Elections

It has been 21 years since Rudy Giuliani led a terrified city through the deadliest attack in its history. As a reporter covering him from a few feet away that morning, I ran with him from the hurricane of ash and debris following the collapse of the World Trade Center’s North Tower, trekked a mile up a Manhattan avenue as he and his aides searched for safe harbor and watched his security detail break into a firehouse with a crowbar.He gave orders to aides calmly and decisively, reassured a frightened police officer, shushed a cheering crowd and spoke to the world from a tiny office. Like countless others, I was grateful that someone had taken charge, undaunted by the madness of the situation.These images often come to me when I try to reconcile that brilliant leader with the confused, widely ridiculed figure facing potential indictment for trying to subvert the 2020 election.Mr. Giuliani is virtually alone at this desperate hour. Supporters have abandoned him; once-friendly news organizations have banished him from their airwaves; and few have helped him fend off bankruptcy from numerous lawsuits and investigations. At 78 years old, the man who helped to lead New York City and the nation out of some of our most horrible days is a shadow of his old self.Mr. Giuliani finds himself in this situation not in spite of his actions on Sept. 11 but rather because of them. The choices he made to leverage his fame from that period — and his efforts to hold on to it when it started to slip away — have led to his troubles today.Mr. Giuliani received overwhelming acclaim for his performance as mayor in the weeks following the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. He was transformed from a term-limited politician to “America’s Mayor,” addressing the United Nations and receiving an honorary knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II. New Yorkers’ long love-hate relationship with him turned into something closer to hero worship. He was a warrior who had spent a career fighting battles as a mob-busting prosecutor and crusading mayor, and they had prepared him for the greatest battle of all, his effort to save a stricken city.With his fame at its pinnacle following Sept. 11, every possible career door swung open. But instead of preserving his statesman’s role — a hero above mere politics — he chose to cash in.His mercenary vehicle was Giuliani Partners, which was billed primarily as a management consulting firm, though neither he nor his group of former City Hall aides had management consulting experience. He was doubtlessly aware that it wasn’t his expertise his clients would pay for, but rather his name.“We believe that government officials are more comfortable knowing that Giuliani is advising Purdue Pharma,” said the embattled pharmaceutical company’s chief attorney after it hired Mr. Giuliani in 2002, as Purdue was fending off almost 300 lawsuits for its role in helping to hook a generation of Americans on opioids. Many other clients followed, troubled companies seeking a seal of approval from the internationally beloved leader.Giuliani Partners grossed an estimated $100 million in its first five years. A man who as mayor bought his suits off the rack at Bancroft for $299 grew addicted to luxury, ultimately purchasing six homes and 11 country club memberships.He leveraged his Sept. 11 fame for power as well as money. President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were as attracted to Mr. Giuliani’s brand as any scandal-ridden company was, finding him to be a powerful ally when their efforts in Iraq went sideways.At the 2004 Republican National Convention, he bestowed his blessings upon the president. As Mr. Giuliani told an adoring crowd, after the first tower fell on Sept. 11, “I grabbed the arm of then-Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, and I said to him, ‘Bernie, thank God George Bush is our president.’”The alliance with Mr. Bush afforded him more client business as well as a launchpad for his ultimate goal, which was the presidency.Kathy Livermore, Mr. Giuliani’s girlfriend in his college years, recalled to The New York Daily News in 1997 that he had vowed to someday become America’s first Italian-Catholic president. “Rudolph William Louis Giuliani III, the first Italian-Catholic president of the United States,” he’d tell her, enjoying the sound of it.His 2008 presidential run is now remembered as a footnote, if it is remembered at all. Some people might recall it because of a gag from Joe Biden, running in the Democratic primary, who said, “There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb and 9/11.”The collapse of his candidacy — he dropped out of the Republican primaries with just a single delegate — marked the end of his political dreams; he would never run for office again.In the years that followed he seemed increasingly desperate to salvage both the financial benefits and political power that came with being “America’s Mayor,” accumulating a roster of shady foreign clients for his company and endorsing Donald Trump — whom he considered a “carnival barker” at the time, according to an aide — for president in 2016.Rudy Giuliani speaking to journalists outside the West Wing of the White House, July 2020.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesHis reliance on Mr. Trump was a driving force behind his serial disasters supposedly in support of the administration: his bizarre efforts to frame Joe Biden in the Ukraine scandal, which resulted in the president’s first impeachment, and his catastrophic efforts to tamper with the 2020 presidential election, which could land him in jail.The man of law and order, famed for his rectitude as United States attorney for the Southern District of New York in the 1980s, is a subject of investigations in Georgia and Washington, D.C. Both center on deeply cynical actions to upend the 2020 election results. They reveal a corruption of character, triggered by a succession of moral compromises over the years undertaken to maintain the power and money that he’d grown accustomed to after Sept. 11.What would have become of Mr. Giuliani if the attack on the World Trade Center had never happened? At some point he might have run for senator or governor in New York, based upon his strong record as mayor, or perhaps landed the attorney general’s job in a Republican administration, based on his record as a trailblazing prosecutor.He wouldn’t have accumulated as much cash or achieved worldwide fame. But then again his hero’s reputation is long gone. (“I am afraid it will be on my gravestone — ‘Rudy Giuliani: He lied for Trump,’” he told The New Yorker in 2019.) His political power has evaporated, and his riches have been almost exhausted — he’s been selling personalized video greetings for $325, and he dressed as a feathered jack-in-the-box for the Fox show “The Masked Singer” this spring. Even his accomplishments on the day the World Trade Center was attacked have been tarnished by numerous findings of disastrous mistakes he and his administration made.History will pay Rudy Giuliani his due for leading New York through its darkest hour. But it will also record that his exploitation of his actions on Sept. 11 led him to the abyss.Andrew Kirtzman, a former New York political reporter and the writer of books about Rudy Giuliani’s mayoralty and the Bernie Madoff scandal, is the author of “Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

