In September, Cook Political Reports elections guru David Wasserman argued that Democrats would be foolish not to court non-college-educated white voters in 2020. That group may make up 45 percent of the electorate nationwide, he wrote, but it represents a majority of the electorate in key battleground states—Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania—and casts almost half of the ballots in North Carolina.

That set off another round of debate about whether and how the Democrats should “win back” the non-college-educated whites who played a crucial role in delivering the Rust Belt, and ultimately the Electoral College, to Donald Trump in 2016.

Some analysts argue that progressives who urge Democrats to focus on turning out their core base—people of color, unmarried women, and younger voters—are too cavalier about the consequences of continuing to lose less-educated whites. Those progressives in turn worry that the pundits and moderate Dems who obsess over working-class whites rarely define what appealing to those voters would look like in practice. Does it mean shifting the party closer to the center and putting less emphasis on issues that matter to the base, like discriminatory policing, reproductive health care, and LGBTQ rights?

But these debates miss quite a bit of evidence, direct and indirect, that Democrats have already “won back” enough white working-class voters to compete next year. Since the 1980s, Democratic candidates have proven that they can win elections while losing whites without a college degree by a significant margin. Obama won 36 percent of their votes in 2012. Bill Clinton averaged 41 percent in his two victories. And in 2020, the candidate will likely need to win a smaller share of white people without a degree, because that group has long been declining as a share of both the electorate and the broader population. According to Gallup, their share of the population has declined by three percentage points since 2014. And a study released by the Center for American Progress in October projects that next year their share of the electorate will be 2.3 points lower than it was in 2016.

The reality is that the Democratic candidate is unlikely to do as poorly with this group as Hillary Clinton did. In 2016, despite winning the national popular vote by a significant margin, she won just 28 percent of these voters, according to Pew, and that wasn’t enough to deliver Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. According to a data set that combines survey and voter registration data with election results, Clinton lost non-college-educated whites by a 28-point margin in 2016, significantly worse than Obama’s 10-point deficit in 2008 or his 21-point gap in 2012.

A similar analysis looking back further found that Al Gore lost working-class whites by 17 points in 2000, and they went for George W. Bush over John Kerry by 23 points in 2004. Clinton also fared significantly worse among this group in 2016 than Democrats did overall when Republicans crushed them in midterm waves in 2010 (by 23 points) and 2014 (by seventeen points).

There are three reasons to believe that Clinton’s performance with non-college-educated whites in 2016 was an outlier, and that Democrats’ support among this group has already reverted to its longer-term trend line—one of gradual decline that has been offset by demographic shifts in the electorate.

First, Trump’s election represented a perfect storm that’s unlikely to be repeated. The Clinton campaign’s e-mails were hacked and dribbled out strategically over the final six weeks of the campaign; then–FBI Director James Comey broke agency protocol by announcing that he was reopening an investigation into Clinton’s own e-mails 11 days before the vote. According to an analysis by FiveThirtyEight, that story dominated the news down the final stretch and correlated with a significant decline in Clinton’s poll numbers—decreasing her support by between 1 and 4 percent nationally.

Second, the Democratic Party lost non-college-educated whites by 21 points in the 2018 midterms, the same margin as Obama did when he won in 2012. Midterm electorates aren’t the same as in a general election, when many more voters go to the polls, but 2018 featured historically high turnout for a non-presidential cycle and was more similar to a general presidential election than typical midterms.

And polling data supports the idea that 2018 can tell us something about the mood of the public. Polls have found Trump losing significant ground among whites without a college degree relative to his performance in 2016. The decline has been especially apparent among less-educated white women—a group he carried by 27 points in 2016 but which broke for a generic Democrat by six points in the August NBC/Wall Street Journal survey. Last month’s Fox News poll found Trump beating Biden by just one point among these women, topping Sanders by three points and losing to Elizabeth Warren by three points.

Remember that Trump won Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which gave him enough Electoral College votes to win the White House, by a margin of less than one percentage point.

Meanwhile, Trump’s approval rates have cratered among all voters in all of the battleground states. Between Trump’s swearing in and the middle of last month, his net approval numbers (approval rate minus disapproval rate) fell by 23 points in Wisconsin, 21 points in New Hampshire, 21 points in Michigan, 18 points in Minnesota, and 19 points in Pennsylvania, according to Morning Consult’s polling. While those numbers aren’t broken down by race and educational attainment, those are the states where non-college-educated whites make up a majority of the electorate, according to David Wasserman’s data. (Trump’s net approval has also declined by 19 points in Ohio, 21 points in North Carolina, and 24 points in Florida.)

One final point on this debate: The only demographic that saw a significant decline in turnout between 2012 and 2016 was African Americans. The conventional wisdom is that this was because Barack Obama wasn’t on the ballot, but the reality is that this defied a longer-term trend of increased black turnout—black turnout was slightly lower in 2016 than it was when John Kerry was on the ballot in 2004. Voter suppression certainly played a role. If all else were equal, it’s possible that even with 28 percent of non-college-educated whites, Clinton might have eked out a win if African Americans had been more motivated to vote or hadn’t faced relentless voter suppression in places like Milwaukee and Detroit.

Given the paper-thin margins by which Trump won, Democrats probably don’t need to win the 36 percent of whites without a college degree that Obama got in 2012 to put together a winning coalition. With Trump firing up the Dems’ natural base, a shift of just a couple of points among this group could be decisive. And there’s every reason to believe that kind of movement is already baked in as we head into 2020.

Recently, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) rejected calls for a presidential primary debate dedicated to climate change. DNC chair Tom Perez argued that focusing on climate change alone would be unfair to those whose campaigns are more focused on other issues—which might be a compelling argument if experts said those matters had the potential to lead to civilizational collapse.

This was a missed opportunity to demand that the candidates who have not authored or signed on to an ambitious proposal to transform our economy and energy infrastructure over a relatively short time frame, like the Green New Deal, explain how they’ll pay for their more moderate approaches.

“But how will we pay for it?” is rarely asked in discussions of the military budget or trillion-dollar corporate tax cuts. But the media consistently demands that Democratic candidates offer detailed explanations of how they would finance Medicare for All or dealing with the student loan crisis.

It’s the same with climate change. When Bernie Sanders released his climate proposal, The New York Times described it as a “$16 Trillion Climate Plan” and noted that it was the “most expensive proposal from the field of Democratic presidential candidates aimed at reining in planet-warming greenhouse gases” in the very first sentence of the story. Newsweek ran a piece headlined “Here’s How Andrew Yang’s Nearly $5 Trillion Climate Plan Stacks Up Against His Opponents.” And many outlets promulgated a scary but utterly bogus estimate, apparently just invented by Republicans, that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s plan for a Green New Deal would cost taxpayers $93 trillion.

If we’re to have any hope of mobilizing the effort scientists tell us is necessary, we have to turn this question around. Because the reality is that even if we set aside the human and biospheric costs of climate change—the excess deaths from extreme weather and encroaching diseases, the refugee crises, habitat loss, and mass extinctions—the economic cost of allowing temperatures to rise even a couple of degrees above that target is simply staggering.

According to the 4th National Climate Assessment, over time these costs would dwarf the price tag associated with even ambitious proposals to tackle the problem. And that’s not factoring in the new economic opportunities that transitioning away from fossil fuels would confer on countries that take the lead in that process.

Although the cost estimates vary, there is almost as much agreement on this broad point among economists who have studied the potential impacts as there is within the scientific community that human activities are warming the planet.

In 2015, the Economist Intelligence Unit compiled a peer-reviewed report warning that “the asset management industry—and thus the wider community of investors of all sizes— is facing the prospect of significant losses from the effects of climate change.” Using the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s warming models, they projected that investors would lose $4.2 trillion in assets by the end of the century, “roughly on a par with the total value of all the world’s listed oil and gas companies or Japan’s entire GDP.” The researchers added that “the average losses to be expected are not the only source of concern; on the contrary, the outliers, the particularly extreme scenarios, may matter most of all.” In the worst-case scenario they considered, 10 percent of the world’s assets would be wiped out.

That’s just the losses to investors. They note that “while the value of future losses from the private sector is substantial, this is dwarfed by the forecast harms when considered from a government point of view.”

Last year, two EPA scientists, working independently of their agency, published a pessimistic study in Nature Climate Change. They compared the potential economic impacts of two scenarios. In the first, humanity misses the 2 degrees Celsius target established in the Paris framework by 0.8 degrees. In the second, we would overshoot the target by 2.5 degrees Celsius. Looking at how warming would affect 22 sectors of the US economy by 2090, they estimated that we would face additional losses of $224 billion per year in the hotter scenario. But the researchers cautioned that because “only a small portion of the impacts of climate change are estimated” in their analysis, it “capture[d] just a fraction of the potential risks and damages.” 

A new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research estimated that if we continue to emit greenhouse gases at our current pace, it would reduce global economic output by 7.2 percent by the end of the century. If we were to meet the goals set forth in the Paris Accord, output would drop by only 1.1 percent. The difference between those two figures would far outstrip the costs of transitioning to a clean economy now.

There’s broad agreement in the scientific community that the impact of climate change isn’t being distributed evenly, and the study’s authors noted that Americans would be especially hard hit. Co-author Kamiar Mohaddes, an economist at the University of Cambridge, told The Washington Post that while “climate change is costly for all countries under the business as usual scenario, (no matter whether they are hot or cold, rich or poor), the United States will be one of the countries that will suffer the most.” Mohaddes and his colleagues estimated that we could face a 10.5 percent drop in real income by the end of the century if we don’t meet the goals set in Paris.

While these studies model the impacts out to the end of this century, business’s bottom lines are already being hit, and some of the largest corporations say that’s likely to get worse soon. According to Reuters, an analysis of corporate survey data by the CDP, formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project, found that “more than 200 of the world’s largest listed companies forecast that climate change could cost them a combined total of almost $1 trillion, with much of the pain due in the next five years.” The author of that study, Nicolette Bartlett, also cautioned that it may understate the problem. “Most companies still have a long way to go in terms of properly assessing climate risk,” she told Reuters.

All of these studies offer similar warnings. The IPCC, which a number of leading climate scientists believe is overly conservative in its estimates, is working on an updated report about potential economic impacts to be released in 2021. But its 2014 report notes that while “estimates completed over the past 20 years vary…and depend on a large number of assumptions, many of which are disputable,” at the same time, “many estimates do not account for catastrophic changes, tipping points, and many other factors,” and “losses are more likely than not to be greater, rather than smaller, than” the models suggest.

n the other side of the ledger, there is a big potential payoff for saving our environment. A 2016 report by the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate estimated that $90 trillion will have to be spent on infrastructure worldwide through 2030, and while transitioning to a carbon-neutral economy would require more up-front capital, the total wouldn’t be significantly more over that time span. In their 2018 report, the researchers estimated that sustainable investments “could deliver a direct economic gain of US$26 trillion through to 2030 compared to business-as-usual.”

It is, of course, morally perverse to frame this debate in cold economic terms. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated in 2014 that heat stress, malaria, malnutrition, and other conditions that can will occur if we don’t tackle the problem could lead to 250,000 excess deaths each year between 2030 and 2050; a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine earlier this year concluded that WHO’s estimate had been way too conservative and projected that twice as many people would perish.

We shouldn’t focus solely on the economics. But if we want to spare future generations, we should turn the “How will we pay for it?” question around on those who aren’t calling for a Green New Deal to fight climate change. 

Bernie Sanders’s high-profile campaign for Medicare for All has pushed the Democratic Party’s conversation about health care reform to the left and opened up space for center-left Democrats to embrace proposals that might have seemed radical just a few years ago.

But while Sanders has made the proposal the centerpiece of his run for president, in 2017, he rejected the idea that support for his approach should be a litmus test for Democrats.

Many others on the left have done just that. But it’s important to be realistic about his bill’s chances of becoming law if the party wins big in 2020. Even if Democrats end up with a significant majority in the House and more than 50 seats in the Senate—and kill the filibuster—they won’t end up with progressive majorities in both chambers who will vote for Medicare for All.

A big reason for that is that public opinion surveys consistently find that mandating that everyone shift into Medicare, as Sanders would do, is significantly less popular than proposals for allowing individuals and businesses to opt in to the program voluntarily.

Both approaches, if designed well, could achieve the same broad goals—delivering comprehensive, universal coverage at lower costs to households, and better controlling system-wide costs. It’s hard to imagine centrist and center-left Dems rallying around Sanders’s approach when voters prefer a voluntary scheme that would come with a smaller price tag for the federal government and be easier to sell politically.

But an optional buy-in could be transformational only if it’s designed properly. The devil is in the details.

The Democratic presidential candidates have floated a number of different proposals for a “public option” approach to reform, but they vary widely in their ambition. So it’s important for progressives to understand the details—and, if Democrats end up with unified control in 2020, to be prepared to walk away from the negotiating process if key conditions aren’t met.

niversality should be first and foremost among these conditions—including immediately covering the estimated 4.9 million low-income people who were screwed as a result of red states’ refusing to expand their Medicaid programs. Reforms must also include assuring that vital benefits such as mental health care and prescription drugs are covered, and it must limit the costs of premiums, co-pays, and other out-of-pocket expenses so people don’t go bankrupt paying for necessary care.

Each of the five leading candidates, with the exception of Mayor Pete Buttigieg, has a major health care reform plan as part of their platform. In press interviews and a brief section on his website, Buttigieg has proposed a straightforward public option that would allow everyone under age 65 to buy into a Medicare-type plan at cost. (He separately proposed new incentives to expand access to health care in rural America.) This is the most modest iteration of a “public option,” and would leave Americans uninsured who can’t afford coverage or choose not to buy in. Everyone else in the top tier, including former vice president Joe Biden, has touted more aggressive reforms.

Biden’s plan is surprisingly ambitious for a candidate running as a moderate alternative to Trump. It would add a new public insurance option offered through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) exchanges, and would automatically enroll people in non-expansion states who make less than 138 percent of the federal poverty line. They would not be required to pay premiums. Everyone else—individuals and businesses—would have the option of buying in to the new public alternative, and Biden would contain their costs by significantly expanding the ACA’s subsidies and making them available to households whose income levels makes them ineligible for assistance now.

According to his campaign’s own estimate, his proposal would reduce the number of uninsured to 3 percent but ultimately fail the test of universality. And while Biden recently reversed his support for the Hyde Amendment—which bars federal funding for most abortions—and would cover all reproductive health care in his public option, his plan would not mandate coverage for mental health, dentistry, or vision care. (He vows to “redouble” his past “efforts to ensure enforcement of mental health parity laws and expand funding for mental health services.”)

Senator Elizabeth Warren has endorsed Sanders’s plan. It passes these tests with flying colors, offering everyone public insurance with more expansive benefits than is typical for countries with single-payer systems. There would be no premiums or co-pays.

Senator Kamala Harris proposes getting to a Medicare for All system that is closer to the existing Medicare program in that private insurers would still be able to sell highly regulated Medicare-compliant plans. Like Sanders’s plan, it would improve Medicare’s coverage to include dental, vision, prescription drugs, and hearing aids. Her proposal envisions a 10-year transition period to get there. (Sanders’s plan would phase in over four years.)

Harris’s transitional plan appears to be modeled on the Medicare for America Act, a bill introduced in the House by Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and over a dozen co-sponsors. It’s a plan that’s worth considering in detail, because it is also a comprehensive, transformative proposal that passes these litmus tests and might attract support from the Democratic Party’s different factions.

It shares three vitally important features of Medicare for All, all of which distinguish it from more modest “public option” schemes. First, like Sanders’s bill, Medicare for America would offer automatic enrollment. Every newborn would be enrolled in the program at birth, as would everyone who is currently uninsured. If someone without coverage requires care, they could simply go to a doctor, clinic, or hospital, get covered and receive treatment. Their premiums, calculated on a sliding scale, would be added to their federal taxes. Anyone whose income is under 200 percent of the federal poverty line would not have to pay for their coverage.

This is important for achieving a universal system. There’s a common belief that in countries with single-payer systems, the government simply covers everyone out of general tax revenues, but that’s a misconception. As Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker told me in an interview a couple of years back, “in other countries, you’re basically guaranteed coverage and then they figure out how to pay for it. Some of that money may come from you, some will come from your employer and some of it will come from general funds. We don’t have that approach. People who don’t have coverage from their employers have to figure out how to sign up—either for Medicaid, or through the exchanges.” Medicare for America and Medicare for All would both bring that cover-first approach to our system.

Second, Medicare for America would roll Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, both of which are administered by the states with federal oversight, into the Medicare program. This provision, also in the Sanders bill and Harris’s transition plan, is vitally important not only because 14 red states continue to refuse the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, but also because those states generally tend to have narrower eligibility requirements and stingier benefits than their blue counterparts.

Harris’s and Sanders’s proposals and Medicare for America would all be financed in large part with new taxes on the wealthiest Americans. They vary in the specifics, but they share the philosophy of using the system to make those at the top pay their fair share.

Medicare for America and Harris’s transitional plan both control costs to individuals by increasing premium subsidies and placing caps on out-of-pocket expenses. Harris’s campaign has said she’d cap out-of-pocket expenses at $200 per year, but offers no other details. Under DeLauro’s proposal, those making less than twice the federal poverty line, or who don’t have to pay federal income taxes, wouldn’t have to pay premiums. People who make more than that would have theirs subsidized on a sliding scale up to six times the poverty line, or around $150,000 for a family of four.

The three proposals differ in that Sanders’s Medicare for All proposal would eliminate almost all private insurance, Harris’s plan would allow private insurers to sell policies through the government-run program, and DeLauro’s bill would allow businesses to continue to offer private insurance outside of Medicare as long as it is “gold-level” coverage.

Over the long run, advocates of this kind of optional approach believe that most people would end up in Medicare because it is more efficient than private insurers and would contain costs by setting prices for a very large pool of insured. That would make it more attractive than what private insurers could offer, and since newborns would be covered and people would be automatically enrolled in Medicare when they lose other coverage, over time the system would end up looking like Medicare for All. (If Sanders’s proposal were implemented, some people—veterans, those who receive care from the Indian Health Service and those who require long-term care under Medicaid—would also remain covered by a payer other than Medicare.)

Despite the usual hand-wringing of pundits and moderate Democrats about the party moving too far to the left on health care, Democrats are in a good place heading into 2020. Republicans have thoroughly discredited themselves on this issue with repeated, highly unpopular attempts to strip coverage from people and kill protections for those with preexisting conditions. As for the Dems, after pre-compromising on the Affordable Care Act, even the moderate candidates are pushing for some relatively ambitious reforms.

The left should continue to make demands based on our values, but in the end we need to make sure that when legislators meet in the middle it ends up more like Medicare for America or Kamala Harris’s proposal than what Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden are offering.

In some corners of the Internet, the hostilities that began during the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries appear to be as heated today as they were three years ago. That isn’t typical. The 2008 primaries, for example, were just as hard-fought—and at times nasty—but the animosity that simmered between Obama and Clinton supporters was largely forgotten by the time the general election was settled.

According to widely held conventional wisdom, this dynamic endures because the Sanders campaign exposed a serious ideological rift in the Democratic coalition between pragmatic, center-left Democrats and their more progressive rivals. Those who subscribe to this theory portray the conflict as a “battle for the heart and soul” of the party.

It’s true that there are real and substantive ideological disagreements within Democratic and progressive circles, something that’s being highlighted as the 2020 candidates carve out their positions on immigration, Medicare for All, and more. Big, schismatic and often unwieldy coalitions are inherent to a two-party system, and the 2016 campaign did highlight intra-coalition disputes over ideology, policy, and strategy that long preceded those primaries.

But the evidence suggests that while the Democratic coalition writ large differs on specific policies and tactics, it is relatively unified in its ideological turns. Progressive strategist Sean McElwee is overly confident when he says that “the progressive domination of the Democratic Party is palpable,” but it is true that a major shift has taken place, and the party is in a far more progressive place than it was 20 years ago, when the dominant faction within the coalition was calling for smaller government, less intervention in the economy, and lower taxes. None of the 24 presidential candidates in this campaign opposes reproductive freedom or brags about having an A rating from the NRA. Earlier this year, Pew found that Democrats are “largely united on immigration, same-sex marriage and race.”

Those who supported Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton in 2016 also didn’t fit neatly on a left-right axis. According to the cumulative 2016 primary exit polls (conducted in 27 states with diverse electorates), Bernie Sanders defeated Hillary Clinton by a 2-1 margin among primary voters who wanted the next president to pursue “more liberal” policies than Obama, but he also won narrowly among voters who favored “less liberal” policies. (Clinton won the largest group—those who wanted the party to continue the policy agenda that Obama had pursued during his two terms in office.)

Those are broad terms. Lee Drutman, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, conducted a study using traditional research questions to get at the ideological differences between the candidates’ supporters. He created a data set based on repeated interviews with the same voters over time, and he concluded that there were only modest policy differences between Sanders and Clinton voters in 2016. “There’s not a lot of divide on ideology,” he told me in 2017. “Across a wide range of issues, Clinton’s primary voters looked a lot like Sanders’s voters. The party is more united on first principles than the Republican Party is.” The larger divide, which some might argue is ideological in a sense, was that Clinton supporters tended to have more faith in our institutions than those who backed Sanders.

By contrast, Drutman found that Republican voters are far more deeply divided along ideological lines than are Democrats, a finding that Georgetown’s Hans Noel echoed in his research. While “both the Republican and Democratic parties are internally divided,” Noel wrote, “among Democrats, the cleavage is mild.” This shouldn’t be a surprise; a recent study by four political scientists found that those who identify as progressives and liberals “do not significantly differ in issue positions, issue priorities, or feelings toward Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders,” and what differences did exist seem “to be more social than policy-based.”

So why does the conflict from a three-year-old primary contest remain so raw?

One likely reason is the amplification effect of social media. We’re watching a bitter food-fight between very online activists with outsize followings. In 2008, only six million adults were reportedly on Twitter worldwide. By mid-2017, that number had grown to 328 million.

But another reason for the continuing intensity of the conflict, one that fits better with the data, is that it remains an open wound because it was deeply wrapped up in identity.

While there wasn’t a neat cleavage between Sanders and Clinton supporters’ ideological positions, the demographic splits were pretty stark. Clinton won among nonwhites 71-28 (and among African Americans 78-21), and Sanders won among young voters by an identical 71-28 margin. (Men were evenly divided, but women broke for Clinton 62-37.)

When political divisions are grounded in identity rather than ideological and policy differences, they’re far more toxic and enduring. Think about white Southerners’ abandoning the Democratic Party en masse in the years after Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Civil Rights Act of 1965. Or Latinx (and other groups’) support for the California GOP cratering after then-Governor Pete Wilson pushed Prop 187, an anti-immigrant law so harsh that they saw it as a direct threat to their existence.

Ideological differences are no doubt significantly more pronounced among activists than rank-and-file voters, but much of their conflict is also grounded in the demographic divides between the Sanders and Clinton coalitions. If your social media timeline looks anything like mine, the fight over whether Sanders supporters are sexist “Bernie bros” is still intense. Clinton backers have long insisted that it’s a valid archetype, while Sanders supporters say it’s a slur that erases young people of color, the majority of whom appear to have gone for Sanders, and the women who voted for him.

Consider the continuing tensions between Black Lives Matters activists and strong Sanders supporters—a conflict that began when the former interrupted several Sanders speeches during the 2016 campaign. Some Sanders supporters assumed that BLM activists would see Sanders as a natural ally because of his focus on economic inequality; many BLM activists resented that, and argued that Sanders failed to substantively address race in his campaign. Clinton’s more ardent supporters are quick to remind you about Susan Sarandon’s suggesting that people like them were “voting with [their] vagina,” and supported her “JUST because she’s a woman,” and those in the opposing camp are just as likely to bring up Gloria Steinem’s contention that younger women were breaking toward Sanders only because they were thinking, “Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.” These weren’t debates about the merits of social democracy relative to democratic socialism or which candidate had the better approach to health care or the college debt crisis.

What began as political differences during the early stages of the 2016 have deepened and become wrapped up in identity. They are now to a significant degree tribal conflicts, with each side recalling past slights and embracing a common set of shared beliefs about the nature of the Democratic Party, why Trump won—and how Clinton won the primaries—and about which group has treated the other with more disdain, among other matters of faith.

Meanwhile, poll after poll finds that rank-and-file Democrats are less interested in the ideological “battle for the heart and soul of their party” that pundits and political junkies embrace than they are in just beating Trump. That may prove to be a problem for the Sanders campaign, which is once again running against both the GOP and the Democratic establishment.

Let’s hope that the hunger to defeat both a president that virtually everyone in the coalition finds utterly abhorrent and an emboldened white nationalist movement means the conflict that ripped Democratic activists in 2016 doesn’t reignite in 2020.

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell told reporters that the left’s fury over Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court will “blow over”—but he’s dead wrong. McConnell blocked dozens of Barack Obama’s nominees, prevented Merrick Garland from getting even a nomination hearing, and has twice exercised the “nuclear option” to make it easier for Trump to pack federal courts with judges of his choice. His overreach is pushing Democrats and progressives to revisit fundamental assumptions about how the Supreme Court operates. Today’s fiercely partisan Court is poised to veto much of the progressive agenda for decades after the Trump regime has left office, and there’s a growing awareness that Democrats and the left must prevent that from happening.

But how? There has been a lot of discussion lately about adding additional justices to “rebalance” the Court if Dems win big in 2020. Pete Buttigieg was the first presidential candidate to come out in favor of it. “In some ways, it’s no more a shattering of norms than what’s already been done to get the judiciary to where it is today,” he said at a campaign event in February. Nine other contenders for the Democratic nomination in 2020 are at least open to the idea, according to The Washington Post.

It’s easy to understand the appeal of simply appointing two (or four or six) liberal justices. But packing the Court is just one potential avenue of reform among many ideas that have long circulated among legal experts. I spoke to a range of scholars about how progressives should approach the right wing’s perversion of the nominating process and systematic capture of the Supreme Court. Some of those I spoke to believed that expanding the Court may be necessary, while others said they favored changing the way justices are selected, limiting their tenure on the Court, restructuring the Court, or even limiting its powers. Most of these potential reforms aren’t mutually exclusive. All are fraught in one way or another.

This is a political moment when all options should be on the table. Since the Court’s relatively brief period of liberal jurisprudence in the middle of the last century, Court watchers on the left have tended to criticize individual rulings that they believed were poorly decided, while conservatives railed against the legitimacy of the institution itself. But the right’s arguments about “robed tyrants” thwarting the will of the majority actually originated on the left, when the “Lochner era” Court was striking down large swaths of the New Deal. Conservatives co-opted that analysis a couple of decades later, as the Warren Court moved to end legal segregation, strengthen prisoners’ rights, and lay the groundwork for Roe v. Wade. Now, the left appears to be in the process of reclaiming that structural critique at a moment when there’s hunger for aggressive action on a host of issues—from climate change to health care—that the Court could potentially block or undo.

Here are the major proposals that emerged from my conversations with legal experts, along with their potential advantages and risks.

Packing the Court

San Francisco State University political scientist Aaron Belkin says growing the number of justices isn’t grounded only in a desire to exact revenge for McConnell’s shamelessness. Rather, his argument echoes a central philosophy of law enforcement—that impunity for antisocial behavior encourages more of it. “There needs to be a political penalty imposed for the theft of the courts,” he said. “I believe that penalty should be proportionate and should nullify the effects of theft in a direct and straightforward way. So, it can’t be like, ‘You stole the courts, and now we’re going raise taxes on the wealthy in response.’ There has to be a direct connection between the penalty and the effects of the theft.”

Democrats must grapple with two arguments against “rebalancing the Court.” The first, and most common, is that it would result in massive political blowback. It’s not hard to imagine Republicans riding a new Tea Party wave back to power, re-packing the Court in their favor and blaming Democrats for establishing the precedent.

Belkin worries about that scenario. But he argues that “Republicans have been trained to believe that Democrats cheat for at least 50 years. And given their profound, deep belief that Democrats cheat, it’s probably baked into their turnout numbers.”

The other argument against Court-packing, alone, is more fundamental. Samuel Moyn, a professor of law and history at Yale, said that the anti-majoritarian nature of the institution is the structural problem that we should address. Adding justices, he said, “changes the personnel on the Court and the balance of power on the Court without changing the power of the Court.”

Moyn explained that in the 1930s, the mere threat of court-packing by Franklin Roosevelt compelled that era’s conservative justices to adopt the doctrine of judicial restraint that ultimately allowed Roosevelt to enact the New Deal. But that had the consequence of reinforcing the legitimacy of five unelected justices who are insulated from public opinion thanks to their lifetime appointments, enjoying veto power over laws enacted through the democratic process. (Political scientist David Faris, author of It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics, proposes that if Democrats are in a position to expand the Court, they should use the threat of doing so to demand Justice Gorsuch’s resignation.)

Limiting the Supreme Court’s Anti-Majoritarian Nature

If the Court’s antidemocratic nature is the real problem, other proposals could mitigate that. One is known as “jurisdiction-stripping,” i.e., limiting the kinds of issues and cases the courts can address. Moyn explained that if a party controls both chambers of Congress and the White House, “you can basically say, under Article Three of the Constitution, what the judiciary is allowed to do. What kind of cases the judiciary can take is up to Congress.”

There are potential problems with this approach. First, like any other act of Congress, it would be subject to review by the Court itself. Moyn believes that Court-stripping would not run into separation-of-powers issues–and he’s not alone—but several other scholars I spoke with believed it would run afoul of the Constitution. Given that this is a hot controversy within the legal community, the current Court wouldn’t have much trouble justifying a ruling that kept its powers intact. And, like Court-packing, it could invite tit-for-tat moves by the GOP. When they regained power, they could just turn around and bar the Court from hearing the kinds of cases that liberals tend to pursue.

A straightforward but risky alternative would be to embrace a concept known as “departmentalism.” Simply put, the founders envisioned the three branches of government as being co-equals, and there’s nothing in either the Constitution or the Court’s ruling in Marbury v. Madison—the landmark case that led to judicial review—that explicitly empowers the Court to overrule the other co-equal branches of government.

Ending judicial review is a radical idea, but one that’s consistent with what many of the founders saw as the Court’s proper role. In the Texas Law Review, Harvard legal scholar Richard Fallon Jr. wrote that “during the early years of U.S. history, it was widely believed that each branch or department of government should interpret the Constitution for itself, without any branch’s interpretation necessarily binding the others. Thomas Jefferson held this position…for all of his life. So did James Madison.”

In theory, a Democratic president with a supportive Congress could emulate Andrew Jackson, who famously (and probably apocryphally) responded to a Supreme Court ruling he didn’t like by saying that then–Chief Justice John Marshall “has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”

But there’s a fundamental danger in limiting the Court’s powers, or even delegitimizing it as Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans have done over the past few years. For all its flaws, the Court is nonetheless responsible for defending Americans’ civil liberties from the political branches.

“Be careful what you wish for,” New York University legal scholar Melissa Murray told me. “Is the court’s role to reflect majoritarian politics in some way, or does the Court have an institutional obligation to protect vulnerable groups from the tyranny of the majority?” She pointed to decisions like Obergefell v. Hodges, which struck down bans on same-sex marriage, Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down anti-sodomy laws once used to persecute the LGBTQ community, and Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, which barred states from banning abortion through the back door by regulating providers out of existence. And decisions like Boumediene v. Bush, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and Rasul v. Bush, set important limits on the George W. Bush administration’s prosecution of its “War on Terror.”

But not all legal experts agree that the Court is an effective protector of minority rights. Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law and author of The Case Against the Supreme Court, told me that he Court has often been an effective veto against unconstitutional legislation, but by and large it hasn’t done a great job protecting vulnerable groups of people. “The Supreme Court has often failed, at the most important times, at its most important tasks,” he said. “When you look at the Supreme Court’s record in regard to race, it’s been dismal. When you look at the Supreme Court’s record in regard to protecting rights during times of crisis, it’s been dismal.”

There is one way to limit the Court’s ability to push around the other branches of government without gutting its ability to strike down unconstitutional laws entirely. There’s nothing in the Constitution that says it must render decisions by a simple majority. If Dems controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress, they could pass a law requiring decisions be supported by a supermajority, say 6-3 or even 7-2. In theory, that alone could prevent the Trump Supreme Court from running roughshod over the Democratic agenda for a generation to come without expanding the number of its seats or barring it from considering civil-rights cases.

Reforming the Confirmation Process

Whether Democrats seek to pack or defang the Court, there are other issues to consider. Given how high the stakes are in controlling the Court, the parties now have incentives to privilege partisan or ideological reliability over legal talent and judicial temperament. Even setting aside the assault allegations against him, Brett Kavanaugh, with his intense partisan animus and quick temper, is a good example.

To address this, Erwin Chemerinsky proposed a merit-based system for selecting federal judges. “Any president could do this,” he told me, “and it wouldn’t require a constitutional amendment.” The idea would be to set up a bipartisan panel of experts, and then require a supermajority to agree on a handful of top jurists for the president to pick from. He points out that Jimmy Carter established just such a scheme for choosing appellate judges, and argued that it might offer a solution to “the intense partisanship that we now have in regard to the confirmation process.” The problem with this approach is that it establishes a norm for future presidents to adhere to and, as we’ve learned, such norms don’t constrain people like Donald Trump.

Ending Lifetime Appointments

Court watchers have long seen term limits for Supreme Court justices as a way of lowering the stakes around confirmations. Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) told The Daily Beast that term limits have “been discussed” on the Hill. He floated the idea of enacting terms “such that every presidency had a certain number of predictable Supreme Court seats.” One proposal that’s popular among reform advocates is 18-year terms that result in one seat turning over every two years.

Term limits alone may not be sufficient for this moment, but it would be an important reform. “We kind of take lifetime tenure for granted,” said Carolyn Shapiro, the founder and co-director of Chicago-Kent law school’s Institute on the Supreme Court of the United States. “But if you think about giving somebody the amount of power these people have for 30 or 40 years in a democracy, it is kind of insane.”

Most proposals for term limits require amending the Constitution, which says that federal judges “shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour.” But Shapiro points out that the Constitution gives Congress broad latitude in structuring the Court and a party with unified control could effectively create Supreme Court term limits by “restructur[ing] the way the courts are set up and how the personnel are assigned.” She noted that while the Constitution guarantees lifetime appointments to the federal bench, it “doesn’t say you get appointed to be a particular [kind of] judge.

That latitude is central to an idea proposed by Daniel Epps at Washington University in St. Louis and Vanderbilt’s Ganesh Sitaraman. They suggested that instead of having nine permanent justices presiding over the Court, lower-court judges would be rotated onto the bench to hear cases for short periods of time. Under their proposal, all federal appeals-court judges would be made associate justices of the Supreme Court, and then nine of them would be selected at random to sit on the bench for two-week periods. It’s an elegant idea that would certainly decrease the power of any single judge and make it impossible for a justice “to advance an ideological agenda over decades of service or develop a cult of personality among partisans.” It would also increase the geographic and educational diversity of the Court.

A real drawback to that idea is that Republicans have been relentless in packing the lower courts with reliably conservative jurists. As Melissa Murray pointed out, “If you’re a progressive who’s worried about the Court going in a rightward direction, you should be really worried about the lower courts.” So one way to limit the terms for federal judges to an extent—and require that they have a certain amount of experience—would be by establishing a minimum age to be nominated for a judgeship.

he ideas for reform outlined above aren’t mutually exclusive. If Democrats kill the legislative filibuster, which they should, they could expand—or “unsteal”—the Court, create a merit-based selection system for choosing federal judges over the age of, say, 45 and then rotate them in and out of the Supreme Court on a regular basis. Everything should be part of the discussion.

The key here is that we shouldn’t limit the debate now emerging to whether Democrats should add a couple of justices if they get an opportunity to do so. We need to think more broadly about how to restore the Court’s legitimacy—and bring some decorum to our circus-like confirmation process—without continuing to aggravate its partisan nature and reinforcing its antidemocratic nature.

Even the redacted version of Robert Mueller’s report is effectively an impeachment referral. His team found that eight of the 10 acts of apparent obstruction of justice they looked at satisfied the Justice Department’s three criteria for charging someone with a crime. The special counsel didn’t do so because he was bound by a Department of Justice legal opinion that a sitting president can’t be indicted, and Mueller made it clear that it is properly the role of Congress, not the executive branch, to rein in a corrupt and lawless president.

On its face, that imposes a duty on House Democrats, all of whom swore a solemn oath to defend the Constitution. But given that it’s almost certain that the Senate would not remove Trump from office if the House indicts him (at least 20 of the Senate’s 53 Republicans would have to vote to convict), there are two prevailing arguments against pursuing impeachment. Both are political.

The first, articulated by Senator Bernie Sanders at a town hall this week, is that impeachment would distract from the Democrats’ core messages. “If for the next year, year-and-a-half, going right into the heart of the election, all that the Congress is talking about is impeaching Trump…and we’re not talking about health care…and all of the issues that concern ordinary Americans,” then impeachment would ultimately work “to Trump’s advantage,” he said, according to CNN.

The problem with that argument is that it presents Trump’s contempt for the law as something that occurred in the past and that Democrats can choose to pursue or move past as the political circumstances dictate. But impunity always breeds more lawlessness, and there’s plenty of evidence that Trump plans to continue to act without regard for the law. The New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer reported that having reached the legal limits of its campaign against Central American refugees, the Trump regime is putting increasing pressure on the Department of Homeland Security to flout those laws and that “there’s a view now that we should be pushing the legal limits,” an unnamed DHS official told Blitzer, because “we’re going to win at the Supreme Court.” And shortly after Attorney General William Barr’s four-page summary of the report asserted that Mueller exonerated him, Trump told Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan that he should violate the law if that’s what it takes to bar Central American refugees from applying for asylum and promised that if McAleenan faced any personal liability as a consequence, Trump would pardon him, according to CNN.

Trump also instructed his Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to defy clear black-letter law by refusing to release his tax records to the House Ways and Means Committee. And in just the past week, the regime has sued House Oversight Committee Chair Elijah Cummings (D-MD) and Trump’s own accounting firm to quash a subpoena seeking additional financial information pertaining to the president’s business interests and ordered then–White House security director Carl Kline, who issued security clearances to senior regime personnel over the objections of career national security officials, to ignore subpoenas from House committees charged with overseeing the executive branch. Trump did the same with now-former White House counsel Don McGahn, who was present at a number of key moments detailed in the Mueller report. (McGahn was mentioned 150 times.) And that’s just the beginning; Trump later told reporters, “We’re fighting all the subpoenas.”

Trump is practically daring Democrats to stop him, and their options for doing so are limited. The House can and should hold intransigent officials in contempt of Congress, as it did this week with one regime official, but Barr’s Justice Department would have to enforce sanctions for criminal contempt. (Congress has that power in theory, but the Supreme Court concluded that it could not be used to compel the cooperation of executive branch officials if the president invokes executive privilege.) That leaves them with the option of a civil contempt process—they can sue—but as Elie Mystal pointed out, that would probably drag on past the 2020 elections.

So this isn’t just about the Mueller report. It’s also a separation-of-powers issue. Trump, armed with a facile talking point equating congressional oversight with presidential harassment, isn’t defying some minor norm. The founders foresaw the possibility of an authoritarian president consolidating power, and impeachment was the tool they gave Congress to protect the integrity of the republic in such a scenario.

Some argue that it’s premature to move to impeachment. But it isn’t necessary for Democrats to launch a formal impeachment process at this time. They could instead begin an impeachment inquiry—a preliminary step in the Rules Committee, which might accomplish two important things. First, it would serve as a shot across Trump’s bow, a warning that he cannot continue to thwart Congress’s constitutional powers without consequences. Second, it would provide a bulletproof legal rationale for the House to pursue testimony from regime officials, Trump’s financial records and an unredacted copy of the Mueller report.

he second argument against impeachment is that it might fire up Trump’s base and spark a backlash against Democrats that could propel him to a second term in 2020. This argument is largely premised on Republicans’ experience impeaching Bill Clinton in the late 1990s. As his former press secretary Joe Lockhart wrote in The Washington Post, “Nothing will unite an increasingly fraying Republican Party more than trying to remove the president anywhere but at the ballot box. Democrats risk the kind of overreach that doomed the Republicans 20 years ago.”

Lockhart acknowledges that there’s a big difference between impeaching a president for lying about sex and holding one accountable for serious crimes. But more important, when Republicans went after Clinton, 63 percent of Americans approved of his job as president, and only 34 percent disapproved, according to Gallup. His approval ratings dipped below 60 percent in just three of the 19 surveys Gallup conducted in the previous year. Trump, on the other hand, is historically unpopular. His net approval rating dropped into negative territory on the 15th day of his presidency, according to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average, and hasn’t come close to recovering since then. His approval rating has consistently bounced between the high 30s and the low 40s for the past 20 months.

Given how fixed public opinion of Trump has been, there’s good reason to believe that Democrats would benefit politically from pursuing impeachment. Most Americans will never read the redacted Mueller report and are getting their information through their preferred media. If your primary source of information is the conservative media or your Facebook friends, you probably believe that Mueller found no evidence of wrongdoing. So while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was correct when she said that “the facts regarding holding the president accountable can be gained outside of impeachment hearings,” a major virtue of impeachment hearings—or hearings pursuant to an impeachment inquiry—is that they would be must-see TV. All the networks would carry them live, and tens of millions of people would tune in and hear from the witnesses and see the evidence against Trump directly.

The Mueller report is incredibly damning, detailing not only Trump’s persistent attempts to obstruct justice but also his venality and incompetence. It showed that once in office, he repeatedly ordered politically motivated prosecutions of Democrats and law enforcement personnel and that he avoided committing more offenses only when his staff ignored those orders. Making sure that the public understands the full scope of what Mueller’s team found can only damage Trump heading into next year’s election.

Trump’s core followers will be motivated to turn out next year regardless. At the same time, it’s not hard to imagine Democratic voters becoming demoralized if Congress sits on its hands and Trump spends the next 18 months claiming that their unwillingness to hold him accountable proves that it was a witch hunt all along. It was one thing to assure the Democratic base that it was unwise to pursue impeachment before the facts were in, but it’s another to say that even though Mueller’s report lays out a damning case against the president, now is not the time to do anything about it because elections are coming up next year.

So Democrats should let the presidential candidates talk about how they would improve people’s lives while the House reveals the full extent of Trump’s perfidy in a series of high-profile hearings. It may be true that only about 40 percent of Americans currently favor impeachment, but that’s twice as high as the 19 percent who favored impeaching Richard Nixon at the beginning of that process, according to Gallup. And over the course of the Watergate hearings, the share of respondents who believed Nixon’s crimes were worthy of impeachment tripled.

The founders gave Congress one constitutional remedy for a corrupt and lawless president. Failing to use it because of political concerns or because the Senate is unlikely to convict would not only signal to Trump that he’s above the law but also make it clear to future presidents that impeachment is too politically fraught to serve as a practical check on their power and that they would have to adhere to the law only if the opposing party controls the House and has a big majority in the Senate.

That’s a bad precedent to establish. Fortunately, reining in Trump with at least an impeachment inquiry is not only a constitutional imperative. There’s also good reason to believe that it would be smart politics heading into 2020.

On Thursday, Attorney General William Barr is expected to send a redacted copy of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report to Congress. While Barr’s letter said that Mueller’s team had found no chargeable evidence that the campaign conspired with the Russian government in 2016, Trump’s inner circle are reportedly worried that new details about his attempts to obstruct justice would emerge.

During his confirmation hearing last year, Barr had vowed to be as transparent as he possibly could within the bounds of the law. He hasn’t kept his word. Last week, he locked horns with Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, who have insisted that he hand over the entire report and all of the materials on which it was based. When testifying, he offered a number of legal justifications for why he couldn’t release the full report. A number of outside legal experts, though, say his claims were false.

Last month, Barr released a four-page summary of Mueller’s findings, which Trump then touted it as “total exoneration.” In response, some members of Mueller’s team leaked, through associates, that they were unhappy with Barr’s handling of their report, including his refusal to release multiple summaries that they had written for public consumption. Since then, Barr has claimed broad authority to withhold virtually any damning information about Trump and his associates, at least in theory. Barr said that he had no choice but to redact information that falls into any of these four buckets: information from ongoing investigations; intelligence findings that could reveal “sources or methods”; any information that would “infringe on the privacy and reputational interests of peripheral third parties” who had not been charged with a crime; and grand-jury testimony.

It’s no surprise that the Department of Justice would seek to protect ongoing investigations, but, as House Democrats pointed out, when Republicans held the committee gavels during the previous Congress, the DOJ gave them “thousands of pages of highly sensitive law enforcement and classified investigatory and deliberative records,” many of which “were related to this very same investigation—which of course was open and ongoing at the time [emphasis theirs].”

While the public should never expect to see any classified information that may be contained in Mueller’s report, the House and Senate Intelligence Committees have secure facilities to review classified information, and they do so on a regular basis. What’s more, Vicki Divoll, former general counsel of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote in The New York Times that under the provisions of the Patriot Act and the National Security Act, “federal law requires that the attorney general provide to the director of national intelligence any foreign intelligence information collected during a criminal investigation. Then the director must by law provide it to the intelligence committees of Congress.” So not only can Barr release that information to Congress, he must produce it via the office of Director of National Security Dan Coats.

Withholding information that would “infringe on the privacy and reputational interests of peripheral third parties” is the most arbitrary, and potentially the most expansive, of Barr’s criteria. The Justice Department operates under a legal guidance that a sitting president cannot be indicted while in office, so at least in theory Barr could decide that since Donald Trump wasn’t charged with a crime, his “reputational interests” must be protected.

Last week, Barr told members of the Judiciary Committee that he had no choice in the matter because the law requires that a special counsel follow all Justice Department guidelines in the course of an investigation, and they include such a provision. But Columbia University legal scholar Jeffrey Fagan said, in an e-mail exchange, that the guideline is “very elastic.” (Barr cited the furor over James Comey breaching those protocols to reveal such details about the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server to bolster his argument.) And while Mueller’s team had to abide by that part of the special-counsel statute, the attorney general does not—he has the power to determine that the public’s interest in knowing what happened in 2016 outweighs any individual’s “reputational interests.”

Barr also claimed that a recent court ruling precluded him from releasing grand-jury material. According to the decision handed down two weeks ago, judges don’t have inherent authority to release grand-jury testimony, meaning they can’t order their release for reasons other than those spelled out in the law. But Fagan says that Barr could ask a judge to do so under the existing statute. “All he has to do is be somewhat creative and cautious at the same time, reassuring the court that this is not new law or precedent,” he said, adding: “If he wanted to. Which it seems he doesn’t. Which is not a surprise to anyone. It’s obvious that he’s playing both sides of that divide in this case, employing a strategy tailored to suit his patron at the White House.”

The House Judiciary Committee has authorized a subpoena for the entire Mueller report, and Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) told Politico that they would wait to see Barr’s redacted version before serving it. Barr has taken a good deal of fire from the legal community for his dissembling, and may yet relent. If he doesn’t, we’re heading for a court fight.

And that’s where things may get interesting. One of the exceptions to the law barring release of grand-jury testimony allows a judge to order it unsealed “preliminary to or in connection with a judicial proceeding.” Most legal experts think an investigation by the Judiciary Committee would qualify as a judicial proceeding and that the exception should apply in this case. But if the Department of Justice found the right judge, he or she could see it differently.

If that were to pass, House Democrats would have one trump card in their pocket: impeachment. An impeachment hearing, after all, is unquestionably a judicial proceeding. That was established when a court ordered material from the grand jury investigating Watergate to be handed over to House investigators who were at that point considering impeaching Richard Nixon. In 1974, Federal Judge John Sirica wrote that “it seems incredible that grand jury matters should lawfully be available to disbarment committees and police disciplinary investigations and yet be unavailable to the House of Representatives in a proceeding of so great import as an impeachment investigation.”

