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103 </blockquote><p>This interview has been edited for length and clarity.</p><hr><p><strong>Julie Beck: </strong>Tell me how you met and became friends.</p><p><strong>Andy Gullahorn: </strong>We first met in 2000, at a show in Birmingham, Alabama. I was playing guitar for my wife, and Gabe was playing guitar for another artist. Somebody booked a show for them to play together.</p><p>[A couple years after that, we all] started playing together on a Christmas tour every December, until this year. We loved spending time together on the tour. We would play a lot of games and have competitions on the road. And every year, at the end, we’d be like: “Man, we’ve got to find ways to see each other these other 11 months.” Because we both lived in Nashville. We made that promise for many, many years.</p><figure><img alt='Gabe Scott and Andy Gullahorn stand in a park, leaning on a sign that reads "Sevier Park"' height="504" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2021/01/IMG_0503_1-1/e15688163.jpg" width="672"><figcaption class="caption">Gabe Scott (left) and Andy Gullahorn (right) (Courtesy of Andy Gullahorn)</figcaption></figure><p><strong>Beck: </strong>It seems like it was almost like a camp friendship for a while—where you see each other once a year and you’re best friends in that specific environment, but it can be hard to bring the relationship into “real life.”</p><p><strong>Andy: </strong>In the music world, being on the road, you’re sleeping in bunks two feet from each other. It totally feels like a camp thing. You spend a lot of time together. And then real life comes back, and there are so many variables.</p><p><strong>Gabe Scott: </strong>You have the routine when you’re on the road, and then you have the routine when you’re home. And we hadn’t gotten those two aligned yet.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/how-friendships-change-over-time-in-adulthood/411466/?utm_source=feed">Read: How friendships change in adulthood</a>]</i></p><p><strong>Andy: </strong>It wasn’t until 2014, when we were both at the same party and having that same conversation—“Man we’ve got to hang out”—that Gabe told me he had moved just a mile and a half down the road from me. I said, “Gabe since you live so close, what if we just walked [toward each other] and high-fived in the middle? If we do that every week for 10 years, that’s the kind of story they would do on <em>CBS Sunday Morning </em>[our wives’ favorite TV show].”</p><p><strong>Beck:</strong> Walk me through the high five’s early days.</p><p><strong>Andy: </strong>The first was probably a day or two after that party. I have it right here in my high-five journal.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>Oh my gosh. [<em>At this point, Andy pulled out a notebook with the outline of a hand on it.</em>]</p><p><strong>Andy: </strong>It was 8:05 AM on April 30, 2014. We texted and said, “All right, let’s leave our houses.” We met at the middle point, gave a high five—and then weren’t sure what to do, so we talked for three hours. The only rule in the beginning was that we had to do it one time each week. The middle point happens to be a park, so we’d give each other a high five, and then we would shoot baskets, talk for 15 minutes or so, and go back home.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>Gabe, I know you were sick recently and had some memory issues. Are you feeling better? Do you remember the origins of the high five, or is it fuzzy?</p><p><strong>Gabe: </strong>I feel better than I did three months ago. But what I’m dealing with is … I’m still me, but I can’t define “me” as my memories. As Andy talks, a few of the things he said are things I couldn’t have told you, but as soon as he says it, I’m like, “Oh, yeah, I remember that.”</p><p><strong>Andy: </strong>I’m not normally one who would just do all the talking.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/08/how-best-friends-share-each-others-memories/496715/?utm_source=feed">Read: Best friends build shared memory networks</a>]</i></p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>It’s now been more than six years of weekly high-fiving. Has the process evolved at all?</p><figure class="left"><img alt="Two men mid-high five, walking past each other on the sidewalk" height="364" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2021/01/FullSizeRender_2_1/ff884e26a.jpg" width="312"><figcaption class="credit">Courtesy of Andy Gullahorn</figcaption></figure><p><strong>Andy: </strong>Yes. I’ll talk about our signal. One person sends the high-five emoji; then the other person responds with the hand. Then you respond with a walking emoji, and the other person does the walking emoji. That’s the only communication.</p><p>By the time of our fifth high five, we were both too busy that week to take the 30 minutes of walking and then also shoot baskets. So we started something called the silent high five. If you just gave each other a high five without talking, then turned around and walked past each other again, that would surely be awkward. So the rule was: You have to first pass each other without looking at each other, and you can’t smile.</p><p><strong>Gabe: </strong>As though you’re strangers.</p><p><strong>Andy: </strong>You take 20 paces, then turn around and come back. You still don’t acknowledge each other till the very last second. Then you just stick up your hand, give a high five, and walk home.</p><p><strong>Gabe: </strong>You can’t speak.</p><p><strong>Andy: </strong>There’s no acknowledgment of the other person’s existence other than the high five.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>Were you able to maintain a straight face?</p><p><strong>Andy: </strong>The first time was hard.</p><p><strong>Gabe: </strong>We got really good at it. We thought, <em>What if a car is driving by right now, or there’s another family walking behind us—and they see two random guys walk past each other, then turn around at the exact same time, walk back, give each other a high five without looking, and then just keep walking?</em></p><p><strong>Andy: </strong>It would be a weird thing to witness, so we saw it as a gift for anybody who happened to be driving by.</p><p>Gabe, talk about the mechanics of the high five.</p><p><strong>Gabe: </strong>[It started as] a pretty standard high five. But over time, we started adding other moves to it. It eventually became a clap, a snap, and then you open your hand and high-five.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>Could we talk about the journal that you have with the hand on it? Was that instated from the beginning, or did you go through the archive to get these details?</p><p><strong>Andy</strong>: Early on, we would shoot baskets, and I wanted to keep score of who was winning. So I started the journal, and I would just go back through our text thread and document who sent the signal and, if we played a basketball game, who won. And anything else interesting about it. We’ve done a few high fives walking across the stage at the Ryman Auditorium here in Nashville when we were doing shows there, or other places when we’ve been on tour.</p><p>Friends started to ask, “Can I go on the high-five walk with you?” So I mark down any special guests. It isn’t rare for our wives or kids to come, too.</p><p>On the first birthday of the high five, we probably had 15 or 20 guys [come with us]. Some walked with me, some walked with Gabe—so there was a long line of guys walking and giving each other a high five. Another gift to the people driving by.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>Over these six years, how often would you say you’ve missed it?</p><p><strong>Andy: </strong>Probably two or three times a year, [when we’re out of town].</p><p><strong>Gabe: </strong>This might sound funny, but for the last six and a half years, it’s been one of the most consistent things in my life.</p><figure class="left"><img alt="Two men mid-high five behind the counter at a restaurant" height="306" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2021/01/IMG_0188_1/b9f44f6ad.jpg" width="408"><figcaption class="caption">A high five at Gabe’s restaurant, Ladybird Taco (Courtesy of Andy Gullahorn)</figcaption></figure><p><strong>Beck: </strong>Walking 30 minutes to high-five each other is not the easiest way to regularly connect with your friend. It would be a lot simpler to just have a weekly phone call. So what makes it so meaningful to you?</p><p><strong>Andy:</strong> It’s the kind of thing that sounds really stupid at the beginning, and it only sounds cool if you’ve been doing it for a long time. There’s something about the aggregate of it that feels special. It’s a commitment. It feels like an intentional waste of time, and I mean “waste of time” in the best sense.</p><p>So much of what makes it special to me is really hard to put a finger on. I look forward to it all the time. Thirty minutes of walking for me is good for my brain; it’s good for my soul to get outside. And this is an excuse to do it.</p><p><strong>Gabe: “</strong>Childish” is not quite the right word, but “child-like” maybe is. Remember when we used to do things that just felt special? The standard deal is when you’re a grown-up, you don’t do those things anymore. The high five has a child-like aspect to it, and that’s been beautiful. And adult things come out of it, too. When I’m going through hard times, I’ve got a buddy that can walk and talk through it with me.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>How did the high five evolve, Gabe, when you were sick? Can you tell me what happened to you, as much as you’re comfortable sharing?</p><p><strong>Gabe: </strong>This [past] year, I had opened this taco shop, Ladybird Taco. The location is on the way to the high five, on a path I’d been walking for years to high-five my buddy. We were supposed to open in March, but postponed it until June. I’ll just be straight with you: One of the things that’s almost completely gone from my memory is that entire period of my life.</p><p>But I was working there one day, and I started feeling weird. Fortunately a doctor was there. Am I telling the story right?</p><p><strong>Andy: </strong>Yep.</p><p><strong>Gabe: </strong>Anyway, he said, “I think you guys need to go to the emergency room.” I don’t know the details, but it turned out I had encephalitis. A particular variety, a much less temporary version.</p><p><strong>Andy: </strong>That first week that he was in the hospital, there was a special high-five moment. He was allowed one visitor a day, and I stayed overnight so his wife could go home and be with their daughter. That night, I asked him, “Do you know who I am?” He’s like, “Yeah. Andy. Did I get that wrong before? I’m sorry.” I asked him if he knew anything about the high five, and he said, “No; what are you talking about?” So I told him the basic story.</p><p>The next morning he got up to use the restroom. At that point, his short-term memory was really, really bad, so he wouldn’t have remembered the conversation the night before. I said, “Okay, Gabe, this probably isn’t going to make any sense, but on your way back from the bathroom, I’m going to walk toward you. I need you to give me a high five.” He was like, “Okay.” We did it with his left hand because his right arm had all the IV stuff in it.</p><p>I started walking toward him, and then right before the high five, he did the clap, and the snap, and I just started crying. I said, “I can’t believe you just did that.” He was like, “Can’t believe I just did what?” It just blew my mind. I didn’t expect him to remember anything about it.</p><p><strong>Gabe</strong>: That’s one of the things I love about the routine of it. Not just the mechanics of it, but the friendship part of it is so burned into my body memory that that’s what came out.</p><p>I was in the hospital for three weeks. I got out around the beginning of October, and I’ve just been trying to … find my life again. This guy is a huge part of it. This thing that we started years ago has come back to be so important.</p><p><strong>Andy: </strong>Since he’s been out of the hospital, the high five has looked different. We don’t do the normal route. I’ll go over to his house; we’ll walk around the neighborhood together and talk. And then at the end, I’ll be like, “Okay, you walk 20 paces that way, I’ll walk 20 paces this way, we’ll give a high five.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/in-the-brain-memories-are-inextricably-tied-to-place/375969/?utm_source=feed">Read: In the brain, memories are inextricably tied to place</a>]</i></p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>It’s interesting that you have this special, sacred tradition you’re carrying on that, for a while, one of you couldn’t remember. Andy, did you feel like you were remembering for both of you? And Gabe, what did it feel like to learn anew about something that was so special to you?</p><p><strong>Gabe: </strong>It felt comforting. Revisiting it, and it feeling real again. I don’t know the right word other than <em>recovery</em>. Getting better. It felt like getting better.</p><p>But also, even in the hospital, in the midst of something I’ve never felt before where my brain is swirling, there was some kind of routine. It brought a little less chaos into what was a pretty chaotic time for me.</p><p><strong>Andy: </strong>There are a lot of entries in this journal of days when everything was great and life was normal. I think every single one of those entries was building a safety net. Something you can pull out on a rainy day. There have been seasons for me where I needed more emotional support, and Gabe was there to walk me through it. During this time, I was carrying more of the memory. But that’s the normal ebb and flow of a relationship. This feels like a time I can repay Gabe for ways that he’s carried me in the past.</p><figure class="right"><img alt="Andy and Gabe hold up a baby's hand to high five them in a hospital room" height="467" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2021/01/BF29C883_F5A4_4ECB_B9F5_2CC95719410D_1-1/09f4b6384.jpg" width="351"><figcaption class="caption">A high five in the hospital with Gabe’s newborn daughter (Courtesy of Andy Gullahorn)</figcaption></figure><p>But the thing about carrying the memory, is that if I told him that every week we would walk and have a sword fight, he would be like, “No, that doesn’t feel right.” I think his wife tried to convince him that he really liked Hallmark movies.</p><p><strong>Gabe: </strong>I was so confused.</p><p><strong>Andy: </strong>He could tell if it rang true inside of him or not. His memory of the essence of relationships has been really spot on.</p><p><strong>Gabe: </strong>Typically, when I think about routine, it means something that comes automatically. And the high five is routine in that we do it every week; we know it’s coming. But the joy and the reward that comes out of it—that’s not routine. Even after six years of doing this, every time I see my wonderful buddy walking down the side of the road toward me, that’s special. We’re dedicated to each other, and we’re showing each other in a way other than just calling and saying, “Hey, I love you.” We’re actually doing something, and that hasn’t gotten old.</p><p><strong>Andy:</strong>. Most weeks we see each other multiple times, not just for the high five. Gabe, his wife, and his daughter are my family’s favorite people. His daughter calls me “Uncle Five.” We started doing this so that we would see each other more often, outside of the Christmas tour. And we’ve achieved that in spades. It’s already given us so much more.</p><p>Ultimately, we’re both people that like a good story. There’s something I love about the idea of telling my grandkids, “I’ve been giving Gabe a high five since 2014.” There are a lot of people who would like to say, “I’ve been having lunch with my buddy every week for 60 years,” but it’s a lot harder to actually do it.</p><hr class="c-section-divider"><p><em>If you or someone you know should be featured on The Friendship Files, get in touch at <a href="mailto:friendshipfiles@theatlantic.com">friendshipfiles@theatlantic.com</a>, and tell us a bit about what makes the friendship unique.</em></p></content><author><name>Julie Beck</name><uri>http://www.theatlantic.com/author/julie-beck/?utm_source=feed</uri></author><media:content url="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2021/01/Tang_Atlantic_HighFiveV7/lead_960.jpg"><media:credit>Wenjia Tang</media:credit></media:content><title type="html">What It’s Like to Carry On a Tradition With a Friend Who Can’t Remember It</title><published>2021-01-22T10:00:00-05:00</published><updated>2021-01-22T14:05:30-05:00</updated><summary type="html">“He could tell if it rang true inside of him or not.”</summary><link href="https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/01/friends-who-high-five-every-week/617775/?utm_source=feed" rel="alternate"></link></entry><entry><id>tag:theatlantic.com,2021:50-617716</id><content type="html"><p class="dropcap">J<span class="smallcaps">oe Biden’s team</span> is planning a party. His inauguration on Wednesday, held under threat from the coronavirus and pro-Trump extremists, wasn’t much of a celebration. But the Biden administration hopes that January 20, 2022—a year from now—will mark what some aides are describing as a “renewing of the vows,” an anniversary that could be a genuinely happy moment.</p><p dir="ltr">By then, Biden hopes, he will have made Americans feel like they’ve put the horrors of 2020 behind them. More than anything, that depends on whether he can dig the country out from the COVID-19 crisis. Vaccine distribution and economic recovery will be key.</p><p dir="ltr">Basic competence of government could go a long way: Imagine the political boost Biden could earn when people start going to the movies again, or children start seeing their grandparents. Biden is already planning to push ahead on an additional $1,400 in relief checks (a disappointment to those who wanted another $2,000) and a $15-an-hour minimum wage—both part of a $2 trillion relief package. He’s also planning an infrastructure bill that would create new green jobs, and include other measures to help fight climate change.</p><p dir="ltr">Biden is trying not to repeat the mistakes that have led to rocky starts for other presidents, and midterm disasters for their parties. So Biden’s team and allies in Congress are planning the most aggressive legislative agenda and political strategy Democrats have advanced in decades.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/11/why-biden-won-presidency/616980/?utm_source=feed">Read: Why Biden Won</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">The success of Biden’s agenda will of course depend on Congress, which is starting off the year having to finish Trump’s second impeachment. “We have to see the Senate as it is”—narrowly divided, with the Democrats’ majority dependent on moderates such as Joe Manchin of West Virginia—“not as we want it to be,” Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut told me. He was in the House at the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency; he’s part of a generation of senators who were not in the chamber the last time Democrats had control of both houses of Congress and the White House, and have a different understanding of party politics than their predecessors did. “While I’m sure that Biden is going to want to spend some time trying to explore whether there’s bipartisan buy-in for his priorities, we all have to be willing to take no for an answer.”</p><p dir="ltr">Though Murphy and other Senate Democrats are hoping that their Republican colleagues will be ready to work with them, he thinks they need to be prepared for Republicans to quickly revert to the obstructionism of the Obama years.</p><p dir="ltr">“There’s a consensus that one of the mistakes of ’09 was playing footsie for a long time with Republicans who never had any intent to actually get to yes,” Murphy added. “And the dynamics in the Republican caucus have gotten worse since then, not better.”</p><p dir="ltr">The trick, says Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, will be lowering the expectations of an impatient Democratic base that is eager to press the party’s slim advantage by forcing votes on issues like Medicare for All or by making structural changes that could secure the party’s power. Booker says there aren’t enough votes to pass statehood for Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico right now, nor for expanding the Supreme Court. He’s taking his own lesson from the early Obama years.</p><p dir="ltr">“I applaud Obama for doing health care and saving the economy, but a lot of Americans felt that that was them losing their autonomy over their health care and a big Wall Street bailout. Then we got demolished in the midterms,” Booker told me. “This is a chance for the Biden administration to do the kind of things that immediately make a difference in people’s lives.”</p><p dir="ltr">Democrats are planning to vote early and often in the new Congress, and to essentially dare Republicans to stand in their way on politically popular measures. In recent years, the fight over the momentum-halting filibuster in the Senate has centered on somewhat arcane issues like Cabinet and judicial confirmations. Going forward, look for arguments over the filibuster to instead focus on COVID-19 relief (which will almost certainly end up tied to the infrastructure bill) or a new Voting Rights Act.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/01/donald-trump-pussy-presidency/617699/?utm_source=feed">Megan Garber: Donald Trump’s masculinity is an empty spectacle</a>]</i></p><p>If Republican senators hold those bills up by filibustering, Democrats would accuse them of standing in the way of helping Americans, or standing in the way of voting rights. Ending the filibuster would then be an easier sell.</p><p dir="ltr">As important as the filibuster requirement is, ending it is not the only way to get around Republican opposition. Democrats are already looking into expanding the process known as reconciliation, a quirk of Congress that allows certain bills to pass with simple majorities. The new Senate Budget Committee chair, with significant influence over reconciliation, will be Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who is very supportive of Biden’s relief proposal.</p><p dir="ltr">Biden’s history of making concessions to Republicans to seal deals during his time as vice president has many Democrats concerned. After one negotiation in which then–Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid thought Biden bent too much to Mitch McConnell, the Nevada Democrat didn’t talk to Biden for months. “I’ve worked with Senator McConnell, and I wish [Biden] luck,” Reid, still skeptical of Biden’s attraction to bipartisan dealmaking, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/12/harry-reid-2020-democratic-nominee/603007/?utm_source=feed">told me in 2019</a>.</p><p dir="ltr">Yet despite Biden’s commitment to healing the country, he has little interest in following Obama’s lead in performative bipartisanship, like the year Obama spent chasing Republican votes for the Affordable Care Act—votes that never materialized. Biden’s instinct is to try compromise first, which is why he <a href="https://twitter.com/rachaelmbade/status/1352222280722604032">pushed back</a> on Democrats who wanted to pass a coronavirus relief bill immediately, with or without Republican votes. Biden doesn’t want Democrats to go it alone without first trying to make a deal. If the GOP is seriously interested in uniting the country, he will eagerly engage. But if they use calmer rhetoric as a feint for obstruction, he is prepared to call that out.</p><p dir="ltr">And if the Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election continue to push their claims of voter fraud, or if any are found to have had more direct involvement in the attack on the Capitol, that will change Democrats’ negotiating strategy, too. “There are so many moving parts to this that we still do not yet know in terms of people’s involvement,” Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware told me, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/01/lisa-blunt-rochester-masks-riot/617661/?utm_source=feed">after reflecting on her own traumatic experience in the riot</a>. “I am a believer in healing, but I know that in order to get there, we have to go through it, not around it.”</p><p dir="ltr">Biden will have an aggressive political and congressional-affairs team in the West Wing. The Democratic National Committee will be more integrated with the White House political operation than it ever was under Obama; Biden picked former South Carolina Senate candidate <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/11/jaime-harrison-biden-dnc-chair/617086/?utm_source=feed">Jaime Harrison to be DNC chair</a>, with a mandate to better connect local activists to what’s happening in Washington.</p><p dir="ltr">With the exception of George W. Bush, all modern presidents’ parties have lost congressional seats in their first midterm elections—Bill Clinton, Obama, and Donald Trump all lost control of the House entirely. The decennial redistricting process, in which Republicans have a strong advantage because they control more state legislatures and governors’ mansions, will help the GOP draw more Republican-leaning districts before the next elections. House Republicans don’t see a wave coming their way, but they do believe they can squeak through enough wins to have a GOP speaker sitting behind Biden when he gives his 2023 State of the Union address.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/conspiracy-theories-will-doom-republican-party/617707/?utm_source=feed">Ben Sasse: QAnon is destroying the GOP from within</a>]</i></p><p><span>That will happen only if the Republicans win back the suburban voters who fled the party in the past four years, said Sean Maloney, a New York congressman and the new chair of the House Democrats’ campaign arm. “The Republican Party hasn’t learned anything from the 2020 election, and they continue to be addicted to Donald Trump,” he said. “They’re so hooked on Trump, they forgot about the voters they need to win in competitive districts.”</span></p><p dir="ltr">Yet Democrats were shocked at how effective Republican talking points were in 2020, especially their focus on <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/06/nyregion/election-nyc-defund-police.html">progressives’ talk of socialism and defunding the police</a>. Abigail Spanberger, one of the Democrats who flipped a Republican seat in 2018 and barely held on in 2020, told me in<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/abigail-spanberger/id1258635512?i=1000498420707"> a podcast interview for The Ticket in November</a> that she thinks Democrats’ decision to push those ideas nearly made her lose in November and will probably make her lose in 2022 if the party doesn’t make a hard turn away from them.</p><p dir="ltr">“My job is not to whine about what activists say. My job is to win races,” Maloney said. “George Floyd got murdered, and a lot of people thought we should do something about that. [Republicans] demagogued racial justice to win a couple of seats. If they’re proud of that, I guess that tells you something about their value system, and ours. As a gay guy who’s won a Trump district five times, I’m not surprised that the other side is going to throw the sink at us. I haven’t won it by being naive or hoping for the best. I’ve got a plan, and I believe that will preserve and expand this majority.”</p><p dir="ltr">If Republican primaries keep producing QAnon adherents, and QAnon keeps getting more known and starts getting less popular, Democrats see even more opportunities.</p><p dir="ltr">The problem with Democrats’ promises about future House races, says Tom Emmer, a Minnesota congressman, who chairs the House Republicans’ campaign arm, is that Democrats were also making rosy promises about the 2020 races, and those didn’t come true. Emmer says the formula for reclaiming a majority in the House in 2022 is the same as the one that won Republicans at least 14 seats (one race is still pending) in November.</p><p dir="ltr">Over the course of a 15-minute phone conversation, Emmer kept bringing the conversation back to the “radical left,” “socialism,” “defunding the police,” or the Green New Deal.</p><p dir="ltr">“We’ve tested these messages that they’re putting out there. They do not work. And I will stand by the November 3 result in the House in saying they’re going to continue down this path where they think they’re actually talking to America. But what they’re doing is they’re talking to each other,” Emmer said. Full Democratic control in Washington, he argued, will only help Republicans in 2022, as voters look to put a check on what he assumes will be overreach.</p><p dir="ltr">Trump, who in 2020 proved to be the biggest turnout motivator in 244 years of American elections, won’t be on the ballot in 2022. Republicans have never voted in anywhere near the numbers that they did for him. Democrats have never voted in anywhere near the numbers that they did against him. Biden, unlike Obama and Trump, has no cult of personality around him—which means voters likely won’t turn out because of him in anywhere near the numbers we’ve gotten used to in the past decade.</p><p dir="ltr">Throughout the 2020 campaign, and especially in the primaries, Biden was mocked for insisting that Trump would drive Republicans to a breaking point and that they would have an “epiphany,” then rediscover some interest in collaborative government. The January 6 Capitol insurrection, some feel, may have actually been that breaking point. In the immediate aftermath, at least, several Republican senators have recoiled from that extremism, determined to distinguish themselves from the Republicans who voted against certifying the election for Biden (a group that includes a majority of the House Republican caucus and its top two leaders).