But, like any good apocalyptic sci-fi film, there may be hope from an unlikely quarter.

Last year, 21 people between the ages of eight and 19 sued the federal government for violating their constitutional due process rights by increasing carbon emissions—even as government officials, going back 50 years, acknowledged the harm of global warming. Among other evidence, the plaintiffs cite a 1969 letter from then–White House adviser Patrick Moynihan to President Nixon’s counsel warning of “apocalyptic change” and the loss-by-sea of Miami and Washington, D.C. The plaintiffs demand that the federal government hatch and carry out a plan to slash carbon emissions—right now.

“These children cannot wait another 50 years. They cannot wait even another five years to secure their rights because the damage as alleged will be irreversibly locked in,” said Julia Olson, lead counsel for the case Juliana v. the United States, in a U.S. District Court in Eugene, Oregon, this September. Olson, who is also the director of the nonprofit Our Children’s Trust, claimed the government had flouted the “public trust doctrine,” a common law precept with roots in the Roman Empire, which holds that the government must protect natural resources for future generations.

The Department of Justice, supported by three trade groups that represent the fossil fuel industry, has moved to dismiss the lawsuit on the grounds that the plaintiffs alleged merely a “generalized grievance,” and thus could not show that government policy had harmed them specifically. The Department of Justice also claimed that the public trust doctrine does not apply to the federal government, and noted that no court has ever recognized a constitutional right to be free of climate change. 

Indeed, for all its urgency, the case was a long shot, in part because federal judges are loath to recognize new constitutional rights. But last week, two days after Trump’s election, U.S. District Court Judge Ann Aiken did just that in denying the motion to dismiss. “I have no doubt that the right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life is fundamental to a free and ordered society,” wrote Aiken.

Aiken found the right to a stable climate system in the Fifth Amendment’s substantive due process guarantee of life, liberty, and property. She likened the case to Obergefell v. Hodge, which affirmed the constitutional right to same-sex marriage on the grounds that so many other fundamental rights rely on the institution of marriage. Similarly, Aiken reasoned, everything we have and are relies on a healthy environment. “To hold otherwise would be to say that the Constitution affords no protection against a government’s knowing decision to poison the air its citizens breathe or the water its citizens drink,” Aiken concluded.

By rejecting the motion to dismiss, Aiken has allowed the case to move forward to discovery, summary judgment, and then, perhaps, trial. More significantly, President Obama now has a fresh chance to settle with the plaintiffs. By crafting a solution with the heads of more than a dozen federal agencies named in the suit, he might just preserve some part of his legacy on climate change policy through the courts.

“Isn’t it crazy to think that we’re the last line of defense almost?” said Victoria Barrett, a New York City high school senior who is one plaintiff in the case. 

The morning after Aiken’s decision, Barrett stood with another plaintiff, Columbia University sophomore Alexander Loznak, on the steps of Columbia’s Low Library with leading climatologist Dr. James Hansen, whose granddaughter is also a plaintiff. Hansen has warned that carbon dioxide concentrations must decrease by 6 percent a year by 2020 to return to 350 parts per million, a threshold for safety we have passed. 

Barrett and Loznak claim to have experienced direct, personal harm from climate change. For Barrett, these injuries included lost school days from Hurricane Sandy. For Loznak (full disclosure: my former student), they include damages to his family’s ranch and hazel nut orchard, which was founded in 1868 by an ancestor, one of the first female ranchers in Oregon. Loznak’s full list of harms, from the dried-up rivers where he used to fish to the wildfire smoke he inhales, total 15 type-written pages 

“I’d very much like to sit down with President Obama,” said Loznak. “We have two months left.” 

But even if it wanted to, could the Obama administration craft a meaningful settlement with the plaintiffs on climate change policy in a mere 70 days? The heads of more than a dozen federal agencies have also been named in the suit, and “the intervenors”—that is, the three industry trade groups—would likely object.

Olson, the lead counsel, is optimistic. “I think it’s very possible if President Obama and the other key defendants come to the settlement table,” she said. “It may not resolve the whole case, but it could provide some very important interim protections for these youth plaintiffs.” Actions that should immediately stop, she said, include the further leasing of public lands for fossil fuels extraction and the building of new fossil fuel infrastructure.

And while the intervenors could object to a settlement, she argued, the court would decide whether to enter a consent decree. In such a settlement, the plaintiff and defendant ask the court to enter their agreement and oversee the decree. In this case, the federal judiciary would be responsible for compelling the Trump administration to honor the terms of the settlement, not unlike the judiciary’s role in protecting the civil rights enshrined in Brown v. Board of Education.

Columbia’s Michael Burger and the University of Vermont’s Pat Paranteau, environmental attorneys with an expertise in climate law, both say that settlement with the federal government is possible, even if likely to be challenged by the intervenors and/or the Trump administration. Leading economist Jeffrey Sachs, who advised on the case, agreed that a settlement is possible. “I think the administration sees absolutely that its agenda is utterly endangered and should immediately step forward,” he said. “I think this is obvious thing to do.”

Sachs, who spoke from Marrakesh, Morocco, where leaders from nearly 200 countries have met to hash out next steps for the Paris Climate Agreement, said he would bring the case to the attention of senior officials. He added that this week, for the first time, the U.S. is going to put forward a long-term plan for carbon reduction.

For its part, the Department of Justice is looking at the case. Spokesperson Wyn Hornbuckle emailed, “We are currently reviewing the decision and considering next steps.”

Olson emphasized that, if the Obama administration falls through, she is prepared to go to court against a Trump administration, arguing that Trump’s lack of factual claims on climate science only strengthens her case. Whether the case will reach trial is still unclear, as the next stage is discovery, which can take years, and then summary judgment, in which the plaintiffs must more fully establish causation between the government’s actions on climate change and their injuries. 

“Even if there is a victory at the trial court, there remains a rough road ahead for the plaintiffs because they’re basically asking the court to recognize a previously unrecognized right,” said Burger. 

That means the Supreme Court might have to get involved, if the case even makes it that far. Less than 1 percent of cases make it to the Court, and even if it did, Parenteau said, a court filled out by a Trump nominee would make for a tough hearing. “The benefit of this case will be: Does this get to trial? And does it make a record of how dire exactly our situation is, and how consequential this election has been for any chance of mitigating it?” said Parenteau. 

Still, what Aiken’s decision means is that the future of climate change remains an open question. At least for one federal judge in Oregon, a stable climate and a world worth living in are no less than fundamental rights.

Thus! This week we dig into the surprise science-fiction hit Arrival, Jeff Nichols’s drama Loving, and Ang Lee’s 120-fps war drama Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. Then, in our Reboot segment, we look at the foster care drama Short Term 12, starring Brie Larson before she won her Oscar for Room.

Let us know what you think @griersonleitch on Twitter, or griersonleitch@newrepublic.com. As always, leave us a review on iTunes with the name of a movie you’d like us to review, and we’ll discuss it on a later podcast

It is an understatement to say that Obama’s departure from the White House is occurring under unusual circumstances. He is managing a transition to the presidency of someone he believes is unfit for that office, who has empowered racist hate groups, wants to undo the Obama presidency, and shouldn’t be entrusted with nuclear weapons.

Despite all that, but also in a sense precisely because of all that, Obama is planning to play something like mentor to Trump over the coming weeks—something that doesn’t normally happen between outgoing presidents and incoming ones when the latter is acceptably disciplined and competent.

In a tense environment where reporters, government workers, world leaders, and anxious citizens and immigrants understandably are scrutinizing every Donald Trump tweet and utterance and leak, Obama’s closing thoughts on the presidency and his successor will be given short shrift. But the things he says about the transition contain critical information about its progress and his confidence that, on the other side of it, things will run smoothly.

His Monday comments suggests he has very little confidence that they will.

There is a text and a subtext to everything politicians say in public, even ones without more elections to run. It was the subtext of Obama’s press conference that unnerved me.

On the surface, his performance was reassuring. He was chipper. He did not doomsay. He searched for the generous and hopeful things to say about Trump and Trump’s designs on the presidency. But on close reading the sum total of his remarks was frightening—a stage-setting, at the very least, for an administration Obama expects will be hobbled by incompetence and likely to fail.

Obama kept returning to three basic themes: that Trump will be given every opportunity to succeed, thanks to the tutelage Obama and his team will be providing, and the fact Trump won’t be inheriting massive crises—which should give him the kind of running room Obama never enjoyed; that the work of a presidency is ceaseless, and much of it highly detail-oriented; and finally that Trump’s grasp of what he’s been elected to do is at best remedial.

Obama may be subtly trying to communicate to the Trump transition team that they need to make massive strides, and quickly, or they will be, in Obama’s words, “swamped.” But his expectation that Trump and his entourage will get their act together is clearly very low.

“The most important point I made,” Obama told reporters at the White House, referring to his conversation last week with Trump, “was that how you staff—particularly your chief of staff, your national security adviser, your White House counsel, how you set up a process and a system to surface information, generate options for a president, understanding that ultimately the president is going to be the final decision maker, that that’s something that’s going to have to be attended to right away.”

This was all accurate, but it was a way of saying that Trump is the first president in living memory not to have even passing knowledge of how a White House operation runs.

Obama repeatedly touted the fact that Trump will be inheriting many advantages: low unemployment, rising incomes and wages, a historically low uninsurance rate, stable financial systems, a high stock market, strong international alliances, and cheap gasoline. Given the baseline Trump will inherit, Obama’s reminder that “the American people will judge over the next couple of years whether they like what they see” suggests a suspicion that many of these metrics will worsen once Trump takes over.

When he was stumping for Hillary Clinton, Obama frequently returned to an immutable fact about the presidency: that the office doesn’t change an inhabitant’s temperamental failures, but magnifies them. On Monday, Obama suggested that the only way around this potentially catastrophic problem for Trump would be to outsource aspects of the job which don’t suit his temperament to less erratic people.

Obama explained how this presidency hack worked in his case:

This may seem like a silly example, but I know myself well enough to know I can’t keep track of paper. I am not well organized in that way. And so pretty quickly, after I’m getting stacks of briefing books coming in every night, I say to myself, I’ve got to figure out a system because I have bad filing, sorting and organizing habits. And I’ve got to find some people who can help me keep track of this stuff. That seems trivial, but actually it ends up being a pretty big piece of business.

The analogy would’ve been amusing but for the fact that, whether he can keep his desk and files organized or not, Trump can’t focus long enough to read through “stacks of briefing books coming in every night” to begin with.

Reading comprehension and patience only scratch the surface of difficulties Trump will face. “I think there will be certain elements of his temperament that will not serve him well unless he recognizes them and corrects them,” Obama added, “because when you’re a candidate and you say something that is inaccurate or controversial, it has less impact than it does when you’re president of the United States. Everybody around the world is paying attention, markets moves. National security issues require a level of precision in order to make sure you don’t make mistakes. I think he recognizes that this is different.”

Trump may or may not need someone to set up a filing system for him, but he’ll need people to do his reading, and to keep him from making shit up or reflexively attacking his enemies in public. The consequences of failing to outsource these tasks to people with better temperament won’t be a disorganized workspace, but crashing markets and accidental wars.

On the campaign trail, Trump responded to relatively trivial setbacks by grinding campaign norms into dust. One of his favorite tactics was positing a variety of fake realities (international conspiracies, the fictional crimes of his enemies, the imagined hellscapes of inner cities) meant to turn his base’s focus away from some new mortifying revelation and back to the demagogic message of his candidacy.

Obama’s warning to Trump, and everyone who stands to suffer for his errors, is that living in a rhetorical fantasy will backfire on a president. “Regardless of what experience or assumptions he brought to the office, this office has a way of waking you up,” Obama said. “And those aspects of his positions or predispositions that don’t match up with reality—he will find shaken up pretty quick, because reality has a way of asserting itself.”

Should Trump respond to such shakeups by transgressing governing norms, where he once transgressed campaigning norms, Obama warned that he would find himself in the midst of scandal or crime.

“One of the things you discover about being president is that there are all these rules and norms and laws and you’ve got to pay attention to them,” Obama said, as if the president-elect weren’t a 70-year-old person with a fancy education. “The people who work for you are also subject to those rules and norms. And that’s a piece of advice that I gave to the incoming president.”

Obama’s presidency was historically uncorrupt and free from major scandal, but that is not typical in U.S. history. George W. Bush’s administration festered with scandal and corruption, even though Bush had governing experience and enough integrity not to let his presidency become a source of personal enrichment. Bill Clinton’s White House, though misremembered by Republicans as one part Saturnalia, one part Nixonian crime den, wasn’t scandal-free either.

“We listened to the lawyers,” Obama said, “and we had a strong White House Counsel’s Office. We had a strong Ethics Office. We had people in every agency whose job it was to remind people, this is how you’re supposed to do things…. We had to just try to institutionalize this as much as we could. And that takes a lot of work. And one of my suggestions to the incoming president is, is that he take that part of the job seriously, as well.”

Because of the unique and awkward position he finds himself in, Obama can’t trash the incoming president or sow panic about the country’s coming stewardship. But it isn’t normal for an outgoing president to have to tell the incoming one he should follow the law, and that aspects of his temperament might get him into an economic crisis or a war or a massive corruption scandal. It’s certainly not normal for him to warn the public about it, however subtly, either.

We’ve become accustomed to some very high standards of behavior, and complacent—or even frustrated—with a slow, steady improvement upon the status quo Obama inherited eight years ago. This is Obama’s only way of preparing us for some abrupt and ugly reversals. We ought to listen very closely.

Until now, Hollywood has given us a lot of movies about male aggression. Think, for instance, of Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down, in which an angry, bespectacled Michael Douglas wreaks a path of destruction because he has been laid off and his wife has left him. Another version can be found in books like Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. The alienated man lashing out at society is a trope that popular culture loves to explore. It is amply backed up by America’s curiosity about what might make someone into a Ted Kaczynski, or a Columbine killer, or a Dylann Roof. Usually such movies have some sympathy for the place their characters find themselves in, some connection to their alienation. The problem, we’re told, is mass culture. Or the gradual deracination of masculinity in a post-feminist country. That truth is treated as self-evident: Michael Douglas is, after all, a man on the edge.

Peter and the Farm works harder than most films to get at the truth of what has happened to its anti-hero. People like Peter do sometimes become Ted Kaczynski, a man Peter himself references with neither admiration nor condemnation, and direct their aggression outward. But more often, they become Peter, a person so deep inside his own self-hate that he exudes his own kind of charisma. Although we are told Peter has been abandoned by his two ex-wives and four children, he is not particularly mournful about his inability to keep a family together. He is an alcoholic who seems unlikely to hurt anyone but who talks frequently of suicide. He offers little to no explanation for why he has become what others might call “A Difficult Person.” Instead he performs a kind of very slow self-immolation in this film, only the tiniest of flames lapping at his feet, growing imperceptibly as the movie chugs along.

To be fair, one thing that Peter shares with men-on-the-edge is deep, abiding frustration. In every single way Peter’s ambitions have been thwarted. He once wanted to be a painter, had an idea that by moving to Vermont he’d be allowed to dedicate himself half the year to art. The other half, he thought, he’d spend making money, and took a job in a sawmill. Then there was an accident with a band saw, which left him with mangled hand. It can grip things, but the loss of the full use of a hand clearly put an end to many of Peter’s hopes.

“Everything had a meaning and everything had a purpose,” Peter says to the documentarians. “And that’s what’s getting lost now. Without enough animals, meaning and purpose is all fucked up.” He is plainly referring to the general condition of society rather than his own particular condition. But it is not a triumphant statement. Peter, for example, often describes his own sheep as prisoners. And even so, the sheep tend to wrangle Peter instead of the other way around. At one point, in the midst of tagging some, he falls helplessly backwards into the muck, declaring loudly that “I hate sheep.” People who have had prior experience with sheep may feel pangs of sympathy, but it’s clear he is deriving little sense of meaning and purpose from those particular animals.

Peter’s charm is, of course, a gendered thing. A woman, living alone as Peter does, angry and depressed as he is, is unlikely to seem quite so intriguing to a filmmaker. She would be a ruin, and not, like Peter, the ruin of a monument for something America used to want to believe about its men. Peter benefits from the fact that hard living often seems to make isolated, unhappy old men more attractive, the lines in their face read as evidence that they have felt things very deeply all their lives. When they have tantrums, the modifier typically applied is “anguished,” rather than “hysterical.”

And Peter is certainly very anguished. “What does it matter?” Peter begins yelling at the filmmaker towards the end of the documentary, the “it” being his life. That the documentary can’t totally answer this question is its biggest achievement. Another sort of film would position Peter as at least nominally heroic, ending with him looking peacefully over his land at the end of a summer workday. The documentary is not so sure about this. Its attitude towards him is something more like Henry David Thoreau’s attitude toward the people of Concord in the nineteenth century: “The inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.”

Where others might be awed by beauty, Peter sees only disappointment. One golden evening they’re all sitting outside, near the pond, and you can hear warbling in the distance. Peter asks the film crew what they think that is. “A beautiful songbird,” one of the producers replies offscreen, and Peter makes a sound midway between a laugh and a snort. “It’s a toad,” he says. It’s a nice metaphor for what the filmmaker clearly wants to convey about the farm, that it’s both a fantasy land and a trap. And that the failure of someone like Peter, someone who has worked all his life without feeling he has anything to show for it, is that he very much knows exactly what he’s sacrificed to keep it going. That is the edge that Peter has on the man-on-the-edge: At least he seems to know that he’s the one who built all the fences that keeps him enclosed in his own rage.

Some show, as it were, the big picture. Look at those revelatory photographs
of Earth from outer space, the ones that streamed back down from the Apollo missions. Today, that beautiful blue-white marble is ... nowhere near as white. Half the summer sea ice in the Arctic has vanished. In only half a lifetime.

But Katie Orlinsky’s pictures provide the close-up. For the past two years, Orlinsky has documented the toll that climate change is taking on the indigenous residents of six villages in northernmost Alaska. Her photographs from the front lines of global warming demonstrate what it means to live in a place where life is still tied to geography. Life in these villages has always involved cold. Cold meant ice, and ice meant seals and whales and polar bears, and the animals meant enough meat to fill a village’s ice cellars, buried deep in the permafrost. Now these givens are givens no more. The seals are disappearing, and the ice is too thin to support whale hunting, and the polar bears are eating what’s left of the whales. The ice cellars are melting, and the food is rotting. The entire village of Shishmaref is disappearing into the sea, and soon all 600 residents will have to relocate.

Other places, of course, are experiencing the cultural and economic and personal dislocation of climate change. But a warmer Westchester or a balmier L.A. doesn’t pose a crisis of identity. In the Arctic, life remains tied to the land and sea; subsistence hunting has formed the basis of the people’s culture for centuries. Now that indigenous way of life is being destroyed at an unprecedented rate. In the Arctic, unfortunately, the pace of change is no longer glacial.

Reporting for this story was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation.

Townhall’s Matt Vespa called it “the revenge of the white working class,” Politico the “Revenge of the rural voter.” Clinton, according to CNN contributor and historian Stephanie Coontz, “was simply unable to present herself as a forceful defender of everyone who has been left behind by the march of globalization, professionalization and the emergence of a new just-in-time, winner-take-all economy.” And Cracked’s David Wong, in an article with nearly ten million views, explains why rural voters came out so strongly for Trump: “To those ignored, suffering people, Donald Trump is a brick chucked through the window of the elites. ‘Are you assholes listening now?’”

It’s true that the white working class was instrumental in delivering Trump the White House. In the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, Clinton underperformed Barack Obama among white working class voters, and this cost her the electoral college. Had about 100,000 of these voters across the three states voted for her instead of Trump, she would be president–elect now, instead of sitting on a possible two-million vote Pyrrhic popular vote victory.

The failure to engage the white working class has been described as a grave tactical error, and that may well be true, given the slim margin of victory in swing states. But the media’s obsessive focus on this voting bloc would leave you to believe that Trump’s voters largely live in areas hit by the decline in manufacturing, are suffering from economic anxiety, and turned out last Tuesday to voice their disdain for smug urban elitists. But this narrative paints a misleading picture of the typical Trump voter, and by doing so, lets off the hook an entire class of voters who are at least as responsible for Trump’s victory: middle-class and wealthy suburban whites, who also came out in droves for Trump and who make up a larger part of his coalition.

The average Trump voter is not poorly educated or unemployed, nor does he live in a rural area. Back in May, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver punctured the myth of the “working class” being Trump’s voter base: In exit polls of 23 states from the primaries, all showed a higher median income for Trump supporters than the national average, usually around $70,000. Exit polls last week, while not definitive, reveal that both college-educated white men and college educated white women voted for Trump by much higher than expected margins.

While it is true that many rural voters who backed Obama in 2008 and 2012 voted for Trump this year, these voters hardly comprise the majority of Trump’s 60 million votes, as rural voters made up only 17 percent of this year’s electorate. Most rural voters generally vote Republican anyway. Clinton’s decision not to target these voters may seem foolhardy in hindsight, but these voters have not been a key Democratic demographic for many decades. Moreover, as a longtime member of the Washington establishment, Clinton was always going to be a hard sell to these voters in a change election.

The voters Clinton really lost—the ones she was targeting and relying on for victory—were college-educated whites. Most polling suggested she would win these voters, but she didn’t, according to exit polls: White men went 63 percent for Trump versus 31 percent for Clinton, and white women went 53-43 percent. Among college-educated whites, only 39 percent of men and 51 percent of women voted for Clinton.

Clinton’s strategy made sense. Trump’s negatives among this group, which normally leans Republican (Romney won them by six points), were pretty high in polling. What’s more, these people hadn’t suffered under Obama; they’d thrived. The kind of change Trump was espousing wasn’t supposed to connect with this group. A massive Gallup study in August revealed that the typical Trump supporter has “not been disproportionately affected by foreign trade or immigration. The results suggest that his supporters, on average, do not have lower incomes than other Americans, nor are they more likely to be unemployed.”

Perhaps, then, these Trump voters are the most deplorable of them all. They’re not suffering or desperate, and have no concrete reason to hate the status quo or to feel like they are in decline. They understand that Trump is manifestly unprepared to be president, have heard his many lies and insults, yet voted for him anyway. And without them, Trump wouldn’t have won. The media ought to focus on their motivations, too—and reporters won’t even have to fly to Youngstown to find them.

But when push came to shove, Democrats did not have a truly social network of groups that could mobilize independently and enthusiastically around issues; organize on behalf of candidates across the ballot; and operate beneath the noise of the corporate media. This failure in a presidential year is especially inauspicious for the 2018 off-year elections. For Democrats to build their party anew, they should study the strengths of the modern Republican Party.

Over the last 40 years, conservatives built a robust and self-sustaining ecosystem of interest groups, organizations, and social movements that was tied to but independent from the Republican Party. Particularly important were the intermediating organizations: pro-life advocacy groups such as the National Right to Life Committee, the NRA, and anti-tax and anti-regulation business groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council and Americans for Prosperity. These organizations served a triple purpose. First, they shaped the party and its candidates in their image. Second, when elections came around, these organizations and their affiliated grassroots groups got out the vote and reminded voters about perceived liberal threats. And, most importantly, when it came time to govern, these groups shaped the legislation Republicans advanced. As Americans for Prosperity’s website puts it: “Stand for Principles. Not politicians.”

Democrats long relied upon organized labor, women’s groups, and civil rights organizations to do similar work. Beginning in the 1980s, however, the party and its regulars began to slide away from this vertically and horizontally integrated network. Instead, Democrats began to rally their base around prominent candidates. Bill Clinton’s success in the 1990s was an example of this tendency to invest progressive hopes in individual stars rather than in self-sustaining, issue-focused, extra-party organizations that had the clout to hold candidates to account.

Democrats’ shift toward candidate-centered party-building reached its apotheosis in Barack Obama’s historic 2008 victory. Obama’s team relied heavily on big data to ensure their candidate reached the very people needed to secure victory in the Electoral College and to pay for the effort. Upon his election, Organizing for America, their grassroots, digitally enhanced machine, maintained a registry of 13 million email supporters, had the financial backing of four million donors, and, incredibly for a presidential campaign, was in the black to the tune of $18 million in the bank.

As Obama turned this commanding resource over to the Democratic Party, no organization in the history of American politics had ever had a more sensitive apparatus for listening to, organizing, and developing policies attuned to its electoral base. Republicans panicked. As conservative operative Ed Rollins put it, “No one’s ever had these kind of resources.”

But the Democrats fumbled their advantage almost immediately. Rather than use their resources to cultivate local candidates and ideologically aligned intermediating organizations, the party chose to blast Obama supporters with emails and phone calls about the president’s escalating war with Congress. Obama’s supporters checked out. The failure became crystal-clear in off-year elections, when Democrats struggled to generate support for down-ballot candidates. The party’s inability in 2010 to elect Martha Coakley in Massachusetts, of all places, to replace the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, of all liberals, was a powerful lesson in the necessity of building an ecosystem of voters and organizations independent of rising star candidates.

Meanwhile, by the mid-1990s, Republicans had used their growing decentralized network to take control of Congress, which was only reversed during the wave elections of the Bush years. In addition to the obvious governing power the independent conservative ecosystem has yielded Republicans, it has also meant that the party has cultivated a deep well of candidates to draw upon. Incredibly, by 2016, after eight years of Democratic control of the White House, Democrats’ roster of potential presidential candidates was exceedingly thin. Down the ballot, the party was hard-pressed to identify rising stars to challenge Republicans. In addition to controlling Congress and the White House and (probably) the Supreme Court, the GOP now is in full control of 33 state governments. Amending the Constitution only requires approval by three-quarters of the state legislatures: That’s just 38 states.

The enthusiasm Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have generated is potentially significant. But, in the absence of building organizations between presidential elections, such excitement is at risk of simply being co-opted into future candidate-centered campaigns, as it was this year. Instead, progressives must harness this enthusiasm and yoke it to building self-sustaining, extra-party organizations focused on down-ballot elections and clear policy agendas: breaking up corporate monopolies, fighting climate change, combating police violence, or tackling poverty and inequality.

Ironically, Trump’s election offers a silver lining in this respect. His election marks a profound break with the institutional structure of the modern Republican Party—that is, the Republicans just became a party defined by enthusiasm for a single candidate rather than a clear range of interest groups. That candidate is also profoundly out of step with longstanding Republican commitments. Though a Republican cloth drapes all of American government, it almost surely veils a roiling battle for the heart of the party.

Furthermore, Trump succeeded because the party did a poor job of balancing the demands of its various groups. That some 17 candidates emerged to vie for the presidential nomination was a sign of the party’s vibrancy, on the one hand. But it was also a symptom of mounting unrest, revealing that each of the party’s interest groups sought a stronger hand to steer the coalition. With the help of Fox News and other conservative and alt-right outlets, Trumpism became a disease that infected the Republicans’ extra-party organizations, and Trump systematically coopted much of the party’s ecosystem. With Stephen Bannon assuming a senior White House advisory position, to think that Trump will suddenly begin to yield to the party elites’ preferences seems naïve.

All this represents an opportunity for Democrats. For progressives to put their faith in a white knight anti-Trump candidate in 2020 would suggest the party and its voters have failed to learn the lessons of the past four decades. Paradigm-shifting candidates like Obama are the exception not the rule. In the absence of such a candidate, technocratic party-building and algorithmic-targeting of voters actually reverse the polarity of democracy: Rather than citizens rallying together around issues and candidates, centralized parties attempt to mobilize individual voters. This year, such disaggregated virtual social networking proved to be profoundly out of touch. With today’s siloed media landscape relentlessly focused on Washington, genuine local social networking may be more important than ever.

Building on the momentum of Black Lives Matter, as well the Sanders campaign’s attention to affordable tuition, minimum wage increases, and single payer health care, progressives must build up a range of intermediating organizations that can remake the Democratic Party from top to bottom and between presidential elections. For the poor and marginalized, for immigrants and workers, for Muslims, for LGBT citizens, and for people of color, the stakes are too high for progressives to wait for another Obama.

The tension between those two messages—the former classic Trump, the latter likely crafted by his team—was a common feature of his presidential campaign, such that his aides “finally wrested away” his Twitter account just days before the election, according to The New York Times. That tension has persisted since the election. In an interview taped on Friday for CBS’ 60 Minutes, Trump insisted of his Twitter use, “I’m going to do it very restrained if I do it at all.” Two days later, before that episode had aired on Sunday night, he went on a Twitter tirade against The New York Times for “their very poor and highly inaccurate coverage of the ‘Trump phenomena,’” calling the paper “dishonest” for reporting on Friday that Trump “has suggested that more countries should acquire nuclear weapons”—a factually accurate statement.

It’s not an absolute certainty that Trump’s erratic Twitter presence will persist once he’s president; one would hope that he’s too busy for that. Then again, Trump is incredibly busy now, as he faces the daunting task of staffing an entire administration despite his having no governmental experience whatsoever (in his meeting with President Barack Obama last week he reportedly “seemed surprised by the scope” of presidential duties). The fact that he is still ranting, amid all of this work, suggests he may not be able to resist the lure of Twitter—a compulsion millions of Americans can sympathize with, but one that’s worrisome, to say the least, in a president.

Which raises the question: What will it be like to have a president who regularly, personally tweets his thoughts and opinions? We saw the power of Trump’s seething tweets when he was the Republican nominee, and the ramifications now are far greater. Trump will be the Twitter President in the worst possible way, giving a whole new meaning to the term “bully pulpit.” And that’s a shame, because his use of Twitter has been politically revolutionary in a way that could have been harnessed for the greater good.

As the 2016 election proved, social media is a deeply contradictory social force. It spreads vital information quickly and provides an unfiltered platform for suppressed voices, but also disseminates misinformation and creates information bubbles. Twitter’s particular contradiction is its pace and brevity, which lends itself to memes, wit, and breaking news but also breeds misunderstanding, acrimony, and outright hate. It is as much a tool for harassment as it is for solidarity.

Though Twitter is often informal, a president’s use of it—particularly the prickly Trump—may thus complicate the line between official and unofficial statements. This is worrying. Leaders of nations have practical responsibilities, but also perform a symbolic function. It’s why the president’s reaction after a mass shooting, natural disaster, or act of terrorism is so important: Those words are meant to set the tone and tenor for the nation’s response. But given Trump’s history—such as his response to the Orlando nightclub massacre, “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism”—his use of Twitter could foster a culture of bias and aggression.

