibly fusing MAHA and MAGA for women.

Over the past year, that union has gotten shakier. Trump’s accord with MAHA—his promise to let RFK Jr. “run wild” on health and food—has been one defining force in his second administration, and the health secretary has managed to remake federal vaccine policy, change the food pyramid, and extract some voluntary commitments from companies about food dye. But many MAHA supporters feel like they were owed more—especially when it came to regulating food and pesticides. The disillusionment has gotten bad enough that one of MAHA’s top leaders, Calley Means, resigned from the Trump administration less than two weeks before the midterms, reportedly out of frustration that the government wasn’t advancing MAHA’s food policy.

Maggie Shannon for The Atlantic

Clark’s bookshelf at her home

Clark, meanwhile, keeps getting angrier. In January, she and other MAHA activists were abruptly disinvited from an event at the Department of Health and Human Services—which they believe was because MAHA had recently launched a petition to fire the head of the EPA. Someone later sent Clark a picture of the check-in table: On the front page of the “Not Permitted List” was her photograph. (In response to a request for comment, HHS referred me to the White House, which did not comment on the disinvitation; a spokesperson told me, “The MAHA coalition has never been stronger or more empowered.”) After the White House and the Supreme Court both came down in favor of the weed killer glyphosate, the chemical that MAHA hates most, Clark headlined a rally outside the Supreme Court Building, wearing a camo jacket that read: I TURN INTO ERIN BROCKOVICH WHEN I’M ANGRY.

Clark thinks that Trump is a true MAHA believer (despite his love of McDonald’s) and that he’s getting hemmed in by those around him. Before the April rally, Trump met with her and other MAHA leaders, and he kept talking about making an executive order about vaccines. According to Clark, what he described was so extreme that if she shared the details, they would “make him look bad right before midterms.” She believes that his advisers steered him away from it. (Trump did later issue an executive order reducing the number of diseases included in the childhood-vaccination schedule. The White House spokesperson wrote in an email that “President Trump wants to execute on ideas that are durable, long-lasting, and hold up in court to ensure the permanence” of the MAHA movement.) Clark still loves the president, but “I have zero stomach for conservative commentators that all they do is blow the Trump admin,” she said. “Sorry to be crass.” As a Republican, she’d be sad if the GOP loses this cycle, but as a MAHA leader, “then I’d kind of get to flex an ‘I told you so’” about the party needing her audience’s vote.

Clark’s own career doesn’t necessarily hinge on the White House’s approval or MAHA’s political viability. Her wellness episodes were doing well before the MAHA label existed, and she’s proved that she has an instinct for where the conservative movement is going and how to get American women—even those who don’t think of themselves as political—to follow it. Maybe this election will mark the end of an era for MAHA. But Clark is already entering a new one herself.

After a day of taping, Clark took me back to her apartment in Scottsdale, Arizona, where she now lives with her butter half. It still looked like a Millennial girl’s Barbie Dreamhouse: maximalist floral wallpaper, a brocade velvet shower curtain, black-and-white striped accent chairs. A Jaspr air purifier hummed in the corner, and on the floor, her Pekingese, Mochi, ate raw rabbit and organic pumpkin puree from his dog bowl and drank glass-bottled, micro-plastic-tested Loonen water.

Voetberg had homemade cookies and raw milk waiting for us. He is a national-champion fiddle player and competitive runner, who grew up homeschooled and one of 10 kids. He’d been a fan of Clark’s podcast for years, and after lobbying mutual friends to set them up, he and Clark had their first date last fall, got engaged over Memorial Day weekend, and got married at the end of August. They’d just returned from their Bora-Bora honeymoon. “We have sex now!” She laughed and leaned over their glasses of raw milk to kiss him.

Clark’s primary goal in life was always to get married and have a family. When, at 23, she appeared on the Fox dating show Coupled, she was so earnest about looking for a husband that the producers told her she needed to relax, she said. Over the years, being single became an occupational hazard. Groypers, the followers of the alt-right leader Nick Fuentes, would DM her pictures of empty egg cartons and tell her that she was useless because she wasn’t married with kids; feminists criticized her for being an unmarried career woman who told other women to focus on their families.

Now that she’s married, she told me, she will not be a tradwife who embodies a pioneer-esque domestic crunchiness: A nail artist comes to her house every two weeks, and she “wouldn’t last five seconds living more than 10 minutes away from a Sephora.” Nor does she plan to adhere to strict domestic gender roles. Voetberg told me that he takes the lead on household chores; he made those cookies and stepped in to cook chili for dinner while Clark was busy talking with me. She has said she will put family first, but she also wants a career. Between that and her choice to continue using the last name Clark professionally, some people on the right call her a closet feminist. She is not, she told me, and believes that feminism has been a “net negative.” Voetberg chimed in to say that he could see how people might think that she has benefited from the movement. But Clark kept returning to the idea that, overall, feminism had badly served women by pushing them to prioritize their careers over motherhood.