</p><p dir="ltr">“It’s not implausible that the Republican reaction to this crisis involves taking real steps to lower the temperature and finding some ways to set an example by working across the aisle,” Murphy told me. “I feel like I said some version of that six other times, and at some point, I maybe should learn that … <a href="https://slate.com/culture/2014/10/the-history-of-lucys-pulling-the-football-away-from-charlie-brown-in-peanuts.html">I’m Charlie Brown</a>. But this is obviously different.”</p></content><author><name>Edward-Isaac Dovere</name><uri>http://www.theatlantic.com/author/edward-isaac-dovere/?utm_source=feed</uri></author><media:content url="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2021/01/GettyImages_493592534/lead_960.jpg"><media:credit>Win McNamee / Getty</media:credit></media:content><title type="html">How Biden Plans to Beat Republican Obstructionism</title><published>2021-01-22T07:00:00-05:00</published><updated>2021-01-22T13:06:20-05:00</updated><summary type="html">History suggests that Joe Biden and the Democrats are going to have a tough two years and a disaster in the midterms. Here’s their plan to avoid that.</summary><link href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/01/joe-biden-democrats-midterms-2022-obama/617716/?utm_source=feed" rel="alternate"></link></entry><entry><id>tag:theatlantic.com,2021:50-617759</id><content type="html"><p>In response to law enforcement’s hands-off approach to the storming of the Capitol on January 6, some on the left have demanded harsher policing of right-wing extremism to match the often-brutal treatment of Black Lives Matter and leftist protest. That is, the very people who supported police reform or outright defunding over the summer seemed to want a crackdown. Skeptics of defunding were quick to point out the apparent contradiction, and they took the opportunity to dismiss the abolitionist position altogether. As the writer Matthew Yglesias mockingly tweeted, “Clearly the answer to yesterday’s failures is to defund the Capitol Police and instead hire a squad of social service providers to tackle the real root causes of the violence.”</p><p>But what Yglesias finds absurd, we find imperative. Thinking in terms of root causes and nonpunitive interventions is never ridiculous, even when the target is right-wing extremism.</p><p>As a sociologist and an anthropologist who study social control in the United States, we know that punishment can radicalize and further alienate people, while social policy and grassroots community building can defuse potential violence. The abolitionist philosophy is precisely what is missing from the current conversation.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/how-i-became-police-abolitionist/613540/?utm_source=feed">Derecka Purnell: How I became a police abolitionist</a>]</i></p><p>First, we should clear up some misunderstandings. Abolitionists <em>do</em> seek to create a future world in which police and prisons are obsolete, but such long-range commitments <em>do not</em> preclude practical harm-reduction efforts or collaboration with less radical allies. Abolitionists work for incremental improvements, especially interventions that set the stage for more radical change.</p><p>Abolitionists, for example, would back the immediate aim of removing white supremacist cops, understanding that it is better to have police officers who are not sympathetic to, or supportive of, racist insurrection. An abolitionist perspective would highlight, however, the limitations of simple personnel overhauls. Hiring more Black and brown officers, for example, does not change the War on Drugs’ disproportionate attention to poor and racially segregated neighborhoods. Instead, it might serve to further legitimize police presence. Similarly, the removal of racist cops might help stifle the next Capitol riot, but this is only a single and long-overdue step in the wider remaking of public-safety forces.</p><p>More generally, abolitionists would endorse a broad analytical scope for diagnosing the problem, and for designing interventions. As the abolitionist police scholar Alex Vitale <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2021/01/07/613802462/how-the-storming-of-the-capitol-was-and-wasnt-about-police">recently noted</a> on NPR, focusing exclusively on individual insurrectionists and local police departments will do little to weaken right-wing extremism around the country.</p><p>Addressing root causes of the attempted coup means actively working to transform the political and economic conditions that have allowed ethno-nationalist and scapegoating ideologies to fester. Granted, such ideologies are not reducible to economic desperation, even if many of them are shaped by it. And many of the currently radicalized may be too deeply entrenched for structural change to impact their understanding of the world. Passing Medicare for All will not keep insurrectionists from storming state capitols during the Biden administration.</p><p>But abolitionists have long been trying to design root-cause-informed <em>immediate</em> interventions. A wealth of research on gun violence, and the experience of grassroots organizations, shows that targeting those at risk of violence can stop retribution from flowing through entire social networks. Nonprofits or government agencies should identify people and regions primed for right-wing violence and then intervene on the ground with counseling and political education, cash stipends predicated on non-offending, and violence-interrupting mentors.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/police-reform-is-not-enough/614176/?utm_source=feed">Mychal Denzel Smith: Incremental change is a moral failure</a>]</i></p><p>De-radicalization programs like Life After Hate offer a complementary example of root-cause-informed interventions. These programs, in which ex–white supremacists help current adherents leave extremist groups, have found success by meeting the human needs for meaning and community. As the ex–white supremacist turned de-radicalizer Shannon Martinez <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/building-bridges/2019/11/12/deradicalization-in-the-deep-south/">said</a>, “I needed an explanation for why the world seemed like a threatening and brutal place for me … I wanted to believe in something that felt like it mattered and was part of something bigger.”</p><p>Abolitionists prioritize such interventions because they work, and because the combination of harsh policing and incarceration often backfires. A significant body of social-scientific evidence shows that labeling and vilifying social groups entrenches identities, generates self-fulfilling prophecies, and offers people fewer life possibilities. Put simply, making a population into a targeted category consistently aids in creating more-extremist individuals and groups.</p><p>In a major 2013 study on the negative effects of carceral punishment on Chicago youth, economists found that children punished in correctional facilities were significantly more likely to be re-incarcerated by age 25 than those who were sent, for example, to in-school detention for the same offense. Since Chicago has a random-judge-selection system, the study was able to isolate the negative effects of harshness of punishment. Abolitionists would push this insight further by seeking fully nonpunitive accountability models, such as restorative-justice education systems, to more effectively reduce harm for the student and the school.</p><p>Considering such dynamics in how we approach right-wing extremists is common sense. We already know that when people are incarcerated, they affiliate along racial lines. This happens officially, because prisons are internally segregated by race, and unofficially, because many incarcerated people join race-based gangs. Rounding up and incarcerating “pop” white supremacists may simply form a bridge to their joining the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Aryan-Nations">Aryan Nations</a>. This danger is all the more likely given Joe Biden’s recent proposal of new domestic-terrorism laws. Much as the War on Terror’s military interventions radicalized a new generation of combatants, the rollout of a War on White Terror might simply create new and more-radicalized white supremacists.</p><p>But abolitionists’ fears go beyond the creation of more right-wing extremists. Abolitionists also fear the consequences of expanded policing for Black, brown, undocumented, and poor communities. Although a Biden administration may, in this moment, keep attention on right-wing white supremacy as the dangerous Other in our midst (though we have our doubts), a future administration may depict peaceful BLM protesters, antiwar and anti-capitalist activists, environmental organizers, and the like as extremists who require surveillance and confinement. Expanded police powers to combat right-wing extremists could well be turned back on already targeted communities.</p><p>The palpable differences in how police treated the Capitol rioters versus BLM protesters are maddening, but that’s not all. They also reveal a deep structural rift that will not be repaired through the same old policy initiatives, especially ones that ramp up policing and imprisonment. Fighting right-wing extremism is not simply about force—it is a long-term battle over culture, meaning, and belonging. Responding to the right-wing dangers knocking at our door does not demand a dismissal of the abolitionist perspective—on the contrary, this alternative vision of strong communities and constructive interventions will be essential to keeping us safe in the long run.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p></content><author><name>Neil Gong</name><uri>http://www.theatlantic.com/author/neil-gong/?utm_source=feed</uri></author><author><name>Heath Pearson</name><uri>http://www.theatlantic.com/author/heath-person/?utm_source=feed</uri></author><media:content url="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2021/01/GettyImages_1230477184/lead_960.jpg"><media:credit>Shay Horse / NurPhoto / Getty</media:credit></media:content><title type="html">Can Abolition Work in an Age of Right-Wing Extremism?</title><published>2021-01-22T06:15:00-05:00</published><updated>2021-01-22T06:15:05-05:00</updated><summary type="html">Punishment can radicalize and further alienate people, while social policy and grassroots community building can defuse potential violence.</summary><link href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/stop-right-wing-extremism-without-bolstering-police-power/617759/?utm_source=feed" rel="alternate"></link></entry><entry><id>tag:theatlantic.com,2021:50-617772</id><content type="html"><p>On Tuesday, the eve of the presidential inauguration, then-President-elect Joe Biden stood on the perimeter of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to honor the more than 400,000 Americans who have died from the coronavirus. In his brief remarks, he said, “To heal, we must remember; it’s hard sometimes to remember, but that’s how we heal. It’s important to do that as a nation.” Those words set the tone for the next day’s peaceful transfer of power, which had been endangered just two weeks prior by a <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/attempted-coup/617570/?utm_source=feed">violent coup attempt</a> at the U.S. Capitol that left five people dead.</p><p></p><p>The threats to the future prosperity of the United States are multiple: the pandemic, near economic collapse, insurgent white-supremacist extremism and antidemocratic forces, and myriad systemic racial inequalities. But watching the inauguration, where President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris recited an oath of service to the nation and fidelity to the Constitution, felt reparative. Rituals and traditions have an anchoring effect that counters moments of upheaval. Even as political theater, Wednesday’s spectacle was a temporary but necessary balm for the wounds acquired from a chaotic and destructive Trump presidency. In his address, Biden emphasized the resilience of democratic order: “To overcome these challenges, to restore the soul and secure the future of America, requires so much more than words,” he said. “It requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy: unity.”</p><p></p><p>Much has been made of the word <em>unity</em> in the past year. After the Capitol attack on January 6, <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/hawley-cruz-trump-impeachment_n_5ffdee53c5b691806c4d0a1c">many Republican</a> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/17/republicans-call-unity-wont-acknowledge-biden-won-fairly/">legislators</a> called for unity, responding to the righteous ire from their fellow lawmakers who demanded investigations, arrests, and impeachment. The unity theme was also a main pillar of the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/joebiden/photos/a.10150487089926104/10156998300646104/">Biden-Harris campaign</a>, messaging intended to implore the nation to fight for a new future. Unity, for some, is pure sentiment. A quick, uncomplicated cure-all that is achieved merely by being summoned. For others, however, unity calls for hard work and accountability, or it risks granting unearned forgiveness for harmful transgressions, papering over deep injustices.</p><p></p><p>To his credit, Biden acknowledged the daunting challenge of achieving unity in a nation that hasn’t been this divided since the Civil War: “I know speaking of unity can sound to some like a foolish fantasy these days,” he said on the Capitol steps. “I know that the forces that divide us are deep, and they are real. But I also know they are not new. Our history has been a constant struggle between the American ideal that we all are created equal and the harsh, ugly reality that racism, nativism, fear, demonization have long torn us apart. The battle is perennial, and victory is never assured.” The inauguration backdrop of an abnormally empty Washington, D.C., fortified by 25,000 National Guard troops, dramatized that battle, showing the enormous distance between the unity ideal and the country’s stark reality.</p><p></p><p>Biden called white supremacy by its name and rejected euphemistic language that obscures meaning. Although these were welcome acknowledgments, questing for unity without executable ways to hold bad actors accountable will render the pursuit useless. Disunion was a cornerstone of the previous administration: family separation at the border; the banning of immigrants from Muslim-majority nations; the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/trump-defends-white-nationalist-protesters-some-very-fine-people-on-both-sides/537012/?utm_source=feed">telegraphing</a> of <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/07/politics/trump-history-comments-trnd/index.html">support</a> for white supremacists; and the political weaponization of the coronavirus pandemic, to name a few examples. To achieve unity moving forward requires swift and decisive steps from lawmakers to correct these wrongs and stamp out their effects through clear policy initiatives.</p><p></p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/01/bidens-two-huge-challenges-after-the-capitol-riot/617692/?utm_source=feed">Read: Joe Biden’s looming war on white supremacy</a>]</i></p><p></p><p>When Frederick Douglass addressed the American Anti-Slavery Society in December 1863, he named concrete terms for what unity would necessitate—“<a href="https://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/4403">making every slave free, and every free man a voter</a>.” Douglass imagined an America that integrated 4 million African Americans into the body politic, and emphasized that solidarity would mean nothing unless backed by action. These principles were embodied in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments introduced after the Civil War, but still needed forceful implementation and support from the federal government. President Andrew Johnson’s lax approach to the enforcement of these reunification provisos led to the re-entrenchment of slavocracy’s tenets and the continued disenfranchisement of Black Americans. It is a prime example of what happens when calls for unity are unaccompanied by action: a return to the status quo.</p><p><br> |
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104 Biden’s inaugural address acknowledged “the work ahead of us” and attempted to map a path forward, one that provides space for civil disagreement rather than “total war.” But the president’s unique challenge is that his vision for unity puts him at odds with his impulse for compromise with Republicans who have <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/07/trumps-collaborators/612250/?utm_source=feed">consistently evaded accountability</a> and consequences for their actions. For now, the image of Wednesday’s multiracial, bipartisan dais at least demonstrated for Americans this administration’s commitment to the democratic experiment. Whether that performance of unity amounts to more than just that depends on Biden’s ability to move past sentiment and into hard work.</p></content><author><name>Syreeta McFadden</name><uri>http://www.theatlantic.com/author/syreeta-mcfadden/?utm_source=feed</uri></author><media:content url="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2021/01/webart_unity/lead_960.jpg"><media:credit>Getty / The Atlantic</media:credit><media:description>Unity requires hard work and accountability, or it risks granting unearned forgiveness for harmful transgressions.</media:description></media:content><title type="html">‘Unity’ Is Not What America Needs Right Now</title><published>2021-01-22T06:00:00-05:00</published><updated>2021-01-22T08:18:16-05:00</updated><summary type="html">President Biden’s pursuit of solidarity is well intentioned. But without concrete plans to hold bad actors accountable, his efforts will be useless.</summary><link href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/01/what-america-needs-more-than-unity/617772/?utm_source=feed" rel="alternate"></link></entry><entry><id>tag:theatlantic.com,2021:50-617757</id><content type="html"><p>Last week, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor published a dissent in a death-penalty case that flagged the striking number of killings taking place in the last months of the Trump administration. “After seventeen years without a single federal execution, the Government has executed twelve people since July,” she wrote, calling it “an unprecedented, breakneck timetable of executions.” As an opponent of capital punishment, I am pleased to see it criticized. But Sotomayor’s claim that the federal government went 17 years without executing anyone is misleading, because the federal government does not exclusively kill men and women who are on death row. It maintains a kill list of people whom it condemns to die in secret and kills with drones.</p><p>These killings began under President George W. Bush, exploded under President Barack Obama, and continue today. They constitute the majority of federal executions. Just 50 people are on federal death row. (Add in the 50 states and America has approximately 2,553 total death-row inmates.) According to the Council on Foreign Relations, Obama <a href="https://www.cfr.org/blog/obamas-final-drone-strike-data">authorized</a> 542 drone strikes that killed an estimated 3,797 people, including 324 civilians. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has <a href="https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/projects/drone-war">higher death counts</a>. And the Trump administration is <a href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/2019/5/8/18619206/under-donald-trump-drone-strikes-far-exceed-obama-s-numbers">thought</a> to have accelerated the pace of drone killings, though its lack of transparency makes counting difficult.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/09/the-killing-machines-how-to-think-about-drones/309434/?utm_source=feed">Read: The killing machines</a>]</i></p><p>Of course, the comparison to death row is not perfect. While death-row inmates are incarcerated and no longer present any danger to society, drone strikes target people who aren’t in U.S. custody and who allegedly pose a threat to America. Then again, all federal death-row inmates were charged, afforded counsel, tried, convicted by a jury of their peers, and given years to pursue appeals. Even after all that, Sotomayor worries that they’ve had insufficient due process and insists that the Trump administration carried out their executions too hastily. Yet drone killings mete out death to individuals who have never been charged or tried. In some cases, the federal government does not even know the identity of the person it is killing––just that he or she is leaving a suspected terrorist safe house, or that a phone he or she is thought to possess was in communication with people considered “militants” by the U.S. military or the CIA.</p><p>“Over the past six months, this Court has repeatedly sidestepped its usual deliberative processes, often at the Government’s request,” Sotomayor wrote. “With due judicial consideration, some of the Government’s arguments may have prevailed and some or even many of these executions may have ultimately been allowed to proceed. Others may not have been. Either way, the Court should not have sanctioned these executions without resolving these critical issues. The stakes were simply too high.” In many drone strikes, the number of lives at stake is far higher: Unlike in Federal Bureau of Prisons executions, innocent bystanders are routinely killed.</p><p>The government justifies the risk to bystanders in part by calling the sites of drone killings “battlefields” in a “war,” but there seems to be neither physical limits to the battlefields nor any end to the war, especially because it is frequently waged in countries where war was never declared.</p><p>As for deliberative processes, the federal judiciary demands little of the federal government in drone litigation. Consider a recent case involving an American citizen in the rare position to sue. In a 2017 federal lawsuit, Bilal Abdul Kareem alleged that during the previous year, while working as a journalist in Syria, he was nearly killed on five separate occasions by attacks closely resembling U.S. drone strikes, including at least one strike from a Hellfire missile of the sort used on U.S. drones. He came to believe that he had been placed on the federal government’s secret kill list, and speculated in his complaint that he may have been mistaken for a member of al-Qaeda or another extremist group because he communicated with militants on his cellphone during his reporting.</p><p>His complaint asked the government to disclose five things in order to have meaningful due process: (1) whether the government had made a determination to kill him; (2) if yes, if it actually tried to kill him; (3) the process by which the government decided to target him; (4) the factual basis for deciding to target him; and (5) whether he was still a target. The government did not want to answer <em>any</em> of those questions and refused to even confirm that the U.S. engages in targeted killings via drones. It argued that Kareem lacked standing to sue, that his case raised nonjusticiable political questions, and that the state-secrets privilege allowed it to withhold answers to questions like <em>Has this American citizen been placed on a list of people to extrajudicially kill if possible?</em></p><p>Last week, on the same day that Sotomayor published her death-penalty-case dissent, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., sided with the government. It ruled that Kareem lacks standing because his complaint fails to present enough evidence that the five aerial bombings he survived were in fact U.S. drone strikes. The government, which possesses the truth, will not be forced to reveal it, and because of such outcomes, America’s shadow death row will continue to operate in secret, with no due process or accountability.</p><p>Bush started drone killings; Obama expanded them, belatedly adding insufficient guardrails and transparency; and Trump reduced the guardrails and the transparency. No one who isn’t legally compelled to keep quiet knows the full extent of the extrajudicial executions that the federal government has carried out over the past four years, or the number of innocents who died in the process.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/drones-dont-spark-war-humans-do/592279/?utm_source=feed">Amy Zegart: Not all drones are created equal</a>]</i></p><p>President Joe Biden has a moral obligation to change course in his earliest days in office. Unless he trusts that the Trump administration has been moral in its use of drone strikes, that it was correct to undo some of the Obama administration’s guardrails, and that it was honest in its internal accounting of how many innocent people it killed, he should impose a moratorium on drone strikes at least long enough to assess the carnage of the past four years and how American drone policy should change to avoid immoral killings.</p><p>And the next time that a drone case makes it to the Supreme Court, the justices should better protect our rights. A secret kill list, kept under the auspices of undeclared or perpetual war, is incompatible with a Constitution that forbids deprivations of life and liberty without due process.</p><p></p></content><author><name>Conor Friedersdorf</name><uri>http://www.theatlantic.com/author/conor-friedersdorf/?utm_source=feed</uri></author><media:content url="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2021/01/2010_05_17T110000Z_765290826_GM1E65J0BJ802_RTRMADP_3_USA_PAKISTAN_DRONES_copy/lead_960.jpg"><media:credit>Christopher Griffin / Handout / Reuters</media:credit></media:content><title type="html">America’s Shadow Death Row</title><published>2021-01-22T06:00:00-05:00</published><updated>2021-01-22T07:10:38-05:00</updated><summary type="html">The government does not exclusively kill people who are on death row. It condemns many to die by drone strike.</summary><link href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/americas-shadow-death-row/617757/?utm_source=feed" rel="alternate"></link></entry><entry><id>tag:theatlantic.com,2021:260-617771</id><content type="html"><p>Fashion Week in Berlin, the departure of former President Donald Trump, the swearing-in of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, COVID-19 burials in Turkey and Mexico, an earthquake in Indonesia, bull-taming in India, a snow-covered Great Wall in China, National Guard soldiers in the U.S. Capitol, diploma artwork in New York City, and much more</p></content><author><name>Alan Taylor</name><uri>http://www.theatlantic.com/author/alan-taylor/?utm_source=feed</uri></author><media:content url="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/photo/2021/01/photos-week/a01_1297311912-1/lead_960.jpg"><media:credit>Chip Somodevilla / Getty</media:credit></media:content><title type="html">Photos of the Week: Ice Castles, Northern Lights, Inauguration Fireworks</title><published>2021-01-22T00:30:00-05:00</published><updated>2021-01-22T11:43:39-05:00</updated><summary type="html">Fashion Week in Berlin, the departure of former President Donald Trump, bull-taming in India, a snow-covered Great Wall in China, diploma artwork in New York City, and much more</summary><link href="https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2021/01/photos-week-ice-castles-northern-lights-inauguration-fireworks/617771/?utm_source=feed" rel="alternate"></link></entry><entry><id>tag:theatlantic.com,2021:50-617774</id><content type="html"><p><em>Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/?utm_source=feed">Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox</a>.</em></p><p dir="ltr">President Joe Biden delivered his inaugural address to a field of flags. And it was before those 190,000-some flags—<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/19/politics/field-of-flags-biden-inauguration-trnd/index.html">stand-ins to represent the Americans unable to attend in person</a>—that he pledged to guide the country through a pandemic that’s claimed 400,000 lives in the United States alone.</p><p>The incoming administration wasted no time: Today, the president signed <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/01/21/us/joe-biden">a batch of executive orders</a> aimed at curbing the outbreak.</p><p dir="ltr">Biden inherits a country divided in many ways, one of the most profound of which is physical. Though COVID-19 cases appear to be easing ever so slightly, much work needs to be done before Americans can gather again.</p><p><b><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/01/pandemic-data-encouraging-week/617768/?utm_source=feed">Pandemic numbers are finally tiptoeing in the right direction.</a> </b></p><p>Here’s the weekly update from our COVID Tracking Project: “We are seeing early indications that the rates of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are easing, though some areas are still reporting dangerously high case and hospitalization levels and wrenching death rates.”</p><p dir="ltr"><b><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/01/should-kids-get-covid-19-vaccine/617762/?utm_source=feed">Kids will likely be key to reaching herd immunity.</a> </b></p><p dir="ltr">“The U.S. will have a hard time reaching [it] otherwise,” Sarah Zhang reports. Vaccines are currently being tested on children as young as 12.</p><p dir="ltr"><b><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/01/coronavirus-evolving-same-mutations-around-world/617721/?utm_source=feed">The coronavirus’s mutations have a troubling pattern.</a> </b></p><p>“Anytime when you have mutations that come up independently of each other in multiple places, it’s really a sign,” one coronavirus researcher told Sarah.</p><p dir="ltr"><b><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/01/hhs-hospitalization-pandemic-data/617725/?utm_source=feed">A reliable source of pandemic data is at risk because of an intragovernmental squabble. </a></b></p><p>Alexis C. Madrigal, one of the founders of our COVID Tracking Project, urges the incoming administration to stick to the current system, rather than try to overhaul it.