Beyond all the obvious reasons for despair, there is also cause for disappointment. In other circumstances, the transparency of a president who personally tweets might have been a revelation. As we saw in the leaked Hillary Clinton emails, messaging by most powerful politicians goes through layers of approval, and is finessed by many hands. The sharp edges are shaved away, leaving language that is often devoid of life. Trump has revolutionized political messaging through his use of Twitter, leveraging the platform to break through the fastidious, tightly scripted politicking that defines contemporary politics. It was vital to his image of authenticity, and no doubt many Americans voted for him as a way of rejecting today’s overly calculated political rhetoric.

The modern relationship between politics and mass media has produced a strange situation in which we all acknowledge there is a difference between the public discourse of politics and how it is practised behind closed doors. We know that lofty campaign speeches bear no resemblance to the profanity-laden arguments in backrooms where power is truly exercised. Statements are crafted this way because of how they move through the media machine: often taken out of context, then used to reductively characterize position, moral character, and ideology. The public vacuity of modern politics is inseparable from its media corollary.

A president who took to a public platform to chip away at some of that disparity—even if it was just to relate personal, emotional statements rather than polished political narratives—might have helped the public believe that the government was acting out of a genuine interest to lead, rather than couching specific, ideological goals in a language meant to obscure them. Instead of relief from empty campaign statements, though, we got a president who uses social media to enact revenge, spout conspiracy theories, and self-aggrandize. Donald Trump will likely reign as the Twitter President, and he will do so like the worst of Twitter itself—primed for outrage, and quick to react with only the barest amount of thought.

But it should also offer Democrats hope in a bleak political era: Privatizing Medicare would be a hugely unpopular move that could tear Trump’s political coalition apart. Launching a pre-emptive attack on the Ryan Plan, especially if done with maximum political theater, offers Democrats a chance to win an early victory against the Republicans. More crucially, it could mark the beginning of a long campaign of divide-and-conquer.

In political terms, the Republicans hold all the cards. They will soon have the presidency, Congress, and (if Trump pushes through his replacement for Antonin Scalia) the Supreme Court. But formal Republican political power masks the fact that the winning coalition Trump has created is highly unstable and will be sorely tested as soon as Trump and the Republican Congress begin to make some political choices.

Consider the figures who are now in power around Trump: Mike Pence, who is a social conservative who believes in gay conversion therapy; Peter Thiel, who is gay and a social libertarian; Stephen Bannon, who wants to launch an alt-right revolution against the GOP elite; and Reince Priebus, a Republican functionary who is the perfect embodiment of that elite. Then there is Trump himself, who has adopted populist policies including expanding infrastructure spending and preserving entitlements, and Paul Ryan, who is an extreme advocate of fiscal conservatism and privatization.

The political task for Democrats going into the next election is to create wedge issues to splinter this coalition. In the 2016 cycle, Trump was able to hold the coalition together by talking out of both sides of his mouth (often incoherently), so different factions thought he represented their interest. Going forward, there will be chances to play the different factions against each other.

There is no more promising division than that between Trump’s economic populism and the deep-seated free-market ideology of Ryan’s faction of the GOP. Trump and Hillary Clinton both campaigned on promises to preserve Medicare and Social Security. This was a key issue that Trump used to differentiate himself from other Republicans (including some who are now his key advisers). As Trump said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe: “Abolishing Medicare, I don’t think you’ll get away with that one. It’s actually a program that’s worked. It’s a program that some people love, actually.”

As Ryan Cooper noted today in The Week, Trump is at odds with Ryan’s radical austerity plan:

He wants to create the perception of a funding crisis to justify cuts. The “Better Way” paper on health care the GOP released in June gives a vision of what they might do — from repealing the ObamaCare cost controls, to expanding the quasi-private Medicare Advantage plans, to destroying Medicare as a public program and replacing it with “premium supports.” With a once-in-a-generation chance at tearing up the Great Society, Ryan is likely going to try to shoot for the moon and go for premium supports.

It can’t be emphasized enough that what Ryan is proposing is political poison, and will particularly hurt working-class voters—a crucial fact given that Trump’s victory relied so heavily on consolidating the white segment of the working class.

Here’s what Democrats need to do immediately: organize an emergency committee to defend Medicare. This committee should be headed by the populist wing of the party: Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Keith Ellison. Other members should include Sherrod Brown, Tammy Baldwin, Catherine Cortez Masto, and Kamala Harris.

The purpose of the committee should be to pick a fight with Trump and Ryan over this issue. The argument should be addressed to working-class Americans, but particularly the former Obama voters who went for Trump in the Rust Belt. The committee should mobilize all over America, with a subsidiary goal of rebuilding the Democratic Party as a force that can win in Congress. This means every state and district should have local committees that are tasked with organizing marches to protect Medicare and to phone local congresspeople (especially Republicans) to reject Ryan’s plan. The Democrats already in Congress should sign a pledge never to privatize Medicare.

It’s essential to hang Ryan around the neck of Trump, to make Trump feel the political cost of going along with Ryan’s agenda. This should be a part of a larger message designed to challenge Trump’s populist pretenses, pointing out all the policies he supports that go against the interest of the working class or enrich the wealthy.

Ryan’s attempt to link the fate of Obamacare with Medicare privatization is a political godsend for Democrats. It means they can frame the defense of Obama’s signature program within the wider preservation of popular policies.

Objecting to this strategy, Ross Douthat of The New York Times tweeted, “The only danger with that fight is that you could end up defeating Ryan but not Trump. Leaving the GOP still more fully in Bannon’s grasp.” The worry about Bannon’s growing power is real, but Democrats can divide Republicans from Bannon on other issues. There are many elements of the Republican Party, notably the foreign policy wing, that will be uncomfortable with Bannon’s foreign policy agenda of creating an alt-right international movement with groups like France’s National Front, the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP), Alternative for Germany (AfD), and the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV). It’s unlikely that this goal has much favor with traditional Republicans.

There’s an old saying from the Civil Rights Movement: “The people need victories.” Demoralized as they are, the Democrats need victories. The defense of Medicare can give them a fight they can win—one that can help revitalize the party.

These images defined the attacks as the world saw them, which, in media accounts, were typically described as either apocalyptic or nightmarish. The images also mirrored how ISIS represented the attacks. After 11/13, the cover image of an issue of Dabiq, ISIS’ propaganda magazine, showed corpses in Paris surrounded by emergency officials with a simple headline: “Just Terror.” Inside the magazine, an article on the attacks was illustrated with a photo of a bloody survivor covered in a space blanket near the Bataclan concert hall. The photo, which was taken by Reuters’ Philippe Wojazer, also appeared in publications around the world. In captioning the image, the editors of Dabiq chose language disturbingly similar to that of many Western publications: “The nightmare in France has only begun.”

But a terror attack is much more than its material footprint. For those who aren’t victims or emergency responders—that is, most of us—terror attacks are assaults on the psyche, and their reach is far. Like an invisible fog, they sweep our phones and our televisions, they invade our conversations, they crowd our thoughts. The world around us looks the same, but it feels somehow different.

While photographers raced from scene to scene of mass murder in the city last year, British photographer Paul Graham stayed put in the apartment he’d been sharing with his partner, Senami D’Almeida, and their infant son, Marlow. Over the next few days, as a portrait of a fearful, besieged city emerged in newspapers and magazines around the world, he slowly, carefully began crafting another account, one in which the attacks are felt but not seen.

Graham’s new book, Paris 11-15th November, 2015, published by MACK this month, contains images that may seem, as far as newspapers and magazines are concerned, completely useless. If the book’s title were left out, viewers would have no way of knowing the photographs depict Paris in the aftermath of violent attacks. The images are mostly confined to a living room in the modest flat whose defining feature is a tall bookcase. Not only is there no sign of the outside world in these images, there’s barely any sign of life at all.

In a series of three nearly identical photos taken over time out a window covered with blinds, the sun moves gradually across the sky. In another set that focuses on a small patch of wood floor, the shadows cast on it sharpen in each subsequent image. Other photos capture the subtle changes in light as expressed on a couch, a curtain, and a door. Only in one photo do people appear. In it, D’Almeida sits on a chair in the shadowy room facing a window, a sliver of light falling on the young child clutched to her chest. This nurturing, protective gesture is the clearest signal that somewhere, something is amiss.

Longtime followers of Graham’s work won’t find his approach here particularly surprising. In his 1987 book, Troubled Land, which addresses the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Graham traveled the area photographing everyday landscapes in which any hint of the ongoing conflict was nebulous at best. “Where a photojournalist would get closer to the story and seek out the murals, the soldiers, young mothers pushing prams in front of barracks, men in balaclavas, Graham stood back. He photographed rural scenes, wide views of towns, pictures you have to delve into to find the subject, which is often a small speck of detail somewhere in the frame,” the BBC’s Phil Coomes observed. In his 2007 book, A Shimmer of Possibility, Graham presented a portrait of the United States through entirely unspectacular moments. One series of nine photos in the book, for instance, shows a man mowing a lawn. “Boredom is part of my work. I accept it and embrace it,” Graham once said. Indeed, in Paris 11-15th November, 2015, life in the time of terror is pointedly and undeniably boring. And that’s its strength.

Terrorism is designed to disrupt, and it succeeds in doing so when the impression persists that the place it targets can no longer go about its dull business as usual. After the Paris attack, news organization around the world informed readers that life in the city had stopped in its tracks— that it had become, as Time magazine put it, a “city gone still,” a place utterly preoccupied by the immediate suffering. But what’s striking about Graham’s book is how much it acknowledges, even celebrates, the passage of time. Here, the Earth spins on its axis, and the sun travels its daily path. Morning turns to night. One day becomes another. It is the quietest and most effective kind of artistic protest, one that greets mayhem with order, fear with the familiar.

There is stillness in these photos, but not the eerie kind born of trauma. It is, rather, the kind of quiet that one feels in the stability of home and family, surrounded by the permanence of old books rather than the frenetic changeability of headlines. Indeed, in Graham’s book, the ills of the world seem far away—because, in a way, they are far away. These photos may not be the only ones we need to show how terrorism is experienced, but our understanding would be woefully incomplete and inordinately dark without them.

After all the sound and the fury, after all the dancing-on-a-razor-blade rhetoric, and the “true existential threat” to our government, and the sheer, desperate seaminess of the last year and a half, there is one thing—maybe the only thing—that can be said for Donald J. Trump: He kept his promise. He blew up our existing system of political campaigns. And in the end, that might be the only valuable thing to emerge from the whole degrading spectacle that was the 2016 presidential race.

The Trump campaign, ugly as it was—and democracy is often an ugly, messy business—served as a social X-ray for our stultified political system. It revealed just how the swelling confluence of big donors, news media as entertainment, and our rancid consulting class has so appalled and disgusted much of the electorate that they were willing to vote for almost anyone, anyone at all, if he would “blow things up,” as one Trump supporter after another kept telling reporters. And in doing so, it compels us to examine how our system of political campaigns came to be, and how it might be upended yet.

Not one but two candidates ran directly at the establishment this year, with breathtaking results. A more unlikely pair of political challengers could not have been imagined: Senator Bernie Sanders, the self-proclaimed socialist from a tiny, virtually all-white New England state, who with his followers very nearly succeeded in winning the Democratic nomination, and who refused to give up even when they were beaten. And Donald Trump, a blustering reality TV host, long ago reduced to something of a joke in his home city, a sort of camp icon, no more to be taken seriously than the Naked Cowboy, or the latest revival of Cats.

The contrast could not have been clearer between them and their common opponent. Hillary Clinton was the most carefully scripted, up-pollstered, consultant-ed, robotic, big-money presidential candidate in American history, someone who would not stray a foot outside the constrictive rhetorical box that her professional handlers had outlined for her. She made Al Gore seem like Che Guevara. Almost to the end, her campaign steadfastly refused to arm her with a debate zinger, an overarching vision, or so much as a single, soaring line of inspiration. In fairness, this was due in part to the idiotic double standards that we—or more precisely, white American males, the Cranky Toddlers of the Western World—still have when it comes to female candidates, the fear being that if Hillary was ever allowed to give as good as she got, still more of those fainthearts would be turned off by such an “aggressive woman.”

Yet Clinton continued, as ever, to complicate everything on her own, turning nonscandals such as her emails and Benghazibenghazibenghazi into unrelenting, painful burrs, thanks to her long allegiance to the modern American political establishment, and all that it has come to represent. Hillary and her husband’s never-ending, murky money-grubbing; her meticulous image-molding; her Wall Street ties and secret speeches to Goldman Sachs; her adherence to said establishment’s obsessive preoccupation with free-trade deals over anything else in American life—including climate change, massive economic disruption, and the rupturing of countless middle- and working-class communities—had come to shed a sinister glare over even the most innocuous events in her life. She, and the dynastic political privilege that her family has come to embody, represents everything that Americans hate most about Washington elites.

Bernie Sanders took a run at these vulnerabilities, and succeeded beyond anything that even he expected. He attracted an avid following, and won the vote of many other liberal Democrats (myself included) who frankly doubted his ability to run the federal government but voted for him to try to correct the party’s long rightward drift—and calamitous electoral losses—under the Clintons and President Obama. Bernie, a rather humorless 75, ultimately lacked the organizational chops, speechmaking ability, resources, name recognition, or breadth of vision to upset Hillary. But he came surprisingly close, and the nature of his unscripted challenge—saying whatever radical thing he wanted, drawing around him a deeply loyal phalanx of individuals concerned about fundamental issues of how we are now to make our living, and unwilling to be put off any longer by the glib reassurances of the establishment about our glorious future—should have been a warning.

Yet as unpolished and uncontrolled as Bernie was—as uncontrolled, almost, as his hair—he still ran a relatively recognizable, mostly genteel campaign, one that focused on old-fashioned things like issues. Donald Trump was something else altogether.

What Trump achieved, almost a month before the Republican National Convention, was exactly what he said he would do. He won the GOP nomination, and became a viable presidential candidate, without the aid of campaign professionals—the small armies of pollsters and political consultants and media analysts who have infested and thwarted our political process for at least half a century. Just three weeks before Election Day, in front of a cheering crowd in North Carolina, Trump literally dismantled a malfunctioning teleprompter, the physical manifestation of our overly scripted campaign machinery. “I went through 17 professional politicians—top people—and I went without any teleprompters,” Trump boasted of his go-it-alone campaign. (Actually, it was only 16.)

There has been no truly parallel moment in American presidential history. Sure, it was mostly bluster and buck-passing, like Trump’s repeated declarations that “the shackles have been taken off me.” The man has been unshackled more often than Houdini. But it wasn’t untrue. One by one, Trump really did throw off all of the fetters that have restrained many a worthier campaign over the years.

His speeches, delivered with the jackhammer monotony of the truly boorish, were indisputably his own. (Why would he need speechwriters? There’s only so much art necessary in 140 characters.) Once in a while, someone managed to toss words into the ever-boiling Trump stew. The apocalyptic, conspiratorial catchphrases that began to pepper his “liberated” speeches in October sounded like they were downloaded straight from the alt-right hard drive of campaign CEO Steve Bannon, and other words bore the imprint of the ludicrous, aging Batman villains Trump likes to surround himself with, from Rudy Giuliani to Roger Stone. But, with rare exceptions, it was all Donald, all the time.

Political consultants fared no better than speechwriters. Chris Christie thought he would steal a march on his fellow losers from the Republican primaries by signing on early as Trump’s self-appointed consigliere. He ended up as a lunch-fetching zombie. Of all the professionals Trump went through, late hire Kellyanne Conway probably fared the best, mostly because she confined herself to helping Trump, man of a thousand digressions, keep hitting his marks and pounding out the same, relentless drumbeat of threats, jeremiads, and hazy promises that constituted his “message.” The number and variety of spokespeople trotted out to speak for the candidate became a running joke. By late September, there was a former contestant from one of his pageants, one Madison Gesiotto, Miss Ohio 2014, taking great pains to describe Trump as a “complete gentleman,” whose behavior was both “respectful” and “sincere.” No one ever succeeded in programming him with what might be considered a coherent worldview, or a plan of action, or consistent answers to any given question. Right to the end, the Donald was denying things he had been caught saying on audio or video, something no political consultant in good standing would ever have let happen. And let’s not get started on his trademark baggy suit, offset by the longest tie in Christendom.

Yet in the end, none of it mattered any more than Bernie’s crazy-grandpa hair. The implication was subtle but clear: Trump was nobody’s man but his own. And left unprogrammed on all the little things by the consultants, he was free to hammer away, with remarkable consistency, on the one big thing of his campaign: America is in trouble. The economy is rigged. The elites won’t do anything about the foreigners, or the illegal immigrants, or the terrorists looking to steal your jobs and blow you up. Lying, crooked Hillary Clinton is with the elites, not you. With me, we will win so much you’ll get tired of winning.

Incredibly, even the money didn’t much matter. Trump was likely outspent by every one of his leading rivals, and much of what his campaign did spend was mostly in the form of kickbacks to his own dubious enterprises. He may even have made money on the whole endeavor, as he will no doubt be bragging before long. This enabled him to ignore the whole cast of sleazy money men, all those Shelly Adelsons and Koch brothers and Foster Friesses who have hovered so visibly over Republican presidential contenders in recent years (not to mention the effluvia of Goldman Sachs that stalked Hillary Clinton all campaign long). When Trump finally had to discard his promise that he would finance the entire campaign himself—something that was probably a lie from the start— all he had to do was put out the word to his “Trumpeters,” as Sarah Palin dubbed them. In a matter of weeks, he had raised more than $100 million from small donors—more than any Republican presidential candidate in history.

And why should he listen to anyone, or take their money? Trump was the first purely instinctual presidential candidate we have seen in a long, long time. He was able to organically understand and channel the longings of the Republican base without needing to round up the usual interlocutors. In an America currently obsessed with the inauthenticity of politicians—and pretty much everything else—Trump was the last authentic man, unafraid to say what he believed, even if it sounded harsh or insulting or terrifying. He was able and willing to speak truth from power, or at least truth as he and his conspiratorially minded followers saw it.

“They want someone to blow that system to hell,” said his apologist and fellow TV demagogue Bill O’Reilly, at the height of Trump’s success in the primary campaign. “That’s why Trump is winning. He pinpointed festering disenchantment long before anyone else.”

What Trump accomplished, all by his lonesome, was to strip down the Republican message to its seething core, discarding all the extraneous nonsense that the base had never much liked: its Chicago School economics and love of global free trade; its longing to hand Social Security and Medicare over to Wall Street; its mad projects of empire in the Middle East. All this was somehow discerned by a man who can barely stand to touch other people (except, that is, for you-know-where), much less learn anything from them. Donald Trump, it turned out—sleeplessly padding the floors of his Tower condo high above the teeming crowds, ensconced alone in the early-morning Mar-a-Lago darkness with just his Twitter account for company—knew more about the soul of the Republican Party than the party itself did.

Yet the big question that remains from the 2016 campaign is not how Trump could get it so right. It’s how all the professionals who have taken over our political system— the consultants and pollsters, the opposition researchers and social media savants, the phone-bank organizers and fund-raising planners, the ad buyers and copywriters and media analysts—could get it so wrong.

It was not always this way.

It’s difficult to say who America’s first political consultant was; maybe Thomas Jefferson and James Madison for their infamous “botanical expedition” that created the Democratic Party in the summer of 1791. In the country’s early days, plenty of presidents had informal advisers, usually friends or colleagues, but it was considered unseemly for presidential candidates to want the office so openly as to campaign. Even after the rise of the Republicans in 1854, when political parties began mobilizing their local chapters to turn out the vote nationwide, the candidate was expected to sit at home running a “front-porch campaign,” gamely shaking hands and making speeches to whatever local delegation the party deemed it important to impress. Political campaigns, in short, were managed by political machines, which handled all the dirty work of politics and reaped much of the profit.

All that started to change, however, at the turn of the twentieth century. Mass movements like the Populists and the Progressives began to challenge the corruption of the machines, and improved communications and transportation knit the country closer together. “A major reason—if not the only reason—for having campaign consultants,” the veteran political consultant Walter De Vries once explained, “is that political parties basically failed to do their job in a changing technological and social environment.”

Consultants first started to get a claw-hold on our political system in the years just after World War I, during the brief nexus of the Progressive movement and the emerging arts of advertising, public relations, and broadcast media. Much of the population was as disgusted with the existing political establishment as it is today, and in active rebellion against the era’s political machines, demanding reform and candidates free from “bossism.” As Dennis Johnson traces in his intriguing new history of consultancy, Democracy for Hire, the rising experts in public relations were considered honest professionals who could help independent candidates circumvent the corrupt party apparatus, and take their appeals directly to the people.

The early consultants knew what they were doing, and their approaches could be startlingly modern. Long before it was used by Richard Nixon—or revived by Donald Trump this year—the term “silent majority” was coined by a leading New York advertising man, Bruce Barton, pumping then-governor Calvin Coolidge in a 1919 profile for Collier’s magazine: “It sometimes seems as if this great silent majority had no spokesman. But Coolidge belongs with that crowd: He lives like them, he works like them, and understands.”

No one seemed to notice that Coolidge was, in fact, the quintessential career politician, running for and winning office more often than any other president in history. Before the 1920s were out, Barton went on to give us such concepts as “battleground states” and the fireside chat. By 1941, another longtime ad guru, Edward Bernays—a nephew of Freud known as “the father of spin”—was stressing message discipline to a client, urging him to use only such “proper verbs,” according to Johnson, as “ask, promise, appeal, urge, hope, advocate, declare, reveal.” Bernays’s work anticipated the language inversions of GOP consultant Frank Luntz, who converted the estate tax into “the death tax,” and Newt Gingrich’s 1990 memo urging Republicans to refer to Democrats and their policies with such words as corrupt, devour, greed, hypocrisy, sick, traitors—and, above all, liberal.

As early as the 1930s, presidential candidates were hiring pollsters and public relations and ad firms to run their entire campaigns—and even to regularly test public opinion between campaigns. Campaign consultancy had started out as a sideline for ad agencies, but by the 1950s, purely political shops proliferated, offering what Johnson calls “full-service campaign management, a one-stop shop for candidates and their campaigns.” Politicians effectively ceded control of the system to a new class of professional managers. “The candidate just had to be,” historian Greg Mitchell observed. “Neither the candidate nor party headquarters had to do.”

Sometimes, as Theodore White chronicled in The Making of the President, 1964, consultants even handpicked the candidate. It was Clifton White, an independent political operative, who convinced Barry Goldwater to run for president, and then got him the nomination. By mastering the caucus system, White imposed a candidate on his party who was likely never its first choice, and who would go on to lose in a landslide that November.

At the same time, consultants found a way to pump ever greater amounts of money into politics—replacing the old corruption of the party machines with their own, even more pernicious brand. The need to raise cash was always a factor in American politics, but the PR boys brought it to a whole new level. At first, they ordered up huge mass mailings of leaflets, pamphlets, postcards, and letters, augmented with blizzards of newspaper ads, cartoons, posters, billboards, film trailers, and even skywriting. But expenditures increased exponentially with the advent of television, buttressed by Supreme Court decisions that equated money with free speech. In 2012, all American elections combined—local, state, and federal—cost $7 billion. The money purchased 1.5 million television ads—but precious little enthusiasm. Despite a hard-fought race and a candidate as charismatic as President Obama, 93 million eligible voters didn’t even bother to go to the polls.

Over the years, as the cash piled up, consultants cut themselves in a second time. They demanded, and received, a percentage of the ad buys—thus giving themselves yet another reason to keep upping the cost of campaigns. “Number one, money is the Lord your Savior,” Democratic consultant Jeffrey Pollock declared in 2006. “You, both candidate and manager, shall have no other Lord.” He wasn’t joking.

The worst thing about the money is that it has locked politicians into a vicious circle. When the main challenge of a campaign became getting on TV, the main task of the candidate became raising money. To raise money, the candidate has to go where the money is: to wealthy elites. Spending so much time with the elites, of course, means removing yourself still further from most voters, and either adopting or seeming to adopt the views of the rich and powerful. The higher you went in politics, the more isolated you became—a big reason why candidates from Ronald Reagan on began telling so many stories about individual citizens they had met along the campaign trail, an attempt to seem folksy and connected that was actually an exercise in denial. In fact, once they had removed themselves so thoroughly from everyday people, candidates had to rely all the more on pollsters to tell them what to think, and even how to act. Inevitably, politicians came to seem ungenuine, all wearing the same approved dark suit and power tie, all mouthing the same scripted party lines like apparatchiks from some totalitarian system. It was no wonder that a Bernie Sanders or a Donald Trump could seem wholly new, even intriguing, just by sporting untamed hair or hideous orange skin. To break from the machine—in message, in personal appearance, in fund-raising methodology—is to seem a free man in a world of artificial and caged creations.

Given their success in taking over the business of politics, it was only natural that the consultants began to see themselves as the real stars. This self-serving attitude was cemented by a whole genre of campaign literature, initiated by Theodore White’s The Making of the President series and carried forward in campaign documentaries like The War Room. In these insider accounts, political operatives were the heroes, the ones who struggled mightily to keep their undisciplined candidates in line—and who were rarely afforded the blame when things went wrong.

The media came to judge candidates more and more in terms of how well they followed advice from the professionals. Campaigns were assessed as being either admirable—that is, smoothly run—or in “disarray.” A candidate’s ability to put together a well-run campaign was even considered a serious indication of how he might fare in the White House—as if making decisions about ad buys on the run in a campaign, or what zinger to unleash at a 90-minute debate, were even vaguely comparable to sifting the calculations involved in, say, going to war, or dealing with climate change, or reducing crime and poverty.

“The modern campaign is the bailiwick of hired guns—political gypsies skilled in the mechanics of polling, fund-raising, media buys, and driving a message,” GOP smear artist Ed Rollins declared in his 1996 memoir, Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms. “The process has become so complex that anyone who tried to do it without people like me is a fool.”

No politician better personified the new age of consultancy than Bill Clinton—“probably the most campaign-astute president we have ever had,” as Dennis Johnson observes. Clinton hired James Carville and George Stephanopoulos to run his presidential campaign in 1992, and they parlayed the job into national celebrity and untold riches. Carville’s hiring was considered such a coup, in fact, that it immediately affected the whole tenor of the race: “clinton wins the carville primary,” as The Washington Post trumpeted in a headline. After the election, Carville married his girlfriend, Mary Matalin, a longtime Republican consultant and aide to Lee Atwater, architect of the Willie Horton ad, perhaps the most vicious smear in the grimy annals of presidential campaigning. Carville and Matalin turned out a best-selling book about their relationship, and lived happily ever after as well-compensated talking heads.

In late 1994, when Clinton’s presidency was on the ropes, he turned to the political consultant he had hired to run his very first campaign for governor of Arkansas: Dick Morris, a bizarre and amoral operative from New York known for his work on behalf of some of the worst dreck that the Reagan Revolution dragged in. It was actually Hillary who called up Morris and invited him back into the fold. “Dick,” she told him, “this election doesn’t seem right to me. If I can get Bill to call you, will you help?” According to journalist David Maraniss, Morris “established a special bond with Hillary, who shared his dark, untrusting perspective on politics.”

Working with his high school pal Douglas Schoen and Schoen’s partner, Mark Penn, Morris manipulated Clinton and his policies to an extent undreamed of by any political consultant. Driven by Schoen and Penn’s polling and Morris’s advice to “triangulate” every issue, Bill and Hillary largely seceded from the Democratic Party, abandoning welfare to the states, deep-sixing any hope of universal health care, deregulating Wall Street, and opening a State of the Union address with the deeply false statement that “the era of big government is over.”

Morris did not outlast the campaign itself, having been caught letting a $400-a-night hooker listen in on his phone calls with the commander in chief. But for his systematic subversion of an entire political party and everything it represented, Morris walked away with a salary of $1.5 million, another $1.75 million for his share of the ad buys made over the course of the campaign, a $2.5 million book deal for his “inside account” of the campaign, and a lucrative career as a newspaper columnist and TV commentator with Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. Penn and Schoen made $700,000 apiece, plus another $4.3 million for their polling work.

It was win-win-win-win all around—save, of course, for the poor, who would be thrown to the dogs in an America that now had its weakest safety net since 1932; or those without health care; or those who would later lose their life savings on the new, wide-open Wall Street; or anyone who had been counting on a Democratic president to at least try to even up opportunity in America. Appeasing the petty pollsters of the present, the Clintons had missed seeing the big picture of what was to come.

In 2008, when Hillary made her first run for president, she went straight back to Mark Penn, one of the most unctuous political operatives ever to emerge from the swamp of Washington. While Barack Obama was using social media to create a new kind of grassroots-driven campaign, Penn arrogantly ignored America’s considerable demographic changes, preferring to spend his time meeting with the Colombian ambassador—another Penn client—to discuss potential free-trade deals they might profit from under another Clinton presidency.

It isn’t simply that Hillary makes bad choices when it comes to political consultants, though her taste in advisers embraces the worst aspects of our corrupt and cynical system. It was that she distanced herself from the electorate simply by becoming such a captive of the pollsters and the image-makers. All the Dick Morrises and the Mark Penns led Clinton into a trap—albeit one she walked into with eyes wide open. How could a candidate who was so poll-driven ever hope to look like a leader? When you let your campaign be managed by hucksters and shills, when you allow your every word and gesture to be scripted and focus-grouped and choreographed, how can you be seen as anything other than a robot, a mechanical puppet programmed by technicians who created you in the image that would bring them—and those who paid for your campaign—the greatest profit?

Then came Donald Trump, a man self-taught in all the elements of the modern political campaign: how to read what the customer wants, and command the camera, and look like a winner.

He is not, perhaps, on closer examination, quite as unscripted or unschooled as he would like to make us think. Pat Buchanan, in his 1992 “pitchfork” insurgency against George H.W. Bush, proposed a “Buchanan fence” that was to run along 200 miles of Mexican border. In 2002, a bunch of former Buchanan acolytes formed the “America First” party, reviving that old slogan long before the Donald. Ross Perot, in his 1992 third-party campaign, refused to pony up what he considered the outrageous dollars for TV ads, saying he could always get another free hour on Larry King, and it was he who formulated the very Trumpian message: “We used to have the world’s greatest economic engine. We let it slip away, and with it went millions of jobs and taxpayers.”