Maggie Shannon for The Atlantic

Alex Clark and her husband, Vance Voetberg, at home with their dog, Mochi

Her latest Culture Apothecary series—“Wife School”—certainly has gone well beyond any feminist’s comfort zone. In these interviews, she asked married Christian women about how to be a good biblical wife. Guests had tips on household organization but also on giving one’s husband input while still allowing him to be the family’s final decision maker. In one particularly controversial episode, the Christian writer Tilly Dillehay said that, for the health of a marriage, women should have sex with their husbands even when they do not want to.

If part of MAHA’s success was that it could speak to people across the political spectrum, the issues Clark is now exploring almost certainly don’t. Over chili, Voetberg said that he thought aspects of first-wave feminism had been good. Like the right to vote, I suggested.

“Don’t get her started on that,” Voetberg said.

“I’m not gonna advocate to repeal the Nineteenth!” Clark replied, although some people in the MAGAverse insist that the Nineteenth Amendment was a mistake that should, like Roe, be corrected. I asked whether they’d vote as a family, and they started talking about landownership, which was once attached to suffrage, and how the question of who should vote in America was a “giant, giant topic,” as Voetberg put it. Clark joked—maybe?—that she’d love it if she needed her husband’s permission to open a bank account, as American women once did. (Later, she wrote in an email that she and Voetberg had not consciously adopted household voting as a practice—“We just automatically vote the same.”)

When she has kids—and she wants to be pregnant before January—she said that she may look at her newborn and decide to never do another interview again. But her current plan is to keep working. Her audience loved “Wife School,” she said, and she is sensing another groundswell like the one she saw toward health—this one toward human connection, in community and family. Championing those issues could be another way to grab female voters: Moms of all political persuasions can probably agree that, as a recent Culture Apothecary episode argued, “babies don’t need all that STUFF!”—even if many of them are not quite ready to give their husbands the final say on their family decisions, finances, or sex lives.

Knowing how seriously to take Clark’s more provocative stances can be difficult. If Taylor Swift is one of Clark’s idols, so is 1980s and ’90s Howard Stern: He was clever and funny, and wasn’t afraid to be shocking. (“I’m not saying, as a Christian, that I agree with the type of content he was doing,” she said.) For similar reasons, she admires the early days of the sex-and-dating podcast Call Her Daddy, when the hosts graphically detailed their own exploits. “I don’t ever want people to feel comfortable,” Clark said—and her more MAHA-leaning listeners might not be, if she doubles down on a conservative vision of family and femininity. But, she told me, “I love controversy.” It keeps people listening. “Whether you listen to me because you love me, or listen to me because you hate me,” she said, “you’re still a fan either way.”

Foie Gras Is Tearing D.C. Apart

2026-10-31T09:48:10-04:00

In Washington, D.C., voters are thinking more than they usually would about ducks. The most contentious question on the ballot in the nation’s capital this midterm-election cycle is a referendum on foie gras, the extra-fatty liver delicacy made by overfeeding ducks (and sometimes geese) through a tube stuck down their esophagus. Selling foie gras has been banned in New York City, Pittsburgh, California, India, and Brazil; Target won’t stock it. On Tuesday, D.C. residents will decide: Should their restaurants still be able to serve it?

In the lead-up to the election, anti-foie-gras advocates have imported Olivia Gray, a four-and-a-half-pound male duck from Maryland, to act as their mascot. A Capitol Hill restaurant has countered with a foie-gras tasting menu. A local publication predicted this week that the year’s hottest Halloween costumes would be foie gras–related. Residents are debating the usual moral quandaries of this issue: Is force-feeding ducks a practice so cruel it should be banned? Do people have the right to eat whatever they find delicious? But the real reason the ballot initiative is tearing D.C. apart is that it’s become a proxy for arguments about democracy.

The referendum, known as Initiative 86, would ban “force-feeding a bird for the purpose of enlarging the bird’s liver beyond normal size” within the district, as well as the sale or importation of any products resulting from such practices. It amassed more valid signatures from D.C. residents than any other ballot initiative in the city’s history—more, even, than Initiative 71, the referendum on recreational cannabis that, when passed in 2014, made it possible to (legally) buy a joint four blocks from the White House. Everyone I spoke with, including foie-gras fans, expects Initiative 86 to pass. Ballot measures tend to do well here, and proponents are essentially asking voters to choose duck happiness over a food they’ve probably never eaten.