</p><figure><img alt="A portrait of Brontez Purnell with colored triangles" height="378" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2021/01/original_38/95811444b.png" width="672"><figcaption class="credit">MELISSA DALE NEAL</figcaption></figure><p dir="ltr"><b>Tonight’s <em>Atlantic</em>-approved isolation activity: </b></p><p>Read Brontez Purnell’s darkly funny new short story about an actor who has come to hate his job: Here’s “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2021/01/brontez-purnell-early-retirement-a-short-story/617392/?utm_source=feed">Early Retirement</a>.” We also spoke with Purnell on <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2021/01/brontez-purnell-talks-about-his-new-short-story-early-retirement/617395/?utm_source=feed">writing fiction from a theater background</a>.</p><p><b>Today’s break from the news: </b></p><p>Throw out your checklist for success. Our happiness columnist <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/01/checklist-achievements-happiness-boxes/617756/?utm_source=feed">wants you to stop keeping score</a>.</p><h2></h2><hr><p></p><p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/sign-up/daily/?utm_source=feed">Sign up for <em>The Atlantic Daily </em>here.</a></p></content><author><name>Caroline Mimbs Nyce</name><uri>http://www.theatlantic.com/author/caroline-mimbs-nyce/?utm_source=feed</uri></author><media:content url="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2021/01/original_2021_01_21T140341.749/lead_960.jpg"><media:credit>Stephanie Keith / Getty</media:credit></media:content><title type="html"><em>The Atlantic Daily</em>: The Battle to Contain the Pandemic Enters a New Phase</title><published>2021-01-21T17:09:00-05:00</published><updated>2021-01-21T20:14:02-05:00</updated><summary type="html">President Joe Biden signed a batch of executive orders aimed at curbing the outbreak.</summary><link href="https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2021/01/joe-biden-pandemic-executive-orders/617774/?utm_source=feed" rel="alternate"></link></entry><entry><id>tag:theatlantic.com,2021:50-617768</id><content type="html"><p><em>Editor&rsquo;s Note:</em> <em>The Atlantic</em> is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/category/what-you-need-know-coronavirus/">here</a>. <br /></p><p>In <a href="https://covidtracking.com/analysis-updates/soaring-death-numbers-and-highly-regional-outbreaks-this-week-in-covid-19-data-jan-14">last week’s update</a>, we wrote that the United States had reported the worst weekly case, hospitalization, and death numbers of the pandemic. At the time, it wasn’t clear what proportion of the case and death increases were related to postholiday reporting backlogs. This week brings some clarity: The backlogs appear to be largely behind us, and the underlying trends are moving in the right direction for most of the country. Even for the states experiencing the worst outbreaks, we are seeing early indications that the rates of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are easing, though some areas are still reporting dangerously high case and hospitalization levels and wrenching death rates.</p><figure><img alt="4 bar charts showing COVID-19 metrics week by week in the US. Tests rose 1% from last week, while cases, average hospitalized, and deaths all fell." height="333" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2021/01/image6-1/1deec3c1f.png" width="672"></figure><p>Weekly new cases for the seven-day period beginning Thursday, January 14 were down 20 percent, the lowest number of new cases we’ve seen for a non-holiday week since mid-November. As important, after 16 straight weeks of increases, average weekly hospitalizations dropped 4 percent this week—a modest improvement, but a good sign. Reported tests reached a new weekly high, edging out last week by 1 percent—though the high test numbers this week probably reflect the fact that the testing backlog is still catching up.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/01/pandemic-cases-hospitalizations-record-south/617589/?utm_source=feed">Read: The most reliable pandemic number keeps getting worse</a>]</i></p><p>States reported 21,301 deaths this week, the second-highest number of deaths of the pandemic to date. Yesterday, states reported 4,409 COVID-19 deaths, the highest single-day number of deaths on record. For comparison, in the week of September 24, 2020, states reported fewer than 5,000 deaths for the entire week.</p><p>Because of the way states report data for nursing homes, assisted-living facilities, and other long-term-care facilities, our figures for COVID-19 in these facilities refer to the week beginning January 8. These numbers remain very alarming: For the second week in a row, LTC facilities reported the highest death toll since we started gathering long-term-care data last May—more than 7,000 residents and staff. The number of known deaths reported this week may include backlogged figures from the winter holidays, and they also got a boost from a change in <a href="https://covidtracking.com/data/state/iowa/long-term-care">Iowa</a>’s death reporting that increased that state’s reported figure.</p><figure><img alt="Alt-Text: 3 weekly bar charts showing COVID-19 metrics in long-term-case facilities in the US over time. New cases are down about 15,000 from the week prior, though deaths are still rising." height="333" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2021/01/image1/285b8cbae.png" width="672"></figure><p>There is also tentative good news from long-term-care facilities: The number of new cases was down by about 15,000 this week. It remains unclear whether case data have fully normalized from the reporting delays associated with the holidays, but next week’s data should confirm whether this case drop indicates a real improvement in the situation in long-term-care facilities.</p><h3>Regional hospitalization and case data</h3><p>A closer look at current COVID-19 hospitalizations offers good news for most U.S. regions. Hospitalizations remain very high but are declining modestly across the South and the West and continuing their substantial declines in the Midwest. In the Northeast, hospitalizations have plateaued.</p><figure><img alt="Area charts showing currently hospitalized with COVID-19 over time in each census sub-region. While hospitalizations are still very high, especially in the South and West, most sub-regions are seeing declines begin." height="334" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2021/01/image5-1/d80970593.png" width="672"></figure><p>At the state level, hospitalization data remain encouraging: Hospitalizations are declining or flat in every state but New York.</p><figure><img alt="Area charts showing individuals currently hospitalized with COVID-19 over time in each census subregion. While hospitalizations are still very high, especially in the South and West, most subregions are seeing declines begin." height="335" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2021/01/image2-2/b4296eeca.png" width="672"></figure><p>Cases, too, are falling in every region. In the Midwest’s “West North Central” division—which includes many of the states that had the worst per capita outbreaks late last fall—cases have very nearly returned to the levels reported at the beginning of October 2020.</p><figure><img alt="Bar charts showing new COVID-19 cases over time in each census sub-region. No sub-region is currently at their peak for cases. In certain sub-regions in the Midwest, cases are close to Oct 1 levels." height="335" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2021/01/image4-1/3b89ffa89.png" width="672"></figure><p>A breakdown of weekly reported COVID-19 deaths by census regions and subregional divisions shows that although deaths are falling modestly across the country, they remain painfully high in most regions.</p><figure><img alt="Bubble chart showing weekly deaths declining in all four Census regions and in all but two subregional divisions." height="334" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2021/01/image7-1/d448d4168.png" width="672"></figure><h3>States we’re watching</h3><p>Case and hospitalization declines are unquestionably good news. At the same time, in the country’s worst hot spots, states are still reporting very high numbers.</p><p><a href="https://covidtracking.com/data/state/arizona">Arizona</a>’s case count has fallen from last week, but per capita, the state’s case numbers remain the highest in the country at a seven-day average of 958 per million. The state is now nearly tied with <a href="https://covidtracking.com/data/state/south-carolina">South Carolina</a>, where cases are rising rapidly. In Yuma County, Arizona, home to many of the state’s seasonal laborers, <a href="https://apnews.com/article/yuma-arizona-phoenix-mexico-coronavirus-pandemic-7a9d2f1365e4493d1f9da9f353d630ab">the Associated Press reports</a> that the county has a positivity rate of 20 percent, compared with 14 percent for the state as a whole, and county public-health authorities said last week that they had run out of vaccines.</p><figure><img alt="4 bar charts for COVID-19 metrics over time in Arizona, with 7-day average lines. Hospitalizations are at close to record levels in AZ, as are daily deaths." height="333" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2021/01/image8/6eab3aa96.png" width="672"></figure><p>Hospitalizations lag behind cases, and Arizona’s per capita hospitalizations remain by far the highest in the country. Arizona’s hospitals are <a href="https://azdhs.gov/preparedness/epidemiology-disease-control/infectious-disease-epidemiology/covid-19/dashboards/index.php">under severe strain</a>, with 92 percent of all ICU and inpatient beds occupied as of Wednesday, accompanied by a <a href="https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/hundreds-of-children-being-admitted-to-arizona-hospitals-for-covid-19">surge in pediatric COVID-19 hospitalizations</a>. Nursing homes are also experiencing an increasing number of cases and deaths, and <a href="https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/nursing-home-covid-19-deaths-cases-in-arizona-are-spiking-aarp-says">Fox 10 Phoenix</a> reports that 40 percent of Arizona COVID-19 deaths have come from nursing facilities. Despite this, delays in the distribution of vaccines mean that many facilities (and patients) are still waiting for the first doses.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/01/should-kids-get-covid-19-vaccine/617762/?utm_source=feed">Read: A vaccine for kids is coming, slowly</a>]</i></p><p>The disparity in COVID-19 outcomes for Indigenous people in <a href="https://covidtracking.com/race/infection-and-mortality-data#AZ">Arizona</a> has been pronounced throughout the pandemic. At least one in nine people identified as “American Indians or Alaska Natives” has tested positive for COVID-19 in the state, while one in 16 white residents has. Indigenous people in Arizona are more than twice as likely to have been hospitalized with COVID-19 as their white neighbors, and more than 2.5 times as likely to have died.</p><figure><img alt="Charts showing the cases, hospitalizations, and deaths per 100,00 in Arizona, broken down for racial and ethnic groups. All three outcomes are significantly more likely for American Indians or Alaska Natives than for other groups reported by the state." height="255" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2021/01/image9/1b121a896.png" width="672"></figure><p><a href="https://covidtracking.com/data/state/california">California</a>, which reported the third-highest number of new cases per capita this week, is finally seeing the number of new cases reported each day begin to decline. Even the state’s Southern California epicenter is seeing modest but important improvements: Following weeks of record-breaking cases and hospitalizations in Los Angeles County, the number of new cases per day is down 17.6 percent from two weeks ago, and hospitalizations are down 10 percent over that same time period, according to <a href="https://www.latimes.com/projects/california-coronavirus-cases-tracking-outbreak/los-angeles-county/">data from the </a><a href="https://www.latimes.com/projects/california-coronavirus-cases-tracking-outbreak/los-angeles-county/"><em>Los Angeles Times</em></a>. <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-01-20/the-end-is-not-yet-in-sight-coronavirus-danger-remains-even-as-some-metrics-improve-l-a-county-says">County officials warn</a> that the virus is still surging in the area, and that hospitalizations remain at dangerously high levels, with ICU numbers remaining nearly unchanged over the past two weeks.</p><figure><img alt="4 bar charts for COVID-19 metrics over time in California, with 7-day average lines. Hospitalizations are at close to record levels but cases have declined from a peak in early January" height="334" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2021/01/image11/171b46f85.png" width="672"></figure><p>On Wednesday, the state surpassed <a href="https://covidtracking.com/data/state/california/cases">3 million total cases</a> to date, meaning that <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-01-19/california-hurtles-toward-3-million-coronavirus-cases">one in 13 Californians</a> has tested positive since the start of the pandemic.</p><p>As we’ve seen over the entire course of the pandemic, rising cases lead to rising deaths. The massive number of cases in Southern California over the past month has resulted in a wrenching death toll: The state reported 3,331 COVID-19 deaths in the past seven days alone. In Los Angeles County, air-quality rules limiting the number of cremations each day <a href="http://www.aqmd.gov/docs/default-source/news-archive/2021/emergency-order-for-crematoriums-jan17-2021.pdf">have been suspended</a> to allow crematoriums to clear a backlog of bodies at hospitals and funeral homes.</p><p>In <a href="https://covidtracking.com/race/infection-and-mortality-data#CA">California</a>, people identified as “Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander” are being disproportionately harmed by COVID-19. Although they make up a small part of the population, Native Hawaiians or other Pacific Islanders are three times as likely to have tested positive for COVID-19, and 1.8 times as likely to have died, as their white neighbors. Black people in California are 1.4 times as likely to have tested positive for, or died of, COVID-19 as white people in the state. Latino Californians, the largest single racial or ethnic group in the state, are 2.6 times as likely to have tested positive and 1.4 times as likely to have died as white residents.</p><p><a href="https://covidtracking.com/data/state/alabama/">Alabama</a>, which had the <a href="https://covidtracking.com/data/charts/hospitalized-per-million-by-state">second-highest number of COVID-19 hospitalizations per capita last week</a>, has now reported its highest ever number of <a href="https://covidtracking.com/data/state/alabama/outcomes">weekly COVID-19 deaths</a>. In a gruesome echo of Southern California’s outbreak, <a href="https://www.al.com/news/2021/01/alabama-crematoriums-running-around-the-clock-as-deaths-from-covid-19-mount.html">Alabama crematoriums are running “</a><a href="https://www.al.com/news/2021/01/alabama-crematoriums-running-around-the-clock-as-deaths-from-covid-19-mount.html">around the clock</a><a href="https://www.al.com/news/2021/01/alabama-crematoriums-running-around-the-clock-as-deaths-from-covid-19-mount.html">”</a> to manage the increased demand. According to the CDC, Alabama also has the <a href="https://www.al.com/news/2021/01/alabama-has-lowest-covid-vaccine-rate-in-the-nation-cdc-says.html">lowest COVID-19 vaccination rate</a> of any state, although the Alabama Department of Public Health disputes the CDC’s numbers.</p><figure><img alt="Four bar charts for COVID-19 metrics over time in Alabama, with seven-day average lines. Hospitalizations are at close to record levels. Deaths have shot up in recent weeks, especially over the past five days" height="334" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2021/01/image10/c117c12c6.png" width="672"></figure><p>The Black population of <a href="https://covidtracking.com/race/infection-and-mortality-data#Al">Alabama</a> is being hit hardest by the state’s outbreak. Over the past two months, the number of cases per capita for Black people has increased more quickly than for other groups. For the 57 percent of Alabama cases where race is reported, Black people are more likely than anyone else in Alabama to have tested positive for COVID-19, and they are the most likely to have died.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/12/pandemic-black-death-toll-racism/617460/?utm_source=feed">Read: The virus is showing Black people what they knew all along</a>]</i></p><p>Adjusted for population, <a href="https://covidtracking.com/data/state/nevada">Nevada</a> had the second-highest number of people in the hospital with COVID-19 this week. It also reported its highest ever single-day number of deaths on Wednesday, <a href="https://www.8newsnow.com/news/health/coronavirus-health/new-nevada-reports-record-high-71-covid-19-deaths/">most of which</a> were reported in Clark County, where Las Vegas is located. Originally intended to be lifted this week, the state’s COVID-19 restrictions <a href="https://www.staradvertiser.com/2021/01/17/travel/las-vegas-advisor/las-vegas-advisor-nevada-governor-extends-covid-19-restrictions-again/">have been re-extended</a> until February 15. On January 15, the <a href="https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-nevada/covid-19-deaths-among-nevada-prisoners-skyrocket-in-january-2254269/"><em>Las Vegas Review Journal</em></a> reported that a total of 40 prisoners in the state had died due to COVID-19, a number that is more than four times higher than the state’s eight cumulative deaths among prisoners as of January 7.</p><figure><img alt="4 bar charts for COVID-19 metrics over time in Nevada, with 7-day average lines. Hospitalizations are beginning to fall as cases have sharply declined in the past few weeks." height="333" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2021/01/image3-3/051da079a.png" width="672"></figure><p>Throughout the pandemic, Latino people in <a href="https://covidtracking.com/race/infection-and-mortality-data#NV">Nevada</a> have been more likely to experience COVID-19 than their white neighbors. One in nine Latino people has tested positive for COVID-19, compared with one in 15 white people in Nevada.</p><p>We are frequently asked for data on <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/01/coronavirus-evolving-same-mutations-around-world/617721/?utm_source=feed">known variants of SARS-CoV-2</a>, the virus that causes COVID-19. At present, very little data on the spread of variants exist in the United States, and we need much more genomic-sequencing data to understand the degree to which the virus is changing, and where variants are appearing. Unfortunately, the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/12/23/us-leads-world-coronavirus-cases-ranks-43rd-sequencing-check-variants/">U.S. currently ranks 43rd in the world</a> for percentage of cases sequenced. By contrast, the United Kingdom, where the widespread B.1.1.7 variant was first identified, is ranked eighth in the world. Earlier this month, the director of the U.S. <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/amd/index.html">Office of Advanced Molecular Detection</a> at the CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases announced a plan to more than <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/03/health/coronavirus-genome-testing-cdc/index.html">double the number of samples sequenced</a>, from approximately 3,000 samples a day to about 6,500. The U.S. is currently reporting more than 200,000 new cases of COVID-19 each day. A state-run lab in Colorado was the first in the U.S. to identify a B.1.1.7-variant case this year and it is now routinely screening all samples submitted to the lab for this mutation. The <a href="https://covid19.colorado.gov/press-release/cdphe-to-add-variant-case-updates-to-data-dashboard-confirms-fifth-case-of-the-b117">Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment</a> has also added variant case counts to their COVID-19 dashboards. To date, most states lack the resources to add genomic surveillance to their ongoing COVID-19 workload.</p></content><author><name>The COVID Tracking Project</name><uri>http://www.theatlantic.com/author/covid-tracking-project/?utm_source=feed</uri></author><media:content url="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2021/01/COVID_1_21/lead_960.jpg"><media:credit>Getty / The Atlantic</media:credit></media:content><title type="html">Pandemic Numbers Are (Finally) Tiptoeing in the Right Direction</title><published>2021-01-21T14:51:00-05:00</published><updated>2021-01-21T16:18:23-05:00</updated><summary type="html">The United States remains in a very alarming place, but COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths all fell in the past seven days.</summary><link href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/01/pandemic-data-encouraging-week/617768/?utm_source=feed" rel="alternate"></link></entry><entry><id>tag:theatlantic.com,2021:50-617761</id><content type="html"><p>Jim Clyburn sat by himself on the dais at Joe Biden’s inauguration, thinking about his late wife, Emily, who wasn’t there with him.</p><p dir="ltr">Without Clyburn, the third-ranking House Democrat, who endorsed the former vice president at a crucial moment last year, Biden might not have taken the oath of office yesterday. But without Emily’s influence, Clyburn told me, that endorsement might never have happened. Without Emily, he might have watched Donald Trump be sworn in for a second term yesterday—a catastrophe he likened to the fall of Rome. Former President George W. Bush agreed, telling Clyburn at the ceremony that he was a “savior.” Bill and Hillary Clinton credited Clyburn too. “I’m taking all the credit because my late wife is not here to take it,” Clyburn replied.</p><p dir="ltr">Clyburn’s endorsement of Biden in February 2020, four days before the South Carolina primary, helped make Biden the Democratic front-runner. Emily Clyburn died in September 2019, but she had made her preference for Biden known one evening the previous June, after Clyburn got home from his “World Famous Fish Fry,” the big political fundraiser he’s hosted back home every year since 1992. Twenty-three Democrats seeking the presidency had appeared onstage at Clyburn’s event that night.</p><p dir="ltr">“Well, I know it’s a big crowd, and I know we’ve got good friends running,” Emily told him, “but our best hope for defeating Trump is Joe Biden.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2021/01/photos-inauguration-president-joseph-r-biden/617749/?utm_source=feed">Photos: The inauguration of President Joseph R. Biden Jr.</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">As they mingled at Biden’s inauguration yesterday, Democrats and Republicans alike told me they were optimistic. But they also had a very real sense that this presidency might be the last chance for the leaders of Biden’s generation to save the republic—that the country’s future now rests in the hands of a generation that won’t be around to see the outcomes of its decisions.</p><p>Biden is old. He’s the oldest president ever. He’s also two years younger than Clyburn. He’s two years younger than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Chuck Schumer, who took over as Senate majority leader yesterday, is a baby by contrast, at 70. But Clyburn says Biden and the others were meant for this moment: “Thomas Paine wrote back in 1776, when the country was trying to give birth to itself, ‘The times have found us.’ I think the times found Joe. People say it wasn’t his time before, but maybe the time wasn’t for him before.” The pairing of Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who’s 20 years younger, Clyburn told me, is “a little bit biblical.” Scripture, he explained, “talks about the elders being called because of their knowledge; the youngsters, because they’ve got strength. And so, knowledge and strength are the things we need to move this democracy forward.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/01/trump-leaves-white-house/617758/?utm_source=feed">Read: What it was like to watch Trump leave</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">The next generation isn’t sitting around waiting, though younger Democrats are ready to defer to Biden for now. Before the inauguration ceremony, I caught up with Eric Swalwell, a California congressman who’s half Clyburn’s age, and who briefly ran for president in 2019 with buttons that read <span class="smallcaps">Pass the Torch</span>. The gag poked fun at Biden, who had called for the generation before him to hand over power in a 1986 speech, when Swalwell was in kindergarten. Most people remember the first Democratic primary debate for Harris’s run-in with Biden, but a few minutes before that, Swalwell took a swing of his own: “If we are going to solve the issue, pass the torch. If we are going to solve climate chaos, pass the torch. If we want to end gun violence and solve student debt, pass the torch.” Biden laughed. “I’m holding on to that torch,” he said then.</p><p dir="ltr">Yesterday morning, looking up at the bunting and the presidential seal in front of where Biden was about to appear, Swalwell told me he was ready to acknowledge that his pitch hadn’t been what the country needed. “I ran making the generational case, but I get why the country right now feels like it [needs] experience and seasoning,” he said. Swalwell wants intense and speedy action out of the White House and Congress to restore Americans’ faith in government. “I don’t think we’ve got any more lives left,” he told me. “People need to see [that] government is working.”</p><p dir="ltr">Andy Kim, a Millennial congressman who worked on the National Security Council during the Obama administration and was elected as part of the 2018 wave, hopes that Biden and other Democratic leaders are ready to share power with younger generations. “It’s hard to put myself in the heads of the older leaders up there, but as the 38-year-old son of immigrants, married to the daughter of immigrants, who won a House seat—I hope that shows America that we have a new generation stepping up,” Kim told me. “I don’t want us to constantly feel like we’re on a precipice.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/a-sermon-in-americas-civic-religion/617750/?utm_source=feed">David Graham: A sermon in America’s civic religion</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Clyburn was thinking of his congressional colleagues, too—but also of the storming of the Capitol two weeks ago, and of Martin Luther King Jr. “King told us in his <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/02/letter-from-a-birmingham-jail/552461/?utm_source=feed">‘Letter From Birmingham Jail</a>’ that he was coming to the conclusion that the people of ill will in our society were making a much better use of time than the people of goodwill.” That sort of attitude, he said, was what led to the Capitol siege. “People of goodwill were just sitting on the sidelines, pretending nothing was going on, indifferent to the whole thing,” he said. The mob that had climbed the scaffolding set up for the inauguration, in an attempt to subvert the Constitution, reminded him of the fragility of democracy, especially the democracy Biden has now inherited.</p><p dir="ltr">“The weather was a good metaphor for today,” Clyburn said. “It was pretty murky weather for every other inauguration that I’ve attended. Today there was snow falling… and it was not long before all of a sudden the sun came out real bright, as if we were starting a new day and a new era to end the error”—he paused to spell out the letters of the pun—“the e-r-r-o-r that the people made four years ago.”</p></content><author><name>Edward-Isaac Dovere</name><uri>http://www.theatlantic.com/author/edward-isaac-dovere/?utm_source=feed</uri></author><media:content url="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2021/01/gerontocracyRedo_copy/lead_960.jpg"><media:credit>Getty / The Atlantic</media:credit></media:content><title type="html">The Biden Generation’s Last Chance</title><published>2021-01-21T13:08:19-05:00</published><updated>2021-01-21T16:32:37-05:00</updated><summary type="html">The country’s future now rests in the hands of a generation that won’t be around to see the outcomes of its decisions.</summary><link href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/01/jim-clyburn-joe-biden-old-president-generation/617761/?utm_source=feed" rel="alternate"></link></entry><entry><id>tag:theatlantic.com,2021:50-617765</id><content type="html"><p dir="ltr">Donald Trump’s chaotic final days in the White House could present President Joe Biden with a historic opportunity to broaden his base of public support and splinter Republican opposition to his agenda.</p><p dir="ltr">Recent polls have repeatedly found that about three-fourths or more of GOP voters accept Trump’s disproven charges that Biden stole the 2020 election, a number that <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/01/bidens-two-huge-challenges-after-the-capitol-riot/617692/?utm_source=feed">has understandably alarmed</a> domestic-terrorism experts. But in the same surveys, between one-fifth and one-fourth of Republican partisans have rejected that perspective. Instead, they’ve expressed unease about their party’s efforts to overturn the results—a campaign that culminated in the January 6 attack on the Capitol by a mob of Trump’s supporters.</p><p dir="ltr">Those anxieties about the GOP’s actions, and about Trump’s future role in the party, may create an opening for Biden to dislodge even more Republican-leaning voters, many of whom have drifted away from the party since Trump’s emergence as its leader. If Biden could lastingly attract even a significant fraction of the Republican voters dismayed over the riot, it would constitute a seismic change in the political balance of power.