Yet whatever it lacked in originality, Trump’s campaign was able to sweep away, for a time at least, all of the campaign janissaries, the onetime helpmates who ultimately took over the political system for their own enrichment and lionization, and left us stumbling about, unable to distinguish what is real from what is not. What Trump was able to understand without having to rely on a single pollster or handler was what a nerve he struck: how many people agreed with his nonsolutions and his barroom blather, his hateful reductions of the world and all the people in it. With his almost uncanny instincts, he grasped how many people in this country will respond to simple ideas, forcefully said.

The trouble with Trump is that he remains authentically inauthentic. He represents no specific place or culture; has no real belief system, no vision of America beyond the subjugation of those he despises. He speaks to no tradition, can claim no true accomplishment beyond not squandering all of the money that his father left him. He doesn’t read, doesn’t question, doesn’t think beyond his own, reflexive outrage. He is a sad product of rape culture, a mass of inchoate desires who barely exists in the tactile world.

All too many of his followers reflect his intellectual passivity and his knee-jerk alienation. They lent a dangerous, violent, often grotesque edge to his rallies, and they’re obviously not going away anytime soon. But the greater problem is that they’re right about so much. Like Trump himself, they can’t or won’t focus their anger on the right targets, and their racist and sexist tangents are obscene. But the system is rigged. It’s bought and sold through a political merchandising class whose amoral, purely mercenary priorities overran Washington—and whatever principles the Clintons may have once possessed—long ago.

If the current economic recovery broadens and accelerates, it’s likely that the truths that Trump articulated about the hollowness at the core of our political campaigns will eventually fade. But if things don’t improve, if we experience another financial shock, one which may well be in the offing already, we may one day get a candidate even worse than a Trump. The questions we need to ask ourselves begin with why it took someone so monstrous finally to agree with us about how broken and corrupt the system is, and what we—all of us—can do to thwart the now thoroughly corrosive power of money in our politics. We cannot afford to ignore the message because we hate the messenger.

Yet while it was illegal to be “mixed” (to have a black parent and a white parent), it was not illegal to be what South Africans call “colored” (to have two mixed parents). Patricia enrolled her son in a colored school and enlisted the help of a colored neighbor to transport him. The neighbor would “walk next to me and act like she was my mother,” Noah recounts, “and my mother would walk a few steps behind, like she was the maid working for the colored woman. I’ve got dozens of pictures of me walking with this woman who looks like me but who isn’t my mother. And the black woman standing behind us who looks like she’s photo-bombing the picture, that’s my mom.”

Noah’s experience of state-sanctioned racism—of its brutality and absurdity—gives his book unusual resonance today. Appointed host of the Daily Show last year, Noah has come to prominence at a time when questions of racial identity transfix the nation to a degree not seen since the 1960s. His good looks, racial fluidity, and vague internationalism—qualities shared by other prominent “biracial” public figures, from Drake to President Obama—help render him appealing to multiple, overlapping American audiences. He embodies an inherent “wokeness” consistent with the left-of-center politics now so closely aligned with late-night comedy. And while he can claim the identity-based epistemology the left increasingly covets, he never presents as so black or aggrieved as to feel unpalatable.

In Born a Crime, Noah recounts his odd and precarious journey from extreme poverty and oppression in South Africa to the brink of his professional breakthrough. Throughout, his ability to move between starkly different social worlds—and to find humor in society’s double standards—proves the result of this initial, drastic inability to fit in anywhere. With the platform he’s built, he has a real chance to influence the way millions of young people think and speak about race, a reconsideration his gripping biography seems to demand.

Noah’s story begins with a portrait of his remarkable, almost inexplicable mother, a woman striving to live outside her era’s airtight constraints of race and class. At age nine, Patricia embarked on a quixotic mission of self-determination as admirable as it was dangerous: She asked her mother to send her to live with her charming, womanizing father. But instead of taking her in, her father sent her to live with his sister. For the next twelve years, Patricia lived in a hut with 14 cousins, tilling the “depleted and eroding” farmland allotted to black farmers. Food was scarce. “There were times when she literally ate dirt,” Noah writes. She would mix clay from a riverbank with water “to make a grayish kind of milk. She’d drink that to feel full.”

It was Patricia’s good fortune to attend a village school taught by missionaries, giving her an English-language education and a means of escape. At 21, she enrolled in a secretarial course and before long she ran away to Johannesburg—a city blacks could enter to work, but were required to leave before the nightly curfew. Patricia slept in public restrooms and learned, from Xhosa prostitutes she met, how to navigate the shadows. “They taught her how to dress up in a pair of maid’s coveralls to move around the city without being questioned,” Noah writes. They also introduced her to foreign white men who were willing to rent out flats illegally. She moved to a bohemian neighborhood called Hillbrow, and befriended a blond man named Robert, who lived down the hall from her. The man would become Noah’s father, though his parents never even tried to be a couple.

Born in 1984, Noah spent some of his early years in his grandmother’s cramped home in Soweto, where he was the only light-skinned person in sight—and, often, got away with murder. When he misbehaved, his grandmother balked at hitting him—even though she beat the living daylights out of his dark-skinned cousins for lesser infractions. (“I don’t know how to hit a white child,” she explained.) His grandfather addressed Trevor as “Mastah,” and insisted on driving him in the backseat, like a chauffeur. “There were so many perks to being ‘white’ in a black family, I can’t even front,” Noah wryly observes. His status in Soweto was so rare that people used him as a landmark when giving directions: “The house on Makhalima Street. At the corner you’ll see a light-skinned boy. Take a right there.”

Noah’s uncommon position—he never directly encountered another mixed child like himself—gave him a unique perspective on the artificiality of racial categorization. Under apartheid, racism in South Africa was even more absurd and convoluted than its American iteration. Chinese people in South Africa, for example, were classified as “black,” while the more economically advantaged Japanese were given honorary “white” status. “I always like to imagine being a South African policeman who likely couldn’t tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese but whose job is to make sure that people of the wrong color aren’t doing the wrong thing,” Noah writes. “He sees an Asian person sitting on a whites-only bench: “Hey, get off that bench, you Chinaman!” “Excuse me. I’m Japanese.” “Oh, I apologize, sir. I didn’t mean to be racist. Have a lovely afternoon.”

Such stupidity would be farcical were it not so evil. And while Noah is deft at exposing and ridiculing the incongruities and absurdities of a racist state, he never quite turns the corner into a full-fledged critique of the idea of race itself—something his own biography would seem to beg for. It’s not simply that the apartheid regime should have been more consistent about organizing Asian visitors as “black” or “white.” It’s that these metaphorical color categories—commonly and falsely understood as empirical fact—are inaccurate when applied to any of us. In their seminal book Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in America, sisters Barbara and Karen Fields argue convincingly that ideology, not biology, governs how we see each other; that the category of race is actually created by the practice of racism. “A commonplace that few stop to examine holds that people are more readily oppressed when they are already perceived as inferior by nature,” they note. “The reverse is more to the point. People are more readily perceived as inferior by nature when they are already seen as oppressed.”

Members of oppressed groups often unwittingly reinforce such hierarchical divisions, in part out of the need for solidarity in the face of that oppressive hierarchy. Yet the bottom line is that the Japanese in South Africa at the time were richer and from a more powerful nation than their Chinese counterparts—hence they became white. Noah adeptly skewers the smallness of the racism, but he doesn’t see through the larger lie. He never flat-out states that race does not exist, and he never seriously questions that he is black. This is understandable, but it feels like a missed opportunity. The idea that we must rise above racism is an admirable one. The idea that we must rise above race is a revolutionary one.

Perhaps such a critique is too much to ask of a comedian. And what Noah has achieved is incredible in its own right. As a child, he became a chameleon fluent in multiple tongues: He learned to speak not only English, but the Xhosa of his family, tribal dialects like Zulu and Tsonga that whites and coloreds seldom deigned to learn, and Afrikaans. It was through mastery of language that he figured out how to bridge the vast distances between himself and others imposed by his skin. His worldliness was a lifeline, another gift from Patricia. “My mom raised me as if there were no limitations on where I could go or what I could do,” he observes. “When I look back, I realize she raised me like a white kid.”

It is hard to overstate the challenges Patricia faced as a single mother of a mixed child in apartheid South Africa. Noah writes affectingly but never self-pityingly of periods when he suffered from extreme hunger, at one point, eating worms for an entire month. When he reached high school, Patricia married a Zulu mechanic named Abel, a prideful black man in a society that made it difficult for him to maintain his pride. Abel’s weakness for drink and inability to manage money only made life harder. To save his failing auto-repair business, the family sold their home and moved into his garage; Noah slept in whatever car Abel was fixing at the time. Once Patricia and Abel had a child of their own, Abel began to beat her. In the book’s most harrowing passage, Noah describes how, in 2009, Abel shot Patricia in the back of the head and left her for dead.

She survived the attack, and Noah refuses to let disaster characterize their story. “It’s not that I find things funny,” he explained in a recent Daily Show segment about the killing of an unarmed black man in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “It’s that my mind uses that as a tool to protect me from pain.” Noah’s memoir relates, in vivid and moving terms, how his life prepared him for the public role he now occupies, drawing on his unique vantage point to cut through and illuminate our shared trauma. Yet he barely alludes to his white-hot career in Born a Crime. Instead, he has written a son’s tribute to the courageous woman who shaped him. That is just as well. In a world still distorted by the indignities of race, Noah knows where the real story lies.

Instead, Trump described the presidential election as “open and successful,” presumably a moment for his supporters to bask in happily. Victory, however, has not quenched the thirst for revenge.

It is one thing for the losers of an election to lash out in anger as they cycle through the stages of grief. It is another thing altogether for the winners to do so. And yet the post-election landscape has been defined by a frightening outburst of retribution and calls for reprisals against Trump’s political enemies.

The way the Trump entourage and his rank and file supporters have responded to their triumph mirror each other perfectly. The tone of his pre-presidency was set during his victory speech, which was itself unusually gracious for a man of Trump’s narcissism and disdain, but was delivered to supporters beseeching him to jail Hillary Clinton and shoot President Barack Obama—interruptions which did not faze him at all.

Trump has been similarly unfazed by a national outpouring of racial hatred and violence directed at African Americans, Latinos, and Muslims, frequently done in his name. What has fazed Trump are the imagined sins and crimes of those who have been most clear-eyed about the dangers of his presidency. The same Republican officials who acquiesced to Trump during the campaign trail are now shrinking from any sense of responsibility to promote pluralism or obligation to reject threats to the constitution. The descent between where we are today and unchecked authoritarianism is long, but we are sliding down it very fast.

The spike in acts of racial violence and agitation since Tuesday has been directed at protesters, ethnic and religious minorities on college and school campuses, and private and public property in their communities. Trump and his goons have made clear that the perpetrators of these acts aren’t the ones with much to fear.

These temper tantrums from these radical anarchists must be quelled. There is no legitimate reason to protest the will of the people. pic.twitter.com/G502pwNSN9

— David A. Clarke, Jr. (@SheriffClarke) November 10, 2016

Sheriff David E. Clarke’s name has been floated as a potential secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. His Wednesday tweet suggested that the U.S. constitution, which contains a right to free assembly in its first amendment, equips him with tools to suppress protest movements that run counter to the “will of the people,” more of whom wanted Clinton to be president than Trump.

The most blistering and unblinkered official condemnation of Trump’s behavior, and the toxic environment his victory created, came from Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid. “Every news piece that breathlessly obsesses over inauguration preparations compounds their fear by normalizing a man who has threatened to tear families apart, who has bragged about sexually assaulting women and who has directed crowds of thousands to intimidate reporters and assault African Americans,” he said.

Their fear is legitimate and we must refuse to let it fall through the cracks between the fluff pieces

If this is going to be a time of healing, we must first put the responsibility for healing where it belongs: at the feet of Donald Trump, a sexual predator who lost the popular vote and fueled his campaign with bigotry and hate. Winning the electoral college does not absolve Trump of the grave sins he committed against millions of Americans. Donald Trump may not possess the capacity to assuage those fears, but he owes it to this nation to try.

When asked about Reid’s comments this past weekend, Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway called them “beyond the pale,” and warned him to be careful in a “legal sense.”

Trump’s enablers are feigning ignorance of the white nationalist, anti-Semitic pedigree of Trump’s campaign chairman, Steve Bannon, who has spent his time since election day courting cooperation from European far-right leaders, and whom Trump on Sunday tapped as the chief strategist for his administration. At the same time, they are still batting about the question of whether to pursue Trump’s promise to jail Clinton.

In The New York Times, this ambivalence about prosecuting Trump’s political enemies for illusory crimes and actions that have already been investigated was delicately woven into a familiar storyline about how new presidents always face the choice between “looking forward” and “looking backward.” The article compared a politically motivated Clinton prosecution to Obama’s decision not to investigate the architects of President George W. Bush’s torture regime. For shoehorning authoritarian threats into a framework of business-as-usual bipartisanship, Trump rewarded the Times on Twitter with a sustained attack on its journalism, and for having the temerity to accurately report that Trump believes “more countries should acquire nuclear weapons.”

Facing calls to condemn acts of racism he emboldened, Trump confined his condemnation to protesters and the media until late Sunday, when Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes successfully pressed him to tell perpetrators of hate crimes to stop.

Trump’s campaign was so unmoored from factual or ideological premises that it has been tempting for optimists to hope Trump used demagoguery as a campaign tactic he will no longer find useful as president. Everything we’ve seen suggests just the opposite.

In the same 60 Minutes interview, he told Stahl, “I’ll conduct myself—in a very good manner, but depends on what the situation is. Sometimes you have to be rougher.”

The themes of Trump’s campaign were vilification, revanchism, and revenge. What he won are the tools of repression and amnesty required to punish his scapegoats, and what his supporters won is the expectation that he will use them.

But this despair can be paralyzing, reinforcing a narrative of helplessness that says the country is on the brink of a complete breakdown. This despair also inspires pointless second-guessing about whether Democrats picked the wrong candidate. It doesn’t matter if Senator Bernie Sanders would have beaten Donald Trump. Laying blame on Clinton or the Democratic National Committee or FBI Director James Comey or the media or Facebook is an intellectual exercise that might make some feel better for a few hours, but it will not change the results of an election where the Democratic candidate, once again, lost despite handily winning the popular vote.

This is almost exactly the position the Republican Party faced eight years ago after Obama won the White House by motivating voters who had sat out previous elections—minus the popular vote discrepancy. In fact the GOP had it even worse with Democrats holding a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. There was a lot of soul-searching and angst among Republicans about the future of their party, but it took very little time for them to move from anxiety to grassroots action.

The left must now find inspiration from the right by starting their own Tea Party revolution.

Within months of the 2008 election, people dissatisfied with Republican politics as usual began to organize, and the Tea Party took hold. People took it upon themselves to demand that their leaders in Washington either resist Obama more forcefully or face primary challengers in their districts and states.

By the midterm elections of 2010, it was clear just how powerful this movement had become. Tea Party candidates won 42 House seats and five Senate seats; then they blocked Obama at every chance they could, even forcing our government to shut down over the debt ceiling. The Tea Party has been extremely successful, and its success came from people who were relentlessly committed to their cause, who refused to compromise their beliefs, and who realized that they only way to gain power was to field candidates at every level of government. They stared down their losses in 2008 and decided that instead of conceding defeat, they needed to double down. If anything, the Tea Party ranks have expanded since then, and it’s safe to assume that they will become the dominant force in government under Trump. (Senator Jeff Sessions, an early Trump supporter, is being considered for a cabinet position.)

Before we all throw in the towel and move to Canada, we might want to learn a few lessons from a movement so many of us despise. But it won’t be easy. Democrats notoriously prefer to ruminate. They are more apt to weigh possibilities and seek consensus and common ground. Some may even point to Clinton’s concession speech and Obama’s “cordial” meeting with Trump as signs that we must give Trump a chance and try to work with him. But their words were ceremonial, nothing but the necessary platitudes that signify a peaceful transfer of power.

What we need instead is a movement that builds upon the steadfast devotion of Sanders’s supporters, one that can arise from the bottom and give people a chance to feel like they have the power to make a difference. Unfortunately, too many people have given up on the expectation that their government is working for them. Fairly or not, Clinton was seen by many not as a devoted public servant, but as beholden to big money and establishment politics.

Like many others, I was unconvinced by the narrative of an angry electorate. It seemed at odds with the America I knew, one that was generally prosperous and clearly recovering from the worst recession of modern times. Obama’s approval numbers seemed to encourage this blindness, as did the polls showing a healthy Clinton lead.

It was this misreading of the electorate and the complacency of many Democrats (like me) which bordered on smugness that allowed for Trump to sweep to power. Still, nothing stirs people out of complacency like a genuine threat to their way of life, which Trump and total Republican control seem certain to provide over the next four years. A Trump presidency leaves us with no choice but to wake up and engage with politics in a way similar to that of the Tea Party.

Democratic leadership is aging. Its ranks are thin thanks to Republican dominance on the state and local levels, and we need fresh blood to bubble in and take over the progressive cause. We must translate despair and anger into action, but not just with protests and marches or with well-meaning but politically ineffective movements like Occupy Wall Street. These are important but insufficient. The only way to effect real change is to encourage a new generation of leaders to commit themselves to running for office at every level of government and empower them to be the change they want to see in this world.

We must make the 2018 midterm elections a national cause, insist that these election years are just as important, if not more so, than presidential election years. Starting today, we must come up with our own “Contract with America,” a plan that can express in clear terms what Democrats stand for, and what they will not stand for. If we believe the survival of our republic is at stake, do we have any other choice?

Amy Adams plays Dr. Louise Banks, a world-renowned linguist who, when we meet her, is teaching at a university and mourning the death of her child . One day, twelve massive floating orbs appear suddenly in locations all over the world. They seem to be trying to communicate with us, but because no one can understand them, the military calls in Dr. Banks to see if she can decipher their language, to see if they are hostile. Working alongside a scientist (Jeremy Renner), Dr. Banks begins to slowly form a bond with the aliens—too slowly for the antsy military leaders of the United States and China. The film becomes a race between Dr. Banks, who’s trying to figure out what the aliens are trying to tell us, and the warmongers ready to blow them out of the sky.

This makes Arrival sound like more of a conventional thriller than it really is, but to be fair, Villeneuve lulls us in with a character arc that, at first glance, doesn’t look that much different than Gravity, another thoughtful science-fiction moonshot. (A female protagonist who has lost a child uses her intelligence and ingenuity to assess an impossible situation.) He also gives Dr. Banks some rather silly stock characters to bump up against—Michael Stuhlbarg is mostly wasted as a bureaucrat who exists solely to be wrong. But Villeneuve is up to something more ambitious here. Dr. Banks is attempting to solve a mystery while still wrestling with her own demons, and as a filmmaker he shoots in a way that, intriguingly, seems to mix the two. At first it seems much more stock than it is—Basic Backstory 101—but that’s just Villeneuve slowly pulling the rug out from under you. There are twists, but they always feel organic to the story Villeneuve is telling. He’s playing a trick, but he’s not trying to trick you. This is the sort of movie that M. Night Shyamalan would bungle.

Much of this can be ascribed to Adams, one of our finest actresses, who has a terrific part to dig into here. Dr. Banks is brilliant but never showy, with a steely resolve that seems, at least at first, to be a direct result of her family tragedy. She’s scared of these aliens and what this might mean for her world, but more than anything she’s fascinated: This is the greatest challenge of her professional career, and you see Adams embrace it and grow increasingly enthusiastic and compelled. The movie has an uncommon faith in intelligence for a Hollywood movie about aliens, and it’s telling that we barely see the aliens at all, and then only in shadow and hidden by clouds. The movie isn’t about aliens: It’s about how we communicate with one another, and how that communication is vital to our understanding of the world. Dr. Banks learns to speak the language of the aliens, not just to figure out what they have to tell us, but what we must know ourselves. Adams is the perfect actress for this part: tough and tender, vulnerable but eager, and above all absolutely committed to unraveling this mystery.

When the conclusion of Arrival comes, it’s with a shock, but a deeply satisfying one: When you understand what has been happening, it all clicks that of course this is where this story was going all along. But the movie doesn’t suffer from excessive self-regard like some of Villaneuve’s other films. He keeps himself mostly in check here, trusting his story and carefully guiding us along the way. This is a smart, almost cerebral film that leaves you in the dark for most of the way before revealing, at the exact right moment, that this all was much more about the heart than the head. Arrival is a science fiction film about the value of knowledge, the warmth of connection and the vitality of communication. It’s about listening, and being heard, and learning. In a film of this scope, this kind of message feels downright revolutionary.

Grade: B+

Grierson & Leitch write about the movies regularly for the New Republic and host a podcast on film. Follow them on Twitter @griersonleitch or visit their site griersonleitch.com.

Now we discover it was probably just a “campaign device,” which is a craven’s way of saying it was an intentional over-promise, if not a lie. Nor was this the only such device Trump used. We’re discovering that some of his most famous promises may have been made with his fingers crossed.

Joyce Karam of pan-Arab newspaper Al-Hayat reported Thursday that, according to Arab diplomatic sources, the Trump campaign reached out to Middle East embassies in Washington, D.C. three months after Trump declared a ban on Muslims entering the U.S.: “The message from the Trump campaign to key Arab diplomats last Spring was a plea to ‘ignore Mr. Trump’s rhetoric on the campaign trail.’” This might explain why Trump is still trying to figure out what to do with the Muslim ban, which briefly disappeared from his website on Thursday, only to reappear.

Trump also said on the campaign trail that he woul “dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran,” calling it his “number-one priority.” But Walid Phares, a senior foreign policy adviser to Trump, told the BBC on Thursday that “he’s gonna take that agreement, it’s been done before in international context, and then review it.... He will take the agreement, review it, send it to Congress, demand from the Iranians to restore a few issues or change a few issues, and there will be a discussion.”

It’s not news that Donald Trump is perhaps the biggest fabulist in American political history, someone who engages in a wide variety of untruths, ranging from tall tales and fibs to outright fabrications. Perhaps his slippery relationship with truth comes from being a real estate developer, a profession where fantastic hyperbole is accepted—if not required—in the negotiation room. Trump’s political promises can be viewed through a similar lens: If he has no real intent to make Mexico pay for the wall or ban all Muslim immigrants, these statements can be seen as a special type of deception: pie-in-the-sky salesmanship.

Trump says whatever it takes to get the deal done—to win. In this way, he’s merely an extreme version of your average Republican. And now the Democrats, who too often sprint to the moral high ground, are facing at least two years without any control in Washington. It’s time for them to start promising the moon too.

There are a few saving graces to Trump’s habitual bullshitting. Perhaps this means that some of Trump’s supporters aren’t suckers and merely enjoy indulging in his flights of fancy: They think it would be great if Mexico paid for the wall, but are aware that Mexico probably won’t. This would also mean that Trump won’t necessarily enact his most extreme measures. Such mitigating factors are small compensation, of course, for the pervasive nihilism of Trump’s political rhetoric—the way it had created a post-truth discourse that makes honest civic discussion impossible.

But in light of Trump’s victory, a disturbing question arises: Maybe Hillary Clinton’s problem was that she was too honest. To describe Clinton this way flies in the face of her popular reputation, with polls showing that the public trusts her less than Trump. But that distrust was based on Clinton’s shifty explanations about her private email server—influenced by the media’s disproportional coverage—and bore little relation to her campaign promises. Clinton’s extremely detailed policy proposals were all grounded in reality, with careful cost-benefit analyses.

Sanders, who appealed to many of the same voters who delivered Trump’s victory this week, understood the importance of overly simplified, if not downright fantastical, campaign rhetoric. As political scientist Daniel W. Drezner wrote in The Washington Post in March:

[I]f Donald Trump has been campaigning on a big lie about the global economy, Bernie Sanders has been campaigning on two big lies. Sanders’s first lie, akin to Trump, is that he thinks trade protectionism will trigger a massive inflow of manufacturing jobs, when most of those jobs have disappeared from the face of the Earth. Sanders’s second lie is that he pretends that there would be no foreign policy consequences from a U.S. shift back to the days of Smoot-Hawley.

The question is whether these are simple untruths or something closer to what Trump is doing: promising an outlandish feast on the understanding that it’s more likely to be a regular meal.

Even Barack Obama, as honest and respectable politician as we’ve seen, over-promises. According to Politifact, Obama has kept 45 percent of his promises, compromised on another 26 percent and broken 22 percent (with the remainder stalled or in the works). Since compromise is essential to politics—especially when power is divided between the parties—no politician can deliver on everything. Political promises, then, belong in the realm of aspiration, and can fairly have an element of day-dreaming.

It’s fair to say, though, that Obama would have tried to keep all of his campaign promises if he’d had a Democratic Congress for eight years. Trump will have a unified government in January, and already his campaign is backtracking on some of his boldest promises—the ones that helped him build a winning base. But that’s precisely it: Trump has already won. He can now do as he pleases, campaign rhetoric be damned. (And if you think reelection strategy will influence Trump’s thinking from day one, as it would an experienced politician, then you haven’t been paying attention for the past year and a half.)

To fight Trump-style politics, Democrats will have to steal at least a page or two from Trump’s playbook by making more audacious promises, as Sanders did with his call for free college education for all and a $15 minimum wage—both of which Clinton balked at. While her plan might have been more fiscally responsible, Sanders better understood the power of raising expectations, especially during a populist wave and change year in American politics. To go the full Trump would be nihilistic, but Democrats need to stop worrying about the fine print and start forging their own unrealistic utopia.

There is little trace of the persona that chronicled romantic love desired and lost, or the one that stared bleakness in the face and bore witness in poetry and song.  Instead, it’s Cohen’s kindness that comes through. It moves me every time I watch the film, connecting me much more strongly with his writing and music. It feels like a secret window into Cohen’s creative process, a subject he actively disdained discussing, and about how his art, so inward-looking and style-fusing, had the power to reach millions. Including, finally, me.

For most of my life I viewed Leonard Cohen with suspicion. The wariness ran so deep, it wasn’t until earlier this year that I gave his work a proper fair shake. I knew, rationally, that Cohen’s literary and musical output meant a great deal to a great many people and deserved the acclaim. I liked what I heard but didn’t go out of my way to listen. I wasn’t ready, until recently, to put away childish skepticism and open my heart to his work.

Let me back up. That suspicion truly did date from childhood. Though I was born and raised in Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, my parents were both born and raised in Montreal, a four-hour round trip we frequently drove to visit with my grandparents while they were all still alive. My mother’s address, until the age of eight, was 5555 Saint Urbain Street. If that street name rings a bell, you may know it from the work of Mordecai Richler, who went so far as to include the street in the title of one of his novels. Richler, like my father and my uncle, all roughly the same age, attended Baron Byng High School. They had to because of provincial laws dictating where Jewish kids could go to school, and Baron Byng was that school. At least, it was for poorer Jewish teenagers. If you came from money, you had other options.

Leonard Cohen came from money, growing up in the affluent neighborhood of Westmount. He described his grandfather as “the most influential Jew in Canada.” His father owned a clothing factory. His grandfather and great-grandfather served as presidents of Shaar HaShomayim, the opulent, cathedral-scale synagogue that is Canada’s oldest and most prominent. So Cohen’s mother might have been looked down upon by her in-laws. So his father died when he was just nine years old. Cohen was a Westmount kid, and the inverted snobbery of the Saint Urbain sector characterized his family as “effete and assimilationist.”

That last quote, by the way, is from the Jewish scholar Ruth Wisse, who knew Cohen when they were students at McGill University. They both studied with and were mentored by Louis Dudek, who published Cohen’s first book of poetry as the launch title of the McGill Poetry Series. Cohen was, Wisse described in a 1995 essay for Commentary, already something of a star on campus, long before his eventual critical acclaim for his two novels (The Favorite Game and Beautiful Losers), four poetry volumes, and later, his songs. Cohen’s aura discomfited Wisse because of the class divide between them, a distinction Dudek never addressed: “The differences he valued,” Wisse wrote, “were between intellectuals and poets, the precious few and the sanctified fewer. If at first I accepted Leonard Cohen’s status as a poet on faith, it was because Louis admired him. Only after I had undertaken to sell the poems did I begin to read them.” Only after Weiss put aside her own ingrained prejudices, handed down from her mother, did she reckon with the force, the clarity, the resonance of Cohen’s work. But snobbery, inverse or otherwise, tends to persist with subsequent generations. And takes so long to cast off.

Cohen was remarkably consistent in his refusal to offer insight into his work.  When asked in a 1965 CBC interview, “How can you be a good poet and not care about something?” Cohen replied: “I do the poetry, you do the commentary.” Half a century later, in David Remnick’s masterful, career-capping New Yorker profile, Cohen swatted away any attempt to explain how he creates: “I have no idea what I am doing,” he said. “It’s hard to describe. As I approach the end of my life, I have even less and less interest in examining what have got to be very superficial evaluations or opinions about the significance of one’s life or one’s work. I was never given to it when I was healthy, and I am less given to it now.”

He didn’t so I won’t. I can only explain how his songs work on me. They reach the part of my soul that expresses herself best in synagogue, singing complicated harmony to the cantor’s tenor-line chants of Kaddish and the Musaf prayers. They mix serious purpose (the oft-covered “Hallelujah”), love lost, but tinged with affection (“So Long, Marianne”), wry humor (“I’m Your Man”) and a bold, unflinching stare at democratic collapse (“Anthem,” one of the few songs he explained)

His songs source themselves to all manner of traditions, from the Zen Buddhism that spurred him to live in a monastery throughout the 1990s, the flamenco chords taught by Cohen’s first guitar teacher, to the liturgical music Cohen learned as that Westmount kid. Never was the last more prominent than in Cohen’s final, brilliant album You Want It Darker, released just a month before his death and my daily listening staple since. 

Cohen’s basso profundo intoning “you want it darker, you kill the flame” throughout the title track, the line sounded before a male choir chants in wordless harmony and seems, apparently, to be open to varying interpretations. Was it prophecy of this unthinkable election outcome? Foreshadowing his own statement of being “ready to die,” even if it was later contradicted by his variant on the Jewish saying of living till you are a hundred and twenty? A general statement on the vast bleakness that exists in the world? 

All of those sound equally plausible and implausible. But the lyric reminded me most of the ner tamid, the sanctuary lamp that hangs in every synagogue that is never allowed to go out because it signifies the eternal presence of God. It suggests continuity from Creation to today, the awe, wonder and fear that God inspires, and the way spiritual relationships can never be extinguished.