Washington is reportedly “bracing” for “Mueller week.” The Wall Street Journal reported that congressional offices “have stockpiled whiskey and drafted pizza orders in anticipation” of speed-reading the 400-page report.

Meanwhile, the White House is preparing a counter-report, and according to The New York Times, “Trump’s plan of attack, aides said, is to act as if the report itself is extraneous to Mr. Barr’s brief letter.” That’s unlikely to fly with Jerry Nadler’s committee, and it looks increasingly likely that the next stage of this two-year saga will culminate in a “judicial process” of one sort or another.

Calls for restoring “civility” have become ubiquitous in the Trump era. After a few Trump regime officials were confronted at restaurants in the DC area, Karl Salzmann argued at National Review that Americans must adhere to “a conservative sense of reasonableness or civic order” because “in the absence of civility, democracy becomes mob rule.” A few months earlier, David French, the magazine’s prominent NeverTrump conservative, wrote that “it’s imperative to read the best expression of the opposing side’s point of view. Reading only the worst (as entertaining as that can be) is inherently deceptive. It can wrongly confirm your own self-righteousness and wrongly demonize your opponent.”

Then, in the midst of all of this performative tut-tutting, the entire Republican Party and its media apparatus coalesced around the wildly uncivil claim that one of our two major parties is quite literally trying to make it legal to murder newborn babies.

“Infanticide” is the word of the day in conservative circles, and none of the people decrying the lack of manners in American politics has batted an eye over a truly outrageous charge.

David French appears to have forgotten the importance of reading “the best expression of the opposing side’s point of view” when he wrote that a proposed Virginia law that would have eased certain restrictions on later abortions promoted “infanticide” and “barbarism.”

French would claim that this wasn’t an outrageous insult to America’s pro-choice majority because under the new law “virtually any claim of impairment would suffice” to justify taking the life of a fully formed, completely viable, living infant.” He worries that women will carry a pregnancy deep into the third trimester and then terminate it on a whim. But, as Michelle Goldberg wrote for The New York Times, “there’s contempt for women embedded in the idea that, absent legal prohibition, someone on the verge of giving birth might instead terminate her pregnancy to avoid the brutalities of labor.”

And make no mistake—conflating abortion with killing babies is as factually accurate as claiming that conservatives eat puppies. The reality is that Roe v. Wade, and subsequent court rulings, allowed states to ban abortions after the point of viability, except when an abortion is necessary to protect the life or health of the woman carrying a fetus. Now, with the Trump Supreme Court widely anticipated to overturn Roe in the coming years, a number of states are taking a fresh look at their restrictions on later abortions, and some have moved to codify Roe’s terms in their own legal codes. These are efforts to protect what has been the legal status quo on abortion in this country for almost a half century.

These efforts are a response to a very real threat. Red states have been passing a flurry of new legislation to sharply curtail access to abortion or ban it outright. In recent weeks, anti-choice lawmakers in Georgia offered a “fetal heartbeat law” that would ban abortions early in the first trimester, when many women don’t yet know that they’re pregnant, and another bill that would make abortion a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison if Roe is struck down. Governor Brian Kemp supports both measures. And last week, lawmakers in Montana considered a referendum that would amend the state Constitution to ban all abortions.

Later abortions are rare, representing around 1 percent of the procedures in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Nearly nine in 10 abortions occur before 12 weeks of gestation, according to the Guttmacher Institute.) We don’t have solid data on why women seek later abortions, but anecdotal evidence suggests that in many cases it’s a matter of tragic and traumatic medical emergencies. That was the case for Erika Christensen, a 35-year-old woman who decided to terminate a pregnancy she and her husband very much wanted to carry to term when, at 32 weeks, doctors told them that the fetus couldn’t breathe outside the womb and would not survive.

There doesn’t seem much point in calling out conservative hypocrisy in the age of Trump. But it doesn’t get a lot clearer than a party which claims to stand for limited government—and that argued that the Affordable Care Act would place faceless bureaucrats between doctors and their patients—insisting that if you don’t favor onerous regulations on what are often the most painful experiences in a person’s life, you want to murder babies.

As for the hypocrisy of decrying the lack of civility in our discourse in one breath while accusing their opponents of literally wanting to murder babies, the public’s been inoculated against seeing the outrageous demagoguery of that claim through sheer repetition.

And there’s good reason to believe that even most anti-choice activists don’t actually believe that abortion is the moral equivalent of murder. As Steve Chapman argued in the Los Angeles Times, when they’re pressed on what punishment should be meted out to women who “murder their babies,” anti-choicers almost always demur. “If abortion is morally indistinguishable from killing a newborn, though, why shouldn’t those who procure abortions be severely punished?” asked Chapman.

When Kevin Williamson lost his gig at The Atlantic for suggesting that women who get an abortion should be hanged, he claimed that he had only been “making a point about the sloppy rhetoric of the abortion debate,” and nobody should have taken him literally. When Donald Trump suggested that women should face some form of punishment for seeking an abortion, Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund, insisted that “no pro-lifer would ever want to punish a woman who has chosen abortion. We invite a woman who has gone down this route to consider paths to healing, not punishment.” “Healing” isn’t an appropriate punishment for homicide.

So it’s a rhetorical choice, and a dangerous one. It takes just one unstable person to embrace the idea that abortion is murder and take it to its logical conclusion—that it’s morally acceptable to commit acts of violence to prevent abortion. That logic motivated Rachelle Shannon to shoot and wound an abortion provider named George Tiller in 1993, and Scott Roeder to succeed in murdering him 13 years later. It’s what motivated the murderers of Shannon Lowney and Leanne Nichols, two receptionists working in a Boston clinic, and John Bayard Britton and David Gunn, two other providers who were assassinated by anti-choice zealots. They weren’t babies, but those were actual homicides.

According to NPR, abortion providers across the country are now reporting an uptick in threats in this current climate. That is decidedly uncivil.

Russiagate skeptics are dunking on the media in the wake of the release of Attorney General William Barr’s summary of the Mueller report on Russian intervention in the election. “If there’s no media reckoning for what they did, don’t ever complain again when people attack the media as ‘Fake News’ or identify them as one of the country’s most toxic and destructive forces,” wrote The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald. The Hill media reporter Joe Concha said on Fox & Friends that “this is a day of reckoning for our media like we haven’t seen since the 2016 election. I would say, maybe the worst day ever for our media given all that coverage.” He added: “Think of the stories we missed as a result of Russia.”

Similar arguments about the media’s “obsession” with the Trump-Russia story appear at The Federalist, The Washington Times, RT, and elsewhere. It is a ubiquitous but unexamined claim. And there are several serious problems with it.

First, according to Barr, Mueller conducted an exhaustive investigation, issuing 2,800 subpoenas and conducting 500 search warrants, and confirmed the conclusions of the CIA, NSA, and FBI that Russian operatives “conduct[ed] disinformation and social media operations in the United States to sow social discord, eventually with the aim of interfering with the election,” and that “Russian government actors successfully hacked into and obtained emails” from various Democrats and “disseminated those materials through various intermediaries, including Wikileaks.” Those who have long contended that “Russiagate” was a story promoted by Clinton supporters eager to absolve her from any responsibility for losing to Donald Trump are hardly in a position to take victory laps over Barr’s letter to Congress.

Second, as of this writing, we have not seen Robert Mueller’s report, nor had an accounting of why he made the prosecutorial decisions that he did. Barr’s summary is artfully worded, clearing Trump of conspiracy with the Russian government while remaining silent on whether the campaign coordinated with nongovernmental actors, and leaving unanswered the question of whether Trump obstructed justice. As Marcy Wheeler wrote for The New Republic, Barr had to “go through contortions to avoid charging” Trump with the crime. We should not allow the goalposts to be moved in a way that lets the president of the United States off the hook for potential felonies.

And the crux of the story was always the possibility that the regime had pushed for sanctions relief as a quid pro quo for Russia’s assistance—a question left unanswered by Barr’s summary. Barr cleared Trump of criminal wrongdoing, but didn’t address the counter-espionage questions related to whether Trump had been compromised somehow as a result of negotiating the Trump Tower Moscow deal deep into the 2016 campaign, or through other business dealings.

Several investigations also remain ongoing, and more indictments could theoretically be forthcoming in the future. We only know that Robert Mueller’s office is done charging people.

But the biggest problem with claims that the media focused too much on the Mueller probe is the premise itself. While Russiagate has led to a cottage industry of Twitter-famous “Resistance grifters” making outlandish claims that Trump—and people like Glenn Greenwald—are Putin’s “puppets,” real journalists did their jobs covering an objectively huge story.

It is bizarre to suggest that the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the president of the United States after he fired his FBI director and privately told two high-level Russian officials that he had “faced great pressure because of Russia” but that it had been “taken off” with Comey’s dismissal is not a legitimately massive story. The same is true of allegations that Trump obstructed justice (something that William Barr had categorically ruled out charging him with before becoming AG and being read in on the investigation).

And over the course of the 22 months since Mueller’s appointment, there have been dozens, if not hundreds, of highly significant developments, each of which merited a decent amount of coverage.

The president’s former campaign manager, deputy campaign manager, personal attorney and fixer, national-security adviser, and longtime political adviser have all been convicted of or pleaded guilty to crimes, or are currently awaiting trial, and while those cases weren’t related to Russia directly, they all sprung from Mueller’s probe and all of them kept the Mueller investigation in the headlines. Mueller’s team indicted 25 Russian nationals and three companies for their alleged roles in Russiagate. And those close to Trump had over 100 contacts with Russian actors during the campaign, according to The New York Times, many of which they hid from investigators.

Each and every time Trump dangled a pardon or Rudy Giuliani disclosed too much to reporters or Paul Manafort violated the terms of his release while awaiting trial, it was a significant and legitimate news story. Those claiming that the media focused too much attention on the Mueller probe should specify which stories they believe didn’t merit extensive reporting.

We should also acknowledge that no human being on Earth has done more to keep the Trump-Russia narrative in the news than Donald Trump. Not only does he have a compulsive tendency to randomly blurt out “no collusion, no collusion”–a claim he’s made 231 times since mid-2017, according to The Washington Post—he’s also kept Russia front and center by refusing to implement sanctions that Congress passed against Russian actors, repeatedly meeting with Vladimir Putin with no advisers or note-takers present, and arguing that Russia was within its rights to annex Crimea. When the president of the United States tells reporters that the president of Russia has “probably” ordered assassinations and poisonings, “but I rely on them; it’s not in our country,” that’s objectively newsworthy.

Remember that there would never have been a special-counsel investigation had Trump simply kept his cool—and his mouth shut—in regard to Russiagate. James Comey was bound just as is Robert Mueller by the DOJ opinion that a sitting president cannot be indicted. Trump made the investigation a huge international story, and there’s nothing for serious reporters to “reckon with” for having covered it as such. As media critic Margaret Sullivan wrote for The Washington Post, “It’s important to acknowledge the value of the serious journalism because there’s a real risk that news organizations will take the edges off their coverage of this subject now.”

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this piece referred to Joe Concha as a media reporter at Fox. In fact, he is a reporter at The Hill, and made the comments quoted when appearing on Fox & Friends. The text has been corrected.

The 2018 midterms brought an infusion of fresh blood, new ideas, and youthful energy into the Democratic caucus on Capitol Hill, and a number of lawmakers—notably those with presidential aspirations—are pushing ambitious, unapologetically progressive proposals to solve some very serious problems. The most prominent may be Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, but there several others: Senator Bernie Sanders’s proposal to significantly expand the inheritance tax; Senator Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax and universal-childcare plan; Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s bid to put predatory lenders out of business by empowering the Post Office to serve as a community bank; Senator Cory Booker’s proposal to use “baby bonds” to close the racial wealth gap and, of course, various versions of Medicare for All. And in the House, Democrats are championing a comprehensive proposal to advance key voting rights and curb the influence of deep-pocketed donors.

While it’s an exciting moment for progressives who have long urged Democrats to embrace these kinds of bold policy ideas, it’s also unleashed a predictable flood of hand-wringing from pundits, conservatives, and more moderate Democrats about whether the Dems are moving “too far to the left.” Rather than acknowledging that their own policy preferences hew to the center or the right, the story they tell is that Dems risk alienating college-educated suburban women or disenchanted Trump voters or some other group they ostensibly need to win over in 2020. We also hear endless concerns over the “price tag” for these kinds of policies—never mind that such questions don’t seem to come up when we’re talking about defense spending or high-end tax-cuts.

It’s a safe bet that these kinds of worries will be a staple of mainstream editorial pages and cable news panels for the foreseeable future. But we should really ignore them. Here’s why.

The first reason may seem depressing on its face, but could ultimately be liberating. There’s good evidence suggesting that voters punish the two major parties for enacting their agendas, and it doesn’t seem to matter that much what those agendas are. In other words, in this highly polarized environment, electoral backlash is inevitable, regardless of whether or not a party is seen as moderate or tries to “find common ground” with its political opponents. Negative partisanship is a powerful force.

The fight over the Affordable Care Act illustrates this perfectly. The ACA wasn’t, in fact, a scheme first championed by the conservative Heritage Foundation, but it did feature the same basic approach. In an effort to make the bill bipartisan, Barack Obama launched “endless efforts to cajole and encourage and beg and plead for Republican support,” as Paul Waldman wrote in The American Prospect in 2012, none which kept the GOP from calling it a “government takeover” of the health-care system that would leave millions of families in ruins and literally kill your grandmother.

In other words, Democrats can try to prevent backlash by compromising with the GOP, but they will probably find that it’s coming either way. Matt Grossman, director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University, looked at the electoral consequences of major legislation dating back to the early 1950s, and he made a compelling case that the kind of resistance Obamacare faced could have been anticipated. According to his research, when Democrats have passed significant laws, it’s consistently energized their opposition, and the same is true for Republicans: As we saw in November, when they enact their agenda, fired-up Dems come out and punish them at the polls.

In an article for FiveThirtyEight titled, “Voters Like A Political Party Until It Passes Laws,” Grossman wrote that while “it might not sound intuitive,…policy victories usually result in a mobilized opposition and electoral losses [as] voters usually punish rather than reward parties that move policy to achieve their goals.” It’s a dynamic that results from a two-party system in which “neither party seems capable of sustaining a public majority to carry out its governing vision to completion” because their congressional majorities are “simply too narrow and short-lived.”

When Republicans are in power, they tend to pursue a maximalist conservative agenda, even when public opinion isn’t with them. Last year’s tax scam was a good example. Many of us on the left attribute the GOP’s tendency to overreach to the fact that they know shifting demographics are not on their side, and they’re trying to lock in as many structural advantages as possible while they can. But perhaps they simply understand that electoral backlash is inevitable in a way that Democrats haven’t fully embraced.

If a backlash is inevitable, you might as well go big. But here’s an important caveat: Not all backlashes are created equal. Some dissipate relatively quickly. The Republican uprising over the Affordable Care Act came and went; the law became much more popular just a few years later when Republicans attacked it. That wasn’t the case with the backlash against California Republicans after then-Governor Pete Wilson ran a notably xenophobic campaign in 1994 and then pushed a series of measures that would bar undocumented immigrants from public education and health services. The party hasn’t recovered yet in the Golden State.

And there are also areas where pursuing a given policy is worth any painful electoral consequences that may follow. Climate change represents a policy area where we face something of a choice between taking sweeping and uncompromising action or facing potential catastrophe. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said after conservatives panned her arguably over-ambitious proposal to tackle the climate crisis, “We simply don’t have any other choice. If it’s radical to propose a solution on the scale of the problem, so be it.”

The other reason to ignore the hand-wringing over the Dems’ increasingly progressive agenda is that several studies have found that voters don’t punish presidential candidates, at least, for taking positions that the pundits view as “extreme.” Summarizing the data in The Washington Post, George Washington University political scientist John Sides wrote that the data show “there is scarcely any penalty for being extreme. To put it bluntly: Candidates may be extreme because they can get away with it.” (He added that while conventional wisdom holds that Barry Goldwater and George McGovern lost badly in 1964 and 1972, respectively, because they were outside the mainstream, “this had as much if not more to do with the fundamental conditions in the country, not with their own ideological positions.”)

Sides cautions that one shouldn’t conclude that “candidate policy views have no impact whatsoever,” but “it does mean that an American public that is not that ideological may not use ideology as a shortcut in voting for presidential candidates. And this in turn allows presidential candidates to have views well to the left or right of the average voter.”

Political scientists Christopher Achens and Larry Bartels have argued convincingly that most voters just don’t have a solid grasp of public policy and take their cues from politicians they admire and other influential voices. So there is a danger that the media’s relentless drumbeat about these proposals supposedly being outside the mainstream could convince voters that the criticism has merit.

That’s why we shouldn’t just ignore all the hand-wringing about Dems’ going too far. We need to push back against it aggressively before it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The longest and most absurd government shutdown in US history came to a temporary end last Friday. But it could not have dragged on for five weeks if its impact had not been blunted by 400,000 federal workers’ being compelled to stay on the job without pay. And that was only possible because the United States has some of the weakest labor protections in the developed world.

Pissed-off federal workers played a big role in ending this impasse, but they didn’t end the 16-day shutdown that Senator Ted Cruz launched in a futile attempt to get Obama to delay the Affordable Care Act in 2013, and they didn’t end the 21-day stoppage that Newt Gingrich used to pressure Bill Clinton to cut spending in late 1995 (if you’re sensing a theme here, there’s good reason). The reasons it took an extraordinarily long shutdown, with no end in sight, before federal workers had had enough is straightforward: They’re barred by law from striking—or organizing wildcat actions like “sick-outs.” And most care about the work they’re doing and don’t think risking a job and a pension and health insurance over a short-term political tussle in Congress is worth it.

This latest budget saga did give way to a new political truism: Protracted lockouts of federal employees will end two hours after enough air-traffic controllers–or TSA agents–stay home, grinding air traffic to a halt. But that’s really a simplification. On the 30th day of Donald Trump’s second shutdown in as many years, Sara Nelson, president of the flight attendants’ union, gave a fiery speech calling on members of the AFL-CIO to talk to their local chapters “about all workers joining together to end this shutdown with a general strike!” Four days later, a Democratic proposal to end the lockout with no money for Trump’s border wall got more votes in the Republican-led Senate than a GOP alternative with funding for a wall, and, with his party becoming increasingly skittish, Trump reportedly decided he needed to end it. The day after that, federal workers missed their second pay period, a handful of air-traffic controllers called in sick, travelers got tangled up, and Trump relented.

In much of the highly developed world, locking out hundreds of thousands of public servants and compelling hundreds of thousands more to work without pay would lead to strikes, because working people, including public-sector employees, enjoy far stronger protections for strikes. In several countries, the right to strike is grounded in core civil liberties—the freedom of speech and assembly. That’s not the case in the United States, where the courts have not interpreted the First Amendment to guarantee a right to strike. Extended lockouts would be impossible if they did.

Cynthia Estlund, an expert in labor law at New York University’s School of Law, says that in countries with a presumptive right to strike, public officials would have to justify any law against public workers’ striking. They would have to “draw lines between essential and non-essential personnel based on whether they actually provide critical services—things like fire safety.” If federal workers weren’t truly necessary to keep people safe, they couldn’t arbitrarily be deemed “essential workers.” Estlund noted that in Canada, “which has much of the same legal architecture that we do but recognizes a constitutional freedom of association and right to strike,” there might even be a process “to decide how many workers you need in some essential category. They would try to respect the right to strike and would look at what exceptions are justifiable rather than it being a matter of executive discretion.”

If Americans enjoyed that right, federal workers who don’t have life-or-death jobs would enjoy the ability to go on strike. But, more relevant to shutdowns, Trump would not be able to compel federal workers whose jobs make the shutdown less painful for the public to keep working jobs that aren’t truly essential. And that is precisely what happened during this latest record-shattering shutdown.

Before Trump caved last Friday, I spoke to a furloughed federal worker named Scott, who asked that The Nation not use his full name because of the “vindictive” nature of the Trump White House. This situation did not sit well with him. “One of the biggest frustrations is that we have the ability to bring so many federal employees into work during a shutdown that American citizens don’t even feel the effects,” he told me. “‘Essential employees’ are supposed to be those who are necessary to maintain the safety of this country, but it’s gotten to the point where anybody who would interact with the public, or make sure the public doesn’t feel the full effects of this is called ‘essential.’”

Scott pointed to the Food and Drug Administration’s decision to recall food inspectors during the third week of the shutdown, following news reports that food safety was being put at risk. Those food inspectors were among “tens of thousands of federal workers” the Trump regime brought back to work that week “to fulfill key government tasks, including disbursing tax refunds [and] overseeing flight safety,” according to The Washington Post. Bloomberg reported that the administration had designated the people who process permits to drill for oil offshore as “essential” workers while “programs that are out of favor with the White House—such as the Energy Star consumer ratings system—aren’t getting the same treatment.” During the last lengthy shutdown in 2013, conservatives had accused Obama of arbitrarily closing national parks in order to pressure Republicans to negotiate; this time, they remained open to the public, but with only “skeleton staffs,” and were totally trashed by the time Trump reopened the government.

In one sense, the politics of brinksmanship which has become central to Republicans’ governing strategy is possible only because of the right’s long war on organized labor. One of the first efforts to organize public workers was the Boston police strike of 1919. According to Erik Loomis, a labor historian at the University of Rhode Island, Calvin Coolidge, then mayor of Boston, crushed that strike by firing all of the striking cops. Coolidge parlayed that assault into national prominence, and ultimately the presidency. “That really put a damper on public-sector organizing,” said Loomis. There would be little in the way of public-sector organizing until the late 1950s. Then, in 1970, the postal workers went on strike demanding better pay and the right to bargain collectively. It would be the biggest wildcat labor action in US history. “That was a groundbreaking strike,” Loomis told me. “It put the Nixon administration on its heels. They didn’t really know how to deal with it.” The postal workers ultimately saw most of their demands met.

There were other wins and losses throughout the 1970s, when the public-sector unionization rate was at its peak and four in 10 workers belonged to a union. And then in 1981, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization went on strike and Ronald Reagan fired them, killing the union and effectively ending that brief period of public-sector radicalism kicked off by the postal workers a decade earlier. According to Cynthia Estlund, that action still reverberates today. “[The air traffic controllers] thought, ‘We’ve got clout, they need us. We know it’s illegal to strike but we think we can get away with it.’ And Reagan pulled the trigger—he declared the strike illegal and summarily fired them all. It caused some serious, temporary disruptions in air travel, but it really sent a message that is still being heard by especially unionized federal workers.” Of the calculus today’s public-sector workers must make, she added: “Maybe it would go down differently this time, but of all the people you might think would be willing to pull the trigger, Trump is right up there.”

After the shutdown ended, some on the left called on organized labor to “walk out” as soon as the next one begins. But Scott, who’s worked for the federal government for 10 years, has a different view. “I understand that inclination, but it’s really an unfair burden—it’s not fair to put the onus on federal employees to do that.” He added that “this is not an administration that’s friendly to federal workers. If the federal workforce were to be gutted by say 15 percent, they wouldn’t have an issue with that, and they wouldn’t be looking to fill those positions. As federal employees, we’re aware of that—I wouldn’t risk my job because I know I wouldn’t be replaced, and I think my job’s important and want the work to continue.”

The public has so far given Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans the lion’s share of the blame for the longest government shutdown in US history. That’s understandable given that Trump kicked it off by saying on nationwide television that he alone would take responsibility for locking out federal workers if he didn’t get $5.7 billion for a wall that—remember!—he originally said he would strong-arm Mexico into financing within his first three days in office.

We should be grateful for Trump’s incapacity for message discipline, because the traditional media are once again failing to convey what’s going on in Washington. The instinct to cover a standoff like this one as an example of partisan bickering runs deep, but that framing obscures the utter absurdity of this shutdown. Yet again, we’re seeing deeply embedded conventions of neutral political journalism effectively normalizing what are really an incoherent series of moves by an erratic president—abuses of power that are now causing deep and potentially lasting damage to the economy.

If you tune in to cable news, or check the latest at outlets like Politico or The Hill, you’ll learn which party has the upper hand in the polls, which caucus is feeling more restive or more confident and analysis of the latest proposals to bring it to an end. And you will hear, repeatedly, that this is a standoff over $5.7 billion for Trump’s border wall.

That’s not what this is about, or not primarily. It is true that the Democratic base is dead-set against funding Trump’s wall, but Democratic leaders have made it clear that they think that if Trump gets his way under these circumstances, they’ll face two years trying to govern with a president who’s learned he can force his way by taking hostages according to the whims of conservative media personalities. “We cannot have the president, every time he has an objection, to say I’ll shut down the government until you come to my way of thinking,” said Nancy Pelosi this week. “If we hold [federal] employees hostage now, they’re hostage forever.”

That’s really what’s at stake with this shutdown. It’s a test of whether Trump can wrap his head around the fact that Congress is a co-equal branch of government. Trump doesn’t want to fold because it would bruise his ego; Democrats can’t fold without undermining the separation of powers for the remainder of Trump’s presidency.

And contrary to what you may believe from dozens of headlines and hundreds of cable news segments, Trump did not offer the Democrats a deal to reopen the government last Friday. He wants to build a giant wall on the southern border, which Democrats oppose. He reiterated his demand for $5.7 billion to pay for it, but he offered nothing that Democrats want and Republicans oppose in return.

Trump said he’d extend protections to the Dreamers for three years and continue to offer temporary legal status to some groups who were forced by conflict or natural disasters to flee their home countries , but both of those programs have long enjoyed broad bipartisan support. And as Elie Mystal pointed out over the weekend, Trump’s assaults on both programs are currently blocked by the courts anyway, and observers don’t expect those cases to be resolved anytime soon.

Some short-term protections for people Trump put in peril in the first place, without a single concession to the Democrats’ agenda, is not an offer to break a partisan stalemate, and shouldn’t be portrayed as such by the press.

That’s not all. For the first 30 days of the shutdown, there was no legislative proposal for lawmakers to consider. The White House has repeatedly refused Democrats’ requests to specify how those $5.7 billion would be spent. It’s not even clear where that number came from. During the campaign, Trump estimated his wall would costs $12 billion. Other estimates range between $15 and $70 billion, according to a report by the Brookings Institution.

(Keep in mind that the Trump regime has only spent 60 percent of what Congress allocated for border security in the 2017 and 2018 budgets, according to an analysis by PolitiFact. And again, this is all over a stop-gap spending measure.)

On Monday night, day 31 of the shutdown, Republicans finally issued a concrete legislative proposal to consider, and as Greg Sargent reported for The Washington Post, it was “so loaded up with poison pills that it looks as if it was deliberately constructed to make it impossible for Democrats to support.” In the fine print are provisions that would make it all but impossible for minors from Central America to seek asylum in the United States and would bar people from Africa and Asia from seeking temporary status due to emergencies. David Bier, a conservative immigration expert at the Cato Institute, wrote on Twitter that the provisions were so restrictive that the “media should stop reporting that the bill would extend” the program. It would also double the application fees for Dreamers, and impose new income requirements for them to stay in the only country many of them have known.

Media reports rarely remind readers how we got here. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has said consistently that he won’t bring bills to the floor unless Trump says he would sign them into law. On December 19, with Trump’s approval, the Senate unanimously passed a short-term spending measure without wall funding. Senators went home for the holidays, assured that the House would pass their measure and longer-term negotiations would begin in the new year. But Ann Coulter rebelled, and Trump shut down the government to keep his base close. (“Trump can withstand Ann Coulter,” an unnamed GOP Senator told Axios this week, but “he can’t lose Hannity and the rest.”)

Trump’s entire justification for shutting the government down in December was that he’d have less leverage to negotiate with Democrats after they took control of the House on January 3. The only rationale he’s offered for keeping the shutdown going now is that he can’t give his political opponents a perceived win. It’s an outrageous justification for a shutdown that’s not only left 800,000 federal workers in a desperate lurch but is threatening our national security. According to reports, nobody knows what Trump’s strategy for getting out of this mess is, including his own aides.

It should go without saying that none of this is normal. And that is really what keeps tripping up reporters. If they flesh out this context in their reporting, it would paint one side of this “stalemate” as an irrational actor, which would invite accusations of “liberal bias.” The alternative is to adhere to established journalistic conventions, treat an incoherent tantrum-fueled shutdown as a normal partisan standoff, and leave the public with an incomplete picture of what’s going on.

Conservatives are furiously spinning Tuesday night’s election results. As everyone expected, Donald Trump took to Twitter to tout his party’s “big victory,” a claim he continued to make during a zany and combative press conference on Wednesday. Glenn Reynolds described the midterms as a “purple puddle.”

Don’t buy it. This was a significant blue wave. Democrats, handicapped by extreme gerrymandering, structural disadvantages in both the House and Senate and relentless efforts to suppress their votes, faced one of the most vicious and dishonest campaigns in memory. Yet, as of this writing, they’re winning the national popular vote by around 7 percentage points, and will pick up something like 30 house seats. In 2010, Republicans gained 63 seats in the House while winning by 7.2 percentage points. This may be have been as close to a blue tsunami as is possible on such an uneven playing field.

Democrats lost some marquee races, with Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum and Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke going down and Stacey Abrahams hanging on by a thread in Georgia’s governor’s race. And it was a rough night for Democratic senators in red states. But when you look under the hood, Democrats and progressives made significant gains up and down the ballot. Some of those wins, like the restoration of voting rights for 1.5 million Floridians who were convicted of a crime and served their sentences, will reverberate long after the 2018 election cycle is forgotten.

Democrats picked up seven governorships and over 300 state legislative seats on Tuesday (in addition to the 40 or so they’d already flipped during Trump’s first two years in office). They took control of one or both state legislative chambers in New York, Colorado, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Maine and Connecticut (where the State Senate had been evenly divided). And they doubled the number of states in which they control the governor’s mansion and both chambers of the legislature, picking up seven “trifectas” on the night. These are crucially important wins with redistricting coming up after the 2020 census.

Speaking of which, voters approved redistricting reforms in Michigan, Colorado and Missouri. (A similar measure in Utah is too close to call at present.) Nevada and Michigan passed automatic registration for voters, and Maryland will offer same-day registration. Medical marijuana passed in Missouri and Utah, and Michigan became the first state in the Midwest to legalize recreational weed. Arkansas and Missouri voters went around their state legislatures to pass minimum-wage hikes that will boost wages for around 1 million working people.

Democrats also wrested control of attorney-general offices in Colorado, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin.

Three red states—Utah, Nebraska, and Idaho—voted to expand Medicaid. With Democrats winning gubernatorial races in Maine and Kansas, Medicaid will almost certainly be expanded in five states, four of them red, as a result of Tuesday’s vote. That would bring the number of holdouts down to 14.

There were also a number of races in which progressives could be forgiven for indulging in a little bit of schadenfreude over the outcomes. In Virginia, Democrat Abigail Spanberger beat Representative Dave Brat. In 2014, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Breitbart went all-in for Brat in his notably xenophobic race against former GOP majority leader Eric Cantor, which was seen as a template for Trump’s own campaign two years later. Republican groups tried to paint Spanberger, a former CIA analyst, as a terrorist sympathizer. Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), arguably the most exuberant supporter of Vladimir Putin in Washington, lost his race. In New York’s 19th district, Democratic challenger Antonio Delgado overcame one of the most racist campaigns in the country to beat Representative John Faso as well as a Green Party candidate backed by deep-pocketed Republican donors. Kim Davis, the Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk who refused to give same-sex couples marriage licenses, lost last night. Karen Handel, who as policy director for the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation cut off funding for Planned Parenthood, is trailing in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District by a few thousand votes. Organized labor is celebrating the defeat of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker on their fourth try.

Of course, winning the House was the big prize. Beginning in January, there will be a game-changing check on Trump and the GOP. Dems will control the committee gavels and decide what gets investigated. Trump’s impunity-by-congressional majority is coming to an end.

All in all, it was a very good night for Trump’s opponents. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this piece reported that Representative Peter King (R-NY) lost his race. In fact, he held on to his seat. The piece also initially reported that a medical marijuana initiative failed in North Dakota. In fact, the measure, which did fail, would have legalized recreational marijuana use. The state legalized medical marijuana in 2016.

Voters in Washington State are poised to pass a sweeping package of gun-safety laws next Tuesday. And in these dark political times, the campaign features some dynamics that might give progressives some hope for the future.

The “Safe Schools, Safe Communities” measure, Initiative 1639, would raise the legal age for buying military-style long-arms from 18 to 21 and impose a 10-day waiting period for such purchases. It would require gun owners to take a safety course and extend the state’s already rigorous background-check system for handgun ownership to the kinds of semi-automatic rifles that are often favored by mass shooters. The measure would also require law enforcement to review those background checks annually to make sure that gun owners continue to be law-abiding citizens after they pass, something that California and Hawaii do now for all firearm owners and Kentucky does with concealed-carry permit holders.

Perhaps most importantly, it pairs the right to own guns with the responsibility on the part of gun owners to help assure the public’s safety. I-1639 requires them to store their weapons safely and makes them liable for charges if one of their guns gets snatched and used in a crime (either misdemeanor or felony charges depending on the nature of the crime). A 2016 study by researchers at Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public Health found that fewer than 20 percent of gun crimes were committed by the lawful owners of the guns used. Thirty percent of the guns used had been reported stolen; for the remainder, researchers were unable to determine whether they had been stolen or loaned to the perpetrators.

The campaign is the latest effort of the Alliance for Gun Responsibility, a Washington-based nonprofit advocacy group. The most visible faces of the Yes on I-1639 campaign are two 17-year-old African-American student activists, Niko Battle, a senior at Kamiak High in Mukilteo, Washington, and Ola Jackson, a senior at Rainier Beach High School. And that may help broaden the movement against gun violence; as Gary Younge wrote for The Nation in 2016, when “national gun-control advocates come to the fore and make the case for the kind of common-sense laws that would keep more Americans safe,” they often focus on suburban-school massacres. But the reality is that “most people who are shot dead do not die in mass shootings—and most children and teens who are shot dead are not that young and not that white.”

Battle told me that on the same day that Nikolas Cruz killed 17 people at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, another young man closer to home had planned a similar massacre. He had reportedly flipped a coin to decide whether to shoot up his own school or lay siege to Kamiak High. The plot was foiled only when the kid’s grandmother became alarmed and alerted authorities.

Battle said he’d been active in gun-violence prevention since his sophomore year, and this past April, he and some other students formed a nonprofit organization called We Won’t Be Next Seattle to promote last spring’s nationwide student walk-out to protest gun violence. “We wanted to keep it going beyond that,” he told me. “Right now, we really see ourselves as a youth arm of the [movement]. And as a group of students that was supporting what the [Alliance for Gun Responsibility] was doing, we also wanted to change the narrative in the gun-violence-prevention community from something that was centered around mass shootings and the way gun violence affected majority-white communities, to also exploring, examining, and hopefully finding ways to mitigate its impacts on communities of color and other marginalized communities.” (I ended our interview by telling him that I look forward to voting for his presidential campaign in 2036.)  

Organizers hope that the measure, along with a high-profile initiative to enact a carbon tax, will boost youth turnout in a cycle that’s crucial both nationally and in the Evergreen State, where Democrats are trying to hold onto slim majorities in the state legislature. (There are also three Democratic women running in competitive races for open US House seats.) A recent poll found that 59 percent of Washington voters supported the measure, versus 34 percent who oppose it. Voters aged 18 to 35 favored I-1639 by a 61-23 margin.  

Renee Hopkins, the CEO of the Alliance for Gun Responsibility, told me that her group has “been working on not just making sure that Initiative 1639 passes, but also that voters who support it know how the candidates in both their local and federal races actually stand on gun-violence prevention. We believe that people running on this issue can win, and that it helps them win, and we’re hoping to see that play out this year.”

The campaign for the ballot measure has been driven by inaction by the state government. Because a handful of pro-gun Dems representing rural Washington have joined with the GOP to oppose gun-safety measures, advocates haven’t been able to accomplish much through the legislative process. “Even though we’ve had slim Democratic majorities in the state government, we have not had a gun-responsibility majority,” said Hopkins.

In March, a month after the Parkland massacre, a bill that would have raised the legal age for purchasing semi-automatic rifles to 21, extended the state’s background check requirements for handguns to military-style rifles, and implemented a number of proposals to enhance school safety died in the Democrat-controlled legislature after a handful of rural Democrats became weak-kneed under an avalanche of lobbying from pro-gun groups. At the time, State Senator Reuven Carlyle (D-Seattle) told The Seattle Times, “In terms of sheer numbers, you have to admire the impressive lobbying effort of the NRA.” Frustration over the defeat of that bill, and earlier attempts to reduce gun violence, have compelled activists to take the issue directly to the voters.

he success of ballot initiatives like I-1639 has in recent years turned Washington from a state with relatively weak gun laws to one with some of the strongest. In 2014, voters approved Initiative 594, which established stringent background checks for (almost) all gun purchases, including those between private parties, by a 20-point margin. Two years later, they approved, by an even wider 70-30 vote, a “red flag” law that empowered law enforcement to remove guns from people if a court determines they pose a high risk of violence. (See this 2017 article for more on why such laws are an important component in reducing gun violence.)

If this campaign has everything that might give progressives hope for the future—young people, including young people of color, getting fired up, the politics of guns shifting toward our side, and the issue potentially delivering rewards at the ballot box—it may also be a harbinger of how conservatives hope to use the courts to thwart progressive wins. Opponents of the measure launched three unsuccessful lawsuits to get it taken off the ballot, and activists say they appear to have held back some of their cash for further legal challenges if the measure passes.

“The gun lobby knows very well that vast majorities of people in Washington State and across the country are calling for commonsense gun laws that will protect communities and our kids,” said Renee Hopkins. “They know they can’t win at the ballot, so their approach is litigation both before something reaches the ballot and after. And the thing that’s really troubling and challenging is that they’re really looking at hampering the rights of voters in Washington State.”

“But I don’t believe they’ll have success,” she said. Hopefully, she’ll be proven right.

As we close in on the second-most-important election of our lives, we’re being barraged with polls and forecasts and punditry predicting big wins for Democrats. While the Senate is a heavy lift for Democrats because of a tough map, it can feel like a blue wave that will sweep the party into power in the House and in a bunch of state legislative races is inevitable. But given the stakes, it’s really important to tune all of that out and work as hard as possible to avoid disaster next week. Here’s why.

Make no mistake, the GOP has a solid chance of holding everything next Tuesday. Not great, but solid. As Princeton number-cruncher Sam Wang points out, the average polling error in midterm contests is significantly larger than that in presidential years. The polls could easily be off by three or four percentage points. At present, Democrats enjoy an advantage on the generic congressional ballot of around eight points. If they were to overperform that number by three, it’d be a blowout win; if they underperform by the same margin, Republicans would get their “red tide.”

It’s difficult to overstate how catastrophic that outcome would be. Not only would it deliver a demoralizing blow to the entire left, it would also validate Trump’s toxic demagoguery and Republicans’ wildly dishonest campaign claims about everything from health care to that caravan of refugees that’s still almost 1,000 miles from our border. It would send yet another a message to right-wing extremists of all stripes that their odious worldviews are in fact mainstream. And we could kiss any meaningful oversight goodbye as Trump and his cronies would continue to enjoy impunity by congressional majority.

The 2016 presidential contest has stark lessons for the reality we face today. Hillary Clinton’s presidency was seen as all but inevitable, even though all the forecasting models gave Trump a real chance of winning. FiveThirtyEight’s final run gave him a 29 percent likelihood; The New York Times’ more bearish model still had the probability of his victory at 15 percent. Those odds aren’t actually that low—things that have a 15 percent chance of happening occur all the time. It’s not like buying a Powerball ticket. But as any meteorologist will tell you, most people simply do not know how to interpret statistical likelihoods. As Nate Silver has repeatedly attempted to pound into people’s heads, the media didn’t cover that race as if Trump had a realistic chance of becoming president, even though he did. If they had, it’s possible—perhaps likely—that he wouldn’t be in the White House today. Although the mainstream coverage of both candidates was overwhelmingly negative, relatively little of it focused on Trump’s myriad scandals. With Clinton, it was the exact opposite. The fact that he was seen as a clownish figure who had no chance of becoming president had to play into those editorial decisions.

It’s likely that a consequential handful of voters also took a Democratic win for granted in 2016. A post-election poll of 100,000 registered voters found that those who decided to stay home skewed more Democratic than the ones who voted. According to CNN forecaster Harry Enten, that difference probably cost Clinton the election.

The midterms feature even more uncertainty than the 2016 election. As of this writing, FiveThirtyEight’s forecasting model gives Republicans similar odds of keeping their House majority, losing 61 or more seats or losing fewer than 20. At 18 percent, Democrats’ likelihood of winning the Senate is the same as Trump’s chances of winning the presidency were in late October of 2016.

There’s some anecdotal evidence suggesting that lots of irregular voters and first-time voters have been lining up to cast their ballots during this early-voting period. If people who don’t usually vote in midterms are in fact turning out this year, polls of likely voters may be missing them. And those irregular voters are likely Democrats—Democrats typically stay home during midterm contests at a significantly higher rate than Republicans. Put all of that together, and it’s entirely possible that polls are systematically undercounting Democratic enthusiasm in a big way, and we’re actually heading for a blue tsunami.

At the same time, polls measure voters’ intent, nor whether their registration has been improperly purged or they have an acceptable form of identification. Voters across the country are at risk of not being able to cast ballots, thanks to voter-suppression efforts. An election official in Dallas County, Texas, told ProPublica that the amount of voter intimidation and harassment at the polls “is the worst she’s seen in decades.” Polls of the North Dakota Senate race don’t tell us anything about whether Native Americans will be able to vote, and the same is true of the Georgia governor’s race, where secretary of state and gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp is using every method available to him to steal that seat. Whether or not it’s a result of foul play, voting machines in Texas appear to be switching votes from Beto O’Rourke to Ted Cruz.

So find a campaign and knock on some doors. Throw a few bucks your candidates’ way if you can afford it. You can also sign up to help get out the vote at thelastweekend.org, a coalition of Swing Left and 22 other progressive groups. MoveOn even lets you do this work from your computer in the comfort of your own home.

Next week’s election hinges on whether the backlash against Trump is great enough to overcome the GOP’s relentless efforts to keep turnout down. The polls and the pundits may point to an approaching victory, but we need to tune out all the noise and work as if lives are in the balance, because they are.

Donald Trump’s presidency and business entanglements have been the subject of some truly excellent investigative reporting. Whether or not they have had much impact, mainstream fact-checkers have done a good job tracking and explaining the 5,000 “false or misleading claims” made by the president in his first 600 days in office, according to The Washington Post. Data journalists, by and large, seem to have grappled honestly with what they got right and wrong during the 2016 election. But much of the ostensibly neutral political press—cable news outlets especially—seems to have learned little from its catastrophic failure in 2016. With so much at stake on November 6, they’re failing us at the worst time

Last year, a study of 2016 presidential election coverage by researchers at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society found that, while negative stories about both candidates dominated, the media consistently covered the issues Trump was running on—immigration, jobs, and trade—and just as consistently focused on Hillary Clinton’s scandals to the exclusion of her policy ideas. Whether it was blowing up a minor story about Clinton using her private e-mail address for government business—something Trump officials did when they got into office—or amplifying a baseless conspiracy theory about Clinton selling off America’s uranium in exchange for contributions to her charity, Trump called the tune, and the media played it.

But every utterance doesn’t deserve a segment on CNN. Producers, editors and reporters haven’t figured out how to curate the news coming from Trump, how to focus our attention on what’s important. Trump floods the zone with bullshit, they dutifully convey it, and we end up swimming in it. Every night, cable panelists dissect whatever nonsense Trump wants them to talk about, regardless of whether they support or oppose him. He’s still calling the shots, and creating controversy out of thin air. There’s no better example of that at present than the so-called “migrant caravan” down in Southern Mexico.

Several thousand refugees slowly making their way north from Central America towards our southern border are certainly a potent political symbol. As The Washington Post reported this week, “President Trump has settled on a strategy of fear—laced with falsehoods and racially tinged rhetoric—to help lift his party to victory in the coming midterms,” and the conservative-media version of the story is tailor-made to stoke racial anxiety among the Republican base. Meanwhile, the facts about our broken immigration system and the ongoing crisis of violence that grips Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua have been all but drowned out by the right-wing spin.

Consider a few facts about what’s actually happening. Arguably, the most important is that the asylum seekers are attempting to follow US laws, not violate them. They have a right, under both US and international law to present themselves at the border and apply for asylum. That is their intent. By law, they cannot apply from outside the country (one can apply for refugee status from abroad, which is a different process entirely). A well-established system is in place for processing those applications (around 90 percent of which are denied these days).

The number of asylum seekers coming to the United States has increased dramatically as the Trump regime has cracked down on both authorized and unauthorized immigration. As of March, there were 318,000 pending applications for asylum. Assuming that number remains the same today, in the unlikely event that all of the estimated 7,000 refugees arrive at our border in a month or two—“fear and police harassment have whittled down [their] numbers,” according to U.S. News and World Report—they would increase the number of asylum-seekers in the US by around one-fifth of 1 percent.

Virtually every news story refers to a “migrant caravan.” Anyone moving from one place to another can accurately be described as a “migrant,” but our laws treat refugees—people fleeing from violence or natural disaster—differently than those who want to come to the United States for work or school or love. Failing to communicate clearly that these refugees have every legal right to apply for asylum only plays into Trump’s hands. He claimed this week that “every time you see a Caravan, or people illegally coming, or attempting to come, into our Country illegally, think of and blame the Democrats for not giving us the votes to change our pathetic Immigration Laws!”

As of Thursday morning, CNN reported that the refugees were in Mapastepec, Mexico, about 80 miles north of the Guatemalan border and more than 1,000 miles from the United States. But even a Washington Post story about “false narratives about the migrant caravan” claimed that there’s a “brewing migrant crisis at the U.S. border.” That kind of florid language is common in such reports, despite the fact that, as Molly Molloy reported for The Guardian, “illegal border crossings have declined significantly from record highs in the early years of the 21st century.”

Headlines like “Mattis expected to send 800 more troops to help border authorities stop caravan” (CNN) and “Defense Secretary Mattis Will Send Some 800 U.S. Troops To Border With Mexico” (NPR) fail to convey the absurdity of this bit of security theater given that the refugees already plan to turn themselves in to Border Patrol upon arrival.

Even David Frum, The Atlantic’s reliably #NeverTrump conservative, fell for Trump’s narrative. In an embarrassingly under-researched piece this week, Frum wrote that the caravan was “a challenge to the integrity of U.S. borders.” He mentioned asylum claims in passing, but spent more time on how “illegal crossings of the southern border in 2018 have returned to their levels of 2016.” He concluded by harrumphing that “if liberals insist that only fascists will defend borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals will not do.” How presenting oneself at the border to be processed by our government violates our borders or sovereignty remains a mystery. It was the intellectually polished version of a typical Trump tweet.

Frum wasn’t trying to help Trump. Neither are others who breathlessly report on the “migrant caravan” or our “crisis on the border,” or the reporters who dutifully chronicle every cockamamie thing he says at a rally. But unwittingly, they are. As long as neutral journalists continue to chase down every rabbit hole Trump digs, he’ll continue to play the news cycle like a virtuoso, and we’ll continue to be overwhelmed by it all.

It’s axiomatic that in the 2016 presidential campaign, which pitted an infamous philanderer against the first woman nominated by a major party, voters’ views on gender played an unprecedented role. “Sexism powerfully predicted vote choice even after controlling for authoritarianism, partisanship, and other predispositions,” wrote the authors of a study published in Public Opinion Quarterly earlier this year. They looked at “the impact of sexism in recent presidential elections,” and found that “2016 was the only year in which it played a large and significant role.”