</p><p dir="ltr">“There is a universe of Republicans looking to divorce Trump,” John Anzalone, Biden’s chief pollster during the campaign, told me. “They don’t necessarily know how to do it … [but] January 6 was kind of the reckoning.”</p><p dir="ltr">In his inaugural address yesterday, Biden made clear that he will pursue those voters. He centered the speech on a promise to unify the country and made an explicit appeal to voters skeptical of him. But he also unambiguously condemned the threat to democracy that Trump unleashed. In doing so, he defined a new dividing line in American politics, between those who uphold the country’s democratic system and those who would subvert it. “We must end this uncivil war,” Biden insisted.</p><p dir="ltr">Beyond providing electoral possibilities for Democrats, the GOP coalition’s widening fissures could provide Biden with leverage to win greater support for his legislative agenda from congressional Republicans, especially in the Senate. Mainstream Republicans’ desire to separate themselves from violent extremists could make some of them more eager to find areas of cooperation with Biden, analysts in both parties have told me. If GOP voters disillusioned with Trump express relatively more approval of Biden, that could also make Republican legislators more comfortable voting with him on some issues. And the bloody backdrop of the Capitol assault could make it more difficult for the GOP to engage in the virtually lockstep resistance that the party employed against Barack Obama during his first months in office.</p><p dir="ltr">“If the Republicans play a hard obstructionist role, there is a good chance that they will turn off some of the more moderate Republicans, who will see it as an effort to delegitimize Biden by other means,” the Democratic pollster Geoff Garin told me. “A lot of this will depend not only on how Biden plays his hand, but how Republican leaders play their hand.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/01/republicans-are-already-rewriting-trump-years/617715/?utm_source=feed">Read: The coming Republican amnesia</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Biden still faces significant headwinds in securing cooperation from Republicans. He can’t threaten many of them politically, because all but three senators and about 10 House members represent jurisdictions that voted for Trump in November. And, as white-collar suburban voters have drifted away from the GOP, most Republican lawmakers have shifted their focus toward promoting massive turnout among Trump’s hard-core base of non-college-educated, nonurban, and evangelical white voters—a group that’s likely to be dubious of any cooperation with the new president.</p><p dir="ltr">One measure of Biden’s challenge came when he declared in his speech, “Disagreement must not lead to disunion.” With that warning, Biden became the first president in more than 150 years to use the word <em>disunion</em> in his inaugural address, according to a comprehensive database kept by UC Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project. No president since Abraham Lincoln in 1861—who spoke when the South had already seceded but the Civil War’s shooting had not yet begun—had thought that the threat of the nation coming apart was material enough to deploy the word in an inaugural address. The only other two presidents who ever did, according to the database, were William Henry Harrison (in 1841) and James Buchanan (whose pro-South maneuvering after his 1857 inaugural helped pave the road to the Civil War). To raise the possibility of disunion, even while cautioning against it, shows how far the nation’s partisan and social chasms have widened after four years of Trump’s relentless division.</p><p dir="ltr">Still, the continuing shock waves from the Capitol assault and the ongoing threat of the COVID-19 pandemic may create crosscutting pressures on at least some Republicans to find ways to work with Biden.</p><p dir="ltr">The $1.9 trillion coronavirus <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/14/business/economy/biden-economy.html">rescue package</a> that Biden announced last week will offer a crucial early test of each party’s strategy in this fluid environment. The Biden White House’s initial preference is to advance the package through the conventional bill-making process, rather than using a special legislative procedure, known as reconciliation, that allows tax-and-spending proposals to pass with a simple-majority vote, one senior White House official told me this week, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy.</p><p dir="ltr">Debate over whether to employ reconciliation may sound like an obscure process argument, but it has sweeping implications. As the official noted, Biden would have practical reasons to skip the procedure now: It takes longer than conventional legislating (when Biden wants to rush out new money for economic assistance and vaccine distribution), and he may also want to save reconciliation for a larger economic-recovery package he plans to unveil next month. (Usually, reconciliation can be used only once in each budget year, but because it hasn’t yet been employed in the fiscal year that continues through September, Biden theoretically could utilize it twice in 2021 to cover both the rescue and the recovery plans.)</p><p dir="ltr">But above all, by attempting to pass the bill the normal way, Biden is making a political statement about his intent to forge compromise between the parties. If the White House and congressional Democrats don’t use the reconciliation tool, they will need 60 votes to break a probable Senate filibuster. That means Biden would need support from at least 10 Senate Republicans, even if he were to pass the measure solely with Democratic votes in the House.</p><p dir="ltr">Winning that many Senate Republican votes wouldn’t be easy; winning them without major concessions might be impossible. When Obama took office in 2009 amid the last economic crisis, his initial recovery plan attracted just three GOP votes to break a filibuster. Biden, as vice president, helped negotiate the package with Republicans, who required the administration to cut about $100 billion in proposed spending and enhance tax cuts. To this day, some Democrats believe that those choices slowed the economic recovery during Obama’s first two years and contributed to the GOP’s landslide gains in the 2010 election. (Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, may have reflected that lingering frustration <a href="https://twitter.com/GregJKrieg/status/1351972663716147200?s=20">when he told ABC yesterday</a>, “If we hear very early on that Republicans do not want to act” on Biden’s plan, “we’re gonna do it alone” through reconciliation.)</p><p dir="ltr">The degree to which Biden accepts concessions on his rescue blueprint will set an early template for his administration’s approach to Congress. But the reverse is true too: Republicans’ response to the package will show how many lawmakers feel comfortable fighting Biden from the outset—and how many feel pressure to chart a more nuanced course.</p><p dir="ltr">William Hoagland, a former Republican staff director for the Senate Budget Committee, predicts that Biden <em>can</em> ultimately attract 10 Republican senators for his rescue package. Although Hoagland says Biden will likely need to narrow the plan to its core relief elements—for instance, by dropping a proposal to raise the minimum wage—he believes that GOP lawmakers will feel pressure to act. “In the crisis we’re facing, I think [enough] Republicans will come around, and there’s going to be a desire to have some form of showing that, with Trump out of here, we can work together,” Hoagland, now a senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank, told me.</p><p dir="ltr">Until the January 6 riot, many Republicans assumed that their party would remain captive to Trump and his base. But Trump’s unending efforts to subvert the election, capped by the attack, scrambled those calculations and weakened his position inside the party. The loss of his Twitter platform—his most fearsome political weapon—further defanged him.</p><p dir="ltr">An array of national polls conducted since the attack show that Trump remains extremely popular within the GOP base. But he’s lost voters too. “What you’ve seen over the past two months is this interesting tension, where he’s simultaneously consolidated the core chunk of people who support him while pushing away the marginal people who would put up with [his] antics because they like the policies,” the Republican communications consultant Liam Donovan told me.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/01/bidens-two-huge-challenges-after-the-capitol-riot/617692/?utm_source=feed">Read: Joe Biden’s looming war on white supremacy</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr"><a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/17/politics/cnn-poll-trump-lowest-approval-of-his-presidency/index.html">In a new CNN survey</a>, for instance, just over three-fourths of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said they approve of Trump’s performance in office. Nearly as many said they do not consider Biden the legitimate winner of the election. But nearly one-fifth of Republicans and Republican-leaners said they disapprove of Trump’s performance—a much higher share than through most of his presidency—and about one-fourth said they <em>do</em> consider Biden the legitimate winner. Two other telling stats: More than one in four said Trump bears at least some responsibility for the Capitol attack. And roughly the same number also partially blame the congressional Republicans who objected to the Electoral College vote.</p><p dir="ltr">Other surveys have similarly captured erosion in Trump’s internal position. About one-fourth of Republicans who approved of Trump in an August survey disapprove of him now, <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/01/20/how-we-know-the-drop-in-trumps-approval-rating-in-january-reflected-a-real-shift-in-public-opinion/?utm_source=AdaptiveMailer&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=21-01-20%20Real%20change%20in%20Trump%20approval%20FT%20HEADS%20UP&amp;org=982&amp;lvl=100&amp;ite=7782&amp;lea=1712621&amp;ctr=0&amp;par=1&amp;trk=">the Pew Research Center found</a> when it recently reinterviewed the poll’s subjects. And a surprisingly large share of Republicans in surveys conducted after the riot by both Pew (40 percent) and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-poll-post-abc/2021/01/14/aeac7b96-5690-11eb-a817-e5e7f8a406d6_story.html">ABC/<em>The Washington Post</em></a> (35 percent) said the GOP should set a different direction or reduce Trump’s influence in the party.</p><p dir="ltr">The share of Republican voters who appear open to Biden is smaller, but not insignificant: <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/19/politics/cnn-poll-biden-favorability/index.html">In the CNN poll</a>, roughly one in five Republican and GOP-leaning voters said they believe he would be, at least, a fairly successful president. About the same number said they view him favorably. Overall, about 60 percent of adults gave Biden positive marks on each question.</p><p dir="ltr">Those findings underscore Biden’s potential to expand his audience. For almost all of this century, as the parties have grown more polarized, presidents have only rarely attracted support from as much as 55 percent of Americans. Trump became the only president in the history of the Gallup Poll never to reach even 50 percent approval at any point in his tenure.</p><p dir="ltr">Anzalone told me that although he’s not “looking [to set] expectations,” he believes that Biden could begin with a much broader base of support than Trump ever amassed. Given Biden’s strong marks in polls during the transition, he said, the new president has a chance for his job-approval rating “to approach or exceed 60 percent … which is really difficult in this environment.”</p><p dir="ltr">In both parties, many operatives are doubtful that Biden could sustain such expansive support for any prolonged period. But even an approval rating consistently over 50 percent might make more Republicans comfortable voting with him—and also improve the Democrats’ odds of avoiding major losses in the next midterm elections, which are typical for a president’s party in his first term.</p><p dir="ltr">The key dynamic for the next two years: Biden, a politician with an instinct for outreach, is arriving precisely as Trump’s presidency has left many traditionally Republican-leaning voters unmoored and uncertain. Those disaffected Republicans, Donovan noted, “demographically and otherwise match the sorts of people who have been fleeing the party to begin with. That paints the opportunity [for Biden] there. I think it’s real, and it’s only going to continue absent some other shift [in the GOP] we’ve not seen yet.”</p><p dir="ltr">It’s entirely possible that the scale and ambition of the Democratic agenda will unite Republican elected officials and voters alike in opposition, allowing them to bridge their differences over Trump’s legacy and future role in the party. That may even be the most likely outcome of Biden’s first two years. But as Trump leaves Washington stained by the Capitol riot, it’s no longer the <em>guaranteed</em> outcome. The GOP faces the alternative prospect of a bitter fissure between its Trumpist wing and its more traditional faction, which will play out through every legislative choice the party faces, starting immediately with the former president’s Senate impeachment trial. All of that tension and turmoil leaves an opening for Biden big enough to drive an Amtrak train through.</p></content><author><name>Ronald Brownstein</name><uri>http://www.theatlantic.com/author/ronald-brownstein/?utm_source=feed</uri></author><media:content url="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2021/01/GettyImages_1230696190/lead_960.jpg"><media:credit>Jonathan Ernst / Pool / Getty</media:credit></media:content><title type="html">Trump’s Parting Gift to Joe Biden</title><published>2021-01-21T09:50:42-05:00</published><updated>2021-01-21T15:43:23-05:00</updated><summary type="html">Tension within the Republican coalition over the Capitol riot could push GOP-leaning voters into the new president’s camp.</summary><link href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/01/how-biden-could-win-over-republican-voters-post-riot/617765/?utm_source=feed" rel="alternate"></link></entry><entry><id>tag:theatlantic.com,2021:50-617395</id><content type="html"><p><em>Editor&rsquo;s Note:</em> Read Brontez Purnell’s new short story, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/1857/11/brontez-purnell-new-fiction-early-retirement/617392/">“Early Retirement.”</a> <br /></p><p dir="ltr">“Early Retirement” is taken from Brontez Purnell’s forthcoming novel-in-stories, <em>100 Boyfriends</em> (available on February 2). To mark the story’s publication in <em>The Atlantic</em>, Purnell and Amy Weiss-Meyer, a deputy managing editor of the magazine, discussed the story over email. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.</p><hr><p><strong>Amy Weiss-Meyer:</strong> In the first few lines of the story, the narrator, Antonio, describes his new habit of applying Preparation H to the bags beneath his eyes. It’s a darkly funny introduction to a character who is both vain and shiftless, self-conscious but unapologetically himself. What, to you, are the primary uses of humor in storytelling?</p><p><strong>Brontez Purnell:</strong> Sometimes I feel like I write fiction from a strong theater background—fiction is drama, and the story has to move. In my head humor and drama are such close siblings. Fraternal twins, maybe? One is always coming out of the other. Also, the character in the story, Antonio, is experiencing a deep depression, and there are ways (sometimes) when in those bouts we become these <em>funny</em> characters. Like, people who show up to CVS in complete pajamas and slippers—midday, no less. Are these people deeply depressed? Oh, hell yeah. Are they kind of funny to watch? Yes. I just like Antonio as a character because you can tell he likes, or at the very least is certainly not afraid of, who he’s become.</p><p>I feel like I use humor as a tool the same way my characters are using it: as a flotation device, a defense mechanism, a point at which to rest or energize. What <em>can’t</em> humor do, really? I like taking risks in my writing, and using humor is kind of based in risk—it can sometimes be dismissed as lacking intellectual rigor, and worse still be seen as lowbrow. I think all good theater and literature should run the zodiac of feelings: Some of it should be sad, some of it profound; some of it should be boring and some of it should jump completely off the cliff. Whatever vehicle I’m using, I’m always trying to arrive at a certain sense of balance.</p><p><strong>Weiss-Meyer:</strong> Some of the funniest asides in your writing are also the most cutting: on the gentrification of San Francisco, for instance, or white neoliberals. Do you see your fiction as a form of social commentary?</p><p><strong>Purnell:</strong> I’m really, really Black and really, really gay so by design anything I write becomes “social commentary.” It’s sooooooooo exhausting. I have always wanted to have Walter Cronkite’s <em>very specific</em> white-man privilege; they literally called him “the most trusted man in America.” Like, whatever came out of his mouth was the honest-so-help-me-God <em>truth</em>. I would really hope that’s where my social commentary would vibrate someday, at the same pitch as that. That said, I would also like to quote a writer friend of mine and say, “I’ve done too much petty hustling to be wildly credible”—again, <em>truth</em>. As for my relentless attack on whiteness, I can assure any offended white neoliberals that I have only about as much contempt for white neoliberal fundamentalism as it has for me.</p><p><strong>Weiss-Meyer:</strong> Antonio is a struggling actor who’s nearly ready to quit the field. He wants applause, but has grown uncomfortable with direct attention. Is that dilemma primarily a professional one, or is it playing out in his personal life too?</p><p><strong>Purnell:</strong> Strictly professional. All plot and drama aside, he’s really just like any person who has come to hate his job. This story is about an actor, but could have easily been about a teacher, a pilot, a professional skateboarder, a tech engineer. He’s a marijuana grower by trade, which is seasonal work. He’s reexamining the seasons in his life, and deciding he has to make a change if he wants to grow and be happy.</p><p><strong>Weiss-Meyer:</strong> The phrase <em>early retirement</em> implies a choice to voluntarily walk away from one’s profession. In Antonio’s case, the final blow to his career comes when he gets drunk and blacks out during a performance—his “onstage retirement party.” Is there a sense of joy, or liberation, to be found in the ruins of a career?</p><p><strong>Purnell:</strong> I think sometimes that we as people can behave like shook-ass octopuses in times of distress—like, totally gnaw our own arm off to get out of a situation. That said, though his exit was violent and bloody, I think Antonio mostly feels a liberation or a weight let off his shoulders.</p><p><strong>Weiss-Meyer:</strong> Throughout the story, Antonio references the feeling of being underwater, which, depending on his mood, can be either comforting or disconcerting. He also spends time working near a lake poisoned with mercury, in a place where he needs to make special trips to the store to procure drinking water. What is the function of water as a metaphor in the story?</p><p><strong>Purnell:</strong> It works in a lot of ways. When he’s listening to the highway at night and intuiting it as hearing the ocean, he’s conjuring a kind of peace for himself. But then there’s this other battle with water as bell jar, making everything dense and murky, and there’s a hard distortion on how to move ahead, or where to file memories. He’s intensely tethered to both metaphors.</p><p><strong>Weiss-Meyer:</strong> The task of “killing all the boys” (eliminating male plants from the marijuana crop he tends) suits Antonio, as does working alone. Is the alienation temporary, or does it signal a larger shift toward solitude? Is he done seeking applause?</p><p><strong>Purnell: </strong>I think certainly for the time being he’s done, but again, this story had a strong sense of “seasons” to it. He’s done for this season of his life, but I can’t say what that character would do in the long run. He has a certain combustible quality, right?</p></content><author><name>Amy Weiss-Meyer</name><uri>http://www.theatlantic.com/author/amy-weiss-meyer/?utm_source=feed</uri></author><media:content url="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2020/12/Atlantic_bront_v2/lead_960.png"><media:credit>Melissa Dale Neal</media:credit></media:content><title type="html">What Novelists Can Learn From Playwrights</title><published>2021-01-21T09:00:00-05:00</published><updated>2021-01-21T11:04:02-05:00</updated><summary type="html">Brontez Purnell on writing fiction from a theater background</summary><link href="https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2021/01/brontez-purnell-talks-about-his-new-short-story-early-retirement/617395/?utm_source=feed" rel="alternate"></link></entry><entry><id>tag:theatlantic.com,2021:50-617392</id><content type="html"><p><em>Editor&rsquo;s Note:</em> Read <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/1857/11/brontez-purnell-talks-about-his-new-fiction-early-retirement/617395/">an interview</a> with Brontez Purnell about his writing process. <br /></p><p class="dropcap" dir="ltr"><span class="smallcaps">He had adopted</span> this insane new beauty practice of rubbing Preparation H on the bags under his eyes. He was trying to scrub that puffy, confused, alcoholic look right off his face—it burned to all hell but goddamn if it didn’t work. There had to be some kind of fancy, faggy, anti-aging, anti-inflammatory something or other at a boutique in San Francisco that, like, smelled nice and blended into the skin in a less severe way. But these days he could barely make it to the corner store, much less downtown San Francisco.</p><p dir="ltr">The trolley cars bothered him, the European tourists giving him that <em>What are</em> you <em>doing here?</em> look on the street bothered him, effort in general bothered him—put all these factors together and what was left was a tube of hemorrhoid cream purchased at the Grocery Outlet for $1.50. He still smelled like alcohol in the morning, but at least his face didn’t look all fucked-up. The small victory would have to do.</p><p dir="ltr">The past couple of months he had started sleeping with his feet hanging out of his second-story window. It helped to correct his restless moving around in bed, and now he could hear the cars out on the highway in the night. He started to have dreams that he was peacefully underwater, but he knew his brain was reinterpreting the cars roaring past. From a distance, the hum of the highway sounded like waves crashing into land. In his bed, he would pull the covers over his head and imagine being in the ocean. Alone and at peace.</p><p dir="ltr">The fall had been a hard stretch.</p><p dir="ltr">He was an actor and had gotten a job that summer as the lead of this god-awful play, some drama about a murderer in a mining town during the Gold Rush. It bored him to tears and he hit the bottle real hard one night before the show, ended up blacking out onstage and being removed from the play the next day. It was not the first time this had happened.</p><p dir="ltr">He relayed the story to his friend Mark over the phone.</p><p dir="ltr">“I got drunk and embarrassed myself in front of a bunch of prominent white neoliberals,” he offered.</p><p dir="ltr">“Again?!” said Mark.</p><p dir="ltr">“Again. The stage manager was this hippie who told me I would never work in this town again! I broke down and cried.” Real tears—he could feel them leaking through the film of the Preparation H.</p><p dir="ltr">Mark kept his cool. “I mean, that’s nice of her to threaten you and all, but keep in mind you never really worked there before—who gives a flying fuck?! Meet me and the boys for lunch.”</p><p dir="ltr">He and Mark were brothers of sorts. A decade and a half ago, the two of them had been cast in a TV show on a fledgling gay channel, about the lives of four single Black gay men in L.A. It was a big to-do—audiences loved it, and he basically played the Black version of all the white queens he hated. He had been working on some horrible avant-garde play in San Francisco when his agent called him with an offer for the part of Jonathan—muscular, 33, a nonurban Black hippie wallflower type. Easy enough. He had been having problems landing acting gigs that didn’t read as “urban”—every role called for a strong masculine Black man with confidence and all the answers, and he couldn’t fake that even for a paycheck. The role of Jonathan felt tailor-made—after all, he’d grown up in Encino.</p><p dir="ltr">The show was so uniquely Black (or as “Black” as white West Hollywood tastes would allow) that no one noticed the characters for what they were: really shitty muscle queens from L.A.</p><p dir="ltr">He hoped at first that they would mirror the Spice Girls and each have some form of distinct personhood (he wanted to be the dark-skinned “woke” one), but no such luck. Instead they were four leads who all mirrored one another like quadruplets; the running catchphrase of the show (said in unison) was “Ew! He’s fat!” (Cue laugh track.)</p><p dir="ltr">He’d made semi-decent money from the sitcom for the price of his soul and done what all reasonable G-list “celebrities” did: stumbled into cocaine and alcohol addiction. The show was over before the third season and he kept on drinking. He moved back to San Francisco, broken as all hell, and chased jobs in regional theater. During harvest season, he worked on the pot farms up north.</p><p dir="ltr">Mark had also moved to San Francisco recently—he was working as an agent now, developing talent.</p><p dir="ltr"><em>I hate the idea of meeting these faggots for lunch</em>, he thought, getting ready to do just that. He despised Mark’s habit of always dragging boys he was fucking to brunch for an awkward meet and greet. Especially today.</p><p dir="ltr">Still—it was time to go meet these faggots.</p><p dir="ltr">Upon arriving, he quickly ordered an Irish Health—Jameson whiskey and green tea on ice with simple sugar (and a splash of Baileys, if you must).</p><p dir="ltr">He slammed it and then ordered a double of the same, feeling better.</p><p dir="ltr">Mark showed up with two queens he’d had sex with the night before. One boy was a blonde and the other had a birthmark on his face. Mark was dominating, as always. He had a way of taking a conversation and boiling it down to its essentials—his stories always led back to sex and/or violence. At this particular brunch he was explaining how he had recently been robbed south of Market Street.</p><p dir="ltr">“I had on a thousand-dollar watch, had all my credit cards on me, $700 in cash I owed my roommate, and an extra-large cheese pizza I’d ordered from the place on the corner. So I see this big Black muscle queen walking toward me from 12th Street. Big ole uncut dick swinging to the gods in his track pants and I’m staring him down like, <em>Wanna fuck?</em> He rolls up on me and the last thing I remember is him punching me in the head. Anyway, I wake up about 30 minutes later, and I know it’s 30 minutes later ’cause I still had my watch on, plus my credit cards and the cash—the only thing missing was the pizza!”</p><p dir="ltr">The boy with the birthmark spit up his Jack-and-soda.</p><p dir="ltr">The blond boy asked me what I did.</p><p dir="ltr">“I was an actor but I failed. Now I work in agriculture, seasonally,” I said, not looking him in the eye. “I’m in between trips.”</p><p dir="ltr">“You mean you grow weed?” he pressed.</p><p dir="ltr">“Yes.”</p><p dir="ltr">They all got drunker and went to Mark’s. The other men got naked on the bed, but he felt apart, too drunk and sad to achieve an erection. There came a point when the merry trio was having sex on top of him and he rolled over and pulled the covers over his head. He wanted to be underwater again.</p><p class="dropcap" dir="ltr"><span class="smallcaps">This year</span>, he took a new way to the farm. Just to be a troll, he’d signed up for one of those Christian free-ride groups, and it totally backfired. The Christian man he hitched a ride with was on his way to Oregon from Texas; he made it a point to pray every time they stopped to get gas or take a piss. At one prayer stop, the Holy Ghost lasted for 20 minutes and ended with the man going into full-on testimony. He sat in the passenger seat listening to the man and wished to God (ironically enough) that he could find a ride group where all he had to do was flash his dick and get to his destination in a timely manner.</p><p dir="ltr">The car finally made its way to Lake County. The farm was near there.</p><p dir="ltr">Supposedly Clear Lake was the largest lake in California, and supposedly it was the oldest lake in North America. He was told these things but never bothered to confirm them himself.</p><p dir="ltr">The car navigated the two-lane highway that circled the lake for miles and miles.</p><p dir="ltr">Post–World War II, the lake had been a popular Northern California tourist destination; he spied from the car window all the dilapidated fishing piers and run-down motor lodges with their decaying mid-century signs more or less intact.</p><p dir="ltr">The lake itself was fishable, yet the catch was rarely edible. The mine nearby had closed in the ’50s, but not before polluting the entire body of water with mercury. It was poison.</p><p dir="ltr">The car dropped him off at the gas station nearest to the farm and he waited for the farm owner to pick him up. It had once been owned by this dyke who then sold it to a Puerto Rican man from New Jersey.