In my column this week, I tackled some of the major objections to President Biden’s Philadelphia speech on MAGA Republicans and the threat they pose to democracy, including the view that it was too divisive.Even if it was, most Americans land on Biden’s side of the argument — in a Reuters poll conducted just a few days after the speech, 58 percent of respondents, including a quarter of Republicans, said that Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement is “threatening America’s democratic foundations.”What I didn’t address was the charge that Biden, and Democrats in general, are acting in bad faith when they condemn Trump and his allies. If Democrats truly believe that MAGA Republicans are a threat to democracy, goes the argument, why are they spending tens of millions of dollars to elevate them in Republican primaries? My colleagues Ross Douthat and Bret Stephens both made a version of this point in their respective columns this week.They are keyed into something real: that it is a bit unsavory, if not outright hypocritical, for Democrats to spend huge sums to help nominate MAGA Republicans at the expense of their more moderate, pro-democracy colleagues while condemning those same candidates, and the movement they represent, as a threat to the constitutional order.Where I part ways with my colleagues is in their conclusion that Democrats are therefore crying alligator tears when they condemn MAGA extremists. If the top priority is depriving the Republican Party of power and influence, then the most important thing for Democrats to do, right now, is win elections. And if the most Trump-aligned candidates tend to be the weakest challengers in a general election, then it is entirely consistent with the argument in Biden’s speech to want to elevate those candidates over more moderate alternatives.At the end of the day, a more moderate Republican in Congress is still a vote for Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House or Mitch McConnell as Senate majority leader. It is still a vote, in other words, for a coalition that includes MAGA Republicans.I could leave it there, except that I think that this answer concedes too much to the premise. Implicit in the question is the factual claim that Democratic spending in Republican primaries is either responsible for — or a significant factor in — the success of MAGA candidates with Republican voters. Otherwise, why would Democrats spend the money and why would conservatives complain about the outcome?I think it is true that Democratic spending has had an effect. But I think the more significant reason that Republican voters keep nominating MAGA candidates is that Republican voters like MAGA candidates. All you have to do is look at the results of the Republican primaries in question and ask if Democratic money really mattered that much.Did Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, spend millions to give a boost to Darren Bailey, the Trumpiest candidate in the Republican gubernatorial primary? Yes. But Bailey led the Republican field before Pritzker’s intervention, swamping his opponents in an October 2021 poll. Democrats may have nudged some undecided voters into Bailey’s camp, but that alone does not explain how the hard-right Republican won more than 57 percent of the vote in a six-way primary. The more likely answer, given his early lead, is that Republican voters liked what Bailey was selling.The same goes for Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, the pro-insurrection Republican candidate for governor. Democrats gave him a boost as well. But he led the Republican pack for much of the race and his final tally — nearly 44 percent of the vote in an eight-way contest — reflects his very real popularity with Republican voters in the state.The other thing to consider is the actual content of Democratic ads on behalf of MAGA Republican candidates. The ad meant to support Mastriano, for example, simply stated his conservative views and emphasized his support for Trump. The ad said that Mastriano wanted to “outlaw abortion” and is “one of Donald Trump’s strongest supporters.” It also points out that Mastriano “wants to end vote by mail, and he led the fight to audit the 2020 election. If Mastriano wins, it’s a win for what Donald Trump stands for.”It is not the Democratic Party’s fault that Republicans are attracted to this message, and nothing forced Republicans in Pennsylvania or Illinois (or Michigan or Arizona) to nominate the most MAGA candidates in the field. Republicans voters like Trump and they want Trumpist candidates, and where there’s demand, supply usually follows.Which is to say that even with Democratic intervention in Republican primaries, the thrust of Biden’s story about the Republican Party still holds up. The party has been captured by extremists, and it’s up to the rest of us to ensure that it doesn’t win more power than it already has.What I WroteMy Friday column was on President Biden’s Philadelphia speech, why I think the objections to it are misguided, and what, if anything, was missing from his argument that the MAGA movement is a threat to American democracy.To divide against a radical minority that would attack and undermine democratic self-government is to divide along the most inclusive lines possible. It is to do a version of what Franklin Roosevelt did when he condemned“organized money,” “economic royalists” and the “forces of selfishness and lust for power.”And in the latest episode of my podcast with John Ganz, Unclear and Present Danger, we discussed the 1992 crime thriller “Deep Cover” with special guest Adam Serwer of The Atlantic.Now ReadingAdam Serwer on free speech for The Atlantic.Jerusalem Demsas on “Black flight” for The Atlantic.Blair McClendon on Jordan Peele’s “Nope” for Mubi.Andrew Elrod on Watergate for N+1 magazine.Rick Perlstein on the assault on public schools for The Forum.Keisha N. Blain on objectivity in history for The New Republic.Feedback If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to your friends. They can sign up here. If you want to share your thoughts on an item in this week’s newsletter or on the newsletter in general, please email me at [email protected]. You can follow me on Twitter (@jbouie), Instagram and TikTok.Photo of the WeekJamelle BouieI went to a car show in nearby Culpepper, Va., and took a few photos. This was one of the better ones. I used Ilford black and white film and a Voigtlander 35mm lens.Now Eating: Farro Broccoli Bowl with Lemony TahiniI’ve been on a real grain salad kick — they’re easy to make for lunch — and this is the latest one. I have no real changes to make. I used more broccoli than the recipe called for and also added a bunch of cilantro. Personally, I would go heavy on the tahini, but I like tahini quite a bit. Your mileage may vary. Recipe comes from NYT Cooking.IngredientsKosher salt1½ cups farro, rinsed and drained4 large eggs, scrubbed under hot running water1 large head broccoli, cut into florets, tender stems sliced2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil1 teaspoon soy sauce, plus more for serving2 tablespoons toasted sesame oil1 tablespoon sesame seeds1 scallion, thinly slicedHot sauce or thinly sliced green chiles, for serving (optional)2½ tablespoons fresh lemon juice, plus more for serving1 garlic clove, finely grated or minced¼ teaspoon kosher salt, plus more as needed⅓ cup extra-virgin olive oil, plus more as needed3 tablespoons tahiniDirectionsBring a medium pot of salted water to a boil. Add farro and eggs. Cook eggs for 6 minutes for very runny centers and 7 