“Hineni,” Cohen later recites, indicating he’s ready for what the Lord has in mind. His own creative light has now flickered out, capping a career that feels almost epochal. We may be facing a magnitude of chaos we didn’t prepare for and can’t fully grasp. But the flame remains eternal. It won’t go out because Cohen left behind instructions, in the form of his own art, on how to keep it that way. Through love, through action, and yes, through kindness. 

It also raises an inevitable question: How could Clinton have lost? Was she a uniquely terrible candidate, or were broader forces aligned against her?

In the days since her shocking defeat, Clinton and the Democratic establishment she represents have been buried in an avalanche of angry criticism. And much of it is deserved. She was the wrong candidate to run in an election defined by a swell of anti-establishment populism. She was nearly as odious to the American people as Trump herself, according to the polls; in fact, Trump was the only presidential candidate in modern history who was more disliked by voters. She bungled every controversy, real and imagined, apologizing only grudgingly when she was wrong (the private email server) and refusing to take seriously accusations of cronyism (the Clinton Foundation) even if they were overblown. It is no wonder that some are saying Bernie Sanders—a populist good-government crusader—would have fared better than Clinton against Trump.

These criticisms often fail to acknowledge the millions of people Clinton did inspire, particularly the women who believed they were on the verge of electing the country’s first female president. (She did, after all, win the popular vote.) They also fail to recognize that Sanders’s class-based approach to addressing our economic ills didn’t resonate with many minority voters in the Democratic primary, alienating a core element of the party’s base. But most glaringly of all, these criticisms reduce the election to the failings of one person, boiling it down to her inability to appeal to a clutch of disillusioned white working class voters in what used to be a Democratic firewall in the Rust Belt.

The enraged focus on Clinton ignores the broader historical forces at work. This was clearly a change election, a wave that was bound to dispel pretty much any Democratic candidate in its path. For the first time in decades, stalwart Democratic states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania went to the Republicans. It is all the more remarkable given that, unlike the last change election in 2008, we live in a time of relative peace and prosperity. The inequalities embedded in our economic system are undeniable. The U.S. continues to have a military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan and has abetted wars in Yemen and elsewhere. But in the past eight years under President Barack Obama, the U.S. has made steady progress toward full employment and has vastly reduced its military commitments abroad, which in the Bush era resulted in thousands of American deaths, hundreds of thousands of injuries, and untold psychological damage to military veterans. In the simplest sense, one candidate in 2016 promised to uphold that progress; the victor promised to reverse it.

This election was about a much greater phenomenon than Hillary Clinton. We know this is true because a nearly identical political undertow has gripped other Western democracies. In Britain, a nativist campaign preying on the fears of immigration and economic dislocation resulted in the Brexit, throwing the country into total chaos. In France, the right-wing National Front is the preeminent political force in the country, after spending decades on the fringes. Britain’s Nigel Farage and France’s Marine Le Pen and America’s Trump have all succeeded by sowing fear and hatred of the other. They lead movements that, at their core, are propelled by white revanchism, a raging against an increasingly globalized world that has threatened white power and diluted white identity.

But it is also becoming clear that the racist face of the resurgent right wing is, in important respects, superficial. To be clear, I find it almost impossible to forgive any person who voted for a blatant racist and misogynist like Trump. I agree with Slate’s Jamelle Bouie that, in attempting to sympathize with the plight of the downtrodden white who voted for Trump, we are in danger of perpetuating a false narrative of white innocence. And I think his election will set back racial progress by decades. However, the rise of the new right also has its roots in the financial crisis, a political earthquake whose deep, radiating repercussions didn’t quite register until Trump’s election. This is a response to what is seen as a corrupt order, one that perpetuates the power of a global elite at the expense of common people. It encompasses Republicans and Democrats, New Labourites and Tories, a Socialist like Francois Hollande and a conservative like Nicolas Sarkozy. It is a protest against liberal democracy as we know it, and it is no surprise that these grievances have found outlet in vulgar authoritarians whose core supporters want to blow up the system.

The first evidence of the revanchist backlash to Barack Obama was the 2010 midterms, when the country was mired in the aftermath of a deep recession. It now appears that the outlier in recent cycles was the 2012 election, in which Democrats held on to power through the singular charisma of Obama himself and the fact that Republicans nominated a straight-up plutocrat. But even though Obama rode to power on liberal anger at the war in Iraq, he was never a populist. In retrospect, he could have done his party—and his country—a favor by jailing some bankers.

What is to be done? In a prescient essay for The New Republic published before the election, the liberal academic K. Sabeel Rahman argued that the Democratic Party must absorb and channel the populist anger that has exploded to the surface. Crucially, he argued that this populism must be wedded to a program of inclusion, noting progressives’ long history of excluding minority groups from initiatives to protect workers and make the economic system fairer. The first step toward a new Democratic Party is to cut off its corporate wing, which adds no votes and undermines the party’s whole reason for existence: standing up for common men and women. This will hurt the party’s fundraising, but what good did Clinton’s fundraising prowess do against Trump?

Whether the party can combine its identitarian minority politics with an economic populism that includes aggrieved whites remains to be seen. One reason the Sandersistas fail to convince is that, while white working class voters may rage against corruption in D.C., it’s unclear they want its replacement to be socialism. There is the danger of veering so far left that the party turns into a Jeremy Corbyn–style rump party that has no chance of winning national elections. The Democratic politician who comes closest to straddling these two poles is Elizabeth Warren, but otherwise the bench is quite barren.

As the Democrats grope toward a new future, however, they can take solace in this: They can’t be much worse off than they are now.

One might suggest that women should just stop caring so much, except that not-caring is the ultimate perfectibility requirement. Which has made the cult of perfection a target in a new strain of female-authored, largely female-oriented and often light-hearted writing. I’m thinking of Marisa Meltzer’s 2013 Elle story about the hidden nature of contemporary dieting (hidden, that is, behind a cover of “juice fasts and Goop cleanses and barre classes”), and Ruby Tandoh’s more recent Vice piece on wellness and orthorexia. Also of Rachel Hills’s 2015 book, The Sex Myth, which pushes against the notion that there’s a correct amount of sex everyone should be having. Comedy writer Jessi Klein has a pro-epidural screed in her new book of essays, You’ll Grow Out Of It. Of natural childbirth, she remarks: “No one ever asks a man if he’s having a ‘natural root canal.’ No one ever asks if a man is having a ‘natural vasectomy.’”

Perfection quests are defined by their inherent unattainability. The new wellness advice isn’t (just) about thinness; it urges a constant attentiveness to the provenance and nutritional attributes of every ingredient. As a project, though, happiness is that much more amorphous than “wellness,” demanding one’s full attention not just at mealtimes and during workouts, but all the time. And it’s that incessant quality that makes America the Anxious, Ruth Whippman’s new book about America’s obsession with happiness, so necessary.

As with other installments in the perfection-rejection subgenre, Whippman’s book addresses the pressures on those who are doing all right to do even better. The “happiness” she writes about at the start of the book isn’t the absence of sadness, but a quasi-spiritual level of delight. Indeed, unless one sticks with a limited definition of happiness—that is, as the absence of clinical depression—the category is about creating a problem where none existed. If you’re in a good enough mood most of the time, do you need to strive to make yourself even happier? Writes Whippman: “Workaday contentment starts to give way to a low-grade sense of inadequacy when pitched against capital “H” Happiness. The goal is so elusive and hard to define, it’s impossible to pinpoint when it’s even been reached, a recipe for anxiety.” Like skincare products that aim not to address specific dermatological needs but rather to achieve better skin, the happiness industry encourages us to chase an ideal of self-improvement.”

Perfection quests don’t just leave those on them feeling inadequate and involve writing for-profit entities big checks. In a chapter with the wonderful title, “Personal Journey? It’s Not All About You,” Whippman interviews psychologist and researcher Dr. Iris Mauss, who criticizes many happiness quests for “‘self-focus.’” Mauss elaborates: “‘You can spend so much time focusing on what you are feeling that you just don’t have time to focus on others.’” Whichever perfection-seeking sinkhole a person—generally a woman—finds herself in, the hours she devotes to pondering her own flaws is time she’s not spending out in the world, accomplishing things or simply enjoying herself.  

The book’s starting point is Whippman’s own experiences as a trailing spouse. About five years ago, she gave up her job making documentaries for television in London so that her husband could pursue a tech career in Silicon Valley. She writes about lonely days at home with their baby, and the (Facebook-fueled) angst of new motherhood. Anecdotal observations of her new neighbors’ happiness pursuits lead her to read up a bit on American “happiness-seeking culture,” at which point her “journalistic curiosity kicks in,” and she decides to apply her background as an investigative reporter to get a deeper picture of American happiness-chasing. (And also—although this goes unstated—to re-launch her own career, a move that has, anecdotally, been known to increase a woman’s happiness.)

She visits self-help workshops, but some sources are more serendipitous—her husband befriends a “devout Mormon” at work, thus offering Whippman, “half-Jewish” and agnostic, a glimpse of family life in a culture very unlike her own. Research she cites supports what her reporting and personal anecdotes suggest, namely that “men are significantly happier than women, and the women who do the most ‘women-y’ type things, stay-at-home mothers, are the least happy of all.”

That’s not to say Whippman’s point is that the obligation to find happiness doesn’t impact men as well. Throughout the book, we meet plenty of male happiness seekers, including a Zappos executive so committed to positivity that he decides to “ban the word ‘don’t,’” and so enthusiastic about his employer that, prior to coming on board, he worked for the company unpaid for nine months despite his high rank. Whippman takes us on a tour of bosses who offer a (supposedly) fun environment in exchange for long hours and low pay. She also meets underprivileged middle school students forced to reveal private struggles to their classmates as part of a happiness-promoting program, reminiscent of the “privilege” walk exercises aimed at their older and less needy counterparts. And the bleakest moment in the narrative, a tour of suicides associated with Las Vegas’s start-up country, is about a handful of deeply unhappy men.

Still, the demand to appear happy falls disproportionately on women, from service-sector positions where a smile is part of the job (as Arlie Russell Hochschild details in her seminal work The Managed Heart) to those upscale enclaves where women have plenty of spare time to dwell on emotional matters. Whippman writes about both situations, interviewing Hand to Mouth author Linda Tirado to learn about expectations placed on fast-food workers, but also describing a new friend she’d made in bourgeois California who prioritized yoga and self-improvement workshops over hanging out.

There’s no one type of woman—no demographic category—that is somehow immune to the pressure to be chipper. It impacts the sort of young white women who seem to have it all (Whippman discusses the Penn student with the upbeat Instagram feed who nonetheless committed suicide), as well as black women, who—as Zerlina Maxwell noted in an article about Sandra Bland’s death—“are stereotyped as aggressive or angry, and this poisons every single interaction they have.” “Joy hunting,” Whippman tells us, is not “just the ultimate luxury for a privileged bunch of high-income Californians.” If anything, the happiness demand impacts otherwise-marginalized women the most.

I especially appreciated Whippman’s takedown of “empowerment,” which she calls “the consolation prize for those of us who will never have any actual power.” She doesn’t spell out the gender implications, but they’re hard to miss: “Creating a Tumblr of photos of your post-C-section wobbling and scarred naked stomach? Empowering! Creating a Tumblr of photos of your post-prostate-surgery rectum? Not so much.”

Why an anti-perfection-quest trend in women’s writing, why now? Demands that women be perfect aren’t new. What’s new—and what, I suspect, has inspired this backlash—is the emphasis these days on effortlessness, in beauty and in other arenas. (The latest hot new parenting book asks parents to reject “parenting,” the verb, altogether, and to try by not trying.) The “effortlessness” turn has had its plusses: We are fortunate enough to live in the age of stretch waistbands, when sneakers have replaced stilettos as the moment’s coveted accessories. Effortless-chic is sometimes genuine pushback against perfectionism, but on the occasions it’s not, it’s perfectionism in its most nefarious form. Not-caring has become its own meta-demand.

Another reason for the trend is—and this one’s unavoidable—the fact that women’s first-person writing sells. The confessional turn in women-oriented writing, for all its sisterhood-solidarity comforts, can be exploitative. Meanwhile, anti-perfection lit may be the least fraught sort of personal writing. All that’s being “confessed” is that one is a regular human being—not a trait that will count as a liability for future employers and so forth. This is a realm of self-deprecating humor, not self-sabotage.

It’s certainly possible to condemn the perfection requirement without invoking or focusing on one’s own struggles (as in Madeleine Schwartz’s spot-on parody of the shares-her-routine beauty-writing genre), but the topic lends itself to a personal telling. It helps to believe we’re hearing from a woman who was on, or at least felt as if she ought to be on, one of these perfection quests, to offset the gentle (or less-than-gentle) mockery of those other women, their earnest perfection-seeking counterparts. Thus why it’s important that we learn, early on in America the Anxious, that Whippman’s interest in self-help and happiness came out of a lonely period in her life, after relocating to the States from the UK with her family. By implicating herself, Whippman avoids coming across as snide or dismissive of her subjects.

The reader first meets Whippman at the gynecologist’s. I wasn’t sure what to make of that choice of opener. Would a man begin a critique of the US economy with a trip to his urologist? My ambivalence, however, lasted only until the second page: Her doctor’s mid-exam small talk involves praising a self-help guide. “I’ve read that book too,” Whippman writes, “and am suddenly overcome with crippling self-consciousness. I hope desperately that my gynecologist is not currently reading the part about how in order to achieve true happiness, it is advisable to give total mental focus to how everything around you smells.” No, a man probably wouldn’t have written that. But readers are lucky someone did.

Then something strange happened. In August, when Peabody finally paid its back taxes, the county turned around and sent the money back.

Brita Horn, the county treasurer, rejected the payment because Peabody had failed to include nearly $92,000 in back interest and fees it owed. In a letter to the local Steamboat Today, Horn accused Peabody of demanding special treatment from taxpayers at the same time it was asking the bankruptcy court for permission to reward its executives with lavish bonuses. “If this office can’t offer a tax break to a single mom who worries about feeding her children,” Horn wrote, “I’m not going to offer one to a corporation that just received permission to pay executives $16 million in bonuses.”

With natural gas and renewable energy on the rise, coal is no longer the economic mainstay it once was in Routt, a rural county with a population of only 24,130. Output at the Twentymile has plunged more than 40 percent over the past decade, and employment is down from 561 miners in 2009 to only 284. Today mining provides nearly 3 percent of the county’s jobs; recreation and tourism supply 39 percent, and legalized marijuana operations are starting to take off. Peabody’s bankruptcy, and its effect on public services, represents “the issues and adjustments that coal country and the wider energy sector are having,” says Rob Godby, director of the Energy Economics and Public Policies Center at the University of Wyoming. “Old revenue models no longer work.”

Now, with the rejection of Peabody’s tax payment, the county has become a prime example of how tensions can flare when local economies begin to transition away from their dependency on coal. Tourists spent $350 million in Routt last year, attracted by Steamboat’s glitzy ski resort and the area’s natural splendor. Climate change—fueled in large part by coal consumption—has created an epidemic of pine bark beetles, which have killed off great stands of lodgepole pines in Routt, reducing them to withered brown swaths. Yet even in the left-leaning ski hub of Steamboat Springs, where snow is an increasingly precious commodity, Peabody is seen more as ally than foe. Lawns in Routt are dotted with signs that read coal keeps the lights on, and many residents feel that the county should have accepted Peabody’s tax payment.

“Treasurer Horn could have been more proactive from day one in developing a relationship with Peabody,” says County Commissioner Tim Corrigan. “She could have looked for solutions toward collecting if not all of the tax, certainly a portion.”

Horn, a 53-year-old rancher and volunteer fire chief, remains undeterred. Dressed in a green sports coat and matching eyeglasses, she has the smiling, open manner of someone who doesn’t seem to care much about what people think of her. In her view, the county cannot legally accept a delinquent payment without interest, which accrues at 1 percent per month.

“My job is to keep the county whole,” says Horn, a Republican. “We don’t do IOUs.”

For its part, Peabody said in a September statement that it had “done everything we can to pay these taxes for the benefit of the community based on the court orders governing our case.” But by October 1, the company still hadn’t paid the interest. So Horn unveiled a strategy that seemed designed to increase the pressure on Peabody: Were the company to fail to pay in full by November 17, she planned to auction its tax liens to the highest bidder. Under state law, investors could purchase Peabody’s debt, and then collect interest from the coal giant at an annual rate of 10 percent. “Where else do you get 10 percent interest?” Horn asked me, smiling.

Then, on October 31, Peabody and treasurer Horn announced that they had resolved the payment—with Peabody including more than $100,000 in interest. “No one gets special treatment in Colorado,” Horn said. She added, “I’m pleased with the outcome.”

An infrastructure program even has a whiff of bipartisanship. Practically all of the Democratic Party, from Bernie Sanders to Larry Summers, has been clamoring for it for years as a way to break out of our economic “secular stagnation” and take advantage of low interest rates. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, among others, vowed to work with Trump quickly on infrastructure.

So what’s the catch? Well, the details of Trump’s infrastructure plan are in keeping with the other thing he likes to do: license his name to private operators. Only his name in this case would be the U.S. government’s public assets, passed off in a privatization fire sale. In fact, the outsider Trump that rode a populist wave to the Oval Office would be engaging in a plan that reeks of the worst of neoliberalism.

In theory, infrastructure sounds great. The American Society for Civil Engineers has identified trillions of dollars worth of pressing projects in America: repairing bridges and airports, dams and levees, seaports and waterways, mass transit and freight rail. Add to that corroded water pipes, an aging electrical grid, and insufficient broadband access. We’re going to need to upgrade it all at some point; deferring maintenance just costs more later.

An infrastructure boom would generate good-paying middle- and high-skill construction and engineering jobs. The projects have a high “bang for the buck,” returning more money to the economy than what’s put into them. Businesses invest in communities where it is easier and safer for their workers to commute and live. More roads without traffic jams and new electric grids that don’t leak energy even have climate benefits.

During the campaign Trump spoke often about America’s broken infrastructure as an example of how “we don’t win anymore.” In August he vowed to double rival Hillary Clinton’s proposed $275 billion investment; eventually he committed to a 10-year, $1 trillion plan. “We’ll get a fund, we’ll make a phenomenal deal with the low interest rates and rebuild our infrastructure,” Trump said, intimating that investors would be able to buy infrastructure bonds (which is actually an old Obama administration stimulus strategy known as “Build America Bonds”).

Another funding scheme has interest from leaders of both parties. Under this plan, Congress would impose a “repatriation fee” on the $2.5 trillion corporations have stashed overseas, to avoid the 35 percent corporate tax rate. A reduced 10 percent tax on this money—which Trump formally called for in his campaign—would yield $250 billion. Trump’s pal, corporate raider Carl Icahn, is one of the country’s biggest promoters of this idea.

That gets you part of the way to full funding. And maybe Trump just doesn’t pay for the rest, borrowing at those low rates and growing the deficit. Liberals have cheered themselves with the prospect of a return to Keynesian spending, which the GOP abandoned during and after the Great Recession.

But that’s not likely. Trump’s “Contract with the American Voter” (get to know this document) stresses that his American Energy and Infrastructure Act “leverages public-private partnerships, and private investments through tax incentives, to spur $1 trillion in infrastructure investment over ten years. It is revenue neutral.”

What do “public-private partnerships” and “tax incentives” mean here? This report from Peter Navarro, set to be one of Trump’s leading economists, lays out the blueprint. The government would sell $1 trillion in revenue-producing bonds, needing only to supply an equity cushion to ensure everyone gets paid. Navarro estimates around $140 billion in government funding when all is said and done, which you could easily get through repatriation.

Investors would get a tax credit to entice them to buy bonds, and Navarro claims that the tax revenue from new jobs created by the projects makes up for that cost. He also wants to contract out these projects, building in a 10 percent profit margin for the private contractor. Navarro claims that construction costs are higher when built by the government, and the private sector is more efficient.

Does this sound familiar? It’s the common justification for privatization, and it’s been a disaster virtually everywhere it’s been tried. First of all, this specifically ties infrastructure—designed for the common good—to a grab for profits. Private operators will only undertake projects if they promise a revenue stream. You may end up with another bridge in New York City or another road in Los Angeles, which can be monetized. But someplace that actually needs infrastructure investment is more dicey without user fees.

So the only way to entice private-sector actors into rebuilding Flint, Michigan’s water system, for example, is to give them a cut of the profits in perpetuity. That’s what Chicago did when it sold off 36,000 parking meters to a Wall Street-led investor group. Users now pay exorbitant fees to park in Chicago, and city government is helpless to alter the rates.

You also end up with contractors skimping on costs to maximize profits. A shiny new toll road between Austin and San Antonio, Texas, done through a public-private partnership is falling apart after only a couple years, and improper drainage is leading residents of Lockhart, a city along the route, to complain of flooding. The contractor refuses to make the fixes; instead the company is walking away with outsized profits.

Under this scheme, private investors and contractors hold power over project selection. Trump—a.k.a. the government—would just be the name on a privately owned bridge or seaport or electrical grid. The notion of an inherent public benefit to infrastructure improvements, the entire point of the enterprise, is totally eliminated.

There’s another unseemly aspect inherent in the bill’s title: the part about “American Energy.” How many of these projects will be things like the Keystone XL pipeline, or coal exporting facilities, or refineries? And what does that mean for carbon emissions?

So the stock market may love this idea. But it’s designed to funnel money to big investors and contractors by essentially letting them purchase public assets. This could impoverish the people these projects are supposed to help, allow corporations to choose investment destinations, and further climate disasters. And given the likelihood of profit-gouging, there’s no guarantee it even has a net benefit for workers and communities over time.

There will be opportunities for Democrats to shape this legislation. It’s not high on Speaker Paul Ryan’s agenda, and Democrats have been musing about infrastructure for a while. They may think it’s wise to offer an olive branch to Trump on this issue because they think they can fix this scheme, with Trump getting an early victory to his liking in the exchange. But it’s a dangerous game.

That is basically what has happened over the course of the past week, except that the hurricane is Donald Trump’s presidency, and the East Coast is all of us—America and the world.

On Wednesday, President Barack Obama delivered strikingly reassuring comments to the public from the White House’s Rose Garden about the coming transition to the Trump administration.

“We all want what’s best for this country,” Obama said. “That’s what I heard in Mr. Trump’s remarks last night. That’s what I heard when I spoke to him directly. And I was heartened by that. That’s what the country needs—a sense of unity; a sense of inclusion; a respect for our institutions, our way of life, rule of law; and a respect for each other. I hope that he maintains that spirit throughout this transition, and I certainly hope that’s how his presidency has a chance to begin.”

On Thursday, he welcomed Trump to the White House for a formal briefing and a photo-op, during which both men managed to appear friendly and productive.

The political media has relished all of it: the pageantry, the symbolism, the implication that our system of government is sturdy enough to persevere through the ugliest election in modern history and withstand the transfer of control between two men who hate each other. The same press corps that was preparing itself two days earlier to cover Hillary Clinton’s emails for two more years swept Trump’s penchant for sexual assault and other depredations out of memory over night.

The New York Times described their meeting as an “extraordinary show of cordiality and respect between two men who have been political enemies and are stylistic opposites—Mr. Trump a brash real estate executive and reality television star whose campaign was defined in opposition to the sitting president, and Mr. Obama, a cool-tempered intellectual who has pressed a progressive agenda in office.”

Cable news network cameras were glued to the tarmac as Trump’s plane touched down in Washington.

“I think that is fascinating, but just to underline there,” said CNN’s John King, “Donald Trump saying during these comments he has respect for the president, he will seek council from the president when he is president of the United States.”

This all sounds very soothing, and Obama in particular must feel obligated to lead the transition with grace and dignity, irrespective of the horribly racist way that Trump—a leading proponent of birtherism—has treated him for the last several years.

But it is all extremely delusional—Obama’s sanguinity, the media’s wonderment, the supposition that antipathy between the outgoing president and the incoming one—as opposed to the latter’s governmental inexperience and contempt for preparation—would be the reason for a rocky transition. There may be fleeting upsides to lulling the public into a sense of calm, but at some point reality needs to break through all of the pomp.

The situation that confronts us is extremely dangerous, and not just for all the civic dissension Trump has inspired, or for his erratic, unpredictable nature. Apart from all the hiring Trump would have to do anyhow, his offensiveness and grotesque unfitness for office is likely to lead to an unusual number of civil-service departures. Relatedly, most decent, honorable professionals are not going to want to work for the Trump administration. At a nuts and bolts level, much of the federal government is going to be run by goons or not at all. This is on top of the fact that of all the basic things the president is required to do on a day-to-day basis—listen attentively, read closely, speak carefully—Trump lacks the intelligence and composure to do any of them.

This would be a combustible situation contained to itself, but in addition to the internal pandemonium, the Trump administration is likely to be tested, as new presidents often are, by hostile foreign actors. If and when that happens, Trump will be reliant on low-rent advisers and his own unstable temperament. This is to say nothing of his actual policymaking, which could include variants on mass expulsion, stop-and-frisk policing, and a de facto Muslim ban—all things his feral supporters continue to demand and expect.

On Wednesday, Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan called on her own outlet and others to do better, and to stand up for their right to challenge Trump and his administration. The next day, members of the press did raise a fuss about the fact that Trump traveled to Washington for his meeting with Obama without his protective pool of reporters. But as I’ve argued in the past, the media lacks a vocabulary for guarding norms that aren’t centrally about press access and press freedom.

In addition to the banal chaos that the Trump administration is likely to unleash, we’re facing a moment that threatens equal protection, due process, free expression, democracy—not just press freedom. It’s not a drill. The media undersold the threat to many freedoms before election night, and it would be self-dealing, and a disservice, if the only liberty under attack we rose to defend was one that undergirds our industry.

There’s a fine line between whipping up panic and informing the citizenry so that people can respond in orderly, considered fashion. But this is an emergency and people need to be prepared for it—even if, in the end, the category-five hurricane is downgraded.

Throughout the Obama administration and indeed long beforehand, critics of the nation’s ever-expanding national security state have been grabbing Americans by the lapels and shaking them, trying to raise consciousness about the dangers. Their efforts too often have been in vain. Now, with president-elect Donald Trump readying for power, those dangers are more immediate than ever.

As Wired worried last month in a piece titled, “Imagine if Donald Trump Controlled the NSA”:

America has watched Donald Trump praise foreign dictators from Kim Jong Un to Vladimir Putin, vow to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate his opponent, Hillary Clinton, if he’s elected, and call for Russian hackers to dig up Clinton’s emails. “I wish I had that power,” he later said in a campaign speech. “Man, that would be power.” If that statement didn’t sufficiently reveal Trump’s lust for surveillance capabilities, he reportedly listened in on phone calls between staff and guests at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach in the mid-2000s.

This expansion intensified under President George W. Bush, with warrantless wiretaps, secret kidnappings, and torture, but much of it continued under President Barack Obama, tainting a generally progressive eight years in the White House. As Greenwald—the investigative journalist who helped Snowden blow the whistle on National Security Agency wrongdoing—wrote at The Intercept on Wednesday:

[B]oth political parties have joined to construct a frightening and unprecedentedly invasive and destructive system of authoritarian power, accompanied by the unbridled authority vested in the executive branch to use it.

As a result, the president of the United States commands a vast nuclear arsenal that can destroy the planet many times over; the deadliest and most expensive military ever developed in human history; legal authorities that allow him to prosecute numerous secret wars at the same time, imprison people with no due process, and target people (including U.S. citizens) for assassination with no oversight; domestic law enforcement agencies that are constructed to appear and act as standing, para-militarized armies; a sprawling penal state that allows imprisonment far more easily than most Western countries; and a system of electronic surveillance purposely designed to be ubiquitous and limitless, including on U.S. soil.

After the experience of the Bush years, it’s shameful that Democrats didn’t hold Obama to a higher standard on these issues. His unprecedented war on whistleblowers should have been a red flag, and Democrats should have pressured him to make more than modest NSA reforms after Snowden’s disclosures. The surest way to defend civil rights and civil liberties is to structure the government apparatus so that it can’t easily violate them.

In fact, it’s not too late for Democrats to do something about this. The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf, another voice in the wilderness on this issue, has called on lame-duck Obama to act now, and the nonprofit Fight for the Future made three specific requests of the president for his final weeks in office:

1. Disclose mass surveillance programs, their plans for expansion, and their legal justification. America needs to know what we’re up against.

2. Delete the data stored on Americans, and demolish the physical infrastructure needed to collect this data. If Trump wants to spy on hundreds of millions of Americans, make him build this capacity from scratch.

3. Pardon Edward Snowden, to encourage more whistleblowers to come forward if these systems continue growing out of control.

Wired asked former NSA counsel Susan Hennessey what exactly Trump could do as president. She said he could, in the magazine’s words, “rescind the executive actions of President Obama aimed at reforming the NSA after Snowden’s revelations,” and he could also “refocus American spying efforts to take the agency’s eyes off Russia and instead target that country’s adversaries, like Georgia, Ukraine, or even the European Union.”

“We shouldn’t underestimate the importance of the intelligence community’s high level priorities,” Hennessey told Wired, “and the ability of the president to shift them.”

The impending Trump presidency is also setting off alarm bells for civil libertarians, and they’re gearing up to fight back. The ACLU released a report on July on why Trump represents “a one-man constitutional crisis,” and after Trump’s election the group slapped his face on their homepage with the words “SEE YOU IN COURT” (next to a “DONATE” button).

Anthony Romero, the group’s executive director, warned Trump against pursuing his unconstitutional campaign promises, including the Muslim ban, the immigrant deportation force, bringing back torture and “opening up” libel laws to sue the press.

“If you do not reverse course and instead endeavor to make these campaign promises a reality, you will have to contend with the full firepower of the ACLU at every step,” he said in a statement. “Our staff of litigators and activists in every state, thousands of volunteers, and millions of card-carrying supporters are ready to fight against any encroachment on our cherished freedoms and rights.”

The question is whether it will be enough.

“Broadly speaking,” Hennessey told Wired, “the only way to tyrant-proof the White House is to not elect a tyrant.”

All available evidence suggests it’s too late for that.

That’s a departure from pre-election polls, which showed her winning this demographic, but there long have been signs that white women wouldn’t flock to Clinton despite the historic nature of her candidacy. In May, The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein argued that Trump needed white women to beat Clinton—and that he might very well win those votes:

Democrats haven’t done nearly as well among white women. In modern exit polling tracing back to 1972, the only Democrat to win more white women than his Republican opponent was Bill Clinton in 1996. Clinton in 1992 and Al Gore in 2000 also ran about even with white women. But since then, the GOP has carried white women by solid margins: 11 points in 2004, seven in 2008, and fully 14 for Mitt Romney against Obama in 2012.