</p><p dir="ltr">He watched the new owner pull up in a huge black pickup truck, introduced himself, and got in. The owner gave him the rundown—there were 92 outdoor plants tucked out past the valley that he would attend to and dry before the seasonal trimmers came in and manicured the buds. The new owner would fly out every two weeks and give him a ride to the general store to replenish his supplies: drinking water, gas for the generators, toilet paper, all that stuff. The owner gave him two guns to keep in case feds or thieves came lurking, and left him on the property to do his work.</p><p dir="ltr">That was in late July, and he had now been on the mountain for a while. The exact number of days, he could not tell—time blurred so much up here. His task was repetitive, but he loved being alone. Just him, the plants, the drying room (the only built structure on the property), the hum of the gas generators, and his two guns.</p><p dir="ltr">His job was to kill all the boys. Even the smallest amount of a male plant’s pollen can seed a whole crop, and pot with seeds is unsellable. Some girl plants could change sex, “dropping balls” (seed sacks) and getting all the other girls pregnant. So he had to kill and dispose of all the new boys too.</p><p dir="ltr">Years earlier, he had worked at several random farms and trimmed for strangers, but it hadn’t lasted long. Being stuck three hours from nowhere in the California backwoods with white hippies was a particular form of hell; they all smelled bad and had Ganesh tattoos. They insisted that he “think positively.” He hated that shit. He had scored the right gig eventually, with this small private farm that he worked alone until the fall trimmers came to finish up.</p><p dir="ltr">A fussy creek cut through the hills, and he bathed in it in the mornings, the icy coldness of it stinging his balls. No soap could be used, for fear of polluting the river. His drinking water and all his other supplies were kept in a slender kitchen with a separate entrance on the back side of the drying room. He had to shit in a hole in the ground.</p><p dir="ltr">The goal was to get all the weed cut and dried before the rainy season arrived in winter. Two years before, the rain had started early and mold had grown on all the plants, which didn’t begin to cover how damn miserable he had been in the tent he had pitched. He made a pallet to sleep on in the drying room this time around.</p><p dir="ltr">At night, when he was alone in the drying shed, the landscape outside had the dark glow of moonlight. The moon put a soul filter on everything. The hum of the gas-powered generator reminded him of the underwater sound of the highway cars he could hear from his bedroom in the city. He felt like a nature god, alone in the great expanse.</p><p class="dropcap" dir="ltr"><span class="smallcaps">If he really thought</span> about it, he had never wanted to be an actor. Not really. In his memory, it had happened upon him. On a whim, he had stormed the stage when he was 5: a one-man coup.</p><p dir="ltr">His older cousin was 8 or 9 at the time, participating in her elementary-school beauty pageant, and he was sitting in his Sunday church suit in the audience in the school gymnasium, next to his auntie. He saw all the girls in delicate dresses, lit up onstage, and noticed the applause every time they twirled about.</p><p dir="ltr">When one contestant departed the stage, he saw it empty and knew he should be there. He sneaked from under his auntie and ran up the side steps and placed his little body midstage. He couldn’t see the faces of the audience (perhaps an early indicator of his nearsightedness). Then came the roar of applause. He knew he had done something right because everyone was clapping for him. As soon as the shock wore off, his little face grinned—just in time for his auntie to come rip him off the stage by his hand.</p><p dir="ltr">“Boy, you know you know betta!” she whisper-yelled in his ear as she led him down the steps. He couldn’t even hear her. The smile on his face lasted for days.</p><p dir="ltr">All he’d ever wanted, he realized, was the stage lights and the applause; the acting itself was just the driver holding the carrot in front of the donkey. He figured that if society had allowed a butcher, a baker, or a candlestick maker to merit stage lights and applause, he would have easily been any one of those, too.</p><p dir="ltr">His mother had always hated his profession; she thought it was too common. She barely even congratulated him when he got on a network show. She wanted him to be a teacher, and she eventually got her wish.</p><p dir="ltr">He’d spent a few years teaching acting workshops at regional theaters after the TV show was canceled—there were a great many people who couldn’t act. He marveled at how all reluctant thespians shared the same complaint: “I don’t like being watched.” The statement was a cop-out. He usually cured the novice actor with one sentence. “You’re not afraid of being watched—you’re afraid of watching yourself be watched.” The student would invariably look confused, and more often than not, a series of breakthroughs ensued.</p><p dir="ltr">In his mind, spewing words was the easy part; the work of blocking out motions was the challenge that killed or illuminated an expression, the business of what to do with the hands or feet while trying to convince an audience that you are someone else. Movement is always the purest indication of how truthful one is being.</p><p dir="ltr">He had never been a good actor, just a committed one—committed like Robert Downey Jr. or Mel Gibson, to being a caricature of himself. In fact, acting had given him license to be himself. The context, mannerisms, or historical backdrop could change from play to play, but he stayed wrapped up in his typecast: a fragile yet strong (or faux brave) and always spiraling man.</p><p dir="ltr">In acting he attempted to put distance between himself and the audience. It was like that first night he stepped onstage when he was 5. As far as he was concerned, there was only the holy trinity of him, the stage lights, and the void. A perfect freedom. It would not be forever.</p><p dir="ltr">He began to notice it—small at first, but then it grew, the thing he’d warned others against but slowly failed to reconcile in himself: He noticed himself being watched. It was the beginning of the end; the death was sudden. One day, out of fucking nowhere and without warning, the audience all had faces, eyes, and expectations.</p><p dir="ltr">After the television show had been canceled, and after he’d gotten bored teaching workshops, he had retreated to the tepid world of Northern California live theater, all bit parts with no infrastructure for advancement. His artistic fatigue began with two celebratory shots before each stage performance, then four, then half the bottle. Before long he had been fired, for the first of many times, because he reeked of alcohol onstage. His fatigue culminated in the night he blacked out onstage for the last of his many times.</p><p dir="ltr">After that, he’d quit booze for a bit and even went to AA—it seemed like a start, until he descended again. The next time was harder. The second and third time you fail is always worse; there’s the voice that asks, <em>Am I really choosing to be this person?</em> The realization felt like death, or like being underwater, but not in a peaceful way.</p><p dir="ltr">Now, up north and safe after his last onstage meltdown, he stood in the general store in town looking at a bottle of whiskey for a good four minutes. He had gone out to refill the surplus gas containers for the farm’s generators. He felt an intense craving but knew he’d be on the mountain by himself. Fearing the hell he might conjure, he decided to be cautious. Whiskey was his shaman drug of choice, and he knew to avoid the spirit.</p><p dir="ltr">He left the medicine aisle and got some dried jerky and water instead. He paid the cashier and left. He bought an extra blanket too, just in case. It was almost October and he had another month and a half on the mountain. It would start to turn cold soon.</p><p class="dropcap" dir="ltr"><span class="smallcaps">By 7 a.m.</span> it was warm, and in a few hours it would be too hot to work. He quickly began counting the marijuana plants, preparing some for a wet trim, taking others to the drying room.</p><p dir="ltr">He worked until his midday break, when he sat under a tree and scraped the dirt and THC crystals from his fingertips—“finger hash,” as they called it. He would smoke it later.</p><p dir="ltr">In his youth, he believed a lot of dumb shit, like that one time an older fag in a bar had relayed to him the origin of “Spanish hash.”</p><p dir="ltr">“So in Spain they send young boys running naked through the marijuana fields and then they scrape the THC from their bodies. That’s why Spanish hash is so expensive!”</p><p dir="ltr">This myth was soon debunked by a fellow weed trimmer.</p><p dir="ltr">“Naw, brother,” said Austin, this California hippie boy he sat next to in the trim room. “No naked boys. They make that shit from explosives. Butane.”</p><p dir="ltr">As the midday heat faded, he was back in the garden, making sure the plants hadn’t swapped sexes. He started to separate the good pot that would be trimmed and sold as flower from the lesser grade that would be consolidated and turned into hash.</p><p dir="ltr">Soon the chores were done and he sat drinking water under the shade of another tree. His mind always doubled down on itself at this point in the day. Whenever catching a moment’s breath, he had the same thought: <em>Where had he gone?</em></p><p dir="ltr">The last thing he remembered before the blackout was forgetting all of his lines. He was told later that he hadn’t resorted to curse words or jittery, unexpected behavior. Rather, it had been a cool and complete dissociation onstage. He’d gone to a table upstage right and buried his face in his hands for a full 15 minutes. The 49 people in the audience got frustrated and eventually walked out. His onstage retirement party.</p><p class="dropcap" dir="ltr"><span class="smallcaps">Mid-November</span>, when the harvest was over, meant it was time to return to the city to pay the rent and nestle in for the wet, rainy winter ahead.</p><p dir="ltr">He sat at the bus stop waiting for his Greyhound to arrive. He decided the bus trip would be nice and didn’t want to risk getting another religious fanatic as a driver.</p><p dir="ltr">It began raining so he wrapped himself in a poncho and covered his gear in plastic. The line for the bus was long, and the unfortunate farmhands who had not shown up early enough to stand inside the shoddy bus-stop shelter were all getting soaked.</p><p dir="ltr">On the ground near the little bench inside the shelter, he noticed a full ziplock bag of weed. Someone had dropped it or left it behind, but he didn’t even blink. He hated marijuana at this point.</p><p dir="ltr">The bus rolled up and all the wet, weary farmers boarded.</p><p dir="ltr">Looking out the window, he was taken aback as always by the beautiful landscape of the area, and by the cultural disconnect of the California backwoods. It somehow remained redneck as all hell—he even occasionally saw Confederate flags on bumper stickers. He remembered that a few hours outside any city in America, it was business as usual.</p><p dir="ltr">Later rather than sooner, he arrived in Oakland. He wanted no more of the bus and got off and called a car to take him to S.F.</p><p dir="ltr">His apartment was as he’d left it: sparsely furnished and clean. His life as a farmer had made him want to be a nomad, and every time he came back from the mountain he got rid of more and more stuff. If only it were possible to be a part-time resident in everything.</p><p dir="ltr">For the first time in forever, he felt that strange and foreign emotion—a stillness and a sense of peace. He began to cry.</p><p dir="ltr">He showered, put on warm sweats, turned on the heater, and boiled water for tea. He finally listened to the voicemails on his phone that he’d ignored while on the mountain. Mostly the usual: one from Mark saying he was no longer hanging out with the blonde or the kid with the birthmark; others from bill collectors, student-loan officers, his mother (over and over and over again)—and one of note.</p><p dir="ltr">“Hello, this is Shelia Waters from the Stein Agency in Los Angeles. This message is for Antonio Johnson. We have an offer for you—the role of Jonathan is being revamped for an upcoming movie project based on <em>Missed Connections</em>. We hope this is still your number! We have a very handsome offer! You can reach me at 310-555-7762, extension 312. Hope to talk soon!”</p><p dir="ltr">He had all but stopped breathing. The news hit him in the gut, hard. Why was the show making a comeback? It seemed like an idea he should entertain, certainly. He felt the butterflies in his stomach as he did. He paced for a bit, and thought about starting a new gym routine, a new diet; going back to his acting coach; finding a place in L.A. to stay while filming. Then the kettle began to whistle, pulling him back into his mind and his apartment.</p><p dir="ltr">He poured the boiling water on the peppermint-tea bag in the cup and brought it to his bed. He sat down and, even though it was raining, rolled his sweats up to his knees and placed his feet out the window. As quickly as it had rushed through him, his excitement fled. He was at peace as the cars sped by on the highway again. He heard waves.</p><p dir="ltr"><small><em>This story has been excerpted from Brontez Purnell’s forthcoming novel-in-stories, </em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/100-Boyfriends-Brontez-Purnell/dp/0374538980">100 Boyfriends</a>.</small></p></content><author><name>Brontez Purnell</name><uri>http://www.theatlantic.com/author/brontez-purnell/?utm_source=feed</uri></author><media:content url="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2021/01/Atlantic_Purnell_art_v1/lead_960.png"><media:credit>Timo Lenzen</media:credit></media:content><title type="html">Early Retirement</title><published>2021-01-21T09:00:00-05:00</published><updated>2021-01-21T09:00:01-05:00</updated><summary type="html">A short story</summary><link href="https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2021/01/brontez-purnell-early-retirement-a-short-story/617392/?utm_source=feed" rel="alternate"></link></entry><entry><id>tag:theatlantic.com,2021:50-617751</id><content type="html"><p>As I sat in my Capitol Hill office two weeks ago, watching a violent mob storm the symbol and seat of our democracy, I was reminded of my distant past. As a child, I saw my birth country of Somalia descend from relative stability into civil war, overnight. The spaces where people felt most secure—their homes and workplaces—suddenly became battlegrounds, torn by gunfights and bombings. Violent targeting of political leaders—once unheard-of—became commonplace.</p><p>I never expected to experience a direct assault on democracy in the United States, one of the oldest, most prosperous democracies in the world.</p><p>But if there is any lesson we can draw from the past four years, it is that it <em>can</em> happen here. If we are to address the root causes of this insurrection, we have to understand, deep within ourselves, that we are human beings like other human beings on this planet, with the same flaws and the same ambitions and the same fragilities. There is nothing magical about our democracy that will rise up and save us. Building the democratic processes we cherish today took hard and dedicated work, and protecting them will take the hard and dedicated work of people who love this country.</p><p>Our shared story of America often begins and ends with the founding—the truths we hold self-evident in our Declaration of Independence, the carefully crafted system of checks and balances enshrined in our Constitution. But in truth, our republic did not arrive overnight.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/it-was-much-worse-it-looked/617693/?utm_source=feed">David A. Graham: We’re just finding out how bad the riot really was</a>]</i></p><p>America in its early days was not a full democracy by any stretch of the imagination. The institution of chattel slavery remained a bedrock of our society, and much of our economy. The violent, forced seizure of Native American land was a cornerstone of the American ideal of “manifest destiny,” codified into policy through laws like the Indian Removal Act.</p><p>It took a literal civil war to quash a violent white-supremacist insurrection, and then to extend basic rights to the formerly enslaved.</p><p>Even then, it would take decades of organizing to guarantee women the right to vote—and later basic reproductive freedom. It would take a labor movement to outlaw child labor, institute the 40-hour work week, establish a minimum wage, and create the weekend. And it would take a civil-rights movement, a century after the Civil War, to end legal segregation and establish basic protections for Black people in this country.</p><p>The genius of our Constitution is not that it was ever sufficient (the Bill of Rights was not even included at first), but that it was modifiable—subject to constant improvement and evolution as our society progressed.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/danielle-allen-constitution/615481/?utm_source=feed">From the October 2020 issue: The flawed genius of our Constitution</a>]</i></p><p>Our republic is like a living, breathing organism. It requires attention and growth to meet the needs of its population. And just as it can be strengthened, it can be corrupted, weakened, and destroyed.</p><p>At every point in our history, revolutionary change has been met with counterrevolution. The Reconstruction amendments were followed by decades of domestic political terrorism. The civil-rights acts of the 1960s were followed by the presidency of Ronald Reagan, the “southern strategy,” mass incarceration, and deep cuts to the social safety net. The rich got richer, the military-industrial complex became more powerful, and unchecked corporate cash placed an ever-increasing stranglehold on our politics.</p><p>Donald Trump was not elected in a vacuum. Inequality, endless wars, and the corruption of unaccountable elites are all common precursors to either violent revolutions or dramatic expansions of democracy.</p><p>President Joe Biden has been tasked with bringing us back from the brink. He will govern a country whose citizens no longer share the same basic reality. He will govern a country that has deep, unhealed wounds and layers of unresolved traumas. We must all work with him and with one another to heal those wounds and to resolve those traumas. The insurrection on January 6 tells us that we are almost out of time.</p><p>The question now is which path we will take. Will we follow Trump and his co-conspirators down the path of democratic breakdown, or choose instead the arduous route of democratic reform?</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/seditionists-need-path-back-society/617746/?utm_source=feed">Anne Applebaum: Coexistence is the only option</a>]</i></p><p>Reform requires full accountability and justice for everyone who led a violent insurrection against our democracy, however powerful they may be. The very survival of our democratic government relies on the peaceful transition of power. Those who plot, plan, or incite violence against the government of the United States must be held fully accountable. That includes not just conviction of the former president by the United States Senate, but removal of any lawmaker or law-enforcement officer who collaborated with the attackers.</p><p>But we can’t stop there. We are doomed to repeat this cycle of instability and backsliding if we do not make <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/1/text?loclr=cga-bill">a bold effort</a> to reimagine our democracy—from our elections on down. We need to end the dominance of unchecked corporate money in our politics, remove the substantial barriers to voting for low-income communities and people of color, ban gerrymanders, and give full voting rights and self-government to the voters of Washington, D.C. January 6, though, demonstrates that we must go further. We must remove the antidemocratic elements from our system, including by eliminating the filibuster in the Senate, reforming the courts, abolishing the Electoral College, and moving toward a <a href="https://www.fairvote.org/ranked_choice_voting">ranked-choice</a> voting system.</p><p>We also cannot fall into the trap of making policies guided by fear, and therefore treating the symptoms of our illness without addressing the root causes. We must act on our disgust at the double standards employed against white protesters and Black ones, and against Muslims and non-Muslims. But at the same time, we must resist the very human desire for revenge—to simply see the tools that have oppressed Black and brown people employed more broadly. The answer is not a larger security structure or an omnipresent police state, but a system of justice that respects everyone’s rights and essential dignity.</p><p>If I learned anything as a survivor of civil conflict, it is that political violence does not go away on its own. Violent clashes and threats to our democracy are bound to repeat if we do not address the structural inequities underlying them. The next Trump will be more competent, and more clever. The work to prevent the next catastrophes, which we should all be able to see coming, starts now.</p><p></p></content><author><name>Ilhan Omar</name><uri>http://www.theatlantic.com/author/ilhan-omar/?utm_source=feed</uri></author><media:content url="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2021/01/Atlantic_omar_v1/lead_960.png"><media:credit>Getty / The Atlantic</media:credit></media:content><title type="html">I Never Expected to See It Here</title><published>2021-01-21T07:45:00-05:00</published><updated>2021-01-21T12:27:33-05:00</updated><summary type="html">Democracy is under attack, and we need to protect it.</summary><link href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/we-cant-stop-fighting-our-democracy/617751/?utm_source=feed" rel="alternate"></link></entry><entry><id>tag:theatlantic.com,2021:50-617762</id><content type="html"><p dir="ltr">A few days after Christmas, Molly Hering, 14, and her brother, Sam, 12, got their first shots as part of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine trials for kids. Their mom had heard about a clinical trial being conducted at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, and Molly told me that she’d agreed to join because she wanted to contribute to the vaccine-development effort.</p><p dir="ltr">Molly and Sam’s dad was recently hospitalized with COVID-19. (He recovered.) Both kids have spent most of the past year dealing with Zoom school and its attendant technical glitches. Molly finally went back to in-person ninth grade this month, but masks and social distancing are required at school. Like everyone else, she’s looking forward to the end of the pandemic. “I’ll finally be able to go to school normally,” she said.</p><p dir="ltr">With COVID-19 vaccines proven to be safe and effective in most adults, <a href="https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04368728">Pfizer</a> and <a href="https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04649151">Moderna</a> have both begun U.S. trials for kids as young as 12. And if those trials go smoothly, the vaccines will be tested in younger and younger kids. This is typical for new vaccines: “It’s called the age deescalation strategy,” Carol Kao, a pediatrician at Washington University in St. Louis, told me.</p><p dir="ltr">There are some 70 million kids in the U.S., nearly a <a href="https://www.childstats.gov/americaschildren/tables/pop1.asp">quarter of the country’s population</a>. Children in general are not especially vulnerable to COVID-19; most infections are mild or even asymptomatic. In some very rare cases—<a href="https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/news/2020/longitudinal-study-follows-multisystem-inflammatory-syndrome-children-mis-c">fewer than 0.01 percent</a>—young patients can develop a complication called multisystem inflammatory syndrome, or MIS-C, but it is generally quite treatable in a hospital.</p><p dir="ltr">Vaccinating kids, however, is often not just about the direct and immediate benefits to them. It’s also meant to protect children against diseases that would otherwise become more dangerous for them as adults—measles, mumps, and chicken pox are three common examples—and dampen the overall spread of these diseases. In the short term, the primary reason to vaccinate children against COVID-19 may be that the U.S. will have a hard time reaching herd immunity otherwise.</p><hr class="c-section-divider"><p dir="ltr">Vaccines that work in adults generally work in children. But their effects can differ, especially in very young children. In newborns, for example, antibodies passed to them in utero can interfere with the protection conferred by the <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4165321/#:~:text=For%20measles%20virus%20vaccination%2C%20maternal,and%20infectious%20disease%20under%20study.">measles vaccine</a>, which is why that vaccine is not given until babies are <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/measles/vaccination.html">12 to 15 months old</a>. An <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12131865/">early version of the pneumococcal vaccine</a> did not work well in children under 2, because it stimulated a part of the immune system that was not yet mature.</p><p dir="ltr">Multiple factors determine the recommended age for a vaccination. “For example, when’s the peak incidence of disease? When is a child most likely to respond to the vaccine?” says Cody Meissner, an expert on pediatric infectious diseases at Tufts. The answers to those questions might not align. For instance, the vaccine for HPV, a sexually transmitted virus that can lead to cervical cancer, is given to boys and girls as <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/hpv/parents/vaccine.html">young as 9 years old</a> because it stimulates a <a href="http://www.jocopediatrics.com/docs/hpv-basics-color.pdf">better immune response in preteens</a> than in older adolescents, even though preteens are unlikely to need the protection until later in life.</p><p dir="ltr">Even though kids rarely get seriously sick from COVID-19, the vaccine can protect them from an illness that may still be bad enough for them to miss school and their parents to miss work, Jeff Gerber, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told me. “Even those two-to-three-day illnesses can pile up.” He pointed out that the flu vaccine is recommended for kids, and about the same number of children <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/flu/spotlights/2019-2020/2019-20-pediatric-flu-deaths.htm#:~:text=LinkedIn-,2019%2D20%20Season's%20Pediatric%20Flu%20Deaths%20Tie%20High,Set%20During%202017%2D18%20Season&amp;text=August%2021%2C%202020%20%E2%80%93%20CDC%20today,for%20last%20season%20to%20188.">died of the flu last season</a> as have <a href="https://www.aappublications.org/news/2020/12/29/covid-2million-children-122920">died of COVID-19</a> to date.</p><p dir="ltr">But the main argument for broadly vaccinating children is that doing so is likely to reduce COVID-19 transmission. Although schools have not been sources of large outbreaks, many switched to distance learning, and most of those that held in-person classes required masks and distancing. If school buildings reopen without these precautions sometime this year, after adults get vaccinated but while kids are still vulnerable, they will essentially be hosting mass gatherings of unvaccinated people, says Jason Newland, a pediatrician at Washington University. “Guess who’s going to end up having it? All the kids,” he told me. “And those kids with certain underlying conditions are disproportionately impacted.” What’s more, kids could bring COVID-19 home from school, even if they don’t have symptoms. “Children could pass it on to Grandma and Grandpa. They can pass it on to another loved one who has diabetes or has obesity or has chronic kidney disease” and is not yet vaccinated, Newland said.</p><p dir="ltr">Public-health experts think that if precautions are in place, community transmission is low, and teachers and high-risk people are vaccinated, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/us/children-vaccine-teachers-schools-reopen-coronavirus.html">reopening schools in 2021</a> will be worth any remaining risk, given the many and wide-ranging <a href="https://en.unesco.org/covid19/educationresponse/consequences">consequences of keeping them closed</a>. But the more children are vaccinated, the safer and more normal school reopenings will be. </p><p dir="ltr">The ultimate goal of most vaccination campaigns is not just to protect the individuals who get the vaccines, but to prevent the spread of the disease to those who can’t get it, such as infants and <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/12/coronavirus-vaccine-allergic-reaction/617482/?utm_source=feed">people at risk of allergic reactions</a>. The more transmissible the virus—and unfortunately COVID-19 appears to be <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/12/virus-mutation-catastrophe/617531/?utm_source=feed">evolving to be more transmissible</a>—the more people need to be vaccinated in order to reach herd immunity and stop its spread through a population. The herd-immunity threshold against COVID-19 is estimated to be somewhere between <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/health/herd-immunity-covid-coronavirus.html">60 and 90 percent of the population</a>. Because some people can’t get the vaccine and some may be steadfastly opposed to it, the U.S. needs to vaccinate as many of the rest of us as it can. “What we want to do is reduce the number of people who might be contagious to others,” Meissner told me. Children will almost certainly need to be a part of that effort.