minutes for medium-runny. Use a slotted spoon to transfer eggs to a bowl of cold water. Let them sit for 2 minutes, then crack and carefully peel the eggs.Continue to let the farro cook until done according to package directions, usually a total of 20 to 40 minutes. Drain farro.As farro cooks, prepare the dressing: In a medium bowl, whisk together lemon juice, garlic and ¼ teaspoon salt. Let sit for 1 minute, then whisk in oil, a few drops at a time, until emulsified. Whisk in tahini and set aside.Broil the broccoli: Position the rack underneath your broiler so that it’s at least 4 inches away from the heating element; heat the broiler.On a rimmed baking sheet, toss broccoli with olive oil and soy sauce, then spread the pieces out into an even layer. Broil until slightly charred in spots, 2 to 5 minutes, watching closely so that it doesn’t burn all over (a few burned spots are OK). Let cool slightly, then toss with sesame oil and sesame seeds and cover to keep warm. (You can also roast the broccoli at 450 degrees for 8 to 15 minutes instead of broiling.)Toss cooked farro with 5 to 6 tablespoons tahini dressing to taste, a large pinch of salt and a drizzle of olive oil. Taste, and add salt and olive oil if needed.To serve, divide farro across 4 serving bowls and drizzle with remaining dressing. Top with turnips, and sprinkle them lemon juice and salt. Add broccoli and egg to the bowl and garnish with sliced scallions and more sesame. Serve immediately, with soy sauce, hot sauce, and-or sliced chiles on the side if you like. More

Some threats to freedom of expression in America, like online harassment and disinformation, are amorphous or hard to pin down; others are alarmingly overt. Consider these recent examples of censorship in practice: A student newspaper and journalism program in Nebraska shut down for writing about L.G.B.T.Q. issues and pride month. Oklahoma’s top education official seeking to revoke the teaching certificate of an English teacher who shared a QR code that directed students to the Brooklyn Public Library’s online collection of banned books. Lawmakers in Missouri passing a law that makes school librarians vulnerable to prosecution for the content in their collections.In Florida today it may be illegal for teachers to even talk about whom they love or marry thanks to the state’s so-called Don’t Say Gay law. Of course, it goes far beyond sex: The Sunshine State’s Republican commissioner of education rejected 28 math textbooks this year for including verboten content.This year alone, 137 gag order bills, which would restrict the discussions of topics such as race, gender, sexuality and American history in kindergarten through 12th grade and higher education, have been introduced in 36 state legislatures, according to a report released last month by PEN America, a free speech organization. That’s a sharp increase from 2021, when 54 bills were introduced in 22 states. Only seven of those bills became law in 2022, but they are some of the strictest to date, and the sheer number of bills introduced reflects a growing enthusiasm on the right for censorship as a political weapon and instrument of social control.These new measures are far more punitive than past efforts, with heavy fines or loss of state funding for institutions that dare to offer courses covering the forbidden content. Teachers can be fired and even face criminal charges. Lawsuits have already started to trickle through the courts asking for broad interpretations of the new statutes. For the first time, the PEN report noted, some bills have also targeted nonpublic schools and universities in addition to public schools.It wasn’t all that long ago that Republican lawmakers around the country were introducing legislation they said would protect free speech on college campuses. Now, they’re using the coercive power of the state to restrict what people can talk about, learn about or discuss in public, and exposing them to lawsuits and other repercussions for doing so. That’s a clear threat to the ideals of a pluralistic political culture, in which challenging ideas are welcomed and discussed.How and what to teach American students has been contested ground since the earliest days of public education, and the content of that instruction is something about which Americans can respectfully disagree. But the Supreme Court has limited the government’s power to censor school libraries, if not curriculums. “Local school boards may not remove books from school libraries simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to ‘prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion,’” Justice William Brennan wrote in a 1982 decision.There may not even be wide disagreement over what American students are being taught. Despite the moral panic over teaching about gender and race, American parents overwhelmingly say they are satisfied with the instruction their children receive. A poll from National Public Radio and Ipsos earlier this year found that just 18 percent of parents said their child’s school “taught about gender and sexuality in a way that clashed with their family’s values,” while 19 percent said the same about race and racism. Only 14 percent felt that way about American history.And yet, some Republican candidates are using the threat of censorship as a show of strength, evidence of their power to muzzle political opponents. Last year in Virginia, Glenn Youngkin won the governorship after a campaign in which he demagogued the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Beloved” by the Nobel Prize-winning Toni Morrison. Other candidates are looking to make issues around censorship a centerpiece of their pitch to voters in the midterm elections in races from Texas to New Jersey.Some want to extend censorship far beyond the classroom. In Virginia, a Republican state representative tried to get a court to declare as obscene two young adult books that are frequently banned in schools, “Gender Queer,” by Maia Kobabe, and “A Court of Mist and Fury,” by Sarah Maas. The case was dismissed on Aug. 30, but if it had been successful, it could have made it illegal for bookstores to sell the books to children without parental consent.Right-wing lawmakers are also looking to restrict what Americans can say about abortion. Model legislation from the National Right to Life Committee, which is circulating in state legislatures, aims to forbid Americans to give “instructions over the telephone, the internet or any other medium of communication regarding self-administered abortions or means to obtain an illegal abortion.” That prohibition would extend to hosting websites that contain such information.Even when such bills fail, these efforts to censor create a climate of fear. Across the country, libraries in small towns are being threatened with closure and library staff members are being harassed and intimidated. The Times reports that librarians “have been labeled pedophiles on social media, called out by local politicians and reported to law enforcement officials. Some librarians have quit after being harassed online. Others have been fired for refusing to remove books from circulation.” The American Library Association has documented nearly 1,600 books in more than 700 libraries or library systems that have faced attempted censorship.There are factions on both the left and the right that are insecure enough in their ideas that they’ve tried to ban discussion of certain facts or topics out of discomfort, or simply to score political points. But only right-wing legislators are currently trying to write censorship into law. This is not only deeply undemocratic; it is an act of weakness masquerading as strength. A political project convinced of the superiority of its ideas doesn’t need the power of the state to shield itself from competition. Free expression isn’t just a feature of democracy; it is a necessary prerequisite.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