The pro-ban side, headed by a group called Pro-Animal DC, has spent more than $470,000 lobbying for Initiative 86 to pass. Most of that money was spent this summer on hiring people to collect all of those signatures, a spokesperson for the organization told me. Supporters have been hanging SAVE THE DUCKS posters at Metro stops around the city. Olivia the duck has been making frequent appearances, including co-hosting a panel at George Washington University’s law school. Meghan Abrego, who bought Olivia on eBay when he was just an egg (and Abrego thought he was female), told me that she’s feeling optimistic heading into Election Day. The real question, she said, is not whether the ban will pass, but “What states will pick it up next?”

The anti-ban contingent is not formally organized. Few people seem eager to be targeted as pro–foie gras activists: Bart Hutchins, a local chef who has become the face of the opposition to Initiative 86, told me he has received death threats and has been followed to his car since writing an op-ed opposing the ban in The Washington Post. Hutchins co-owns Butterworth’s, the Capitol Hill restaurant serving the foie-gras tasting menu in protest of the referendum. He told me that the two farms that produce virtually all U.S. foie gras are run ethically; when he has visited the farm he procures Butterworth’s livers from, he said, the ducks don’t actually seem to mind gavage much. Sales from the tasting menu will benefit Hutchins’s Foie Gras Legal Defense Fund, which he says will be put toward mounting a challenge should the ban pass and financially supporting chefs who are fined for continuing to serve the dish, as he intends to do.

This fight is a microcosm of questions about money in politics and what powerful forces might really be behind a grassroots movement. Hutchins and his allies have argued that animal-rights groups are trying to, effectively, force their political views down District residents’ gullets: The initiative is mostly funded by the national organization Pro-Animal Future, which is based in Oregon; Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, headquartered in California, has also contributed money. (Even Olivia is not a D.C. resident.) On the opposing side, a major foie-gras producer based in New York is already rallying its lawyers to challenge the ban if it passes, Axios reported this week.

National organizations fund the activities of local chapters all the time, but D.C. is a particularly attractive city for outside interest groups to fund ballot initiatives: Because of its national prominence, initiatives that pass here are more likely to inspire similar actions across the country. And because its civic-minded voters are packed into a tiny geographic area, gathering petition signatures is easy. Six citizen initiatives have reached the D.C. ballot since 2014, and nearly 90 percent of the total funding for them came from outside the District. As much as they’re arguing about the merits of foie gras, Washingtonians are arguing about astroturfing.

Another popular argument against Initiative 86 is that no one in D.C. should be wasting any time on such a small issue in the first place. Yet I was ready to do my own civic duty. On Wednesday, I made my way to a church to meet Abrego, who was pushing Olivia the duck around in a stroller. Abrego wanted Olivia to appear at a town hall being convened there, but the church wouldn’t let Olivia in, so we stood outside. Some attendees recognized the duck and tried to pet him; D.C.’s Democratic nominee for mayor gave him a high five.

Then I headed from the church to Butterworth’s. Waiting for me were four courses of foie gras, including a Waldorf salad laid on a bed of “foie gras snow” and a “foie gras Twinkie” served with foie-gras ice cream. I’d had foie gras once before on the urging of someone who said the taste would change my life, but I’ve never understood the hype. I still found Butterworth’s version almost disgustingly rich; the duck breast, however, was a star. As I ate, Hutchins made sure I understood that his foie gras comes from ducks that live in open barns and keep to a vegetarian diet; the liver and breast on my plate may have come from the same animal, he said, which helps make farming more sustainable. A man sitting next to me, who said he was a Trump-administration staffer but didn’t volunteer his name, described himself as a foie-gras enthusiast. Nearby, another table started chanting, “Olé, olé, olé, olé; foie gras, foie gras” to the tune of the soccer anthem.

As an on-again, off-again vegetarian, I gravitate toward meat that is so thoroughly estranged from its animal origins that I could imagine it grew on a tree—like a chicken nugget. All in all, the ducks that made my meals at Butterworth’s probably had a better life than most animals I consume. Still, in the lulls in my conversation with Hutchins, my mind would sometimes flash back to Olivia in the stroller, or to the videos I’d seen earlier that day of ducks with metal tubes down their throat. Even if the birds live in an open barn and eat no meat, their livers swell up to 10 times their normal size. After about two weeks of force-feeding, the ducks get so fat they can’t really move.

Foie gras is a low-hanging source of suffering, and using a ballot initiative to bring the issue to a vote seems like a healthy-enough expression of democracy—certainly more healthy than eating as much foie gras as I did. In the Butterworth’s bathroom after my meal, I found myself staring at the rabbits on the wallpaper, feeling sick. Maybe I wasn’t built to handle that much liver. Or maybe the campaign and the backlash had both succeeded in forcing me to think about the political and moral dimensions of my food. That’s democracy at work.