</p><p dir="ltr">A still unanswered question about the COVID-19 vaccines, however, is how well they protect against asymptomatic transmission of the virus. When vaccinated people are exposed to the virus, their bodies’ immune response tamps down its replication—enough to reduce symptoms by 95 percent, according to the results of the Pfizer and Moderna trials for adults. But a person who is vaccinated and then exposed might still carry enough virus to spread it to others. Experts think the vaccines very likely reduce the risk of asymptomatic transmission, but follow-up studies are needed to find out by how much.</p><hr class="c-section-divider"><p dir="ltr">How soon the vaccines are available to children will depend on how long the clinical trials and the FDA review process take. In the most optimistic scenario, a vaccine could be available for large numbers of kids, especially older ones, in time for the start of the school year in the fall. But last week, Operation Warp Speed said that Moderna was <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2021/01/13/moderna-covid-19-vaccine-trial-adolescent-volunteers-coronavirus/6646795002/">having trouble recruiting enough participants</a> in its trial for adolescents, having enrolled only 800 out of a planned 3,000. The <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/11/covid-vaccine-moderna-doesnt-expect-data-for-young-children-this-year.html">company’s CEO also said</a> that while Moderna would soon begin trials for kids ages 1 to 11, it did not expect to have results until 2022. Pfizer’s adolescent trial has <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-19/kids-sign-up-for-vaccine-trials-in-next-step-to-conquer-covid">reportedly finished enrollment</a>, though the company declined to specify when it plans to move on to younger children.</p><p dir="ltr">The FDA fast-tracked the COVID-19 vaccines for adults using a process called emergency use authorization. But the normal vaccine-approval process may be more appropriate for children, says Vanderbilt’s Tina Hartert, who is leading a study on the incidence of COVID-19 in kids. Approval will take more time for several reasons. For example, the FDA has said that it wants to see more <a href="https://www.fda.gov/media/139638/download">safety data</a>—six months or more depending on the novelty of the vaccine technology—compared with the <a href="https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/vaccines/emergency-use-authorization-vaccines-explained">two months required for emergency use</a>.</p><p dir="ltr">The newness of the COVID-19 vaccines combined with the mildness of the disease in children might lead to hesitancy in some parents. When the chicken pox vaccine first became available, in the 1990s, uptake was slow—until public schools started requiring it. Meissner, who sits on the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee, said he thinks schools are unlikely to require a vaccine that is authorized only for emergency use. But there is genuine debate among advisory groups about whether to mandate COVID-19 vaccination at all. “Once you require a vaccine,” Meissner says, “a lot of people who ordinarily might get the vaccine become indignant and say, ‘I’m not going to be told what I have to do for myself or my family.’”</p><p dir="ltr">In the long term, the COVID-19 virus is <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/08/coronavirus-will-never-go-away/614860/?utm_source=feed">unlikely to go away entirely</a>—and neither is the need for vaccination. If the <a href="https://www.statnews.com/2021/01/07/coronavirus-mutation-vaccine-strength/">virus continues to mutate</a> or if immunity wanes, annual vaccinations or boosters every few years might be necessary. The vaccines could also become part of the recommended childhood immunization schedule. Experts say this is the best way to ensure that the entire population remains protected. “The most successful implementation programs are universal pediatric programs,” Kathleen Neuzil, a vaccine researcher at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, told me. Parents are already used to their children getting shots from pediatricians, and pediatricians are already used to vaccinating large numbers of children. Although children may not be particularly vulnerable to COVID-19, they will be when they reach adulthood. And vaccinating large numbers of adults, as the world is currently finding, is very difficult indeed.</p><p dir="ltr">Molly Hering, who is participating in the Pfizer trial, doesn’t yet know whether she got the placebo or the actual vaccine. She and her brother are using an app to track their side effects; she had some nausea and headaches after she first got the shot, while he had a low fever. They are going back for their second shots this week. For childhood vaccinations to help slow the spread of the virus, more volunteers will have to join them in the trials.</p></content><author><name>Sarah Zhang</name><uri>http://www.theatlantic.com/author/sarah-zhang/?utm_source=feed</uri></author><media:content url="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2021/01/2020_11_20T150036Z_1297396388_RC237K9D5UE5_RTRMADP_3_HEALTH_CORONAVIRUS_ITALY_FLU_copy/lead_960.jpg"><media:credit>REUTERS/Flavio Lo Sc</media:credit></media:content><title type="html">Why Kids Might Be Key to Reaching Herd Immunity</title><published>2021-01-21T07:35:05-05:00</published><updated>2021-01-21T19:32:27-05:00</updated><summary type="html">Children rarely get very ill from COVID-19. But there’s another reason to vaccinate them.</summary><link href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/01/should-kids-get-covid-19-vaccine/617762/?utm_source=feed" rel="alternate"></link></entry><entry><id>tag:theatlantic.com,2021:50-617736</id><content type="html"><p>As President Joe Biden takes office, his administration will get to work reversing some of the Trump administration’s most controversial and destructive policies, including the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/trump-environment-rollbacks-list.html">elimination</a> of key environmental protections, the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/us/politics/trump-immigration-hunger.html">creation</a> of new immigration restrictions, and the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/14/opinion/trump-obamacare-illegal.html">sabotage</a> of the Affordable Care Act.</p><p>After the Georgia runoffs, it’s tempting to think that a Democratic Congress could just legislate these policies away. But the Senate filibuster is likely to remain intact for now, effectively giving Republicans a veto over legislative efforts to undo President Donald Trump’s regulatory legacy.</p><p>Nor can President Biden reverse the damage just by signing <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-first-executive-orders-measures/2020/11/07/9fb9c1d0-210b-11eb-b532-05c751cd5dc2_story.html">a fat stack</a> of executive orders. Instead, the law requires federal agencies to follow certain procedures—many quite persnickety—when they make changes to government policy. And reversing Trump-era policy will be all the more difficult because that administration used its remaining days in office to create <i>additional </i>procedural obstacles to insulate its decisions from reversal.</p><p>The Biden administration will therefore have to balance a desire for speed against the need to protect its actions from court challenges. The threat of judicial review looms especially large because President Trump has <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/07/15/how-trump-compares-with-other-recent-presidents-in-appointing-federal-judges/">stacked the courts</a> with zealous conservatives who view the administrative state with suspicion and who are unlikely to take a charitable view of the new administration’s actions.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/democrats-case-court-packing/616446/?utm_source=feed">Read: The Democrats’ Supreme Court Hail Mary</a>]</i></p><p>That will put a premium on good and creative lawyering. How can federal agencies move quickly while minding their p’s and q’s?</p><p>There’s no single answer to that question; instead, much will depend on the specific legal rules that apply to different types of policies. Some will be easy to reverse—President Biden can rejoin the Paris climate accords without much fuss. Others will be harder—undoing the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/climate/endangered-species-act-changes.htmlhttps:/www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/climate/endangered-species-act-changes.html">rollback</a> of habitat protections for threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, for example, may require a cumbersome <a href="https://www.fcc.gov/about-fcc/rulemaking-process">notice-and-comment process</a>.</p><p>Nowhere will the trade-off between speed and procedural regularity be posed more starkly than in the context of Medicaid work requirements. Addressing them will be an early test of the Biden administration’s nimbleness and competence.</p><p>On the long list of the Trump administration’s bad policies, allowing the states to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients ranks high. Such requirements serve no good purpose: <a href="https://www.cbpp.org/health/states-experiences-confirm-harmful-effects-of-medicaid-work-requirements">Data show</a> that they don’t serve their ostensible goal of increasing employment. All they do is create <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/upshot/medicaid-enrollment-obstacles-kentucky-work-requirement.html">onerous paperwork</a> and strip poor people, potentially <a href="https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/implications-of-a-medicaid-work-requirement-national-estimates-of-potential-coverage-losses/">4 million</a> of them, of their health insurance.</p><p>Still, 19 Republican-controlled states <a href="https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/medicaid-waiver-tracker-approved-and-pending-section-1115-waivers-by-state/">asked</a> the Trump administration to waive parts of the Medicaid statute to allow them to impose work requirements. The Trump administration has so far granted eight such waivers, but, for now, federal courts in Washington, D.C., <a href="https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/payer/kentucky-medicaid-waivers-d-c-court-lawsuit-work-requirements">have</a> <a href="https://healthlaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Gresham-v.-Azar-DC-Circuit-Ruling-Feb-14.pdf">ruled</a> that they’re illegal. The courts’ reasoning is simple: <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/1315">By</a> law, a Medicaid waiver has to advance the program’s core objective, which is providing health coverage. Taking insurance away from people doesn’t advance that objective; it’s inimical to it.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/10/she-lost-medicaid-and-gained-addiction/616820/?utm_source=feed">The human cost of work requirements</a>]</i></p><p><span>The courts’ opinions are strong and well reasoned. Last month, however, the Supreme Court </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/us/supreme-court-medicaid-work-.html">agreed to hear</a><span> two cases about the validity of work requirements in Arkansas and New Hampshire. It’s possible—even likely, as </span><a href="https://repository.law.umich.edu/articles/1928/">I’ve written elsewhere</a><span>—that work requirements may get a sympathetic hearing from the conservative justices. If so, the waivers could spring back into effect—in the midst of a global pandemic, no less.</span></p><p>A decision upholding work requirements would also set a dangerous precedent. Absent Supreme Court intervention, as Ian Millhiser <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/12/8/22158659/supreme-court-medicaid-work-requirements-azar-arkansas-gresham-obamacare-health">noted</a> at <i>Vox</i>, “a future Republican administration would likely have to spend months or even years litigating the question of whether work requirements are permitted.” But if the Supreme Court blesses the requirements, Republicans could quickly move to impose them the next time they win the White House.</p><p>So the race is on for the Biden administration to withdraw the waivers before the Supreme Court issues its decision, probably sometime in May or June.</p><p>Easier said than done. By regulation, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services—Xavier Becerra, if he’s confirmed—can <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/42/431.420">withdraw</a> waivers when he concludes that they no longer advance Medicaid’s purposes. In doing so, however, HHS has to abide by certain procedures it agreed to follow when it granted the waivers.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/04/medicaid-work-requirements-seema-verma-cms/587026/?utm_source=feed">Read: Why states want certain Americans to work for Medicaid</a>]</i></p><p>Until two weeks ago, those procedures were modest. The agency would have had only to give objecting states “<a href="https://www.medicaid.gov/Medicaid-CHIP-Program-Information/By-Topics/Waivers/1115/downloads/mi/mi-healthy-michigan-ca.pdf#page=30">a hearing to challenge</a>” the withdrawal before it took effect. In practice, that afforded HHS lots of flexibility. Some hearings are elaborate, formal, and in person—think here of a criminal proceeding. Others are brief, casual, and on paper—the process you might use, for example, to challenge a parking ticket.</p><p>To eliminate work requirements, the agency could have held expedited, stripped-down hearings, ones that gave the states a chance to make their case, but that didn’t bog the agency down in a procedural morass. If HHS sprinted, it could have finished its hearings before the Supreme Court acted. At that point, the work-requirement cases would have been dismissed as moot, much as the Court, in a case last term, <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/18-280_ba7d.pdf">dismissed as moot</a> a challenge to a New York gun law that had since been repealed.</p><p>On January 4, however, the Trump administration <a href="https://subscriber.politicopro.com/health-care/article/2021/01/cms-moves-to-makes-it-harder-to-erase-conservative-medicaid-changes-2028100?source=email">announced</a> that it was changing the rules. In a seemingly innocuous letter to state Medicaid directors, the director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Seema Verma, offered “additional details of the process” for withdrawing waivers. One of those new details is that no withdrawal can take effect for at least nine months.</p><p>The change is a brazen, cynical attempt to protect work requirements long enough for the Supreme Court to rule on them. And while it’s dastardly, it’s also clever. When the states agree to the terms of Verma’s letter—and Republican-controlled states certainly will, if they haven’t already—its terms arguably become enforceable as a kind of intergovernmental contract. I say “arguably” because the letter itself may be legally defective, as two Democratic congressional leaders have already <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://energycommerce.house.gov/sites/democrats.energycommerce.house.gov/files/documents/Pallone%2520Wyden%2520Ltr%2520to%2520CMS%25201.19.21%2520UPDATED.pdf&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1611173317127000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHtLycZ39TNt21pIVZZHvGRrWD9fw" href="https://energycommerce.house.gov/sites/democrats.energycommerce.house.gov/files/documents/Pallone%20Wyden%20Ltr%20to%20CMS%201.19.21%20UPDATED.pdf" target="_blank">argued</a> in an angry missive to Verma. But the possibility that the courts might treat it as binding means that it’d be risky for the Biden team to withdraw the waivers before nine months are up.</p><p>The Biden administration still has options, however—and here’s where the creative lawyering comes in. Among the states that have sought to impose work requirements, Michigan is really unusual. The state’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, is a Democrat who has been <a href="https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-government/judge-blocks-michigans-medicaid-work-rules-victory-gretchen-whitmer">vocal</a> about her distaste for work requirements. She has stuck with them only because, under the prior Republican governor, the Republican-controlled legislature passed a law requiring her to keep them in place. (From March to August 2020, I served as special counsel to Whitmer on her COVID-19 response.)</p><p>Whitmer doesn’t want to make it harder for Biden to undo work requirements, which is why Michigan won’t be keen to sign Verma’s letter. Without Michigan’s signature, the old rules allowing for an expedited paper hearing would still apply in the state. And a quick hearing for Michigan would give the Biden administration leverage to put the Supreme Court case on hold while the other states’ waivers were withdrawn. <i> </i></p><p>Here’s how it might work. Shortly after Biden takes office, his HHS could announce that it will be withdrawing all the work-requirement waivers. Most of the withdrawals would take effect nine months later, per Verma’s letter, but Michigan’s would take effect much sooner—say, on May 1.</p><p>Moving on an expedited timeline, the agency would develop an exhaustive and carefully considered explanation for the withdrawals. To anticipate red-state objections, the explanation would make two things abundantly clear: first, that the agency has reconsidered its legal position about the compatibility of work requirements with the Medicaid statute, and second, that the agency no longer interprets the available evidence to suggest that such requirements can reasonably be expected to make people healthier.</p><p>Once Michigan’s waiver was withdrawn, the remaining waivers would be doomed. The Justice Department would then have a compelling reason to ask the Supreme Court to dismiss the pending cases involving Arkansas and New Hampshire—or at least delay ruling on them. There’s no need for the Court to resolve difficult, controversial cases that will become moot within months.</p><p>The department could also argue, with real force, that the outgoing administration shouldn’t be allowed to manipulate procedural rules in order to manufacture a basis for a Court decision. Doing so would be especially anomalous given that work requirements are operationally complex and depend on extensive outreach to Medicaid beneficiaries. Even if the Court approved work requirements in the early summer, neither Arkansas nor New Hampshire would have enough time to impose them before the withdrawal of their waivers became effective in the fall.</p><p>Will this approach work? Maybe. The Supreme Court could still plow ahead with the cases on the technical ground that the Arkansas and New Hampshire waivers would be valid for a few months more. And counting on the forbearance of the conservative supermajority might be dicey. Still, the strategy is both straightforward and plausible.</p><p>Now that Democrats have taken the Senate, however, a second potential avenue for getting rid of work requirements may have opened in Congress, even if the filibuster remains intact.</p><p>The Congressional Review Act is an obscure law that allows a bare majority of the legislature to repeal Trump-era rules enacted within the administration’s last two months—so-called midnight rules. Matthew Lawrence, a law professor at Emory University, has <a href="https://www.yalejreg.com/nc/midnight-waivers-can-they-be-revoked-through-the-congressional-review-act-by-matthew-b-lawrence/">argued</a> that Congress might be able to characterize the work-requirement waivers as “rules” and invoke the law to rescind them.</p><p>Though Lawrence doesn’t go this far, waivers that were adopted several years ago might even be subject to the Congressional Review Act on the theory that they were never submitted to Congress for its consideration. (In 2018, the Republican-controlled Congress <a href="https://www.consumerfinancemonitor.com/2018/05/08/congress-disapproves-cfpb-bulletin-concerning-discretionary-pricing-by-auto-dealers/">exploited that loophole</a> when it eliminated a 2013 automobile-pricing guidance document from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.)</p><p>Using the act would have two key advantages: First, Congress’s decision <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/805">wouldn’t</a> be subject to court review. Second, HHS would be <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/801">prohibited</a> from reissuing waivers that are “substantially the same” as the Trump-era waivers. Work requirements might be off the table forever.</p><p>This legal strategy, though clever, is far from airtight. Using the Congressional Review Act might require Congress to get a positive legal opinion from the Government Accountability Office, which may not agree that waivers count as “rules” and, in any event, is unlikely to move quickly. In addition, the act is a somewhat blunt tool. Simply canceling waivers that are bound up in broader state Medicaid programs may create more problems than it solves. A more surgical, agency-led response would likely be preferable.</p><p>Whatever the Biden administration chooses to do, the broader point is that even the simple act of rescinding waivers is hard. Remaking policy in other domains will be harder still. That’s why undoing what the Trump administration has done can’t happen overnight. It will take years of patient work, overseen by lawyers who marry close attention to detail with the urgency that the times demand.</p><p>It won’t be easy. But it’ll be worth it.</p></content><author><name>Nicholas Bagley</name><uri>http://www.theatlantic.com/author/nicholas-bagley/?utm_source=feed</uri></author><media:content url="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2021/01/0121_Becca_Katie_UndoTrump/lead_960.png"><media:credit>Katie Martin / The Atlantic</media:credit></media:content><title type="html">How to Undo One of Trump’s Worst, Most Despicable Policies</title><published>2021-01-21T06:30:00-05:00</published><updated>2021-01-21T11:45:50-05:00</updated><summary type="html">With patient, painstaking work</summary><link href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/undoing-trump-damage/617736/?utm_source=feed" rel="alternate"></link></entry><entry><id>tag:theatlantic.com,2021:50-617756</id><content type="html"><figure class="left"><img alt="" height="61" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2020/06/smiley/bb76b74cc.jpg" width="62"></figure><p><em>“<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/how-build-life/?utm_source=feed">How to Build a Life</a></em><i><em>” </em>is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Starting today, the column will be published weekly on Thursday mornings.</i></p><hr class="c-section-divider"><p class="dropcap">I <span class="smallcaps">am an inveterate</span> scorekeeper. I can go back decades and find lists of goals I set for myself to gauge “success” by certain milestone birthdays. For example, in my 20s, I had a to-do list for the decade, the items on which more or less told the story of a penniless musician who had made some dubious choices. It included quitting smoking, going to the dentist, mastering my pentatonic scales, and finishing college. (I hit them all, although the last one mere days before my 30th birthday.)</p><p>There is nothing unusual about this tendency to keep score. Google “30 things to do before you turn 30” and you will get more than 15,000 results. Researchers writing in the journal <em>Psychological Science</em> a few years ago <a href="https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1298&amp;context=oid_papers">observed</a> that people are naturally motivated toward performance goals related to round numbers, and <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23066883/">birthdays</a> in particular can often act as landmarks to motivate self-improvement. We naturally seek outside sources of quantitative evidence of our progress and effectiveness—and, thus, our happiness.</p><p>Building a “30 by 30” list, however, is a misbegotten approach to happiness. Not that anyone in our material- and achievement-oriented society could be faulted for thinking this way, of course. Every cultural message we get is that happiness can be read off a scorecard of money, education, experiences, relationships, and prestige. Want the happiest life? Check the boxes of success and adventure, and do it as early as possible! Then move on to the next set of boxes. She who dies with the most checked boxes wins, right?</p><p>Wrong. I don’t mean that accomplishment and ambition are bad, but that they are simply not the drivers of our happiness. By the time many people figure this out on their own, they have spent a lifetime checking things off lists, yet are unhappy and don’t know why.</p><p class="dropcap">T<span class="smallcaps">he economist</span> Joseph Schumpeter once <a href="https://essaydocs.org/the-social-dimensions-of-entrepreneurship.html">wrote</a> that entrepreneurs love to earn fortunes “as an index of success and as a symptom of victory.” That is, every million or billion is another box checked to provide an entrepreneur with a feeling of self-worth and success. Given our finances, most of us don’t have this exact problem. However, we do the same thing all the time in our own way, whether it’s taking a certain job for what it says about us to others, or selecting friends for the social prestige they’ll bring us.</p><p>We have every evolutionary reason to want to keep score in life—passing on genes is a competitive business, after all. But there is no evidence that Mother Nature gives two hoots whether we are happy or not. And, in fact, this kind of scorekeeping is a happiness error for two reasons: It makes us dependent on external rewards, and it sets us up for dissatisfaction.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/07/why-success-wont-make-you-happy/614731/?utm_source=feed">Read: ‘Success addicts’ choose being special over being happy</a>]</i></p><p>You can be motivated to do something intrinsically (it gives you satisfaction and enjoyment) or extrinsically (you are given a reward, such as money or recognition). Most people know that intrinsic rewards are the sweeter of the two. That’s basically what graduation speakers mean when they employ hoary nostrums such as “Find a job you love, and you will never work a day in your life.”</p><p>But there’s a twist: Psychologists have found that extrinsic rewards can actually extinguish intrinsic rewards, leading us to enjoy our activities less. In a classic 1973 study, researchers at Stanford and the University of Michigan <a href="https://content.apa.org/record/1974-10497-001">showed</a> this in an experiment with preschoolers. The researchers allowed a group of kids to choose their preferred play activities—for example, drawing with markers—which they happily did. The kids were later rewarded for that activity with a certificate featuring a gold seal and a ribbon. The researchers found that after they had been given the certificate, the children became only about half as likely to want to draw when they weren’t offered one. Over the following decades, many studies have <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10589297/">shown</a> the same pattern for a wide variety of activities, across many demographic groups.</p><p>Relying on external rewards lowers satisfaction. You will like your job less if your primary motivation is prestige or money. You will appreciate your relationships less if you choose your friends and partners based on their social standing. You will relish your vacation less if you choose the destination for how it will look on social media.</p><p>The scorecard approach to life also feeds right into a known human tendency that drives us away from happiness: People often have trouble finding lasting satisfaction from worldly rewards, because as soon as we acquire something, our desire resets and we are looking to the <em>next</em> reward. Check one box, and another one immediately appears. And, of course, it’s always a <em>bigger</em> box. No one envisions life’s boxes in terms of downward mobility: “By 40, I aim to make less money and no longer own my home!” It’s always aspirational: We will have more, perform better, get richer.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/10/money-measure-everything-pricing-progress/543345/?utm_source=feed">Read: How money became the measure of everything</a>]</i></p><p>Again, there’s nothing wrong with aspiration. But if your happiness depends on an escalating list of worldly accomplishments, you might soon find that your fear of failure supplants your ambition.</p><p class="dropcap">T<span class="smallcaps">o increase</span> our happiness, we need better questions than “What accomplishments should be on my scorecard?” Let me suggest a few that will lead to answers that can deliver authentic well-being.</p><h5>1. Who has intrinsic characteristics that I admire and want to emulate?</h5><p>Money, possessions, and power are all characteristics extrinsic to a person. Therefore, emulating them in others will lead you to extrinsic motivations for your own activities, which, as we have seen, will likely lower happiness. Instead, look for admirable <em>intrinsic</em> characteristics in others—virtues such as compassion, faith, fortitude, and honesty. Imitating these characteristics cultivates intrinsic motivations. Thus, they are the best criteria for finding the right role models and mentors to imitate and learn from.</p><h5>2. What do people most need from me, and how can I provide it?</h5><p>The box-checking exercise tends to be about <em>my wants</em>. Shifting it to <em>others’ needs</em> brings greater well-being. This is straightforward: Decades of <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1037/a0023059">research</a>—and millennia of common sense—have shown that self-centeredness leads to fluctuating emotions at best, while a focus on the needs of others can bring stable happiness. And lest you think this makes a person passive or unambitious, note that there is a significant body of evidence <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fa0013079">showing</a> that a focus on the good of one’s institution (as opposed to oneself) enhances career success as well.