The many lawyers who have helped the former president avoid removal from office and indictment have drawn legal problems of their own.A dark joke has begun circulating among lawyers following the many legal travails of former President Donald J. Trump: MAGA actually stands for “making attorneys get attorneys.”Over six years and nine major investigations by Congress, the Justice Department and local prosecutors, as Mr. Trump has managed to avoid removal from the presidency and indictment, it has become clear that serving as one of his lawyers is a remarkably risky job — and one that can involve considerable legal exposure. Time after time, his attorneys have been asked to testify as witnesses to potential crimes — or come under scrutiny as possible criminal conspirators themselves.While the consequences his lawyers faced were extraordinary when Mr. Trump was in the White House, the dangers have only intensified since he left office and have become increasingly acute in recent weeks, as the former president has come under scrutiny in two different Justice Department investigations and has been forced yet again to find lawyers willing to represent him.Last week, a Justice Department filing revealed that Mr. Trump’s lawyers had misled federal investigators about whether he had handed over to the Justice Department all the classified documents he took from the White House when he left office. That raised questions about whether the lawyers, M. Evan Corcoran and Christina Bobb, could be prosecuted themselves and might ultimately be forced to become witnesses against their client. (Ms. Bobb recently retained a lawyer, according to a person familiar with the situation.)The revelation capped a summer in which a team of lawyers that had been advising Mr. Trump as he tried to overturn the 2020 election faced a range of repercussions across the country from federal investigators, local prosecutors, state bar associations and government accountability groups.One of Mr. Trump’s highest-profile lawyers, Rudolph W. Giuliani, was named as a target in a state criminal investigation in Georgia. The conservative lawyer John Eastman, who came up with what he conceded privately was an unlawful strategy to help Mr. Trump overturn the election, said he believed he was a target in that same investigation and declined to answer questions while being deposed before a grand jury. Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Eastman have also been named as subjects of interest in a flurry of federal grand jury subpoenas seeking evidence about attempts by Mr. Trump’s allies to create fake slates of electors to help keep him in office.Two others who worked for Mr. Trump in the White House — the White House counsel Pat A. Cipollone and his deputy Patrick F. Philbin — were subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury in Washington investigating the efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including the roles that Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Eastman had played in helping Mr. Trump.Mr. Cipollone, Mr. Philbin and at least nine other lawyers who worked for Mr. Trump have testified before the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. Earlier this year, Mr. Cipollone and Mr. Philbin also were interviewed by the F.B.I. as part of its investigation into the classified documents investigation.A video clip of John Eastman, left, invoking the Fifth Amendment during a deposition for the House Jan. 6 committee was shown in a hearing this summer.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAnd 17 mostly lesser-known lawyers who represented Mr. Trump in battleground states as he tried to overturn the election are facing ethics complaints, putting them at risk of being disciplined or disbarred by bar associations or the courts.Vigorously defending the client — even one known for unscrupulous behavior or accused of an egregious crime — is part of a lawyer’s basic job description. But attorneys are bound by a code of professional conduct that forbids them from crossing certain lines, including knowingly making false claims, filing frivolous lawsuits or motions, and doing anything to further a crime.The adage for lawyers representing clients accused of criminality, said Fritz Scheller, a longtime Florida defense lawyer, is that at the end of the day, no matter how bad it may have been for the client, the lawyer still gets to walk out the front door of the courthouse without any personal legal issues.“That bad day for the criminal defense attorney becomes his worst day when he leaves through the courthouse door used for defendants on their way to jail,” Mr. Scheller said.What to Know About the Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

The far right has made strides by tying the longstanding issue to immigration, while Sweden’s center-left party is blaming it on failed integration to fight an exceptionally tight race.STOCKHOLM — The best years were still ahead for Susanna Yakes and her 12-year-old daughter, Adriana. The two danced to music around the house and screamed together on roller coasters — still ahead were more adult milestones like travel and love.“I could see it on her face, you know, when the rose is almost ready to open,” Ms. Yakes said, adding that she was excited for the vibrant woman her daughter was becoming.That all changed one night in 2020 when Adriana went for a walk with her dog and got caught in the middle of a gang conflict outside a restaurant.“I didn’t know until I lost my daughter that there are different kind of tears,” said Ms. Yakes, 34, who two years later still visits Adriana’s grave twice a week.The killing of young Adriana, an innocent bystander, became a prominent part of a steadily swelling epidemic of gun violence in Sweden, which now has some of the highest rates of gun homicides in Europe.As Sweden votes on Sunday in parliamentary elections, gun crime has loomed large for a country more commonly associated with its high living standards, women’s rights and welcoming asylum policies, rather than endemic street violence.Officers and security guards patrolling in June in the Rinkeby neighborhood of Stockholm.Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York TimesThe gun issue, amid an energy crisis and soaring inflation, has helped spawn an exceptionally tight race — one entwined with deeper questions about Swedish identity, a diversifying country and a failure to integrate immigrants, especially those who arrived in Sweden during Europe’s migration crisis in 2015.Other European countries like Germany with similar levels of immigration have not experienced the same rise in gun violence, and with many cases unsolved, researchers say more study is needed to understand the epidemic.But the debate has offered fodder for conservative parties in an already tense campaign, especially the far-right Sweden Democrats, a contender for Sweden’s leading opposition party who are using the violence to further a longstanding anti-immigrant agenda.The center-left Social Democrats — already governing without a majority in Parliament — find themselves in perhaps their most precarious position after a century of dominating Swedish politics.The government argues that more resources and employment opportunities must also be put toward integrating the segregated, immigrant-heavy suburbs that ring major cities where the gun violence has been concentrated.But fearful of losing more voters, it has capitulated to public concerns by adopting tougher policies on crime, even as the far right and other conservatives are calling for even harsher steps.