The #MeToo movement, which soon followed, may be an outpouring of pent-up anger and disgust after revelations of serial sexual abuse by high-profile men like Harvey Weinstein, but it’s also a backlash against the election of Donald Trump, a man who has been accused of various forms of sexual misconduct by almost two dozen women. An audio recording of Trump bragging about getting away with sexual assault because he’s famous may have helped him lose the popular vote by 3 million ballots, but it didn’t derail his candidacy.

With Donald Trump leading the GOP, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the debate over gender equality has become inexorably intertwined with partisanship. Tufts University political scientist Brian Schaffner presented a paper to the American Political Science Association at the end of August that suggests that these dynamics appear to have made Republicans more comfortable with expressions of what researchers call “hostile sexism.”

Schaffner tells me that during the 2016 campaign, he “felt like Trump was getting a pass for saying things that people might not otherwise be willing to stomach.” After the election, he became “interested in how his victory might have changed what people were willing to say after he had won.” He set out to answer both questions.

First, he conducted a straightforward experiment. He asked one group of respondents how they would react to an acquaintance who called a woman “a dog” and referred to his wife as “a beautiful piece of ass.” Schaffner then asked them to rate their response on a scale ranging from “very comfortable” to “very uncomfortable.” He asked the other group the same question, but this time he attributed the boorish statements to Donald Trump. (Trump has said both of these things.)

The results, when respondents were sorted by political party, were significant. Sixty-three percent of Republicans (and Republican-leaning independents) said those statements would make them very or somewhat uncomfortable if they came from an acquaintance, but only 39 percent said the same when they were attributed to Donald Trump.

Democrats and Dem-leaning independents were more likely to feel queasy about those statements when they were attributed to Trump than if they were attributed to an acquaintance, but the effect wasn’t statistically significant. Schaffner says that’s probably because they were more likely than Republicans to be uncomfortable with these kinds of statements regardless of who supposedly uttered them. (Long before Donald Trump came on the scene, the GOP had its share of rank misogynists like Todd Akin, the 2012 Missouri Senate candidate who blew up his campaign by claiming that women were unlikely to get pregnant as a result of a “legitimate rape.”)

Schaffner then set out to determine whether Trump’s victory had validated the sexist sentiments he expressed during the campaign. He had conducted a series of surveys with the same groups of respondents just before the election, in March of 2017, and then finally this past July. The survey used a panel of questions that’s common in such research. Designed to measure how much resentment people express toward women fighting for equality, it asks respondents whether they agree with statements like, “Many women are actually seeking special favors, such as hiring policies that favor them over men, under the guise of asking for ‘equality,’” “Women seek to gain power by getting control over men,” and “When women lose to men in a fair competition, they typically complain about being discriminated against.”

The surveys found that Republicans were significantly more likely to agree with these statements after Trump’s victory than they were prior to the election. Democrats were slightly less so, but again the shift on their side was small. Interestingly, there was a gap in these perceptions between Democratic men and women, but, Schaffner says, “Republican women score almost as high on this hostile-sexism measure as Republican men do.” Does that mean that partisanship trumps Republican women’s own lived experiences? “It’s not to say that gender or lived experiences aren’t important,” says Schaffner, “but a lot of that’s already baked into what party they identify with in the first place. The women who are still in the Republican Party at this point are perfectly fine with these kinds of sentiments.”

(In an earlier study, Schaffner and two colleagues found that there was a significant education gap seen in white voters’ expression of both sexism and racial bigotry. Non-college-educated whites—the most commonly cited Trump constituency—scored higher on both measures than better-educated whites.)

Schaffner says this is consistent with what researchers call the “justification-suppression model of prejudice.” In a nutshell, we all harbor some prejudices, but we tend to suppress them, either because we don’t want to see ourselves as being prejudiced, or because we don’t want to appear that way to others. But we also may take cues that tell us it’s all right to lower our guard and say the quiet parts out loud in certain situations. It’s why locker-room talk tends to be a lot more offensive than boardroom talk.

Schaffner found a similar dynamic with open expressions of racial animus earlier this year. White respondents who viewed Trump’s rant about Mexico sending us their “rapists” were more likely to express hostility toward all other groups than those who saw more traditional campaign messages. But that effect, unlike the one in this new study, was seen in both Trump and Clinton voters.

“Absent partisan politics, we might feel like maybe we shouldn’t say things that are so sexist or express views that are so sexist. But when sexism becomes viewed through a partisan lens, which I think is especially happening right now, right in this moment, then that sort of pushes in the other direction and says, well, my party is basically the party that’s expressing this hostility towards women and, therefore, by endorsing these [hostile] statements I am supporting my team,” says Schaffner.

And partisan passions lead people to engage in “motivated reasoning”—the tendency to reject information that conflicts with one’s strongly held views and accept that which reinforces them, even if that information is poor or from dubious sources. We’re seeing an excellent example of that dynamic right now, with conservatives responding to Brett Kavanaugh’s contentious confirmation to the Supreme Court by embracing the idea that men are at high risk of being falsely accused of assault. That story requires not only ignoring the fact that victims often face dire consequences for coming forward with their allegations—Christine Blasey Ford is still in hiding—but also dismissing studies showing that false accusations are rare.

Some degree of backlash against the #MeToo movement was probably inevitable, but partisan animosity tends to make people more entrenched in their views. But backlashes are cyclical, and while Schaffner didn’t find that partisanship had a significant effect on Democrats’ comfort expressing sexist attitudes, there’s plenty of evidence from other surveys that Republicans’ embrace of Trump’s misogyny is motivating Democratic-leaning women in a big way. A CNN poll released this week found a whopping 35-point gender gap on the generic congressional ballot among likely voters. That may be an outlier, but not by much—a Washington Post survey of 69 of the most competitive House districts found a 19-point gender gap and a Fox News poll taken conducted nationwide before the Kavanaugh hearings found a 21-point gap.

The upcoming midterms will be a test of which party’s base is more pissed off, and gender politics will play a big role. At present, Democrats appear to have an advantage.

On the left, the notion that changing demographics offers the Democratic Party an opportunity to forge an enduring governing coalition is pretty controversial. But the conservative movement clearly embraces it, whether or not they say so out loud.

Ever since the “Emerging Democratic Majority” thesis became popular, Republicans have worked tirelessly to insulate themselves from democratic accountability. Rather than pursuing a policy agenda that might enjoy broad public support or adapting to an increasingly diverse electorate, they’ve engaged in relentless efforts to suppress the vote, implemented “extreme gerrymandering” schemes, opened up a river of undisclosed campaign cash, and, most consequentially, weaponized the judicial branch.

At the federal level, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has led this campaign with brutal effectiveness. “One of my proudest moments was when I looked at Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr. President, you will not fill this Supreme Court vacancy,’” he bragged in 2016 after blocking Merrick Garland, along with dozens of Obama’s lower-court nominees. But it’s the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, a nakedly partisan judge, which may be the culmination of his long effort to insulate his party from the wrath of voters. It’s the whole game. He’s racked up a lot of wins, and Kavanaugh is the biggest one.

This nomination process was a complete sham. Two recent lawsuits revealed that there are “potentially thousands of Brett Kavanaugh’s White House emails and other records related to the Senate hacking scandal from early in the George W. Bush administration and other controversial subjects that have not been disclosed to the Senate,” according to Yahoo News. The New York Times reported that White House Counsel Donald McGahn II, who pushed through Kavanaugh’s nomination on his way out of the White House, told Donald Trump that the “wide-ranging [FBI] inquiry” into accusations of sexual assault against Judge Kavanaugh by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford that Trump promised to conduct “would be potentially disastrous for Kavanaugh’s chances of confirmation to the Supreme Court.” In the end, the FBI interviewed nine witnesses. Kavanaugh and Blasey Ford were not among them.

A truly “wide-ranging inquiry” might have unearthed corroboration of the sexual-assault allegations against Kavanaugh, and it almost certainly would have demonstrated that he lied repeatedly to Congress. Even as Republicans railed about “due process,” they made certain that none would be forthcoming before Saturday’s final vote.

Mother Jones reporter Ari Berman, author of Give Us The Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, told me that as a lower-court judge, Kavanaugh ruled that states don’t need to demonstrate in-person voter fraud to justify strict-voter ID laws, wrote “opinions making it easier for foreign interests to interfere in an election,” and was “hostile to any regulation on Big Money in politics.” According to Berman, Kavanaugh’s judicial record suggests that he “has an ideology of making it easier for special interests and corporations to buy an election and making it harder for minorities and low-income people to vote in an election. And I think that is the ideology that the four other [conservative] justices have, and I’m very worried that we’re going to have a five-member majority on the court that is down-the-line hostile to voting rights for decades to come.”

Justice Elena Kagan said on Friday that she worries the Court will no longer have a swing vote. That role now falls to Chief Justice John Roberts, whose much-ballyhooed institutionalism and concern for the legitimacy of the Court shouldn’t obscure the fact that he’s always been a movement conservative. The Court is poised to become a Republican veto on any and all Democratic priorities, from environmental protections to reproductive rights to expanding public insurance coverage. But Mitch McConnell’s most consequential and lasting victory will be making his party less accountable to the electorate.

This is a bleak reality that we’re likely to struggle against for a generation to come. But there is a possible silver lining that could prove significant.

For decades, the right has attacked the fundamental legitimacy of the courts, arguing in broad terms that liberal activist judges—“robed tyrants”—were legislating from the bench. (There was a kernel of truth to that claim for a short period under the Warren Court, which, over the course of 16 years, ended legal segregation, strengthened defendants’ rights and other civil liberties, and established that the Constitution granted a right to privacy that would later become the basis of Roe v. Wade.) And while conservatives endowed chairs at law schools, funded organizations like The Federalist Society, and made the courts into a top issue for their voters, liberals and progressives tended to criticize individual rulings they hated, but by and large continued to believe in the fundamental legitimacy of the Supreme Court.

After denying Barack Obama an opportunity to shift the balance of power on the Court for the first time since 1970, and with four conservative justices appointed by Republican presidents who came to power despite losing the popular vote—and two justices who have been confirmed despite credible accusations of sexual misconduct—the left’s belief in the legitimacy of the institution cannot be maintained.

This could signal a sea change with far-reaching consequences that Republicans ultimately come to rue. As Mark Joseph Stern wrote at Slate, it’s not hard to imagine a future Democratic president simply ignoring the Court’s rulings. “It’s easy to envision the presidential statement,” Stern wrote. “As the chief executive, it is my duty to enact this legislation, passed through the democratic process, and to reject the illegitimate ruling of Donald Trump’s Supreme Court.”

It’s already spurred some talk of packing the Court if or when Democrats regain power. Less dramatically, if the Supreme Court becomes as important for Democratic voters as it is for Republicans, it would open up new space for organizing and activism, and new efforts to reform the institution. It even has the potential to mitigate Democrats’ persistent drop-off in turnout for midterm elections.

Mitch McConnell is a shrewd field general, and his party just won a major battle that will change American life in dramatic ways for years to come. But their naked power grab may have woken a sleeping giant, and that could ultimately cost them the war.

We don’t yet know how Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation process will end, but two women getting in Arizona Senate Jeff Flake’s face may ultimately prove to have had a historic impact on the future of the Court.

“Look at me when I’m talking to you,” Maria Gallagher, a 23-year-old activist from New York, told a cowed Flake as he stood, his head bowed, in a Senate elevator. “You’re telling me my assault doesn’t matter. You’re letting people who do these things into power. That’s what you’re telling me when you vote for him. Don’t look away from me!”

Shortly after, Flake surprised everyone by demanding a weeklong halt in Kavanaugh’s confirmation to let the FBI investigate his accusers’ claims. He told reporters that his confrontation with Gallagher and Ana Maria Archila, the co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, didn’t sway his decision to throw a wrench into the works. But depending on how cynical you are, it’s pretty clear that he was either moved at least in part by the passion of the activists, or by the viral impact of the video itself.

It was easy to connect the video to a series of other incidents of citizens confronting public officials with visceral expressions of outrage over what’s happening in this country directly and unavoidably in public spaces across the Washington, DC, area. Five days earlier Senator Ted Cruz was hounded from a fancy restaurant by protesters yelling, “We believe survivors!” White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump adviser Stephen Miller, and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen have all faced the wrath of activists while trying to enjoy a nice meal.

The utility and appropriateness of these tactics have become entangled in a larger debate over the importance of maintaining civil discourse—despite the fact that Trump and his party have been blowing up other long-standing political norms with a vengeance.

Condemning this kind of direct action is almost a prerequisite for those wishing to be seen as sober, serious commenters. After the confrontations with Sanders, Miller, and Nielsen, the Washington Post editorial board wrote that, regardless of their complicity in ripping apart families at the border, government officials “should be allowed to eat dinner in peace.”

If we’re talking about ordinary citizens, even activists, I generally agree. Americans are a messy, highly polarized polity, and people should be able to eat a meal in peace without being punished for their political views. And as a practical matter, these tactics certainly play into the right’s pervasive victimization narrative.

But when it comes to politicians and their staff, the crucial context is that we’re facing a crisis of elite impunity. Look no further than the White House, where Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office despite facing over a dozen allegations of sexual harassment or abuse and having refused to release his taxes or divest his sprawling business interests.

Hyper-partisanship has similarly shielded other politicians in both parties. Representative Duncan Hunter (R-CA) and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton are both running under multiple federal indictments—Hunter for defrauding his donors, and Paxton for securities fraud and related charges—and both are currently leading their opponents. Michael Barajas reported for The Texas Observer that “Team Paxton’s biggest coup, according to prosecutors, has been defunding and derailing the case for years.” Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) is leading his race as well after his corruption case ended in a mistrial. Legal experts say prosecutors declined to retry the senator in large part because the Supreme Court has consistently narrowed the definition of public corruption in recent years, most prominently when they overturned former Virginia governor Robert F. McDonnell’s conviction for what had previously been a crime in 2016. Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) has a good shot at becoming the Republicans’ next leader in the House, despite allegations that he turned a blind eye to sexual abuse when he was an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State University in the 1980s.

The emerging consensus on the right is that Brett Kavanaugh should be given a lifetime gig deciding the validity of democratically enacted laws unless it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that he attempted to rape someone. Never mind that he appears to have repeatedly lied to Congress, a felony, or that the American Bar Association had “raised red flags about ‘his professional experience and the question of his freedom from bias and open-mindedness’” when he was first nominated to become a federal judge 12 years ago, according to The Washington Post.

It’s a stark example of the infuriating breakdown in democratic accountability we’re facing as a nation. Brett Kavanaugh is vying to become the fourth Supreme Court Justice to be appointed by a president who came into office despite losing the popular vote. If he’s confirmed on a party-line vote, Senators representing 44 percent of the population will have prevailed over those representing 56 percent (depending on how you do the math, the picture can look even worse). In the House, voter suppression and what the Brennan Center for Justice calls “extreme gerrymandering” means Democrats have to win by a significant margin in November to gain just a bare majority of seats. At the time of this writing, Democrats enjoy an eight-point lead in the congressional generic ballot, yet FiveThirtyEight’s projection model gives Republicans a one-in-four chance of maintaining their control of the chamber.

Democrats are also facing concerted efforts to suppress the vote. “States are kicking a growing number of voters off their rolls in the wake of a 2013 Supreme Court decision that invalidated a key part of the Voting Rights Act,” according to Vox. The Brennan Center for Justice notes that purging inactive voters is necessary, but in many cases, “Officials strike voters from the rolls through a process that is shrouded in secrecy, prone to error, and vulnerable to manipulation.” Since that Supreme Court ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act, federal actions to protect the minority voting rights have dropped sharply, according to the US Commission on Civil Rights. A 2016 study by researchers at UC San Diego found that strict voter-ID laws decrease Democratic turnout by 8.8 percentage points and Republican turnout by just 3.6 points.

This would all be intolerable in a democratic republic if the stakes were much lower than they are. But we’re not talking about differences in marginal tax rates; we’re litigating whether the United States will remain a pluralistic, multicultural country where no person is above the law.

Millions of Americans are justifiably outraged by what they see in the news virtually every day of the Trump era. The vast majority of them are expressing that through traditional political activism. They’re registering voters and canvassing and donating to politicians—Act Blue, the online fund-raising site, raised almost $36 million in the month of August alone. But increasingly, they feel that’s not enough—and understandably so. If elected officials keep finding ways to insulate themselves from the wrath of their constituents at the ballot box, they can’t be surprised to find themselves hounded in public.

In the Hudson Valley, a distinctly Trump-like Democrat is facing an unexpected primary challenge in a key local race—one that’s mostly flown under the national radar.

At a candidates’ forum in Woodstock last week, Ulster County Sheriff Paul Van Blarcum, who is seeking his fourth term in office, raised eyebrows when he told the crowd, “It’s out there that I’m a racist, and that the sheriff’s office is racist. Am I getting sued by four black officers? Yes. But let me tell you this: They’re suing me for not getting promoted. Two out of the four never even took a promotional exam. The third one took the exam and failed. The fourth person took the exam, and passed, but unfortunately, he was arrested for stealing from the sheriff’s office. So that makes me a racist and I don’t understand it.”

He added: “As far as the other lawsuits against me, we’ve won every one of them.” (A female corrections officer who sued the Ulster County Sheriff’s Office in federal court for on-the-job harassment was awarded a large settlement in 2014.)

Norman James, who retired from the sheriff’s office in April after 30 years working at the Ulster County jail, is one of the plaintiffs in the case Van Blarcum mentioned in Woodstock (there are five in total, and two are no longer with the department). He said he and the others are suing the sheriff’s office in federal court for systemic discrimination against the department’s small number of black corrections officers.

“The white officers get a lot better treatment than the black officers do,” said James. “If you’re a black officer and you commit some sort of infraction, you’re dealt with much more harshly by the administration than if you’re white. If you’re white, you may get a 30-day suspension, but it’s easily forgiven and forgotten and you’re still able to advance. You also get easier job assignments.”

“There’s an old-boy network,” he said, “and it’s all white.”

Van Blarcum didn’t respond to an interview request.

James told me about a white officer who threw a glass at a woman in a bar, causing a facial injury that required 150 stitches. He faced a 30-day suspension and then went on with his career. The black cop who was “arrested for stealing from the sheriff’s office” was a veteran with a clean record who ran out of gas one night and filled up his personal vehicle with the department’s gas. He offered to pay restitution. According to James, that incident occurred 15 years ago, and that officer has been repeatedly passed over for promotions ever since. “Twenty-two years on the job, and he’s still working on the housing units like a rookie,” he said.

“I have no interest in promotions,” said Tyrone Brodhead, a 19-year veteran of the department and another plaintiff in the suit. “My issue is that I’m constantly being accused of bringing in contraband and subjected to internal affairs investigations. I’m subjected to locker searches, vehicle searches and personal searches. They’ve never substantiated any of these charges, but I’ve been labeled a drug dealer.”

“I’ve been on the countywide swat team, but I’ve been held back from operations whenever they involve narcotics,” Brodhead observed. “I’ve never been involved in drugs, I don’t use drugs, and there’s no reason for this other than the color of my skin. It’s a hostile work environment.”

The attorneys representing the officers didn’t respond to an interview request by press time.

In 2014, Van Blarcum ran unopposed for his third term in office. He was reelected easily, taking 90 percent of the vote. According to the Times Herald Record, Van Blarcum’s vote total in the county that year exceeded that of both the Democratic and Republican gubernatorial candidates combined.

But in May, as several other local incumbents sailed to easy victories at the Ulster County Democratic nominating convention, Van Blarcum faced an uprising among local Democratic officials and activists. He reportedly left the venue before his bid for the nomination was rejected by a lopsided, 85 percent to 15 percent margin.

What shifted in the intervening years? Andrew Zink, president of the Ulster County Young Democrats, said, “The election of Donald Trump changed the equation.” (Local Democrats were furious when Van Blarcum and several of his deputies appeared in a photo-op with the president in the Oval Office.) “Trump’s election woke people up,” said Zink. “Trump made us look at these local issues and evaluate our local elected officials and ask ourselves, ‘is this what we want?’ And when the Democratic voters of Ulster County looked at that question in that race, they said, ‘no, we don’t want our own Donald Trump.’”

Since his last, easy reelection in 2014, Van Blarcum has made a series of headlines, some going national, that alienated restive Democrats. Local activists said Van Blarcum’s tendency to use his office to amplify hard-right messages became intolerable after the 2016 election.

In the days following a 2015 mass shooting that left 14 people dead in San Bernardino, California, Van Blarcum urged county residents with gun permits to carry firearms at all times. The appeal was posted on his office’s official Facebook page. The following year, he trashed local “sanctuary city” ordinances, and said that his deputies, who, according to Van Blarcum, have long cooperated with the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, wouldn’t change the way they did business. Shortly before his last election, he’d angered gun safety advocates by urging his deputies to “use discretion” when considering charges against people who violated the Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement (SAFE) Act, a gun-control package that New York state passed in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre.

“The sheriff’s made it very clear that he’s above the law,” said Dan Torres, a New Paltz City Councilor and a fierce critic of Van Blarcum. “He’s done that by campaigning with county resources, thumbing his nose at communities that want to protect their immigrants, making wild statements about guns, and then getting the country sued multiple times because of his actions. He’s a wingnut with a real disregard for the US Constitution.”

Van Blarcum’s Democratic challenger, Juan Figueroa, said that it was the sheriff’s decision to weigh in—again, on the Ulster County Sheriff’s official Facebook page—on NFL players taking a knee to protest racially discriminatory policing that first drew his interest in the race. The post, which echoed tweets about the issue from Donald Trump, claimed that the players had “show[ed] an utter lack of patriotism and total disrespect for our veterans—living and dead—and everything that they put their lives on the line for!” It called for Ulster County residents to “boycott all football telecasts [and] refrain from attending or viewing any NFL games.… let the NFL play to empty stadiums.”

Figueroa, a New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent, said the post was part of a “pattern of that sort of behavior” that “just shows [that Van Blarcum] has been in office a little too long and doesn’t realize what his job is supposed to be. When you use your office for something like that, you’re abusing your office. The sheriff is elected by the people, and he’s supposed to represent all of the people.”

Figueroa was also incensed by Van Blarcum’s practice of conducting “suspicionless warrant checks” on people entering the local social-services office, a practice that was only discontinued after then–New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sent county officials a letter clarifying that the policy was discriminatory and “in violation of civil rights law.”

Figueroa, a stocky, 53-year-old retired state trooper and veteran of the first Gulf War, doesn’t fit neatly into the narrative of a leftist insurgency raging against a centrist Democratic establishment. Describing his politics as “middle of the road,” he said that his campaign, to some degree, has been driven by a broader “backlash” against Donald Trump’s presidency. “I’ve been involved in other races, but this is different,” said Figueroa. “I have never seen so many people get involved in local races.”

Figueroa faced some resistance from local Democratic officials when he first considered getting into the race. Some dismissed Van Blarcum’s bluster as just that, and felt that it was better to have an incumbent Democrat in the office than risk losing it to a Republican who might be more reactionary. And there was a sense that Van Blarcum was simply unbeatable.

Local activists also tell me that some were wary of opposing the sitting sheriff due to the very nature of his office. “The sheriff’s office is supposed to be there for all citizens of Ulster County,” said Zink. “But now, people [who don’t agree with Van Blarcum’s politics] think, ‘Well, if I have a bumper sticker and the sheriff’s office pulls me over, or I need help, are they going to support me?’”

But Dan Torres, who introduced Figueroa at the county nominating convention, said those worries were dispelled when Figueroa took the stage. “I’m not being overdramatic when I say it, but people cried when he spoke,” he said. “They saw a guy stand up there and talk about how his parents told him that being a person of color meant he had to work that much harder. And he talked about what it meant to be a person of color in law enforcement, and how that affected his views on policing and his views on what it means to be an American.”

Figueroa is not only Van Blarcum’s opposite in terms of their respective approaches to law enforcement. He also represents Ulster County’s increasingly diverse, younger, and more Democratic-leaning population. In some ways, the county is a microcosm of the country, with deep-blue towns dotting rural areas that went big for Donald Trump in 2016. Figueroa’s supporters are hoping that an energized Democratic coalition will deliver a rebuke not only to Donald Trump in November but also to their own Trump-like sheriff.

Because of New York State’s arcane fusion-voting system, Figueroa has to beat Van Blarcum three times to win the office. He won their first contest at the county nominating convention, and he trounced the Sheriff in the September 13 Democratic primary, winning 82 percent of the vote. But come November, Van Blarcum will still appear on the November ballot on the Republican, Independence Party, and Conservative Party lines.

A majority of millennials think that lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people face a significant amount of prejudice in America. Most young people—whether gay or straight, gender-conforming or otherwise—think it’s important to protect youth from bullying, and the larger LGBTQ community from discrimination in housing and employment.

At the same time, millennials are products of the world in which they live, and a surprising number of them say that “the increasing acceptance of homosexuality in our society is causing a deterioration of morality.”

That somewhat flummoxing finding is from the latest GenForward survey of 18-34-year-olds [PDF]. The project is led by Cathy Cohen, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. The first-of-its kind series gauges the views of a nationally representative sample of more than 1,750 young people, with big sub-samples of African- and Asian-American and Latinx respondents. (Technically, the oldest millennials are now in their late 30s, but the researchers use that term loosely.)

“The news is very positive in that millennials are generally supportive of a broad and expansive framework for rights and equality for the LGBT community,” said Cohen. “They believe that folks should be able to adopt. They should be able to serve in the military. And they shouldn’t face discrimination.”

The millennial generation is known for its racial and ethnic diversity—more than four in 10 identify as nonwhite. Other research suggests that they also tend to be more tolerant than earlier generations have been of people who hold identities and viewpoints that are different from their own. The latest GenForward survey found similar dynamics in younger people’s views of sexuality and gender. A majority of millennials across all ethnic groups think that transgender adults should be able to serve in the military, and that LGBTQ should be able to adopt kids. Majorities favor efforts to combat discrimination, want more funding for prevention and treatment of HIV, and think the United States should give safe haven to LGBTQ immigrants fleeing countries that criminalize their sexuality.

Across racial and ethnic lines, many millennials report that there’s “a lot” of discrimination in their own communities. That’s true of a majority of young Asian Americans (53 percent) and Latinxs (61 percent), a plurality of African Americans (43 percent), and 27 percent of white millennials.

When asked specifically about transgender people rather than people who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, larger shares of young people say that transgender individuals face “a lot” of discrimination in our society. A majority of young blacks (51 percent) said as much, as did pluralities of Latinxs (48 percent), whites (45 percent), and 30 percent of Asian Americans.

So younger Americans are more “woke” than older generations, which isn’t breaking news, but that’s not the whole story. The survey found a racial divide in millennials’ views of mainstream LGBTQ advocacy groups. When LGBTQ respondents were asked whether the issues queer people of color grapple with differ from the “issues being promoted” by the advocacy organizations, 52 percent of them said they were. Among millennials as a whole, 53 percent of African Americans and half of Latinxs agreed that the agendas of LGBTQ political groups don’t always reflect the lived experiences of minorities within the LGBTQ community, while a majority of white and Asian Americans in this cohort “believe that all LGBT individuals benefit when mainstream LGBT organizations fight for their basic rights,” according to the research.

Then there’s the finding that fully 40 percent of people aged 18–34 who identify as straight believe that “the increasing acceptance of homosexuality in our society is causing a deterioration of morality.” Even more incongruously, that view was shared by slightly more than one in five LGBTQ millennials. In May, Gallup phrased a question slightly differently, asking whether “gay or lesbian relations” is “morally acceptable,” and only 30 percent of the general population said no.

Cohen says this was both “the most surprising and also the most disturbing finding,” and offers a couple of possible explanations for what seems like a pretty striking disconnect. She notes that the morality question is a standard one for this kind of research and was the only place where the survey uses the term “homosexuality.” The rest of the study refers to variations of “the LGBT community.”

“I think one could argue that homosexuality has a different connotation for millennials,” says Cohen. “LGBT are a group that they’ve grown up around, they’re people who are part of their social networks and represent a community that they understand, while ‘homosexuality’ has been” stigmatized by society as a whole. “And the research tells us that individuals can have what seem to be very contradictory ideas, so they can believe in equal rights for LGBT folks, and also believe that homosexuality is a moral detriment.”

As for the 21 percent of LGBTQ millennials who answered in the affirmative, Cohen says, “They grow up in a homophobic culture. The idea that we are immune from taking in that homophobia and regurgitating it is naive. We should also keep in mind that eight in 10 disagree.”

Millennials’ views of gender, sexuality, and civil liberties provide a peek into the future of American society. The group now makes up the biggest generation in the US workforce, and, this year, are projected to become the largest group of eligible voters. By next year, they should surpass baby boomers as the largest living generation in the overall population. If you’re a fan of diversity and tolerance, the latest GenForward survey paints a hopeful picture—but it also shows that, when it comes to bias, the solution isn’t demographics alone.

In one of the tightest swing districts in the country, one of the most vulnerable Republican incumbents is running an unabashedly Trump-like campaign. Representative John Faso represents New York’s 19th district—a microcosm of the country, closely divided between densely populated, deep-blue towns and long expanses of rural red—and he isn’t talking about Trump’s tax cuts (House leaders let him vote against them) or focusing on any other issues of substance. He certainly isn’t talking about health care, after voting to strip coverage from almost 10 percent of his constituents. Instead, the centerpiece of his campaign has been claiming that MS-13 gangsters are coming to kill us all, and promising to address the contrived “issue” of low-level drug dealers being arrested with SNAP benefit cards in their pockets.

Faso didn’t face a primary challenger, so this isn’t about throwing red meat to the base to secure the nomination. What we’ve seen so far is likely to be his pitch for reelection. And it’s striking to see a politician who won this relatively purple district in 2016 by portraying himself as a moderate Republican, critical of Trump’s campaign, now choose a strategy that seems more appropriate for a deep-red district in the Bible Belt. (Faso’s popular predecessor, Chris Gibson, was arguably one of the last moderate Republicans in the House.)

This time out, Faso has chosen to run on classic appeals to white racial anxiety. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, a right-wing, restrictionist group that doesn’t shy from trumpeting the ostensible dangers of MS-13, no member of the gang has ever been arrested in the district. Journalist Hannah Dreier, who has been covering MS-13 for years, reported that while MS-13 is notably brutal, it is small compared to other gangs, hasn’t grown in membership in recent years, and almost never targets “true outsiders—people who are not friends with any gang members or targets for recruitment.” While MS-13 is not the transnational powerhouse conservatives describe, Drier noted, “it is the US gang most strongly tied to Central America, which is where the majority of asylum-seeking teenagers come from.”

“In that way,” said Drier, “it’s the perfect focal point for Trump’s message of closed borders.”

The food-stamp claim may be more insidious, as it’s part of a larger Republican push to attack the program. According to the Albany Times-Union, “Rep. John Faso is doubling down on his push to place stricter work requirements on SNAP recipients” by suggesting that SNAP is plagued by widespread fraud. The reality, as noted by the US Department of Agriculture’s own watchdog, is that the program’s fraud rate was just 0.9 percent in 2016—up slightly from 0.6 percent the year before. And while the implication is that wealthy, Scarface-esque, drug kingpins are being busted with SNAP benefit cards, back in the 1990s a researcher at the University of Chicago found that low-level members of drug organizations—the kind of people who are most likely to be apprehended by police—were making $3.30 per hour, on average. It’s true that they probably don’t report their income, but that’s also the case with many other low-income workers in the gray economy who genuinely need nutritional support.

Faso’s gambit is risky. Last month, Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg wrote in The New York Times that Trump’s rhetoric is not only “making Democratic base voters even angrier than you might expect,” but his “red meat strategy” also “gets a decidedly less enthusiastic response with Catholic and nonreligious conservatives.” Greenberg noted that 71 percent of Tea Party supporters strongly approve of Trump, but that’s only true of 31 percent of moderate Republicans. (Again, New York’s 19th isn’t a deep-red congressional district.)

Democratic voters chose Antonio Delgado to run against Faso in November. Delgado is a gifted, charismatic attorney, a graduate of Harvard Law and a Rhodes scholar. With the backing of the progressive grassroots organization Citizen Action, and early support from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Delgado should be a formidable opponent for Faso. Delgado is also African-American, and cut a hip-hop album with a cover that depicts him staring out from under a hoodie. It will be interesting to see what lines of attack Faso pursues against him in the coming months.

Given his district and his competition, Faso may be especially vulnerable, but he’s not the only Republican grappling with the best way to navigate Trump’s first midterm cycle. Republicans in competitive races across the country are walking a tight-rope: If they embrace Trump and his extreme brand of dog-whistle politics too closely, they risk further firing up an already enthusiastic Democratic base. At the same time, according to a June Gallup poll, Trump enjoys an 87 percent favorability rating among self-identified Republicans, so GOP candidates distancing themselves from their president risk demobilizing their most energized, reliable voters.

After his loss in a congressional primary earlier this month, former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford wrote that “the operative question” in his race “was not about conservative policies that are normally the lifeblood of a Republican primary, but rather who on the ballot would more loyally support the president.”

“I wasn’t Trump enough in the age of Trump,” Sanford decided, “and so indeed I lost.”

The decisions Republicans make in navigating this difficult electoral terrain, and whether those who choose to channel Trump’s style of racist demagoguery are rewarded or punished at the polls this fall, could affect US politics well beyond any particular midterm race.

Until recently, there was something approaching a consensus among political scientists that politicians had to tread cautiously when appealing to white racial grievances. If they were too obvious about it—if they eschewed subtle, coded messages for blatant bigotry—voters had a tendency to reject them as too divisive. That view was overturned by Trump’s Electoral College victory in 2016. Now, two years later, if it turns out that conservatives can turn out their base with hyper-charged appeals to racial grievance without paying a price for it, we can expect Trump-like demagoguery to become a fixture of Republican messaging. If, on the other hand, those kinds of candidates face a demonstrable backlash, the calculus will be very different.

Early results from a small sample of special elections could suggest a backlash is brewing. Republican gubernatorial candidates Ed Gillespie in Virginia and Kim Guadagno in New Jersey both blanketed the air with ads featuring hazy images of dangerous-looking, brown “gang members” and lost by wide margins. In Pennsylvania’s very Republican 18th Congressional District, Republican Rick Saccone’s closing argument in a March special election was, “Democrats love illegals and hate God.” (Saccone subsequently lost to Democrat Conor Lamb by less than 1,000 votes in a district Trump won by 20 percent.) Republicans have made attacks on immigration “a key component of their political strategy,” according to America’s Voice, a group that advocates for immigrant rights. And, as the group notes, from the special election for US Senate in Alabama to local races in states like New York and Florida, “the anti-immigrant strategy failed.”

Of course, for Faso, as for a number of Republican candidates across the country, the real test will come in November.

Since the 2016 election, there’s been a sprawling debate within the left over whether Democrats should abandon “identity politics” and focus instead on a forward-leaning message centered on economic populism. (Social identity is a central influence on everyone’s political choices, so when we talk about “identity politics” in this context, we really mean identity politics that don’t appeal to straight white people.) The idea is that focusing on issues of ethnicity, immigration status, gender, and sexual orientation risk alienating more of the non-college-educated whites who have moved toward the Republican Party since Obama’s election. There’s also a significant body of data suggesting that racial animus is a key driver of white conservatives’ opposition to redistributive policies and a robust safety net. Implicit in the argument is that people of color and the LGBTQ community would continue to support Democrats if they spent less time focusing on the unique concerns of those groups, both because progressive economic policies should appeal to their interests, in most cases, and because the GOP continues to signal that its “tent” isn’t big enough to welcome them.

But new data suggest that the entire debate poses a false choice, at least as it applies to racial-justice issues. Preliminary findings from Anat Shenker-Osorio (author of Don’t Buy It: The Trouble with Talking Nonsense about the Economy), Ian Haney López (author of Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class), and researchers at the progressive think tank Demos show that a unified message that acknowledges both racial and economic disparities wins over white voters more effectively than an economic message alone. Just as significantly, the researchers found that while race-neutral economic arguments won’t cause voters of color to embrace the GOP, they do make them less enthusiastic about participating in elections. They say that more research on this is coming down the pike.

Shenker-Osorio told me that the “race-class narrative” she and her colleagues are developing “draws a causal link between issues of race and racism and the extreme and growing class inequities that are of course more acute for communities of color.” The project’s goal is to determine whether a message “that combines issues of race and class [can] actually beat both the opposition’s message—which is always the name of the game—and also the kind of color-blind, economic populist message that we’ve come to accept as a progressive standard.”

The results, according to Shenker-Osorio, were compelling. “Every single message that we tested that gave explicit mention of race” performed better with what the researchers defined as the progressive base and was “also more persuasive to the 59 percent of people who fell not in our base, and not in the opposition’s, but in that coveted middle.”

There have been several phases of studies so far. They included a series of surveys fielded in conjunction with Lake Research Partners (a political polling and strategy firm that works extensively with Democrats and organized labor), and a door-to-door canvas of 800 voters in Minnesota—half of them white and half people of color—that was conducted in partnership with a coalition of grassroots groups called Our Minnesota Future.

“Persuadable” white voters, as the studies call them, tend to be torn between two competing narratives: On one hand, these voters said that it’s important to talk about race, and that they care about racial equity. But the same voters also perceived conversations about race as being difficult in ways that tend to pull them “toward racial resentment and conservative fears.” In races against politicians who use racially coded dog whistles to fire up their base, one or the other of these views typically gets “primed,” or activated, by campaign rhetoric, and a race-neutral economic message cedes that contest to the kind of appeals to racial grievance that have long been a mainstay of conservative messaging.

A key drawback with economic messages alone, according to Shenker-Osorio, is that they attempt to counter fears situated deep in our reptilian brains with promises of greater economic security, and that tends to be a losing proposition. “When someone knocks on your door and says that crime is spiraling out of control and MS-13 is coming to kill you,” she said, “and then some Democrat knocks on your door and offers free college, the reaction is, ‘Sure, free college is great!’ But the problem is that you were just told you were going to be killed.”

Shenker-Osorio said that it’s vital to “help white people understand why it is that these severe racial disparities exist, rather than just naming the disparities, which leaves people to fill in the causal relationship for themselves.” When voters are left to draw their own conclusions about why people of color have disparate economic outcomes, they’re more likely to embrace conservative narratives that hold that poor work habits or stereotypical cultural flaws are responsible. Naming a culprit—in this case, politicians who use racial animus to divide working America—creates a sense of solidarity with people of color, rather than stoking resentment toward them. “Perhaps the most interesting finding from our research,” said Shenker-Osorio, “is that explicit references to race actually bolster economic populism.”

The point of the canvas was to test how these competing messages influenced voters’ preferences at the polls. All 800 households were shown a real flyer from a Republican congressional candidate, with the candidate’s name and partisan affiliation removed. It bashed Democrats for, among other things, “demanding more sanctuary cities for criminal and illegal aliens.” After viewing the flyer, a majority of white respondents agreed with the sentiment (as did a plurality of people of color).

Half of the respondents were then shown a flyer from an imaginary candidate that contained a progressive, race-neutral economic message, while the other half were offered one with a message that incorporated both race and class. The latter read, “Whether white, black, or brown, 5th generation or newcomer, we all want to build a better future for our children. My opponent says some families have value, while others don’t count. He wants to pit us against each other in order to gain power for himself and kickbacks for his donors.”

After viewing the GOP flyer and one of the two progressive messages, respondents were asked which candidate they were likely to support in an election. Among whites who agreed with the first flyer and were then shown the race-neutral economic flyer, 56 percent stuck with the Republican, while 44 percent shifted to the progressive candidate. But among those shown the race-class message, the numbers basically flipped—with 43 percent choosing the conservative candidate, and 57 percent switching to the progressive.

People of color were also asked which candidate they’d support, but they were offered a third option: just staying home on Election Day. More than six in 10 who were receptive to the initial dog-whistle flyer said they’d support the progressive candidate after seeing the one that incorporated both race and class—significantly higher than among those shown the race-neutral economic message (just under half switched to the progressive).

But perhaps more importantly, in terms of electoral success, the purely economic message led twice as many people of color to say that they’d simply sit out the contest than did the race-class narrative. (Among those who agreed with the Republican flyer, 8 percent of the group that then saw the race-class message said they were unlikely to vote, compared with 15 percent of those who saw the pure economic message; among those who disagreed with the first flyer, those numbers were 8 percent and 18 percent, respectively.)

The researchers think that this is likely because people of color navigate an environment in which they see structural racism all around them—they aren’t able to choose to ignore “identity politics” because they’re affected by those issues on a daily basis—and as a result they perceive race-neutral economic messages as not really being about them, or not speaking directly to them.

These findings are especially important in the Trump era. As the 2018 election cycle heats up in earnest, Republicans, who continue to see divisive stereotyping and race baiting as a winning strategy, are sticking to their dog whistles in hopes of turning out their base in November. The research from Shenker-Osorio, Haney López, and Demos suggests that Democrats would be wise to alter theirs.

Correction: This article has been edited to reflect he latest tallies of “persuadable” middle voters. They make up 59 percent of those surveyed; not 63 percent, as had previously been reported. We apologize to our readers for the error.

The 2018 election cycle sees women running for Congress in unprecedented numbers. The Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) reported that, as of April, 527 women made up 23 percent of all federal candidates—dwarfing the previous high-water mark of 16 percent, and they have won almost half of their primary campaigns thus far, according to The New York Times. The sharp upswing has been almost entirely on the Democratic side of the aisle. “While women now make up 30 percent of the candidates fielded by the Democrats, Republican women only make up 13 percent of their own party’s candidate pool,” the CRP noted, “meaning that 75 percent of female candidates are Democrats.”1

Part of this potential “blue wave” is Deb Haaland. Haaland is running in New Mexico’s District 1, which includes three-quarters of Albuquerque, on an unapologetically progressive platform, calling for expanding Social Security, a federal jobs guarantee, Medicare for All, universal childcare and pre-K education, criminal-justice reform, and aggressive action to combat global warming. (NM-1 is currently represented by Democrat Michelle Lujan Grisham, who is giving up her House seat to run for governor of New Mexico.)2

Republicans have identified the district as a top target in 2018, but if Haaland—who served as the chairwoman of the Democratic Party of New Mexico, and the tribal administrator of the San Felipe Pueblo—succeeds in the June 5 Democratic primary and goes on to win in November, she will become the first Native American woman to serve on Capitol Hill.3

I caught up with Haaland last week to talk about her race, and to get her perspective on what this milestone would mean to her and her community. You can listen to our discussion in the player above, or read the transcript below, which has been edited for length and clarity.4

Joshua Holland: We’ve seen a number of first-time candidates emerge in response to Trump’s election, but that doesn’t describe your experience. You’ve run for office before. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you first got into politics?5

Deb Haaland: Sure. For almost 20 years, I’ve worked on various campaigns. I started out as a phone volunteer. I’d go into campaign offices, ask for lists of Native American voters, and just start calling people because I felt that I just wanted to help more Native folks get to the polls. That ended up turning into sort of a full-blown organizing job in Indian country for me.6

I worked on a lot of campaigns focused on that, and then in 2012, I was the state Native American vote director for President Obama’s reelection campaign, and I helped us win New Mexico. After I worked for the president, that’s when I decided to run for lieutenant governor, and then after we lost our general election, I decided I would run for state chairwoman of the Democratic Party. I won, and we won our elections across the state in 2016, so I was proud of that.7

JH: Can you tell us about your top two or three priorities would be?8

DH: The top priority for me, and it’s one that resonates real well in this district, is climate change and renewable energy. I think that if we had a renewable-energy revolution, not only in New Mexico’s District 1, but across the country, that would create thousands and thousands of good-paying, sustainable jobs. That’s, for me, the number one issue.9

One of the other top issues is Medicare for all. Everybody needs to have health care, and just last month President Trump and the Republicans worked overtime to make sure that Planned Parenthood has a harder time helping women get the care they need, and so I want to go to Congress to fight for that, to make sure that everybody has an opportunity to get the care that they need.10

JH: Now, the first congressional district, it’s mostly Albuquerque, right? It’s largely urban. It leans blue.11

DH: Yes. Albuquerque is the largest city. We do, however, have rural communities in District 1. We have some small towns to the east of Albuquerque, and I have one Native American community in my district. It’s Tohajiilee of the Navajo Nation.12

JH: Are there local issues in your district that folks from other parts of the country may not be thinking about?13

DH: You know, I’m willing to bet that a lot of us care about us the same thing. Whenever the Republicans have an opportunity, they’ve tried to make New Mexico into a right-to-work state, and so I’ve been on the front lines fighting that for a long time.14

JH: Just the other day, I was on Twitter and a Native American man from Idaho was telling me that he thought that Native Americans are, as he put it, “the forgotten people of color.” He said that in the discourse about marginalized communities, the focus tends to be on African Americans and Latinos and Asian and Pacific Islanders, and he thought that Native Americans get overlooked. I think he was lamenting the lack of what one might call “intersectionality.” Does that statement resonate with you?15

DH: Yes, it does. Think about how long the water protectors at Standing Rock were fighting for their sacred lake, and how long they were fighting before it got any news in the national media. I agree with him there, because it does take a lot for Native Americans to get recognized, and I think once Standing Rock kind of grabbed the attention of more folks, it did become a national issue, but it took a very long time. Likewise, missing and murdered Native women—it happens so often, and nobody knows about it, because it doesn’t hit the mainstream media. I’ve been working hard to raise those issues.16

They’ve been trying to frack in Chaco Canyon here in New Mexico for a long time. That’s my ancestral homeland, and I made it into a national issue, because I talked about it a lot with the national press. But we have to keep talking about these issues. We have to raise them up so that people know that those are things they should care about, just like Black Lives Matter and all of the discrimination and targeting that happens every single day in this country. Native Americans are the second-smallest population in our country and they have among the highest numbers of criminal cases in federal courts. What does that tell you?17

JH: It seems to me that one example of this kind of erasure of Native Americans is that Donald Trump’s nativism and bigoted views towards blacks and Latinos have gotten a ton of press, but he has relentlessly attacked Native Americans repeatedly, and it doesn’t seem to get as much attention.18

Most recently, he directly challenged the sovereignty… or maybe we should call it “quasi-sovereignty” … of Native American nations. This was in the context of enacting work requirements for Medicaid recipients, and the Trump regime claimed that Native American tribes constitute a racial category rather than a group that enjoys a measure of self-governance.19

He often calls Senator Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas,” but this isn’t new. His hostility towards Native Americans dates back to when some tribes on the East Coast opened casinos that competed with his Atlantic City properties. The Washington Post reported that in 1993, Trump “told lawmakers that organized crime… ‘is rampant on Indian reservations.’ He predicted ‘one of the biggest scandals since Al Capone.’” Then he said of the tribe that opened up the Foxwoods Casino, “They look like Indians to me.” It goes back a long way. It’s not a new thing.20

DH: No, and it’s absolutely shameful.21

And I think one of the reasons I would be honored to go to Congress is that I feel there’s a lack of education about the history of our country, and clearly President Trump doesn’t understand the trust responsibility that the United States government has toward tribes. We do have a government-to-government relationship with the tribes. We’re not special-interest groups. We’re not a racial category. The US government has a responsibility to provide health care, and so when we ask to be exempt from various things, that is grounded in law. For example, we can enroll through the Affordable Care Act any time of the year. We don’t have to wait until the open-enrollment period. And it’s because the US government has that responsibility. So he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He doesn’t speak for Native Americans. He doesn’t get to decide who is Native American. I will always be proud of who I am, and understand what my relationship with the land and the water and all these things mean. I would be happy to bring that experience with me to Congress and help educate some of these folks, so that they understand it better.22

JH: We have this unique relationship with Native American tribes. Native American nations are the surviving vestiges of what amounts to a genocide against the indigenous population. They have semi-autonomous status with governments that are ultimately reliant or subordinate on the US government. In what way does that situation give Native Americans an experience that’s distinct from other communities of color?23

DH: As I mentioned, the US government has a trust responsibility to tribes. When the Europeans first came to our country, this land was occupied. Right now, there are over 500 recognized tribes in the country. There were far more than that. This was our land. This was Indian land.24

Slowly but surely, the US government continued to encroach across the country. So that’s where treaties came into play. When you hear the term “reservation,” that means the Indians had a large swath of land, and the US government came in and said, “Well, we’re going to take all this land and we’ll reserve a small portion for you. This is where you all can live.”25

There were a lot of horrible eras in our country’s history, like the allotment era, when they said for each tribal member, we’ll give this certain number of acres and you can live here. As time went on, the land was sold off, or it was divided so much between heirs that they didn’t really have any large reservation land where they could have economic development or anything like that.26

So, here in New Mexico, our Indian Pueblos are essentially defined by Spanish land grants. When the Spanish came here in the late 1500s, they essentially claimed the land for Spain. And those land grants are essentially the boundaries of our pueblos today.27

We are sovereign governments. We do have treaties with the United States. The deal was basically, “In exchange for all of the land that we took, we are going to be responsible for certain things for you.”Health care is one of those.28

JH: There have been a number of reports over the years about difficulties organizing Native American communities and turning out the vote. My understanding is that some of these problems are structural, and some are informed by partisanship. In some states, there’s voter suppression. Can you speak to that issue as someone who has organized Native American communities and national politics in the past?29

DH: In New Mexico, we’re very lucky that we have laws in place that really help ensure that Native Americans’ right to vote is unencumbered. We have a secretary of state right now, Maggie Toulouse Oliver, who cares tremendously about that. So we enjoy a lot of things that some states don’t.30

They had passed a law in North Dakota some time ago to require photo IDs. There were members of Indian tribes who didn’t drive, they couldn’t even get to a motor-vehicle place to get a state ID. Although they had been voting at the same location for 50 years, and everybody in the community knows who they are, they couldn’t vote. So those are things that the Republicans implement because they know that if more people get out to vote than they’ll lose.31

In my experience, if I’m able to drive 10 Native Americans to the polls, nine of them will vote for Democrats. So I think we just need to keep raising our voices and making sure that we have that right to vote and that it’s unencumbered. I mean, it’s never going to end. It’s a constant issue that I think everybody needs to speak up about. It would be nice if every state were like New Mexico and cared about the Indian vote.32

JH: Deb Haalland, I believe we’re out of time. I want to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it.33

DH: Thank you. And make sure you early-vote, if you can.34

Has Donald Trump’s relentless demagoguery against Mexicans, Muslims, and African Americans made Americans more hateful? Or did Trump capitalize on a white backlash against the election of the first black president to put himself in the White House?