Trump’s “grab them by the pussy” tape, the sexual assault and harassment allegations against him, and his selection of anti-abortion, anti-LGBT Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate all bothered college-educated white women, but not their working class peers. White women without college degrees—an educational status correlated to lower income—overwhelmingly supported Trump, enough so that he won white women as a category. 

That did not have to happen. But the Democratic Party for years has packaged superficial progressivism as real social justice, and the Clinton campaign’s simpering celebrity feminism ultimately proved tone deaf to the vital women voters who were more concerned about their pocketbook than “grab them by the pussy.”

White working class voters aren’t necessarily committed Republicans. As New York magazine reported Wednesday, many had voted for Obama. And there’s evidence they still feel warmly about our sitting president, who has a national approval rating of 56 percent. That’s a startling contrast with Clinton’s approval rating, which dropped to 38 percent in August and hovered around 41 percent in late October. Trump’s approval ratings have been little better, but he still managed to turn out voters. Clinton, meanwhile, suffered from the enthusiasm gap many had warned about for months. 

Clinton’s campaign strategy, especially when it came to appealing to white women, indicates that she and her staffers didn’t quite grasp these dynamics. Her campaign employed a candy-colored brand of female empowerment seemingly based on the assumption that white women’s political priorities are influenced by the pop culture they consume. White working-class women weren’t going to vote for Clinton just because Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Lena Dunham, and Sheryl Sandberg were.

These celebrity overtures were out of step with the priorities and concerns of white working-class women. How can you “lean in,” as Sandberg implores working women to do, when it’ll cost you your minimum-wage job? And if you can’t afford HBO, how likely is it you even know who Lena Dunham is, much less care about her political opinions? 

Yet Clinton’s campaign relied heavily on these endorsement gimmicks. It saturated its messaging with the same superficial celebrity feminism that anoints everyone from Taylor Swift to Madeline Albright as role models for would-be girl bosses. It assumed that this branding, and Clinton’s bid to make history, would be enough to attract the white women she needed to win. Not only did this tactic fail in that regard, but it alienated some queer women, women of color, and even millennials.

Clinton and her staffers should have anticipated this outcome. Breaking glass ceilings doesn’t feed families. Progressive policies will. Though Clinton’s platform was inarguably more progressive than Trump’s, she failed to communicate those policies to the voters who needed to hear it most. Instead, she focused on girl-power anthems and cultivated wealthy celebrity surrogates who were incapable of addressing the grievances that fueled Trump’s campaign.

The Democratic National Committee shares some blame in this. The Podesta emails showed that the DNC is currently run by a tight-knit inner circle committed to the very incrementalism voters rejected Tuesday night. In an anti-establishment year, it promoted a progressivism defined by social liberalism and little else. It balked at adopting popular economic reforms, like a $15 minimum wage and free college tuition. It backed moderates like Katie McGinty. Meanwhile, the party’s historical base has moved on without it: Trump didn’t just split white women. He split union voters, too.

It’s possible that white working-class women wouldn’t have rallied to any Democrat this year. But Clinton’s campaign strategies didn’t help her, and couldn’t make up for the DNC’s decision to abandon progressive populism decades ago.  An intact working-class base would have made the DNC less reliant on the whims of one fragment of the women’s vote—and they would have kept at least some of the white working-class women they lost to Trump. This political work must go on outside the election cycle, and it’s certainly not going to be accomplished with parody ads starring Lena Dunham.

I can’t say Rosemary’s Baby looked particularly good with motion-smoothing, but I have to admit that, in its own strange way, it added something to the experience. I know Rosemary’s Baby backwards and forwards, but the disorienting effect made the movie seem new. That soap-opera sheen amplified the paranoia and horror of Mia Farrow’s plight—it made every scene feel alien and gave its terror a fresh urgency. Movies aren’t supposed to look like this, I thought, but that was precisely why it worked in this instance: The very process of watching Rosemary’s Baby in this perverted manner gave it an extra captivating hold. It looked like what I knew, but somehow wasn’t.

I say all this to suggest that Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, the new film from two-time Oscar-winner Ang Lee, doesn’t entirely work, but part of what’s wrong with it is ultimately what makes it succeed. The film was shot at a higher frame rate—120 frames per second (fps)—than the typical 24fps movie, giving it the same hyper-real, soap-opera feel that you get when you have motion-smoothing on a television. Most theaters aren’t equipped to show Billy Lynn at that frame rate—a large percentage of viewers will see it in the 24fps format, which feels normal to our eyes—but I did see it in 120fps and in 3D, and I have to confess that Lee’s experiment is arresting even when the film’s story isn’t always.

Based on Ben Fountain’s novel, the movie stars newcomer Joe Alwyn as Billy Lynn, a young Texas man who in the mid-2000s has come home from serving in Iraq to be honored, along with some of his fellow soldiers, at a Dallas football game for their battlefield bravery. They’re going to receive a hero’s welcome as part of a halftime extravaganza supporting the troops, and neither Lynn nor the rest of the buddies (which include Garrett Hedlund’s sarcastic sergeant) quite know what to make of the hubbub being paid them.

Billy Lynn takes place over the course of one day as the soldiers arrive at the stadium and prepare for the halftime show, but it keeps flashing back to Lynn’s memories of Iraq—particularly his time with Shroom (Vin Diesel), an influential sergeant whose death during combat still haunts him.

Lee seeks to make both experiences—the Middle Eastern battlefield and the Dallas halftime hoopla—unnerving in their own way. This is where the 120fps proves surprisingly effective. There is no question the movie’s glossy look is jarring, and I can’t say I ever quite adjusted to it over the film’s running time, but maybe I’m not supposed to. Billy Lynn is, in part, about how soldiers start to discover that, once they go off to war, there really is no “home” for them anymore. Yes, a war zone is fraught with the possibility of death, but the relative banality and tedium of being stateside carries its own unnerving terrors—the sheer absence of danger can be just as rattling. So when Lynn and his buddies travel to the game and are instructed how they’re to perform during the halftime show—they’re even given choreographed moves to perform as if they’re a dance troupe—the surrealism is even more alarming because the physical images projected on the screen look so bizarre.

The 120fps creates a different, but equally effective result during Lynn’s flashbacks. The increased frame rate and the higher-resolution cameras that Lee incorporates give the central battle scene a freakish immediacy unlike any war movie I’ve seen. Lee’s staging of battle isn’t particularly innovative, but the strange bright sheen—the live-TV look—shakes us out of our familiarity with Iraq war dramas. It would be inaccurate to say that we’re truly seeing combat for the first time in Billy Lynn, but our discomfort with this higher frame rate keeps us from settling into preconceived notions of what such a scene will look like. We don’t feel protected, which makes the battlefield deaths feel more immediate and raw.

Lee has often pushed himself, taking on new genres with each movie and, in the case of Life of Pi, embracing 3D and motion-capture technology. He’s had his hits and his misses—Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a poetic martial arts movie, while Hulk failed badly in trying to create a different kind of comic-book flick—but that adventurousness has always powered him through his films’ weaker moments.

The same is true with Billy Lynn, which has some of the sharpest cultural commentary Lee has attempted since his deft 1970s satire The Ice Storm. As Lynn and the other soldiers gear up for the halftime show, they (and the audience) begin to understand that they’re nothing more than patriotic props in a gaudy, shameless celebration of American jingoism. It’s a bitter, piercing insight, and Lee and production designer Mark Friedberg do a brilliant job illustrating that with their knowingly over-the-top halftime show, which places Lynn in a waking nightmare no less chilling than the Iraqi battlefield. With Steve Martin playing the Dallas team’s smug, rich Jerry Jones-like owner—Billy Lynn never calls the team the Dallas Cowboys, but it’s clear that’s who it’s supposed to be—the movie is like a late Fellini film with its distorted caricatures and off-center tone, which Lee emphasizes by having the actor deliver a pro-USA monologue directly into the camera that, aided by 120fps and 3D, makes him look like a monster.

But Billy Lynn’s thematic and technical audacity can only distract somewhat from Jean-Christophe Castelli’s undernourished script. Outside of Diesel and Hedlund, nobody else really registers among Lynn’s platoon—and Alwyn can’t do much with a character that’s meant to be a little deer-in-the-headlights. And that’s to say nothing of Kristen Stewart, who’s largely wasted as Lynn’s staunch anti-war sister, and Makenzie Leigh, who plays a sassy Southern cheerleader who falls for Billy so quickly it doesn’t feel very convincing. The movie plays out like a nervy cinematic experiment, more about trying to push the art form forward rather than fully having the expertise to execute it perfectly. I never saw the Hobbit films in 48fps, but I know enough people who did and swear that these higher frame rates are an abomination. I’m curious to check out Billy Lynn in 24fps, but like with Rosemary’s Baby, I’m glad to get a taste of another way of actually “seeing” a movie. But I wouldn’t necessary say it’s a better way.

Grade: B

Grierson & Leitch write about the movies regularly for the New Republic and host a podcast on film. Follow them on Twitter @griersonleitch or visit their site griersonleitch.com.

He thinks he knows more than experts when he knows next to nothing of relevance to policymaking and governance. He thinks it’s none of the public’s business whom he’s indebted to, or whether his policies (or merely his status as a U.S. president with a huge interest in a privately held company) are sources of personal enrichment for him. And then there’s his temperament, which, as many rightly said over the course of the campaign, makes him unfit for office. But that unfitness isn’t limited to the obvious, headline-making antics that should’ve been disqualifying. It extends down to the most mundane aspects of the job.

As Trump’s presidency becomes a reality, this is what I’m most chronically anxious about. His tendencies are diametrically opposed to those that the job requires, and the risks we face are therefore unpredictable.

Most of us know the worst-case scenarios, Trump’s most frightening traits. He’s sanguine about nuclear proliferation. When he faces setbacks, or when he has his back against the wall, he lashes out at scapegoats. But in a way, it’s scarier to imagine how quickly the affronts will pile up simply by doing banal things.

Read enough about the presidency or do enough reporting on it, and you find that a huge amount of the day-to-day requires close reading, attentive listening, and measured speaking. The president gets a daily intelligence briefing about key global conflicts and risks to the homeland. The president meets with interest groups and stakeholders. The president must be well briefed on a variety of important things happening in the government, and then use steady judgment to make decisions about how to address them. The president has to read a lot, about many different things.

If you want to feel very bad about how Trump will manage these tasks, go back and read reporting from September and October about how un-coachable Trump was ahead of presidential debates. Trump has no focus. Trump likes to watch cable news and tweet. But the job he is about to enter will confront him with daily nuisances and provocations. It will make even routine governing dysfunctional. It will also provide a steady stream of new people to scapegoat or single out for retribution on a rolling basis.

Trump is going to enter office with a huge mismatch between power (complete control of government) and public consent to his vision of governance. Trump lost the popular vote, but stands poised to upend the policy status quo with huge changes to foreign and immigration policy, to say nothing of the radical tax and spending bills the Republican-controlled Congress might send him. People are already protesting his as-yet-unconstituted administration. The routine of his presidency will center disproportionately on this kind of conflict—the backlash to his victory, his intolerance, and eventually his policies. Rather than learn, understand, adapt, and change, he will attack, dissemble, scapegoat, use government power to exact revenge.

That’s just during a typical, uneventful week. As president, he will also be briefed as needed about natural disasters and important global developments, and his administration will be expected to spearhead emergency management responses. He will be briefed every time there is a domestic mass casualty attack, including when the shooters or bombers are Muslim.

His ability to cope with these challenges will be the subject of intense scrutiny, and when he comes up short (as all presidents inevitably do, and Trump seems unusually likely to) he will reflect the blame back on the communities touched by the crises. Violence will be laid at the feet of imaginary turncoats who refused to rat out their friends and neighbors; mishandled disasters will be the fault of underlings, city and state governments, and victims. His radicalized supporters will at times turn to vigilantism, as if his pronouncements (perhaps intended to shield himself from narcissistic injury) were implicit permission to seek retribution.

Terrible things can snowball, just from routine responsibilities. Nearly every day will create the possibility of a new cascade. And then he could also start a war.

The only people that now stand between Trump and a complete overhaul of the Obama era are the 48 Democrats in the Senate. “Unified party control tends to yield more productive Congresses, but it’s not a magic bullet,” says Sarah Binder, a political science professor at George Washington University. “There are ways, especially in the Senate, in which a dedicated minority can block a ruling party.”

Over the past eight years, the GOP wrote the playbook for obstructionism in the Senate, over the howls of Democrats and proponents of good governance. Democrats have struggled to pass budgets and get executive and judicial appointments filled, including Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court. The irony is that if the Democrats want to safeguard the gains they have made in the last eight years and prevent diehard conservatives from controlling the Court, they will have to use that very playbook themselves.

The biggest items on the Republican chopping block are Obamacare and the Wall Street regulations contained in Dodd-Frank. Both the populist and establishment wings of the party want to repeal those laws, and Republicans should have no problem standing united on that front. On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was already signaling that his party would move to repeal Obamacare as soon as Obama left office. 

Even if Democrats oppose the move, Republicans may be able to skirt them. Parts of the Affordable Care Act were passed using a technique called budget reconciliation—a maneuver that would allow the Republican-controlled Congress to bypass a potential filibuster by Senate Democrats. According to William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Republicans may now do the same when they try to repeal it. Indeed, the Republican Congress did just that in January, sending a repeal bill to President Obama’s desk.

However, there is no guarantee that the Democrats can remain united in defending Obamacare. Vulnerable Democrats in red states, in particular, may be inclined to cooperate with Republicans to deal with the fallout from a rising cost in health care premiums. This gets to one of the big differences between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to an opposition strategy: The GOP could remain united because the Senate is structurally tilted in favor of rural, conservative states, giving Republicans little incentive to side with Obama. To win in those states, however, Democrats may feel the need to work with a President Trump.

Democrats will likely have better luck defending Dodd-Frank, with Wall Street being as unpopular as Congress these days. But they may be unable to withstand the onslaught of tax cuts that Trump and his fellow Republicans intend to pass, rolling back even the meager tax hikes that the Democrats were able to levy on the richest Americans. 

The Senate Democrats will probably attempt to filibuster whichever conservative judge Trump ends up choosing to fill Antonin Scalia’s shoes on the Supreme Court, prompting the inevitable Republican claims that the Democrats are hypocrites. After all, less than a year ago, Minority Leader Harry Reid was railing against the Republicans for their “premeditated obstruction” of Obama’s Supreme Court nominee. Now, the new Democratic leader may have to return the favor to jam up the Republican agenda, on the grounds that the dysfunction and gridlock introduced by Republicans have become the governing norm.

The debate could provide the Republicans the ammunition they need to end the filibuster altogether. As Jonathan Chait has pointed out in New York magazine, the legislative maneuver, created by Aaron Burr in the confusion over Senate rules in 1806, was weakened during the Obama administration. In September, Reid told New York Times reporter Carl Hulse that his party might eliminate it if they reclaimed the Senate. Republicans are already thinking about it now. 

Democrats could gain from legislative priorities that pit Trump against his fellow Republicans. Trump has laid out a plan to spend hundreds of billions—more than $550 billion, according to some estimates—to revamp crumbling bridges and roads across the country. That could prompt opposition from Republican budget hawks in Congress. 

Trump may also butt heads with congressional Republicans in other areas. He has said that on his first day in office he would name China “a currency manipulator,” implementing a 45 percent tariff on Chinese imports. Most Republicans in Congress, many of whom were elected with help from the Chamber of Commerce, support free trade and would likely oppose this. Should he pick those battles, Trump will encounter a Congress far less willing to be a rubber stamp on his agenda. “That will be quite an adjustment for someone who spent his career as a CEO, without the separation of powers,” Galston says. “We have no idea what his governing style is going to be. But we know what happens when things go against him: He tends to lash out and pit himself against others.” 

The safest and best course, naturally, would be for Democrats to win back the Senate in 2018. There is some hope that could happen. According to Binder, unified governments tend to overreach, reading their “mandates” as a blank slate to implement sweeping legislative reforms. In the end, it often comes back to bite them, as Democrats who lost their seats in the 2010 Republican wave can attest.

Still, in the scenario of an overreaching Republican Senate, the damage will have been done. And Democrats would still only have a slim chance of winning back the chamber. Two years from now, the math looks dismal for the Democrats. The party will be defending 25 seats, including five in bright red states: Indiana, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, and West Virginia—all of which broke for Trump this time around. It would need to win every single one and then flip three additional Republican seats, in a year when only Arizona and New Mexico look like they could conceivably be up for grabs.

The prospect of having to fight for all those seats is even more daunting in a midterm election year. Democrats have long struggled to turn out their base in off years. These days, young voters especially are moving around more than ever before, making it tough for the mammoth Democratic field operation to track them down and turn them out in off years. In fact, it’s highly possible that Republicans will broaden their majority in the Senate. In 2018, low turnout could endanger Democratic senators up for reelection in Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida, which have long been tough terrain for the Democrats in midterms. And Clinton lost those states this year.  

The dismal political landscape in 2018 threatens the opposition efforts against Trump. Endangered moderates up for reelection will be hesitant to stand up to a congressional agenda handed down from the White House. Consider the tax reforms or environmental policies that Trump is likely to introduce: A Democrat like Joe Manchin will have every incentive to go along, because the Republicans would otherwise launch attack ad after attack ad against him in West Virginia, a state where almost 70 percent of voters backed Trump.

Mitch McConnell, you can be sure, will be sketching out an agenda designed to force these endangered Democrats to make excruciating votes over the next two years. It increases the likelihood that he can pick them off one after the other, expanding his Senate majority two years from now. It also means we can expect few proposals designed to attract bipartisan support. Don’t expect Senator Pat Toomey to introduce measures to create new background checks for gun buyers, or for Senator Marco Rubio to take another stab at immigration reform. 

Can 48 Democrats in the Senate hold out long enough to ensure that at least some of Obama’s legacy remains in place? They can try, but it won’t be pretty.

“Should we go report ourselves now?” another asked.

“At least we aren’t in Syria.”

How could we not laugh? Trump was a buffoon, a cartoon, a caricature of a caricature. He was the embodiment of all that was ugly in America—from the excessive makeup to the narcissism to his persecution complex. The writer Aleksandar Hemon had described Trump as a “reality-TV starlet high on Viagra and racism”—we thought that he was right and that most Americans would agree with us. But underlying our laughter was a deep unease. Trump had proposed to ban our families and to monitor our friends. He had likened us to terrorists because of the color of our skin and the faith in our hearts. In attacking Khizr Khan, he had attacked our uncles and our fathers. In mocking Ghazala Khan, he had mocked our mothers. In cheapening the sacrifice of Captain Humayun Khan, who was slain on the streets of Iraq defending this country, he had cheapened the sacrifices of our Muslim brothers and sisters serving in uniform.

Then Ohio was called. Florida. North Carolina. Trump was up in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. All the election models that had assured us 24 hours earlier that Hillary Clinton would handily win the presidency now switched their forecasts to a Trump victory. We watched in stunned silence, the room around us shrinking, the air growing thick with anxiety.

Then one of us said, “He’s going to win.”

At that moment our lives changed. We had lost much more than an election.

We Muslims have done everything that was asked of us. We worked hard, staying up all night to study and taking on menial jobs to care for our families. Our lives were difficult, but they were no comparison to the struggle of our parents who had emigrated to the West, defied the odds, learned a new language, and built enough wealth to give their children a roof over their heads—even if they were nervous about next month’s paycheck. They put up with one setback after another so that we, their children, could accomplish our goals. We wanted our lives to validate their struggle; we wanted to be worthy of their suffering.

So we stayed in the library all night accumulating knowledge, worried that with one or two bad moves we might end up on the streets. The world around us had been an unforgiving place. Before we legally became adults, we saw the Twin Towers fall, saw countries occupied, saw financial markets collapse, saw a black man with a Muslim name get elected to the highest office in the land. Throughout it all, what was important was to keep faith—faith in meritocracy, faith in America. Our parents had overcome unthinkable hurdles. What excuse did we have?

So we kept working, kept hustling.

We saw ourselves as fulfilling the promise that previous generations had made: that if you worked hard and stayed optimistic, you would be rewarded. We did everything that was asked of us. We jumped over every hurdle, surpassed every expectation. But when the election was called, all we could do was watch in silence as the narrative of our lives shattered before our eyes. We felt in the deepest chambers of our being that America had betrayed us, had repudiated who we were. In a matter of minutes, the shining city on the hill became an armed citadel determined to oppose our existence.

The election of Donald John Trump on November 8, 2016, will be rationalized on economic grounds. It will be explained as the rage of the white working class against the elites who had forgotten them. The same pundits, pollsters, and editorialists who guaranteed a Clinton victory will now guarantee that everything will be fine. The same Democratic Party that cleared the field to run a flawed candidate will ask that we not blame them. The preachers and speech-makers will tell us to spread love because “love trumps hate.” But as people who come from the edges of society, we know what the face of white terror looks like and what Trump’s victory means for our future. There is no silver lining.

It is true that many of the people who voted for Donald Trump were not racists; many were good people, kind-hearted and selfless. Every racist and white supremacist, however, cast their ballot for Trump, a man who successfully empowered the right-wing fringe of America, which believes minorities are inferior to the white race. The people who voted for Trump exercised a privilege we minorities do not have: the privilege of assuming that Trump’s vile rhetoric and authoritarian proposals were just abstractions. They, the white men and women who betrayed us, had the supreme luxury of thinking that Trump did not mean what he said. For Muslims and for minorities, there exists no such privilege. We have spent our youth distancing ourselves from terrorists and condemning terrorism, all in an effort to prove to white society that we are not monsters but human beings. White America responded to our struggle by electing a monster of their own.

There is no cause for optimism among us, for in Trump’s America we see our own undoing. We see white supremacists and overt racists of every kind coming out of the sewers they have been hiding in since the Civil Rights movement, to remind us once again of who’s boss. We who have been unjustly forced to take responsibility for every crime committed by our kinsmen—Muslims having to address “radical Islamic terror,” to employ the right’s fetishized term—know that white voters who put Trump into office will never take responsibility for what he and his supporters will do to us. The awesome power that white supremacists now have is to define the terms by which we are judged, and to enforce policies that will affect our bodily existence.

When all the networks declared Donald Trump the president-elect of the United States, I got a flurry of texts from my mother, a hijab-wearing woman who prays five times a day and keeps every fast during the month of Ramadan, even when it’s blistering hot outside. She lives in Canada and was planning to visit me at Yale for the first time later this month.

I expected her texts to convey a deep-seated fear because I was deeply afraid. In the last three years, I have been in Istanbul after an ISIS attack, Jerusalem after knife attacks, and northern Iraq as ISIS was surging, and yet I felt the vulnerability of my existence in New England on election night 2016. I thought she would tell me how frightened she was to be a practicing Muslim in a world that had condemned her.

But my mother, my beautiful mother, said that we had to give Trump a chance, to remain hopeful that he would do the right thing. She said that forgiveness and love are what her Muslim faith taught her—to accept all people, and to always see the best in humanity because there was a light even in the dimmest of souls. The same religion that Trump and his fascist underlings had vilified as a barbaric, violent, anti-American creed was at the core of my mother’s forgiveness of all that Trump had done.

From my teenaged years, I had been in love with America, with the precious words of the First Amendment, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution. I had believed in the overwhelming idea of America, enshrined in the Statue of Liberty, that called this great republic a “Mother of Exiles.” I had seen in America a reflection of my own story, as the son of strivers who rebelled against improbable circumstances and, through sheer sweat and toil, put a roof over my head and a desk where I could finish my homework.

As much as I wanted to believe my mother’s words, all I could think was that she, in her innocence, had no idea of what was coming. Evil was real in the world, and it was most insidious when championed by individuals who were otherwise good people. Many—most?—of Trump’s voters were probably decent human beings, which is precisely what made their support of Trump so dangerous. If good people could salute a xenophobe, imagine what terrible people are now thinking?

A new era of progressive radicalism begins now. The old media establishment is finished, having fed self-righteous liberals data and arguments that confirmed their beliefs. The old Democratic Party is done, too, as is the myth, which President Barack Obama believed and propagated, that America had somehow made progress against the shadows of racism and hatred of the Other. There is no room for optimism anymore, only the hard reality that exists for those of us born with the wrong color of skin, into the wrong religion, worshipping the wrong gods, and struggling for the wrong virtues.

Those of us who are Muslim or Hispanic or black, those of us who for centuries have been condemned as foreign pestilences, we can disregard whatever plans we had the day before the election. Our life for at least the next four years will be one of opposition. This is our fight now. This is our reality.

MTV’s new scripted comedy series Mary + Jane is the latest of a handful of shows that are working to break that mold. The series follows Jordan (Scout Durwood) and Paige (Jessica Rothe), two millennials who have started a weed delivery service, and vow to become “the great ganjapreneurs” of their neighborhood. Since it began airing in September, the show has been much more about ganjapreneurship than ganja itself: In the first few episodes, Paige and Jordan grapple with being mistaken for prostitutes after word gets out that they’ve slept with a few of their customers, they deliver product to a Brangelinaesque couple of A-listers, and they worry that an old rival will steal their business model. After all, as their nemesis points out to Paige, “We’re both girls, and we both deliver weed.”

These plots, inevitably, invite a comparison with Comedy Central’s Broad City. Abbi and Ilana (Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer), the broads of the show’s title, wander through a New York City where joyful chaos lies around every corner. Being high mostly serves to make them ever more game for the adventures they stumble into: chasing a purse snatcher to his petrifyingly blue-blooded home, tracking down a stolen phone, trading identities for a day. While Mary + Jane is about business acumen and getting ahead, Broad City is about reveling in the moment. In this sense, the shows have little in common. But both are about female stoners, which makes them almost unique not just in today’s media landscape, but in film and television history.

It’s not Mary + Jane’s fault that there’s so little else in the weed-comedy genre, at least on television. High Maintenance and Weeds are its closest relatives, but subject matter aside, they’re as different from Mary + Jane as Maui Wowie is from Strawberry Cough. High Maintenance is a downbeat comedy that strays into the lives of a new, differently dysfunctional set of New Yorkers in each episode, as seen through the eyes of their weed deliveryman, while Weeds is a family melodrama. Mary + Jane has more in common with a classic sitcom, playing for big, mainstream laughs. It stakes its ambitions on America’s green rush: the sweeping state-by-state legalization that has made cannabis not just a lucrative industry, but a safe one—and has made stoner comedy both newly relevant and newly innocuous.

America’s first stoner comedy was not intended to be funny. Reefer Madness, a 1936 film, was a cautionary tale, produced to warn Americans about a “violent narcotic” responsible for “destroying the youth of America in alarmingly increasing numbers.” The movie’s characters are presented to demonstrate marijuana consumption as a cause of violent crime, sexual assault, murder, suicide, and insanity—all this from a “vicious plant,” the movie’s trailer noted, that could be “rolled into harmless-looking cigarettes.”

The first stoner comedy that knew it was a comedy was Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke, which came out in 1978, about a decade after pot began to shed its reputation as what Reefer Madness termed a “burning weed with its roots in hell.” The movie culled a decade’s worth of Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong’s standup material, and articulated the ethos of the stoner genre: It’s not the destination but the journey, man. In Up in Smoke, Cheech and Chong meet by chance, become fast friends, and lament the fact that no one in town has any smoke to sell, even as they unknowingly drive a van made of pure cannabis across the border from Tijuana. The exhaust fumes alone make traffic cops giddy and give a straitlaced narc squad the giggles and the munchies. Cheech and Chong fell their enemies without realizing anyone had it out for them to begin with.

Up in Smoke was so popular—spawning five sequels—that it’s easy to forget what it actually accomplished. It may have been a movie about weed, but it was also one of all too few American movies—even to this day—to achieve mainstream success without a white protagonist in sight. Cheech Marin, a Chicano born in South Central L.A., met Tommy Chong, the Canadian-born son of a white waitress and a Chinese truck driver, when he moved to Vancouver to avoid the draft. Their comedy was about getting high and slacking off, but it was also about subverting social order. Nearly every stoner comedy since, from The Big Lebowski to Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, has been built on the premise that it’s better to have fun with your friends than to expend all your energy on competition and success.

Big ideas flourish in genres the critical mainstream doesn’t pay much attention to; it’s easier to be daring when no one takes you seriously. This is especially true of the 1995 movie Friday, which details a single day in the life of a neighborhood in South Central L.A. The film stars Ice Cube as Craig, a 22-year-old struggling to find direction, and Chris Tucker as a small-time dealer. It’s a lighthearted comedy whose final act includes a drive-by shooting, and whose last moments show Craig putting down his gun and de-escalating the violence that fills his neighborhood. By giving up on trying to “be a man,” he becomes one. His decision is the result of countless factors, but the movie suggests that smoking weed is one of them. So much for the destruction of society.

Which brings us back to the current green rush and the ganjapreneurs making bank off of it. Snoop Dogg is one of Mary + Jane’s executive producers, but watching it makes you wonder how much attention he actually paid to the show’s content, in part because its writers seem to have very little understanding of what being high is actually like. In one episode, Paige and Jordan accidentally get stoned at a bridal shower, and find that they can telepathically connect not just with their own vaginas, but with the vaginas of all the women around them. In case you haven’t had the pleasure, I’ll save you some time and tell you now: Cannabis doesn’t make you telepathic. (Of course, don’t let that stop you from trying.)

Realism aside, the talking-vagina gimmick is droll until the moment you realize that Jordan’s blaccented vagina is one of the show’s only characters of color. Paige and Jordan, like nearly all their friends and clients, are white, fashionable, and middle-class. Their lives revolve around Instagram and trendy restaurants, and they regard weed as a substance that might make them rich, but could never land them in prison. The series milks laughs from having Jordan exclaim “We’re drug dealers!” because it’s just so cute for two nice white girls to describe themselves that way when they are so obviously immune to drug laws that have directly fueled the mass incarceration of people of color. While marijuana use is roughly the same among black and white Americans, blacks are nearly four times as likely to be arrested for possession, and more than ten times as likely to receive a prison sentence.

It might seem unfair to go easier on Broad City than on Mary + Jane, since both shows are about young white women flaunting the same privileges. But Broad City, like Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke, arose organically from its stars’ longstanding work as a comedy team, while Mary + Jane feels more like a gimmick that was focus-grouped into existence. In the world of Broad City, even the fearlessly impish Ilana is wary of the police, and she doesn’t aspire to start-up CEO-dom. Substitute “Kween” for “Man” and you’ll find the spirit of Cheech and Chong’s comedy all but unchanged—only this time, the girls get to be in on the fun, too.