“Too much migration and too weak integration has led to parallel societies where criminal gangs have been able to grow and gain a foothold,” Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson said last month, as she introduced measures expanding police powers and lengthening punishments for serious weapons offenses.Such calls in the middle of the election campaign have left the victims of crimes frustrated that they are being used as political pawns and the residents of Sweden’s poorer neighborhoods feeling marginalized by a nation that promised them equal treatment.Carolina Sinisalo with her son Alejandro, her daughter Diana and her granddaughter Leah. Mrs. Sinisalo’s family is working through the grief of a shooting that killed her 15-year-old son Robin and partly paralyzed Alejandro.Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times“Crime is, to a certain degree, also a question of how we see immigrants and how we see the multicultural society,” said Magnus Blomgren, a professor of political science at Umea University, in northern Sweden, adding that the issue had now taken on outsize importance in a country of shifting demographics.“We have a picture of what we are,” he said. “But that is changing.”And for now, uncomfortably so.A fifth of Sweden’s 10 million residents were born abroad — split between European migrants and an increasing number of migrants from countries like Syria, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan in the past decade.But in cities like Stockholm, Malmo and Gothenburg — where a higher proportion of migrants have settled compared to the rest of the nation — the media and residents alike point to two separate worlds: a polished city center emblematic of the nation’s wealth, and poorer, ethnically diverse outer suburbs where police officers carry tourniquets to stem gunshot wounds.Axel Shako, center, talking to members of the European Commission at the Fryshuset youth center in June in Stockholm. “We came with hopes and aspirations,” said Mr. Shako, who is originally from London.Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times“Linking it to migration is in the interests of those that are interested in creating a very simplified reality and creating polarization,” said Amir Rostami, a sociologist at the University of Gavle. “We are only seeing this very narrowly.”From 2010 to 2018, the number of shootings in Sweden rose rapidly. The police this year have so far recorded 273 shootings in what they expect could be Sweden’s worst year ever. The current record number of shootings was set in 2020, at 379.In a country with strict gun laws, where licenses are usually limited to hunting rifles, criminologists have linked the shootings to the illegal drug trade and say they have been fueled by a stockpile of thousands of firearms smuggled in from postwar Balkan countries, Eastern Europe and Turkey.Still, as the nation closes in on an election, lawmakers have zeroed in on promises of law and order, citing gang warfare and riots in some Swedish towns.The Rinkeby neighborhood of Stockholm is known for gun violence, though many residents feel marginalized by messaging used by lawmakers.Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York TimesThat focus has left some migrants in neighborhoods outside of cities like Stockholm mistrustful of the authorities and feeling like second-class citizens even after decades in the country.“We came with hopes and aspirations,” said Axel Shako, an activist from London involved at the Fryshuset youth center in north Stockholm. “The question should be for the politicians. We are just doing our best.”The victims of gun violence, too, say that they are weary of watching lawmakers clash while little progress has been made on reversing the problem.“When he died, I didn’t see the point of living,” said Maritha Ogilvie, whose son Marley Fredriksson, 19, who was Black, was shot and killed seven years ago in Stockholm.Since then, Ms. Ogilvie has campaigned for harsher punishments for gun crimes — but she believes programs supporting young teenagers are equally important, frustrated by a system that she says has not done enough to protect people of color like her son.“They are trying to run a country that they don’t even understand,” she said, referring to lawmakers, despite their promises to address the problems. “Racist parties,” she said, were simply using the issue to get voters.Maritha Ogilvie holding a portrait of her son Marley Fredriksson. “When he died, I didn’t see the point of living,” she said.Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York TimesFor Carolina Sinisalo, the grief of a shooting that killed her 15-year-old son Robin and partly paralyzed her older son Alejandro was nearly unfathomable.Ms. Sinisalo, who lives in Stockholm’s Rinkeby neighborhood, which is known for shootings, is running this year as a Social Democrat for a local political office for the first time.“The guns — it’s the tip of iceberg,” she said.“The prime issue here is the schools and the ability to get to work,” Ms. Sinisalo said, adding that despite supporting harsher laws for gun violence, the tenor of the campaign had shocked her. “Nobody is born criminal.”The cases remain unsolved. They join about 70 percent of gun homicides that are uncleared in Sweden, and researchers saying tackling that could help address the problem.But police officers, who blame local gangs for the shootings, say they face challenges in getting witnesses to speak on the record and collecting enough evidence to prosecute suspects in the Swedish justice system, which does not allow anonymous witnesses — something that conservatives have proposed changing.That is little comfort for the victims’ families.Stockholm has begun sending more police officers and security guards to neighborhoods where shootings are more frequent. On a recent afternoon, one officer, Rissa Seidou, stopped to chat with passers-by during a routine neighborhood patrol.Inspector Seidou has lost track of the gun crime scenes and funerals she has attended in the past few years. Now, she is working on a policy strategy she believes will save lives: building connections with the local community to encourage residents to report unusual behavior to the police.Inspector Rissa Seidou, center, preparing to head out from the Rinkeby police station in Stockholm.Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York TimesInspector Seidou advises parents to send their children away if she believes they are at risk of being hurt, and she hosts information sessions for parents on the Swedish legal system.“For me, it’s not about getting more police officers,” said Inspector Seidou, adding that she was frustrated with the way officials had handled the issue. “We need to use them well.”Underage offenders in Sweden are already facing less leniency if they commit serious crimes, as the government said last month that it would increase the sentence for serious weapons crimes.But social workers and youth organizations have called harsher punishments a Band-Aid solution that ignores the larger problem of the inequality dividing Sweden, including better resources for school programs, work opportunities and mental health.“I wish those questions were as urgent and as important as the question of putting them away in prison,” said Camila Salazar Atias, a criminologist at Fryshuset, a national youth organization that runs programs for at-risk children.Juri Escobar knows from personal experience what needs to be done, he says. A former gang member, Mr. Escobar served a 10-year prison sentence for murder, blaming a difficult upbringing for leading him into that lifestyle.“Harder punishments will not work,” he said. “You have give them an option, give them a treatment.”Today, he runs Vision 24, a program that he says collaborates with the police and social services in Stockholm to help about 30 men disengage from criminal groups every year. More recently, he has been getting calls from smaller towns in Sweden.“Nobody wants to live this life,” Mr. Escobar said.Christina Anderson More