Last week, Reveal, a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting, identified 150 incidents of verbal harassment or physical violence over the past 18 months in which the perpetrator explicitly mentioned Donald Trump. Reveal’s Will Carless wrote that “nearly every metric of intolerance in the U.S. has surged over [that time period], from reported anti-Semitism and Islamophobia to violent hate crimes based on skin color, nationality or sexual orientation.”

This postelection surge in hatred has been referred to as “the Trump Effect.” But several studies have suggested the spike in racial animosity pre-dates Trump. For instance, George Washington University political scientist John Sides found that the white working-class voters who had first backed Barack Obama and then voted for Trump in 2016 were already moving toward the Republican Party before the campaign got underway. Sides found that the share of these voters who “perceived that the Democratic Party was to the left of the Republican Party on the issue of how much the government should help improve the status of African Americans grew dramatically over the Obama years.” Obama, Sides told me last year, “was clarifying on this issue, and that may have hastened their departure from the Democratic Party.” And a study by Mara Cecilia Ostfeld that was published last week in the journal Political Behavior similarly concluded that, “as White Democrats learn about Democratic outreach to Latinos, they become less supportive of Democrats.”

But a new, as yet unpublished study presented to the Midwest Political Science Association last month suggests that there’s a causal relationship between Trump’s demagoguery and those reports of racialized abuses. Brian Schaffner, a scholar at UMass Amherst, found empirical evidence that Trump’s rhetoric did indeed lead non-Hispanic whites to express more bigoted views of “the other.”

Shortly before the 2016 election, Schaffner randomly divided almost 1,200 non-Hispanic white respondents into four groups. He showed one, the control group, three relatively anodyne statements made by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton during the course of the campaign. The second group was given the same three statements, and also shown an excerpt of Trump’s infamous Mexican-rapists speech. A third group saw a different inflammatory statement that had been tweeted by Trump: “Our great African-American President hasn’t exactly had a positive impact on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore.” And the final group was shown all five.

Schaffner then asked respondents to say something in their own words about African Americans, Mexicans, white people, politicians, the middle class, and millennials. (One tricky part of conducting a study like this is you have to avoid tipping off your subjects about what you’re looking for. So Schaffner presented the survey as an attempt to gauge how closely respondents were paying attention to the campaign. The inclusion of the middle class and millennials helped hide the purpose of the experiment.)

The results were surprising. Respondents who were exposed to Trump’s comments about “thugs” in Baltimore weren’t affected by that inflammatory statement to a significant degree, but those who read his tirade about Mexicans were. They made significantly more negative comments about the groups in question than those who only saw more conventional campaign rhetoric. Eight-hundred people were recruited to rate the comments on a scale from “very negative” to “very positive,” and Schaffner averaged out the results.

“The finding here that I think is really interesting,” Schaffner told me, “is that Trump’s language [about Mexicans] doesn’t just embolden people to say more negative and more offensive things about the group he’s talking about, but it actually leads them to say more offensive things about all groups.” Schaffner thinks “this pattern is likely due to the fact that the quote about Mexicans is particularly offensive.”

Interestingly, this “Trump Effect” was about equal for whites who backed Trump and those who supported Clinton.

It’s hard to nail down precisely what mechanism is at work here. Schaffner considered the possibility that respondents were simply mimicking Trump’s own words when they were fresh in their minds, but he was able to control for that possibility.

Schaffner’s own explanation is that Trump is giving respondents tacit permission to be bigots. “People aren’t always sure what the norms are in terms of what’s OK and what’s not OK to say,” he says. “There have been several psychological studies showing that people tend to take cues from their peers when they’re asked to talk about other groups. When they hear somebody saying something offensive about some group, then they basically say to themselves, ‘Oh, I can say that because this other person said it, so it must be OK.’ And I think something similar is going on here. People hear a politician who is running for president using this inflammatory terminology, and they think, ‘Well, if a major party’s presidential candidate is using this language then it must be acceptable for me.’ So I think people are changing their understanding about what the norms allow for, or preclude, based on what they’re hearing from Trump.”

Schaffner’s research isn’t in conflict with those other studies that found a white backlash against Obama before Trump arrived on the scene; it’s complementary. Schaffner says that before Obama’s election, political scientists believed that “when candidates used language during a campaign, or during a debate, that was explicitly racist, voters would indicate that they liked that candidate less and were less likely to vote for them. So the idea was that if politicians wanted to make racial appeals, they had to do it in a subtle, implicit way.” But more recent studies—Schaffner points to experiments conducted during Obama’s presidency by Nick Valentino and his colleagues at the University of Michigan —found that those penalties were no longer showing up.

It appears that both are true: Obama’s election activated white voters’ racial grievances and anxieties about being displaced by other groups. But it was Trump’s nasty rhetoric that gave them permission to say what they might have kept quiet out loud—and in some cases, to act on those feelings.   

Conservative firebrand Kevin Williamson was wronged by The Atlantic. He’s a known quantity, and they shouldn’t have hired him only to fire him days later. But let’s be clear: He did not lose that gig for his conservative views, as he claimed last week in a column for The Wall Street Journal. He was a poor fit for a mainstream magazine like The Atlantic because of his own rhetorical choices.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the provocative, bordering-on-obnoxious style Williamson has—that kind of writing can be fun!—and he has made an excellent career for himself in the conservative media. But by repeatedly stepping over the line of acceptable mainstream discourse, he’s effectively disqualified himself from a cushy sinecure at a mainstream publication. He has nobody to blame but himself.

Make no mistake: Conservatives are well represented in the mainstream press. Slate’s Osita Nwanevu tallied 18 of them on the opinion pages of The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The New York Times alone. One of Williamson’s former colleagues at the National Review, Jonah Goldberg, wrote a shoddy, ahistoric book calling liberals fascists, but it didn’t disqualify him from becoming a regular columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

 What Williamson portrays as his big thought-crime was a series of comments—on Twitter and a conservative radio show—advocating hanging women who get an abortion. In his Wall Street Journal column, he wrote that asking anti-choicers to take the assertion that abortion is murder to a logical conclusion is “a silly argument.” So when the question came up, he says, rather than address it in a serious way, he responded that he had “hanging in mind.” But he continued to double down on it. Williamson freely acknowledges that this was “trollish and hostile,” but he won’t take any responsibility for the consequences of acting like a hostile troll. (Williamson also writes that people who accused him of wanting to lynch a quarter of adult American women are guilty of intellectual dishonesty, but as New York magazine’s Ed Kilgore discovered last week, he still refuses to say what kind of punishment should be meted out to women who have abortions if the procedure is criminalized. Williamson followed that up with a column in The Washington Post titled “The Punishment I Favor for Abortion,” in which he once again refused to answer that question.)

Let’s acknowledge that writers like Williamson do face a real challenge transitioning from the conservative media to the mainstream press. But that’s not the fault of liberal “Twitter mobs,” as Williamson and his defenders claim. The problem is that in the conservative ecosystem, writers are incentivized to cross that line. They’re hailed for courageously dissenting from liberal hegemony. They’re applauded for “triggering the libs,” and refusing to bow down to the “social-justice warriors.” Refusing to be bounded by political correctness is a savvy career move in that world. The problem is that a National Review reader’s definition of political correctness looks like common decency to a typical Atlantic subscriber. But when Williamson published a piece describing a 9-year-old black child as “a three-fifths-scale Snoop Dogg” who displayed “the universal gesture of primate territorial challenge,” the choice of metaphors—the not-so-subtle reference to the constitutional formula of counting slaves as three-fifths of white citizens—was his and his alone.

In his column, Williamson deflects responsibility for this with semantics—human beings are primates, and he never actually said the kid was a monkey—and by falling back on the well-worn excuse that he didn’t really mean what he said. It’s your fault for taking his words seriously.

But the thing that eludes Williamson and his defenders is that we’re all playing by the same rules. For writers on the left, right, and center—especially those of us who work mostly online—“Twitter mobs” calling for our heads are a constant. It’s just part of the job. But they can only claim your head when you’ve given them solid ammunition to use against you.

Both The Washington Post and The New York Times feature writers, George Will and Bret Stephens, who dismiss the scientific consensus around climate. Williamson’s “Twitter mobs” have come after both of them, but they still have their jobs at mainstream publications because they’re more cautious with their prose than a writer like Williamson. You can claim that people who support legal abortion are “extremists” being “deceived by a cruel ideology that has licensed the killing of millions of innocents for almost 50 years,” as Ross Douthat did in The New York Times. You can write that George Zimmerman had reason to fear Trayvon Martin’s Skittles when he gunned down the black teenager because of “black-on-black crime,” as Richard Cohen—ostensibly a liberal—did in The Washington Post. But you can’t use primate metaphors or suggest that women who terminate a pregnancy should be hanged. Those are rhetorical choices, not ideological positions.

It is true, as David Roberts argued at Vox, that the kind of reactionary authoritarianism that’s become dominant in conservative outlets like Breitbart is largely absent from mainstream opinion pages, and that this better represents what true conservatism has become in the age of Trump than do the kind of conservatives writers who write for big mainstream platforms. In order to provide readers with true ideological diversity, he argues, mainstream outlets would “have to recruit Sean Hannity or Tomi Lahren or Mark Steyn—someone who thinks of liberals as godless traitors and accepts ludicrous conspiracy theories about Democratic staffer Seth Rich being assassinated or Hillary Clinton colluding with Russia to defeat Donald Trump or Democrats running a child-prostitution ring out of a pizza restaurant. They would have to recruit Ben Shapiro to run serial variations on “rap is crap” or “whites are the real victims of racism.” On the far-right, that may seem like ideological discrimination, but for the rest of us, it’s about enforcing minimal journalistic norms on mainstream opinion pages. It’s certainly true that there are limits to what’s considered acceptable opinion for mainstream publications, but that doesn’t apply only to the right; Osita Nwanevu tallied one self-identified socialist—Elizabeth Bruenig—writing alongside those 18 conservatives at WaPo, The Times, and The Atlantic.

I’ve written provocative pieces. I’ve pointed out that Republicans would kill people by repealing Obamacare, and I’ve argued that a massacre perpetrated by Micah Johnson, the veteran who ambushed a group of police in Dallas in 2016, took the “insurrectionist theory” of the Second Amendment popularized by the gun lobby to its logical conclusion. But I knew I was making provocative arguments and I navigated them with a degree of care. I didn’t suggest or imply that Republicans were consciously trying to kill people with their repeal bill or that the gun lobby directly inspired Johnson to kill those cops. I didn’t suggest prosecuting them for murder. These pieces pissed people off, but they didn’t offer any reason to get me fired. It may well be that Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg wouldn’t hire me because I enjoy throwing a sharp elbow on occasion, but if that’s the case, it wouldn’t mean I’m a victim.

And here’s the real hypocrisy of Williamson blaming the Twitter mob for getting him fired: He’s devoted lots of ink urging marginalized people to stop blaming others for their plight, and then blames everyone but himself for the rhetorical excesses that make him a bad fit for The Atlantic.

 In 2016, Kevin Williamson stirred up the conservative Twitter mob by writing in the National Review that white working-class people living in hollowed-out Rust Belt communities have only themselves to blame for their circumstances. “Get off your asses and go find a job,” he wrote. “You’re a four-hour bus ride away from the gas fields of Pennsylvania.” The column raised some decent points—Williamson argued that Trump was depending on voters who scapegoat immigrants for their economic woes. He talked about the costs and benefits of international trade and argued that it represents a net positive for the country as a whole. It could have been a relatively uncontroversial piece, but his sneering attitude—he ultimately concluded that “the truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die”—pissed off many of his conservative co-tribalists. But the thing that really stands out after the Atlantic affair is how that argument contrasts with the whiny, woe-is-me attitude on display in his Wall Street Journal op-ed. For Williamson, taking personal responsibility is a virtue to be demanded of others, not something he’s inclined to grapple with himself.

Make no mistake: Kevin Williamson is no victim. He’ll be just fine. By firing him, The Atlantic made him a martyr on the altar of political correctness, elevated his already high profile in the conservative media, and punched his ticket on the conservative speaking circuit. It’s likely that he’ll get a big book deal for his troubles.

But because he chose not to be constrained by the norms of “elite” mainstream discourse—because he never passed up an opportunity to melt down some “liberal snowflakes”—he’s too controversial to keep a writing gig at The Atlantic. That’s not an assault on his freedom of expression, and he has nobody to blame for it but himself.

On this Tax Day, let’s pause for a moment to appreciate how difficult it is to craft a massive tax cut that the American public doesn’t like. Republicans recently managed to do just that, passing a tax “reform” scheme that finances over $1 trillion in cuts skewed overwhelmingly toward corporations and the wealthy through deficit spending and is projected to cause 3 million Americans to lose their health coverage as a result.

The tax bill did gain in popularity after it was passed in December, mostly because Republican partisans were happy that their party, which controls all of Washington, finally managed to pass a significant piece of legislation. But as New York magazine’s Eric Levitz pointed out, several polls have found that it then became less popular once it went into effect in January. Three recent polls have found that the cuts remain under water in terms of public opinion by a margin of 8-9 percent.

That shouldn’t come as much of a surprise; the average $4,000-per-household raise in after-tax income with which Republicans sold the tax bill never materialized. An analysis by the Tax Policy Center found that an average household earning between $49,000 and $86,000 will see a cut of around $930 per year, almost half of which will be wiped out by rising gas prices (not all of which can be attributed to Trump or his party, but, as USA Today notes, “fears of political instability in the Middle East, including the prospect of U.S. military strikes in Syria, and trade tensions with China” are a big part of the story). Fewer than one in three respondents to a recent survey by CNBC said they’d noticed any bump at all in their pay.

But it’s the brazenness with which the Republican Party abandoned any last remaining pretense of caring about deficits or federal spending that may come back to haunt them, and mark a shift in the political landscape around taxes and spending. It goes further than the $1.9 trillion in additional deficits, including higher payments on the national debt, that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects will result from the tax bill over the next 10 years. When the nonpartisan number crunchers evaluated the fiscal impact of all of the legislation passed since mid-2017, including new spending, their analysis found that the GOP will add $2.6 trillion to the deficit over that period. What’s more, as Catherine Rampell noted in The Washington Post, that assumes that the economy will continue growing apace, and that the “temporary” individual tax cuts will expire according to the written law. But recent history suggests otherwise—most of George W. Bush’s budget-busting cuts were made permanent under Obama. In CBO’s worst-case scenario, “deficits would be larger by an average of a full percentage point of GDP, rising by a total of $2.6 trillion to yield a cumulative deficit of nearly $15 trillion” over the next 10 years.

Then, having created massive deficits for as far as the eye can see, House Republicans had the chutzpah to try to pass a constitutional amendment that would bar future Congresses from running any deficits at all. It’s a remarkably stupid policy. Running deficits isn’t inherently a bad thing if the purpose is to stimulate the economy during a recession or address a national emergency. The problem with these deficits is that they come at a time when the economy is growing and mostly just enrich the wealthy and pump up corporate profits.

The degree of hypocrisy on display here is such that even the most obtuse pundit can no longer pretend that the right’s rhetoric about “fiscal conservatism” is anything but a cudgel to use against Democratic priorities. Back under Obama, Paul Ryan warned that the only way to “avoid a Greek [debt] tragedy here at home” was to “chart [a] new course & cut spending now.” Then, he bashed the Affordable Care Act for adding to the deficit and endorsed the claim that failing to “address exploding path of fiscal deficits would be morally irresponsible.” This week, he dismissed the CBO’s analysis and insisted that the trillion-dollar deficits resulting from Republican policy were actually inevitable solely as a result of “entitlement spending.” Conservatives are already calling for cuts to safety-net programs to address the deficits their party created over the past year.

We’ve seen this all play out before. The Bush tax cuts, like Trump’s tax scam, were sold on the premise that they would stimulate the economy to such a degree that they’d actually pay for themselves. But as this classic chart put together by the Center or Budget and Policy Priorities illustrated, that claim defied basic math.

But Trump’s tax bill, a maximalist expression of Republican priorities, might just mark a shift in the political landscape around taxes and spending. A remarkable exchange between Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) and Ella Nilsen from Vox suggests as much. Nilsen was talking to Schatz about his debt-free-college proposal, and asked the senator how much it would cost. “I don’t play the pay-for game. I reject the pay-for game,” he said. “After the Republicans did the $1.5 trillion in unpaid-for tax cuts, and as we’re doing a bipartisan appropriations bill which is also an increase in federal spending.… I just reject the idea that only progressive ideas have to be paid for. We can work on that as we go through the process, but I think it’s a trap.”

It is a trap, and it has always been a trap, and this is the right answer. Obviously, the cost of legislation will be part of the discussion at some point in the process—when CBO scores an actual bill—but Republicans articulate their priorities and just dismiss the budget projections that they don’t like. Democrats can take a lesson from that, and if Schatz’s response is any indication, perhaps they do.

The one bright spot in these otherwise perilous times is that Trump has exposed the dark reality of much of the right’s views on race, criminal justice, immigration, and the rule of law. With their tax scam, congressional Republicans have made sure that we also have just as much clarity about what “fiscal conservatism” really means. Time will tell how that plays out in the policy debates to come.

A lot of our current political dysfunction is rooted in our deeply imperfect Constitution. We tend to view our founding documents, and their authors, as unified around certain principles of limited government. But the framers were actually deeply divided, and the Constitution they created was a mishmash of compromises. It successfully created a series of checks against what many of framers feared could develop into rule by a tyrannical majority—so small states were given power equal to the largest in the Senate, whose members the framers envisioned being chosen by state legislatures rather than through direct elections. A judicial branch was established to sort out the disputes that would inevitably arise in a federalist system. But the Constitution also contains clauses that were left vague because the framers couldn’t come to an agreement on defining questions, such as how slaves would be counted or the power of the federal government and the rights reserved to the states.

When this delicate balance of powers failed, it did so spectacularly, as it did during the Civil War. More often, it led to political stalemate and dysfunction. But for much of the 20th century, it worked, more or less, because the major parties adhered to a set of democratic norms. But that is no longer something we can take for granted. With the increasing radicalization of the GOP, one of our major parties has abandoned these norms in order to maintain power. Whether it’s “extreme gerrymandering,” using the contrived specter of “voter fraud” to impose ID laws that depress Democratic turnout, or abusing the vague “advice and consent” power to block nominees in the Senate, it is an asymmetrical war. And for good reason: One party has an incentive to limit democratic participation and the other doesn’t. As an analysis of 2012 data by Sean McElwee illustrated, nonvoters fall significantly to the left of the voting population.

The maximalist agenda that the GOP has pursued under Trump—the second Republican president to be elected with a minority of votes in the past 20 years—appears to be opening progressives’ eyes to this sorry state of affairs. And one political scientist is now calling for Dems to start employing the same kind of procedural combat that their opponents employ to fight not only for power but also for a pluralistic democracy that’s more responsive to the public.

In his new book, It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics, David Faris, a professor at Roosevelt University, argues that Democrats—and progressives more broadly—must be prepared to use whatever constitutionally permissible means are necessary to fight back.

I spoke with Faris about his book last week. You can listen to our discussion in the player above, or read a transcript that has been edited for length and clarity below.

Joshua Holland: Republicans appear willing to do anything to exercise and maintain power. You’re calling for Democrats to fight fire with fire, is that right?

David Faris: Absolutely. We’ve seen an escalating process of institutional and procedural warfare being used against us for the last 20 years, and it’s long past time that Democrats, and the left more broadly, started to understand what was happening to them and to use the powers that they will have [when they regain control of Congress and the White House] to fight back in kind.

JH: Many readers will be familiar with some of the undemocratic moves that the Republican party has undertaken in recent years. There was a study conducted by researchers at UC San Diego which found that strict voter-ID laws suppress the vote of Democrats by 8.8 percent and Republicans by 3.6 percent. Then there are the structural imbalances, like California having the same number of Senate seats, with millions and millions of people, as a sparsely populated state like Wyoming or Montana. What are some of the other issues that you look at in the book?

DF: In some cases, Republicans have rigged the system. In others, the institutions are kind of stacked against us based on how the Constitution is written and how it’s been interpreted. The most outrageous example of institutional warfare was the Merrick Garland fiasco. I mean, every time I think about that, it makes my blood boil, but—

JH: Me too.

DF: It’s just outrageous. They stole a seat on the Supreme Court, and they did so because the Constitution is not specific enough about what “advice and consent” means. So there you have a very good example of Republicans finding a kind of a loophole in the Constitution and exploiting it really ruthlessly when they had the opportunity.

A key point of the book is that a lot of the things that drive us most crazy about are political system are not written into the Constitution at all. The Constitution doesn’t have much to say at all about voting rights, so the reality is that a lot of these electoral advantages are vulnerable to a dedicated Democratic majority rewriting the laws and playing hardball. Fighting dirty really means leveling the playing field, fighting back in kind, passing a National Voting Rights Act that will eliminate these voter-ID laws, that will restore voting rights for all ex-felons, that will create a national voting holiday, that will automatically register all Americans to vote.

This is low-hanging fruit. This could be done in a month the next time the Democrats take power, and so the book is kind of a call to arms. We need to get smart about these things. We need to fight, and we need to level the playing field, and we can defend these things as a project to improve the long-term performance of American democracy overall, to build trust in the system.

JH: Let’s say hypothetically that the “blue wave” that we’re all hoping for materializes in November, and then Trump loses in 2020. So if Dems end up in January 2021 with the White House and solid majorities in both chambers of Congress, what are you proposing they do other than the things that we’ve already discussed?

DF: One of the first things they’re going to have to do, unless they win a supermajority in Senate, is to eliminate the filibuster. The filibuster is a sort of antidemocratic relic of a bygone age, and I don’t think it’s justifiable. So once they get rid of the filibuster, Democrats can do all kinds of things, the first of which should be granting statehood to Washington, DC, and to Puerto Rico. The situation in those places is just outrageous from a small-d-democratic perspective. They don’t have voting representation in Congress. DC doesn’t really control its own city budget. These could be states that would easily send four Democratic senators to DC. It would instantly change the strategic balance in the Senate.

If we had done this already, we’d have the Senate right now, and we would not have to worry about Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s health or Anthony Kennedy’s health. We could just stonewall Trump and return the favor of blocking Merrick Garland by not approving any of his nominees.

A longer-term project would be to really seriously think about breaking California up into six or seven pieces. Instead of sending two senators for the 38 million people of California, we could send 14. It would change the math in the electoral college, and it’s also not unconstitutional. It would be a heavier lift, it would take longer—this would not be a day-one thing—but it’s something the party needs to get serious about. So much of the energy on the left is in California, but it’s kind of bottled up right now in those two Senate seats.

We also need to really think hard about how we elect the House of Representatives. Last year, Republicans won the national popular vote for the House by a single percentage point, but still have this huge majority of seats. It’s not the first time that’s happened. In 2012, Democrats won the national popular vote for the House and they still lost the chamber by a dramatic margin. I have a plan in the book about how to move the whole country past these destructive gerrymandering battles and create larger districts and increase the size of the House. These moves would make the results of those elections more proportional, make it harder for Democrats to win popular votes but lose control of the chamber. I also think it would invite third, fourth, and fifth parties into the process in a more meaningful way than they are now.

The elections clause of the Constitution clearly gives Congress the right to set and alter policies for federal elections, so there’s nothing stopping us from doing that except a sort of lack of imagination and a lack of will. I’d probably start with those things and the National Voting Rights Act. So think of it as a kind of a blitzkrieg in the first three months of the next Democratic administration. If they have control of Congress, they could really take some important steps to level the electoral playing field moving forward.

JH: Let me play devil’s advocate here. Probably the most controversial thing you call for in the book is packing the Supreme Court to get a progressive majority—that is, adding more justices to the Court to change its ideological balance. The question is, where does it end? If you packed the courts, you’d recover a Supreme Court seat that was stolen when Mitch McConnell blocked Merrick Garland for a year. But doesn’t that give the next Republican president and Congress a precedent for doing the same thing? If both parties stop respecting the minority’s rights to influence the government, if both parties no longer feel some fealty towards the norms that made these institutions function, where does that end?

DF: That’s a question I wrestled with when I was writing this book. I do think that the Merrick Garland theft was a much more serious escalation than we think. It’s not just about this one seat on the court. Neil Gorsuch is illegitimate in my mind, and there’s no question about it. But if you think about the underlying norms about how Supreme Court appointments get made, they are already gone. Prior to the election, when Republicans thought that they were going to lose, some of them talked about how if they controlled the Senate and Hillary Clinton won the election, they weren’t going to let her fill a Supreme Court seat.

So the other side is already deeply radicalized. There are plans floating around the right-wing judicial universe that are very similar to what I’m proposing in this book, and they are not by fringe figures. There are articles out there about jurisdiction stripping, which mean Congress passing a law depriving the Supreme Court of its ability to rule on certain issues, and frankly that the entire architecture of judicial review is in jeopardy based on the increasing radicalization of the right.

But I am concerned about retaliation in the future. I think one of the ways that Democrats can describe what they’re doing is to offer an olive branch and say, “Okay, instead of packing the courts, we could do this other thing,” and that would be passing a constitutional amendment to end lifetime tenure on the Supreme Court, and in the federal courts more broadly. Democrats [could] pitch it as, look, we’re the ones who actually want to take the partisan temperature down. We want to end these destructive partisan battles over court appointments by more explicitly spelling out the constitutional language about how they get made and when they get made, how many appointments each president is entitled to, rather than it being what it is now, which is a lottery. We say each president gets to appoint two justices in every four-year term, people leave after 18 years, so we don’t have to appoint Doogie Howser types to the court anymore. We can go with people in their late 50s and early 60s, who might not have 30 years in them, but might be a better choice in terms of their underlying abilities.

At the end of the day, I’m pretty convinced that we’re not that far away from the right choosing to do some of these things first, and the last thing I would like to see is Democrats maintaining this commitment to institutionalism and pragmatism and then once again being outflanked.

JH: One thing that’s inspiring conservatives to do all of these things is a sense that they’re facing demographic headwinds—that their core coalition, which Alan Abramowitz described as married white people who identify as Christians—is rapidly shrinking. I don’t buy the “demographics are destiny” argument, but the demographics certainly represent a coming advantage, and I think that’s pretty clearly recognized by both sides.

The other thing is that they know that the policy preferences that they advance tend to be unpopular. Cutting taxes on the wealthy and killing safety-net programs doesn’t poll well, while increasing the minimum wage and protecting the environment do.

Do you think Democrats have, on some level, told themselves, “Well, you know, young people skew our way and we have this growing Latino vote and they’re skewing our way, the Asian-American vote as well, and our policies are popular,” and that’s why they haven’t fought back in the same way?

DF: I think it does have something to do with that. I think there’s been a little bit too much belief in the sort of long-term demographic trends. If you remember [John Judis and] Ruy Teixeira’s book, The Emerging Democratic Majority, was published 14 years ago and things have not exactly worked out as we thought they would. I think that, at least prior to 2016, there was a sense that, okay, well, demography is on our side and surely, surely the American people will punish the Republicans for the way they’ve been behaving over the last eight years, and that just didn’t happen.

That was one of the most depressing things to me about the 2016 election. I also had this sense that surely, right will win out here—that people will look at what Republicans have done in office with their obstructionism and destruction of norms, and they will vote them out of office. And they didn’t do that. So I think that we can’t afford to wait for these demographic trends to fully vest. We need to get creative about our procedural warfare.

JH: And, as you point out, we don’t know where these antidemocratic policies might end. Just recently, we saw the introduction of a citizenship question into the Census. It is yet another creative way of gaming the system in a way that advantages Republicans. So right now, we’re seeing people who are very savvy about these things debating by what margin Democrats need to win the popular vote in order to secure a majority in the House of Representatives. It should be 50 percent plus one vote, and yet because of what the Brennan Center calls “extreme gerrymandering”—as well as an inefficient distribution of Democratic votes—we’re hearing that they actually need to win by eight percentage points or more to actually take the House, and that’s just maddeningly undemocratic.

I would say that everything that you say in the book can be framed as a pro-small-d-democracy agenda, and I think it’s really important that the Democrats pursue this.

DF: Yeah, some of the ways that our procedures lead to undemocratic outcomes are really outrageous. And one of the big advantages of doing some these things would be that they will put us in a much better position for the 2022 midterms if we are able to take power in 2020. Restoring voting rights for millions of people, creating an Election Day holiday and passing laws that make House results fairer, makes it much less likely that we’re just going to turn power right back over to these guys in 2022, like we did last time. Because the reality is that the trajectory of the Republican Party right now is so dangerous, so destructive, that I really, really believe the Democrats need to win, three, four, five national elections in a row in order to bring this country back onto the track that it needs to be.

JH: I think you’re right, and I think that the best hope for a silver lining in the age of Trump is that his victory in the Electoral College along with events like the theft of the Supreme Court are finally opening people’s eyes up to the fact that it is good to have civility and bipartisanship and all of that in the abstract, but when you get down to where the rubber meets the road, we have to exercise power if we want to maintain our values, and those values include pluralistic liberal democracy.

David Faris, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really do appreciate it.

DF: It was a pleasure, Josh.

In his first 14 months in office, Donald Trump has consistently appealed to nativism and pursued an approach to immigration-law enforcement based explicitly on the premise that every undocumented immigrant should, as the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) put it, “look over [their] shoulder”and “be worried” about deportation. He’s become a hero of the anti-immigration movement.

Immigrant communities are terrified, and rightly so; despite Trump’s insistence that his priority is removing immigrants who commit crimes, there have been reports across the country of people being detained by ICE in the ordinary course of their law-abiding lives—going to work, dropping their kids off at school. Even more alarmingly, it appears that ICE has been actively targeting immigrant-justice activists who dare to speak out on the issue.

But while it may be hard to see it at present, over the longer term, Trump may end up doing enormous damage to the movement to restrict immigration to the United States. Immigrant-rights advocates say that Trump’s penchant for skipping the right’s typical dog whistles and overtly racializing the issue is changing the political landscape in three important ways.

First, the backlash against Trump appears to be making the public as a whole more welcoming to immigrants. A spike in hate crimes following the launch of his campaign is often described as the “Trump Effect,” but we’ve also seen a reverse Trump Effect at play. For over 20 years, Pew has been asking Americans whether they believe that immigrants “strengthen the country with their hard work or talents” or “burden the country by taking jobs, housing [and] health care.” When Trump began his campaign in 2015, 51 percent of respondents said immigrants strengthen the country and 41 percent thought that they represented a burden. A little over two years later, Pew found that there had been a whopping 29-point swing in public opinion, with positive views of immigration now outnumbering negative ones by a 65-26 margin. (This swing is consistent with an increase in favorable opinions about Islam, according to research by YouGov and The Huffington Post.)

That shift has been driven almost entirely by Democrats and Dem-leaning independents, which may signal that the “intensity gap” on this issue is shrinking. It’s hard to overstate how consequential that would be. While polls consistently show that only a minority of Americans favor a punitive, “enforcement-only” approach to undocumented immigration, it’s a vocal, well-organized group, and its preferences have dominated Republican politics without a counterweight of similarly passionate activists on the other side of the issue. The imbalance has given anti-immigration hard-liners veto power over centrist compromises with broad public support—policies like DACA, and Comprehensive Immigration Reform.

Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, a prominent DC-based immigrant-justice group, says that Trump has made immigrant rights a central issue within the broader progressive movement in a way that it has never been before. “This is the most under-reported story in America—at least in my world,” he says. “We used to think of ourselves as the ugly stepchild of the multi-issue progressive movement. It wasn’t really a priority the way that income inequality, health, education, women’s rights, or the environment were. But in the last year or two, there has been a coming together that’s historic. Groups like Planned Parenthood, Indivisible, and MoveOn have become major players in the immigration space. They’re now joining organizations like [the Center for American Progress], SEIU, and Unite Here that have been doing this work for a while now. And then at the local level, we’re seeing organizing networks that in the past may have occasionally worked on immigration issues but are now taking it on board as a top priority.” Sharry points to the large, multiracial protests against Trump’s Muslim ban that were rapidly organized at airports across the country as an early turning point on the issue.

Jackie Mahendra, a senior fellow at MoveOn.org, says that her organization is “member driven and data driven,” and its leadership has prioritized the issue in response to a significant spike in MoveOn activists’ interest and participation in immigrant-rights campaigns. “Trump’s vilification and scapegoating of both documented and undocumented immigrants has given existing progressive groups and the burgeoning resistance something to rally around,” she says. “One of the consequences of this divisive anti-immigrant rhetoric coming out of the White House is that [white] progressives are working much more closely with immigrant-led organizations and coming to the defense of immigrant communities in a way that they haven’t in the past.”

This “historic coming together” has the potential to give immigrants’ rights a real and potentially enduring electoral constituency. It’s hard to overstate the importance of getting the kind of “consistently liberal” voters who make up the membership of multi-issue groups like MoveOn.org or Indivisible to make immigration a key electoral issue. After “consistently conservative voters,” these are the people who are most likely to vote or contact an elected official. In the past, groups like Latino Decisions, Asian American Decisions, and Mi Familia Vota have focused on turning out Hispanic and Asian-American voters. They’ve done good work, but they’ve been targeting demographics with historically low turnout rates. Both Latino and Asian-Americans turnout rates have increased over the past 20 years, but according to Pew, they still trail white and African American turnout by more than ten percentage points. The Latino share of the electorate increased by 60 percent between 2000 and 2016, but Latinos still cast only around 9 percent of votes in the last election.

inally, Trump has fatally compromised a narrative that had been carefully cultivated for years by the organized anti-immigrant movement. Mainstream anti-immigrant groups have long claimed that they welcome legal immigrants and are only up in arms over undocumented immigration. (One far-right restrictionist group calls itself “Americans for Legal Immigration.”) They’ve worked to distance themselves from overtly racist white-nationalist groups. “What part of ‘illegal’ don’t you understand?” is a common rejoinder in debates over the issue.

That they’re motivated by racial animus rather than some abiding concern for the rule of law was always betrayed by their opposition to the printing of government forms in languages other than English and their occasional freak-outs over Cinco de Mayo or automated phone systems that give people the choice to press two for Spanish. But Trump—with advisers like Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller—has explicitly racialized the debate. He’s called for reducing legal immigration as well as targeting the undocumented. He said that he’d rather bring people into this country from Norway than from “shithole” countries in Africa or Latin America. As Frank Sharry puts it, Trump has “ripped the facade off of the anti-immigrant movement and exposed this nest of racist snakes. They’ve made it clear that they want to kick out black and brown and yellow people.” Over the long run, he thinks this may be a “game-changer.”

Cristina Jiménez, executive director and co-founder of United We Dream, says that this is also creating new intersectional alliances with groups like Black Lives Matter. For years, immigrant-justice advocates have tried to expose the links between immigration law and the larger issue of racial bias in our judicial system, but Jiménez says that this message “didn’t get much traction.” But now “you have this administration that is explicitly and unapologetically exposing what’s been beneath our immigration laws for years. We’re having a more honest conversation about how the immigration issue links to the larger issue of institutional racism in this country.” She says that Trump’s rhetoric is clarifying, and has forced people who may not have given much thought to the issue to pick a side. According to Jiménez, her group has worked more closely with other communities of color since Trump took office. “This work isn’t done. But at the grassroots level, we’re seeing people coming together, and this is one of the reasons why I’m hopeful about the future of this country.”

All of this bodes well for the long-term. Studies find that young people are not only more diverse than past generations themselves, but also tend to be more sensitive to issues of racial justice.

So far, elected Democrats appear to be moving in the right direction, but at a slower pace than their base—a dynamic that’s reminiscent of their hesitation to embrace marriage equality. The immigrant-rights community was furious that Senate Dems folded without securing protection for the Dreamers after briefly shutting down the government in January—one organizer told me that “they grew a pair on Friday but then somehow couldn’t find ’em on Monday morning”—but they were also encouraged by the fact that they’d made the demand in the first place. Advocates are also encouraged by new sanctuary laws and other pro-immigrant statutes being passed by Democrats in blue states and municipalities.

t least partially as a result of the backlash against Trump, congressional Democrats are now getting much more heat from their base than they had in the past for being on the wrong side of the issue. A recent primary challenge against Representative Dan Lipinski (D-IL) may prove to be a model. Lipinski, who is also anti-choice, was one of only a few Dems to vote against the Dream Act in 2010, calling it an “amnesty bill” (he eventually reversed himself on Dreamers in 2017). He also voted in favor of Trump’s border wall. But outside groups like MoveOn.org went all-in on behalf of his opponent, Marie Newman, who made immigration a central issue in the campaign. They did it in part to send a message to other Dems that they should fear a backlash from pro-immigrant voters. And despite being heir to a Chicago political dynasty and having the support of the local party machine, Lipinski only squeaked past Newman by about a 2 percent margin. Ilya Sheyman, executive director of MoveOn.org Political Action, says that while Newman’s close loss was a disappointment, “Lipinski was forced to turn a corner on issues Marie Newman and the coalition championed, and for which he can now be held more easily accountable.”

Democrats are also seeing Republicans losing badly despite trying to mimic Trump’s demagoguery of immigrants. That’s what happened in recent gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey, and in Democrat Conor Lamb’s victory over Republican Rick Saccone in the heart of Pennsylvania Trump country. The electoral incentives associated with defending immigrant communities appear to be changing before our eyes.

None of this offers real comfort to immigrant communities that are being systematically terrorized by the federal government. But, as with the emergence of new resistance groups, Democrats voting in huge numbers in special elections, and high-school kids taking on the NRA, it offers some hope for the future in what is otherwise a very dark time.

Let’s recap the Trump camp’s account of the Stormy Daniels story in all its ludicrous glory. They insist that the tryst Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, claimed to have had with Trump never happened. It’s all a big lie. And despite the fact that it never happened, Michael Cohen, Trump’s notoriously combative consigliere (he reportedly told a journalist working on a negative story about his boss, “I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting”) took out a line of credit on his own home to pay Daniels $130,000 in hush-money.

Margaret Hartmann wrote for New York magazine that, “while there’s little evidence that Cohen was kept on the payroll for his sharp legal mind, he’d demonstrated again and again that he possesses the unshakable loyalty that Trump values so highly,” and yet Cohen claims that he didn’t even tell his boss about this magnanimous gesture, and never planned to do so. He says that he negotiated the agreement and made Trump a party to it without uttering a word about it, and certainly didn’t ask to be reimbursed for it. Paying a porn star $130,000 to keep quiet about an affair that never happened was just a personal transaction by a guy who refers to himself as a “pit bull” on behalf of a guy with much deeper pockets than he has. (The White House has consistently dodged the question of whether Trump knew of the payoff.)

Cohen further insists that it had nothing to do with the Trump Organization, despite the fact that he used his company e-mail address to set up the wire transfer to Daniels and, according to CNN, “Jill Martin, a top lawyer at the Trump Organization,” is listed in a court filing as the attorney representing the LLC that Cohen established specifically to pay off Daniels. Martin, whose title is vice president and assistant general counsel for the Trump Organization, also issued a statement claiming that she worked on the matter only “in a personal capacity,” despite the fact that the address she listed on the filing is that of the Trump National Golf Club in Los Angeles.

All of this, according to the White House and Cohen, also had nothing to do with the presidential campaign—never mind that this all went down just weeks before Election Day, at a time when it appears the campaign was working furiously to kill off stories about the affair that were set to run in at least three outlets. If it had been related to the campaign, Cohen would be liable for an illegal $130,000 campaign contribution, but he insists that it wasn’t.

This doesn’t appear to be an isolated incident. Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who has a story that’s very similar to Daniels’s, was also paid $150,000 to keep quiet by a close friend of Trump’s, David Pecker, who runs A.M.I., the National Enquirer’s parent company. According to The New York Times, Michael Cohen “was secretly involved in her talks with the tabloid company.” The company confirms that, but Cohen says that he doesn’t remember anything about the deal.

A small child caught with her hand in a cookie jar could come up with a more credible story than this mishmash of obvious untruths, yet 41 percent of Republicans believe it, according to a recent poll conducted by CNN.

How could so many people believe such a cockamamie tale spun by the most mendacious political figure in modern history? It’s not (necessarily) because they’re stupid. It’s simply an example of motivated reasoning—the human tendency to discount information that conflicts with our deeply held beliefs and embrace that which supports them, no matter how ridiculous it may seem to people who aren’t invested in the same belief system. We all do this to a degree.

But it’s important to understand the mechanism by which this cognitive process functions. It requires an alternative, ostensibly factual narrative from some seemingly credible individual or institution. There must be an alternative set of “facts” to latch onto in order to dismiss something as obviously false as the story Cohen and Trump’s staff are peddling to the American people.

Climate-change denial would not be possible were it not for a handful of “contrarian” researchers arguing that the Earth is actually cooling, or that warming is a result of solar activity. There’s an entire cottage industry devoted to writing dubious articles or producing fake—or at least misleading—charts purporting to prove that climate change is a scam.

So it is with Trump’s constant laments about “fake news.” It may seem silly and immature to those of us who don’t support the administration, but it’s no laughing matter. A Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted last October found that three out of four Republicans “think the news media invent stories about Trump and his administration, compared with only 11 percent who don’t think so.” Barrels of ink have been devoted to stories about how Trump’s core supporters have stuck with him through thick and thin—about how he really could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose their loyalty—and Trump’s constant laments about fake news is a big reason why that is.

By all accounts, Trump is not a particularly intelligent man, and there’s no reason to believe that he has some special understanding of how this dynamic works. The conservative movement has long claimed that sources of information that conflict with its ideological priors—the academy, the media, various government agencies—are all hopelessly biased against the right. Trump’s simply turned that up a notch, claiming that it’s not just a matter of subconscious bias at work, but rather that negative stories about him are entirely fabricated.

Trump’s official and utterly ludicrous account of what transpired with Stormy Daniels is just one example among many of how his supporters convince themselves that he’s the guy they voted for in 2016. The pro-Trump media, following his lead, churn out a constant stream of alternative storylines that his fans can hang onto.

It’s become common these days to lament “media polarization,” as if it’s a generic problem that afflicts both sides of the partisan divide. But it’s important to note that there’s a stark difference in how the left and the right views the mainstream media, and its flaws. Partisan outlets on both sides of the ideological divide see themselves, at least in part, to be watchdogs for the traditional media. But progressives tend to focus on subconscious biases or questionable norms, like the tendency to present both sides’ arguments as if there are no objective facts, reporters’ hesitation to risk their access to the powerful or their eagerness to conform to the conventional wisdom. When conservatives talk about “media bias,” they’re often not talking about bias—as a subconscious process—at all.

If you think that professional reporters regularly invent stories out of whole cloth, it may seem defensible to do so yourself in the name of fighting fire with fire. So when a conservative operative tried to pose as a victim of former Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore in order to dupe The Washington Post into reporting a false charge against him, her cover was blown when reporters uncovered a post she had written in which she gleefully announced that she’d “accepted a job to work in the conservative media movement to combat the lies and deceipt [sic] of the liberal MSM.”

There’s also a feedback loop between Trump—and Republicans in Congress—and the conservative media. Trump tweets out policy statements based on the nonsense he sees on Fox and Friends, while Attorney General Jeff Sessions names a prosecutor to follow up on House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes’s (R-CA) discredited claims suggesting that Kremlingate is a “deep-state” conspiracy and the real problem is the FBI’s supposed bias against Republicans. There’s an alternative narrative for every damning story about the regime, even something as straightforward as EPA chief Scott Pruitt’s notorious penchant for traveling first class on the taxpayer’s dime.

So if you watch Fox and read Breitbart, it’s quite likely that you believe the Trump regime has been disciplined and effective and free of scandals, while the mainstream press continues to cover up the greatest political crimes of our generation, all of which revolve around the Clintons or Barack Obama. It’s a scam, but one that works to keep those who want to believe it in the fold.

Richard Spencer, the white-nationalist provocateur, is beating a retreat, at least for now. In a YouTube video, Spencer called off his tour of colleges, saying a “course correction” is in order and adding: “Antifa is winning to the extent that they’re willing to go further than anyone else, in the sense that they will do things in terms of just violence, intimidating, and general nastiness.”

At The Intercept, Natasha Lennard writes that “Spencer’s statement, celebrated by antifa groups and supporters across social media, offers a sharp rebuttal to the glut of claims that antifa practices serve as a gift to the far right.” For Lennard, Spencer’s acknowledgement that antifa activists have taken the “fun” out of being a fascist settles a longstanding argument about antifa’s tactics.

Lennard is right to call out “a cottage industry of panicked media commentary [that] has dedicated itself to decrying the threats that antifa and its ‘no-platforming’ stance pose to free speech.” As UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ said last year, “Free speech has been adopted by the alt-right as one of its strategies to construct a narrative about universities that is extremely useful for their political goals.” There have been scattered incidents of violence by campus activists, including antifa members, but most of the mainstream “free speech debate” has centered around conservative speakers’ “complaining about an atmosphere of intense pushback and protest that has made some speakers hesitant to express their views and has subjected others to a range of social pressure and backlash, from shaming and ostracism to boycotts and economic reprisal,” as Thomas Healy wrote for The Atlantic.