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/05/how-choose-fulfilling-career/611920/?utm_source=feed">Read: 4 rules for identifying your life’s work</a>]</i></p><h5><strong>3. What is my life’s purpose?</strong></h5><p>Heavy question, I know. But we all know that sooner or later, it has to be addressed, and the box-checking approach to success manifestly does not do that. It is little more than an exercise in answering the “what” questions of life: what you do for work, what you own, what people think of you. As my friend the management expert Simon Sinek likes to <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action?language=en">point out</a>, understanding our purpose comes from answers to life’s “why” questions. These answers deliver both success and happiness, but they require serious thought and reflection.</p><p class="dropcap">S<span class="smallcaps">corecards of self-focused</span>, worldly rewards are easy to create by looking at any “30 by 30” bucket list. But they won’t lead any of us to happiness. For that, we need better metaphors for growth and progress than a <em>list</em>. I would suggest a <em>light</em>.</p><p>Instead of checking items off a list, the Buddha suggests shining a light on yourself and others. “Dwell as a lamp unto yourself,” he <a href="https://www.wayofbodhi.org/attadipa-sutta-dwelling-as-a-lamp-unto-oneself/">advised</a> his disciple Ananda. He meant that happiness comes from the illumination of your greatest virtues, thus showing the way for other people, and making visible to yourself your true purpose. This ancient wisdom is a near-perfect summary of what the research says will bring us true well-being as we make our way through life.</p></content><author><name>Arthur C. Brooks</name><uri>http://www.theatlantic.com/author/arthur-c-brooks/?utm_source=feed</uri></author><media:content url="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2021/01/HowToBuildALife22_A/lead_960.jpg"><media:credit>Jan Buchczik</media:credit></media:content><title type="html">Stop Keeping Score</title><published>2021-01-21T06:00:00-05:00</published><updated>2021-01-21T13:05:28-05:00</updated><summary type="html">She who dies with the most checked boxes wins, right? Wrong.</summary><link href="https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/01/checklist-achievements-happiness-boxes/617756/?utm_source=feed" rel="alternate"></link></entry><entry><id>tag:theatlantic.com,2021:50-617755</id><content type="html"><p>Proponents of the Iran nuclear agreement are sounding the alarm. In 2018, the United States withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, and since then, Iran has increased the quality and quantity of its uranium enrichment well beyond what the deal allows. Recently, it has even begun enriching uranium to 20 percent, a short distance away from weapons-grade. Iran, JCPOA advocates say, is closer today to producing a bomb than it was in 2015, when the deal was concluded. Only the deal’s renewal, they insist, can prevent the nightmare of a nuclear Iran.</p><p>“Five years ago, American-led diplomacy produced a deal that ensured it would take Iran at least a year to produce enough fissile material for one bomb,” Joe Biden <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/13/opinions/smarter-way-to-be-tough-on-iran-joe-biden/index.html">wrote</a> in September. “Now—because Trump let Iran off the hook from its obligations under the nuclear deal—Tehran’s ‘breakout time’ is down to just a few months.” More recently, he warned that if Iran gets the bomb, then Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt will follow<strong>.</strong></p><p>Why, then, aren’t Israelis and Arabs—those with the most to lose from Iranian nuclearization—also demanding a return to the JCPOA? Why aren’t they panicking over its dissolution? The answer is simple: The JCPOA didn’t diminish the Iranian nuclear threat; it magnified it.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/us-and-iran-shape-new-deal/593590/?utm_source=feed">Dennis Ross: There’s a deal to be had between the U.S. and Iran</a>]</i></p><p>Iran needs to acquire three components in order to become a military nuclear power: highly enriched uranium, a functional warhead, and a missile capable of delivering it. The JCPOA addresses only the first of these efforts in any detail, and even then, offers merely partial and temporary solutions. The deal largely ignores the second effort, and actually advances the third.</p><p>The JCPOA did limit Iran’s immediate ability to enrich enough uranium for a bomb. It reduced the regime’s uranium stockpile by 97 percent, mothballed two-thirds of its centrifuges, and re-designated two of its major nuclear facilities as civilian research centers. Uranium enrichment was capped at 3.7 percent, far short of weapons-grade. These concessions were intended to extend the time Iran needed to enrich enough uranium for a single bomb from approximately three months to a year. Should Iran attempt to break out and go nuclear, advocates explained, the international community would have enough time to intervene. The JCPOA, they asserted, blocked all of Iran’s paths to a bomb.</p><p>But the JCPOA allowed Iran to retain its massive nuclear infrastructure, unnecessary for a civilian energy program but essential for a military nuclear program. The agreement did not shut down a single nuclear facility or destroy a single centrifuge. The ease and speed with which Iran has resumed producing large amounts of more highly enriched uranium—doing so at a time of its own choosing—illustrates the danger of leaving the regime with these capabilities. In fact, the JCPOA blocks nothing.</p><p>If the restrictions on Iran’s nuclear enrichment were inadequate, they were also designed to be short-lived, some sunsetting as early as 2024. Meanwhile, the deal allowed the regime to develop advanced centrifuges capable of spinning out more highly enriched uranium in far less time. Less than a decade from now, Iran will be legally able to produce and stockpile enough fissile material for dozens of bombs. The 97 percent reduction of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile achieved by the JCPOA would be swiftly undone. Breakout time would no longer be a year, or even three months, but a matter of weeks.</p><p>This isn’t just the assessment of the deal’s opponents, but also that of its principal architect. “If in year 13, 14, 15 [after making the deal], they have advanced centrifuges that can enrich uranium fairly rapidly, the breakout time would have shrunk almost down to zero,” President Barack Obama acknowledged in an April 2015 <a href="https://www.npr.org/2015/04/07/397933577/transcript-president-obamas-full-npr-interview-on-iran-nuclear-deal">interview</a> with NPR.</p><p>Realizing that the JCPOA guaranteed Iran’s future ability to enrich uranium on an industrial scale, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey accelerated their search for nuclear options as soon as the deal was signed. The JCPOA’s opponents never feared that Iran would violate the deal, but rather, they feared that the regime would keep it—waiting out the sunset clauses and emerging with the ability to produce enough uranium for a nuclear arsenal.</p><p>The deal, then, allows Iran to eventually possess the first component for a bomb: a stockpile of highly enriched uranium. Next it needs a warhead. Despite Iran’s insistence that it has never tried to build a bomb, Western intelligence officials have long determined that it did, but believed that the regime suspended its efforts in 2003. The weapons program was directed by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a nuclear scientist and general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, who was assassinated in November. In a recording obtained by Israel and shared with the United States in 2008, Fakhrizadeh explained that the secret efforts in fact continued and that Iran intended to initially produce five nuclear warheads.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/iran-deal-myths-are-pervasive/594208/?utm_source=feed">Michael Oren: The three myths of the Iran deal</a>]</i></p><p>The possibility that Iran might still be trying to build a bomb did not, however, preoccupy the framers of the JCPOA. Of the deal’s 159 pages, only half of one page addresses Iranian weaponization, and it contains no mandate for international action. Although there are provisions for inspecting enrichment-related facilities, none exist for inspecting potential bomb-making sites or punishing Iran should any be discovered. Instead, there is merely an Iranian declaration that it will not try to make a bomb—a promise that Iran, which has systematically lied about its nuclear program for decades, has repeatedly broken in the past.</p><p>The recklessness of this omission became even more glaring three years ago, after Israel exposed Iran’s secret nuclear archive. Among its many thousands of pages were documents detailing undeclared nuclear sites and radioactive materials, as well as blueprints for a missile-borne bomb. More damning, the archive confirmed that Iran’s nuclear-weapons program did not stop in 2003 but was merely split into overt and covert channels, some of them embedded in prestigious universities, and both aspects of the program were headed by Fakhrizadeh. The goal, he states in the documents, was to maintain “special activities … under the title of Scientific Development” that “leave no identifiable traces.”</p><p>These revelations underlined the fatal flaws of the JCPOA. The very existence of a secret archive was a flagrant violation of Iran’s obligation to come clean about its previous weaponization work. And it was exposed not by international inspectors, but by Israel’s Mossad. Advocates of the deal are hard-pressed to explain why Iran would keep, conceal, and repeatedly relocate designs for a nuclear weapon unless it wanted to preserve the option of someday making one.</p><p>With its nuclear infrastructure intact, its work on advanced centrifuges proceeding, and restrictions on enrichment ending with the sunset clauses, Iran’s future nuclear stockpile of enriched uranium is ensured. And with its weaponization-related efforts unimpeded, the regime needs only a system for delivering a bomb. The regime already possesses Shahab-3 missiles, based on the North Korean No-dong, capable of hitting any country in the Middle East and even nations as far away as Romania. The archive contains detailed plans for fitting a nuclear warhead on the Shahab-3. Iran aims to expand its threat to Western Europe and the United States by developing intercontinental ballistic missiles. Intelligence sources agree that the rockets Iran has already developed for its space program can easily be converted to ICBMs. Iran’s missile development violates a UN ban on its missile program—a prohibition the international community has failed to enforce. In 2023, however, the JCPOA will lift that ban entirely.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/05/iran-nuclear-deal-flawed/559595/?utm_source=feed">Read: The Iran deal is strategically and morally absurd</a>]</i></p><p>The JCPOA, then, has not substantially blocked any of Iran’s efforts. The violations that Iran has committed since America’s withdrawal from the deal, and more intensively in recent months, will pale compared with the industrial-scale enrichment program the JCPOA ultimately permits. Combined with its weaponization-related work and its missile development, this will position Iran to become a global nuclear power.</p><p>In return for merely postponing that outcome, the deal rewards Iran extravagantly. The JCPOA infused the Iranian economy with tens of billions of dollars in immediate sanctions relief and trade deals and promised to provide hundreds of billions more. Yet rather than invest in its decaying infrastructure, the regime used portions of this windfall to expand its international terror network, enhance the offensive capabilities of Hamas and Hezbollah, and further assist the Syrian regime in massacring and uprooting its own people. In addition to extending its dominance of Lebanon, Iran has consolidated its influence in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Gaza. Rather than buying Iran’s moderation, the JCPOA helped fund its quest for regional hegemony.</p><p>Exporting terror and instability, massacring and expelling Syrian Sunnis, and trying to kill Israelis—all of these Iranian activities were blandly subsumed by the JCPOA’s framers under the term <em>malign activity</em>. The deal was intended to serve as a precedent for international cooperation in addressing these crimes, but in practice, little has happened. Instead, desperate to preserve the agreement, signatories have ignored the regime’s aggression. The failure to address this “malign activity” reflects a near-total unwillingness to confront Iran and signals that the regime generally has little to fear from international interference.</p><p>The sermons and military processions accompanied by chants of “Death to Israel”; Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, <a href="https://apnews.com/article/a033042303545d9ef783a95222d51b83">calling</a> for the elimination of the Israeli “cancer”; even a recent bill <a href="https://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2021/01/04/Iran-parliament-discusses-bill-to-eliminate-Israel-by-March-2041-">proposed</a> in the Iranian parliament that would commit the government to “eliminate” Israel by 2041—all of these outrages and more are taken for granted by the international community. Yet no other country today so publicly and repeatedly declares its intentions to annihilate a fellow UN member state, linking its national purpose to that goal. At the same time, Iran has committed enormous resources and paid a staggering economic and diplomatic price to develop the means to fulfill its genocidal vision. The weaknesses of the JCPOA only deepen Israel’s fear that the international community is taking the inevitability of Iran’s nuclear-weapons capability for granted, too.</p><p>Israel has vowed to prevent the regime from going nuclear, so the Iranians are investing in massive deterrence. In the Middle Eastern countries under its domination, Iran has deployed tens of thousands of missiles, a growing number of them highly accurate and capable of hitting anywhere in Israel. Though some observers now claim that Iran’s missiles, rather than its nuclear program, most endanger the region, they have it backwards. The missiles are a tactical means to a strategic nuclear end. They are intended to deter Israeli efforts to stop Iran from moving toward breakout. Even so, Israel can handle the conventional missile threat, however costly, but the nuclear threat could be existential.</p><p>The flaws with the JCPOA are painfully obvious to both Arab and Israeli leaders. Why, then, did the international community ever agree to such a deal? For Europe, in particular, financial interests were involved. For America, though, the impetus was more complex. The Obama administration seemed to genuinely believe that Iran was capable of change. If it were treated respectfully and reintegrated into the international community, Obama maintained, Iran would lose interest in a nuclear bomb long before the deal expired, choosing instead to become “a successful regional power.” The regime would finally begin addressing the needs of its restive citizens and cease supporting terror. From the very beginning of his presidency, Obama pursued reconciliation with Iran, along with Palestinian-Israeli peace, as the centerpiece of his Middle East policy.</p><p>The JCPOA was supposed to provide Iran with the time and the incentive to moderate; instead, it gave Iran the means and the legitimacy to intensify its aggression now, while enabling it to go nuclear later. Much of the American public, meanwhile, exhausted by two Middle Eastern wars, feared becoming embroiled in another overseas conflict. Many Americans believed Obama when he insisted that “all options are on the table,” and that the only alternative to the deal was war.</p><p>In fact, the alternative to the president’s approach was tougher diplomacy, aimed at producing a better deal. But that would have required pressing Iran with even harsher sanctions and posing a credible threat of military action, neither of which the administration was willing to do. The “punishing sanctions” for which the administration took credit, and which brought Iran to the negotiating table, originated in Congress and were approved over the administration’s objections.</p><p>Rather than forcing Iran’s hand, the administration made far-reaching concessions at the very outset of the secret talks in 2012. American negotiators effectively recognized the regime’s “right to enrich,” overriding UN resolutions denying it that right, and even dropped their previous demand for a temporary freeze of enrichment. This essentially reduced the rest of the negotiations to wrangling over the details.</p><p>From the outset, the Obama administration was so wary of antagonizing Iran that it consistently overlooked the regime’s outrages—including a 2011 plot to assassinate the Saudi and Israeli ambassadors in Washington (the Israeli ambassador at the time was Michael Oren, a co-author of this essay) and the routine harassment of U.S. Navy ships in the Persian Gulf. No reckoning was sought for Iran’s complicity in the Syrian civil war, which has left some 500,000 civilians dead and 11 million homeless. Obama’s refusal to uphold his own red line regarding the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime in 2013 was viewed by Israel and by Arab governments—and no doubt by Iran—as a further sign of his determination to placate Tehran.</p><p>And yet, even if America had the will, denying nuclear weapons to Iran was always fraught with risk. For religious and nationalist reasons, the regime sees itself as the Middle East’s rightful ruler, as well as a global force. More than anything else, though, Iran’s nuclear program is about the regime’s survival. Its leaders saw how the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi terminated their nuclear-weapons programs, and were later toppled and executed. They see how North Korea’s deliverable bombs have won Kim Jong Un power and immunity. They know which example to emulate.</p><p>Still, Iran can be stopped.</p><p>Although every new administration seeks to distinguish itself from its predecessor—and this incoming administration all the more so—President Joe Biden should not squander the leverage he has inherited. The reimposition and intensification of American sanctions has placed enormous pressure on the Iranian regime. After waiting out the old administration in the hope that 2021 would bring a new one, the regime is now trying to intimidate Biden into renewing the JCPOA. It is hardly a coincidence that the regime waited two years before approaching 20 percent enrichment—which it could have done at any time—but is doing so only now, with the onset of the new administration. The regime responds to pressure and acts defiantly when it senses hesitation. Biden must not give in to this nuclear blackmail.</p><p>The JCPOA allowed Iran to both maintain its nuclear program and revitalize its economy. Biden must make clear to Tehran that it can have one or the other, but not both. Tragically, spokespeople for the new administration are proposing to return to the JCPOA and lift sanctions, and only afterward negotiate a longer, stronger deal. Such a course has no chance of success. Even a partial lifting of sanctions would forfeit any leverage that could compel the regime to negotiate a deal that genuinely removes the danger of a nuclear Iran. At best, the regime will agree to cosmetic changes—for example, extending the sunset clauses—but not to dismantling its nuclear infrastructure. A fatally flawed deal would remain essentially intact.</p><p>The Biden administration must resist pressure from members of Congress and others who are urging an unconditional return to the JCPOA. Even the deal’s fervent supporters need to recognize that its fundamental assumptions—that Iran had abandoned its quest for a military nuclear option and would moderate its behavior—have been thoroughly disproved.</p><p>At the same time, America must consult its Middle East allies about what they think a better deal would look like. Such a deal would verifiably and permanently remove Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons. This means not merely mothballing the nuclear infrastructure, but eliminating it. It means empowering international inspectors with unlimited and immediate access to any suspect enrichment or weaponization site. It means maintaining economic and diplomatic pressure on the regime until it truly comes clean about its undeclared nuclear activities and ceases to develop missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads. A better deal will deny Iran the ability to commit the violations it is now committing with impunity.</p><p>Achieving these objectives will require close and candid cooperation among the United States, Israel, and concerned Arab states. Such cooperation was not possible in the negotiations leading up to the JCPOA, which America initially conducted behind the backs of its Middle Eastern partners. In the final stages, U.S. officials misled their Israeli and Arab counterparts about America’s negotiating positions. This displayed not only bad faith, but a patronizing presumption of knowing the vital security interests of the countries most threatened by Iran better than they knew those interests themselves.</p><p>The incoming administration has declared its determination to restore the trust of America’s allies, along with promoting peace and human rights. But those objectives are incompatible with renewing a deal that betrayed America’s allies, strengthened one of the world’s most repressive regimes, and empowered the Middle Eastern state most opposed to peace.</p><p>The JCPOA is also incompatible with President Biden’s long-standing commitment to Israel’s security. At a 2015 gathering celebrating Israel’s independence, then–Vice President Biden said: “Israel is absolutely essential—absolutely essential—[for the] security of Jews around the world … Imagine what it would say about humanity and the future of the 21st century if Israel were not sustained, vibrant and free.”</p><p>Reviving the JCPOA will endanger that vision, ensuring the emergence of a nuclear Iran or a desperate war to stop it. Biden is a proven friend who has shared Israel’s hopes and fears. He must prevent that nightmare.</p></content><author><name>Michael Oren</name><uri>http://www.theatlantic.com/author/michael-oren/?utm_source=feed</uri></author><author><name>Yossi Klein Halevi</name><uri>http://www.theatlantic.com/author/yossi-klein-halevi/?utm_source=feed</uri></author><media:content url="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2021/01/image/lead_960.png"><media:credit>Mohammad Berno / Iranian Presidency Office / AP</media:credit></media:content><title type="html">The Case Against the Iran Deal</title><published>2021-01-21T06:00:00-05:00</published><updated>2021-01-21T12:19:17-05:00</updated><summary type="html">Reviving the JCPOA will ensure either the emergence of a nuclear Iran or a desperate war to stop it.</summary><link href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/case-against-iran-deal/617755/?utm_source=feed" rel="alternate"></link></entry><entry><id>tag:theatlantic.com,2021:50-617741</id><content type="html"><p class="dropcap">K<span class="smallcaps">amala Harris’s vice presidency</span> was already shaping up to be a uniquely consequential one. Now Democratic control of the Senate has propelled her to the front of the political scene, where she’ll be breaking ties and giving President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda a chance at life.</p><p>Being part of the president’s deliberative process is already a major step for a vice president—before Walter Mondale, the office lacked any precedent or model for West Wing power-sharing. Now Biden and Harris may offer a vision of an even more empowered vice president, able to champion legislation herself, use her bully pulpit, and potentially break ties to protect her own policy priorities. No vice president has done all of that before, but Harris could.</p><p>An evenly split Senate is <a href="https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/tied-senate-who-controls-a-50-50-chamber/">rare</a>, but party leaders have worked out power-sharing agreements before to ensure smooth operations, most recently after the 2000 election. Tie-breaking votes are more common (vice presidents have cast them 268 times), and have happened more frequently in the past 20 years than they used to.</p><p>That uptick coincided with the emergence of the modern vice presidency, Joel Goldstein, a vice-presidential scholar, told me. Though originally considered a legislative officer, since Richard Nixon’s term, the vice president has served primarily as a member of the executive branch. Modern veeps rarely spend time in the Senate, except on ceremonial occasions.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/07/joe-bidens-vice-president-powerful-history/614161/?utm_source=feed">Read: Joe Biden’s vice president could be the most powerful in history</a>]</i></p><p>The partisan makeup of the chamber also lends itself to more ties, Goldstein said: Former Vice President Dick Cheney cast most of his eight votes during his first term, when the Senate was either evenly split or closely divided. The closest the Senate ever got to a tie while Biden was vice president was from 2011 to 2013, with 53 Democrats and 47 Republicans—and he never cast a tie-breaking vote.</p><p>Ties are also more common because of the sorting of parties into homogenous ideological groups, Goldstein told me. “The Senate is more evenly split, and the fact that politics has become increasingly polarized” means that fewer senators are willing to cross party lines, and more contentious votes are taken. In addition, the slow rollback of the filibuster means that fewer actions require more than a simple majority—which a vice president can help achieve. Of the 13 ties Mike Pence had to break, half were to confirm Cabinet-level, judicial, or ambassadorial nominations—votes that vice presidents hadn’t had to cast before, because nominations were less disputed. That collection includes the votes to confirm Betsy DeVos as secretary of education in 2017 and Jonathan Allen Kobes as a federal circuit judge in 2018. In each case, increased partisanship set up the vice president to play a major role in advancing the administration’s goals.</p><p>Harris may have to break even more ties than Pence did—especially on Cabinet picks, coronavirus-relief bills, and electoral reforms, all of which are priorities for the Democrats, as my colleague Elaine Godfrey <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/democrats-win-senate-white-house/616370/?utm_source=feed">has reported</a>. Harris may end up being the public face of these deliberations—unless relatively moderate senators such as Joe Manchin, Susan Collins, or Lisa Murkowski cross party lines.</p><p>Harris will be constrained by loyalty to Biden on these votes; television shows such as <em>Veep</em> and <em>The West Wing</em> have conjured images of rogue vice presidents turning on their governing partners for key votes, but that has rarely happened—only one vice president, John C. Calhoun, has broken a tie by voting against the president, dooming Andrew Jackson’s nomination of Martin Van Buren to be the ambassador to Great Britain. Calhoun, who chose not to break a tie on a different judicial nomination in order to stymie Jackson, also holds the <a href="https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/VPTies.pdf">record</a> for most ties broken.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/08/why-biden-picked-harris/615100/?utm_source=feed">Read: Why Joe Biden picked Kamala Harris</a>]</i></p><p>A vice president voting against a president’s wishes would have been more likely in the 18th and 19th century, Goldstein told me, because deputies weren’t always loyal to the president, either because they weren’t from the same party (like Adams and Jefferson) or because they weren’t in the president’s inner circle (like Kennedy and Johnson). Neither is true for Harris. She hopes to follow Biden’s example as vice president, a Harris aide told me, acting as a full governing partner rather than sticking to a limited set of portfolio issues. (The aide spoke on the condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to discuss administration matters on the record.)</p><p>And though vice presidents cast tie-breaking votes as representatives of the administration, they can still claim those votes as part of their political résumés: Should a new version of the CARES Act or the Voting Rights Act face a tie in the Senate, Harris could claim responsibility for its passage.</p><p>There is a downside to more tie-breaking votes: Harris will have to keep her calendar clear to actually cast those votes—and finicky congressional schedules might make that a nuisance. That logistical hurdle might complicate meetings abroad after the pandemic subsides. And there’s also a potential new problem: If Chief Justice John Roberts <a href="https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2021/01/19/the-washington-trump-leaves-behind-491443">opts out</a> of presiding over the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump, Harris, as the Senate’s presiding officer, could occupy another visible, though vexing, spot in the chamber she just left. But the choice would be hers.</p></content><author><name>Christian Paz</name><uri>http://www.theatlantic.com/author/christian-paz/?utm_source=feed</uri></author><media:content url="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2021/01/GettyImages_1229658194_bw/lead_960.jpg"><media:credit>Al Drago / Bloomberg / Getty</media:credit></media:content><title type="html">Kamala Harris Is the Decider</title><published>2021-01-21T06:00:00-05:00</published><updated>2021-01-21T13:15:03-05:00</updated><summary type="html">With a 50–50 split in the Senate, Harris is poised to have final say over crucial decisions in the coming years.