William Ruto built a career on beating the odds. In his greatest triumph, he is expected to be inaugurated as Kenya’s fifth president on Tuesday.NAIROBI, Kenya — William Ruto wept when he won, falling to his knees in prayer after Kenya’s Supreme Court confirmed his presidential win last week, the climax of a bruising courtroom battle over the results of a hard-fought election.Aides patted the sobbing Mr. Ruto, as his wife, a Christian preacher, and his running mate knelt by his side, thankful that a bid to overturn his win from the Aug. 9 vote had been thwarted.On Tuesday Mr. Ruto, who has been Kenya’s vice president since 2013, will be inaugurated as the country’s fifth president.The outburst contrasted with the image of a leader better known for his steel than for his tears. Since he began his political ascent three decades ago, enlisting as an enforcer for an autocratic president, Mr. Ruto has developed a reputation as a wily operator with a talent for reinvention and an instinct for ruthless pragmatism.He survived arduous shadow battles with his boss, President Uhuru Kenyatta. He won elections that he was widely predicted to lose. And he emerged as a free man from the International Criminal Court at The Hague, where Mr. Ruto had been charged with crimes against humanity, after witnesses changed their stories and the trial collapsed in 2016.“Ruto seems to thrive in going against the odds,” Macharia Munene, a political scientist at the United States International University in Nairobi, said. “Once he has garnered attention, he finds a way of separating himself, then comes out on top as a leader.”Supporters of Mr. Ruto celebrating in Nairobi on Monday.Ben Curtis/Associated PressThose qualities served Mr. Ruto especially well this past month. Not only did he vanquish his electoral rival, Raila Odinga, who had been favored to win by pollsters, but he also triumphed over Mr. Kenyatta, a former ally once so close to Mr. Ruto that they dressed in matching suits and ties.Mr. Kenyatta is now his embittered foe. After last week’s court decision, the departing president, who backed Mr. Odinga’s losing ticket, delivered a grievance-laced speech in which he refused to utter Mr. Ruto’s name, much less congratulate him on his win. It was the latest twist in a saga of loyalty and betrayal that has dominated Kenyan politics for over a decade.“I haven’t talked to him in months,” a chuckling Mr. Ruto told laughing supporters at his residence after the Supreme Court confirmed he would be replacing his former boss. “But shortly I will be putting a call to him so that we can have a conversation on the process of transition.”Already, Mr. Ruto has made soaring promises in eloquent speeches that his presidency will unlock the potential of Kenya, an East African economic powerhouse and regional anchor. But to Kenyans who look to his mixed record in office, blemished by violence and financial scandals, a Ruto presidency is a worrisome prospect.“He has so many unresolved controversies, which affects how much people are willing to trust and believe in him,” said George Kegoro, head of the Open Society Initiative for Eastern Africa, a democracy-promotion organization. “That’s a problem.”Few doubt his political skills. On the campaign trail, Mr. Ruto loved to tell of his humble origins: his barefoot childhood in the Rift Valley; his first pair of shoes at age 15; the early adult years when he sold chickens by the roadside to scrape by. That underdog narrative lay at the heart of his populist pitch to the “hustler nation” — young Kenyans striving to succeed on modest means, as he once did.It was also code for a kind of class warfare. Unlike other Kenyan leaders, educated at elite Western schools or ushered into politics by gilded bloodlines, Mr. Ruto grew up in a remote village where he raised cows and sang in the choir. In a freewheeling, alcohol-soaked political culture, he is a teetotaler who rises early, prizes punctuality and is unabashed about his Christian faith, attributing his successes to “the hand of God.”Employees in an electronics store watching the live broadcast of the Supreme Court of Kenya’s judgment on the general elections in Nairobi on Monday.Yasuyoshi Chiba/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesTo many ordinary Kenyans, that image resonated powerfully at a time of pandemic-induced hardship, said Mr. Munene, the analyst. “Everyone was suffering, yet the elite seemed to be doing fine,” he said.Many wealthy Kenyans, however, saw something different: “A thief and a murderer who is patently unsuitable to be president of this republic,” said Jerotich Seii, a one-time aid worker and Odinga voter, now a prominent Ruto supporter. “It’s a class thing.”Despite the slogan, Mr. Ruto was not the average “hustler.” He cut his teeth in politics in the early 1990s as a campaigner for Kenya’s longtime autocratic president, Daniel Arap Moi, a fellow ethnic Kalenjin. As minister for agriculture, then higher education, between 2008 and 2010, Mr. Ruto was seen an effective, hands-on leader, but no reformer: He sided with conservatives to oppose a new constitution that was approved in 2010.Along the way, he became very wealthy, growing a business empire that includes luxury hotels, a 15,000-acre ranch, a commercial farm and a huge poultry processing plant. He was implicated in corruption scandals, including accusations that he tried to grab land from a Nairobi school for a hotel parking lot — a case that is still before the courts.Mr. Ruto has always denied any wrongdoing — “I have been audited left, right, upside-down and inside-out” he said at a presidential debate in July — and many voters are willing to look past his wealth.