The answer to hateful speech is more speech, according to the cliché, but that doesn’t seem to apply to college kids condemning intentionally provocative reactionaries, even when their protests are nonviolent.

Left unstated but implied in Lennard’s piece is that Spencer’s apparent withdrawal from the campus wars not only proves that standing up to Nazis makes it harder to be a Nazi, but also vindicates all of antifa’s tactics, including fighting them in the streets.

Does it? On the left, there’s been a long-standing debate about whether violence, specifically, is self-defeating. Antifa may well be making Spencer’s life hell, but the unknown unknown here is whether they’d be more or less effective if they focused exclusively on nonviolent tactics.

“It’s important to understand that antifa politics, and antifa’s methods, are designed to stop white supremacists, fascists, and neo-Nazis as easily as possible,” says Dartmouth historian Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook. “The vast majority of their activities are nonviolent. They function in some ways like private investigators; they track neo-Nazi organizing across multiple social-media platforms.” Doxing—publicly disclosing the identities of members of the fringe right—is a central tactic of antifa, albeit one that gets less media attention than fighting them with sticks and stones. Bray says it’s about “telling people that they have a Nazi living down the street, or telling employers that they’re employing white supremacists.” He adds that, “after Charlottesville, a lot of the repercussions that these khaki-wearing, tiki-torch white supremacists faced were their employers firing them and their families repudiating what they do.” (Just this week, the Pacific Northwest Antifascist Workers Collective outed a mortgage consultant working for Wells Fargo in Oregon as a white supremacist who had attended the “Unite the Right” hate rally in Charlottesville, and the bank promptly announced that he is no longer an employee.)

Lennard has written several pieces for The Nation celebrating Nazi-punching and framing the debate as one between mushy liberals who want to engage in dialogue with white supremacists and antifa activists who refuse to legitimize their noxious ideology. But when Noam Chomsky said that antifa is “generally self-destructive” and “a major gift to the Right,” he was referring specifically to those who come out to fight. “When confrontation shifts to the arena of violence, it’s the toughest and most brutal who win—and we know who that is,” Chomsky told The Washington Examiner. “That’s quite apart from the opportunity costs—the loss of the opportunity for education, organizing, and serious and constructive activism.”

As viscerally satisfying as punching Nazis may be (and I won’t deny enjoying that viral video as much as anyone), it’s clear that far-right groups have enjoyed significant success recruiting thugs to duke it out with antifa activists. Mark Bray argues that antifa violence is primarily about self-defense—and that was the case in Charlottesville, where police appeared to hold back while Nazis ran amok—but in places like Berkeley, California; and Portland, Oregon, both sides come ready to fight in what has become a predictable dance of violent confrontation.

There’s good reason to believe that antifa has the Nazis on the run despite the violent tactics and not because of them. A study of black liberation movements in the 1960s by Princeton University political scientist Omar Wasow found a clear mainstream backlash to political violence. “Black-led nonviolent protests precipitate increased Congressional debate about ‘civil rights’ and increase proximate county-level white Democratic voteshare in the 1964, 1968 and 1972 presidential elections,” wrote Wasow. “By contrast, disruptions in the same period in which some protester-initiated violence occurred spark Congressional discussion of ‘crime’ and ‘riots’ and cause a statistically significant decline in proximate county-level white Democratic vote-share.”

Antifa’s big-picture strategy—making it clear that inherently violent, racist ideologies are not acceptable in a pluralistic society and creating a tangible cost for those who adhere to them—is laudable. But given that most of what they do is in fact nonviolent, they have a public-relations problem that stems entirely from the widespread perception that they represent a mirror image of their fascist opponents.

In addition to doxing fascists and depriving them of venues, antifa activists have engaged in a number of creative tactics that haven’t resulted in the same kind of blow-back as they’ve gotten for rumbling with white-nationalist goons. White-supremacist websites have been systematically kicked off of large swaths of the Internet. Klansmen have been sent packing by the mockery of activist clowns in Knoxville, Tennessee. In Germany, a town responded to a white-supremacist march by “sponsoring” its participants—raising money for anti-fascist groups on the backs of the very fascists they oppose.

Meanwhile, street fighting, supposedly in defense of “free speech,” is the neo-Nazi movement’s primary source of attention at this point. Andrew Anglin, editor of The Daily Stormer, a leading neo-Nazi site, acknowledged last week that his white-supremacist “revolution” has “absolutely zero infrastructure. We do not have a huge pool of reliable, competent people. We do not have any stable organizations, we do not have developed communities, we do not have allies in the government or military, we do not have allies in academia, entertainment or media, we do not have a legal team. We do not really have much of anything at all.”

Antifa activists are unlikely to be swayed by the argument that embracing a “diversity of tactics” may not represent an example of best practices. Last year, when I asked Scott Crow, a gun-toting former antifa organizer and author of Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community Armed Self-Defense, about the movement’s PR problem, he said, “it doesn’t matter. Because antifa has a singular goal—to shut down fascism—so it doesn’t matter what the media says. And that’s always been the case.”

It should matter to other progressives. As I wrote last year, since the end of the Vietnam era, the far right has held a near-monopoly on political violence in the United States. So while violent confrontation is just one antifa tactic out of many, in addition to being a potent recruiting tool for right-wing hoodlums, it also muddies the waters around the primary source of political violence in America. That’s a problem for everyone.

Was Scot Peterson, the sheriff’s deputy who didn’t storm into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in the midst of a mass shooting that claimed the lives of 17 teachers and students, a “coward,” as Donald Trump described him?

David Chipman, who, unlike Donald Trump, knows a thing or two about facing off against an armed gunman, says no—that Peterson is, instead, one of “the many victims of Parkland.” Chipman, a 25-year veteran of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), served on one of its Special Response Teams—the agency’s equivalent of SWAT—and is now a senior policy adviser to former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’s campaign to curb gun violence. He says, “We rightfully applaud heroes. People who disregard their own personal safety for another. But it is a rare act. We hope that when the chips are down, we will exercise our duty, but you never know until that day comes. I’d like to say I would have rushed into a building with only a handgun to confront an active shooter armed with a military-style assault rifle, knowing I was outgunned, knowing that I would likely die, but I don’t know.”

Trump says of Parkland shooting: “I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon.” The Latest on his meeting with state governors is here: https://t.co/kRGXxmN9ZC

—AP Politics (@AP_Politics) February 26, 2018

By all accounts, Scot Peterson had been a model cop until he became a national disgrace. “His personnel record is filled with commendations,” reported the Sun-Sentinel. “Four years ago, he was named school resource officer of the year. A year ago, a supervisor nominated him for Parkland deputy of the year.” But like most of us, he had never faced a situation like he did on the day that Nikolas Cruz shot 33 of his former classmates, teachers, and coaches with an AR-15.

The criticism Peterson’s received is understandable. He took a risky job. Since the school shooting at Columbine, police officers have been trained to enter a building in such circumstances, even if it might cost them their lives.

But Chipman says that the reality is that, even though they undergo extensive training designed to inoculate them against natural human stress reactions, it’s not uncommon for soldiers to freeze up the first time they experience combat. It’s not a sign of cowardice. In most cases, those same troops perform well—or even heroically—after that first exposure to real-life combat. We can’t expect police officers to behave any differently.

The data show that having access to a firearm almost doubles your risk of becoming a homicide victim, but, according to Pew, two-thirds of gun owners “cite protection as a major reason for owning a gun”—far more than any other reason given.

The gun lobby’s heroic-gunslinger fantasy also animates Donald Trump’s repeated calls for arming school teachers. It’s a distraction from the real issue—mass shootings, on and off campus, accounted for fewer than 4 percent of gun murders last year. Still, I asked Chipman: What’s wrong with the NRA’s idea that “good guys with guns” could stop people like Cruz? How realistic is it to expect a teacher, administrator, or other bystander to intervene in such a situation?

You can listen to our 20-minute interview through the player above, or read the transcript below, which has been edited for length and clarity.

Joshua Holland: We’ve had another mass shooting, and predictably, conservatives are calling for teachers to be armed. Conceding that we can’t post a police officer in every classroom, why shouldn’t we train teachers? Why not send them to the range, make sure that they’re proficient with their weapons, and hope that they can stop the next massacre?

David Chipman: Let me break it down a couple of ways. First, what the president really said is that the presence of guns in the hands of teachers would serve as a deterrent. Deterrence is something I believe in, and in policing, in certain respects, it does work. The problem is that [Nikolas Cruz] suffered from severe mental illness, and as we know, for most mass shooters, it’s basically a suicide attack, so that’s when deterrence falls apart. If you’re willing to die, it’s tough to imagine that a deterrent would work.

So let’s say that it isn’t a deterrent, but perhaps the outcome could be better. I was a trained SWAT team member for ATF. I was actually issued a semiautomatic AR-15 during my duty, so I know what that gun can do, and I know the type of training that I had not only to be proficient at shooting it, but also to be proficient when the chips were down.

I also have some expertise in teaching, because my father is a mathematics professor. Now, my dad and I are very different people. For instance, for his birthday, I gave him a device that caught bugs on the wall of his house so that he could let them go outside. This is a person who’s wired against killing anything, and I think that it’s interesting how people assume that everyone is capable of killing another human being, and the research shows that that’s just not true.

There’s this famous book called On Killing, by David Grossman, who studied how training in the military has evolved over the years. They used to qualify by shooting at round targets, and what they found is that once they got into combat, many of them did not fire their guns, and even when they fired their guns, they would purposely fire over the enemy. So they had to train people to actually shoot at targets that looked more like humans, and that’s why police qualify today on targets that aren’t round but are shaped like people.

So I think that unless you are trained—and you’re trained over and over again, and you practice like you play, which means you’re training in simulated life or death environments—the likelihood of you even firing your gun is small. And then the likelihood that you would actually hit a moving target surrounded by other moving targets—any trained operator knows the fallacy in that. It’s highly unlikely that it would turn out well.

Now, there’s a limited number of exceptions. The pro-gun people say this, “Well, what happens if you’re lined up against a wall and people are being slowly executed one at a time, would you want a gun?” Okay, sure, yeah, of course I would, but that’s not a realistic scenario we’re talking about.

JH: There’s a natural stress reaction that law enforcement and the military train hard to overcome. If you’re in a situation with an active shooter, you have adrenaline coursing through your body and that makes it very difficult to respond in an effective, smart manner. Can you talk about that a little bit?

DC: When you’re in a life-or-death encounter, your blood goes to your major organs and you experience tunnel vision. That’s why police and the military train repeatedly under similar conditions. I think that 30, 40 years ago, they would put you under stress by actually physically hurting you. They just exhausted us, because being very tired is similar to stress. We also trained in simulated situations where we were firing live ammo around each other, and there’s a difference in how you respond to a situation when you know you’re firing real bullets. It just changes everything.

I think you also have to understand the element of fear. The fear involved in doing these operations is something that every individual has to deal with on their own terms. Law enforcement doesn’t really provide much support in terms of how to deal with these things. Cops are really good at drinking together and telling stories, but they never really talk about what’s going on emotionally.

I’ve never talked about this before, but for me personally, to get through these operations, I would actually pretend that I was already dead. And in that way, I had the courage to do what I needed to do to safely to protect my team and do the operation. How many other people do that? I don’t know. I can just share my own experience. But I can just tell you that the movies and real life are so different, and it concerns me that we have a president talking about things that are way beyond his scope of qualifications.

JH: What’s the practical effect of coming down with tunnel vision?

DC: You lose your peripheral vision, and you only see what you’re focusing on. And the problem is that you become hyper-focused on that one target and you don’t see innocent victims nearby, or other offenders, or your partners who might be arriving on the scene. It’s a very dangerous thing that you can overcome through breathing and lots of practice. But you need to overcome it because it can put you in a situation where you not only don’t shoot your correct target, but you hit unintended people.

Yes, most [gun owners] practice, but they’re not practicing with rounds of ammunition zinging past their head.

JH: We should acknowledge that, as you said, there are situations in which it is proper for a bystander to intervene if he or she has a weapon, but for the most part, law enforcement counsels people not to do so in an active shooting situation unless they are immediately in front of the shooter and have a very clear shot. And then in that circumstance, you should put your weapon down immediately after firing. Why is that?

DC: Well, for a host of reasons. [Even] members of law enforcement are told not to shoot if they’re off-duty in a situation like that unless it’s a clear and imminent danger. They’re told that it’s better to be a good witness, because there have been so many incidents where off-duty officers are trying to render aid or defuse a situation, and they’re actually killed by law-enforcement [officers who think they’re the shooter].

That’s what happened to John Capano, the ATF agent most recently killed in the line of duty. It was New Year’s Eve [of 2011], he was going to a pharmacy to pick up a prescription for his father, and he walked into the middle of a prescription robbery. He engaged this robber, got into a fight with them, had his weapon drawn, and another off-duty cop shot and killed him.

Some aspects of law enforcement are like being a doctor. You never want to do harm. You don’t want to make the situation worse. And it seems to me that this idea of putting a gun in teachers’ hands is like giving up in this issue. The time that we needed to focus on the shooter in Florida was every moment prior to him exiting his Uber with a military-style assault rifle, and what I mean by that is all of the warning signs, how we regulate guns in America, his mental-health condition and what we could have done to intervene there. Those were the opportunities to be heroes and save the day—not after he began shooting, because we know that once the shots are fired, things move so quickly that even trained people have difficulty reacting fast enough to actually stop the shooting from occurring.

JH: It seems to me that we need a comprehensive approach, like we take for other public-health issues, but the discussion often gets derailed by either/or thinking. When you mention mental health, for example, people think that that means you’re trying to avoid the issue of banning assault weapons or other forms of gun control. What are some of the measures that the Giffords campaign is advocating right now?

DC: I love thinking about it in terms of that kind of culture of safety. I grew up just north of Detroit, so as a child I grew up riding in a car without seat belts, with both my parents smoking Pall Malls, and I think I was sitting over the gas tank. And here we are today, we have mandatory seat belt laws, we have airbags, and we have other sensors that help us drive safe, and it’s actually become cool to buy a safe car. Cars are marketed for their safety, and that has evolved over several decades.

At Giffords, I’m a concealed-carry owner, [Giffords co-founder] Mark Kelly is a combat war veteran—even Gabby [Giffords] has a naval warship filled with guns named after her. We are not anti-gun. We recognize how lethal guns can be in the wrong hands and how accidental shootings and other things can impact families in a bad way. So we want there to be more focus on smart technologies—different technologies that can make guns safer. From “smart guns” to visible signs that a gun is loaded, to just securing guns in your car. One of the biggest problems for law enforcement today is that as more people are carrying guns outside their home, they’re leaving them unsecured in cars and they get stolen and then those guns are used in crime. My boss in Detroit retired from ATF and within two years, he was walking his dog outside in northern Virginia and he was murdered with a gun by someone who had stolen it from a car two blocks away.

These are real things that happen to real people, and I think that people will do the right thing if it becomes the cultural norm. Like don’t drive drunk, that kind of thing. Unfortunately, the gun lobby sees safety as a potential mandate, and they just oppose any regulation or mandate whatsoever as a matter of principle, and so that’s what we’re up against. But I think the more we get cops like me and veterans and other gun owners saying, “Hey, look, I like my rights to have a gun, but I know how dangerous it is, and I want to make it safe,” I think we’re making progress.

JH: Another important piece of this is that the gun lobby pays lip-service to the idea of keeping guns out of the wrong hands, but they oppose every single measure to do so. An important component of this is not only closing the so-called gun-show loophole—which is not necessarily just about gun shows, it allows individuals to sell each other weapons without a background check—but also these red-flag laws that empower law enforcement to confiscate guns from people who are identified as a threat, at least on a temporary basis.

There are a number of things we could do that just seem like common sense. For example, there are mental illnesses that will disqualify you from purchasing a firearm, but when you’re given a 72-hour emergency hold during a moment of crisis, and a psychiatrist says you represent a threat to yourself and others, in most states there’s no mechanism for law enforcement to intervene in that circumstance and make sure that you don’t have guns.

So it’s not either/or, it’s yes/and. We need to improve these systems. We need to deal with the culture. And I believe that we should ban military-style weapons with high-capacity magazines that result in greater body counts.

Thank you for taking the time to speak with me, David. I really appreciate your expertise and wisdom on this topic.

DC: It’s always a pleasure.

Three major business groups alone—the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Realtors, and the Business Roundtable—spent $56 million in the last three months of 2017 lobbying Congress to give them a massive tax cut. According to Public Citizen, 6,243 lobbyists—more than half of the total number of active lobbyists in DC—worked on the bill, which works out to 11 for each and every lawmaker in Congress.

For their effort, they got massive, permanent cuts to the corporate-tax rate. Republicans had talked about closing loopholes so that their cuts wouldn’t blow up the deficit, but that fell by the wayside, and in the end we’ll mostly be financing this huge giveaway through public debt.

Now many of the corporations that lobbied for the bill are trying to make what began as a historically unpopular law more palatable with a series of high-profile announcements crediting the tax cuts for investments that they’d already planned to make or touting one-time bonuses for workers.

Exxon Mobil CEO Darren Woods penned a blog post crediting the tax bill for playing a major role in the company’s plans to invest $50 billion in the United States over the next five years. This generated a slew of headlines along the lines of the one that appeared in Reuters: “Exxon plans major U.S. investments due to tax reform: CEO.” But according to an analysis of the company’s financial statements by Americans for Tax Fairness, that’s actually $2.7 billion less than the company invested in the United States between 2012 and 2016. And Bloomberg reports that the company’s investments dipped in the last couple of years after oil prices crashed, and the capital-investment plan represents nothing more than “a return to the oil giant’s spending habits before crude suffered its worst price rout in a generation.” (The company’s “fourth-quarter profit nearly quintupled after President Trump’s tax cuts gave the oil giant a big lift,” according to USA Today.)

Disney made headlines when it announced that it would give 125,000 theme-park workers a $1,000 bonus as a result of the cuts, but now the company is threatening to withhold those payouts from its unionized workers if they don’t accept an offer for a new contract with a 50-cent hourly wage increase—an offer the union rejected in December. The unions representing them are now accusing the media giant of illegal labor practices for holding the bonuses hostage.

Disney is just one of “scores of companies” that have announced similar bonuses in the wake of the tax law’s passage, according to The New York Times. But the Times adds that “a look at the fine print…shows that some of the largess is not nearly as large as company news releases suggest.”

It was probably Walmart that made the biggest waves when it announced that, thanks to the tax cuts, it was not only giving its employees a one-time bonus of $1,000 but also introducing an $11-per-hour minimum wage and new benefits like paid maternity leave.

But Walmart’s ostensible pro-employee moves aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Only those with 20 years at the company are eligible for the full $1,000 bonus. The average tenure for a Walmart worker is 3.3 years, which would put $250 in a worker’s pocket. Even if that smaller bonus is helpful, it won’t offset other costs Walmart’s workers are likely to face, including state- and local-tax hikes to offset cuts in federal spending, or the 10 percent increase in health-insurance premiums that the Congressional Budget Office says will result from the tax bill.

And the bigger picture at Walmart is even more sobering. The retail giant has laid off tens of thousands of workers “at both the store and corporate level” since the announcement, according to Marketwatch. And it’s not alone—Comcast, AT&T, Pepsi, Kimberly-Clarke, and other firms have followed suit. And we can expect more of the same. One of the more perverse effects of Trump’s “America First” tax bill is that it incentivizes American multinationals to move production offshore.

And while most of the bill’s tax cuts for individuals are set to expire in 10 years, Walmart is expected to reap between $1 and $2 billion in tax savings from the bill every year under this new baseline.

Even taking as genuinely positive some components of Walmart’s announcement—the higher minimum wage and the paid maternity leave—are they actually linked to the tax cuts? Experts are dubious. Charles Fishman, author of The Walmart Effect, noted for Politico that the company actually said that, because of the cuts, it would “‘accelerate a few pieces of our investment plan’ in the United States, as if these moves might have been in the planning stages,” and added that “rolling out paid maternity leave across 4,752 stores is hardly something you can do in 20 days.”

Economist Dean Baker says these announcements are “clearly public relations.” The story peddled by corporate America and the conservative media is that Trump’s tax breaks will encourage greater domestic investment, which will increase productivity and ultimately result in higher pay, but Baker says that “historically, investment has not been closely related to changes in after-tax income, and I see no reason to believe that” it will be different this time. He adds that even if the claims made by the law’s boosters were true, it would take a significant amount of time for the cuts to “trickle down” into working people’s paychecks.

In Walmart’s case, Baker argues that it’s more likely that the company is trying to retain workers in a tightening labor market—and in response to minimum-wage hikes across the country (18 states and more than 30 localities raised their minimum wages starting in January). “We hear all these employers complaining about it being hard to find workers, and while that may be exaggerated, it’s certainly harder to find workers in the context of a 4.1 percent unemployment rate than it was a few years ago when we were in the depths of the recession,” says Baker. “That does mean they have to raise wages, particularly if they want workers to stay—[turnover] is an especially big problem in low-paying sectors. If you don’t want to be constantly training new workers, there’s good reason to pay a little more, and I think that’s far more of a motivating factor than the tax cut.”

An analysis by Morgan Stanley earlier this month found that “only 13% of companies’ tax cut savings will go to pay raises, bonuses and employee benefits,” while “43% will go to investors in the form of stock buybacks and dividends.” That’s a very different picture than the one being painted by companies like Walmart, ExxonMobil, and Disney.

here’s a reason businesses are eager to tout purported benefits of the tax law for workers. “They know that the American public is deeply opposed to giving big tax breaks to corporations,” says Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, says. “Everything the business community does in the normal course of business is going to be spun as a result of the tax breaks because they were reading the same polls that we were reading, and they knew that they needed to change this dynamic.”

The tax bill itself incentivized companies to announce bonuses right away. Because of a quirk written into the law, corporations could deduct bonuses if they announced them in 2017, but not if they offered them—or higher wages—in 2018. According to a post at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, “this means, in effect, that the government would have been paying these companies [14 percent of the value of a bonus] to announce [it] before the end of the year. Since we all believe that companies respond to incentives, it should not be surprising that many announced bonuses before the end of 2017.”

So Republicans in Congress incentivized companies to roll out these one-time bonuses, and that effort helped advance a multimillion-dollar PR campaign by the Koch brothers and the US Chamber of Commerce to turn around public opinion about the law. Together, the messaging appears to be having some impact: While the law remains relatively unpopular for a large package of tax cuts, The New York Times reported this week that it “now has more supporters than opponents,” which is “buoying Republican hopes for this year’s congressional elections.”

Is the increasing acceptance of the law the result of people receiving more take-home pay? It’s unlikely. Polls show that very few voters say they’ve actually noticed a bump in their paychecks, and “self-identified Republicans are more likely to say they have seen a larger paycheck under the new law” than Dems or independents, according to Politico.

At the same time, it appears that congressional Democrats are unsure about how or whether to keep attacking the law. The conservative media have worked hard to fabricate a scandal from prominent Dems’ rightly referring to these one-time bonuses as “crumbs,” painting them as elitists who dismiss the value of a few hundred bucks for cash-strapped working people; outlets like Breitbart and The Daily Caller have run virtually identical stories about the use of the phrase by Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Andrew Cuomo and other Democrats. (Those articles are quickly followed, of course, by gripes that the mainstream media refuse to cover the nontroversy.)

Whether or not that narrative is having an effect—it appears to be—Dems seem head shy about attacking the law now that it’s passed, especially in the 10 Trump states where they’re defending Senate seats. But that’s a case of political malpractice—it should be easy to message against a law that finances massive tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy in part by stripping health insurance from 13 million Americans.

Democrats should take a page out of the Republican playbook on Obamacare and spend the next eight months explaining how the Republican tax “reforms” will ultimately hurt the very workers that corporate America and its allies on the right are claiming it’s helping. Unlike their opponents, they have the benefit of that claim’s being true. Unless they do, the spin coming out of corporate PR departments and the GOP is going to continue to go unchecked.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration let states impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients. Ten states, all of which have Republican governors, lined up to make it harder for low-income people to get benefits. Kentucky was the first to get approval for the policy.

Only very few working-age Medicaid recipients are able to work and aren’t working. The Kaiser Family Foundation notes that “most nonelderly Medicaid adults already are working or face significant barriers to work, leaving a very small share of adults to whom these policies are directed.” Instead of moving meaningful numbers of Americans into the workforce, the move will only deepen an already massive divide in how states administer their Medicaid programs that was created when the conservative majority on the Supreme Court ruled that states could opt out of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion. The states that expanded Medicaid made the program available to everyone making up to 138 percent of the poverty line; in the states that opted out, the median cutoff for eligibility is just 44 percent of the poverty line for families with children. In all but one of those states, people without children are ineligible for benefits no matter how little they earn. An estimated 2.4 million Americans have lost out on public insurance in those 19 states. With work requirements, some of these states will soon provide coverage to an even smaller portion of their low-income population—Kentucky governor Matt Bevin brags that the move will kick 100,000 Kentuckians off the Bluegrass State’s Medicaid rolls.

That same week, a very different story came out of New Jersey, where newly elected governor Phil Murphy was sworn in. Murphy ran on a platform of legalizing pot within his first 100 days in office, raising the Garden State’s minimum wage to $15 per hour, closing its gender pay gap, and rejoining the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative that his Republican predecessor ditched in 2011. Now that a Democrat is in the governor’s mansion, the state is entirely controlled by Democrats. Key political figures in the state seem eager to enact major progressive policies. According to The Washington Post, “If Murphy has his way, New Jersey will become a proving ground for every liberal policy idea coming into fashion, from legalized marijuana to a $15 minimum wage, from a ‘millionaire’s tax’ to a virtual bill of rights for undocumented immigrants.”

What’s happening in states like Kentucky and New Jersey is part of a larger trend, as an increasing number of states come under one-party rule at a time when Trump and congressional Republicans are explicitly targeting blue states for punishment and the resistance is both energizing Democrats and holding their elected officials accountable.

To a certain extent, red and blue America have long been divided by different approaches to public policy. Democratic-leaning states tend to spend more on education, health care, and various social services than their red counterparts, and tend to have stronger protections for the environment, workers, vulnerable minorities, etc.

These differences are, to some extent, ameliorated by federal law, which limits the states’ autonomy in several key policy areas and guarantees a degree of conformity among the states. Most education policy, for example, is set by the states, but they have to do so in a way that conforms to various federal laws and regulations. This isn’t news.

But since the election of Barack Obama—and even more so now that Trump and the Republicans essentially own Washington, DC—three factors have come together to dramatically deepen these long-standing divides, and they threaten to undermine the fragile continuity that makes us one country.

First, our tendency to cluster in places with like-minded people combined with a well-funded conservative campaign targeting state governments helped create a huge number of states where one party controls both the governor’s office and the legislature. There are nine more states with unified control of government today than there were as recently as 2010. With New Jersey, Democrats now have eight, the Republicans hold 26 and there are only 16 states where the two major parties share power, according to Ballotpedia.

Rising polarization has raised the stakes of partisan fights. In the post-war era, the two major parties have never been as divided on what are often really core values as they are today.

And, perhaps most importantly, under Trump, and with the efforts of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell under Obama, Republicans have shattered the norms that held together an often contentious republic. It’s hard to overstate the degree to which the tax bill Republicans passed last month was unprecedented in its specific targeting of Democratic-leaning states with higher state and local taxes for punishment. After the embargo of Obama Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, the gloves are coming off.

To varying degrees, the eight states with unified Democratic control of government—home to a quarter of the population—have been passing pro-immigrant legislation, expanding public health-insurance coverage, legalizing marijuana, raising minimum wages, implementing automatic-voter-registration systems, and combating climate change.

They’re making moves to protect their citizens from Trumpism, and they see it that way: Peter Schrag writes that California Democrats are “determined [to] fight, wherever possible, against the cruelty and inanity of an administration and a Republican congressional majority hell-bent on rolling back the programs and policies of enlightened self-interest enacted over the better part of a century under both Republican and Democratic administrations.” California is one of several blue states that are considering various ways to shift from income taxes, deductions for which the GOP plan capped, to payroll taxes or perhaps even charitable donations in order to maintain their deductibility.

Others are considering enacting health-insurance mandates at the state level after the GOP killed the Affordable Care Act’s mandate last month. Oregon voters just approved new taxes to help pay for the Beaver State’s aggressive expansion of Medicaid, which has helped reduce its uninsured rate to 5 percent, one of the lowest in the country.

With the Trump administration rolling back Obama’s overtime rule, which would have given 4 million working people a healthy raise, Democrats are looking to pass a similar measure state-by-blue-state. (Meanwhile, red states are passing laws that prohibit their cities from raising their minimum wages—Missouri went so far as killing an existing minimum-wage ordinance in St. Louis—guaranteeing paid family leave, passing laws to protect the LGBT community against discrimination, environmental rules, and more.)

Republicans want to expand this divide further by block-granting programs like Medicare and Medicaid. It’s not hard to imagine a near future where citizens of red and blues states effectively live in two different countries, with even wider gaps in education and public health, radically different social safety nets, and divergent regulatory regimes.

ll of this raises the stakes for this year’s elections, when Republicans will be defending 26 governorships—and unified control of eight battleground states—against what many observers believe will be a Democratic wave election.

It also highlights the importance of the upcoming Census, which will set up redistricting in 2020 and which the Trump regime is trying to game by scaring immigrants into refusing to participate. The Census not only helps determine the shape of Congress for the next decade, but also how trillion of federal dollars will be allocated between the states over that same period (around a third of all federal assistance programs are divvied up between the states according to Census data).

The outcome of these fights will also have a huge influence on voting rights, access to reproductive and other health care, and the degree of social insurance offered by the states. And given the current trend, they may ultimately help determine whether the United States looks like one country with a modern, mixed economy, or two very different republics sharing one set of borders.

On Tuesday, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer told Rachel Maddow that if Republicans refuse to play ball on a humane Dream Act, “the awful, awful, awful pictures of DREAMers being deported” would ultimately “rally the nation” to their cause and force the GOP’s hand.

He may be right, but seeing Dreamers ripped away from their lives and sent “home” to countries they never knew is not an acceptable outcome for immigrant communities and their progressive allies. There’s a fundamental disconnect between congressional Democrats’ political calculus, right or wrong, and the sense of emergency—of being under siege by white nationalists empowered by the full force of the federal government—that’s driving immigrant communities and their allies to see this as the fight of their lives.

For many on the left, the Dreamers are a proxy in the larger battle to beat back Trump’s noxious brand of white ethnonationalism. It isn’t just a matter of temporary legal status for people who were brought to this country as kids without the proper paperwork. It’s also about ICE snatching up people with deep ties to their communities in courthouses and hospitals and schools. It’s about people suddenly disappearing and families being torn apart. It’s hard for those of us who came to this country generations ago to fully appreciate the visceral sense of foreboding—even terror—that comes with knowing that you or the people you love are at risk of being scooped up by ICE agents at any moment of the day or night. Since many recent immigrants live in mixed-status homes—and certainly neighborhoods—it’s a threat felt by millions of Americans citizens and legal immigrants.

Immigrant communities are demanding that Dems mount a fight that’s commensurate with what they rightly see as an existential threat. Democrats, on the other hand, are treating it like any other legislative battle. While activists want them to fight as if they’re challenging the Fugitive Slave Act, they’re trying to figure out what pressure points they can apply to a party that controls everything and weighing the potential costs and benefits of going to the mat for “illegals,” as it’s been portrayed on Fox News.

Given that disconnect, it’s no surprise that progressive groups like Credo and Moveon are trashing Dems for backing down from their shutdown fight after three short days and without any guarantees of a Dream Act. Calling Schumer “the worst negotiator in Washington,” Credo accused him of “cav[ing] to the white supremacist base of Trump’s Republican Party and [leading] the Senate Democrats to a total surrender.”

One line of criticism seems tough to deny: Dems reportedly could have gotten six years of pared-down funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and a vague promise from Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell to move forward with a bill to protect the Dreamers on Friday, before they shuttered the government. Having pulled the trigger, they folded their hand prematurely, spooked, according to The Washington Post, by their own polling, which found “that in more conservative states, blame for a shutdown would be split between Trump and Republicans and Democrats in Congress. But when interviewers asked respondents about a shutdown that might be tied to the legal status of dreamers, Democrats absorbed more blame.” That appears to have been a misread of popular opinion; as MoveOn’s Ben Winkler points out, tracking polls show that “ voters swinging toward the view that the fight over Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals was worth a shutdown, from an even 42-42 split beforehand to a favorable 47-38 once the shutdown had started.” Trump is the least popular president in modern history, and that shapes public opinion in a way that elected Democrats don’t seem to fully grasp. At a minimum, they should have waited to see how the fight was playing out before throwing in the towel.

he counterargument is that Democrats took funding for CHIP out of the equation in exchange for three weeks of government funding, and can use their leverage again early next month if McConnell doesn’t follow through with a vote on a humane iteration of the Dream Act. The problem with that argument is that having folded once, Republicans feel that they have the upper hand, and it’s hard to see vulnerable Democratic senators agreeing to shut down the government again on February 8.

From Democrats’ perspective, there’s limited upside, because even if they stand tall and get an acceptable bill through the Senate, the true obstacle to a decent Dream Act rests in the House. They’re not wrong. The day after the Senate voted to reopen the government, Representative Steve Scalise, the majority whip, said, “We’re not going to pass a bill that has amnesty. There are things that would anger our base that I don’t see us passing in the House.” There are probably enough votes for a relatively clean Dream Act in both chambers, but Speaker Paul Ryan is unlikely to defy his hardliners and bring a bill to the floor. And yesterday, the White House rolled out a proposal to offer the Dreamers a path to citizenship—spun by anti-immigration hardliners as “amnesty”—in exchange for “pretty much everything conservative immigration restrictionists have even thought about asking for,” as New York magazine’s Ed Kilgore put it. The Dreamers’ real problem is that Republicans from deep-red districts worry more about a primary challenge from a Trumper on their right—and therefore how Breitbart spins the issue—than about the general public’s support for the Dreamers. It’s possible that Trump himself could change that equation, but according to reports, he’s being counseled by white nationalists like Steve Miller.

Schumer’s already rejected the White House’s poison pill-laden proposal, and it’s not clear what’s next. Even if Schumer can get his caucus to shut down the government a second time, it’s not going to compel the House to hold a vote, and the fact that House Republicans are signaling that “amnesty” is DOA in the lower chamber is a disincentive for vulnerable Democratic senators to take another bite at that apple.

The Dreamers and their advocates are ultimately in a tough quandary. It’s quite possible that an acceptable Dream Act will only be possible if Democrats can win one chamber of Congress in November. The movement’s coalesced around a strategy of calling out the Dems for their ostensible lack of spine, hoping that if they can get a bill through the Senate, public opinion will force the House to follow. But if they hit that message too hard, they could end up dampening turnout for the midterms.

If Trump were more calculating, and not a raging id lurching from position to position based on whatever the last person tells him, one might suspect that this kind of discord was his goal when he killed DACA in the first place.

In the criminal-justice system romanticized by Hollywood films, those convicted of crimes are generally guilty. And a protagonist need only prove that someone’s been wrongly imprisoned to get them freed by a judiciary that values truth and justice. The scrappy investigative reporter, jaded detective, or overmatched defense attorney comes up with the key piece of evidence that proves beyond doubt that someone has been wrongly convicted, and in the next scene that person walks out of the courthouse to be surrounded by joyful loved ones and supporters as the credits roll.

The real world is often quite different. Since it was established in 1992, the Innocence Project has succeeded in reversing the convictions of over 200 people, but the group says that a “staggering number of innocent people” remain behind bars today.

Perhaps even more troubling is that even when clear, indisputable evidence emerges showing that someone has been imprisoned for a crime they didn’t commit, prosecutors, police, and judges will often fight tooth and nail to keep them incarcerated.

In his new book, Blind Injustice: A Former Prosecutor Exposes the Psychology and Politics of Wrongful Convictions, University of Cincinnati legal scholar Mark Godsey examines why that happens. Godsey was a former prosecutor who would later go on to co-found the Ohio Innocence Project, a chapter of the national organization. The book, which is in part a confessional, looks at how innocent people can become the victims of faulty eyewitness testimony, bad forensics, and a variety of blinding cognitive biases on the part of law-enforcement personnel, prosecutors, and judges, and why the system so tenaciously defends the status quo, even when it’s guilty of railroading innocent citizens.

With so much attention rightly focused on racial injustice in recent years, Godsey’s book offers another important piece of the puzzle. You can listen to my 25-minute discussion with Godsey in the player above, or read a transcript that’s been edited for length and clarity below.

Joshua Holland: You were an accomplished prosecutor in New York—a prosecutor’s prosecutor, as you write in the book. You believed in the system. And at first, you were skeptical about the Innocence Project. Tell us a little bit about how you came to be an advocate for reform.

Mark Godsey: It was by accident. I was very proud of my job and loved being a prosecutor. I went into academia to become a law professor, and the first school where I got a job had an Innocence Project. When I arrived, they said, “The professor who runs it is on sabbatical this year. Since you’ve got a criminal-law background, you’re going to have to supervise it.’ I really couldn’t say no—I was untenured, I was the new guy on the block. But I remember thinking, “You’ve got to be kidding me. There are no innocent people in prison.” That was my view.

I went to the first meeting and the law students were talking about this guy they just visited in prison named Herman May, and they were totally convinced he was innocent. I remember sitting there, just doing internal eye rolls and thinking, “What a bunch of bleeding-heart nonsense.” But then DNA testing ended up proving that he was innocent and he was released. It was a huge eye-opener for me. It made me realize that my assumptions perhaps had been wrong—I’d been a little bit too cocky about the criminal-justice system that I’d been a part of.

So I went through a conversion in that one year, and then the very next year, I founded the Ohio Innocence Project. And we’ve now freed 25 Ohioans, who together served 471 years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit.

JH: Twenty-five people who had served over 470 years—that works out to just under 20 years, on average.

MG: Our longest was Ricky Jackson, who served almost 40 years for a murder he didn’t commit. You’d think you’d be totally broken and a mess after going into prison at 18 years old and getting out when you’re basically 58, but he’s an incredibly inspiring person. These exonerees are often really inspirational people that make you realize that when you get upset about traffic or stupid things, there’s a lot more important things in life that we’re taking for granted.

JH: Your book reveals how hostile police, prosecutors, and judges often are towards efforts to absolve those who have been wrongly convicted, even when there’s solid evidence. You detail how even simple requests for records are ignored or treated as some sort of effort to undermine the credibility of the courts.

Yet, as you write, these officials who appear from the outside to be operating with an abundance of bad faith and dishonesty see themselves as the good guys and gals, and believe themselves to be doing the right thing. How do you square that circle?

MG: The first thing that shocked me when I started doing post-conviction innocence work is when we had several cases with DNA evidence, and it was absolutely clear the person was innocent. I saw these prosecutors just going into denial and spinning all these ridiculous theories about how the person might still be guilty. They almost make you laugh. My first reaction was, “Are these people kidding? Are they serious?” I’m in court thinking, “Is this Candid Camera?”

That’s how ridiculous these theories could be. And I realized that the Innocence Movement is really pointing out some flaws at the basic core of the criminal-justice system, and those in the system are really in denial about it. I think I was too, as a prosecutor. So I started studying the psychology behind it and seeing how, when you’re in a bureaucracy that’s cocky and has been around for centuries, and you become a part of it as a prosecutor, and you believe that it’s something where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and then somebody comes along and says there are all these flaws in it, it’s very hard to accept.

I have a grip on that as a former prosecutor, because I had that mentality as well. Really, you just tend to write off these people who are challenging the system as these outsiders who have these crazy theories, and there must be some catch somewhere. People in these roles become very close-minded to any claims of innocence. That’s one of the things we’ve got to change.

In the private sector, there are incentives for being open-minded and for playing devil’s advocate. In the justice system, we’re often missing that devil’s advocacy. And then complacency and arrogance just sort of set in. That’s one of the things that the book tries to challenge.

JH: You talk about this idea of “administrative evil.” You explain that when they’re part of a bureaucracy that affirms their actions, individuals do things that they would not necessarily do outside of that system. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

MG: Administrative evil is a psychological concept that came out after the Holocaust when people started trying to explain how ordinary Germans could have participated in this genocide. The theory is that when people are part of large bureaucracies like the criminal-justice system, and everyone is sort of moving in lockstep, in unison, and they’re following certain policies, they can do things that cause great injustice. Things that are really unfair, like fight to keep an innocent person in prison. When you work in a bureaucracy like that, the values of the bureaucracy—and the steps you’re supposed to take to function within it—replace your internal moral compass. I knew this as a prosecutor, where you get conditioned to just follow what you’re supposed to do. If you really could step out of that role, somebody might be able to just sort of shake you out of that bureaucratic mindset and say, “Step back from this a minute. Look at why you went to law school. Look what you’re actually doing to this person.”

When you’ve been in that system—when you’ve been a prosecutor for 10 years or you’ve been a police officer for 20 years—you become conditioned to just think, “My job is to fight this claim. I’m not supposed to admit that a mistake has been made,” and you just do it robotically without even thinking about it. I give many examples of prosecutors who have done that, and how I did that as a prosecutor.

JH: One of your clients, Nancy Smith, was quite obviously innocent. If she had had a robust offense, would she have ended up in prison in the first place?

MG: Absolutely not. In the early ’90s, there was a 60 Minutes episode that featured a daycare center where parents allege that their 3-year-olds had been molested, and they all ended up suing the daycare center. After that 60 Minutes episode aired, there were these copycat claims at daycare centers all across the country, and they all had something in common, or many of them did, which is that they were daycare centers with deep pockets, and all these families got millions of dollars in settlements. We now know that in most of these cases, the charges were trumped up and the parents got these little kids to say things that weren’t true.

Nancy Smith’s case was one of those. She was a bus driver for Head Start, so she would go on a bus route and she would pick up these little kids—3- and 4-year-olds—take them to daycare, and then at the end of the day she’d pick them up and take them home. She went to another job in the middle of the day when the kids were in school. One of the parents got several of the parents whipped up on a particular day in question, and said that Nancy didn’t take their kids to school but instead took them to her boyfriend’s house where they allegedly abused the children all day.

What’s amazing about this is that Nancy had a bus aide—because you can’t just have a bus driver with a bunch of 3- and 4-year-olds. The kids will go nuts. You have to have somebody in the back keeping them calm. The bus aide was ready to testify [that no crime had been committed], but that never happened. In addition to that, all the kids actually were marked present at school that day. And then on top of all that, Nancy went to this other job between dropping the kids off in the morning and coming back to pick them up at the end of the day, and the records show that she was at work that day. So there was conclusive proof from multiple sources that this never happened, but the defense attorney did no work whatsoever to bring these facts forward.

The testimony of the children was ridiculous—they changed their story so many times, it was clear to any objective person that they had been coached by their parents. Her defense attorney just thought that there was no way that the prosecutors were going to get a conviction in this case, but then she ended up having to serve 15 years in prison before all this came out and she was ultimately freed.

JH: You write that a key piece in all of this is the dehumanization that’s inherent in the job of locking people up. Prosecutors and judges have to see the accused as cases rather than individuals. You detail in the book how prosecutors and judges can appear to be completely immune to the hardships that people who have been unjustly convicted of a crime suffer, often for years on end. How did this manifest in Nancy Smith’s case?

MG: Nancy Smith was exonerated and freed, but the prosecution refused to admit that a mistake had been made. They kept appealing it, and they eventually got her exoneration overturned. And not because she wasn’t innocent. It also wasn’t because the court thought she was guilty. They kept her locked up because of a jurisdictional issue—the Ohio Supreme Court ultimately said that the trial court didn’t have jurisdiction to exonerate her, which meant she had to go back to prison until we could fix it. So she’d have to sit in prison while we relitigated the case, which could take forever.

She agreed to take a plea deal so she wouldn’t have to go back to prison. It was just an absolutely gut-wrenching decision for her. She didn’t know if she was making the right decision. She was basically on the verge of vomiting through this entire court proceeding. The day that it happened, the courtroom was just full of cameras. The judge came out in his robe for this proceeding, and looked at all the cameras and just started laughing, and said, “Hey. If I’d known there were going to be cameras here today, I would’ve gotten myself a haircut.” Then he just kept cracking jokes and hamming it up for the cameras.

It just dawned on me that this guy was completely oblivious to the human suffering in the room. It was just another day at work for him because he’s been caught up in this bureaucratic mindset. You sort of lose your humanity when you’ve been involved in the criminal-justice system for so long. It was like sitting there watching a doctor tell somebody they have six weeks to live, but cracking jokes while they’re doing it.

In the criminal justice, we don’t have the right training, we don’t have the right mindset to fight these bureaucratic effects of dehumanization, administrative evil, and things like that, so it happens more than it needs to.

JH: In the book, you offer insights into the psychology and the incentives that lead prosecutors, judges, and the police to falsely convict people, and resist efforts to free the innocent, but you don’t discuss how racial discrimination or implicit bias plays out in these injustices. That’s obviously very prominent in the news these days with Black Lives Matters movement, etc. What role does race play?

MG: Obviously, racism is a huge problem in the criminal-justice system, and it’s a huge part of wrongful convictions. But what I focus on is things like confirmation bias, malleable memory—things that don’t get as much attention. If I were to address racism, it would end up swallowing the entire book, because it’s such a pervasive problem. It’s also addressed elsewhere in other books, and I’m trying to highlight things that aren’t regularly discussed.

If you tell people up front it’s a book about racism, everybody thinks they’re not a racist, so they just sort of check out, and think, “Okay, this doesn’t apply to me.” But if you disarm them on that, then you can get them to learn about confirmation bias and tunnel vision and all these psychological flaws that we all have.

So it’s subtly about racism, but I think that the points I make about the other psychological flaws aren’t getting enough attention, and I think they are very important and need to be addressed. 

JH: You mentioned these laughable theories that prosecutors tend to offer to counter your claims. I know this is a form of gallows humor, but what is an “unindicted co-ejaculator”?

MG: It’s sort of a joke in the Innocence Movement. It’s a play on the phrase “unindicted co-conspirator,” which is a common phrase in American court rooms. Basically, you’ll have a client who was convicted of rape and has been in prison for 20 years. You look at the trial transcript, and the victim at trial said, “This guy raped me. I wasn’t sexually active,” and they collect semen at the hospital, so there’s a rape kit that has the semen of the perpetrator.

The victim’s testimony at trial 20 years ago is very clear that there was one person who raped her, broke into her house, or whatever the terrible facts of the case may be, and so 20 years later, the Innocence Project does DNA testing and proves that the guy is innocent. Instead of accepting the truth, many times the police and prosecutors will come back and they’ll say, “So the DNA—the semen that was collected after the rape—doesn’t match the guy in prison. Clearly, there must have been two rapists. Clearly, the victim was mistaken. Two guys broke into her house. We’re getting the DNA results of the other person. We don’t know who it is, but your client must have raped her too. He just didn’t ejaculate.” So no matter what the evidence is, they spin it and come up with these theories in order to justify keeping the person in prison. You see it time and time again.

JH: One would think that the kinds of psychological and sociological biases you discuss in the book would be less prominent in the world of forensics because this is a scientific field. Many people assume that forensic science follows the scientific method, people publish independently reviewed studies on forensic techniques, there are professional conferences, etc. But you show that that’s not necessarily the case.

MG: On television shows like CSI, forensics are portrayed as miracles of modern science. But the reality is so far from that. In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences, which is an independent agency, came out with a scathing report showing how bad the state of forensics is in this country. We need a complete overhaul. All kinds of wrongful convictions are caused by faulty forensic testimony. Some techniques that are frankly junk science are being used to convict people, and have been for decades.