Broad City is, after three seasons, not just a show but a millennial manifesto. My friends and I often describe ourselves as Ilanas and Abbis. It’s a shorthand that lets us talk about our careers, our sexualities, our taste in bras. The show puts a new spin on the dyad that describes most fictional friendships: the free spirit and the homebody; the slob and the neatnik; Oscar and Felix, Laverne and Shirley, Chrissy and Janet. Mary + Jane wants its viewers to see themselves as Jordans and Paiges, which should be easy enough, since the two are less characters than archetypes. Jordan is the freewheeler who loves sex, but somehow she always seems to be listing her one-night stands, rather than enjoying them. On Broad City, Ilana displays her sensuality in her sheer joy at inhabiting her own body; Jordan’s sexuality is not about experience, but acquisition. And for Paige, life is about pining after relationships with men but never actually having a good time in their company.

Sex, like weed, gets a lot of lip service in Mary + Jane, but always seems to exist just beyond the frame. In the series’s emotional landscape, even Paige and Jordan’s friendship feels flat. It seems as though the show’s writers have realized that female friendship in all its feral, affectionate glory is suddenly a hot prime-time property, but they have no clear idea what these friendships look like.

No matter how hard Mary + Jane tries to emulate Broad City, it can’t bring itself to cast off the cultural expectations that until so recently made the female stoner comedy impossible. Their pot business aside, Paige and Jordan are endlessly focused on their careers, relationships, and sex lives. Are they having enough sex? Too much? Are they on the path to marriage? Are they getting old? Are they winning?

In the stoner-comedy canon, women have traditionally been visible only as enforcers of social order: shrewish wives, disappointed girlfriends, disciplinarian mothers. Such stereotypical casting persists largely because social norms continue to dictate that women have to keep their wits about them, not just to succeed in the world, but to be accepted or stay safe. Life as a woman, we are given to believe, is a walk on the razor’s edge between prude and slut, workaholic and feminist failure, bitch and bimbo. But if we let women embrace the ethos of the stoner comedy, something remarkable happens. The underlying social norms don’t vanish overnight. Instead, we just stop caring about them.

And in this way, Reefer Madness was right all along. Marijuana is destroying American society as we know it: by helping women do not what they’re told to, but what they want.

Still, our warnings about the dangers of his presidency stand. If you’re feeling uncertain about how the country will be run or what will change about it, you have very good reasons.

To offer insight into what happened we welcomed Sean Trende, Senior Elections Analyst Real Clear Politics, back to the show. He was the first political analyst to posit the existence of a large enough latent population of disaffected whites to elect Republicans nationally, without making major inroads with minority constituencies.

As for what’s to come after inauguration? Todd Zwillich, Washington correspondent of WNYC’s The Takeaway joins us to imagine life under unified Republican rule with Trump at the helm.

Further reading:

• Republicans have pulled the country and the world into the abyss.

• Shame on us, the American media.

Like many of my classmates, I was filled with idealism about everything good American government could be, and on that night—a night that today feels like a far-away dream—we showed the world exactly that. As images of Chicago’s Grant Park were broadcast around the world, we felt that this was our best selves as Americans. Better, in many ways, than we’d ever been before.

I was in The Washington Post newsroom when the result came in, an intern surrounded by some of the nation’s finest journalists during world-historical news: The United States, a country founded on the original sin of slavery, had elected its first black president in Barack Obama. Against the historical odds, this brilliant, compassionate, and inspiring man who called on us to hope and believe in progressive change would hold the highest office in the land.

I couldn’t stay in the newsroom for long. I wasn’t essential, so I excused myself and hurried home. The campus was euphoric. I hugged my friends. We cried.

We had spent so long wishing for this, watching all the debates together, packing the rallies, listening to the soaring speeches. We were there in AU’s sports arena when Ted Kennedy endorsed Obama, a symbolic passing of the torch from one generation of Democratic leadership to another. We were the generation that made him president, organizing and turning out. Now we were huddled together, watching the president-elect as he told us that everything we so desperately wanted to believe about our country was true.

“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer,” Obama said in his victory speech. “It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled.”

He was right. We hadn’t just elected a black president. We’d elected a man of mixed race who’d lived all around the world and stood as a testament to an ascendant multicultural majority. As young people, we’d embraced the diversity that is the hallmark of our generation, urged on by a leader with a vision of true equality for all Americans.

“Americans sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states,” he said. “We are, and always will be, the United States of America.”

I wish I were still confident of that. After winning the White House on Tuesday, Donald Trump is poised to undo Obama’s legacy. Millions will lose healthcare. Efforts to fight climate change will be scrapped. A conservative Supreme Court could overturn Roe v. Wade, and that may be just the beginning. Trump’s proposals to restrict immigration, build a wall on the Mexican border, and deport millions of undocumented immigrants will now presumably move forward. There’s no way to see this other than a descent into darkness.

The next four years are going to be devastating for Americans of all stripes, and my generation will be among them. Over the past eight years we witnessed incredible strides for gay rights and feminism, and even the fight against climate change. Racial justice activism, including the Black Lives Matter movement, spurred an awakening, and there was even talk for a while about bipartisan criminal-justice reform. Soon it may be as if none of that ever happened—and people of color, women, gays and lesbians, immigrants, and low-income Americans will bear the brunt of it.

Obama is everything you could hope for in a politician. He’s been an exceptional president, and no post-election analysis—not even the very real soul-searching Democrats need to do about the white working class—should make us forget it. We’ll be grateful to have him and Michelle and Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders all fighting for America and against the Trump administration over the next four years. We need his hope again, now more than ever.

But today, as many have said, is not a day for hope or healing. Trump’s victory is a repudiation not just of Obama, but of all of us who so proudly put him in office twice. Eight years ago we were rewarded for hoping for progress. Now we’re hoping that not all is lost.

“Obama is leaving soon,” I said. “We have to pick a new president.”

I waited a beat, unsure of how much more I should say. We have never discussed elections, even though she’s been in tow while I’ve voted in them. She is six but not yet politically aware, and that is my deliberate choice. I have my reasons for leaving her out of the loop on this. Raising a black daughter—one with special needs, for whom the pleasure of complex conversation has been hard-won—has meant making daily decisions about which lessons to impress upon her early—say, about kindness and navigating bullying—and those that will simply have to wait.

But I kept talking, anyway. I couldn’t help myself.

“We have to pick a new president,” I repeated, “and it might be a woman!”

She perked up. “I am a woman!”

I didn’t expect her to make so immediate a connection. I had, as I often do, underestimated all that she’s able to understand.

My daughter was born two years into the Obama administration, but I didn’t tell her much of anything about the first family. I didn’t know how to explain the historicism of their victory without also explaining the dogs and the fire hoses, the billy clubs and the bridge, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, passed all those decades ago, to end the same voter suppression that has persisted through the eight years of Barack Obama’s tenure. For me, these events are inextricable.

I also didn’t know how to tell my daughter that when Obama’s era ended, the next election would probably be a race between white people—and how, when white people race toward the highest office in the land, black voters can’t believe anything they promise us on the campaign trail. They are known to neglect and even outright renege on those promises, once they have our votes.

How could I introduce that sort of suspicion into her life at so young an age? How had I forgotten that I might need to?

The experience of a black presidency is normal for my daughter and unprecedented for me, and I never knew where we were headed from here. I wanted to preserve her sense of normalcy for as long as I could, and I’ve had no real power to do so beyond that which is attached to my vote.  

I woke up early yesterday, buoyed by the prospect of electing a historic successor for a historic leader—a woman with whom my daughter identified. At 6:45 a.m., a line of predominantly black voters snaked through the corridor of my polling center in Maryland. My fellow voters seemed similarly energized. We were jovial, determined, proud. Because we’re a blue state and I live in a very blue precinct, I am always lulled into a false sense of confidence about the country’s values. In my neighborhood, amid the beautiful unifying energy at my poll, I tend to believe the best about America—just fleetingly, while we’re there, setting our intentions toward racial and gender progress.

We did not know that morning that so many people in so many other states would set their intentions elsewhere, backing a candidate who openly opposes legislative measures that would protect women, blacks, Latinos, indigenous, and Islamic people, and low-income communities.

We didn’t know then that our children would not see the next four years governed by someone who wasn’t a white male conservative.

I do not regret the brief exchange I had with my child about the possibility of a woman president. And as a black woman who grew up with only white male presidents, I can probably prepare her for some of what that will be like for us in the years to come. But some of this will be new to us both. Neither of us has lived in a post-black presidency before, an America that convincingly backed a bigoted candidate over a woman who spoke out about implicit bias. Neither of us has lived in an America ruled by a man who has bragged about committing sexual assault and wants to ban immigrants based on their religion or nationality.

But there are people we can ask about this. We need only to consult the same elders who never thought they’d live to see a black, self-professed feminist hold the country’s highest office. We can ask them what it’s like to live under a truly oppressive regime, where the leader of the free world—and the people he appoints to similarly powerful positions—doesn’t think twice about redefining the country’s hard-won definitions of freedom. I am sure they can tell us all that we need to know, and we will hold one another as we listen.

But we shouldn’t lose sight of one simple fact: By the standards used to conduct elections in virtually every liberal democratic jurisdiction in the world, Hillary Clinton won. As I type, Clinton has a popular vote lead of about 150,000 votes, and when the ballots from West Coast states are counted, her lead is likely to expand substantially to a million or more. The American people, in other words, chose Hillary Clinton. She lost because the Constitution does not choose the president democratically.

It’s very likely that, had the Constitution been framed and ratified even a decade or two later, the president would have been chosen by direct popular vote. Not only does no other comparable democracy use any system like the Electoral College, no American state does (although the Constitution leaves them free to use the electoral system of their choice so long as it is consistent with “Republican” government). And Donald Trump is an all too logical product of the Electoral College’s deficiencies. As Yale Law School professor Akhil Amar put it in 2000, when Al Gore both won the popular vote and lost the election, the Electoral College “was designed at the founding of the country to help one group—white Southern males—and this year, it has apparently done just that.”

The Electoral College was essentially the product of two imperatives, neither of them very attractive. First, it reflected the belief of many framers that the “excess democracy” shown by state legislatures that had passed debt relief legislation needed to be curtailed. (It is not a coincidence that the Constitution of 1787, even after being amended by the Bill of Rights, did not protect the free speech or due process rights of citizens against state legislatures, but did prevent the states from passing any “Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts.”) The Electoral College was meant to act as a “filter” between the people and the White House. And while the idea that the electors should exercise independent judgment quickly became discredited, the Electoral College remained to potentially bequeath the White House to a candidate who is not the choice of the people.

The second major purpose accomplished by the Electoral College was to protect the interests of slaveholders. Slaves, of course, did not vote. But the Electoral College meant that slaves (who were counted as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of apportionment) would give the South extra clout in the Electoral College. And because Congress failed to adhere to its obligation under Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment to reduce the representation of states that disenfranchised voters, during the Jim Crow era the Electoral College allowed the South to be fully represented in the selection of the president even as it denied the right to vote to a large segment of its population.

The Electoral College, in other words, is anti-democratic twice over. As Harvard Law School’s Michael Klarman, author of the superb new book The Framer’s Coup, puts it, the framers “rejected direct election of the president mostly because they distrusted the people and because Southern slaves would not count in a direct vote.” The result was that “the malapportionment in the Electoral College, which never had a very good justification, continues to exert influence today.”

In facilitating the election of Trump, the Electoral College has effectively disenfranchised racial minorities once again. The Electoral College underrepresented Clinton’s diverse, urban-centered coalition, and overrepresented Trump’s coalition, which is based around rural and suburban white people. Trump’s white nationalist demagoguery was unable to secure a plurality, let alone a majority, in a racially diverse country—but he didn’t need one.

This is simply indefensible. The Electoral College does not serve any legitimate purpose that could justify its anti-democratic aspects. The frequent argument that it ensures that attention will be paid to small states is absurd. In reality, it means that campaigns will ignore both most small and smallish states (neither campaign, for example, seriously contested Wisconsin) and large states where the outcome is not in doubt, like New York, California, and Texas. There is no democratic value to largely confining presidential campaigns to a relatively small number of large states where the outcome is perennially in some doubt. And white rural states, which are already massively overrepresented in the Senate, hardly need further overrepresentation when choosing the president.

Unfortunately, while the Electoral College is horrible, we’re going to be stuck with it for a long time. It has now handed the White House to what should have been a losing Republican candidate twice in less than two decades. Republicans, therefore, will certainly be able to thwart the supermajorities required to pass a constitutional amendment, and will also almost certainly be able to stop a National Popular Vote workaround.

Indeed, what’s depressing is that the egregiously anti-democratic aspects of the Electoral College will have self-reinforcing anti-democratic effects. The last misfire of the Electoral College in 2000 ultimately gave us John Roberts and Samuel Alito as Supreme Court justices, and they provided the pivotal votes for the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. A solidly Republican Supreme Court will continue to act as a matador for voter suppression efforts by Republican state legislatures, which will disenfranchise more minority voters.

Donald Trump’s election is a tragedy on a world-historic scale. And it happened because the United States uses an indefensible, anti-democratic anachronism to elect the most powerful figure in its federal government.

You can believe that half the country is racist if you want, and there’s no question that there’s an undercurrent of anger in Trump’s stunning rise. But that anger isn’t directed at any individual ethnic group. It’s more inchoate than that. It’s rage at institutions that people believe have failed them forever. It’s rage at an economy that doesn’t work for ordinary folks. It’s rage at a cultural milieu that perceives too many non-coastal Americans as buffoons. It’s rage at the aftermath of a financial crisis and Great Recession, in which the gap between winners and losers just grew larger, and the two-tiered system of justice paraded on full display. It’s rage at an elite class that people feel is lined up against them.

That rage has no doubt been whipped up—by Trump and his campaign, among others. It may not always be based in reality, but it’s real.

In the final analysis, 2016 wasn’t a fear election. It wasn’t like 2004, when George Bush and Dick Cheney repeatedly raised the threat of terror. (And if we’re honest, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats this year often appealed to fear—of a Trump presidency.) No, this was a rage election: a rage built up over many years, among people who’d decided they were disrespected, abandoned, and voiceless.

Liberals weren’t completely caught unawares. We recognized the rage—how could we not? We saw it in our social-media feeds all year. We read (and wrote) endless articles featuring reporters edging out to Red America, armed with a notebook and a pretense of empathy, to see what Trumpism was all about, why the fever seemed to be running so high among these people.

And what did that produce? The daily filling of a basket of deplorables. I sometimes refer to it as “point-and-laugh” liberalism. Our relentless mockery of Trump and his followers helped fuel the backlash and make it spread.

They say success has a thousand fathers (and vice versa); I don’t want to point to any one thing as the reason for what we saw yesterday. It’s very difficult for a party to keep a third term, no matter what—especially in a media environment determined to not tell anyone the public-policy stakes of full Republican control. The weakening of unions into an impotent force in American life proved more successful than we’d even realized—particularly in the place where labor strained so hard to stop it, Wisconsin. And then there’s voter suppression and the madness of the Electoral College and a culture that de facto assumes businessmen are smarter than the rest of us.

But let’s get real here. Political parties go into a presidential election knowing the landscape. They know the challenges. Their goal is to win. And my feeling is, the lesson for Democrats is ultimately clear enough: You cannot write off half the country, much less spend an election cycle deriding it, and expect success.

The rage in the country isn’t limited to the stereotypical rural white American of the liberal imagination. We know that now. Trump didn’t just win in small towns, though he galvanized communities there. He surged in the aspirational exurbs where conservatives rule culturally. He also surged in Rust Belt communities that voted for Barack Obama twice. Places like Scranton, Pennsylvania; Youngstown, Ohio; Janesville, Wisconsin; Orange County, Florida—places that have trended Democratic in some cases for decades—moved away from the Democratic candidate. Hillary Clinton either lost or battled to a draw in those regions, which had made up margins of victories for past Democratic presidents. Even union households voted in high numbers for Trump.

Liberal Democrats knowingly snickered at Trump’s lack of campaign offices or ground game. Built reams of evidence out of polls. Never missed the stray comment from the craziest conservative or Trump surrogate in the country, and offered it up for mockery. We turned “economic anxiety” into a meme that implicitly belittled anyone who didn’t find their life wonderful. We lapped up every Owen Ellickson Twitter narrative and every Funny or Die video of Trump being as dumb as a bag of hammers. And yes, the Democratic standard-bearer commented that “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.”

However correct that quote might have been, it contributed to this anger and stoked it. Americans outside the big cities may not identify with conservatives, but they identified with their neighbors, both physically and culturally. And they heard the popular culture laughing at them.

Not so long ago, Democrats used to have a thing called the 50-state strategy. They walked into red areas and blue areas, states where they thought they could win and states where they thought they couldn’t. In this election, they appeared to write off large swaths of the country, even those that supported Democrats in previous elections. They didn’t give people living in those areas anything tangible to explain their circumstances, and didn’t foreground how they could be improved.

Democrats comforted themselves with the emergence of a new majority of women, Latinos, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, gays and lesbians, immigrants, and Muslims. It was an inspiring reflection of the ideal of the melting pot. And it looks to have been a bit too soon, if not a mirage. Regardless, placing such a big bet on so fragile a coalition looks to have been unwise. It left behind people who voted twice for Obama in the process.

I don’t have wise thoughts about what we’re going to do about this. Set aside for a moment the destruction that could result from total Republican control of government. I know that surrender is not an option. I believe in my country and don’t believe you walk away from it in a time of need. But the way back has to include engaging the entire country, every voter, and giving them something to latch onto.

Sure, you’re going to get the finger, sometimes. It’s going to seem hopeless, sometimes. The financial elites that back Democrats will be made uncomfortable by it, sometimes. But I don’t see another way. Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign had a slogan: “respect, empower, include.” It’s time to live up to that, in all 50 states, in every city, in every county.

That’s how Summer Zervos, who was a contestant on the fifth season of The Apprentice, says Donald Trump assaulted her at a Beverly Hills hotel in 2007. It is also exactly how Juanita Broaddrick says Bill Clinton, then the attorney general of Arkansas, assaulted her during his 1978 gubernatorial campaign.

The parallels between the two cases reveal an uncomfortable truth. They not only mirror each other in their particulars, they also reflect certain attitudes about women and sex long held by many men in power. In the final weeks of the campaign, when a tape surfaced of Trump bragging that his celebrity entitles him to grab women “by the pussy,” Trump attempted a simple and telling defense: “Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course.” At that moment, the outcome of this year’s presidential race was made plain: Whichever candidate won, a man accused of some form of sexual misconduct would, in one capacity or another, occupy the White House for the next four years.

The tape of Trump, so many pundits declared on cable news, created an “unprecedented” situation. To some extent they were right. A recording of any public figure describing sexual assault in such unequivocal language is a rare find. In the days after the tape came to light, a dozen women came forward to assert that Trump’s words were, in fact, more than just words. In the past, some of their stories had been ignored or dismissed. But now that Trump’s own words supported their claims, major media outlets like The New York Times and CNN treated their allegations as presumptively legitimate.

It would be tempting to see this as a turning point in our attitudes toward assault cases. Women who accuse a powerful man were finally being given the benefit of the doubt. In an earlier era, many journalists would have treated Trump’s accusers as suspects: Why did they wait so long to come forward? Are they politically motivated? Those were some of the questions raised when Broaddrick made her allegations public in the late 1990s. Since then, a series of high-profile cases—notably the more than 50 women who have accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault—have altered our expectations of victims and clarified our sense of what constitutes consent and coercion. Zervos, in fact, is represented by Gloria Allred, the lawyer who took the lead in drawing national attention to Cosby’s accusers.

Yet it’s also true that Trump is a unique case, an outlier. Whereas we once looked for the “perfect victim”—say, a sexually inexperienced, middle-class white woman who could not be said to have given her attacker any “encouragement”—we have instead found in Trump an avatar of the “perfect attacker.” Few men in the public eye, especially those seeking high office, have flaunted their sexual aggression as nakedly as Trump. His lack of shame on the tape, plus his well-documented history of lashing out at women, all but confirmed what many would like to believe: that rapists are somehow different, a breed apart. That you can spot a man who is willing to commit a sexual assault by the way he talks and looks.

Bill Clinton was something else again: a charismatic and accomplished man who said all the right things and was married to a committed feminist. Allegations against him have not been taken as seriously, in part because he does not “look like” a sexual predator. Even today, Juanita Broaddrick’s case is often dismissed out of hand by major media outlets. Earlier this year, on the Today show, Andrea Mitchell called Broaddrick’s claims “discredited,” even though they have never been disproved. (NBC later scrubbed the online version of the report, muting “discredited,” while leaving the phrase “long-denied.”) Her detractors point out that Broaddrick once signed an affidavit denying her own claims, and only retracted the denial once Kenneth Starr offered her immunity from perjury charges. They also point out that Broaddrick appeared on behalf of Trump at his second debate with Hillary Clinton, and announced that she would vote for him.

Today when women come forward with allegations of sexual assault, we are urged to “believe them.” But for Democrats, Broaddrick’s story challenges that mantra—because belief in her runs counter to party allegiance. To voice confidence in her claims required us, in effect, to voice doubt about the first female presidential candidate of a major party. That paradox posed a net loss for American women. That a husband’s bad behavior could still detract from his wife’s success was intensely demoralizing. “Never imagined the election of the first female president would come down to a fight over who’s the real rapist,” New York Times reporter Amanda Hess tweeted before the second debate, “but here we are.”

The allegations of Bill Clinton’s and Donald Trump’s sexual misconduct inspired more than frustration in their supporters and glee in their opponents (or in Clinton’s case, in his wife’s opponents). Pro-Trump or Never Trump, with Hillary or against her, the revelations allowed people on both sides to feel virtuous. And virtue was in short supply, as the presidential contest grew darker and angrier. Trump’s insult-comic routine, his mocking of the disabled, his bald racism, the violence of his rallies— all of it surfaced every bad thing America believes about itself. So the widespread disgust at Trump’s sexual boasting brought with it an undercurrent of relief. Everyone was desperate to feel something better than what they were feeling, to rise above the sleaze. Defending a victim of sexual assault allowed each of us to make one last grab—no pun intended—at human decency.

While the election was underway, it was difficult to discuss any of this honestly, in large part because liberals did not want to risk tipping the electoral math in Trump’s favor. But we should acknowledge the parallels that emerged during the campaign’s final weeks. We do not have to believe that Bill Clinton’s behavior is the equivalent of Donald Trump’s. We do not have to believe that Bill Clinton is the same as Bill Cosby. We simply have to accept what has been apparent since at least 1992: that Bill Clinton was never afraid to use the allure of his power as a tool of seduction. Much worse, he has, at every opportunity, opted to save himself at the expense of the women who tried to report any bad experience with his alleged charms.

Not all of those experiences amounted to the kind of assault that Juanita Broaddrick described, but they are troubling nonetheless. Take the case of Monica Lewinsky, where the facts are relatively uncontested. Lewinsky readily admitted that her relationship with Bill Clinton, whatever its sexual and emotional contours, was consensual. But from the moment he was forced to confront his actions in public, Clinton did everything he could to undermine and discredit her. As far as I know, he has yet to admit to any wrongdoing on that score, though he has acknowledged that the relationship itself was inappropriate.

It’s curious to remember that at the time, Clinton elicited sympathy from prominent women, many of them declared feminists. In 1998, the New York Observer assembled a panel of luminaries to dissect “the only topic anyone talked about all week,” which led to plenty of cruel jokes about Lewinsky. “My dental hygienist pointed out that she had third-stage gum disease,” said Erica Jong, the author of Fear of Flying. Lewinsky’s name is still used as the butt of jokes: New York magazine recently compiled more than 40 rap lyrics that reference her, including a song titled “Splashin over Monica.”

Only two years ago did the story America told itself about Lewinsky begin to change. In 2014, she published an essay in Vanity Fair about the ridicule she endured after the scandal. “It may surprise you,” she wrote, “to learn that I am actually a person.” At least in some quarters, it began to dawn on people that something more complicated than a sordid sex scandal had befallen Lewinsky, something not quite reducible to, as she put it, a blue dress and a beret.

And yet, all these years later, we still don’t have a word or a phrase for what happened to Lewinsky. She got caught in a destructive vortex of power and sex that no one knew how to talk about. Even after this election-year parade of horribles, even after all our sober public pronouncements about sexual assault, it isn’t clear that anyone knows how to talk about it. The vocabulary simply doesn’t exist. The call to “believe women” was always a gesture at that reality. It was a demand that, at the very least, we learn a sexual assault victim’s terms for her own experience before we render judgment.

Over the past few weeks, it seemed that America was ready to conduct a long-delayed reckoning on issues of power, gender, and sexual assault. But in practice, now that the campaign is over, we’ll likely find it easier to put the whole nasty business behind us. We will congratulate ourselves on a discussion about sexual assault that we didn’t actually have, in the false hope that a season of profound discomfort is finally over.

Now Trump has won the presidency on a platform of ethno-nationalism, and his victory will have enormous consequences not just for the United States but for the entire world. By making Trump the most powerful man on Earth, Americans have abdicated their country’s role as the world’s leader.

Trump’s success amounts to a reversal of the broad consensus that has governed American foreign policy since the late 1930s, when President Franklin Roosevelt began to move the country away from its interwar posture of isolationism. He and all subsequent presidents shared a broad internationalist philosophy that the U.S. had a duty to uphold the international order through military alliances, support for international organizations like the United Nations, and trade agreements.

Trump’s foreign policy message is a stark repudiation of this bipartisan consensus. Under his rule, the U.S. will no longer be the guarantor of the international order, but rather pursue national interests unilaterally with only its self-interest in mind. What would a world look like where America is no longer the anchor of the international system? The only precedent we have—the global order that existed between the two World Wars where the British Empire was in decline and America refused to step up to the plate—is hardly reassuring. We’d be back to a Darwinian international order, with great powers like Russia and China enormously emboldened.

Policies to push for human rights, which have been part of America’s agenda since World War II, will no longer have the support of the government. Nationalists all over the world, ascendant as they already are, will be further emboldened by Trump’s triumph and try to instigate similar policies.

It’s important to remember how Trump rose to power. The ethno is just as relevant as the nationalism. He made overtly bigoted appeals to white grievance, which is just another way of saying he ran for president as a racist. When he promised to “Make America Great Again,” he did not mean simply that the nation would turn inward, away from the international community, but also that the “real America”—code for white America—would return to cultural dominance. His campaign was an explicit rejection of an increasingly diverse, multicultural America (one whose changing demographics, it should be said, were supposed to have delivered victory to Hillary Clinton).

This, too, is a detour from America’s longstanding position in the world. After all, the liberalism abroad that began under Roosevelt went hand in hand with increasing liberalism at home. Many of the major improvements in civil rights in America (notably the dismantling of Jim Crow laws) came about because the U.S. government was aware that its reputation as the upholder of the international liberal order meant it had to fulfill the very obligations it presses upon other nations.

America’s international influence has grown in concert with its progress domestically, and this was by no means coincidental. Over the last 70 years, liberalism at home and abroad worked together. Now we will see what happens to the world when liberalism at home collapses. But it’s safe to say that the fear Trump sowed in America has now spread across the globe.

Much of it looks foolish now, of course. And there will be plenty of time for recrimination in the weeks and months ahead. How much of this upset was due to the political media’s obsession with Clinton’s email practices and to its underplaying of Trump’s proto-fascism? How much of it was the FBI director’s late intrusion into the presidential race, raising the alarmist and ultimately inaccurate sense that Clinton was guilty of a crime? How much of it was Republican-led voter suppression in states like North Carolina (enabled by John Roberts’s Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act)? How much of it was Gary Johnson and Jill Stein? How much of it was Clinton herself?

Whatever variables account for the polling failure, though, we have to accept that there was a great deal of truth to what the political analyst Sean Trende dubbed the “Missing White Voter” thesis—that every election year, in rural communities in the rust belt and the panhandle of Florida, millions of white people without college degrees just don’t vote.

The question was: What could the Republican Party, the natural home for that constituency, do to bring them back into the electorate?

We know the answer now, and it reflects horribly on the party and their new voters. What it took was a campaign of undisguised white nationalism—brash, unapologetic scapegoating of immigrants and Muslims. It took not only misogyny, but the endorsement of sexual assault. And it took Republicans who recognized their candidate’s recklessness, ignorance, and racism to decide that closing ranks around him was worth all of the dangers they knew they were inviting into the world, if it meant reclaiming political power.

It is hard to know, at this early stage, what a Trump presidency will mean for the future of the country. I traced an optimistic scenario back in the spring: that even our rickety democratic institutions could contain Trump’s worst impulses; that Trump’s own indifference to conservative ideology might create the space for some legislative compromises that aren’t altogether horrible for progressives. But as I wrote just yesterday, before polls closed, I am no longer confident in such a scenario.

At a minimum, Republicans are going to do incredible violence to President Barack Obama’s accomplishments. The bookend to his remarkable political story will be that he is replaced in the White House by a man who tried to delegitimize him as leader of the birther movement. Trump will almost certainly abrogate Obama’s international climate agreement and the global powers agreement preventing Iran from creating their own nuclear arsenal. Republicans will send Trump legislation undermining Obama’s legacy everywhere they can find congressional majorities to do so, and Trump will sign those bills. Republicans don’t know how to repeal Obamacare, let alone replace it. But they will try.

The Supreme Court will return to conservative control, and over the next four years, it may very well become far more conservative. Voting rights will be further weakened; the constitutional right to abortion is vulnerable to abolition.

But things could get much, much worse. Remember, sitting members of the Republican Senate conference, when they were running against Trump in the GOP presidential primary, warned that he could not be trusted with control over the U.S. nuclear arsenal. They said he was an amoral conman. They were right about all of that. Then they endorsed him. We don’t know what will happen to the global order; we don’t know how Trump will respond to perceived slights by foreign leaders, whether in allied countries, or hostile ones.

It is little solace to say that whatever becomes of this horrible leap into the abyss—whatever happens to immigrant and Muslim and black communities; whatever happens to LGBT and women’s rights; whatever happens to our economy; whatever happens to global stability—Republicans did this to us. As matters of both politics and conscience, they will have to live with this forever. But so will we.