“They are all crooks, we know that,” said Ms. Seii. “I’m going for the crook with a plan.”Mr. Ruto’s career has been shaped, to a large degree, by the International Criminal Court.In 2010 prosecutors accused Mr. Ruto and Mr. Kenyatta of leading the political violence that followed the disputed election of 2007 — the great trauma of recent Kenyan history, with over 1,200 people killed, and 600,000 others displaced, as the country threatened to tip into civil war.An opposition supporter being arrested in Kibera, a slum that is an opposition stronghold in Nairobi, in late 2007. Stephen Morrison/European Pressphoto AgencyThe I.C.C. indictment depicted Mr. Ruto as the godfather of mayhem in the Rift Valley, accusing him of distributing weapons, issuing kill-lists and telling supporters which houses to burn. But that case floundered badly at trial, ultimately managing only to unite Mr. Ruto and Mr. Kenyatta, and transforming Kenyan politics.The two leaders ran on a joint ticket in the 2013 election, with Mr. Kenyatta as president, portraying the court as a tool of Western oppression and rallying other African leaders to their cause.On the ground in Kenya, witnesses disappeared or changed their stories amid accusations of bribery and intimidation, and by 2016 the trials of both men had entirely collapsed.Mr. Ruto and Mr. Kenyatta became an apparently unstoppable force. Before they were re-elected in 2017, they finished each other’s sentences in interviews and joshed in a jokey campaign video, drawing comparisons with the Obama-Biden partnership in the United States.But a year later, it all fell apart. In 2018, Mr. Kenyatta signed a pact that switched his loyalties to Mr. Odinga, triggering a shadow war inside Kenya’s government.Uhuru Kenyatta, in a red shirt, as a presidential candidate, next to his running mate, Mr. Ruto, in a yellow shirt, at a rally in Nairobi in 2013. Now, they are bitter foes.Pete Muller for The New York TimesMr. Ruto started to build a political base in Mount Kenya, Mr. Kenyatta’s political backyard.Mr. Kenyatta used the state apparatus to thwart his deputy’s ambitions.Last year, a senior Kenyan government official made public a list of Mr. Ruto’s assets. Security agencies began to obstruct his movements. His supporters came under unusual scrutiny by the tax authorities, said a senior Western official who spoke anonymously to discuss sensitive issues.As the election drew near, the main news media outlets tilted their coverage in favor of Mr. Kenyatta’s ally, Mr. Odinga.And on Aug. 15, just before Mr. Ruto was declared the winner, a delegation of senior police, military and presidency officials tried to subvert his victory quietly, the head of the electoral commission, Wafula Chebukati, told the Supreme Court last week. The real test for Mr. Ruto may come when things aren’t going his way. He insists there’s nothing to worry about.“We are competitors, not enemies,” he assured his rivals after his victory was confirmed last week. “I pledge to make Kenya a country for everyone.”A poster of Mr. Ruto in Eldoret, Kenya, last month.Ed Ram/Getty ImagesAbdi Latif Dahir More

Stephen Miller, a senior policy adviser, and Brian Jack, who served as White House political director, are among those who received requests for information this week from a federal grand jury.The Justice Department has subpoenaed two former top White House political advisers under President Donald J. Trump as part of a widening investigation related to Mr. Trump’s post-election fund-raising and plans for so-called fake electors, according to people briefed on the matter.Brian Jack, the final White House political director under Mr. Trump, and Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s top speechwriter and a senior policy adviser, were among more than a dozen people connected to the former president to receive subpoenas from a federal grand jury this week.The subpoenas seek information in connection with the Save America political action committee and the plan to submit slates of electors pledged to Mr. Trump from swing states that were won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the 2020 election. Mr. Trump and his allies promoted the idea that competing slates of electors would justify blocking or delaying certification of Mr. Biden’s Electoral College win during a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.A lawyer for Mr. Miller declined to comment. Mr. Jack, who remains an adviser to Mr. Trump as well as to Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House Republican leader, and several other House Republicans, declined to comment.A subpoena does not indicate someone is under investigation, but the Justice Department may send one to people from whom it is seeking information.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 9Making a case against Trump. More

A conversation with Max Fisher, who covers the decline of democracy around the world.Friday’s newsletter is a discussion with Max Fisher, an international reporter and columnist for The New York Times who covers conflict, diplomacy and the sweeping sociopolitical changes taking place all over the globe.Max often delves deep into the world of ideas and where they intersect with the real world, from the rise of new social movements to the subject of today’s chat: the decline of democracy in the United States and abroad.Here’s our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity:You recently wrote about how democracy is under threat all over the world. What did you find most worrying?That democracy is declining more or less everywhere now. Not necessarily in every country but in every region, in rich and poor countries, old and new democracies. And the decline is incremental but steady, which means that the scale of the change isn’t necessarily obvious until you start looking at the data.We tend to think of democratic decline as something that happens in big dramatic moments — a coup, a government collapsing, tanks in the streets. But that’s not typically how it happens anymore.What happens is more like what has occurred in Venezuela, say, or Turkey or Hungary. Elected leaders rise within a democracy promising to defeat some threat within, and in the process end up slowly tearing that democracy down.Each step feels dangerous but maybe not outright authoritarian — the judiciary gets politicized a little, some previously independent institution gets co-opted, election rules get changed, news outlets come under tighter government control.No individual step feels as drastic as an outright coup. And because these leaders both promote and benefit from social polarization, these little power grabs might even be seen by supporters as saving democracy.But over many years, the system tilts more and more toward autocracy.That doesn’t always end up leading to full-on dictatorship. But that pull toward elected strongmen rulers is something we see happening in dozens of countries. By the sheer numbers, according to a democracy monitoring group called V-Dem, more democracies are in decline today than at any other point in the last century.What did you find most surprising?There’s one chart I think about a lot that was put together by the political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart. They tracked every election in Europe, at every level, going back decades. And they looked at how populist candidates did, on average in those elections, over time.Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart(Political scientists typically use the word “populist” to describe politicians who champion cultural backlash and oppose establishment institutions. Here’s a definition from the book “How Democracies Die,” by two academics named Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt: “anti-establishment politicians — figures who, claiming to represent the voice of ‘the people,’ wage war on what they depict as a corrupt and conspiratorial elite.”)What Norris and Inglehart found was that, in Europe, populists have been receiving a steadily larger share of the vote, on average, basically every year since 1960. That year is important because it’s roughly when Western countries, as the colonial era ended, collectively began to embrace what we now think of as full, liberal, multiracial democracy. And that is also the moment, it turns out from this research, when populist politics began steadily rising in a backlash to that new liberal-democratic order.That discovery is really important for understanding the threat to democracy. It shows that, for all the ways that we might think of the threat as top-down, it’s also, and maybe chiefly, bottom-up.And though we might tie the rise of populist hard-liner politics to specific events like the global financial crisis of 2007-8 or the refugee crisis of the mid-2010s, this is in fact something much larger.It’s a deeper backlash against the demands of modern liberal democracy — and this is something I’ve written about a lot over the past few years — both among voters who feel that they’re being asked to soften their racial and religious identities and among leaders who are being asked to compromise their political self-interest for the sake of democratic norms.What patterns have you found abroad that you now see in the United States?The United States fits pretty cleanly into what is now a well-established global pattern of democratic backsliding..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.First, society polarizes, often over a backlash to social change, to demographic change, to strengthening political power by racial, ethnic or religious minorities, and generally amid rising social distrust.This leads to a bottom-up desire for populist outsiders who will promise to confront the supposed threat within, which means suppressing the other side of that social or partisan or racial divide, asserting a vision of democracy that grants special status for “my” side, and smashing the democratic institutions or norms that prevent that side from asserting what is perceived to be its rightful dominance.You also tend to see political parties and other establishment gatekeepers, who are in theory meant to keep authoritarians from rising in politics, either weaken or become co-opted. Once populist hard-liners gain enough power to begin eroding democratic checks, such as an independent judiciary or the rule of law, it’s usually a steady slide toward democratic erosion.This trend has really picked up speed, globally, only in the last 20 years or so. So it’s hard to say exactly how common it is for countries that begin on this path to end up like Hungary or Turkey. But very few democracies have begun to slide and then reversed course.You have a new book called “The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World.” In your reporting and research for the book, what sorts of effects on democracy did you find social media is having? I’m old enough to remember when techno-evangelists like Clay Shirky were predicting that social media would unleash a wave of democratization in the developing world. Obviously, that hasn’t happened. Or has it?I had that same arc of initially seeing social media as a democratizing force.So did a lot of Arab Spring activists from the early 2010s, like Wael Ghonim, the Egyptian revolutionary and Google engineer. But, within a few years, Ghonim had come to conclude, he has said in a TED Talk, that “the same tool that united us to topple dictators eventually tore us apart” by “amplifying the spread of misinformation, rumors, echo chambers and hate speech.”A neutral social media really could be a democratizing force, in theory. But the major platforms are far from neutral. They are deliberately designed to manipulate you, and to manipulate your experience on the platform in ways that will change how you think and how you behave. These platforms do this not just by what they show you, but also by eliciting certain emotions and behaviors from you.All this digital manipulation, at the scale of maybe hundreds of hours per year, changes you. And not just online, but in your offline life, too. It changes your emotional makeup, the way that you approach politics, your sense of your own identity — even the way that you process right and wrong.For an individual user — and we now have hard, empirical, scientific evidence for this — the effect can be to make you angrier, more extreme and intolerant, more distrustful, more prone to divide the world between us and them, and more disposed toward hostility and even violence against people outside your social in-group.This might change you just by a matter of degree. But when you multiply this effect out by billions of users, and often among a majority of the population, the effect can change society as a whole, too, and especially its politics, in ways that can be detrimental to democracy.What do you think most people miss about the link between social media and threats to democracy?One thing that social platforms have done — and it’s hard to blame this entirely on Silicon Valley — is to displace the traditional activism that is an important part of bringing about democracy or of preventing an existing democracy from backsliding.That activism used to happen through organizing among real-world networks, like student groups during the civil rights movement in the United States, or mothers’ groups in 1970s Argentina resisting that country’s dictatorship. Now, social media allows a protest group, even a leaderless one, to skip that process and, by going viral online, to activate thousands or even millions of people overnight.That is really effective at driving huge numbers of people onto the street, but not at much else.With the advent of social media, the number of mass protest events in the world shot way up. A million people marching on a capital city became a more common occurrence. But the success rate of those movements fell from about 70 percent to only 30 percent.The Yellow Vests movement in France quickly gained momentum in 2018 before fizzling out.Mauricio Lima for The New York TimesThe Yellow Vests, the French protest movement that began in 2018, exemplifies this. It was this stunning, spontaneous, nationwide uprising for political change. And it had been organized almost entirely through Facebook and other platforms. But it was also internally incoherent. For all its force, it quickly fizzled out, having caused a lot of traffic problems but having changed very little.Partly that was because of what had been lost in the displacement of traditional organizing. But partly it was also because of the distorting effects of those platforms. Those systems, just as they do for users globally, had pulled the Yellow Vests supporters who were gathering on those platforms toward extremes: demands to bar all refugees from the country, to default on the national debt, to replace elected legislatures with fuzzily defined citizens’ councils.It’s not the only reason the Yellow Vests mostly receded, but it is, I think, a metaphor for those platforms’ effects on our societies and democracies broadly.What to read about democracyLuke Broadwater and Michael Schmidt have an update on the long-shot push, led by some members of Congress and nonprofit groups, to bar Donald Trump from running for president in 2024 by invoking the 14th Amendment to establish him as an “insurrectionist.”Writing in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik asks a provocative question: Can’t we come up with something better than liberal democracy?The editorial board of The New York Times is reaching out to readers to ask: What concerns and confounds you about the state of American democracy? Read about the project here.Thank you for reading On Politics. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected]. More