I can go on forever about this—there are all kinds of examples. And we’ve recently discovered how confirmation bias plays a big role in faulty forensic analyses. A psychologist conducted these amazing studies. He went to leading fingerprint experts and he said, “We have a case where a fingerprint expert years ago testified that the defendant’s fingerprint was found at the crime scene, but we now know the person is innocent, he wasn’t at the crime scene. Can you look at the fingerprint from the crime scene and the defendant’s fingerprint from that case and tell us where the fingerprint expert went wrong?” What each expert didn’t know is that he had actually gone into their own case files and had pulled a fingerprint that that expert had called a match in court years before and caused a person to get convicted. So they’re looking at one of their own findings that they called a match, but now they’re being told this is from a case where a mistake was made. He got 80 percent of them to flip their answer and conclude that the prints didn’t match. He’s since replicated this study in different fields of forensic science. It shows how the human mind works to see what it expects to see. When you’re told an answer beforehand, your mind is set up to actually only look for evidence that confirms what you solidly believe the answer will be, and your mind won’t even register conflicting information. As a prosecutor, you’re often told by the police, “Hey, we know this guy did it. We know the fingerprint is going to match. We know the bullet is going to come from his gun. Just confirm it for us.” The mind operates differently when it’s doing that kind of analysis than it would if you were to set up a blinded or more neutral question.

Despite the fact that we know this—and despite the fact that the National Academy of Sciences came out and said that we’ve got to start doing this differently, we can’t tell forensic scientists what the right answer is before they start—nothing has changed.

JH: Powerful as it is, psychology alone doesn’t explain all of the dynamics that you discuss in this book. Having been on both sides of the courtroom, can you talk a little bit about the incentives that would encourage people to deny what is sometimes very plain evidence of innocence?

MG: I was a federal prosecutor in New York City. Federal prosecutors and judges are appointed by the president. They don’t have to run for reelection. They don’t have to get the endorsement of local law enforcement. When I came back to Ohio, and started doing innocence work, I was absolutely shocked at how the [state] judges [who are elected] just seemed to be politically aligned with the prosecution. The judges would simply line up with the prosecution and ignore plain evidence of innocence. I detail in the book how the imperatives of electoral politics cause prosecutors to always want to look tough on crime, and they end up being conditioned to look tough on crime all the time instead of being reasonable in some cases.

It’s the same with judges. The person that judges want to get to endorse them and appear on commercials with them come re-election time is the prosecutor. This is common in the 38 states where we have elections. So if a judge does something that’s going to really upset the prosecution, a prosecutor may run somebody against that judge or endorse his or her opponent. It creates this dynamic where the system isn’t neutral and fair like many people expect it to be. Instead there’s a sense that one needs to get to the right result.

JH: There is some research which shows that elected judges tend to be more punitive—“tougher on crime,” as they say—than appointed judges.

MG: Particularly in election years. The system is politically stacked against the defense and in favor of the prosecution. I think anybody who’s gone through what I’ve gone through would understand the need to move away from the election process because one of the reasons the founders set up the federal system so that judges are appointed is that we need at least one of the branches of government to be insulated from the political process.

JH: Let’s talk a little bit about how you think some of these issues could be addressed with some simple reforms.

MG: Some reforms are fairly simple. There should be screening mechanisms set up for the forensic sciences so that the experts are truly using the scientific method, they’re doing it in a vacuum and they don’t know what the right answer is before they start. That’s a fairly inexpensive reform that can be done tomorrow.

I have a whole chapter on memory malleability and how the way line-ups are done—the way they show photos to witnesses and things like that—taint the outcomes. There are very simple steps that can be taken to change the eyewitness identification process and interrogation process to cut down on false confessions. This is not groundbreaking stuff.

Other things, like changing the system so that judges and prosecutors are not elected anymore, would be much more difficult. That may take generations or decades of yelling and screaming in order to get people to realize how important that it. Maybe that’ll never happen, but with some of the leading causes of wrongful convictions, there are fairly inexpensive steps that can be done to minimize the error rate. One of the frustrating things about this is that so little has been done.

JH: That plays back into the basic thesis of your piece of your book, which is that the system is ultimately set up to protect the system, and the actors within it have every reason to play along. Mark, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I really do appreciate it.

MG: Thanks for having me.

The conservative media’s ability to create, nurture, and sustain a dubious scandal until mainstream journalists feel pressured to cover it may be the most powerful weapon in contemporary American politics. It represents a significant structural advantage for Republicans. And now, as it’s being trained on intelligence and law-enforcement agencies—and special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russia’s intervention in last year’s elections—it poses a serious threat to the separation of powers and the rule of law.

The Republican scandal machine dogged Barack Obama’s presidency. And, with an assist from Russia, former FBI director James Comey, and some sloppy journalism, it helped convince millions of Americans that supporting a venal, uninformed reality-TV host who’d bragged about sexual assault on a live mic was an acceptable choice in last year’s election, given the alternative.

Now, with that reality-TV host as president, embroiled in allegations of conspiracy and attempted obstruction of justice, the scandal machine is focused on distracting from and derailing the investigations into the relationship between Donald Trump and Russia, and discrediting the law-enforcement and intelligence officials who have conducted them.

The effort began in March, when House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes (R-CA) tried to validate a bizarre tweet by Trump claiming that the Obama administration had wiretapped his campaign. Nunes seized upon the fact that in 2016, Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, had “unmasked” the identities of campaign staffers who had been recorded making contacts with foreign operatives. The requests were routine—part of the job—but Nunes rushed to the White House, where he held a press conference to announce that he had briefed White House officials on the supposed “wiretapping.” It was later revealed that he had in fact gotten the information from the White House and was spinning it on Donald Trump’s behalf. This was the day after then–FBI Director James Comey confirmed in testimony before Congress that the bureau was investigating potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Early coverage of Nunes’s stunt was largely dismissive. Multiple intelligence experts from both parties said that Rice’s actions were “normal and appropriate” and that there was “no evidence of wrongdoing.” It was clearly an effort to distract from Trump-Russia, and reporters treated it that way. But the conservative media continued to run with the story, keeping the unmasking “scandal” alive. Nunes also continued to beat that dead horse, “relaunching” his investigation in June, months after supposedly recusing himself from the Russia investigation. And every time he issued a statement or demanded new information from the Department of Justice, mainstream outlets duly covered the news, creating the impression that there were legitimate questions surrounding Rice’s actions.

Then the scandal machine turned to Robert Mueller and the team that he’d assembled. Painting the special counsel’s investigation as a partisan “witch hunt” was a tough task, given that Mueller is a Republican who was first appointed by George W. Bush, and had been a highly decorated Marine during the war against Vietnam. But in June, former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich tweeted that Republicans would be “delusional” to think that Mueller “is going to be fair” to Trump, and urged them to look at his team’s political donations. Sure enough, it turned out that four of Mueller’s prosecutors had donated a combined total of $6,100 to Hillary Clinton’s campaign—and had previously given to other Democrats—and this fact was relentlessly hammered by the conservative media for several months until Representative Sean Duffy (R-WI) went on CNN and claimed that Mueller was “bringing in Democrat campaign donors at a very high level.”

Fox News and other outlets then seized on a report that one of Mueller’s investigators, Andrew Weissmann, had attended Hillary Clinton’s election-night party in New York City. And a former aide to Mueller had later represented one of Hillary Clinton’s aides. The idea that veteran prosecutors can’t be trusted to do their jobs impartially if they’re Democrats is ludicrous on its face, and an insult to the profession, but it has nonetheless become Exhibit A in the case against Mueller. On the right, these tenuous connections became proof, in the words of Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL), that “Donald Trump [was] being persecuted by Hillary Clinton’s fan club.”

In December, an FBI investigator was dismissed from the team when it was revealed that during the 2016 campaign he, like millions of other Americans, had called Trump “awful” and an “idiot,” and opined that Hillary Clinton “just has to win now. I’m not going to lie, I got a flash of nervousness yesterday about Trump.” That same month, one of Trump’s lawyers made the baseless claim that Mueller’s team had improperly obtained e-mails from the Trump transition team.

Six months ago, headlines lauded the prosecutorial and investigative chops of Mueller’s “dream team”—veteran law-enforcement officials who had exposed public corruption, prosecuted complex money-laundering cases, and taken down mobsters. Mainstream journalists have never given the claims that Mueller’s biased against Trump seriously, but the conservative press has hammered on the theme relentlessly, and neutral journalists have dutifully reported their accusations. Stories like “Trump’s lawyers looking for conflicts of interest among Mueller’s investigators” (Associated Press), “Trump Aides, Seeking Leverage, Investigate Mueller’s Investigators” (The New York Times), and “U.S. Risks ‘Coup’ If Mueller Investigation Continues, Republicans Warn”(Newsweek) may have offered important and necessary context to these claims, but the volume and prominence of these kinds of headlines for months on end have had an effect. In December, a poll found that 54 percent of the public, and 70 percent of Republicans, believed that Mueller had a conflict of interest. Another poll released this week found that almost half of those surveyed believe Trump is likely to be exonerated this year.

ore recently, Republicans have attempted to make the FBI’s investigation into Trump-Russia a scandal unto itself. Their latest claim is that the dossier on Trump compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele formed the basis of the FBI’s original probe, and that this somehow taints the results. That claim was debunked by The New York Times, among other outlets, but the “controversy” persisted despite the fact that it would have been entirely appropriate for the FBI to investigate the Steele dossier. Even if Steele weren’t a highly respected intelligence operative with extensive contacts in Russia, law-enforcement agencies act on tips from all sorts of people all the time. The dossier would certainly have been enough to get a surveillance warrant from a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court; civil libertarians have long argued that the bar that the intelligence agencies need to clear in these secretive courts is significantly lower than what police face in a civilian court. No one, especially no one on the left, should uncritically accept the FBI’s claims, but there’s no reason to question the justifiability of its current Russia investigation.

Republicans also tried to smear deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe as a partisan hack for working on the Clinton investigation while his wife was running for a Virginia State Senate seat as a Democrat. The fact that his involvement with the probe began only three months after she lost her race hasn’t kept Trump and his allies from crying foul. Under persistent fire from the scandal machine, morale at the agency is reportedly near an all-time low.

The provenance of the Steele report has also been twisted into a talking point. Fusion GPS, the firm that hired Steele, is not a Democratic-leaning firm, as the conservative media would have you believe. Its core business is doing research for corporate clients. It was first retained to gather dirt on Trump during the GOP primaries by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website funded in part by Paul Singer, the billionaire hedge-fund operative and deep-pocketed Republican donor. It was only after Trump had clinched the nomination that associates of Hillary Clinton hired the firm to continue its opposition research.

Two of Fusion GPS’s co-founders, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, both former Wall Street Journal reporters, testified for hours before the Senate Intelligence Committee back in August. Last week, they went public with what they told investigators in The New York Times, accusing Republicans of selectively leaking details of their testimony “to media outlets on the far right. When Senator Dianne Feinstein released the transcript of their hearing this week, it became clear that, as Brian Beutler reported for Crooked, Republicans “spent their hours instead trying without much success to impeach Simpson’s credibility and paint him as a partisan. They were particularly interested in skewing the composition of Simpsons’ client base to make it seem tilted to Democrats (it isn’t), and in getting Simpson to testify that he had a financial interest in triggering an FBI investigation of the Trump campaign (he didn’t). Confronted with the allegation that the Trump campaign was complicit in a criminal plot to sabotage the Clinton campaign, Grassley’s representatives wanted to know why Simpson had the nerve to try to alert the public, through the media.”

All of this is being amplified by the unique feedback loop between Donald Trump and Fox News. Fox runs a dubious story and he makes it news by tweeting it out to the world. The Washington Post reported this week that the Department of Justice is now crafting policies to appeal to Trump’s TV viewing habits. “[DOJ] officials have tried to publicly tout their successes, hopeful that political allies and the president, a frequent television viewer, will take notice,” report Josh Dawsey and Matt Zapotosky. “They’ve done work that—in their view—should appeal to the president and his base, such as settling lawsuits with tea party groups, issuing guidance on religious liberty, cracking down on illegal immigration and rolling back various Obama-era guidances, including one advising courts to be wary of imposing heavy fines on those who can’t afford them.” Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently directed senior prosecutors to open investigations into Hillary Clinton’s e-mail servers.

The scandal machine gave us Donald Trump. It nurtured what began as a widely criticized campaign attack by Mitt Romney about Benghazi for four years, eventually turning it into a series of congressional investigations that revealed that Hillary Clinton used private e-mails for official business—like a number of Republicans before her and several Trump officials after the campaign ended. It turned the Clintons’ charity, the Clinton Foundation, into an avatar of corruption.

Now that same machine is threatening to undermine the to institutions vital to a functional democracy.

The prototypical member of the resistance may be that nice woman down the street who’d never shown much interest in politics until she was shocked into action by Donald Trump’s election. But there are also those mild-mannered public servants who’d largely worked behind the scenes—until they recognized Trump as a threat to the democracy they had taken for granted under previous administrations, and then threw themselves into the fight to preserve it.

Andy Slavitt served as the acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) during the last 21 months of the Obama administration, commuting between Washington, DC, and his home in Minnesota. In the weeks before the 2016 election, he and his wife had been pondering whether they’d take their two boys out of high school and move to the capital if Hillary Clinton asked him to head up the agency on a permanent basis. It was not to be. The day after the election, Slavitt says, “I delayed my emotional response and started calling governors and health-plan CEOs and anyone I could get in touch with to make sure that everyone understood that it wasn’t going to be as easy to get rid of the Affordable Care Act as some people thought.”

At the CMS, Slavitt had started his days reading e-mails from some of the 100 million Americans who rely on the centers for insurance; it’s what gave his job “meaning.” And when the candidate who’d vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act “on day one” became president-elect, Slavitt says, “my message to everybody at the time was: ‘There are too many people who count on this law’” to allow Trump to destroy it.

Soon after Trump took office, Republicans made “repeal and replace” a top legislative priority. Slavitt noticed that they “were voting to repeal the ACA but refused to hold town halls” on the issue. He spent the next several months issuing Republican lawmakers a challenge: either face their constituents or debate him. If they refused, Slavitt would come to their district and hold a town hall himself.

No one accepted his challenge, so Slavitt traveled from district to district, often on his own dime, explaining to some 35,000 Americans how the ACA’s repeal would affect them. He took to social media to inform and energize hundreds of thousands more. He worked with any resistance group that reached out to him. And, in the end, he helped to rally the tsunami of opposition that would turn repeated attempts to kill the law into a massive debacle for the Republican Party.

The Republicans have since moved on to pass a tax-overhaul bill, despite its unpopularity. The core problem today, Slavitt says, is that lawmakers are no longer accountable to their constituents. His next project, he adds, will work to change that dynamic; he’ll be unveiling it later this month.

Skeptics of the widely accepted view that Russia conducted a multi-faceted propaganda and cyber-warfare campaign to influence last year’s elections often argue that there’s no evidence to support the claims. The fallacy they’re deploying here is straightforward: They’re conflating “evidence” with “proof.”

Many criminal convictions are obtained without video or DNA evidence, or some other slam-dunk proof. Prosecutors offer a theory of the case, and then support it with multiple pieces of evidence that would not themselves prove a defendant’s guilt when viewed in isolation. Individual pieces of evidence may speak to motive, means, or opportunity, or may be used to undermine the defense. They’re often the bricks with which prosecutors build a larger structure.

It’s true that we don’t yet have, and may never discover, a smoking gun that proves definitively that Russia ran a multi-pronged “active measures” campaign to help Trump get elected, or that the Trump campaign colluded with Russian operatives in doing so. Espionage operations are covert, often conducted through cutouts, and specifically designed to provide plausible deniability. Similarly, our own counter-intelligence agencies may never reveal everything they know because doing so would compromise classified sources and methods of obtaining information. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a mountain of evidence suggesting that the Kremlin expended significant resources to influence the outcome of last year’s elections, that Trump’s people were communicating with Russian agents during the campaign, and that those involved have since worked very hard to cover their trail.

The skeptics are correct that the findings of the intelligence community don’t constitute proof, but it would be odd to discount them as evidence. The conclusions of the CIA, FBI, NSA, and several allied intelligence agencies are the equivalent of experts testifying in a court of law. Their findings should carry greater weight given that the skeptics’ own experts have proven to be unqualified and uninformed. Trump’s decision to fire James Comey, and then explain on nationwide TV that he did so because of the Russia investigation, is evidence of a cover-up, as are the dozens of undisclosed contacts between members of Trump’s inner circles and Russian officials, and other characters who are close to the regime. E-mails from middlemen connected to Russian oligarchs offering help from the Russian government for Trump’s campaign, multiple attempts to set up covert back-channel communications between the Kremlin and Trump Tower, multiple indictments or guilty pleas for lying to investigators—all of these are solid pieces of evidence of something nefarious involving Russians and the 2016 campaign.

Luke Harding’s new book, Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win, doesn’t claim to have definitive proof that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to win the election. Still, Harding, who served as The Guardian’s Moscow bureau chief for four years before being thrown out of the country for his critical reporting on Vladimir Putin’s government, presents a powerful case for Russian interference, and Trump campaign collusion, by collecting years of reporting on Trump’s connections to Russia and putting it all together in a coherent narrative. It’s the sheer breadth of connections, many of them dating back 20 years or more, between Trump and his associates and Russians with close ties to the Kremlin that put the lie to Trump’s repeated claims that he has no ties to Russia. If all of these dealings were on the up-and-up, Trump and his crew wouldn’t have gone to such great lengths to obscure them. Couple that with the intelligence community’s conclusions about Russia’s active-measures campaign, and the fact that, as both a candidate and as president, Trump has consistently staked out positions that perfectly align with Moscow’s, and it’s clear that this is all far from a partisan “witch hunt.”

In an interview with The Nation, Harding was quick to acknowledge that there’s a lot that we don’t know. “I think when it comes to following the money, we only have maybe 10 or 15 percent of the story,” he said. “I think 85 percent of that story is still submerged.”

Nonetheless, he says that what we do know so far is significant.

I think this is a huge story. Without wanting to come across as hyperbolic, I think it’s bigger than Watergate because this isn’t one set of Americans doing dirty tricks to another set of Americans, as was the case back in the ’70s. This is one set of Americans basically contracting with a powerful foreign power to help it cripple an opponent, Hillary Clinton. The stakes are much larger.

I think [Vladimir] Putin has kind of done this quite cleverly. He’s not some kind of evil villain in a cave flipping red switches. He’s essentially an opportunist who has very adroitly taken advantage of problems in the West, and divisions in American society—whether they’re cultural or racial or political—and he’s sought to exploit and instrumentalize them for his own purposes.

There are also really interesting questions about how far back Russia’s relationship with Donald Trump goes. One thing my book makes clear, or seeks to make clear, is that the Russians play a very long game. They’ve been interested in Donald Trump for a very long time.

You can listen to our entire conversation in the player above, or read an edited transcript below.

Joshua Holland: There were some things in the book that I didn’t know, but for the most part, I was surprised by how many of these stories I’d read about at the time but had since forgotten—because there has been just one revelation after another for over a year. It’s hard to keep it all together in your head. The book is powerful in part because it puts a couple of years of reporting together into one coherent narrative.

Luke Harding: I think people are very familiar with the American heroes of the story—or antiheroes if you like—whether it’s Paul Manafort or Carter Page or Donald Trump Jr. But they are less familiar with the Russians. And what we’re talking about here is an alleged conspiracy with two halves.

What I wanted to try and illuminate was what the Russians were doing. And I wanted it to be contextual, to explain that if you really want to interpret what happened last year in America, you need to go backwards almost through a kind of wormhole toward Cold War times and you need to be a sort of student of espionage, and in particular of the KGB method. I wanted to marry some of the contemporaneous stuff that we’ve seen in the news with my own reporting from Moscow. I feel that I understand Russian spydom having suffered from it to an extent when I was the bureau chief there for The Guardian. My flat was broken into and I was bugged and followed around and all the rest of it.

It’s also important to look at how the KGB used to do things in order to to understand Vladimir Putin and his methods. Putin operates in the manner of a classic KGB-trained spy. He uses strategies of subterranean influence that were tried and tested during the ’60s and ’70s under [then–Soviet Secretary General] Leonid Brezhnev and so on. I wanted to pull that together.

JH: I think it’s important to make that point about Putin not being a superhuman person. There have been some concerns among Russian reformers that the way that we portray this story helps bolster Putin’s image at home as this mastermind manipulator. In some ways, he lucked out. A lot of these methods were low rent—sending out phishing e-mails to hack into the DNC, for example, isn’t the most sophisticated form of hacking.

You write in the book that there’s a fuzzy line between the Russian government and these shady groups of quasi-criminal cyber-warriors. How does that relationship work?

LH: I rely to a degree on some very good Russian reporting here, particularly that of Andrei Soldatov, who’s written a fantastic book called The Red Web. I discussed this extensively with him when I was writing my hacking chapter. Essentially there are hackers who are basically criminals. They do this stuff for money, but they quite often get co-opted by the FSB, the Russian spy agency. They have to do certain things because the state is pulling the strings. And it has plausible deniability.

They will hack material and someone in the government will make a strategic decision about how and when to release it. They often do this through cutouts. In this case, of course, WikiLeaks published Democratic e-mails, including John Podesta’s e-mails, at a time designed to cause maximum damage to Hillary Clinton.

If you think about the Russian state, it’s not like the American government or, let’s say, the German government. I wrote a previous book about [the Russian government] called Mafia State. There is a bureaucracy, and superficially it looks like a government with a parliament and elections and so on, but actually that’s largely decorative. The government not only has a very close relationship with organized crime, it is also kind of criminal in nature. And there are really two projects going on at the moment in contemporary Russia.

One of them is this nationalist movement to project Russian power and to reassert what Moscow would call bipolarity. In other words, a world in which Russia is the equal of the US, even though it isn’t.

The other project is to steal stuff. By stuff, I mean billions of dollars from state enterprises, like Gasprom, or Rosneft, the oil producer. The people who sit at the top of these organizations are some of the richest people on the planet. Criminality is kind of hardwired into the system, but that doesn’t mean that the state can’t do “patriotic” things like hacking the American election.

JH: There’s a temptation to see Trump as some kind of Manchurian candidate, given how long the Russians have been… I don’t know if grooming him is the right word, but he’s been doing business with them since the 1990s, a fact that he denies, and US intelligence flagged what they saw as suspicious contacts between members of his inner circle and Russian operatives months before he even declared he was running. But you write that, in reality, the relationship was likely much more transactional than that. Can you unpack that?

LH: I think what you can say is that Donald Trump is the kind of leader that Vladimir Putin likes to deal with. He doesn’t like people who are idealists. He doesn’t believe in international law. He doesn’t actually really believe that Western democracies are democracies. He thinks that they’re basically shinier versions of Russia, and proponents of democratic reforms are hypocritical. He hates being lectured, for example, by visiting Western leaders on human rights.

JH: Russia experts I’ve spoken with say that Putin sees the post–World World II international order—the UN, NATO, the human-rights courts, and even things like the Paris accord—he sees all of these things as kind of tools of Western hegemony, and he’s not entirely wrong about that.

LH: He likes leaders in the mold of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy or Gerhard Schröder in Germany or Donald Trump, people who don’t talk about abstract ideas or noble ends or civic values. You talk about deals, preferably deals over energy—bilateral deals which are to Russia’s advantage and maybe with a little sweetener on the side for your nephew or whoever. That’s the kind of world that Vladimir Putin operates in. He genuinely thinks that practically anything can be negotiated. If it can’t be negotiated, it’s a conspiracy.

Therefore, Donald Trump is a perfect interlocutor. What we know from publicly available evidence is whenever they meet, they seem to get on terrifically. Trump seems to be more attracted to Putin than any other leader. There’s almost this sort of magnetism going on, or a kind of strange allure.

JH: Let’s turn to the Steele dossier, a document compiled first for conservatives who opposed Trump in the primaries and then for Democrats after he became the nominee by Christopher Steele, a very well-regarded former spook in British intelligence. You write that he’s a conservative analyst who isn’t prone to including rumors in his reports. And the dossier sent shock waves through the intelligence community. But it was raw intelligence, and Steele himself thought that some of it might turn out to be wrong. Many of the things that Steele reported have since been verified by others, including yourself, but the most salacious bits—the golden showers, the prostitutes—have not. To what degree do you think Buzzfeed’s decision to publish the dossier in its entirety shaped the way it was received or the way that the media covered it?

LH: It was a bold decision by Buzzfeed. I think it was the right decision, because at that point some of the allegations were already swirling around. A lot of journalists, I would say from the late fall of 2016, were aware of it. I didn’t actually see it until Buzzfeed published, but I did get an e-mail summarizing some of it.

It was having an impact on the political conversation. Harry Reid, famously the senior Democrat, wrote to Jim Comey after getting a briefing on this stuff in late August and said, “You are sitting on explosive information concerning Donald Trump and yet you haven’t seen fit to inform the American public.” When everyone on Capitol Hill, or everyone in Washington knew about these rumors but ordinary Americans didn’t, I think Buzzfeed did the right thing by publishing.

As you said, Christopher Steele is not saying this dossier is 100 percent correct. He acknowledges that some of it may be wrong, but his assessment is that it’s somewhere between 70 and 90 percent right. In other words, it’s mostly right. Plan A, if you like, wasn’t to get Buzzfeed to publish it. In fact, I think Chris was less than thrilled by the fact that Buzzfeed did publish it. Plan A was to get the FBI to go full out to investigate these reports and use all of its resources to prove or disprove them.

He sent his memos to the FBI and he was increasingly disillusioned by their almost nonchalant response, or lack of response. They just really didn’t seem to be doing very much. The final straw for him was when Comey announced that he was reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails 10 days before Election Day but still keeping silent about Trump and the far more incendiary claims that he was essentially in bed with Russia.

JH: This piece of the book made my blood boil because it’s extremely clear that members of the US intelligence community at the highest levels were looking very, very seriously at this dossier for a significant period of time—and then let the ball drop.

LH: Actually, they did more than that. I mean, the FBI mis-briefed The New York Times at one point and said there was nothing in it. That, to me, is the most astonishing aspect. It’s not just that they didn’t put the foot on the accelerator, there was some disinformation going on as well.

JH: And they said specifically that the reason that they were hesitant to go public with it was they didn’t want to intervene in the US election, and then Comey makes this announcement that he was reopening the case into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails.

You were already looking at this story before you met with Steele and before you had gotten a look at the memos published by Buzzfeed. Steele steered you in the right direction. He said, “Follow the money.” In broad terms, what happens when you follow the money?

LH: What happens is, it gets complicated very quickly. It’s very hard to be definitive, but there is a kind of factual scaffold, if you like. We know that Russians have been buying properties in Trump Tower not since last week but since Trump Tower went up in the 1980s. Some of these Russians were mafia people who did time subsequently for various felonies. There is a recurring motif of Russians, often criminal-connected Russians, investing in Trump properties.

One thing that we were talking to Steele about was this Russian oligarch, Dmitry Rybolovlev—very wealthy man, a multibillionaire—who bought Trump’s Florida house in 2008 for $95 million, leaving Trump, who bought the same property a couple of years earlier, with a $50 million profit. I spent time with Rybolovlev’s press guy, who said that the oligarch put on a pair of swimming trunks and paddled past the property, but he never actually set foot on it. He bought it, discovered it had mold, demolished it, and is now reselling it in chunks. This is someone who is very good with money, who made a fortune in the post–Soviet Union, and yet he effectively gifts Trump $50 million. Why would he do that? Well, he basically says, “Nothing to see here.”

Meanwhile, there’s another very curious story about Deutsche Bank—Germany’s biggest lender, a bank with a global pretensions—which lent huge sums of money to Donald Trump. And that same year, in 2008, Trump defaults on a major loan, $45 million, sued the bank, and then, for reasons which are still inexplicable, the bank continued to lend to him. He still owes Deutsche Bank about $300 million. And then while Deutsche Bank is doing this out of its New York division, the same German bank in Russia is running essentially a kind of VIP money-laundering scam where $10 billion from Moscow is sent out the country.

JH: As you know, there’s a fair degree of skepticism about the Russia story, including among some of my colleagues at The Nation. Some have long-held views that were shaped by their scholarship or their experiences with Russia. Others, a much larger group of skeptics on the left, are pretty clearly influenced by the idea that apportioning some blame to Russia for Trump’s election absolves Hillary Clinton from running a bad campaign or not focusing enough on her economic message or whatever.

This combination of Russian disinformation online, trolling, cyber warfare—the things that you describe as kind of standard operating procedure are not unique to our elections. This is seen as an issue across Europe. I’m wondering how the conversation differs in countries where people weren’t invested in this divisive primary. Do you see similar skepticism toward allegations of Russian interference in French or German elections or in Brexit?

LH: It’s an interesting question. I would just say, just to clarify my own position, is that it’s quite possible that Hillary ran a terrible campaign and that Russia interfered. These things are not mutually exclusive.

JH: That’s my position.

LH: But I’m not an American. That’s for you guys to figure all that out. I’ve got no doubts that Russia did interfere, and I think very successfully.

I think that in Europe, we kind of got the memo about this some years ago. I’m speaking to you from London, where in 2006, two Kremlin assassins sent by Vladimir Putin—we can say this because there’s been a public inquiry here—poisoned a guy called Alexander Litvinenko, who was a Russian dissident, an ex-FSB officer, with a radioactive cup of tea in really one of the most dramatic and astonishing murders since the Cold War. This was a huge case here. It was front-page news. There was a massive criminal inquiry by Scotland Yard, the police force in London. Thousands of pages of scientific evidence. And a retired judge concluded that this was a Kremlin plot. In other words, a decade before the US election hack, the Russia of Vladimir Putin felt sufficiently emboldened to bump off people the president personally didn’t like on the streets of a European capital.

So I think there’s much more skepticism here towards Russia. There’s a widespread belief that Russia does act aggressive on the international stage. We’ve seen the war in Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea. We’ve seen Europe’s borders change by force for the first time since 1945. I think there’s much less skepticism here [in England and Europe], regardless of whether Hillary was a good candidate or not, about what Russia does.

The nearer you get to the Russian Federation border—when you talk to the Baltic countries of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania—they are fearful. They are worried. They are fretting about who or what is going to be next after the United States last year.

JH: Another thing that skeptics in this country on both the left and the right claim frequently is that this whole story has been driven by a kind of obsession among Democratic partisans. What do you make of that claim?

LH: I find it slightly bizarre. I respect other people’s views. I think, given the cacophonous times we live in, it’s important to be polite towards other ideas and to accept that things are complicated, but a lot of the people who are very skeptical about this narrative actually know nothing about Russia. Most of them don’t read the Russian press, and are not familiar with Russian espionage.

JH: Let me just add my two cents onto that. It seems to me that investigative journalists like you have been driving the story, and kept it in the news—as well as Trump’s own actions. The story got new legs when Trump fired the FBI director and went on television to say that he did so because of the Trump-Russia investigation. This story blew up again when Trump told several Russian diplomats that he had fired Comey in order to stop the Russian investigation. It’s Donald Trump who’s obsessed with this story and who keeps it alive by constantly tweeting and talking about it.

Another common claim among Russian skeptics is that the story’s being promoted by unreformed Cold Warriors in the US “deep state.” You write that Vladimir Putin, former head of the KGB, is quite open in his nostalgia for the old Soviet Union. One of your chapter titles is a quote from Putin saying that the dissolution of the Soviet Union—and I’m paraphrasing—was a great tragedy of the 20th century.

Is there a certain irony in claiming that US intelligence officials are stuck in a Cold War mentality when Putin is so open about his own Cold War tendencies?

LH: You can call that irony, but let’s be clear: This is a not a neocon position. I’m a journalist—I describe reality first and foremost—but my civic position is progressive. I would describe myself as a person of the left. That means I care about things like human rights and what you might call universal values, if that doesn’t seem too old-fashioned.

If you look at the domestic situation in Russia, there are no free elections. The press and TV is pretty much under the Kremlin’s thumb. Dissidents, people who speak out or annoy the regime, suffer consequences ranging from minor harassment to being shot dead outside the Kremlin. I think we need to be mindful of that.

And in terms of the Cold War question, I don’t think Putin makes much of a secret about it. Really, his geopolitical sensibility is shaped by the Cold War. He regards the fact that the Soviet Union lost it as a profound humiliation. What he’s now seeking to do is to win the next Cold War—Cold War II if you like.

It’s being fought already. It’s being fought in a way that pays no heed to international law—whether it’s starting war in Ukraine, assassinating dissidents in London, or hacking an American election. He thinks the West is weak. He thinks the West is decadent. He thinks the West is hypocritical. Even though Russia is not a powerful country, it is exploiting traditional patterns and methods of KGB espionage. Sometimes it works well. Sometimes not so well. He is a Cold Warrior, but he’s a Cold War II warrior in the age of Facebook and Twitter. That’s all there is to it really.

JH: Luke Harding, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really do appreciate it.

LH: Sir, thank you. I really enjoyed our conversation.

Editor’s Note: This article initially cited a Bloomberg story reporting that special counsel Robert Mueller subpoenaed Deutsche Bank to produce “documents on its relationship with Trump and his family.” That reference has now been removed. That Bloomberg story was later corrected with the news that Trump’s and his family’s records were not targeted.

Clarification: Luke Harding states that “two Kremlin assassins sent by Vladimir Putin…poisoned a guy called Alexander Litvinenko” and that “a retired judge concluded that this was a Kremlin plot.” The report released by the retired judge, Sir Robert Owen, concluded that it was probable that Putin had approved the operation. Harding also states that the annexation of Crimea represents the first time Europe’s borders have changed by force since 1945. Europe’s borders also changed by force when Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008.

The tax bill Senate Republicans rushed to pass in the dark of night, unread by most senators, was a Hail Mary pass by a party that expects to lose seats in the coming midterms, and knows that its historically unpopular president has a good chance of serving only one term. It was an act of legislative looting by a party that’s behind by an average of eight points in generic congressional ballot polls, doesn’t think it will enjoy unified control of government again in the immediate future, and is grabbing whatever benefits it can for its donors while teeing up deep, damaging cuts to the safety net in the future.

The conventional wisdom holds that Republicans pursued a maximalist approach to the bill because they faced a donors’ revolt if they didn’t deliver something big after Obamacare repeal turned into a debacle, and because they’re insulated to a degree from the wrath of the voters.

This is true. As a result of a combination of gerrymandering and the inefficient distribution of Democratic voters, the GOP might be able to hold on to control of the House despite losing the popular vote by as much as seven or eight points. Next year, Republicans will defend only nine Senate seats, many of them in solidly red states, while their opponents try to hold 25. And conservative donors have threatened to close their wallets if they don’t get big cuts.

But those factors alone don’t explain congressional leaders’ apparent contempt for public opinion. Looking at the bigger picture suggests that they’ve internalized the “emerging Democratic majority” thesis: They know that the electorate is becoming more diverse, more urban, and better educated. They understand that their core demographic—married whites who identify as Christians—is in rapid decline. This is what animates their relentless efforts to suppress the vote of typically Democratic constituencies, and it explains their rush to pass a massive rewrite of the tax code that’s historically unpopular.

As The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein noted on Twitter, the Senate bill will come down especially hard on the Dems’ rising coalition: “urban residents, blue states, college and graduate students.… It’s an enemies list as much as a revenue bill.”

Republicans understand that their last two presidents entered office despite losing the popular vote, as they’ve now done in six of the past seven presidential contests dating back to 1988. They get that Donald Trump’s approval ratings are historically low for this stage in a presidency, and that today’s intense partisanship makes it unlikely that he’ll ever enjoy anything even approaching majority support. They know that he’s going to lead them into a 2020 contest in which the Senate map favors the Democrats. And of course they know that Robert Mueller’s investigation is looming over all of this.

They know a backlash is coming, and they’re making the most of the power they have while they still can. They don’t care about public perception if it’s an obstacle to enacting long-term cuts to taxes and spending that will be difficult for future Congresses to reverse.

It’s difficult to overstate how destructive this bill will be over the long term, and impossible to overstate the degree to which their shambolic, one-party legislative process was an affront to the most basic norms of democratic governance.

In order to finance a portion of the $1.4 trillion in tax cuts they’re showering on corporate America over the next 10 years, they eliminate the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) individual mandate. According to the Congressional Budget Office, this would lead to 4 million Americans’ losing their coverage next year, and 13 million fewer insured in 2027. As healthy people leave the pool, premiums for everyone else in the ACA’s exchanges would spike by 10 percent.

That’s only the beginning. As Amy Goldstein reports for The Washington Post, the bill would have “potent ripple effects” throughout the health-care system. As a result of an existing “pay as you go” law, rising deficits will make automatic budget cuts kick in, unless Congress steps in to stop them, that would reduce funding for Medicare by $25 billion per year. And it’s not just health care—Margot Sanger-Katz reported for The New York Times that if this bill becomes law “the funding for dozens of federal spending programs could be cut—in many cases to nothing—beginning next year.”

Republican senators blithely dismiss this reality, insisting that the bill would unleash sufficient growth to pay for itself. “I’m totally confident this is a revenue-neutral bill,” said Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). “I think it’s going to be a revenue producer.” This is something like confidently stating a belief in the tooth fairy or Santa Claus.

Congress’s own Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that the bill will drive up deficits by $1 trillion over the next decade. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin promised that his staff would produce an analysis that would support Republican claims that the bill would pay for itself—he said that he had 100 people working on it—but it was never released. The agency’s inspector general is now investigating to determine whether he spiked the analysis because it contradicted his talking points. House majority leader Paul Ryan (R-WI) touted a letter signed by a number of economists who supposedly supported the House bill, but Lee Fang reported for The Intercept that it included signatures by people who don’t exist or who say they never signed anything of the sort, as well as “office assistants, ex-felons and a sprinkling of real economists.” Meanwhile, a survey of 38 academic economists conducted by the University of Chicago’s Initiative on Global Markets found that 37 of them expect the bill to blow up federal deficits, and the 38th “misread the question,” according to The Washington Post.

iven all of that, it should come as no surprise that Republicans didn’t want their sausage making to see the light of day until shortly before the vote. Open hearings, expert testimony, and public discussion of the bill’s provisions were the last thing Mitch McConnell and his colleagues wanted to see.

The process and product are inseparable: It isn’t a bad bill because it was crafted by a small group within the Republican leadership and passed without an opportunity for the public to digest its provisions. They jammed it through because they knew that if it went through anything resembling the Senate’s regular order, it would trigger significant public opposition.

And the truly maddening part is that when Democrats do regain power they typically try to revive the institutional norms that Republicans ignored. They don’t feel that they’re facing demographic headwinds and have to pursue a maximalist agenda. So they hold dozens of hearings and markups on their legislation, and their opponents still claim that it’s being shoved down their throats. See: The Affordable Care Act.

The game is transparent: Republicans claim, despite all evidence to the contrary, that tax cuts will pay for themselves, and when those cuts result in huge deficits, they use them as leverage to force Democrats to accept new spending cuts. That’s precisely what happened under Obama after George W. Bush’s tax cuts blew a giant hole in the federal budget. Lather, rinse, repeat.

But this fight is not over. The House and Senate still need to reconcile their respective bills, and resistance groups are focusing especially on the House, where everyone’s up for reelection in 2018 and the divide between the hardcore members of the “Freedom Caucus” and more pragmatic members may imperil final passage. It’s still worth contacting your representatives.

We know that corporations use offshore tax havens to dodge their fair share of taxes. According to Gabriel Zucman, an economist at UC Berkeley and author of The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens, American companies avoid paying $70 billion in taxes every year by parking their profits in low- or no-tax countries.

But the release of the Paradise Papers—thousands of documents leaked from Appleby, an offshore law firm that advises companies and the wealthy on using the tax code to their advantage and is a major player in this market—has shed some new light on the network of financial firms, lawyers, and accountants that make the system work. They’ve also exposed how some of the wealthiest people in the world use various trusts and shell companies to not only make a killing but also to keep their positions from the public’s view.

The most prominent example of this is probably Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s holdings in a shipping company called Navigator, which is closely tied to an energy firm controlled by members of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, including his son-in-law. Another member of that inner circle controlling the energy firm is Gennady Timchenko, a Russian billionaire on the Treasury Department’s sanctions list. Experts told NBC News that the relationship should have raised red flags, but it wasn’t fully disclosed during Ross’s confirmation process. Senator Richard Blumenthal said members of Congress “were under the impression that Ross had divested all of his interests in Navigator. Furthermore, he said, they were unaware of Navigator’s close ties to Russia.”

But Ross is only one of many within Trump’s circle of advisers and donors whose offshore investments were unveiled in the Paradise Papers. They include Steve Bannon, his erstwhile backer Robert Mercer—who used untaxed money from his offshore holdings to finance Clinton Cash, a book accusing Hillary Clinton of corruption—the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, chief economic adviser Gary Cohn, casino magnate Steve Wynn, and Carl Icahn, among others. Their holdings may not violate any laws—when properly disclosed—but they certainly fly in the face of the “America first” rhetoric their president embraces.

A search of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists database of the leaks finds two prominent Democrats in the Panama Papers. A holding company tied to former presidential candidate Wes Clark used Appleby to register a new subsidiary on the Isle of Man, where all of its intellectual property now resides. And Penny Pritzker, who served as Commerce Secretary under Barack Obama, appears to have used Appleby to transfer holdings to her children that she claimed on her ethics disclosures to have sold.

Avoiding disclosure—including disclosure of potential conflicts of interest or schemes that might be politically damaging if made public—may be secondary to minimizing those tax bills, but it’s clearly a factor for those whose holdings have been revealed by the Paradise Papers.

The Queen of England’s private estate invested in an offshore trust and, according to the BBC, some of those funds “ended up in the company behind BrightHouse, a chain accused of irresponsible lending, and Threshers, which went bust owing £17.5m in UK tax.” The BBC also reported Prince Charles tripled his money in an offshore investment after he lobbied for changes to international climate agreements that would have benefited the firm. According to The Guardian, Jean-Claude Bastos de Morais, a wealthy businessman who administers Angola’s sovereign-wealth fund, made five investments in his own companies using cash from the struggling country’s “people’s fund.” Stephen Bronfman, an heir to the Seagram family fortune and a key fundraiser for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose Liberal Party made “a promise to make sure that people were paying their fair share of taxes,” as Trudeau said shortly after being elected, was a key player in “a $60-million US offshore trust in the Cayman Islands that may have cost Canadians millions in unpaid taxes,” according to the Canadian Broadcasting Company. Even U2 frontman Bono, who has long campaigned for debt relief for developing countries, “is under investigation for potential tax avoidance” via a sketchy Lithuanian shopping mall, which was exposed by the Paradise Papers.

bscuring one’s investments is just one feature of a much larger scam. For corporate America, offshore tax havens aren’t just a means of shifting the tax burden onto the rest of us—they actually serve as profit centers. In 2015, Americans for Tax Fairness estimated that American companies were holding $2.1 trillion in profits in various tax havens around the world, and under current law, they don’t have to pay taxes on them until they “repatriate” those dollars. In theory, that means that all of those profits represent an interest-free, or at least very low-interest, loan from the federal government, which they can then invest as they’d like and pocket the returns. It’s easy to make money with free money from Uncle Sam.

But Gabriel Zucman says “it’s even more than an interest-free loan, because all these profits that are parked offshore are supposed to be taxed upon repatriation in the US at the rate of 35 percent—but they will never be taxed at this rate.” That’s because corporations hold those dollars hostage, demanding occasional “tax holidays” to bring them back to the United States at a fraction of what they owe.

Zucman notes that in 2004 “these behemoth international companies were able to repatriate their offshore earnings at a rate of 5.25 percent. So in practice all these profits that they manage to book in places like Ireland, Jersey, the Cayman Islands, and so on face really tiny tax rates, and that’s the reason why the artificial shifting of profits to low or zero tax places has kept growing over the last years and decades.” Companies promise that they’ll bring those profits back to invest here at home—that’s their leverage for demanding these “holidays”—but, according to William Galston, writing for The Wall Street Journal, “the 15 companies that repatriated the most” profits during the 2004 tax holiday “raised salaries for senior executives, cut more than 20,000 jobs, decreased investment in research, and expanded dividends and stock buybacks. All this happened despite the letter of the law, which specified that the funds be used for investing in research and the workforce and prohibited their use for compensating executives and repurchasing stock.”

Zucman says that according to the latest available data, 63 percent of all the foreign profits made by US firms last year were recorded in just six low- or zero-tax jurisdictions. “Year after year they manage to book a bigger fraction of their global profits in these tiny Caribbean or European islands.”

It’s not like Apple or Microsoft are making a lot of sales in these jurisdictions. There aren’t that many customers in Bermuda or Jersey. The way the scam works, says Zucman, “is that they manipulate the price of their intra-group transactions. So, for example, they might export goods from the US at artificially low prices to Ireland and then import from Ireland at artificially high prices.” The other way they shift their profits overseas is by locating intangible assets, like algorithms or logos or trademarks with their subsidiaries in low tax countries. He offers an example: “Google moved its IT, its intellectual property in 2003 before even being listed as a public company to its Bermuda subsidiary and since then all the profits that are generated by these search technologies accrue to its Bermuda operation. In 2015, Google made $15.5 billion dollars in profits in Bermuda, where the corporate tax rate is 0 percent.” That’s almost three times the island nation’s entire economic output.

Zucman says that it would be exceptionally easy to put an end to this kind of systemic tax evasion. “We could start from the global consolidated profits of firms, and just apportion those profits to each country where sales are made. Think about Apple for instance. If they make 100 billion dollars in profits globally, and 50 percent of their sales in the US, then we could say ‘Okay, 50 percent of their global profits are going to be taxed in the US.’ And you immediately see the beauty of this system. It would put an end to this tax avoidance because right now Apple can move its profits to Jersey but cannot move its customers to Jersey. The customers are in the US, they are in Germany, they are in France. With the system that I describe, we would put an end to corporate tax avoidance.”

Ideally, that would be done on an international basis, but Zucman adds that “any country could adopt it unilaterally. The US could next year say, ‘That’s going to be the way we tax multinational corporations.’ We don’t need international cooperation.”

Instead, Washington lawmakers are going in the opposite direction, pushing for companies and their investors to enjoy yet another “tax holiday” that would allow them to bring their profits back to the US for pennies on the tax dollar that they owe. If history is any guide, they’d pay that cash to their investors through stock buy-backs and dividends, and start the whole process over again next year.

Despite seven years of demagoguery about the law’s effects, Republicans were unable to kill the Affordable Care Act. That’s given reformers on the left renewed confidence. The question of how best to keep the ACA’s unfulfilled promises will be a central issue in the 2020 election, and if Democrats regain power, the fight to further expand coverage and reduce health-care costs will likely be front and center.

Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative John Conyers have captured the energy of the progressive movement with similar proposals to make Medicare benefits significantly more generous than they are now—covering almost every medical expense, while eliminating co-pays and almost all other out-of-pocket costs—and then move almost the entire population into this more expansive program. Conyers would achieve this in one fell swoop, in under two years; Sanders would phase it in over four years.

But, as I wrote in August, these bills represent the most disruptive and difficult possible route to a comprehensive national health-care system. They’re too easy to misrepresent. Like any other deep reforms, they’d face concerted opposition from the right, centrist Democrats and health-care providers. But they’d face another obstacle, too: Because they compel so many people to give up their existing coverage for the promise of something better—all within a short period of time—they’re almost guaranteed to spark a popular backlash. Without strong popular support, these approaches are doomed to fail.

At the same time, Democratic lawmakers, think-tankers, and academics have offered a menu of incremental reforms that range from creating a public insurance program that would compete with private insurers in Obamacare’s exchanges to allowing people aged 55–64 to buy into Medicare to giving states the option of allowing anyone who lacks insurance to purchase coverage from their Medicaid programs. All of these ideas would bring about progress. And because they avoid a full-frontal assault on industry stakeholders, and leave the familiar employer-based insurance system in place, they’re more feasible politically. But they wouldn’t get us to universal coverage, and aren’t designed to aggressively control costs. More importantly, they’re unlikely to capture the imagination of young voters or energize the activist left. So the very practicality of these approaches is a major liability.