But we now know the numbers mean nothing. Approval ratings, election forecasts, aggregates of polls—all have been obliterated in the wake of Donald J. Trump’s astonishing victory in the presidential election. Whatever we thought we knew about the American electorate has changed overnight. In electing Trump, voters have rejected everything Obama has done in the past eight years, ushering into office a man who has promised to undo all these accomplishments. Most of all, they have rejected what Obama and his election stood for: progress—real progress—on the issue of race.

Trump’s election is also a rejection, most directly, of Hillary Clinton and everything she stands for, including progress for women. That the first female presidential candidate would lose to Trump, an unrepentant sexist accused of serial sexual assault and harassment, is an embarrassment and a source of everlasting shame on this country. Surely other factors—Clinton’s perceived flaws as a candidate, the failures of the elite technocratic class, the disruptions to community and identity caused by globalization—led some to vote for an ethno-nationalist populist. But what’s striking is the racial component of Trump’s election.

We know that race was the deciding factor because Trump launched his political career with racist attacks on Obama, questioning whether he was an American citizen. He then launched his presidential campaign with a racist attack on Mexican immigrants, describing them as rapists and thieves. He expanded his platform of white revanchism by calling for a ban on Muslims entering the United States. All of this is known, and has been repeated ad nauseum throughout this election. Even if Trump voters had other, more sympathetic reasons to vote for Trump, it doesn’t change the fact that they elected a man who was openly running on a platform of white supremacy—whose political raison d’être was to be a megaphone for whites raging at their diminishing influence. That alone stands as a rebuke to Obama.

Obama is fond of quoting Martin Luther King Jr.’s line, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Clearly nothing could be further from the truth. From our vantage point on election night, we cannot possibly know the extent of the setback that has just occurred, but it is safe to say that it will be immense. Any notion of a permanent liberal majority composed of minorities, women, and millennial voters—the so-called Obama coalition—has been utterly shattered. The Republican Party, now an unapologetic whites-only party, is on track to control all three branches of government, to the detriment of everything liberals have achieved in the past eight years, toiling under the long shadow of the last Republican administration.

Some are already noting that Trump may have picked off white supporters who previously supported Obama. This is evidence that it isn’t all about race, they say. But it’s also apparent that Trump has unearthed new white voters in rural areas who sat out previous elections and have been activated like sleeper cells. And again, it doesn’t change the fact that, even if some of these voters were Obama Democrats, they had no problem with voting for the most openly racist presidential candidate since the Civil Rights Act was passed.

This brings us to the problem of how the Democratic Party—and America as a whole—can recover from this calamity. There is sure to be a civil war among Democrats, with leftists arguing that a purer, less compromised version of liberalism will have a better chance of appealing to those very voters who put Trump over the top. There will be a push to expand the Democratic message beyond the identity politics that has increasingly defined the party in recent years—to welcome with open arms those blue-collar and middle-class whites who have been culturally alienated by newly assertive blue-collar and middle-class workers of brown skin. And there will be a backlash to this, an argument that the Democratic Party’s function is to redress the wrongs that have been done to minorities and make white America atone for its sins—“to force our brothers to see themselves as they are,” as James Baldwin put it, “to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.”

It is not clear that the Democratic Party is capable of making a tent that large without it collapsing under its own contradictions. In terms of policy, Barack Obama’s administration has done far more for this country—for whites, blacks, Latinos, and Asians—than the previous administration ever did. Hillary Clinton offered Americans of all stripes more than what Trump and his Republican enablers did on issues ranging form child care to paid leave to the minimum wage. And it was not enough.

Let us know what you think @griersonleitch on Twitter, or griersonleitch@newrepublic.com. As always, give us a review on iTunes with the name of a movie you’d like us to review, and we’ll discuss it on a later podcast.

The relief over Trump’s defeat will be hard-earned. The campaign was long and ugly, bringing out the nation’s nastiest instincts. There will be an understandable desire to write off the last year and a half as a nightmare that is now over—a desire not just among Hillary Clinton supporters and Never-Trumpers, but Republicans who went along with the nominee despite being embarrassed by him. These Trump enablers, from House Speaker Paul Ryan and RNC Chair Reince Priebus on down, will also be eager to turn the page.

As welcome as Trump’s loss will be, such celebration and consolation would be premature. The majority of voters will have done their duty to protect our democracy—and perhaps the world—from a grave threat, but we cannot move on so easily. Not until America grapples with the hatred that made Trump so successful.

Trump has revealed and confirmed deeply disturbing facts about America which should preclude any triumphalism. Trump launched his campaign with an overt appeal to nationalism and prejudice, which is worth quoting in full once more:

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.

There was widespread shock over Trump’s comments, but he did not apologize. Instead, he proceeded to push bigotry more overt than anything America has seen on the national stage since George Wallace’s campaigns of the 1960s and early 1970s. He called for banning Muslims from entering the United States, and gave “law and order” speeches that portrayed African Americans as “living in hell.” To top it all off, his closing ad of the campaign stated that “a global power structure” has “bled our country dry,” while flashing images of three Jewish Americans: business magnate George Soros, Fed Chair Janet Yellen, and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. Beyond Trump’s racism and anti-Semitism, he’s a misogynist whose campaign has been built around stereotypes of female frailty, with repeated statements that Hillary Clinton lacks the “stamina” to be president. He also faces many accusations of sexual assault, granted further credence by the Access Hollywood tape in which he boasts about grabbing women “by the pussy.”

Trump won more than 14 million votes in the Republican primaries, and he’s on track to win at least 50 million votes in the general election. Senator Bernie Sanders recently tweeted:

This is unnecessarily generous and naive. We can’t know the motives of all Trump voters, and certainly many of them are voting for reasons other than his racism and sexism (such as party loyalty or a distrust of Clinton). Still, given the centrality of racism and sexism to Trump’s campaign, it’s surely the motive for many of his voters. Even those who have other principal motives for choosing Trump are in effect saying that they are willing to condone racism and sexism.

That tens of millions of Americans are voting for a racist and sexist candidate is not just dire news for the Republican Party, but for America at large. Those voters will not suddenly disappear tomorrow; they’ll be around for future elections and will shape American politics. Given Trump’s popularity with a plurality of the GOP base, there is every reason to think that future candidates will mimic his racist and sexist theatrics in order to gain support.

There is a real tension between what benefits Democrats politically in the short term and what benefits America in the long run. A Trumpified Republican Party can lose national elections, but still poison politics and control Congress and statehouses. It would also spread racism and sexism, hurting women and people of color—in other words, the Democratic base. That’s why it makes sense for Democrats to support Republicans who are genuinely committed to purging their party of Trump-inspired hate. A detoxified GOP truly would be a cause for celebration.

Part of the reason for that possibility can be found in public opinion of the candidates. By four percentage points, likely voters in two national surveys hold a belief that’s demonstrably untrue: that Trump is more honest and trustworthy than Clinton. Voters trust Trump over Clinton 44 percent to 40 percent, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll taken November 2-5; and by 37 percent to 33 percent, according to a Fox News poll taken November 3-6.

It’s positive news that a strong majority of these Americans knows Trump can’t be trusted. His candidacy has flummoxed fact-checkers, and his capacity for lying is unprecedented in presidential politics. But to believe that Clinton is just as bad or even worse than Trump on this issue is to succumb to false equivalence.

The 2016 campaign has not been, as Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd said on MSNBC Monday, a “post-truth election.” Clinton has not run a post-truth campaign. She hasn’t always been truthful; The Washington Post’s Fact Checker awarded her seven of its worst Four-Pinocchio ratings throughout the race. But critically, the Post noted that this is an average score, putting her “in about the same range as President Obama and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney in 2012.” (There was far less discussion about the end-of-truth-as-we-know-it four years ago.)

Moreover, “Trump has amassed such a collection of Four-Pinocchio ratings—59 in all—that by himself he’s earned as many in this campaign as all other Republicans (or Democrats) combined in the past three years.” Todd acknowledged the differential in his segment, but failed to drive the point home.

It’s not just the Post either. PolitiFact published a comparison of Clinton and Trump on its Truth-O-Meter, and the vast majority of her statements were all or partially truth. The vast majority of his statements were all or partially false.

As The Atlantic’s conservative senior editor, David Frum told The Ezra Klein Show over the weekend, “Hillary Clinton tells lies, but she never forgets that the truth is there.” She might shade the truth or hide it, misrepresent it or even evade it—as all politicians sometimes do. What she rarely does is deny it outright.

Trump, of course, does that constantly. As Vox put it succinctly a month ago, he “has spent his entire campaign gaslighting America by denying that he ever said or did things that we have clear video or text evidence that he did, in fact, say or do.”

Clinton’s honesty needn’t be graded on a Trumpian curve. In August, Kevin Drum at Mother Jones concluded “Hillary Clinton Is One of America’s Most Honest Politicians,” citing the chart above, of PolitiFact scores for 20 of America’s most prominent pols. Drum noted that The New York Times reached a similar conclusion; Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of the Times, called Clinton “fundamentally honest and trustworthy” in her Guardian column in March, citing PolitiFact and her own reporting.

Clinton can even be honest to a fault. Several times during this campaign, she has told a truth at her own political expense.

In March, she told CNN that “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business” since “we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels”—a harsh but accurate assessment of the future of such jobs. Her broader quote was about helping the affected workers by bringing them clean energy jobs, but Trump hammered her for it nonetheless. Last month, CNN reported, “Hillary Clinton might lose Ohio because she badmouthed coal.”

And in September, speaking at a New York fundraiser, Clinton said, “To just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it.” This resulted in widespread condemnation—it would soon become a Trump ad—and Clinton later said she regretted saying “half.”

Retreat was wise politically, but The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates and Slate’s Jamelle Bouie, two prominent black writers, argued Clinton was right on the substance. Coates wrote that “data is on her side”:

Much like Trump’s alleged opposition to the Iraq War, this not an impossible claim to investigate. We know, for instance, some nearly 60 percent of Trump’s supporters hold “unfavorable views” of Islam, and 76 percent support a ban on Muslims entering the United States. We know that some 40 percent of Trump’s supporters believe blacks are more violent, more criminal, lazier, and ruder than whites. Two-thirds of Trump’s supporters believe the first black president in this country’s history is not American. These claim are not ancillary to Donald Trump’s candidacy, they are a driving force behind it.

How come voters see Trump, for whom serial dishonesty isn’t even his most damning character flaw, as more honest and trustworthy than Clinton? There’s an element of sexism, to be sure. And there’s a kernel of truth to the “vast right-wing conspiracy”—a sustained, coordinated campaign that has for decades sought to destroy the Clintons as a political force.

The key, however, is Trump’s one true talent for branding. That’s how he dispatched the likes of “Little Marco” and “Lyin’ Ted” in the primary, before relentlessly hammering “Crooked Hillary” as a liar on the stump (“She lies more than any human being,” he said two weeks ago) and in advertising. It’s further proof of the well-documented fact that simply repeating falsehoods can make people belief they’re true.

Whatever the reasons, millions of Americans who are voting today somehow believe that Hillary Clinton is a liar who can’t be trusted. Here’s hoping she’ll get four years to prove them otherwise.

It was obvious by then that Trump’s reckless and illiberal candidacy would be damaging to America’s civic health, just by itself. But those very traits, it seemed, would also make it nearly impossible for him to win the presidency; and in the event of the unthinkable, he would be hemmed in by both the exigencies of governing and the conforming power of imperfect institutions like the legislature, the judiciary, the civil service, and the media, outside the presidency.

Almost eight months later, I am grateful we will likely never have to test my hypothesis, because I no longer think it’s a safe bet—and the failure of my own institution shook my faith the most.

There is no shortage of journalists and outlets in this industry with a lot to be proud of, but the larger system we are a part of did not convert those inputs into a correct portrayal of the choice voters face in today’s election. This has happened before. The way journalists who covered the 2000 election portrayed George W. Bush did a disservice to consumers, perhaps allowing the loser of the popular vote to keep the race close enough to “win” the electoral college.

No failure of that kind is excusable, but back then the stakes seemed relatively small. Obviously they turned out not to be. The difference today is that few people in the business are unaware of how enormous the stakes of this election are—and yet, conveying those stakes turned out not to be the media’s primary interest.

A key component of successful journalism is the unearthing and relaying of facts, and on this score the media—faced with a historically opaque candidate and one with an instinct for opacity but a long public record—did a good job. Despite Trump’s best efforts, we know much more about him today than we did before this election started. Through less laborious processes we also know more about Hillary Clinton.

But another key component of journalism is the framing and contextualizing of events and new information: How do you take that raw material and present it in ways that don’t just provide consumers with new data points, but help them suss out how critical those data points are and what they mean in the scheme of things?

Here, major media outlets failed abysmally. The best illustration of this came just days ago, when a media monitor tallied the amount of time nightly news broadcasts devoted to stories about Clinton’s emails, and the amount of time they devoted to stories about all policy matters combined, and found that the former exceeded the latter. On any given Sunday morning, network news shows host panels of journalists, nearly all of whom are fluent in the esoteric details of Clinton’s email practices, but many of whom couldn’t tell you how Trump’s tax plan works. As a result, if Trump were to win, millions of people would expect him to enact a populist agenda, even as his own campaign promises to raise taxes on millions of middle-income workers, privatize roads, and deregulate Wall Street.

As it turns out, the legislation that Trump might enact, though radical, is only a medium-sized story compared to more basic facts like his disdain for democratic norms and his temperamental unfitness for public service—just how dangerous it would be for him to be the president. Here, the story isn’t much better. News outlets did make real, novel efforts to communicate Trump’s unique kind of political dishonesty and his erratic nature to news consumers, but this was offset by a parallel collective decision to hold him to the irresponsibly low bar that his campaign set for itself.

The final week of the campaign has been reminiscent of every relatively quiet stretch between Trump’s serial implosions (attacking Gonzalo Curiel, attacking the Khan family, attacking a former Miss Universe, or responding to the unearthing of the Access Hollywood video in which he boasted about committing sexual assault with impunity). When Trump wasn’t in the midst of a self-inflicted crisis, we were treated to breathless commentary about how he was once again “sticking to script,” as if this were a meaningful demonstration of competence for the hardest job in the world.

These past 10 days have been no different. On the rare occasion when Trump stories eclipsed the din of chatter about Clinton’s completely irrelevant emails, they were frequently about how Trump had shown “discipline” in the final stretch. In reality, on every single one of those days, he was saying outrageous and false things at a dizzying clip. Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel captured this phenomenon well on Sunday when he tweeted:

Many different incentives drove this phenomenon: the fact that campaign journalism abhors the absence of a horserace; the competition for audience share; the bias toward balance; the attendant stove-piping of news content into Republican and Democratic bundles—where Trump’s bundle was filled with so many outrages, no single one could define him, but Clinton’s was filled almost entirely with email-related stories, feeding the false impression of that she’d committed a disqualifying error.

These structural forces were greater than any specific failures like access-seeking or process obsession by individual journalists, though there were plenty of instances of both. In sum, they contributed to a ludicrous public perception that Trump is more honest and trustworthy than Clinton.

Defensive colleagues will point to Trump’s record-low approval ratings as evidence that the media scrutinized him effectively. But even if you attribute this to journalism, and not to the things Trump did with his free airtime, it doesn’t account for the fact that Clinton (a manifestly more fit candidate) is nearly as disliked as he is. Trump resembles the political leaders of the European far right, and his core supporters embrace him for that very reason; but this was generally not the way he was portrayed, and definitely not the way his supporters were portrayed.

The inability of political media to process and communicate asymmetry between the parties is a genuine crisis for the industry and our political culture. I believe both that if Trump were to become president, it would be a consequence of that crisis, and also that the media would do a much better job covering a Trump administration, outside the context of a horserace, than it did when he was running against a Democrat. But the way this campaign has been covered gives me incredible pause about the latter assumption. And even if it’s correct, the double standard makes no sense. There’s no way to justify systemically misinforming people about the stakes of an election, and then clarifying the consequences after it’s over.

An industry that bandies about terms like “fourth estate” to describe itself should constantly reckon with whether its lofty self-perception matches its output. Does the press serve merely as a guardian of the right to unearth facts? Or is it also a defender of hard-won democratic norms like pluralism and tolerance, and against racial hierarchies and authoritarianism?

This election cycle revealed a critical tension between the press’ self-perception and its failure to defend those norms when they were under frontal attack. Not only did many news outlets lower the bar for Trump and never raise it; by doing so, they subjected themselves to the same dismal standard. Whatever happens Tuesday night, we have to do better next time—assuming that by next time, it’s not too late.

So why haven’t we heard much about Democrats’ efforts to seize governorships, thereby reshaping progressive policy at the state level? The answer is as simple as it is troubling.

Just as in every presidential year, 2016 features only a dozen gubernatorial races, and most aren’t competitive. Thirty-six states elect their governors during off-years instead, including 16 of the 20 largest by population. (New Hampshire and Vermont both elect their governors to two-year terms.) That form of electoral staggering, which also affects races for the country’s 99 state legislatures, puts Democrats at a significant structural disadvantage in statewide campaigns. Republicans currently control the governor’s mansion in 31 states, and have total control in 23 of them.

The electorate is more conservative in non-presidential years because young people, racial minorities, and the poor—though reliable constituencies during media-saturated presidential campaigns—vanish during midterm elections. A voter pool stripped of these core groups spells doom for Democrats in gubernatorial as well as Senate races. By not showing up to vote, natural Democratic voters spot Republican politicians an enormous lead.

Case in point: You’ve likely read about Hillary’s vaunted “blue wall,” the 18 vote-rich states (plus the District of Columbia) that have gone Democratic in each presidential election since 1992. There are reasons to doubt the existence of a Democratic “electoral college edge”; but the fact remains that when they’re primed for maximum statewide voter turnout, these states have consistently rallied for both winning and losing Democrats for a quarter-century. By comparison, their gubernatorial records are pretty checkered.

Wisconsin, which probably would support the Democratic nominee even if she spat on a portrait of Vince Lombardi, famously elected Scott Walker three times in four years, essentially approving his evisceration of public-sector collective bargaining (in the state that invented it, no less). In neighboring Minnesota, home of liberal tribunes Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale, Tim Pawlenty perfected the Republican move of raiding K–12 schools for money to cover up budget holes. Polls project Maryland to favor Clinton over Trump by roughly 30 points, but voters there shocked the world in 2014 by riding with Republican Larry Hogan. Massachusetts, of all states, has elected four Republican governors since 1990 and only one Democrat.

It goes on and on. New Yorkers toppled Mario Cuomo in favor of George Pataki; New Jerseyans gave a grateful nation the spectacle of Chris Christie’s Bridgegate immolation; Maine has elevated Trump-lite Paul LePage. Of all the “blue wall” states, only three—Oregon, Washington, and Delaware—have chosen Democratic governors with the same frequency that they’ve chosen Democratic presidents. Tellingly, both Washington and Delaware elect their governors on presidential years.

If off-year voters turn blue states into swing states, they also turn swing states into red states. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama won Florida three times in their four presidential campaigns, when voter turnout averaged 74.5 percent. (A more comprehensive recount in 2000 would have handed the state to Al Gore that year as well, but that’s a different article.) But the last time a Democrat claimed the governor’s seat was in 1994, when beloved incumbent Lawton Chiles barely fended off Jeb Bush’s first candidacy. (Turnout that year was uncharacteristically high for a midterm race—66 percent—but it’s averaged just 50.2 percent since.) Similarly, Ohio supported Democratic nominees in 1992, 1996, 2008, and 2012, but has only spent four years of the last 26 under a Democratic chief executive. During each of the last six gubernatorial elections, turnout plummeted far below the previous presidential race.

The costs of this yo-yoing voter participation has been astronomical. When Republicans have had unified control over statehouses, they’ve mostly run the same playbook: attack organized labor, pass voter ID laws, and rush through donor-friendly tax cuts. The Obamacare Medicaid expansion has been shot down by Republican governors in Maine, Florida, Wisconsin, and Georgia, all of whom could be defeated by Democratic challengers in presidential years. Even recalcitrant GOP legislatures in Virginia and Missouri have accomplished the same over the objections of Democratic governors. To make matters worse, the party’s political bench has been starved of state officeholders who might later move up the chain.

This is a devilishly difficult problem to remedy. In general, state authorities can’t move the date of elections without first amending their state constitutions. That tends to require supermajorities in state legislatures, which are in precious short supply for Democrats. Thankfully, there are 18 states that permit what are called “initiated constitutional amendments”—those passed through the ballot initiative process. This strategy is an expensive, complex proposition, since such referenda often must be approved by 60 percent of the state electorate, and even the process of getting them on the ballot can be enormously tricky.

Democrats in Michigan—a deep blue state laboring under the mismanagement of its Republican governor, Rick Snyder—kicked the tires earlier this year on a ballot initiative to reschedule statewide races for presidential cycles, but it came to nothing. Florida Democratic strategist Kevin Cate floated a plan to do the same after his party lost its fifth consecutive governor’s race in 2014. The idea generated plenty of buzz at the time, counting Senator Bill Nelson among its advocates. But it still hasn’t been acted upon.

What makes that inaction particularly puzzling is that half a century ago, Cate and Nelson’s own party was responsible for shuffling Florida’s elections in the first place. After an obscure Republican had ridden Richard Nixon’s presidential coattails to a surprisingly strong showing in the 1960 governor’s race, the then-dominant state Democrats maneuvered to protect their grip on the statehouse by decoupling presidential and gubernatorial races. Turnout was indeed markedly diminished in 1966, the first gubernatorial election held during the midterms. But the Democrats’ chicanery was no match for the wave of segregationist voters abandoning their party for the GOP, and in 1966 Claude Kirk was elected the first Republican governor of the state since Reconstruction.

It’s time for national Democrats to follow their own example and prioritize the power of election schedules. Only this time, they should aim to expand the electorate, not narrow it.

And here we are. Republicans nominated a candidate who has flouted a whole host of conservative orthodoxies, but retains the undying support of a hard core of Republican voters because of one stance: his overt hostility to non-whites, including Latinos, blacks, and Muslims with origins in the Middle East. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, is favored to win, riding what appears to be a surge of Latino voters flocking to the polls. They are #WithHer, sure, but the Latino vote is primarily a backlash to Donald Trump, his party, and what they represent.

The idea that the RNC would issue a similar autopsy report in 2017 is laughable. Trump’s victory in the primary—against a field stacked with governors and senators—proves that a plurality of Republican voters are not prepared to budge on the issue of immigration. Furthermore, Trump’s candidacy has pulled the entire party further to the right on this issue. Comprehensive immigration reform is now surely a dead letter in the Republican Party. Any person with aspirations to become president knows that the only road to the GOP nomination is the one paved by Trump. The unifying message going forward is one of resentment and reaction, often on racial lines.

That means we are likely to see a Trump-like figure—if not Trump himself—winning the nomination in the 2020 cycle. And it will be 2016 all over again.

There has been much talk this election about what will happen to the Republican Party in the event that Trump loses. Some conservatives have left the GOP. Others have planted their #NeverTrump flag, vowing to win back their party. But there are few signs that a real reckoning is in order. The Republican Party as a whole has overwhelmingly backed its nominee, in large part because it has no choice: Voters have flocked to Trump, and party stalwarts, even those with misgivings like Speaker Paul Ryan, have been forced to fall in line.

Furthermore, Trump will not cease to exist on November 9. America’s most self-obsessed grandstander will not retreat, tail between his legs, to live out the rest of his days in Howard Hughes-ish solitude. Trump, who has significantly higher favorable ratings within the GOP than Ryan, will continue to be a force in the party. And all signs point to the fact that he will not go quietly, should he lose. Trump has signaled repeatedly that he will contest the results of the election if they do not fall in his favor. This suggests that the Trump-fueled erasure of civic norms will continue—who would have predicted that we would look back fondly on John McCain’s 2008 concession speech?—and that the Republican Party has every incentive to go along with it.

Republicans in elected office have telegraphed that, should Hillary Clinton win, they will spend the next four years doing everything in their power to subvert her presidency, with some even suggesting that she could be impeached immediately after taking office. The hounding of the Clintons is one of the Republican Party’s proudest traditions, and Trump will be a more prominent and important tool in this respect than anything in the Republican woodshed in the 1990s.

Going after Clinton will unify the party’s shrinking base, giving it no reason to go through the kind of soul-searching necessary to re-establish itself as a viable national party. Instead, we’ll continue talking about Clinton’s emails and Benghazi forever, until a new scandal emerges. Far from recalibrating itself for future national elections, the Republican Party can keep playing Trump’s tune of “lock her up.” As my colleague Brian Beutler has written, the Republicans in Congress will extend, not retract, Trump’s claims of illegitimacy, and use them to prevent the government from functioning: judicial vacancies will lie unfilled, legislation will not be passed—nothing will get done. The refusal to even consider President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court is the new normal.

Any policy seen as benefitting non-white voters is even deader than it was before. When it comes to immigration, anything short of The Wall is off the table. Ethno-nationalism has become the defining characteristic of the GOP, and from now on Republicans, from statehouse races to the presidency, will be competing for the white nationalist vote, which could accelerate the Republican Party’s makeover as an unapologetic white nationalist party.

Finally, the right-wing echo chamber—particularly talk radio and Fox News—has been instrumental in determining the nature of the modern Republican Party. But Trump’s campaign has shown that there is a willingness to embrace new levels of misinformation. He has both further eroded the public’s trust in the national news media and actively promoted stories that have no basis whatsoever in reality. One of the Trump’s campaign’s most important lasting legacies will be its embrace of blatant falsehood as political strategy and its championing of outlets like Breitbart that would have been considered untouchable even a few years ago.

Donald Trump is the product of forces that have been unleashed and amplified by one party. Division and obstructionism, the obliteration of political norms, the politicization of previously apolitical parts of our government and civic life, the contempt for government, the rise of ethno-nationalism—all were prevalent before Trump. And all these traits will become only more ingrained in the coming years, thanks to Trump and his Republican enablers, as the GOP works to undermine the legitimacy of the government, the media, and other national institutions.

There are other forces that have contributed to Trump’s rise, forces that have also roiled the Democratic Party: the failures of technocratic liberalism, the disruptive tendencies of globalization, the manifest inequalities that permeate America in the 21st century. Whether the Democrats are up to these challenges is an open question. But if 2016 is any indication, they will be the only acceptable option come 2020.

There was no gun; police released Crites after a brief interview. But a myth was born: Trump had survived an assassination attempt. In a subsequent rally in Denver, Trump was introduced by Father Andre Y-Sebastian Mahanna, a Maronite Catholic priest who lamented the “attempt of murder against Mr Trump.” The false narrative quickly became Trumpian lore on social media and was echoed by prominent members of the campaign, including Donald Trump, Jr., and social media aide Daniel Scavino.

Crites’s ordeal was real. He feared for his life. “There were people wrenching on my neck they could have strangled me to death,” he told The Guardian. But Crites story is also a perfect symbol for the larger problems faced by his brand of opposition politics. Over the last year, one of the most intriguing developments in American politics has been the emergence of a faction of Republicans who find Donald Trump intolerable: #NeverTrump, to use its social media moniker.  Like Crites’s protest, NeverTrump has been noble in intent (putting national interest above party loyalty) but ineffective and even counterproductive in result. Not only has it failed to convince most Republicans; it might even have helped Trump by giving him a convenient scapegoat to blame for the problems of his candidacy. If #NeverTrump is ever going to be an effective force in reforming the Republican Party, they’re going to have to figure out what they did wrong.

Trump has been criticized by Republicans from the moment he announced his candidacy on June 16, 2015, but it’s fair to say that for many months he was wrongly dismissed as a passing fad, in the manner of Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich in 2012. The panic that led to NeverTrump really began in late February 2016, after Trump’s victories in New Hampshire and South Carolina, when party elders like Mitt Romney and Karl Rove started organizing in earnest to stop him. But it was already too late by then, as Trump enjoyed a beachhead of support that he carried to victory in the primaries.

NeverTrump was always more of a tendency than a coherent movement, and it suffered from the same factional divisions that allowed Trump to dominate over his Republican rivals. The NeverTrump camp could never agree on who they wanted to stand as an alternative to Trump—Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, or Marco Rubio? Muddying the waters, conservative pundits like William Kristol started entertaining fantasies of some mysterious new champion emerging, a daydream that sometimes took the form of Mitt Romney but then devolved into ever more obscure figures, like National Review writer David French, until finally settling on the quixotic campaign of former CIA operative Evan McMullin.

The search for ever more esoteric alternatives to Trump points to another failure in NeverTrump: They misjudged everything about the Republican Party, from the nature of the electorate to the moral fortitude of party leaders to the power of partisanship.

NeverTrump thought the Republican base wanted a conservative ideology rooted in the Constitution and free market thinkers like F.A. Hayek, when a plurality of that base really wanted racist appeals to white grievances; Trump has made all too clear that when it comes to limited government, the GOP base mainly wants to restrict policies that help non-whites.

NeverTrump also thought figures like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz would take principled stands against Trump. On February 26, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat tweeted:

In fact, those politicians, who have a better sense of where the party’s grassroots are, caved and supported Trump (in Cruz’s case after putting on a ridiculous drama about his tortured conscience). 

Finally, NeverTrump thought there was enough opposition to Trump that they could rally followers to support third-party candidates like McMullin or to stay at home, thus making a real difference in the election. This was the biggest illusion of all. If Trump loses, it won’t be because of garment-rending manifestos like the National Review’s “Against Trump” special issue, but because Clinton rallied the Democratic base (people of color, millennials, single women, college educated whites) in sufficient numbers.

The GOP—not just Trump’s hardcore supporters, but the party base as a whole—has learned to live with their nominee. Citing the latest tracking poll, The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake noted on Friday that “the Republican base is as united in voting for him (87 percent of them are behind him) as Democrats are in voting for Hillary Clinton (also 87 percent).... In other words: It looks like the NeverTrumpers are leading a movement without a real base. And no matter what happens on Tuesday, they’ll have a mess to clean up.”

If Trump wins, NeverTrump will be enemies of the new Republican president. If he loses, they’ll be among the fall guys blamed for the loss. Interviewed by MSNBC last month, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway lamented, “We have the Never Trumpers who are costing us 4 or 5 percent in places.” (As the race has tightened, the Trump campaign has downplayed the dangers of NeverTrump in favor of claims of a “rigged” election.)