</summary><link href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/01/kamala-harris-vice-president-senate/617741/?utm_source=feed" rel="alternate"></link></entry><entry><id>tag:theatlantic.com,2021:50-617753</id><content type="html"><p>Joe Biden begins his first full day as the 46th president of the United States today with as daunting a list of foreign-policy challenges as almost any of his predecessors. After four years of Donald Trump, the new administration must overcome skepticism about America’s ability to deal with the great tests facing the world, including the rise of China as a 21st-century superpower, the spread of nuclear weapons, and the onslaught of man-made climate change. To this list can be added a new issue: patching up the transatlantic alliance.</p><p>Last month, with Biden’s inauguration just weeks away, the European Union and China pushed a new economic agreement over the line. The actual terms of the China Investment Agreement remain unclear—the text is still to be finalized—but the broad outline is simple enough: a deeper trading relationship based on common and apparently enforceable standards. According to the EU, the deal ties Beijing to a new “values-based investment relationship” that will protect labor and environmental standards, and help root China in the rules-based global order. This is Europe fulfilling the global role it has cast for itself as a “regulatory superpower,” exporting and defending its values through its economic size.</p><p>Yet this is not how the agreement is seen in Washington. Brussels went forward with the deal despite a very public <a href="https://twitter.com/jakejsullivan/status/1341180109118726144">plea</a> from the incoming administration to hold fire. Four years of Europe-bashing by Donald Trump, it seems, had hardened European hearts in favor of a pointed display of “strategic autonomy.” Autonomy from whom, you might ask? The United States is the only answer.</p><p>Europe’s refusal to wait until yesterday’s transfer of power in Washington is an indication of the extent to which the world has changed since Biden was last in government. Today’s Europe is not prepared to “consult” the U.S. before signing an agreement of such importance, as Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, requested—and it rejects the very notion that it should have to. Just because the U.S. defends Europe does not mean a kind of <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/1968-the-world-transformed/czechoslovak-crisis-and-the-brezhnev-doctrine/F0A3CC488D041AF286081A440883DB65#">Brezhnev doctrine</a> of obedience is in place, the EU argues.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/10/donald-trump-foreign-policy/616773/?utm_source=feed">Read: The world order that Donald Trump revealed</a>]</i></p><p>In one sense, then, Biden’s Europe problem is obvious: The continent that the U.S. fought two wars to free, paid to rebuild, and has spent 75 years protecting at great, uneven, and continuing cost is now striking deals behind its back with its main strategic rival. Some ally. In this telling, Trump’s shortsighted and unpredictable malevolence has created the world that he claimed already existed but that, in fact, did not: one in which the U.S. is being taken for a ride by allies that are no such thing.</p><p>This deal with China, however, masks an altogether more profound problem for Biden: not European strength, but weakness. For much of the past few years—and particularly the past few weeks—the specter that has haunted the West is one of <i>American</i> decline. In contrast, Europe, embodied by that most unlikely of liberal heroes, Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, had come of age and was the real leader of the free world. Europe had its problems, the argument went, but was showing none of the morbid symptoms on display at the Capitol this month.</p><p>While the U.S. clearly does have significant problems to overcome, though, these should not overshadow some of the systemic challenges facing Europe, which may prove in time to be far more serious than those in America.</p><p>In 2007, following years of solid growth, the EU’s economy was slightly larger than that of the U.S., <a href="https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=EU-US-CN">according to the World Bank</a>, and both were drastically larger than China’s. By 2019, the American economy had grown by around 50 percent, whereas the EU’s had essentially flatlined. China, meanwhile, had all but caught up with the EU. George Magnus, an economist at Oxford University’s China Centre, told me that the trend over the past decade was clear: American resurgence and European stagnation. Since 2010, the U.S. share of the global economy has not only held, but increased, from 23 percent to 25 percent, according to International Monetary Fund data used by Magnus. Europe’s has shrunk from 21.5 percent to 17.5 percent, even including Britain in the total.</p><p>If you take Europe’s perspective that economic heft is its own form of might, then it is Europe that is in relative decline, not America.</p><p>One notable aspect of the past few weeks is the steady discrediting of Trumpism as a political ideology, but without the cost of an economic revolution that might erode America’s extraordinary strength, at least so far. Europe, meanwhile, even as its second-biggest economy, Britain, opted to leave, has yet to face a moment of crisis, because its decline is not so obvious—a steady, creeping crisis rather than a bombastic one as seen across the Atlantic.</p><p>European diplomats are concerned, for example, that the continent—including Britain—simply does not have the industrial or technological base to compete with the U.S. or China. Of the <a href="https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/audit-services/publications/assets/global-top-100-companies-june-2020-update.pdf">top 50 companies</a> in the world by market capitalization, only three are headquartered in the EU, and only one of those is involved in technology. The U.S., by contrast, has 34, 10 of which are tech-focused. With Britain’s departure, the EU also has only one university in the <a href="https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2021">top 50</a> in the world, and has lost the continent’s global financial hub, London. Even the region’s economic engine, Germany, has question marks hanging over it: Tesla, for example, is worth more than all of Germany’s main car manufacturers combined.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/11/american-election-spurs-british-reflection/616955/?utm_source=feed">Read: Britain is holding its breath</a>]</i></p><p>On top of this, although the EU has shown admirable political unity over Brexit, it remains a politically weak confederation of states that have hugely different economies and interests, featuring higher levels of economic inequality than even the U.S., with poorer southern Europe lagging far behind wealthy northern countries. It must also now deal with a pesky regional competitor in Britain, whose future remains unclear.</p><p>Henry Kissinger once described the newly unified Germany as “too big for Europe, but too small for the world.” In some senses, the same might now be true of the EU: It is strong and united enough to be a pain for its erstwhile imperial overlord, but not yet strong enough to strike out completely on its own.</p><p>There are two strategic calculations for Biden to consider, and both are problematic. The first is that the driving force behind this deal was Merkel. Fundamentally, the German chancellor—and Germany generally—does not want to have to pick sides in a conflict between the U.S. and China, according to analysts I spoke with in Berlin and Washington. The country rejects the very idea of a grouping of democracies to contain China’s rise. It does not want a transatlantic alliance on this issue. By reaching an agreement with Beijing, Merkel hopes to avoid this trap. (Nor will her retirement this year necessarily change much. Her replacement as leader of the center-right Christian Democrats, Armin Laschet, is a moderate Merkelite with a history of soft-pedaling criticism of Russia and China.)</p><p>The second challenge for Biden is that the EU’s deal with China reveals Germany’s absorption of the French obsession with strategic autonomy from the United States. The inherent danger in this is that it will become self-fulfilling, and Europe could try to achieve economic independence to deal with China while aligning with the U.S. to address the strategic challenge of China’s economic rise. Perhaps Washington will conclude that it’s not particularly happy with this bargain, and seek new international formats to contain China, loosening its commitment to the heavy expense of Europe’s military defense umbrella.</p><p>Europe sees itself as one of the three great economic powers on Earth, but is it overplaying its hand? Notably, it persists in promoting engagement with Beijing even when some former proponents of America’s engagement policy with China now argue that it was <a href="https://www.thewirechina.com/2020/06/07/the-birth-life-and-death-of-engagement/">a mistake</a>, an effort exploited by Beijing to build its own power that did little to westernize or democratize its behavior.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/11/donald-trump-europe-bogeyman/617054/?utm_source=feed">Read: Europe can’t blame Donald Trump anymore</a>]</i></p><p>What is remarkable about the EU-China deal, which is supposed to show European strategic autonomy, is how unstrategic it appears to be. At first glance, it seems little more than a tactical opening for certain sectors in Europe. The agreement’s defenders have—correctly—said that the deal does not stop the EU from taking measures against China should Beijing not uphold its side of the bargain. Yet an extraordinary naïveté (or, more cynically, a PR spin) appears to be running through the document. The <a href="https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_2541">press release</a> welcoming the agreement contains much about the values and commitments that China has signed up to for the first time. It even carries the claim that China has agreed to make “continued and sustained efforts” to uphold international rules against “forced labour,” a reference to Beijing’s ongoing crackdown on Uighurs in Xinjiang. It’s hard to know what’s worse: including such feeble language on slavery or ignoring it.</p><p>And the early returns are not great. In the days after the deal was announced, China launched a <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-55555299">fresh crackdown</a> on prodemocracy protesters in Hong Kong and sent out <a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3117799/china-and-european-171-nations-revive-summit-plans-aiming">invitations</a> for a controversial “17+1” meeting between itself and an alliance of Central and Eastern European states, among them EU member states. Is China already dividing and ruling?</p><p>That other great German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, once remarked that it was always better to be “one of two in a world of three.” Has Europe forgotten this advice? The bloc has many strengths, and has proved over time to be far more resilient than many of its critics dare admit—principally those in Britain who seemed to write it off as they pursued Brexit. But it also remains fundamentally weaker than either the U.S. or China, and risks being left behind by both.</p><p>Beijing’s goal, Henry Kissinger writes in <i>On China</i>, is not a decisive clash of forces, but “the patient accumulation of relative advantage.” Who out of China, the U.S., and Europe is most obviously accumulating relative advantage and enhancing its strategic position?</p><p>Europe may wish that it did not have to choose between the U.S. and China, but it might not be able to avoid it. Being in a two with a volatile America might well prove a better choice than being cast alone in the duopoly to come.</p><p>For Biden, meanwhile, the choice is easier because there isn’t one: His administration will engage and try to rebuild the transatlantic relationship. In the longer term, the greater challenge, however, might prove to be not European independence, but European weakness.</p></content><author><name>Tom McTague</name><uri>http://www.theatlantic.com/author/tom-mctague/?utm_source=feed</uri></author><media:content url="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2021/01/Atlantic_Biden_eu_v1/lead_960.png"><media:credit>Getty / The Atlantic</media:credit></media:content><title type="html">Joe Biden Has a Europe Problem</title><published>2021-01-21T01:00:00-05:00</published><updated>2021-01-21T12:03:39-05:00</updated><summary type="html">The new president has a daunting list of foreign-policy challenges. Among the biggest will be managing a longtime ally.</summary><link href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/01/joe-biden-europe/617753/?utm_source=feed" rel="alternate"></link></entry><entry><id>tag:theatlantic.com,2021:50-617763</id><content type="html"><p>Everyone knows that Joe Biden’s presidential aesthetic <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/biden-should-build-back-boring/617740/?utm_source=feed">is purposefully boring</a>: He’s promising a national nap time after Donald Trump’s <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/trumpism-not-terrorism/617703/?utm_source=feed">violent four-year kegger</a>. “Politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire,” the new president said during his inauguration address today, speaking where insurrectionists had recently <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/dc-protester-arrested-11-molotov-cocktails-guns-list/story?id=75211356">carried Molotov cocktails</a>. It was natural to expect that Biden’s induction ceremony would make for a few hours as healthfully bland as a Zoom yoga session. (That is, unless you were one of the QAnon followers giddily awaiting the Space Force to intervene in the proceedings.)</p><p>Yet the first twist of the Biden era is that the 46th president’s inauguration was rather lit. It felt more like a trippy, tony masquerade than a crisis-era bureaucratic procedure. By the time of the scorching closing prayer by Reverend Silvester Beaman, late-in-a-Marvel-movie sensory overload had set in. Maybe that was because the pandemic added a dose of surreality via mandatory face wear and a flag-peppered National Mall. Maybe the ceremony hinted at a roaring-2020s cultural shift percolating after the grueling, catastrophic 2010s. In any case, the inauguration offered a reminder that the political dream of “normalcy” is a dream not of dullness, but of joy. Skepticism from the right and the left toward Biden’s gauzy rhetoric won’t and shouldn’t go away. But Wednesday was the moment to revel in the mass psychic unburdening that happens when the guy with the nuclear codes doesn’t openly stoke civil war.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/a-sermon-in-americas-civic-religion/617750/?utm_source=feed">Read: A sermon in America’s civic religion</a>]</i></p><p>After all, despite Trump’s gilded decorative tastes, the last inauguration was a bleak nightmare defined by the word <em>carnage</em> and <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/01/trump-inauguration-welcome-concert-3-doors-down-toby-keith-make-america-great-again/513905/?utm_source=feed">the groans of 3 Doors Down</a>. By contrast, the 2021 inauguration might persist in the public memory as a whirl of fun fashions: the <a href="https://twitter.com/Phil_Lewis_/status/1351926660673769482">regal purple</a> of the coat swishing around Kamala Harris; the <a href="https://twitter.com/BJonesCooper/status/1351930289187119112">dusk-hour burgundy</a> of Michelle Obama’s pantsuit; the <a href="https://twitter.com/rubycramer/status/1351915535647330306">kitschy zigzags</a> of Bernie Sanders’s mittens; the <a href="https://twitter.com/benkesslen/status/1351921657619894272/photo/1">craftwork sparkles</a> on Ella Emhoff’s shoulders; the glimpse of <a href="https://twitter.com/ComplexSneakers/status/1351929012025745408">Dior sneakers</a> behind Amy Klobuchar as she speechified. The event was a musical extravaganza too. Americans know the songs of their patriotic canon plenty well, but they haven’t often heard those songs performed quite like they were performed today. The arts-and-culture establishment—which largely sat out Trump-era ceremonies in protest—was back to flaunt its repressed ridiculousness.</p><figure><img alt="Lady Gaga singing at Joe Biden's inauguration" height="443" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2021/01/2021_01_20T193256Z_2134400668_RC2VBL946O7O_RTRMADP_3_USA_BIDEN_INAUGURATION/7ac81618c.jpg" width="672"><figcaption class="credit">Saul Loeb/Pool via REUTERS</figcaption></figure><p>Certainly, any expectations that Lady Gaga would forgo gonzo excess for this sacred gig vanished as soon as she toddled out <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAe02qarUFk">to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”</a> Gaga wanted to give America a feast: She’d braided her hair in the manner of a black-and-white challah; she wore a pouf dress that recalled a red-velvet cupcake; she sported a dove-shaped brooch as enormous as a Chipotle tortilla. (The dove itself snacked on an olive branch.) She then rendered the national anthem in the style of Richard Wagner’s Valkyries, which is really to say in Gaga’s own “Bad Romance” style: guttural, glamorous, serious, silly. When she got to the lyric “our flag was still there,” she turned around and belted to the American flag itself. One might call that maneuver <em>preposterous </em>in any other year, but was it not true that this particular flag persisted through a recent battle to <a href="https://people.com/politics/pro-trump-rioters-tear-down-american-flag-replace-with-trump-flag-at-u-s-capitol-building/">tear it down</a>? For Gaga to bellow any less ferociously, without such tearful commitment, would have been an abdication of duty.</p><p>Jennifer Lopez’s <a href="https://twitter.com/BidenInaugural/status/1351955914887102464">performance</a> was, by contrast, a feat of musical restraint—at least for a bit. Singing with a delicate tone, she reworked the cadence of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land”—a collectivist anthem written by <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/a-story-about-fred-trump-and-woody-guthrie-for-the-midterm-elections/amp">an ancestral foil to the Trump family</a>—to give it an adult-contemporary, <em>democracy-is-fragile</em> smoothness. But the military band’s arrangement and Lopez’s voice gathered fervor as the song went on. Then Lopez pulled off a series of sharp escalations: into the bombast of “America the Beautiful,” into a Spanish-language rendition of the Pledge of Allegiance, and into a mantra from Lopez’s own catalog—“Let’s get loud!” Stately reverence had given way to inclusive chutzpah. “That was great,” Klobuchar said, flatly and correctly, when she took the mic after Lopez.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2021/01/photos-inauguration-president-joseph-r-biden/617749/?utm_source=feed">Photos: The inauguration of President Joseph R. Biden Jr.</a>]</i></p><p>The third headlining slot of the show <a href="https://twitter.com/BidenInaugural/status/1351949364743204864">went to</a> Garth Brooks, the slyly kooky country legend. He’d previously <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/20/us/garth-brooks-inauguration.html">joked about</a> being the only Republican at the inauguration, and his participation was advertised as a small sign that Biden’s calls for unity would not go entirely unheeded. Singing “Amazing Grace” a cappella, with his hat in his hand, Brooks’s almost-angelic affect emphasized the meaning of the lyrics “how sweet the sound.” When he asked listeners—in person and at home—to sing along with him for the final verse, the silence that continued to swaddle him felt psychedelically intense. Maybe the senators in attendance were shy about their voices; maybe they were muffled by their masks. But in any case, this was the moment when the absence of in-person inaugural crowds came into focus. If Biden succeeds in his task to free America from pandemics and seditionists, we’ll be able to sing en masse again.</p><p>Gaga, J.Lo, Garth—these are long-established superstars, and their performances made a strong case for why we have normcore, big-tent entertainers (and, maybe, political leaders) in the first place. But the signature art-statement of the day came from a newcomer. Arrestingly decked in canary yellow and cherry red, the 22-year-old poet Amanda Gorman debuted her new work, “The Hill We Climb,” in a <a href="https://twitter.com/NewsHour/status/1351948728823910403">flawless five-minute recitation</a>. The poem itself is a hyper-alliterative string of reassuring aphorisms; the most moving passage, about “a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it,” was written after the attack on the Capitol. Really it was Gorman’s delivery—flowing with tidal grace, accentuated by symphony-conductor hand motions—that cast a spell in the manner of great music. “We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace,” went one line of her poem. The garish hues and the go-for-broke singing of this inauguration suggested a correlated truth: If we achieve true peace, it might get loud.</p></content><author><name>Spencer Kornhaber</name><uri>http://www.theatlantic.com/author/spencer-kornhaber/?utm_source=feed</uri></author><media:content url="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2021/01/2021_01_20T181145Z_525901596_RC2TBL9ZRRQ5_RTRMADP_3_USA_BIDEN_INAUGURATION/lead_960.jpg"><media:credit>Patrick Semansky / Pool via REUTERS</media:credit><media:description>American poet Amanda Gorman reads a poem during the 59th Presidential Inauguration at the U.S. Capitol.</media:description></media:content><title type="html">The Surprising Thing About Biden’s Inauguration</title><published>2021-01-20T20:05:24-05:00</published><updated>2021-01-21T10:17:40-05:00</updated><summary type="html">The colorful and joyful ceremony didn’t feel like a crisis-era bureaucratic procedure.</summary><link href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/01/biden-inauguration-lady-gaga-jlo-garth-brooks-amanda-gorman/617763/?utm_source=feed" rel="alternate"></link></entry><entry><id>tag:theatlantic.com,2021:50-617760</id><content type="html"><p>Donald Trump’s presidency concluded not with mutiny in state capitals or an attempted attack on his successor, but with a calm, conventional ceremony in an otherwise quiet city.</p><p>Walking through Washington, D.C., today, the silence in the streets was the sound of a country not quite ready to exhale. It was a fitting end to the noisiest era of American politics that many Americans can remember.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/01/joe-biden-inauguration-security-militarization/617728/?utm_source=feed">Read: Among the guardsmen</a>]</i></p><p>If this had been a normal Inauguration Day, in a normal year, the National Mall would have been covered with hundreds of thousands of shivering people hoping to catch a glimpse of the new president. The streets of the capital would have been packed with out-of-towners ready to pay $25 a head to visit the Spy Museum, and lining up at sidewalk vendors’ tables to buy Kamala Harris–themed merch. But the only civilians I saw downtown during the ceremony were a few committed joggers and a clutch of Joe Biden supporters lingering outside the White House. The showing was so small that journalists seemed to outnumber the revelers; I watched as reporters interviewed the same handful of attendees, over and over again.</p><p>Democrats in D.C. and beyond have a lot to be grateful for. They replaced Donald Trump with Barack Obama’s former vice president. They elected the first Black woman vice president in U.S. history. But on this day, of all days, they chose to celebrate from the warmth of their homes.</p><p>That could be a reflection of how complicated this moment really is. A pandemic that is still raging has killed 400,000 Americans. The national vaccine rollout is slow, and new strains of the coronavirus are alarming scientists worldwide. COVID-19 didn’t stop Washingtonians from protesting in the streets this summer, but the country has changed since then. It’s changed a lot in just the past two weeks. Washington, D.C., is in lockdown mode, the result of a far-right delusion that led to a <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/01/republicans-created-chaos-outside-us-capitol/617571/?utm_source=feed">violent insurrection</a> in the seat of American democracy.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/01/pandemic-now-bidens-hands/617743/?utm_source=feed">Read: A tragic beginning to a presidency.</a>]</i></p><figure><img alt="Flags fill the National Mall between the Capitol and the Washington Monument" height="448" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2021/01/h_15471937/a69e3c827.jpg" width="672"><figcaption class="caption">Chang W. Lee / The New York Times / Redux</figcaption></figure><p>Seven months ago, I saw demonstrators <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/protest-dc-george-floyd-police-reform/612748/?utm_source=feed">do the Macarena</a> in Black Lives Matter Plaza, a moment of joy after so many days of marches and die-ins to protest police brutality. I was walking through my neighborhood on November 7 when, at the precise moment that the networks projected Biden the winner, locals exploded out of their homes holding <span class="smallcaps">BYE, LOSER!</span> signs and popping bottles of Veuve Clicquot.</p><p>To get to the plaza today, supporters had to pass through a TSA checkpoint and walk several blocks out of the way. Once they got there, most stood quietly in a circle, listening to the new president’s inaugural address over someone’s portable loudspeaker. A handful of protesters waved <span class="smallcaps">BIDEN-HARRIS</span> or <span class="smallcaps">FUCK TRUMP</span> flags. A few of them cheered when Biden promised that “the dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer.”</p><p>Diamond Douglas and her mother, Felicia, arrived in D.C. last night from Greenville, South Carolina. They’d come to town for Obama’s first inauguration, when Diamond was in fourth grade, and they wanted to witness history again, with the swearing-in of the first Black woman vice president. Diamond wished she could be closer to the proceedings—to actually see the ceremony, not listen to it from behind a tall fence more than a mile away. “It’s not what I was expecting,” she told me when I asked how she felt about the attendance and the security. “But I have to respect it, because it’s in the best interest for everyone.”</p></content><author><name>Elaine Godfrey</name><uri>http://www.theatlantic.com/author/elaine-godfrey/?utm_source=feed</uri></author><media:content url="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2021/01/h_15471901/lead_960.jpg"><media:credit>Todd Heisler / The New York Times / Redux</media:credit><media:description>Photos of Vice President Kamala Harris hang outside a restaurant in Washington, D.C., on Inauguration Day.</media:description></media:content><title type="html">The Sound of Silence</title><published>2021-01-20T18:23:35-05:00</published><updated>2021-01-21T09:58:35-05:00</updated><summary type="html">The quiet in the streets of D.C. today was a fitting end to the noisiest political era many Americans can remember.</summary><link href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/01/washington-dcs-eerie-quiet-bidens-inauguration-day/617760/?utm_source=feed" rel="alternate"></link></entry><entry><id>tag:theatlantic.com,2021:50-617764</id><content type="html"><p><em>Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/?utm_source=feed">Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox</a>.</em></p><p dir="ltr">Today’s presidential inauguration was mostly remarkable for how unremarkable it was. My colleague Annie Lowrey described today’s scene at the Capitol as “patriotic normcore.”</p><p dir="ltr">After four years of assaults on democracy and endless uncertainty, President Biden steered the national mood, however incrementally, back toward normalcy.</p><p dir="ltr"><b><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/a-sermon-in-americas-civic-religion/617750/?utm_source=feed">Biden’s speech invoked the familiar—and made it newly fresh.</a></b></p><p dir="ltr">The president’s address “was well wrought, but it offered nothing unusual, nothing surprising, nothing especially memorable,” our Ideas staff writer David A. Graham notes. “Paradoxically, that was the source of its power.”</p><p dir="ltr"><b><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/kamala-harris-makes-history/617002/?utm_source=feed">Today, Kamala Harris did it.</a></b></p><p>“Her vice presidency is worth celebrating because—however painful the process—she made it to the other side of the barrier,” the contributing writer Jemele Hill wrote back in November.</p><p dir="ltr"><b><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/01/pandemic-now-bidens-hands/617743/?utm_source=feed">The administration begins amid tragedy.</a></b></p><p>On the eve of Biden’s swearing in, the U.S. pandemic death toll reached 400,000. And it could hit 500,000 by the end of February, Biden’s incoming chief of staff, Ron Klain, warns.</p><p dir="ltr"><b><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/wounds-trump-leaves-behind/617738/?utm_source=feed">And the country will still need to heal from the assaults of the Trump era.</a> </b></p><p dir="ltr">“If there is to be a recovery, it will be long and arduous, and require sustained intensive care,” Adam Serwer warns. “Even old wounds can ultimately prove fatal.”</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Further reading: </b></p><ul><li aria-level="1" dir="ltr"> |
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