What we lack, and what we need, is a pathway to something like Medicare for All—or what Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker calls “Medicare for Most”—a scheme that establishes comprehensive health care as a right and is aggressive in challenging a status quo that continues to fail millions of Americans—but which would be merely very difficult to pass, rather than all but impossible.

So consider an alternative approach, one that combines the audacity of the Sanders and Conyers plans with an understanding of the difficulties involved in restructuring a sector of the economy that accounts for one out of every 11 American jobs.

We could roll Medicaid’s low-income coverage, the Child Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and other public spending into the Medicare system, creating a very large pool of people insured through that program. We can empower it to negotiate with providers, and then expand the program’s coverage, as a benefit, to older working people, children, and the poor. And we can then open up this new Medicare for the rest of the population—individuals and businesses—to buy into, voluntarily and at their own pace.

If those of us who extol the benefits of universal health care are right, then we can expect this system to be more efficient and better at controlling costs than the fractured private insurance market, and expect most companies to eventually take what would be a better deal. Over time, we’d get to something approaching an “all-payer” system, with a single rate-setter, which I’ll discuss in more detail below.

This would get us to universal coverage in a way that’s almost as ambitious as the Medicare for All proposals that are currently on the table, but the transition would be more gradual and less disruptive. More importantly, it would pit reformers against the health-care industry, rather than the public.

dvocates of the Sanders/Conyers approach to Medicare for All are caught in a rationality trap. They believe single payer’s simplicity and efficiency—and the lure of eliminating co-pays and out-of-pocket costs—will spur massive public support for a bill like Sanders’s, and that the outpouring of popular power will overcome the inevitable resistance from the health-care industry and its allies in Congress.

It’s true that several polls have found majority support for their approach, but that support is notably soft. Advocates cite a Kaiser Family Foundation survey from July that found that 53 percent of respondents supported an approach “in which all Americans would get their insurance from a single government plan.” (When asked specifically about “Medicare for All,” support rose to 57 percent, which is probably a reflection of Medicare’s popularity.) But the study also found that “the public’s attitudes on single-payer are quite malleable, and some people could be convinced to change their position after hearing typical pro and con arguments that might come up in a national debate.” When those who supported the plan were asked how they would feel if they heard that it gave the government too much control over the health-care system, 40 percent said they “would change their mind and would now oppose the plan.” There were similar shifts when people were asked how they’d respond to arguments about raising taxes to pay for it or were told that Medicare for All would eliminate Obamacare.

The central problem is that both Sanders and Conyers would compel almost six out of 10 people in the non-elderly population that get insurance through their employers (or their spouse’s employers) to move into a new program in a short period of time. This runs headlong into our well-established bias toward maintaining the status quo—we tend to fear change—and our tendency to loathe the idea of losing something that we already have, even if we might get something better in exchange, a concept known as “loss aversion.” (I discussed these problems in greater detail in August.) And that organic resistance to change will inevitably be amplified by the same dishonest messengers who turned the free-market-friendly Affordable Care Act (ACA) into a government “takeover” of the health care system.

In a perfect world, breaking the connection between employment and health insurance would be a laudable goal. Why should a business determine what kind of insurance its employees have access to? But that’s not the world we live in. The United States developed its employer-based system during World War II, when companies competing for workers in a booming wartime economy couldn’t offer higher pay because of government-imposed wage controls. So they turned to offering benefits like subsidized health insurance to attract those scarce workers. In 1943, the IRS ruled that employer-based insurance would be tax-free, and in the 1950s Congress codified the rule, creating a permanent exemption for health-care benefits. According to Miami University economic historian Melissa Thomasson, just 9 percent of the US population had voluntary, private insurance in 1940; by the 1960s, that number had grown to 70 percent. At that point, most Americans saw employer-based insurance as the natural order of things.

And while most other countries established their national systems back when health-care costs were only pennies on today’s dollar, and then used those systems to keep costs down over the intervening years, we face the unprecedented challenge of reforming a health-care sector that’s ballooned to 17 percent of our economy.

Our health-care system is anything but rational, but we live in an irrational world, and that’s the one in which we have to fight for universal coverage. The priority should be establishing that comprehensive health care is a human right guaranteed by the government—regardless of what kind of structure we use to do it.

nother irrational truth is that while the United States can certainly “afford” to pay for a single-payer system—we already spend far more per person on health care than any other country—a dollar in new taxes is, from a political standpoint, very different from a dollar that’s already being deducted from one’s paycheck for an employer-sponsored plan. “The basic problem is that the move to single payer involves a massive shift of resources,” wrote economist Dean Baker, himself a single-payer advocate, in Democracy last month. Baker worked with single-payer advocates in Congress to figure out how to transfer the 10 percent or so of the country’s economic output that’s currently spent on private-sector health care to the public sphere. In theory, it could work: If you’re spending a dollar more on taxes and a dollar less on private insurance premiums, you’re coming out even. But it might not feel that way. Employers pay part of that dollar now, and workers who end up paying higher taxes would have to trust that they’d get their share back in wages. It’s unlikely they would. Baker concluded that, “while in principle it should be a matter of indifference to people whether they pay money for health insurance to providers in the form of premiums and co-payments or to the government in the form of taxes, members of Congress who have to run for reelection don’t seem to think this is the case.”

Neither Bernie Sanders nor John Conyers propose specific funding mechanisms in their plans, enabling their fellow Democrats to sign on to the principle of universal coverage without facing a barrage of negative ads accusing them of favoring massive tax hikes. It’s savvy politics at this point. But when the time comes to get specific, and the opposition starts talking about increasing federal taxes by almost $1.5 trillion, it’s a safe bet that these ideas will face significant opposition, even if those new taxes are offset by reductions in private premiums.

t’s important to understand that the United States already finances half of its health care through the public sector, but we do so irrationally and inefficiently, with a fractured system that prohibits the government from using its market power to control prices and a huge discrepancy in resources from state to state. This is a serious problem on several levels. It undermines our public-health system’s buying power. And it enables states to sharply limit benefits.

Nineteen states have refused tons of federal dollars from the ACA to expand Medicaid by raising the cutoff for eligibility to 138 percent of the federal poverty line. (Under the law, the federal government picks up 95 percent of the costs now, and then 90 percent beginning in 2020.) This significantly undermined the Affordable Care Act’s promise of universality.

Under non-expanded Medicaid, states set their own eligibility criteria, and many of the same ones that refused the expansion have also made those criteria so onerous that the program covers only a fraction of low-income people. In 18 of the 19 states that refused the expansion, people without kids are ineligible for Medicaid regardless of how little they earn. For people in those states who do have children, the median cut-off for eligibility is just 44 percent of the federal poverty line; in Alabama and Texas, parents are ineligible for Medicaid if their household income exceeds just 18 percent of the federal poverty line.

At a time when there’s a lot of cynicism toward the government, and political disinformation is everywhere, Sanders and Conyers are asking people to take a huge leap of faith based only on single-payer’s promise.

But here we can take another lesson from the ACA. Whatever its shortcomings, expanding coverage to over 20 million people dramatically shifted the discourse around health care in the United States. It helped bring about majority support for the idea that the government should guarantee coverage, and it made the loss of insurance under the GOP’s various plans to repeal-and-replace politically toxic.

Health-care reformers could build support for single payer in a similar way—demonstrating its benefits by creating a model on the state level. But that comes with its own challenges. The most likely states to become models for single payer haven’t been able to deliver so far. Despite a high-profile campaign earlier this year, California lawmakers tabled a single-payer bill in June. Some activists blamed their fecklessness and fealty to big donors, but legislators said practicalities drove the decision; an arcane spending formula embedded in the California Constitution meant that the legislature couldn’t enact a single-payer system without simultaneously tripling education spending.

That formula doesn’t apply to measures passed by popular referendum, but if advocates put single payer on the ballot, it would be relatively easy for corporate stakeholders to flood the airwaves with misleading ads and kill the measure. That’s precisely what happened in California in 1995, when opponents “waged a well-funded, sophisticated media campaign that the proposition’s proponents could not counter,” according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. The referendum was defeated by a 73-27 margin. It happened again in Oregon in 2002, when a similar proposal was defeated 78-22, and then once more in Colorado last year, when a single-payer proposal went down 80-20. In a small, liberal state like Vermont, which passed a single-payer law in 2011, the political will was there but the state government couldn’t find a way to raise the revenues necessary to implement it.

here’s another way—one that’s national in scope but avoids the popular opposition that forcing a huge share of the population to give up their current insurance would elicit. It would also require significantly fewer tax dollars to work.

This missing path starts with the understanding that all of the goals of progressive health reform—universality, greater equity, an expansion of public health care, cost containment through efficiencies of scale and reducing the role of profit in health care—can be accomplished to a significant degree without dismantling the current system entirely.

First, we should nationalize Medicaid’s low-income coverage and CHIP, and fold them into Medicare. Red-state governments have proven that they can’t administer these programs properly. Nationalizing them would bring an end to miserly cut-offs for eligibility. And we should cover everyone earning up to 150 percent of the poverty line—the more generous cutoff that was proposed in early iterations of the ACA.

Automatically enrolling children in the program at birth and covering them until they reach adulthood would eventually lead to a cultural shift, with people from all walks of life expecting to have insurance coverage regardless of their family’s economic situation. Then, with our existing public-health dollars folded into a single large pool, we should empower the government to negotiate prices with providers and allow drugs to be imported from other countries with strong safety standards. And we should expand public health care further by lowering the eligibility age for Medicare—as a benefit subsidized by the federal government rather than as an option to buy into—to the age of, say, 55.

We would also eliminate the ACA’s exchanges and offer those who aren’t covered under a group insurance plan the option of buying into Medicare for a premium that reflects the cost of covering them adjusted for their current Obamacare subsidies. This would not only lead to a significant expansion of public health care and a dramatic reduction in the rate of uninsured, but it would also bring almost all public spending on insurance under one single umbrella.

If we stopped there and declared mission accomplished, we’d have a near-universal system. But it still wouldn’t approach the efficiencies of a single-payer scheme. Most of the working-age population would remain covered by a fractured web of private insurers, and would continue to pay for their limited bargaining power, higher administrative expenses and profits.

So we shouldn’t stop there. We should then allow employers to buy into the Medicare program—first small employers and ultimately every employer. If single-payer advocates are correct about its benefits—if it reduces administrative overhead and contains costs more effectively than private insurance—then, over time, most employers will buy into the program voluntarily because it would make good economic sense to do so.

That would push us not toward single payer but an “all-payer” scheme with a single rate-setter. In an all-payer system, the prices that health-care providers can charge are negotiated with the same massive market power that single-payer systems can bring to bear, but multiple payers actually foot the bills. Those rates can be set, or negotiated, by groups of insurers and providers, as in Germany—a market-based all-payer system—or by a governmental authority, as is the case with Maryland’s all-payer system for hospital costs.

In Maryland, private insurers and government programs both pay hospitals rates set by an independent board of health-care experts. No more than three of the seven commissioners can be affiliated with health-care providers, which prevents the commission from being captured by the industry.

Established in 1971, the system has had a measurable impact. According to a 2009 study published by Health Affairs, the cost of a Maryland hospital admission went from 26 percent above the national average in 1976 to 2 percent below the national average in 2007. It’s also resulted in greater access to care and more equitable care, because even those on Medicaid can visit the state’s top facilities and its academic medical centers. It makes no difference to the government because they charge the same amount.

Austin Frakt, a health-care economist at the Department of Veterans Affairs and an associate professor at Harvard and Boston University, says, “This is a way to have multiple payers, and have the bargaining power of a single-payer.”

He points out that Medicare is currently a de facto all-payer system. While around one-third of those covered by the program have a private Medicare Advantage plan, a regulation sharply limits the incentive that private insurers have to pay providers more than traditional Medicare does, and no incentive for providers to accept less for the same services. With some slight variations, public and private Medicare plans pay the same for similar services.

By phasing out an exemption in the ACA that allows smaller companies to not cover their employees, over time this new, expanded Medicare program would effectively become a single-rate-setter in a similar way. With an employer buy-in, paired with an expansion of public health care to cover the uninsured, we’d capture many of the benefits of a single-payer system without dismantling the employer-based system that, for better or worse, most Americans have grown accustomed to for the past 70 years.

Rather than figuring out how to transfer close to 10 percent of our economic output from the private sector to the government in a relatively short period of time, we’d have to figure out how to finance only the fraction of those costs required to cover children and people aged 55–64.

The proposals offered by Bernie Sanders and John Conyers both contain a political hand grenade that’s just waiting to explode: In the name of improving Medicare, they would do away with Medicare Advantage plans—the private insurance plans that around one-third of Medicare enrollees choose over traditional Medicare—as part of their ban on all private insurance that offered the same coverage as their new entitlement. That would mean stepping on a proverbial “third rail” of American politics by making a huge number of current retirees give up the insurance plans that they chose. Just imagine what Fox News would do with that one.

If we want to get rid of the Medicare Advantage plans, it would be better to grandfather them in for current enrollees and stop offering them to new beneficiaries. But it would also be smart to allow private insurers to continue to sell the kind of heavily regulated policies that they currently do under the Medicare Advantage program to companies and prime working-age individuals who buy into Medicare. Make the public benefit truly public, and give private insurers a role in covering those who get their insurance through their employer.

ernie Sanders is right that you should begin a negotiation by asking for more than you hope to get. Progressives shouldn’t negotiate with ourselves by starting in the center. But if you go into a salary negotiation hoping to get $60,000 per year, and you start by asking for $600,000, they’ll either think you’re in a completely different league, or nuts, and show you the door. It’s important to articulate a viable transition away from our deeply entrenched system.

Our health-care costs are so high that major reform will doubtless generate major opposition, but this approach avoids the kind of immediate shock to the existing system that would likely doom the approach embraced by Bernie Sanders and John Conyers. It doesn’t fit neatly on a bumper sticker, but we could still capitalize on Medicare’s popularity and familiarity by calling it an alternative pathway to Medicare for All.

It may be incremental, but it’s not timid. It would represent a massive expansion of public-health coverage that would inevitably face concerted opposition, and be difficult to enact into law, but by building on demonstrable progress over time rather than pushing everyone into a new insurance scheme based on a promise that it will be superior, it would make a popular backlash less likely.

On Sunday, Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri insisted that he was not being held captive in Saudi Arabia during a television interview that, according to the Associated Press, “was filled with bizarre moments” and which led some allies to believe that he was performing under duress. Eight days earlier, Hariri, whose family owns a massive Saudi construction company, had turned up in Riyadh to announce that he was resigning. He blamed Iran’s growing influence in the region and said that he feared that an assassination plot was underway—a claim the Lebanese military denied later in the week. The move sent Lebanon’s fragile government into a major political crisis.

Hariri hadn’t been heard from for over a week prior to Sunday’s interview, and members of his party suspected that he’d been placed under house arrest.

But Hariri’s sudden resignation was only one element of the intrigue that shook the Saudi Kingdom on November 4. That same day, Muhammed bin Salman, the brash young crown prince who had made headlines in the West by spontaneously buying a $550 million yacht from a Russian vodka tycoon while pushing a painful “austerity program” back at home, consolidated his control over the Saudi armed forces and rounded up almost a dozen members of the Saudi royal family—along with other senior officials—on the pretense of fighting corruption. They included Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah, a powerful rival whom bin Salman had skipped over to become heir to the throne when the former’s father, King Abdullah, died in 2015, and Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the billionaire investor who owns or has owned significant positions in companies like 21st Century Fox, Citigroup, Apple, and Twitter.

Widely known as “MBS,” bin Salman had become a darling of DC’s foreign-policy community, who saw him as a reformer, and had reportedly formed a personal friendship with Jared Kushner, who visited him recently during Kushner’s third trip to Riyadh since the election.

That same day, the Saudis said they’d intercepted a missile fired at Riyadh’s airport by Houthi rebels in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia has waged a brutal proxy war with the Iranian-backed forces. MBS immediately characterized the missile strike and the “assassination plot” against Hariri as acts of war on the part of Iran. Last Thursday, the Saudi government ordered its citizens to leave Lebanon immediately.

Meanwhile, almost a dozen Saudi princes remain detained in a gilded prison at the Ritz Carlton Riyadh.

I asked Madawi Al-Rasheed, a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics and Political Science’s Middle East Centre, for her take on these events that have shaken the Saudi Kingdom andwhat MBS’s endgame was. Could MBS hold such powerful figures indefinitely? What happens next?

Nobody knows. According to the Saudi press, there will be fair trials. But [the princes] may be sidelined, or basically disappear into oblivion. Like Muhammed bin Nayef, who was expelled from his office in July. Since then, we haven’t heard anything about him. He has not spoken to the media. He hasn’t appeared anywhere. Which means that he’s under house arrest somewhere in the kingdom, or on an island in the Red Sea.

Those 11 princes may face the same fate—in addition to all the ordinary Saudis who are detained, lets not forget about them. It is very, very sad to see how the international’s community is so worried about those 11 princes. And we forget that there are hundreds of Saudis detained in Saudi prisons simply because of their opinion. They are political prisoners.

Al-Rasheed offered an overview of how MBS came to hold such power, and how far his ambitions have led him from the typical norms of Saudi governance. You can listen to our entire interview in the player above, or read an edited transcript below.

Joshua Holland: I’d like to start out just by briefly setting the stage here. Is everything we’ve seen in the last week a culmination of a competition for power that began with King Abdullah’s death in 2015?

Madawi Al-Rasheed: Yes, absolutely. In 2015, we saw how many princes stood to become kings after King Salman, who ascended to the throne that year. So Salman immediately sacked his brother Muqrin, who had been the crown prince. He also got rid of Muhammed bin Nayef, who became crown prince after Muqrin, and promoted his own son Muhammed bin Salman, otherwise known as MBS. So there has been a change in the line of succession in Saudi Arabia. It had gone from one person to his brother. But in 2015, King Salman moved towards making it go from father to son, along the European model of monarchy.

There are several reasons for this. First, the brothers of Salman are old, and none of the remaining ones are actually [strong] enough to become kings. So Salman didn’t face great opposition when he sidelined all his remaining brothers. Now, his choice of Muhammed bin Salman, the youngest son, was controversial. He immediately placed MBS in high position, making him minister of defense. MBS then amassed so much power in his hands, maintaining his control over the media, over the military apparatus of the Saudi regime and the intelligence services. And that paved the way for the recent detentions.

And the detention of the commander of the Saudi Arabian National Guard, Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah, was actually the removal of the last rival to the throne of that generation.

JH: Now, MBS’s moves have been described as a departure from long-standing norms of Saudi governance. They tended to stress a sometimes difficult process of creating some consensus within the royal family. There was also an emphasis on continuity. Can you talk about that briefly?

MAR: Muhammed bin Salman has shattered the consensus of the Saudi royal family. Detaining senior princes is unprecedented in the history of the Saudi state. The only time we’ve had princes detained is when they committed criminal acts. And they would be put under house arrest. Even those who challenged the rule of the House of Al Saud in the 1950s and ’60s—the free princes—were eventually pardoned. They came back to Saudi Arabia. They were invited to come back, and were forgiven.

This detention, even if there are no serious charges, has undermined the status of these other princes and proved to the world, and to Saudis, that there’s only one man who’s running the show in Saudi Arabia, and that is Muhammed bin Salman.

JH: Can you tell us a little bit about bin Salman’s modernization plan known as “Vision 2030,” and what do you make of the claims that this move to consolidate power was the only way of overcoming resistance to the kind of sweeping change that he envisions for the Saudi Kingdom? This idea that he’s trying to overcome defenders of the status quo?

MAR: There are multiple issues here. Bin Salman’s Vision 2030 builds on previous development projects in Saudi Arabia. It’s not that new. For example, privatization had already started in Saudi Arabia. “Saudization”—replacing the expatriate labor force with Saudis—has been government policy since the 1970s.

What’s new in this vision is the IPO that is planned for Aramco, the state oil company. It’s not going to happen anytime soon because they still don’t know whether they’re going to do the deal in New York or in London. Or, possibly, the Chinese are going to buy a huge chunk of it. It’s still up in the air.

But this is the novelty of Vision 2030—that it touches the oil sector, which is the main economic driver in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia depends on oil for about 75 percent of its income. Muhammed bin Salman’s vision is to [sell] 5 percent of the oil company’s stock.

The other aspect of Muhammed bin Salman’s vision is to engineer social change from above. Which means that he sees Saudi Arabia becoming more open in order to attract foreign investors. For his project to succeed, at least the economic one, he needs an open society, an open environment.

But the openness that we have seen so far is very superficial. Women’s driving [which has still not been legalized] is extremely important. But the real question is why Saudi women have been denied the right to drive until the 21st century. Hundreds of articles in the Western media have been written about MBS’s moves to rescind the ban as if it were the culmination of a great social transformation, or a revolution. In fact, that’s not the case, because there remain certain restrictions and legal issues that need to be resolved.

Finally, some claim that Muhammad bin Salman wants to advance a moderate vision of Islam, bringing Saudi Arabia back to a kind of religious moderation. But when he announced that as a goal, he was actually not very accurate when it comes history. The Saudi regime has always been built on a radical version of Islam, namely the Salafis or the Wahabis. And to claim, as he did, that since 1979 Saudi became radical as a result of Iran—thus blaming it on Iran—this is totally untrue. Those of us who spend time reading the archives and looking at Saudi history realize that this is absolute rubbish. Saudi Arabia has always been radical.

But let’s assume that he’s going to make Saudi Arabia endorse a moderate Islam. How is he going to do that, when he has actually put in prison so many religious scholars and clerics who are not radical at all? To give you one example, Cleric Salman Al Huda, who was associated with this more moderate Islamist trend, recently announced that we do not, and cannot, prosecute homosexuals. He said we should not impose punishment on those people. But Muhammed bin Salmon objected to this kind of development in religious thinking and put that cleric in prison in September.

The founders of the NGO Hashim have been imprisoned since 2009 simply because they formed an independent civil society, calling for human rights. When Salman became king, he did not pardon them. When Muhammad bin Salmon became crown prince, he put more of them in prison. Some of them are over 75 years old, and they’re going to die in prison simply because they dared to ask for civil and political rights in Saudi Arabia and expressed their opinion. This kind of repression is really not the right environment in which to encourage moderate Islam.

JH: This recent roundup has been couched as an assault on corruption. How do you define corruption in a monarchy where the line between the royal family and the state is so fuzzy? And is that framing something that’s resonating with the Saudi public?

MAR: Yes, the Saudi public has cheered this move. They like the idea that anybody who’s suspected of corruption is going to be detained, put on trial. But one thing that dictators usually do, if they want to get rid of their opponents, or rivals, is they always fabricate some kind of case against them, and put them in prison. We’ve seen this in other countries. So Muhammed bin Salman is not doing anything new.

And by detaining his rivals under the pretext of fighting corruption, he’s trying to augment his popularity in the eyes of both the Saudi public, and also with foreign investors. But this proved to be counterproductive, because since the detention the Saudi stock market has declined, and a lot of people overseas who may have considered investing in Saudi are thinking about the rule of law and what it means to do business and put a lot money in a country that lacks transparency and an independent judiciary.

And those foreign investors in the US, Europe, Japan, and other places must think twice about investing in a country like Saudi Arabia, where you don’t know what will happen to your money. In the short term, these investors may make a lot of money, but at any minute they could be detained and put in the Ritz Carlton or, even worse, in the Saudi Al-Ha’ir prison for any reason. Or because this autocrat has proved to be erratic, young, and in a hurry to make a lot of money.

He’s also used the pretext of fighting the war on terror. So in September when he detained a number of professionals, activists, and religious scholars, he claimed that they were all radical, and this is absolutely not true. According to Human Rights Watch, those people have not been involved in violence. In fact, a lot of them were just peaceful critics of the regime. And some of them aren’t even critics—they just abstained from applauding every policy that Muhammed bin Salman had introduced. And they were punished for their silence.

JH: I want to talk about the US relationship with the Saudi regime, with MBS. The Trump regime has adopted an unspoken Saudi-first Middle East policy. In part, I think that’s a reflection of their hawkish view towards Iran. In any event, a number of analysts have argued that the administration’s uncritical embrace of MBS and King Salman has emboldened the prince and given him the sense that he can make these kind of radical changes without any repercussions from the outside world. Is that your view? Or, are we giving Washington too much credit for its influence over these events?

MAR: There are two issues here. Quite a lot of the stuff that is going on inside Arabia—unpleasant things, like these detentions—has to do with the power struggle in Saudi Arabia at the very top level. At the level of the royal family. But Mr. Trump, since he became president, has given positive signals to Muhammed bin Salman. Especially in MBS’s policies in the Middle East.

The first example is Yemen. Trump remains silent on Saudi atrocities in Yemen. As much as Obama had been. Both presidents didn’t make any noise about this humanitarian crisis that they had precipitated in Yemen.

And then there is the crisis with Qatar, which has been blockaded by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States. And here, Mr. Trump has simply endorsed what the Saudis told him in Riyadh when he visited. They told him that Qatar sponsors terrorism, and he seemed to have repeated that like a parrot, I’m sorry to say, without any kind of investigation. I think he was trying to endear himself to the prince—they have a lot in common.

And Muhammed bin Salman has miscalculated this war in Yemen. Three years later, he hasn’t brought the Houthis—his rivals in Yemen who are supported by the Iranians—to their knees. At the same time, the Qatar crisis is ongoing, but the Qatari Emir hasn’t been expelled from the country. The Qataris are not starving. In fact, what Muhammed bin Salman wanted is to limit Iranian influence in the Arabian Peninsula. But the crisis in Qatar has brought Qatar closer to Iran than to its neighbors in the Gulf.

So a lot of these policies that Muhammed bin Salman has pursued are backfiring, and he must be feeling some pressure. And he’s short of money. Despite Saudi Arabia’s wealth, oil prices are still low, which hobbles MBS’s projects.

JH: The regional context here seems a little bit bewildering on its face. It looks like MBS is taking a recklessly aggressive stance toward Iran at a moment when, as you mentioned, his country is in the midst of this campaign in Yemen. And the resignation of Saad Hariri has plunged Lebanon into chaos. Is there a method to all of this? Or is this about being young, and brash, and inexperienced?

MAR: MBS has ambitions to become the final arbiter of all Arab affairs. But this is not going to happen, for all sorts of reasons. One of them is that Iran is there, and it is there to stay in the Middle East. And should Muhammed bin Salman be interested in fostering peace and security in this region, he should come to the negotiating table with Iran to discuss how they could divide this region into different zones and refrain from interfering in other Arab countries’ internal affairs.

But that’s not going to happen because every time we think that there is a way out of this seemingly eternal rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, we face a setback. The latest setback was when Saudi regime summoned Saad Harriri, the Lebanese prime minister who’s very, very close to the Saudi regime historically, and is also a Saudi citizen. He has dual nationalities. So he’s Lebanese and Saudi at the same time. MBS summoned him to Riyadh where he announced his resignation.

And throughout history, no prime minister would resign from another country unless he’s trying to form a government in exile, or during war time. But perhaps he didn’t have a choice. He was summoned and announced, unexpectedly and abruptly, that he’s resigned. And the resignation is very important, because Lebanon spent two years without a president. Eventually they arrived at a kind of agreement between the various factions in the country and formed a government and got a president elected. So Saad Hariri gives the regime in Lebanon a kind of legitimacy because it means that all of the country’s factions, the sectarian groups—the Sunni, the Shia, the Christians—are all participating in the government. By pulling Hariri from government, the Saudis hoped the Lebanese political agreement would collapse, and then Muhammed bin Salman could blame Iran for it.

Among Donald Trump’s more pernicious and oft-repeated lies is that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is imploding. It isn’t. But to the extent that problems are mounting, they are largely his doing. In March, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) concluded that “in most areas,” Obamacare’s exchanges were stabilizing, and that most enrollees who received subsidies wouldn’t see their premiums increase significantly. Six months later, the CBO issued another report that, according to CNN, named “several policies the White House is pushing” that will lead “to rising premiums and decreased enrollment in individual insurance markets over the next year.”

In August, two months before Trump announced that he was discontinuing payments to insurers that limit out-of-pocket costs for low-income enrollees, a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation estimated that “uncertainty” about the possible move alone—along with doubts that the Trump regime would enforce the individual mandate—was causing insurers to request premium hikes for of up to 20 percent for 2018.

Trump seems to think he knows what he’s up to. He has said on multiple occasions that, as premiums spike and enrollment falls, congressional Democrats will be forced to come to him with hats in hand to negotiate some sort of replacement for Obama’s signature law. That’s a bad misreading of public opinion, which tends to hold the party in the White House responsible for virtually everything. Indeed, a Kaiser poll conducted in August found that 60 percent of respondents think Trump and Republicans would be “responsible for any problems with the ACA going forward,” compared with just 28 percent who said the same of Obama and Democrats.

It may be a political problem for Trump’s party, but a significant amount of real-world damage has been done. In January of 2014, when the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion kicked in, almost 18 percent of the population was uninsured, and in the 34 months that followed, that number fell to 10.9 percent, an all-time low. But in the year since Trump won the Electoral College vote on a promise to “repeal and replace” the law, the rate of uninsured has ticked back up to 12.3 percent. That trend doesn’t show any signs of slowing.

How exactly has Trump been sabotaging the ACA? Most prominently, he’s refused to pay a subsidy to insurers for reducing the out-of-pocket costs of their poorest enrollees. But in an interview with The Nation, Sam Berger, a senior policy adviser at the Center for American Progress who has been tracking these issues, says that it goes much further than that.

It’s hard to pin exactly how many people are leaving the exchanges as a result of the administration’s different methods of sabotage. It’s the combination of constant threats to repeal the Affordable Care Act—which may have caused some folks to think it was in fact repealed—and more direct forms of sabotage that significantly increased premiums in the marketplace and left some folks figuring that that they can’t afford coverage.

It’s really a whole of government approach to undermining the Affordable Care Act.… It’s been clear that the political appointees in the Department of Health and Human Services and the folks in the White House are doing everything that they can to make sure that this law doesn’t work, big and small.

What’s clear is that there was a trajectory of greater coverage and fewer uninsured. And as soon as Donald Trump became president and started working to undermine this law, we saw those trends reverse.

And this isn’t just crazy or unusual in a political sense—having a president actively working to undermine a duly enacted law. This has real consequences for people. People are going to be paying more for their coverage, or in some cases, people won’t have coverage at all. God forbid they needed that coverage, it won’t be there for them. That has tremendous consequences in folks’ lives.

Berger goes into more depth in our 20-minute interview, which you can listen to in the player above. Or you can read a transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity, below.

Joshua Holland: About 3.5 million more Americans are uninsured today than when Donald Trump was sworn in 10 months ago. How much of that can we attribute to the actions of the White House, and Republicans more broadly?

Sam Berger: With these things it’s always hard to pin an exact number, but I think it’s fair to say that a substantial portion, if not all of that change, is a result of their actions.

JH: Trump constantly claims that the Affordable Care Act is unraveling. How stable was the law when Donald Trump was sworn in?

SB: It was quite strong. The Affordable Care Act has been fantastically successful in reducing the uninsured rate, reducing it to the lowest it’s ever been in this country. We did see in 2017 a premium increase that reflected insurers’ still getting used to a new market, and a couple of [other] changes that happened that year. What we’ve seen from the financial statements since then is that insurers were moving towards profitability. In some cases, they were getting significantly into the black, and the expectation was that we were going to see low premium increases this year, reflecting only the continual cost increase of medical care. Instead, we’re seeing very large increases. While the majority of Americans that buy their insurance through the marketplace will be protected because they receive tax credits that increase with the premiums, it’s really the middle class that will be hit the hardest. They’re the ones that aren’t eligible for those tax credits because of their income, and so they’ll bear the full brunt of these 15, 20, 25, 30 percent cost increases that are the result of Trump’s sabotage.

JH: Trump has taken some concrete steps to undermine the Affordable Care Act. But before we talk about those, how has the uncertainty around the law’s future affected it?

SB: There are three ways that has an impact. The first is on prices. When you’re an insurer, you try to figure out how much providing insurance is going to cost you for the upcoming year. If there’s a threat that there’s going to be a huge cost increase because the administration’s going to undermine the law, then you price that in. It causes premiums to increase. And actually that’s one of the reasons why, when Trump finally canceled the cost-sharing reductions, there were some premium increases, but most of those had already been baked in, so to speak—insurers had already taken that into account, and they’d already increased people’s costs.

The second effect is scaring insurers out of the market. Insurance is, in some cases, a low-margin business. Insurers want to have some level of certainty. If they think the market’s not going to be there in one year, two years, they might decide that it’s just not worth the confusion and the risk, and just pull out. And you’ve seen that. You’ve seen some of the big insurers continue to leave. You’ve seen smaller insurers pull out. You’ve seen folks say, “Look, I was willing to go into a market, or I’m willing to come back if you just get rid of this uncertainty, if you stop threatening to destroy the marketplace.”

The third thing that it does is it creates confusion for people. Some of us spend our every day and night following what’s going on, but most people don’t. They have a lot of things going on in their lives. They can’t keep track of every twist and turn. They keep hearing all of this talk about how the ACA’s failing. It’s going to be repealed. It has been repealed. It’s not there. And people think, “Oh, well maybe it’s not even worth taking a look because either it’s not there now, or it won’t be there in the near future.” We’ve seen an unfortunate number of people, a pretty sizable percent[age], that have that concern.

JH: I just want to briefly explain the cost-sharing payments that we’re talking about. The Affordable Care Act requires insurers to give low-income enrollees a break on out-of-pocket costs. The insurers have to offer those reductions. They have no choice. In order to make that policy work, Congress created these “cost-sharing reductions” payments, also known as CSRs, for the insurers. Because of some issues in the way the law was written, Republicans challenged the legality of the payments. But Obama, and then Trump, continued making the payments while the legal challenge worked its way through the courts—until he stopped making payments last month.

Obviously, that threatens to destabilize this market. If you’re an insurer, you could be making a fortune in another part of the market, but when you deal with this group of insured, you have to reduce their out-of-pocket costs, regardless of whether those subsidies are coming or not. So insurers have two choices: They can either raise premiums to cover the difference, or they can leave the exchanges.

Now, there’s an irony here. By cutting those payments, the government will actually have to pay out more money. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the government will have to shell out 23 percent more by not making those payments than it saves by cutting the payments. That amounts to $2.3 billion next year. How does that work? How can cutting payments cost the government more money?

SB: Well, first of all, I think this really shows that there’s no real policy rationale for doing this.

This is sabotage, pure and simple. The three effects of cutting these cost-sharing reductions are a 20 percent increase in premiums, about a million fewer people having coverage, and as you said, billions of dollars being spent unnecessarily. The reason that this happens is because basically, insurers only have two different ways to cover their costs. They get covered through the premiums that you pay, or your deductibles and co-pays. The law now, for certain eligible folks that receive these cost-sharing reductions, says you can’t change their deductibles and co-pays. That’s set. So the only choice they have is to increase the premiums. But those same people also receive premium tax credits. And those increase dollar for dollar when the premiums go up. But the premium tax credit covers a wider swath of people than the cost-sharing reductions. So when you increase the premium tax credits for low-income enrollees, you actually increase the total amount of money that’s being spent for everyone receiving a tax credit. So ultimately what you’re left with is that some folks will actually get a better deal. Again, it’s really the middle class that’s going to pay the price here. They’re the ones that don’t get premium tax credits, so they’re going to feel the full brunt of those 20 percent premium increases.

JH: We know that the ACA requires support from a wide swath of agencies, organizations, and both federal and state entities to make it work. Are they cooperating as well as they did in the Obama era?

SB: Running the ACA is complicated. There are a lot of different parts. And each state has a big role to play. Then there are outside groups that help enroll people or do other work to make the system function. They all depend on a lot of communication with HHS [the Department of Health and Human Services] to understand changes that are being made, how they can coordinate activities and how to avoid redundancies. Those groups have said, quietly, behind the scenes, that they haven’t been hearing anything [from HHS]. The normal amount of communication to ensure that we’re running the most efficient and effective program possible—that’s not happening.

In fact, in some cases, HHS employees are being told they can’t work with outside groups. And events have had to be canceled. It’s really a whole of government approach to undermining the Affordable Care Act. And to be clear, folks shouldn’t blame the career officials at HHS. They’re just following orders. But it’s been clear that the political appointees in HHS, the political folks in the White House, they’re doing everything that they can to make sure that this law doesn’t work.

JH: Sam Stein at The Daily Beast reported that Trump “spent taxpayer money meant to encourage enrollment in the Affordable Care Act on a public relations campaign aimed at methodically strangling it. The effort, which involves a multi-pronged social media push as well as video testimonials designed at damaging public opinion of President Obama’s health care law, is far more robust and sustained than has been publicly revealed or realized.” What other, less obvious mechanisms the administration has used to undermine the law?

SB: One of the big ones that hasn’t gotten quite as much attention has to do with the open enrollment period. Basically, they’re giving you less time and they’re trying to make it as hard as possible for people to know that’s happening. Instead of having 90 days where people can go to HealthCare.gov and shop around and look at plans, now it’s only 45 days. Then on top of that, they [HHS] are doing some unspecified “maintenance” on the site for 12 hours at a time on a number of Sundays, so it’s even fewer days than the original 45, when you count those periods in.

They’ve also drastically reduced marketing, cutting it by about 90 percent. That’s incredibly important, because a lot of folks don’t have it written down on their calendar that today is the day that open enrollment starts. Even if they did, all those dates have changed, so they’d have to know that the Trump administration secretly cut this in half.

It’s really important for folks who care about health care to make sure everyone knows that open enrollment this year, in most states, will run from November 1st to December 15th and that they go to HealthCare.gov and check out their options. Despite all these efforts at sabotage, for the vast majority of people, they’re going to be able to find plans between $50 and $100 a month.

JH: It’s often observed that red states and blue states are like two different countries when it comes to social services. Blue states provide far more generous benefits for health care, welfare, unemployment, and more. Because the Supreme Court ruled that the ACA Medicaid expansion was optional, the ACA has exacerbated those differences. For example, in the states that expanded Medicaid, those earning up to 138 percent of the poverty line are eligible for the program, but in states like Texas or Alabama, which did not, the cut-off for Medicaid is just 18 percent of the poverty line. And that’s only if you have kids. In 18 of the 19 states that didn’t expand their Medicaid programs, people without children are ineligible for Medicaid no matter how little they earn.

Are we seeing these same differences in terms of how states are responding to Trump’s moves to undermine the Affordable Care Act? Are blue states responding in a way that mitigates these threats?

SB: They certainly are, but it depends on the state, on the resources they have, and the extent to which they rely on the federal government for their enrollment. You see states like New York and California where they’re taking a wide range of steps to try and mitigate the damage, and maintain the levels of outreach that they’ve had in past years. Those are two states that basically run their own exchanges, rather than relying on the federal government. But even in states where they rely on the federal government to run their exchanges, there’s a lot that states can do in terms of getting the word out, and in terms of elected officials’ doing what they can, using their platform to make sure people are aware of what’s going on in their state.

Even some of the reddest places, we seen some recognition that these premium increases aren’t a good idea. But, unfortunately, when a state’s government doesn’t like the Affordable Care Act and isn’t willing to put in work to help people find out about their options, we’re going to see less effort to bring in insurers, which will mean higher premiums. And we’re going to see fewer people enrolled, which is also going to cause problems for the risk pool. You’ll have fewer healthier people in it, which will also cause costs to increase and have some real effects.

It’s sort of ironic that the end result of all this is that middle-class, working-class voters in very red states, who the Trump administration seems to think is its base, are the ones who are going to be hurt most by all these efforts to sabotage the law. They’re the ones that are going to see their costs go up, and in some cases, not be able to afford care, which can have disastrous consequences for families.

Last Thursday, Donna Brazile dropped a bombshell on a Democratic coalition that’s still nursing open wounds from a bruising 2016 primary fight. But, as more details have emerged about what Brazile described as Hillary Clinton’s “secret takeover” of the party infrastructure, it looks a lot less explosive than it first appeared to be.

Brazile, who is set to release an insider’s view of the 2016 race this week titled Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House, wrote for Politico that shortly after becoming interim chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) last summer she unearthed evidence that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had taken control of the ostensibly neutral institution a year earlier, months before the first primary votes had been cast.

It had been widely reported that both the Clinton and Sanders campaigns had signed identical joint fundraising deals with the DNC, with the eventual nominee being able to use funds that were raised for the general election. But the Clinton campaign had also signed a separate “memorandum of understanding” in July of 2015, according to NBC’s Alex Seitz-Wald, who reported on this memo shortly after Brazile’s Politico piece went live. In exchange for an initial payment of $1.2 million to defray some of the debt the DNC had accrued under the leadership of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and with additional payments to follow, the Clinton campaign would enjoy, as Brazile described it,

the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about…budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.

In Brazile’s telling, this scheme came to light only as a result of her sleuthing. She writes that, shortly after she took over the helm of the DNC from Wasserman Schultz last July, she promised Senator Sanders that she “would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process.” She had already had suspicions based on the leaked DNC e-mails, she wrote, “but who knew if some of them might have been forged? I needed to have solid proof.”

That proof was in the side agreement. According to Brazile, Gary Gensler, Clinton’s chief financial officer, later told her that “the party [was] fully under the control of Hillary’s campaign.”

Coming from a figure like Brazile, who embodies the party establishment, the story was catnip for political reporters. When Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) later told reporters that Brazile’s revelations proved that the primaries were “rigged” against Sanders, many of his supporters saw it as vindication of their claims, despite the fact that Warren didn’t articulate a mechanism by which even a Clinton-controlled DNC could have swung around 3 million primary votes to the eventual nominee.

Of course, those who have an interest in maintaining a divided Democratic coalition also promoted Brazile’s narrative with enthusiasm.

Donna Brazile just stated the DNC RIGGED the system to illegally steal the Primary from Bernie Sanders. Bought and paid for by Crooked H….

—Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 3, 2017

But in the days following the publication of Brazile’s story, additional details have emerged that cast the story in a different light. Her account certainly exposes the grubby kind of behind-the-scenes transactions that are inherent in a system of costly, drawn-out elections financed primarily through the private sector. It was widely reported during the primary that Clinton’s joint fundraising deal provided a means of effectively laundering money from maxed-out donors who were legally barred from contributing more to her campaign directly but could still cut large checks to the party, a problem the Sanders campaign didn’t run into with its small-donor base. But it doesn’t necessarily reveal a playing field that was tilted against the Sanders campaign, at least not intentionally so.

Very importantly, while Clinton’s side deal may have been unknown to Brazile, at least the broad contours of the agreement weren’t kept secret from the Sanders campaign. Brazile writes that Sanders was only “familiar” with “the fundraising agreement that each of the candidates had signed.” But in the wake of Brazile’s article, The Washington Post’s Michael Scherer, David Weigel, and Karen Tumulty obtained a September, 2015 e-mail from attorney Graham Wilson—whose firm represented both the DNC and the Clinton campaign—to the Sanders campaign with a copy of the standard joint fundraising agreement. According to the report, at the end of email, “Wilson suggested that should the Sanders campaign raise ‘significantly more’ money than was required to pay for the party voter file, then Sanders could have a say in how those funds would be used ‘to prepare for the general election.’” Wilson wrote that “the DNC has had discussions like this with the Clinton campaign and is of course willing to do so with all committees raising funds for the Committee.”

Wilson wasn’t being entirely forthcoming—he said the DNC had “had discussions” with the Clinton campaign, when Clinton’s agreement had already been signed. But his e-mail shows that the Sanders campaign was informed that such a deal was in the works, and was given the opportunity to enter into a similar arrangement if it raised a bunch of money for the DNC. Of course, it had no interest in doing so—Brazile writes that Sanders and his staff “ignored” their joint fundraising deal because “they had their own way of raising money through small donations.”

Brazile’s ostensible surprise upon learning of the agreement is also curious, given that it was public knowledge that Clinton’s staff had been looking for just such an arrangement. Seven weeks before the Clinton campaign signed that memorandum of understanding with the DNC,Edward-Isaac Dovere wrote a piece for Politico titled, “Clinton puts tight grip on DNC wallet.”

Dovere reported that “the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee are struggling to finalize a joint fundraising agreement—because the campaign doesn’t trust the national party structure with the money.”

He added that “years of neglect from the White House—and what’s perceived by the campaign as mismanagement by DNC leadership—has left the Clinton camp convinced the organization is nowhere near ready for 2016.” He detailed how the campaign was seeking to put strings on how the money that was raised jointly with the DNC was spent, despite the fact that “the DNC wanted access to all the funds immediately.”

The chronology here is important. The agreement that the Clinton campaign signed specified that it only covered “general election related communications, data, technology, analytics, and research,” and “does not include any communications related to primary debates—which will be exclusively controlled by the DNC,” a detail that was absent in Brazile’s piece. It’s hard to imagine that those staffing decisions wouldn’t have some impact on the primary, at least at the margins. But Dovere’s report was published in late July 2015, when Clinton was leading Sanders in The Huffington Post’s average of national polls by a 56-18 margin.

It’s routine for a front-runner to exert control over his or her party’s committee when they become the presumptive nominee, and there was good reason at that time to see Clinton as such. Not only was she well ahead in the polls, she had raised far more cash and garnered the support of many more party actors than her rivals. Dovere wrote that, “while DNC staffers are officially neutral, most see her as the eventual nominee, and several staffers describe a ‘first among equals’ approach to her when dealing with the primary field.” This was no secret. And it’s quite possible that Sanders’s disinterest in his campaign’s joint fundraising agreement for the general election reflected his own estimation at that time of his chances of becoming the eventual nominee.

Brazile also shouldn’t have been surprised by the existence of this kind of arrangement, given that she managed Al Gore’s 2000 campaign. In her Politico piece, she says that she only “started inserting our people into the DNC in June of that year,” but Boris Heersink, a political scientist at Fordham University, wrote in The Washington Post that, while “this is technically true, it misrepresents the level of control Gore already had over the DNC before the 2000 primaries began: By 1999, the DNC’s senior staff was dominated by Democratic politicos with long-standing relations to Gore—including both co-chairmen, the finance chair and one of the senior advisers. Thus, while the DNC did not endorse Gore, it clearly preferred him in the 2000 primaries.”

There is indeed a tawdry element to ostensibly neutral party committees getting ahead of their voters, even if it’s not as unusual or clandestine as Brazile implies. But it’s the kind of insider-baseball that usually passes without notice, and is only a big, public scandal because the DNC became such a lightning rod in the last election.

The context around this deal was available when Brazile’s piece hit the Internet, but most of it was absent from the early reporting. It seems that salacious Clinton scandal stories tend to gain traction faster than they can be fact-checked or put into perspective. So Brazile will sell some books, and perhaps be rehabilitated among Sanders supporters, and the bitter dissension over the 2016 primaries within the Democratic coalition will continue unabated.

About nine hours before Stephen Paddock opened fire on a concert in Las Vegas, killing 58, gunshots rang out on a street in Lawrence, Kansas, just as bars were closing in the college town. When the gunfire died down, three people, all under the age of 25, lay dead, and two others were injured. It was a big local news story, but didn’t garner a lot of national coverage. Police haven’t made any arrests.

We’re riveted by mass shootings—understandably so—but statistically, the kind of quotidian gun violence that played out that night in downtown Lawrence takes far more lives. In 2016, mass shootings, defined as those involving four or more victims, accounted for less than 2 percent of all gun-related deaths, excluding suicides.