It’s easy to imagine NeverTrump going into a long-term exile from politics: at home with neither the post-Trump Republican Party nor the increasingly progressive Democratic Party. Perhaps in seeking consolation for their repeated failures, the NeverTrump faction will take consolation in their own alternative fable, a Lost Cause narrative whereby they are the true heirs of Reaganism, usurped from their rightful place by the orange Pretender. 

For the good of both the GOP and America, NeverTrumpers must not indulge in such nostalgic fantasies. The Trumpified Republican Party is a nightmare, and there is no one more likely to repair it than NeverTrumpers. But if they want to do the job, they have to give up the pernicious habits that allowed them to lose to Trump. The earlier #NeverTrump complaints that “Trump is a liberal” have been disproven by Trump’s success in mimicking, albeit often in crude terms, standard conservative rhetoric about filling Supreme Court vacancies, a muscular foreign policy, and the general horridness of the Clintons. They have to stop pretending that all the party needs is a return to Reaganite bromides about low taxes, American exceptionalism, and family values, since Trump has shown how easily such slogans can be co-opted by a cynical outsider. 

NeverTrump’s best hope for returning their party to a rational and functioning organ in national politics is to recast Trump’s powerful nationalist appeal, but in a less toxic form. The core of Trump’s politics are immigration restriction, protectionism, and a unilateralist foreign policy. It might be possible to offer a less abrasive version of these policies: immigration restriction without the xenophobic bashing of immigrants, opposing trade agreements that offshore American jobs, and a realist foreign policy that eschews the adventurism advocated by neoconservatives. This Trump-lite policy cocktail could be combined with a more vigorous policing—by Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell on down—of conspiracy-minded conservative media such as Breitbart and Alex Jones.

A reform agenda along this line may or may not work, but it would engage with the actual politics of the Republican Party in a more realistic, constructive way. And it’s not as if the NeverTrump movement has anything left to lose.

Taking time to do hard drugs when killers are chasing you is narrative code for “This character deserves whatever’s coming.” (A shot of whiskey, on the other hand, might indicate serious determination.) The show is about Teresa and her drive to survive no matter what. She’s motivated by a vision of her future self as a stylish drug queenpin. The vision whispers encouragement to Teresa from behind her sunglasses when things get really rough, like when a vicious hit-squad member rapes her. Brenda begins the show as her foolish bestie, a contrast with Teresa and a lesson in what would happen to her if she were any less tough.

There’s a visual language to their differences. Braga’s Teresa is exceptionally thin, even by American television standards. Her hair is stringy or pulled back, and her no-makeup-look makeup is often smeared with dirt. The clothes she wears are minimal and utilitarian: A tank top and jean shorts. Everything about her presence is steely and lean, ready to run. Teresa reflects her priorities, which are escape and independence. Brenda is the opposite. She has an hourglass figure, and her hair and makeup are always done in a way that indicates effort. Brenda keeps her cartel wife outfits, not changing into fugitive wear. And she has a child. Against the odds, however, Brenda survives the pilot and crosses the border into America with her young son, Tony.

An undocumented immigrant widow and her son trying to get by, while fleeing the drug war, sounds more like art house cinema than a sexy cable action-drama. But Brenda is not the typical didactically moral immigrant mom, whose misery and exploitation rebuke the viewer’s complacency, and this is not Under the Same Moon. When she ferrets out a rinky-dink drug ring operating out of the motel where she and her young son are staying, Brenda immediately takes over and turns the men into her underlings. She sits on a bench outside a Home Depot, not asking for charity or looking for work, but hustling men who she accuses (in a loud voice) of trying to solicit her. Brenda becomes the American right’s worst nightmare: An illegal immigrant mom drug-dealer blackmailing innocent men with false sexual harassment allegations.

Brenda is also—by far—the show’s most interesting, sympathetic character. In a sea of drug war cliches, she is the only thing that sticks out. At some point, the writers and producers must have noticed that Machado was acting circles around the rest of the cast, including the star Braga. Brenda survives, even as her story becomes more and more tangential. Her fight to save her life feels like a struggle with narrative conventions and genre constraints, as much as with the cartel. But Teresa is most compelling when she’s plotting with Brenda, and the protagonist refuses to ditch her companion even when the script makes it seem like she probably should. For brief moments over the course of its first season, Queen of the South was a show about two friends showing up for each other.

Even though it takes place on and around the border, the show doesn’t bother with the immigration debate. On Queen of the South, the border is realistically porous: People and drugs flow through, but so does power. The cartel is connected with the Mexican government and the Mexican government is connected with the American government. The so-called national interests that a border wall is supposed to protect don’t exist; here there are only competing business interests, and they live on both sides. This approach removes a lot of ripped-from-the-headlines baggage from a show that is still centrally about Mexican drug traffickers operating in Texas. That Brenda and Teresa are undocumented is just another challenge that they have to face; we never consider whether or not it’s ethical for them to cross the border. That would be ridiculous.

A show about Brenda might be able to leave most of the drug war cliches on the table. The bosses and their chess-like games, the worried wife at home, the sadist hitman and his contrastingly principled partner: It’s all dull and tiresome. Brenda’s story—an immigrant single-mom Better Call Saul—is a different proposition entirely, and a better one. When she bosses her dufus drug underlings into cooking meth it’s funny, unlike the rest of the show. With a little time, the viewer begins to understand what Brenda’s doing, why she dresses and acts the way she does. The motel goons weren’t going to fall in line for just anyone. Her performance comes into focus.

But Brenda won’t be starring in a spin-off. Spoiler alert: In the first season’s final episode, Teresa and Brenda find a way out of another trap and use some information as leverage to snooker a couple of cartel lieutenants. As they walk away, Brenda’s whole character collapses and instead of her normal wiles she turns into a pile of melodramatic maternal instincts. Panicking, she gives the game away, and once she tells the bad guys that she has a son, her leverage evaporates. Teresa can’t save her, and Brenda is killed. It took them all season, but the rules of television finally got to her. Queen of the South was renewed for a second season, but without Brenda (and Machado), I don’t know what’s left that’s worth watching. She was a good character, killed by a bad show and an unimaginative industry.

Trump encouraged his supporters to “knock the crap” out of protesters, and even suggested he would pay the legal fees of followers who assaulted his critics.

By refusing to commit to accepting the results of the election, he has confirmed the doubts among his supporters about the integrity of American elections. Thereby, he has increased the risk of possibly violent resistance by hard-core Trumpists.

It would be comforting to conclude that the menace of violence surrounding the 2016 presidential election is unique. But my research on the history of voting rights in the United States suggests that this is far from the case. Indeed, the threat and execution of violence around elections has a long, sad history in American politics.

Somewhat like the 2016 election—which has revolved around issues of race and immigration—efforts by disadvantaged (and often nonwhite) citizens to secure greater political influence have been met with violent repression by those already enjoying power (usually more affluent whites) throughout American history.

History of violence

Violent conflict surrounding elections goes all the way back to the beginning of American history. The Founding Era—often portrayed as a period dominated by outstanding, level-headed statesmen who set the United States on a course toward inevitable greatness—was actually a chaotic period.

Political violence was a constant threat in that period. And, occasionally, a reality.

In 1804, Aaron Burr, vice president and an aspirant for higher office, killed Alexander Hamilton, George Washington’s former secretary of the treasury, in a duel. Doubting Burr’s judgment and patriotism, Hamilton had worked to deny Burr the governorship of New York. Burr was outraged over Hamilton’s efforts to deny him the political success he craved.

The period between the 1820s and the onset of the Civil War was marked by a substantial increase in ethnic and religious diversity. This period was also notable for an increase in violent conflict surrounding politics and elections.

In a precursor of today’s politics, these clashes stemmed from heightened anxieties among native white Protestants about the consequences of Irish and German Catholic immigration for American identity and social harmony.

Of particular note was the rise of the virulently nativist, anti-Catholic “American Party” (better known as the “Know-Nothing” Party) in the 1850s. For some Know-Nothings, violence against recent immigrants was an acceptable means to preserve the rights of native whites.

The Know-Nothings were hardly a fringe movement: By 1854, they had elected 52 of the then 234 members of Congress, as well as the mayors of several major cities. The rise of the Know-Nothings triggered serious conflicts between native white Protestants and those who had recently immigrated.

In a particularly horrifying 1855 event known as “Bloody Monday,” 22 people—mostly recent German and Irish immigrants—were killed, and many more were injured, in an Election Day riot in Louisville, Kentucky.

In a disturbing precedent given Trump’s request that his supporters monitor polls in “certain locations,” an immediate precursor of the riot was an effort by armed Know-Nothing supporters to prevent eligible immigrant voters from casting ballots.

The deadliest conflict

It also bears remembering that the Civil War was sparked by the refusal by southern states to accept the results of the 1860 election.

That unusual contest, which had featured four major presidential candidates, had been won by Republican standard-bearer Abraham Lincoln despite the fact that he secured only 39.9 percent of the vote.

Although Lincoln did not support the immediate emancipation of African American slaves, southern leaders believed he intended to destroy the southern slave system. They sought to exit the Union in order to prevent that from happening.

When Lincoln refused to accept southern secession, the result was the Civil War—still the nation’s deadliest conflict in terms of total casualties.

Racialized election violence

But violence directly linked to elections arguably reached a fever pitch in the decades following the North’s victory in the Civil War. The national Republican Party’s attempts to enfranchise African Americans and strengthen Republican Party organizations in southern states were contested strenuously—and often violently—by southern whites.

In the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s, armed groups of newly enfranchised African Americans and their white Republican supporters repeatedly squared off against white supremacist paramilitary organizations in states throughout the South.

In one of the worst single episodes of violence—the Colfax Massacre of 1873—a group of white vigilantes killed somewhere between 62 and 150 African American men. African American Republicans had occupied the Grant Parish, Louisiana courthouse in order to preserve the results of the 1872 gubernatorial election, which had elevated a Republican to the governorship. Three whites were also slain in the battle, which had featured the use of trenches and cannon.

A long history

The threat—and repeated execution—of violence remained important features of efforts by white supremacists to suppress African American (and Latino) registration and voting all the way up until enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which strengthened federal voting rights protections and authorized federal monitoring of election rules in states with records of racial discrimination in voting.

Indeed, the immediate impetus for enactment of the Voting Rights Act was widespread public outrage following the nationwide broadcast of images of the brutal police suppression of a peaceful voting rights march in Selma, Alabama.

And the subsequent expansion of the Voting Rights Act to protect the rights of non-English-speaking Americans was shaped in no small part by reports of the violent intimidation of prospective Latino voters, especially in southwestern states.

Just a few years after enactment of the Voting Rights Act, the 1968 Democratic National Convention was famously marred by the violent suppression of anti-war demonstrators by the Chicago police. Demonstrators explicitly portrayed American involvement in Vietnam as the continuation of American imperialism and suppression of nonwhite peoples. The clash represented another example of racialized violence surrounding elections.

As a general matter, elections in more recent decades have been characterized by greater civility. However, the long history of violence in American elections should caution citizens against undue optimism about the continuation of this recent favorable trend.

Trump’s incitement of violence and denigration of the integrity of American elections do, in fact, risk the resumption of ugly historic patterns.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Hate crimes against Muslims have soared over the past year; Trump protesters have been attacked viciously, and with impunity, in public spaces; immigrants have spent the campaign in fear of what will become of their families and their safety in the event that Trump somehow wins. Last week, arsonists torched a black church in Greenville, Mississippi, after spraying “Vote Trump” on one of its exterior walls.

There are other, less obvious but just as troubling symptoms of this national tension. For instance, there is a very high probability that we will wake up Wednesday to find that president-elect Hillary Clinton will serve her first term without control over either chamber of Congress. In that event, it’ll be easy to imagine that Antonin Scalia’s vacant Supreme Court seat will remain empty for four additional years. If an elderly liberal justice departs the Court in that time, conservatives would reestablish control over it, effectively nullifying the voters’ will.

It is commonly said that the scenario facing us is unprecedented, but that isn’t quite so. There have been two times in the nearly 200 years since Congress set the number of seats on the Court at nine when our political system became so dysfunctional that the size of the Court came into question. The first was in 1866 when, as the legal scholar John Orth has written, “an ill-conceived and short-lived judiciary act reduced the number of justices … to seven,” to void President Andrew Johnson’s appointment power. The next was in 1937, at the end of the Lochner Era, when President Franklin Roosevelt proposed adding seats to a Supreme Court that was so ideologically hostile to economic regulation that it crippled his ability to respond to the Great Depression.

This kind of procedural extremism, in other words, seems to be the byproduct of a threadbare civic fabric. If we’re experiencing a crisis of civic wellbeing that rivals either the immediate aftermath of the Civil War or the nadir of the Great Depression—when the American way of life was beset on both sides by fascism and communism—it goes without saying we’re in some trouble.

Trump has frayed bonds of trust we depend upon to hold our communities and our entire political culture together. No small share of Trump’s supporters are reluctant—mortified by his behavior, aware of the toxic effect he’s had on our society. It is essential in the closing days of this election that they grapple with the ways their votes are contributing to the damage Trump is doing.

Last week, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote a final plea to fellow conservatives, religious conservatives in particular, not to succumb to the temptation to vote for Trump—not to think about voting for Trump as an unfortunate evil needed to thwart the liberalization of America.

I wasn’t the target audience. His argument was directed at reluctant Trump voters, from one conservative to others, all of whom share premises I find mistaken. But the right thing for anti-Trump conservatives to do at this point is to convince shy Trump voters that they’re making a huge mistake, and this was an excellent attempt.

It is a hard thing to accept that some elections should be lost, especially in a country as divided over basic moral premises as our own.... [T]oday’s conservatism has far more to gain from the defeat of Donald Trump, and the chance to oppose Clintonian progressivism unencumbered by his authoritarianism, bigotry, misogyny and incompetence, than it does from answering the progressive drift toward Caesarism with a populist Elagabalus.

Not because it is guaranteed long-term victory in that scenario or any other. But because the deepest conservative insight is that justice depends on order as much as order depends on justice. So when Loki or the Joker or some still-darker Person promises the righting of some grave wrong, the defeat of your hated enemies, if you will only take a chance on chaos and misrule, the wise and courageous response is to tell them to go to hell.

This got me thinking about what a parallel, liberal plea to these same voters would look like, and if such a plea could possibly break through a quickly thickening barrier of distrust between liberals and conservatives. What could an urbanite liberal possibly say to convince committed Republicans that this election is worth losing?

Maybe nothing. But it’s worth noting that as thick as that barrier now is, it is based on a number of inaccurate or irrelevant assumptions conservatives make about liberals, and vice versa. It can still be crossed. The one thing that would make it fully impenetrable is for people who understand that Trump is a dangerous man, and a stain on the country, to fail to empathize with people who will be harmed by his presidency, and vote for him anyhow.

All shy Trump voters will have their reasons. For many religious conservatives it will be the belief that Trump will restore conservative dominance of the judiciary. For supply siders, the expectation that Trump will sign Paul Ryan’s tax and spending bills. For suburban whites, perhaps, a Blue Lives Matter–inspired camaraderie with Trump and police, against an imagined plague of inner-city lawlessness.

Liberals disagree with all of these motivations, but can empathize with them to varying degrees. That empathy helps hold families and entire communities, riven by ideological differences, together at trying times. Most liberals don’t share Republican militarism, but many serve in the armed forces, or have friends and family who do. My great-grandparents fled here from Berlin to escape Nazis after their family members disappeared; they supported their adopted country’s decision to go to war with their native one. My grandfather, of the forgotten generation, was drafted as an officer into the Army during the Korean war. My first boss was a marine who served in Desert Storm; close friends of mine fought in Iraq and Afghanistan—some of their friends were killed. Many members of my family haven’t voted for Democrats in decades. They support lower taxes and take a dim view of welfare. They instinctively trust police and are ripe targets for Trump’s depiction of urban life.

These are ultimately the same views that motivated them and millions of people to vote for Mitt Romney, and when that election day arrived, it was taken for granted they would vote for the Republican nominee. Their votes didn’t suggest that their conception of citizenship had been corrupted. Nobody was under the illusion in 2013 that conservatives would stop fighting for their particular moral conception of government—and liberals were prepared to engage in that familiar fight, in good faith, all over again.

Whether Trump would be a reliable exponent of conservative ends or not, it can’t be said that tax reform or higher military spending would be the hallmarks of his administration.

Trump has already made his core supporters feel as if casual acts of racism are permissible; under his umbrella of protection, they menace members of the media with threats and anti-Semitic chants, in front of children and indifferent adults. Under Trump it is all too easy to imagine not just mass expulsion of illegal immigrants and heightened law enforcement scrutiny of Muslim communities, but a culture of impunity in which Mexicans and Muslims are subjected to violence and other routine violations of their constitutional rights and civil liberties.

Voting for Trump despite knowing all this about him, accepting it as collateral damage for others to cope with, is like crossing a civic Rubicon. It makes the notion of restoring any sense of community with liberals or ethnic minorities or women very difficult to entertain. There remains a basis for conservatives and liberals to see each other as less alien than we often do, but what’s left can be easily squandered.

And once it’s gone, there will be left no foundation of trust, however thin, for working through the impasses that will confront us politically and culturally, starting the day after the election. That’s why loose talk about leaving Supreme Court vacancies unfilled is so disconcerting. The GOP’s decision not to fill the open seat will be transformed from a partisan power grab to an irreversible statement of contempt for the majority of the country. Should Trump win with the help of conservatives who have extraordinary misgivings about him, he will fill the vacancy, and liberals will view the Court’s ensuing decisions as illegitimate or ill-gotten for years.

Republican resistance to the Obama agenda was extraordinary, but for a time at least Republicans benefitted from the assumption that their obstruction stemmed from serious ideological commitments. That assumption will not hold in a Clinton presidency, when the people making the moral and ideological arguments against her agenda just tried to get Trump elected. It’s unclear whether Republicans will even bother seeking the benefit of the doubt, or if they’ll instead reject the legitimacy of her election openly.

Much of this acrimony is already baked into our near-term political future, but each vote for Trump will deepen it further. The closer he gets to the presidency, the more alienated people on different sides of the election will feel from one another. Just as it will be impossible to take official Republican appeals to Christian moralism or liberty seriously, liberals will be left wondering if the Trump voters in their midsts decided to vote for him because they share his bigotries, or because they viewed those bigotries and his recklessness as acceptable burdens others should bear for whatever they claim really defines their conservatism.

Those who are struggling to convince themselves that a vote for Trump is justifiable should imagine what their decision will communicate about them to the Trump opponents in their lives. The harm will be lasting.

The movie recounts the romantic complications that befell Richard (Joel Edgerton) and Mildred Loving (Ruth Negga), a mixed-race couple living in rural Virginia in the 1950s who decide to marry after learning of Mildred’s pregnancy. Since the Commonwealth of Virginia won’t recognize mixed-race marriage, they travel to Washington, D.C. to sign the license and arrive home only to be swiftly thrown in jail. Their sympathetic lawyer (Bill Camp) convinces the judge to give them a suspended sentence: Richard and Mildred can stay married, but they have to leave Virginia, unable to return together for 25 years.

For some, this would have been a frustrating but tolerable outcome, but Mildred becomes convinced over the years that they can’t raise their three children in a big city. She misses her family back home—the plea deal feels more like a banishment than an opportunity to start a life. Help comes in the form of an attorney (Nick Kroll) hired by the ACLU to fight their conviction. He thinks he can take it all the way to the Supreme Court, doing away with a cruel anti-miscegenation law in the process.

There are no shocking twists, no grand speeches, no big actorly moments in Loving, which is in keeping with Nichols’s previous spare films. From Shotgun Stories to Midnight Special, he has made exceedingly smart and sneakily emotional indies that flirt with specific genres without ever succumbing to their clichés. With that in mind, Loving could be thought of as his take on Oscar-bait awards drama: It’s a true story in which love triumphs over hate, striking a blow for racial intolerance and showing how far we’ve come as a society.

It’s to Nichols’s credit that he resists the hoarier tendencies of this kind of film. In fact, he may do so to a fault. Loving has no patience for sweeping sentimentality or feel-good liberalism, but his storytelling is almost undernourished. Nichols follows the couple over the course of about a decade, monitoring how they react to obstacles put in their way. Neither of the Lovings is particularly demonstrative, and the legal wranglings that occur in the film’s final third aren’t presented with much suspense or intrigue. Richard and Mildred just want to live their lives—it’s almost as if they never wanted a movie to be made about them—and Nichols is doing his best to stay out of the way.

Other filmmakers might fetishize this stripped-down tale, fascinated with the minutiae of the Lovings’ world and the particulars of their lawyers’ journey to the Supreme Court. But Loving isn’t a film about process: Nichols crafts his story with an eye to making its commonness resonate with subtle moral outrage. The Lovings aren’t meant to seem unique—or even that dramatically engaging—precisely because that’s what offends Nichols so much about their plight. Poorly educated, working-class and without any connections to political power, they’re exactly the type of people that easily get swept away by unfair laws they have no means to fight. To a certain extent, Richard and Mildred have come to understand that they can’t hope to change their circumstances. The best they can do is cope with them.

There are limits to Nichols’ strategy, however. Even with its steady and confident approach to filmmaking, Loving can’t help but feel over-abundantly tasteful. It would be inaccurate to say nothing happens in the film, but there’s so little gradation in the slow-burn drama that the Lovings’ stiff-upper-lip resilience can feel to when loved ones suffer silently without taking action. Nichols won’t stoop to the emotional manipulation of award-season movies, but his earlier films, particularly Take Shelter, highlight how he can wring pathos and suspense from the simplest of setups. By comparison, the stately reserve of Loving can sometimes seem like a defensive crouch, a way of safeguarding against making a derided kind of movie without necessarily coming up with an inspired alternative.

That said, the lead performances speak to this limitation while also demonstrating how actors can bring their own grace notes to the proceedings. What’s unmistakable in Loving is that Richard and Mildred are not educated people, but that doesn’t mean they are stupid. Edgerton and Negga do fine work portraying decent, honorable countryfolk who aren’t gifted orators, able to articulate their anguish in evocative language. This is immensely tricky—it requires the actors to avoid treating the couple as simpletons or saints—and yet the duo skillfully suggests the Lovings’ inability to fully appreciate what’s happening to them. Edgerton’s Richard is a gruff man who barely speaks whole sentences, preferring to say as much with a glare as with words. Negga’s Mildred is warmer and lovelier, but she’s exceedingly docile in a way that, sadly, feels learned. As a black woman who only feels comfortable around those of her own race, she’s developed a talent for being respectful around the judgmental whites she meets out in the world. It’s telling that Nichols and his cast don’t even worry about explaining Richard and Mildred’s bond: They love each other, and that’s enough.

If Nichols’ four previous films proved him a master of weaving small-scale drama rich with life and everyday insights, Loving is a bit of a letdown, only because it can’t quite elevate the material to something equally transcendent. But this isn’t to say its isn’t an effectively touching film in its own right. When frequent Nichols collaborator Michael Shannon shows up in a cameo to play a LIFE photographer, his dialed-down performance suggests the wealth of compassion any right-minded person would feel toward the Lovings. The movie’s final shot is quietly crushing, recalling both an earlier scene and one of Loving’s visual motifs, neither of which you may have realized were that meaningful until they come back here in the end. In its conclusion, Loving makes its finest argument: What can seem like an unremarkable life to those on the outside means a whole lot more when it’s the only one you’ve got.

Grade: B-

Grierson & Leitch write about the movies regularly for the New Republic and host a podcast on film. Follow them on Twitter @griersonleitch or visit their site griersonleitch.com.

But it turns out fake reality on the ground in America is different. That’s why this year, the holiday has stuck with me since it passed—an ongoing event that has refused to recede, instead conflating with another holiday, Election Day, and defining our big and singular American moment.

My wife had ordered me a “Mr. Billionaire Wig,” a tousled toupee the color of cheap champagne, and acquired some pumpkin-orange face paint. Then, the Saturday before Halloween, she announced she’d been so busy sewing the ghost and pink unicorn outfits our children had requested that there was no time left for a pantsuit. She would again wear the chicken outfit she’d made last year. I was a political rooster out on my own. 

In New Haven, where I grew up and now live near, Halloween is serious. People thinking about real estate describe virtue in streets that are “good for trick or treating.” The Sunday morning before Halloween there is a children’s parade on the west side of the city. Then, on the night itself, residents from surrounding communities converge on East Rock, a densely settled neighborhood populated by many liberal professionals and university employees. It’s a Democratic city in a blue state, but around town and just outside you can find a diversity of opinion—and signage.

On Sunday I put on a white shirt, red tie, suit coat, stuffed a large pillow under the shirt, and slid into the front jacket breast pocket a little card with “BIGLY” written on it. Then came the hair and the face paint; I was ready for the hustings. Truth be told, it had been a busy week and I hadn’t really thought about what it might feel like to impersonate such a divisive figure as Trump. Many people across the country were dressing up as one of the candidates. It was just this year’s benign costume. 

Except maybe not. The Chicken would meet us afterwards, so I marched alone with the ghost and pink unicorn in the parade, and as soon as I began walking there was the discomfiting feeling that onlookers didn’t know how to take this. Westville has a substantial population of older left-progressives. As I guided the kids across intersections, passing by people whose appearance suggested a kinship with Ben and Jerry, there were hard looks. But I sensed similar hostility from the middle-aged white dudes lounging around a pickup truck. All the way along, I had the impression that there was indecision about whether I was celebrating Trump or mocking him, and it seemed to me the default was to feel I was against them. 

The parade ended in a park, and for a while I happened to stand by a stone wall. Now that I was stationary, there was abundant commentary. People would spot me and yell out “Hey, Trump!” or “It’s Trump!” There was the assumption that I’d offer up Trumpisms in return, and I called out “Wrong!” or “Huge!” or “Disgusting!” or “Low energy!” or “Only little people pay their taxes!” That I was beside a wall was further provocation, prompting references to “Your wall.” It was pleasurable to say “millions” and “billions” with that particular Trump inflection, and it was initially fun to make strangers laugh by telling them they were “Very, very sad puppets.”  

I never crossed over into the sexual harassment realm—faked or not, I couldn’t go there. But it quickly became apparent that, as Trump, I could say just about anything—“You’re a terribly overrated and horrible loser!”—and people would smile and genially lob similar insults in return. I was expected to do the unacceptable; the mere presence of the persona gave license for the sort of uninhibited language most of us would normally suppress. 

This, I thought, is what some people mean when they applaud Trump for saying what he thinks, for speaking exactly what’s on his mind. A lot of Americans want to voice their raw opinions, and they resent the social norms that demand restraint. Hence, the cacophony of racist and sexual and anti-Semitic insults at Trump rallies. I also thought about what Halloween is, the holiday when people take on the guise of something other, put aside the filters of deliberation, and get to be impetuous, visceral, transgressive, scary, and orange. Only this year, when our annual permissive-aggressive evening has morphed with the political season, Halloween had suddenly become more potent.

All presidential nominees spend the late stages of the campaign twisting and contorting to appeal to a vast country of voters. Usually, the game is not to bend yourself too far, to reassure people that in the end you have humane values and core beliefs, that you stand for something, that you can be trusted. Yet by behaving like a Halloween character and saying virtually anything he pleases, Donald Trump has undeniably touched something deep in the American grain. 

Part of why both Halloween and the rituals of election season are so popular is that America is the country built on a myth of self-reinvention: all of our votes are equal, so we all can be anybody we want to be. But that’s a story we like to tell ourselves, because the myth is only true for some Americans. Trump’s is the story of a brilliant self-reinventer. He’s been allowed to dress up as many things across his fascinating life. That there may be far less there than he claims (in the bank and otherwise) is part of his genius, and his privilege. 

Among the reasons you don’t want a Halloween character to be your president is that in real life people who think or otherwise seem different become unprotected and vulnerable. It may be that our current impulsive, headlong climate has something to do with an F.B.I. director who announced right before a national election that a presidential candidate is under investigation even before anybody reviewed the potential evidence. (Whether James Comey was taking advantage of the times or succumbing to them, only he knows.) It shouldn’t need to be said that bright-size performative behavior undermines the duller virtues of public servants who must abide process, especially when the crowd’s at full throat. 

On Monday night we four went trick-or-treating and, uneasily by now, I figured I’d see the stunt through, so I put the Trump wig and the “BIGLY” card back on. This time I also carried a notebook. Usually political caricature is an acceptable lampooning of authority, but while dressing up as Trump isn’t the same as “being” Hitler or a Klansman, for a lot of people he’s on the continuum, somewhere beyond Nixon and over the line. 

“Why are you Donald Trump?” a four-year old ninja wanted to know. “He says bad things.” Up and down the city sidewalks superheroes and witches berated me: “It’s HIM!” and “Boo Mr. Bigly!” and “Sad man!” and “Let me see your hands!” and “You’re the puppet!” and “Shame on you!” and “He’s saying big league!” This is, after all, a college town. It’s also an international town and, at a street corner, a man with a Russian accent looked me over as he said, “We’re from the Wiki dark side. He kills his mother in the end.” I was still mulling that one when I noticed a group of teenaged skeletons close behind who were discussing what kind of harm they were going to do me. 

In the face of derision, I was annoyed with The Chicken walking at my side for leaving me in the barnyard like this. I worked up faux-Trump inner-monologues. On a crowded portion of sidewalk: “Get out of my way, you disgusting slobs!” Passing a crying child: “Kid’s gonna grow up to be a weak loser.” And when there was the obvious expectation that I’d offer some in-character “wrongs” and “sads,” I obliged. I was exchanging this sort of banter with a group of African-American trick-or-treaters who were gleefully shaming me back, when I told them, “You’re the puppets!” There on the dimly lit sidewalk, it seemed to me that startled looks crossed their faces, and I saw myself for what I was: a white guy in a suit insulting black people.

Putting on costumes and disguises can offer surprising insight into our personal realities. During this long, unsettling election year, far more than at any other time in my life, I’ve thought of myself as a white guy, rather than just a guy. The juxtaposition of Trump playing to white male grievance just as the country is approaching a day when minorities will no longer be minorities is part of this. It’s a wincing reminder of what a great privilege it is to go through life thinking of yourself as just a guy, without any additional descriptor. And it’s chilling, even on Halloween, to be somebody other people can’t stand simply because of what you look like. I came home that evening miserable, and I’d brought it all upon myself. But I got to toss the wig when I didn’t want to play Trump anymore. Most people can’t so easily shed what makes them targets.