We may never be able to stop mass shooters like Paddock, who didn’t have a history that would disqualify him from owning guns. But the kind of violence that shook Lawrence that night—as well as suicides involving guns—could be cut significantly with smarter public policies.

Police say the bloodshed in Kansas began with some kind of altercation in a bar earlier in the evening. In most countries, whatever the fight was about would likely have been settled with fists. In the United States, far more people who are prone to getting into a fight are armed. According to a 2015 study published in the journal Behavioral Sciences and the Law, around 9 percent of the adult population in the United States have both a history of impulse- and anger-control problems and easy access to a gun; around 1.5 percent of adults in the United States are angry, impulsive, and carry a gun with them. And Duke University professor of psychiatry Jeffrey Swanson, the lead investigator of the study, says that number “might even be higher now, because the data were collected several years ago, and since that time there’s been a real expansion of concealed carry.”

As if that weren’t troubling enough, the study found “a significant three-way association among owning multiple guns, carrying a gun, and having impulsive angry behavior.” People who owned six or more guns were about four times more likely to be among those carrying around both a gun and a chip on their shoulder than those with only one gun.

The NRA calls for better mental-health care as a way of deflecting calls for gun control. But even if more gun owners received treatment for mental-health issues, Swanson says that, while his team “did find that many of these individuals would meet criteria for some kind of psychopathology, it didn’t tend to be the kinds of disorders that characterize populations that are involuntarily committed and would thereby lose their gun rights under existing federal law.” Many of these angry gun-owners abused alcohol or drugs, or suffered from depression, anxiety, PTSD, compulsive gambling, and other personality disorders that would not make them ineligible to buy a gun or two—or seven.

And even if more limitations were imposed on people with mental illnesses, it’s important to keep in mind that most mentally ill people aren’t prone to violence—mental illness alone is a bad predictor of gun violence. According to Swanson, the mentally ill are responsible for around 4 percent of violence in this country, “so even if we somehow rid society of mental illness entirely, we’d only reduce the violence by a marginal degree.”

“Prior violence is a much better predictor than mental illness is,” he says. “And violence does escalate—today’s fist and black eye too often becomes tomorrow’s gun and dead body.” A key problem is that the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, established in 1968, doesn’t use up-to-date, evidence-based criteria for blocking access to firearms. For example, convicted felons can’t buy guns—although there are loopholes—but people with a record of violent misdemeanors can, even though that’s one of the best predictors of future violent behavior.

Swanson says there’s a lot we could do if we called the gun lobby’s bluff and focused seriously on keeping guns out of the hands of people who pose an elevated risk of violence. He cites the case of Craig Steven Hicks, the North Carolina man who murdered three Muslim students in cold blood in 2015. “People knew he was angry,” says Swanson. “People were scared of him. But there wasn’t much they could do. He owned those guns legally. If they had the clear legal authority to do so, they could have at least removed his guns” before the bloodshed occurred.

Another example: While some states have enacted more stringent safeguards, federal laws designed to keep guns from perpetrators of domestic violence are riddled with gaps. They don’t apply to stalkers, or people given a temporary restraining order. They don’t apply to people who victimize family members other than their children or partners. Perhaps the biggest problem is that, while they disqualify some abusers from buying new guns, they don’t strip them of the guns they already own.

The answer is to provide a legal mechanism to confiscate guns from potentially violent people. Some states have enacted laws that allow for a temporary civil order to remove guns from high-risk individuals, and Swanson says that these laws have proven effective. In Connecticut, the first state to pass such a law, Swanson and his fellow researchers found that for every 20 removal orders, a potential suicide was averted.

People who are involuntarily committed to a mental-health institution are barred from buying guns, even though that may not may not mean they’re prone to violence. But there’s another gap in the law around people who are only hospitalized briefly in the midst of a mental-health crisis. Swanson says that even when a clinician explicitly deems them to be a threat to themselves or others, these short-term holds often don’t “progress to a gun-disqualifying involuntary-commitment hearing, where someone would meet the definition under federal law.” We could also give police the power to take such patients’ guns away from them until they’ve received treatment and are past their crisis.

wanson and his colleagues conducted another illuminating study in Florida in 2016. They found that in 72 percent of suicides by gun, the person who killed himself legally owned the gun on the day he used it to take his life, and half of that group had had a temporary involuntary hospitalization in their past. “Some people go out and buy a gun specifically because they’re in that moment of despair, on impulse,” says Swanson. “And at that moment, when someone is feeling so hopeless that they’re inclined to hurt themselves, if they use anything but a gun, they’re very likely to survive. If they have a firearm, they’re very unlikely to survive.”

Another part of the solution is enacting universal background checks—a reform that’s supported by most gun owners but opposed by the gun lobby—but with updated criteria for barring people from buying guns. We shouldn’t allow people who have a string of misdemeanor-assault convictions or who terrorize their neighbors to own guns just because they haven’t shot anyone yet. And Swanson asks, “With mounting evidence that problem drinking elevates violence risk, why not prohibit people with multiple driving-under-the-influence convictions from buying guns?” We could at least do that on a temporary basis.

In a gun-crazy society, we’re not going to eliminate gun violence entirely, but we could reduce it significantly. The gun lobby insists that guns don’t kill people, so let’s call them on it—and, at a minimum, work to keep guns out of the hands of the people who do.

Conservatives take it as a given that the mainstream press has been hostile toward Donald Trump since he declared his candidacy for president. And it’s true that there’s been no small amount of critical reporting since his inauguration. But a new study of the online “media ecosystem” by researchers at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society finds that throughout the 2016 campaign the political press consistently focused its coverage of Trump on the key issues he was running on—immigration, jobs, and trade—and just as consistently focused on Hillary Clinton’s scandals to the exclusion of the issues she ran on. Overall, the tone of the coverage of both candidates was negative, but the difference in the content clearly worked to Trump’s advantage, perhaps decisively so.

According to the study’s lead researcher, Harvard legal scholar Yochai Benkler, this wasn’t only a matter of lazy he-said/she-said journalism. And it wasn’t, as some have speculated, just a result of the widespread assumption during the campaign that Clinton would win. There’s an element of truth in both of those explanations, but Benkler says that, in instances, this imbalance was the result of the mainstream media’s “being played, or manipulated, by a very sophisticated and disciplined right-wing messaging campaign.”

The numbers are stark. Looking only at mainstream sources—like The New York Times, Politico or CNN—the researchers identified almost 70,000 sentences about Clinton’s e-mails, which dwarfed the number of references to all other topics for both candidates. After that, there were around 22,000 mentions of the Clinton Foundation. The issue associated with Clinton that got the most attention was jobs, which were mentioned in around 15,000 sentences. Overall, sentences mentioning Clinton’s various scandals outpaced those focused on her agenda by a ratio of around four to one. (This finding is consistent with another study released by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center for Media Politics and Public Policy last December.)

The opposite was true in coverage of Trump. Whether it was his refusal to release his tax returns, allegations of sexual harassment and assault by over a dozen women, his fraudulent university, or his foundation’s raising money for dubious purposes—none of these stories was mentioned more than 10,000 times. Jobs, immigration, and trade, on the other hand, were mentioned in stories about Trump over 75,000 times.

he study relied on a set of analytic tools called Mediacloud that the Harvard team and their colleagues at MIT developed over the past nine years. Their system analyzes who reads news stories, which outlets cite them, and who shares them across social media. It places news outlets on the ideological spectrum by looking at cross-linking patterns between sources, the reach of stories on Twitter and Facebook and the ratio of tweets by partisan influencers on the left and the right. To complement this “big data” approach, researchers also took a more granular look at certain stories, developing brief case studies of how they developed, how widely they were disseminated and by whom. Their database contains information about the content and spread over two million articles published during the 18 months leading up to Election Day.

A couple of different dynamics contributed to the disparity in mainstream coverage. The authors write that “an unusual pattern of support for Trump” in 2016, “some right-leaning outlets, most notably Breitbart, launched attacks targeted not only at Democrats and Trump’s Republican rivals but also at media outlets that did not fully support Trump’s candidacy.” Many of these intra-partisan disputes centered on immigration and trade. On the latter, Trump broke with what had long been the orthodox Republican view that trade was a net benefit for the economy. On immigration, “Breitbart rose to serve as a focal point for Trump supporters and media organizations on the far right…serv[ing] as a translator and bridge that helped to legitimate extreme views on topics such as immigration and anti-Islamic sentiments.” Mainstream reporters are always attracted to intra-party fights, and mainstream conservatives opposed to Trump were more likely to focus on his outrageous claims about Islam and violent immigrants than on Trump University’s ripping off its students.

Among partisan Democratic outlets, there was significantly less conflict over the issues. By the end of the bruising primaries, Hillary Clinton’s agenda was similar to that of Bernie Sanders’s, but debates about her trustworthiness and integrity continued. On both the left and the right, the Clinton scandals dominated her coverage, so it only follows that this in turn informed the mainstream reporting.

Another key finding was that “the structure and composition of media on the right and left are quite different,” in large part because “the leading media on the right and left are rooted in different traditions and journalistic practices.” And these differences, the researchers argue, played an important role in the campaign.

Media polarization has gotten a lot of attention in recent years. But Yochai Benkler says that his team found that media polarization in 2016 was asymmetrical. “It’s not the same on the left and the right. Essentially, everyone from the center right—from publications like National Review or The Wall Street Journal—all the way to the left, at publications like Mother Jones, had a more or less normal distribution, in the sense that most of the attention was given to [reporting in] the older, more professional media like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN. Whereas what happened on the right is that the more you were shared and used by [conservatives], the more attention you got.” The conservative media were largely walled off from the rest of the ecosystem, linking to and sharing content from like-minded sources. As a result, a handful of outlets—led by Breitbart, which played a dominant role on the right—formed a sort of nucleus of online media on the right. The broad left was as likely to share a story from The Hill as they were a piece from The Nation, while the right—other than the “never Trump” types at some center-right outlets—tended to stay inside the bubble.

“People on both sides did go to the other side to try to find evidence to support their own position,” says Benkler. “And the big difference was that the right-wing media was very message disciplined, so there was very little for people outside of the right-wing to find there, whereas the more traditional journalistic media [and the left] had negative coverage of both candidates.”

That asymmetry left both sides vulnerable to different kinds of manipulation, according to the authors. “The more insulated right-wing media ecosystem was susceptible to sustained network propaganda and disinformation, particularly misleading negative claims about Hillary Clinton,” they wrote. “Claims aimed for ‘internal’ consumption within the right-wing media ecosystem were more extreme, less internally coherent, and appealed more to the ‘paranoid style’ of American politics than claims intended to affect mainstream media reporting.” Think about the feverish stories told by Alex Jones, The Gateway Pundit, or Mike Cernovich.

Meanwhile, traditional journalism, with its standards of balance and goal of objectivity, continued to get the most attention on the center-left and the left, and the authors note that these very “journalistic practices were successfully manipulated by media and activists on the right to inject anti-Clinton narratives into the mainstream media narrative.” This is how, despite being walled off from the rest of the media landscape, stories that originated in the right’s echo chamber were nonetheless able to make the leap into the mainstream.

his was evident in coverage of the Clinton Foundation. While there was some legitimate criticism of how its funds were spent, the allegations of corruption never amounted to more than innuendo. It nonetheless was mentioned in more sentences in the mainstream press than any of Trump’s more substantial scandals or Clinton’s policy positions.

Allegations that the Clinton Foundation tied the Democratic candidate to radical Islamists and Russia began in the fever swamps of the right, but when Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer, then a “senior editor at large” at Breitbart, gave The New York Times an exclusive in advance of the book’s publication, those allegations got mainstream footing. “it provided a key narrative within the right-wing media ecosystem to establish belief in both the personal corruption of Hillary Clinton and the ‘fact’ that she had sold out U.S. policy interests to historical and current strategic adversaries,” according to the study’s authors. Validated by the Times, the story was then picked up by the rest of the traditional media.

That was in the spring of 2015, and despite a rash of reports immediately following the Times story, it then remained largely confined to the conservative media until the summer of 2016, when Hillary Clinton got a significant bump in the polls following the Democratic National Convention. At that point, the 18-month-old story, which had been validated by mainstream reports the year before, became a central feature of the campaign.

According to the study, this was a result of excellent media activism on the right. Just before the convention, Breitbart launched a movie based on Clinton Cash that “was edited to appeal to supporters of Bernie Sanders.” In announcing the release, “Breitbart quoted MSNBC and the Guardian as sources asserting that the movie was ‘devastating’ or ‘designed to stir up trouble’ at the convention.” Breitbart promoted the film by noting that “The New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC News, and other Establishment Media have verified and confirmed the book’s explosive revelations that Hillary Clinton auctioned State Department policies to foreign Clinton Foundation donors and benefactors who then paid Bill Clinton tens of millions of dollars in speaking fees.”

At that point, the wall of separation between the right and the rest of the media universe collapsed, and “instead the Daily Caller, Breitbart, and Fox [were] all clustered around the New York Times and [were] linking to its 2015 coverage as a source of validation for their…stories.”

That case study doesn’t negate other media analyses, but it highlights that in an increasingly complex ecosystem where traditional reporting, opinion, and hyperpartisan clickbait vie for attention in fractured social-media circles, a concerted effort to shape the conversation by savvy activists like Stephen Bannon can pay big dividends for a campaign.

“This was a stark finding,” says Benkler, “as here we had the right-wing media being relatively insular, but still able to shape the agenda in such a way that the traditional media, which had many more viewers overall, followed the same narrative consistent with both the Trump campaign and the right-wing media.”

Studies consistently show large partisan and ideological divides when it comes to faith in the mainstream media. On the left, criticism of sloppy or biased reporting and false equivalencies is common, but there remains a certain degree of faith in the underlying process of “neutral” journalism. This, according to the Harvard study, is a vulnerability. And conservative activists, who have long been told that the mainstream press isn’t just flawed, but actively hostile to their beliefs, appear to have learned how to exploit it.

Virtually all of the debates over the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia waged a multifaceted campaign to influence the 2016 election look at the issue through a prism of US domestic politics or the bilateral relationship between the United States and Russia. That’s understandable, given what a shocking outcome the election produced. But it also sidesteps the troubling reality that the Kremlin’s attempts to influence other countries’ electoral processes have been a problem across Europe for over a decade, and that our intelligence agencies weren’t alone in sounding the alarm. And that’s a serious problem for those who are dismissive of the evidence of Russian intervention. Russia’s effort in our election may have been its most dramatic—and arguably its most fruitful—but evidence suggests it was hardly an isolated event.

The US intelligence community’s conclusions about how Russia intervened in our elections fits a pattern that European analysts say dates back to 2007, when Vladimir Putin told the Munich Security Conference that American dominance in a unipolar world was “pernicious,” and that NATO’s expansion “represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust.” The Kremlin saw a pressing need to confront a series of anti-Russian “color revolutions” in the former Soviet states during the early 2000s. Sebastian Rotella reported for ProPublica that “Russian leaders believed the United States was using ‘soft power’ means, such as the media and diplomacy, to cause trouble in Russia’s domain.” The Russians decided to fight fire with fire, as they saw it. USA Today international-affairs correspondent Oren Dorell reported that “Russian sabotage of Western computer systems started that same year.” It was also in 2007 that “Russians began experimenting with information warfare” in Estonia, followed soon after “by attempts at disruption in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Finland, Bosnia and Macedonia,” according to The Washington Post’s Dana Priest and Michael Birnbaum.

Priest and Birnbaum reported that “Russia has not hidden its liking for information warfare. The chief of the general staff, Valery Gerasimov, wrote in 2013 that ‘informational conflict’ is a key part of war. Actual military strength is only the final tool of a much subtler war-fighting strategy, he said.” Earlier this year, Russia’s Ministry of Defense announced that it had established a new cyberwarfare unit.

Classified documents from Macedonia’s intelligence agency that were leaked to The Guardian showed that “Russian spies and diplomats have been involved in a nearly decade-long effort to spread propaganda and provoke discord in Macedonia.” That was just one part of Russian effort “to step up its influence all across the countries of the former Yugoslavia. The Kremlin’s goal is to stop them from joining NATO and to pry them away from western influence,” reports The Guardian.

British officials say they believe that in 2015, Russia “interfered directly in UK elections “with a series of attempted cyber hacks and “clandestine online activity,” according to The Independent. German intelligence officials say that “‘large amounts of data’ were seized during a May 2015 cyber attack on the Bundestag…which has previously been blamed on APT28, a Russian hacking group,” according to Reuters. In July, Germany’s interior secretary, Thomas de Maiziere, and Hans-Georg Maassen, the country’s spy chief, warned that Russia will “start publishing compromising material on German MPs…in order to destabilise elections in September,” according to Andrew Rettman at EUobserver.

In May, NSA Director Michael Rogers testified under oath before Congress that American officials had found evidence of Russian involvement in the recent French elections, which they shared with their intelligence officers in Paris. “We had talked to our French counterparts,” he said, “and gave them a heads-up: ‘Look, we’re watching the Russians, we’re seeing them penetrate some of your infrastructure.’”

The list of countries targeted by Russia goes on. Earlier this year, Dutch Interior Minister Ronald Plasterk announced that all votes cast in the March election in the Netherlands would be hand-counted because of “software problems and fears of Russian hacking,” according to Politico’s European edition. The Norwegian Police Security Service informed that country’s Labour Party that it had been hacked, and Norwegian media reported that the group behind the cyber-attack was the same one that breached the DNC’s computers last year. Russia is believed to have been involved in similar attacks throughout what it views as its sphere of influence.

Some skeptics have seized on reports that French and German intelligence officials were unable to confirm that Russia was behind recent hacks in those countries. But officials in both countries treat Russian attacks as an active and ongoing threat to their democracies. And Mark Galeotti, head of the Centre for European Security at the Institute of International Relations Prague, says that while the intelligence agencies were not able to establish direct ties to Russia, his sources in the French and German intelligence remain confident that they were behind the hacks. “In any cyber case it’s very difficult to be absolutely conclusive, because even if it’s coming out of a machine that’s situated in Russia, it could have been controlled by someone in North Korea or China or Belgium for all we know, and you’d really need a forensic examination of the machine where the attack originated.” And while people “expect the kind of standards of proof that one would expect in a court of law—proof beyond a reasonable doubt—there comes a time when you have to talk about the balance of probabilities. Intelligence agencies very rarely rely on single-point information—a single source. When intelligence agencies say, ‘We’re pretty confident it’s X,’ it’s because they have alternative sources, whether it’s signal intelligence or human intelligence, inclining them in the same direction.”

In the case of the recent US election hacks, it wasn’t US intelligence agencies that originally picked up the scent. According to The Guardian’s Luke Harding, Stephanie Kirchgaessner, and Nick Hopkins, it was the GCHQ—the UK’s version of the National Security Agency—that “first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious ‘interactions’ between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents.” Then, as the Guardian piece outlines, “Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western agencies shared further information on contacts between Trump’s inner circle and Russians.” That included intelligence officials from Germany, Estonia, Poland, Canada, and Australia. According to one source, French and Dutch spooks also passed on signals intelligence to their American counterparts.

nalysts say that the Kremlin’s motives are relatively straightforward. As its post–Cold War “hard power” declined, Vladimir Putin’s government has pursued its interests by stepping up its cyber-warfare and disinformation campaigns in order to divide, destabilize, and demoralize its geopolitical opponents.

According to Paul Goble, a former official with the State Department and the CIA who now teaches at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, DC, “Putin doesn’t believe in democracy, and he wants to send the message to other people that democracy is a system that outside forces can manipulate, and therefore cast doubt on its legitimacy.” A related goal is “to weaken the transnational political, economic, and military institutions that have been the basis of American foreign policy for a very long time. The weakening or destruction of NATO, the weakening or destruction of the EU, dividing Europe from the United States—this has been Russia’s goal since the creation of NATO.”

Galeotti agrees, telling me that when Vladimir Putin “looks at these international institutions, what he sees are institutions created by the West, to serve the West’s interests. When Putin talks about sovereignty, his notion is ‘nobody gets to tell us what to do within our own borders.’” Galeotti doesn’t think Putin “has a grand agenda,” so much as he “wants to be able to opt out of the post-1945 world order.” With an economy roughly the size of Spain’s, Russia’s no longer a superpower, but, says Galeotti, “Putin is clearly committed to making Russia great again,” and “one way to assert Russian power is to get everyone else divided and weakened. If you can’t make yourself stronger, at least you can try to make others weaker.”

Natasha Kuhrt, a Russia specialist at King’s College, London, is herself skeptical of claims that “the Kremlin is pulling the strings of certain groups in certain countries.” While she does believe that Russia has tried to influence other countries’ elections, she says that the media have overstated the impact. But she says the Russians “have been very adept” at exploiting anxieties about European integration—the “general trend of questioning certain values, let’s say, partly for economic reasons and partly for other reasons.” As for our election, Kuhrt adds that “there is a kind of anti-Western discourse within Russia that is used mainly for domestic purposes.” With most Russians’ living standards flat or in decline, “the regime’s legitimacy to a large extent rests on that now. So it’s also about showing what idiots Americans are for electing a buffoon like Trump.”

Russia and the United States have attempted, and in many cases succeeded, to influence other countries’ electoral processes for the past hundred years. But analysts say the scale and sophistication of Russian attacks have taken this practice to a new level. Today’s lightning-fast communications and low barriers of entry into online publishing represent a departure from the kind of influence campaigns countries waged in the past. Back in January, Max Fisher argued in a New York Times piece that our media are highly susceptible to being duped by dark PR campaigns, noting that while “[r]eporters have always relied on sources who provide critical information for self-interested reasons,” in 2016 the source was often “Russia’s military intelligence agency, the G.R.U.—operating through shadowy fronts who worked to mask that fact—and its agenda was to undermine the American presidential election.”

US investigators are currently looking into “whether Trump supporters and far-right websites coordinated with Moscow over the release of fake news, including stories implicating Clinton in murder or pedophilia, or paid to boost those stories on Facebook,” according to Julian Borger at The Guardian. A Pew study released last year found that six in 10 Americans get news from social media, mostly from Facebook.

ere at home, the growing evidence that Russia’s intervention in our elections was only the most recent, and successful, example of an international campaign that dates back George W. Bush’s presidency is a serious problem for those who dismiss or discount the US intelligence community’s findings.

For some on the left, including a number of voices at The Nation, the real story involves one or more of the following: Democrats hyping a story line in order to excuse their embarrassing loss to Donald Trump; Hillary Clinton loyalists defending their candidate from the same charge; rogue elements within our intelligence agencies either fabricating or exaggerating Russian involvement to undermine Trump’s legitimacy after he compared them to Nazis, or those same elements of the “deep state”—inveterate cold warriors—sabotaging Trump’s efforts to bring about détente with Moscow.

But these narratives don’t hold up when viewed in a larger geopolitical context. It’s unlikely that in 2015 British intelligence tipped off US spy agencies about those suspicious contacts because it wanted to absolve Hillary Clinton for her future loss to Donald Trump. The Dutch aren’t interested in what lessons the Democratic Party took away from their defeat, nor are the Lithuanians invested in the idea that Bernie would have won. And it’s highly unlikely that Germany, which was torn apart during the Cold War, is chomping on the bit to launch a new one.

In recent months, one intelligence official after another has testified before Congress that the Russians will take the lessons they learned in the US election last year, and in previous campaigns elsewhere, and use them again in the future. Last week, CNN reported that, “emboldened by the lack of a significant retaliatory response” to its attack on the 2016 election, “Russian spies are ramping up their intelligence-gathering efforts in the US, according to current and former US intelligence officials who say they have noticed an increase since the election.” According to the report, “US intelligence and law enforcement agencies have detected an increase in suspected Russian intelligence officers entering the US under the guise of other business.” Former director of national intelligence James Clapper warned on CNN about potential Russian intervention in the 2018 midterm elections. “They are going to stretch the envelope as far as they can to collect information and I think largely if I can use the military phrase, prep the battlefield for 2018 elections,” he said.

The fact that there’s a significant amount of skepticism on both the left and the right is blunting calls to prepare for the next attack. The president has hesitated to even acknowledge that this is a serious issue. And, while a recent analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice found that just $400 million invested in replacing paperless voting machines with machines that read paper ballots—less than the Pentagon spent last year on military bands—would help secure our election infrastructure, no such funding is in the works. In fact, in late June Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee voted to defund the Election Assistance Commission, which Ari Berman says is “the only federal agency that helps states make sure their voting machines aren’t hacked.” The level of concern should be even higher now that we have evidence that the Russian military intelligence did target election systems specifically: The Intercept reported last month that leaked NSA documents showed that Russian military intelligence launched cyber-attacks against an election-software vendor’s internal systems. A subsequent report by Bloomberg said that US investigators had found evidence that “Russian hackers hit systems in a total of 39 states.”

Compare our lackadaisical response to the seriousness with which Europe is taking the issue. Dana Priest and Michael Birnbaum reported for The Washington Post that “European countries are deploying a variety of bold tactics and tools to expose Russian attempts to sway voters and weaken European unity.” Across Europe, “counterintelligence officials, legislators, researchers and journalists have devoted years—in some cases, decades—to the development of ways to counter Russian disinformation, hacking and trolling” that they’re now trying to use to safeguard their own democratic processes.

France and Germany have pressured Facebook to take down thousands of automated accounts that spread fake news. In Sweden, school children are learning to spot fake news. Fourteen hundred Slovakian companies have agreed to boycott a list of fake-news sites. The EU is employing hundreds of volunteer researchers to expose false stories on the Internet. “In Lithuania,” write Priest and Birnbaum, “100 citizen cyber-sleuths dubbed ‘elves’ link up digitally to identify and beat back the people employed on social media to spread Russian disinformation. They call the daily skirmishes ‘Elves vs. Trolls.’”

While Russian interference in last year’s election was all about us, Moscow’s use of asymmetric tactics to undermine multilateral institutions and aid pro-Russia parties in so many other countries is not. The difference is that with some Americans across the political spectrum insisting that we should simply move on, we aren’t doing much to counter it. Doing so doesn’t mean creating an environment of “neo-McCarthyite hysteria,” escalating hostilities with Moscow or blundering toward a shooting war in Syria. It simply requires that we acknowledge the reality of the problem and work with our allies to address it in a sober and serious way.

To the editors:

Joshua Holland’s anti–single payer screed (“Medicare for All Isn’t the Solution for Universal Health Care”) is so riddled with misinformation and outright errors that it makes one wonder whether The Nation has laid off its fact-checkers.

Just one example: In arguing the impossibility of a health-care transformation in a high-spending nation, Holland claims that Switzerland’s health expenditures in 1996 amounted to only 5 percent of GDP. The correct figure is 9.2 percent. [Editor’s Note: This has been corrected in Holland’s article.]

He suggests that cost control under single payer requires halving doctors’ incomes, a serious political problem if it were true. But Canadian doctors make about 80 percent what their US counterparts do, and, taking into account their lower educational debt and post-retirement health expenses (more than $250,000 per couple in the United States), they’re about as well off financially as their US counterparts. Moreover, most US single-payer projections foresee increased spending on physician visits once copayments are abolished, and simplified billing would reduce the bite that office overhead takes out of doctors’ take-home pay.

Holland falsely claims that no one has provided guidance on the transition to single payer. We, and our colleagues in Physicians for a National Program have published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, The American Journal of Public Health, and the New England Journal of Medicine several quite detailed proposals laying out transition plans for acute-care financing, long-term care, and quality monitoring; another, on prescription-drug regulation and financing, is in the works. We’ve analyzed in detail the likely shifts in administrative costs and employment, and the federal single-payer legislative proposals include funding for job retraining and placement and income support to transition the million or so insurance and administrative workers who currently do useless bureaucratic work and whose jobs would be eliminated under single payer. While the transition would be disruptive for some administrative workers, it would be simple for hospitals (they’d stop billing for each patient, Band-Aid, and aspirin tablet and instead be paid lump-sum budgets), and a welcome relief for doctors and nurses, who suffer record high burnout rates in the current medical-industrial complex. That’s why recent polls show that around half of doctors favor single payer (and 21,000 of them have joined Physicians for a National Health Program), and National Nurses United, the leading nurses’ union, is the nation’s strongest single-payer proponent.

Most egregiously, Holland misrepresents the single-payer legislation that’s actually been proposed, citing Medicare’s deficiencies to smear reform proposals. As the title of John Conyers’s bill HR676, the Expanded & Improved Medicare for All Act, makes clear, that legislation would upgrade Medicare coverage, eliminating copayments and deductibles, and fix its other flaws. Holland suggests that, since many Medicare recipients supplement their coverage with private policies, such legislation would boost out-of-pocket costs for millions who currently have employer-paid coverage or Medigap policies. In fact, virtually no one would face increased copayments or deductibles under HR 676 (or Bernie Sanders’s forthcoming legislation, or the many state bills), although wealthy Americans’ taxes would rise. And few people would complain about being freed from insurers’ narrow provider networks; not one of the Medicare Advantage plans, without out-of-pocket benefits, covers care at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Under single payer patients could, as in Canada, choose any hospital or doctor.

Holland’s scare-mongering about the chaos likely to ensue during a transition to single payer echoes The Wall Street Journal’s dire predictions of “patient pileups” and other disasters at the dawn of Medicare in 1965. It didn’t happen then and wouldn’t happen now. Medicare, sans computers, enrolled 18.9 million seniors (displacing private insurance for many of them) within 11 months of its passage.

The real enemies of single payer aren’t the disgruntled patients or doctors whom Holland features but the insurance and pharmaceutical firms that he barely mentions. That powerful opposition is the real problem we have to overcome, not the imagined chaos of the transition or the phony fear that patients would revolt against better coverage.

David U. Himmelstein, MD
Steffie Woolhandler, MD, MPH

The authors are primary-care physicians, distinguished professors of public health at the City University of New York at Hunter College, and lecturers in Medicine at Harvard. They founded Physicians for a National Health Program and served as health-policy advisers during Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign.

o the editors:
Liberals have created a new single-payer bogeyman to justify their renewed pursuit of failed incremental policies for health reform, as in Joshua Holland’s recent article. It used to be that single payer was not “politically feasible.” Now, according to the likes of Holland, Harold Pollack, and Dean Baker, the problem is that single-payer advocates haven’t worked out a plan to “implement” single payer, or the “brass tacks.”

In fact, implementation is the easy part of health reform. The Canada Health Act is less than 14 pages long, and is only that long because it is also printed in French. Taiwan, which had 40 percent of its population uninsured, installed a universal single-payer system ahead of schedule in less than a year in 1995. The ease of adoption of the American Medicare program also bodes well for single payer, as Holland admits. Indeed, nearly every implementation issue Holland raises is already addressed in the Physicians Proposal for Single Payer National Health Insurance (2015) and Representative John Conyers’s bill, HR 676, the “gold standard” for single-payer legislation.

The “single payer” envisioned in these proposals is not today’s Medicare, of course, but an improved version of Medicare, with more comprehensive benefits, and greater ability to control costs. HR 676 may not specify an exact financing plan, but gives specific enough parameters so that whatever financing plan is adopted (one possible plan is here) it will shift the burden from the sick and poor to the healthy and wealthy, and make care free at the point of delivery. Private employers only pay a paltry 20 percent of the current health care tab, which can be recouped with a small payroll tax or tax on corporate revenues (as recently proposed by Robert Pollin for California). According to a study by David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler in the American Journal of Public Health, taxes already fund over 64 percent of health care in the United States, so moving to a publicly-funded plan is a shift, not a radical change.

Holland assets that physicians will have to be paid less under single payer, which is false. There are many advantages to a single-payer system, not least of which is the saving of $500 billion annually currently wasted on insurance overhead and excess provider bureaucracy—more than enough money to cover the extra costs of clinical care for the uninsured and underinsured, and to eliminate copays and deductibles for everyone, without cutting physician pay. Having said that, the single payer system will have the ability to shift more funding towards primary care over time, which would help with both access and costs down the road.

Bizarrely, Holland tries to revive Jacob Hacker’s discredited proposal for a “public option” that would compete with private insurers. The premise for Hacker’s proposal is that Americans are “stubbornly attached,” in Hacker’s words, to employer-based insurance and don’t want to give it up, refuted by Kip Sullivan in this blog post. But polls show that over two-thirds of Americans favor Medicare for All. Adding one more insurance company to our fragmented and failing health system will not cover everyone or control costs.

Proposals for incremental reform to “fix” rather than “repeal” the ACA are now on the congressional agenda, but much more fundamental reform is needed. If Congress passed single payer today, we could implement it within a year and save tens of thousands of lives. Time to get to work.

Ida Hellander, MD

Ida Hellander, MD, is a former executive director and director of national health policy (1992–2017) at Physicians for a National Health Program.

Joshua Holland Replies

Himmelstein and Woolhandler aren’t alone in accusing me of dishonestly failing to note that Representative John Conyers’s Medicare-for-All bill would “fix” the current program’s “flaws,” including the fact that Medicare is not currently structured as a single-payer program. But I wrote quite clearly that, “if we were to turn Medicare into a single-payer program, as some advocates envision, then we’d also be asking a third of all seniors to give up the heavily subsidized Medicare Advantage plans that they chose to purchase. Consider the political ramifications of that move alone.”

Like other critics, Ida Hellander simply wishes away what I see as the central issue of loss aversion, citing a 2009 blog post by Kip Sullivan which asserts that “two-thirds of Americans support Medicare-for-all.” Sullivan cites a number of conflicting polls conducted in the early 2000s. We have more recent indications of how the American public feels about government involvement in health-care provision now, seven years after the Affordable Care Act was enacted: Pew’s oft-cited poll from June of this year found that, while a record high 60 percent of respondents say that it’s the government’s responsibility to cover everyone, only 33 percent said that should be accomplished through a “single national government program,” and the remainder offered that it should be done through a mix of public and private programs or were unsure.

Loss aversion is a very well documented phenomenon, and it is entirely irrational. In one famous study, one set of participants were given $50 and offered a choice between keeping $30 or taking a 50/50 all-or-nothing bet. Another group were offered the same terms, but this time the choice was phrased as losing $20 or taking the bet. Just changing the wording from “keeping $30” to “losing $20” resulted in a significant increase in those willing to roll the dice—such is our distaste for losing something we have.

Status-quo bias is another very real, and not entirely rational phenomenon—people tend to wary of change, especially sudden or radical change. And of course, the next debate over health-care reform won’t be conducted honestly, as we’ve seen from the opposition to the Affordable Care Act. It’s telling in that arguing that “implementation is the easy part of health reform,” Dr. Hellander cites the experience of Taiwan, which in 1994 was a country of 21 million that was still transitioning from a military dictatorship and spent 5 percent of its GDP on health care.

Unfortunately, these writers and other critics confirm my worry that a single, extremely difficult route to universal coverage is fast becoming a litmus test for progressives. All have attempted to excommunicate me from the left, framing my piece as part of an attack, perhaps a concerted one, on single payer by “liberal” opponents. The reality is that I have long been, and will continue to be, an advocate of establishing a universal health-care system that might be called “single payer.” But I continue to think that rapidly moving much of the population into a single program—without first either creating a model at the state level or delivering some tangible benefits through more modest Medicare expansions—is a recipe for failure.

Within the broad Democratic coalition, it’s pretty clear that the discussion of health care has shifted to the left. Mainstream figures like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a potential presidential candidate in 2020, are embracing single payer. Representative John Conyers’s Medicare-for-All bill currently has 115 Democratic co-sponsors in the House. And Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer recently said that single payer is now “on the table.” Assuming we have free and fair elections in the future, and Democrats regain power at some point, this is all very good news for single-payer advocates.

But that momentum is tempered by the fact that the activist left, which has a ton of energy at the moment, has for the most part failed to grapple with the difficulties of transitioning to a single-payer system. A common view is that since every other advanced country has a single-payer system, and the advantages of these schemes are pretty clear, the only real obstacles are a lack of imagination, or feckless Democrats and their donors. But the reality is more complicated.

For one thing, a near-consensus has developed around using Medicare to achieve single-payer health care, but Medicare isn’t a single-payer system in the sense that people usually think of it. This year, around a third of all enrollees purchased a private plan under the Medicare Advantage program. These private policies have grown in popularity every year, in part because the field has been tilted against the traditional, government-run program. Medicare Advantage plans must have a cap on out-of-pocket costs, for example, while the public program does not. Around one-in-four Medicare enrollees also purchase some sort of “Medigap” policy to cover out-of-pocket costs and stuff that the program doesn’t cover, and then there are both public and private prescription drug plans.

The array of options can be bewildering—it’s a far cry from the simplicity that single-payer systems promise.

At the same time, Medicare-for-All is really smart politics. Medicare is not only popular, it’s also familiar. Many of us have parents or grandparents who are enrolled in the program. And polls show that a significant majority of Americans now believe that it’s the government’s “responsibility to provide health coverage for all.”

But from a policy standpoint, Medicare-for-All is probably the hardest way to get there. In fact, a number of experts who tout the benefits of single-payer systems say that the Medicare-for-All proposals currently on the table may be virtually impossible to enact. The timing alone would cause serious shocks to the system. Conyers’s House bill would move almost everyone in the country into Medicare within a single year. We don’t know exactly what Bernie Sanders will propose in the Senate, but his 2013 “American Health Security Act” had a two-year transition period. Radically restructuring a sixth of the economy in such short order would be like trying to stop a cruise ship on a dime.

Harold Pollack, a University of Chicago public-health researcher and liberal advocate for universal coverage, says, “There has not yet been a detailed single-payer bill that’s laid out the transitional issues about how to get from here to there. We’ve never actually seen that. Even if you believe everything people say about the cost savings that would result, there are still so many detailed questions about how we should finance this, how we can deal with the shock to the system, and so on.”

Achieving universal coverage—good coverage, not just “access” to emergency-room care—is a winnable fight if we sweat the details in a serious way. If we don’t, we’re just setting ourselves up for failure.

entrist Democrats will no doubt be one obstacle to universal coverage, but a more fundamental problem is that compelling the entire population to move into Medicare, especially over a relatively short period of time, would invite a massive backlash.

The most important takeaway from recent efforts to reshape our health-care system is that “loss aversion” is probably the central force in health-care politics. That’s the well-established tendency of people to value something they have far more than they might value whatever they might gain if they give it up. This is one big reason that Democrats were shellacked after passing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010, and Republicans are now learning the hard way that this fear of loss cuts both ways.

“Remember how much trouble President Obama got into when he said that if you like your insurance you can keep it?” asks Pollack. “For something like 1.6 million people, that promise turned out to be hard to keep. And that created a firestorm.” Those 1.6 million people represented less than 1 percent of the non-elderly population, and most of them lost substandard McPlans which left them vulnerable if they got sick. The ACA extended coverage to almost 10 times as many people, but those who lost their policies nonetheless became the centerpiece of the right’s assault on the law. Trump and other Republicans are still talking about these “victims” of Obamacare to this day.

Under the current Medicare-for-All proposals, we would be forcing over 70 percent of the adult population—including tens of millions of people who have decent coverage from their employer or their union, or the Veteran’s Administration, or the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program—to give up their current insurance for Medicare. Many employer-provided policies cover more than Medicare does, so a lot of people would objectively lose out in the deal.

Some large companies skip the middle man and self-insure their employees—and many offer strong benefits. We’d be killing that form of coverage. If we were to turn Medicare into a single-payer program, as some advocates envision, then we’d also be asking a third of all seniors to give up the heavily subsidized Medicare Advantage plans that they chose to purchase. Consider the political ramifications of that move alone. And because some doctors would decline to participate in a single-payer scheme, which would come with a pay cut for many of them under Medicare reimbursement rates, we couldn’t even promise that if you like your physician you can keep seeing him or her.

Don’t be lulled into complacency by polls purporting to show that single payer is popular—forcing people to move into a new system is all but guaranteed to result in tons of resistance. And that’s not even considering the inevitable attacks from a conservative message machine that turned a little bit of money for voluntary end-of-life counseling into “death panels.” Public opinion is dubious given that nobody’s talking about the difficulties inherent in making such a transition.

t’s true that every other developed country has a universal health-care system, and we should too. But make no mistake: Moving the United States to national health care would be unprecedented, simply because we spend more on this sector than any other country ever has.

“For the most part, these countries were spending maybe 2 or 3 percent of [their economic output] on health care when they set up these systems after World War II,” says Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “Most of them are spending 8 or 9 or maybe 10 percent of their [output] now, and this is 70 years later.”

In 2015, the United States spent 17.8 percent of its output on health care. The highest share ever for an advanced country establishing a universal system was the 9.2 percent that Switzerland spent in 1996, and they set up an Obamacare-like system of heavily regulated and subsidized private insurance. (They also spend more on health care today than anyone but us.)

There’s a common perception that because single-payer systems cost so much less than ours, passing such a scheme here would bring our spending in line with what the rest of the developed world shells out. But while there would be some savings on administrative costs, this gets the causal relationship wrong. Everyone else established their systems when they weren’t spending a lot on health care, and then kept prices down through aggressive cost-controls.

“Bringing costs down is a lot harder than starting low and keeping them from getting high,” says Baker. “We do waste money on [private] insurance, but we also pay basically twice as much for everything. We pay twice as much to doctors. Would single-payer get our doctors to accept half as much in wages? It could, but they won’t go there without a fight. This is a very powerful group. We have 900,000 doctors, all of whom are in the top 2 percent, and many are in the top 1 percent. We pay about twice as much for prescription drugs as other countries. Medical equipment, the whole list. You could get those costs down, but that’s not done magically by saying we’re switching to single payer. You’re going to have fights with all of these powerful interest groups.”

Baker is himself a single-payer advocate, and he’s worked with various groups that advocate for it, but, he says, “I don’t think you can get there overnight. I think you have to talk about doing it piecemeal, step-by-step.”

ingle-payer advocates are mostly right about its benefits. These systems are simpler, they cut down on administrative costs, and they cover everyone.

But the term “single-payer” is itself misleading. The truth is that many of the systems we refer to as single-payer are a lot more complicated than we tend to think they are. Canada, for example, finances basic health care through six provincial payers. Its Medicare system provides good, basic coverage, but around two in three Canadians purchase supplemental insurance because it doesn’t cover things like prescription drugs, dental health, or vision care. About 30 percent of all Canadian health care is financed through the private sector.

Most countries have mixed funding schemes that vary in complexity, and the term “single-payer” may be giving some people a false promise. Conyers’s Medicare-for-All bill promises to cover virtually everything while banishing out-of-pocket costs, but no other health-care system offers such expansive benefits. Even people living in Scandinavian social democracies face out-of-pocket expenses: In 2015, the most recent year for OECD data, the Swedes covered 15 percent of their health costs out-of-pocket; in Norway, it was 14 percent and the Finns shelled out 20 percent out-of-pocket.

Most countries with “single-payer” systems rely on some combination of public insurance, various mixes of mandatory and voluntary private insurance (usually tightly regulated), and out-of-pocket expenditures (often with a cap). They offer free coverage for those who can’t afford it, but the exact benefits vary from country-to-country.

Germany’s “single-payer” system has 124 not-for-profit insurers participating in one national exchange. About 10 percent of Germans—the wealthiest ones—opt out of the national system and go fully private, and most of them buy plans from for-profit insurers.

The Dutch system is somewhat like Obamacare in that everyone must purchase insurance for basic services from private insurers. But the similarities end there: Insurers are barred from distributing profits to their shareholders, and a separate, entirely public scheme covers long-term care and other costly services. Premiums are subsidized, but most Dutch people purchase supplemental insurance to cover things like dental care, alternative medicine, contraceptives, and their co-payments.

The French system is often cited as the best in the world, and about a quarter of it is financed through the private sector. The French are mostly covered through nonprofit insurers in a single national pool, but most working people get their policies through their employers. Almost all French citizens either purchase government vouchers to cover things like vision and dental care, or are provided with them gratis if necessary. The system is financed through a complicated mix of general revenues, employer contributions, payroll taxes and taxes on drugs, tobacco, and alcohol.

So the United States isn’t unique because it uses a mix of public and private financing—the big difference, as these OECD data show, is that we rely much more heavily on private insurance than any other wealthy country.

Understanding that other countries’ schemes vary significantly in the details—and that in the United States, the cost of care would remain a serious challenge under any system—should lead to a different conversation among progressives. Rather than making Medicare-for-All a litmus test, we should start from the broader principle that comprehensive health care is a human right that should be guaranteed by the government—make that the litmus test—and then have an open debate about how best to get there. Maybe Medicaid is a better vehicle. Perhaps a long phase-in period to Medicare-for-All might help minimize the inevitable shocks. There are lots of ways to skin this cat.

At a minimum, it’s time to get past the idea that anyone who doesn’t embrace Medicare-for-All, as it’s currently defined, must be some kind of neoliberal hack.

n obvious alternative to moving everyone into Medicare is to simply open up the program and allow individuals and employers to buy into it. We could then subsidize the premiums on a sliding scale. But recent experience with the ACA suggests that this kind of voluntary buy-in won’t cover everyone, or spread out the risk over the entire population.

There are other alternatives, one of which was a popular progressive scheme before Barack Obama tried to tackle health care.

Progressive critics of the ACA are partially correct when they say that Democrats passed a plan that looked similar to “Romneycare” in Massachusetts. In the end, it was at least structurally similar to a scheme originally cooked up by the Heritage Foundation, thanks to a handful of Democrats—led by then-Senator Joseph Lieberman—who killed the public option.

But the sausage-making began well to the left of anything Heritage would ever countenance, modeled in part on Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker’s “Health Care for America” proposal. It would have left employment-based insurance—and Medicare coverage for the elderly—intact, and created a large new Medicare-like public insurance program that would have been far more robust than anything contemplated during the development of the ACA.

Hacker still thinks that, in broad terms, this is the best approach. He calls it “Medicare for More,” and hopes that it would do a better job at containing costs than employer-based insurance. Then, by creating a kind of virtuous cycle, there would be more buy-ins which would ultimately lead to “Medicare for Most.”

“In other countries, you’re basically guaranteed coverage and then they figure out how to pay for it,” he says. “Some of that money may come from you, some will come from your employer and some of it will come from general funds. We don’t have that approach. People who don’t have coverage from their employers have to figure out how to sign up—either for Medicaid, or through the exchanges. Yes, we have a penalty to encourage people to do that, but they still have to navigate this incredibly complex system.”

With Hacker’s program, perhaps to be called Medicare Part E, employers would have a choice of providing their employees with coverage as good as they would get in this big public insurance pool, or buying into the scheme. Premiums would vary based on workers’ incomes.

Hacker says he has various ideas for bringing people who aren’t attached to the labor force into the system. One possibility would be to automatically enroll everyone at birth, and cover them until they have a choice of switching to an employer-based plan. Call it Medicare-for-All-Who-Need-It.

“While the savings would be larger if everyone participated in a single pool, they’d still be significant,” says Hacker.

nd maybe there’s a better way still that hasn’t yet been discussed. The fight for a universal health-care system in the United States is now in its 105th year, and if we don’t admit that financing any kind of universal system is going to be especially difficult given how much we spend, or acknowledge the role that loss aversion plays in the politics of reform, then we’re going to fail again the next time we get a shot at it.

Above all, progressives need to learn something from the Republicans’ effort to replace the ACA. They promised that facile slogans like “freedom” and “choice” would magically increase coverage and bring down costs. They were selling snake oil, and one way or the other, it’s going to come back and bite them.

We shouldn’t make promises that we aren’t going to be able to keep. “It’s not going to be easy to do,” Jacob Hacker says, “and anyone who tells you that the most expensive health-care system in the world is going to undergo a sudden shift to highly efficient and low-price medicine has not been studying American medicine.”

Editor’s Note: This article initially misrepresented the percentage of GDP spent by Switzerland on healthcare in 1996. Public spending on healthcare was 5 percent of GDP, as the article initially stated, but total spending was 9.2 percent. The article has been updated to correct the error.