Elections

WESTMINSTER, Calif. — Dozens of Vietnamese-speaking volunteers filled a community center on a recent Wednesday to phone bank for Representative Michelle Steel, Republican of California, a Korean American lawmaker whose campaign signs and fliers in Vietnamese and English lined the walls.A few neighborhoods down, Jay Chen, a Democrat and Navy reservist of Taiwanese descent who is challenging Ms. Steel, passed out fliers outside of Zippost, a shipping business that residents often use to send packages to relatives in Vietnam. Mr. Chen, donning a Navy hat, walked around the plaza with a Vietnamese-speaking volunteer in tow helping residents register to vote.Ms. Steel and Mr. Chen are vying to appeal to the Asian American voters who dominate the electorate in this slice of Orange County, making up a quarter of the voting population. Their race — one of only a few dozen competitive ones that could determine which party controls the House — is being watched closely for clues about what may move voters in this increasingly critical bloc.“The Asian vote can really give enough votes for a candidate to win,” said Mary Anne Foo, the executive director of the nonprofit Orange County Asian and Pacific Islander Community Alliance, a nonpartisan resource center. “What’s significant now is the number of Asian Americans running for office. Having representation is exciting.”Across the country, Asian American voters, who comprised 4 percent of the electorate in 2020, are the fastest-growing population of eligible voters. The Asian American Voter Survey found in July that nearly half of Asian Americans identified as Democrats, about a third as independents and about a fifth as Republicans. About two-thirds voted for Mr. Biden over Mr. Trump, surveys show.However, an analysis by The New York Times found that immigrant communities shifted to the right as they had a surge in voters in 2020. The Asian American Voter Survey found that older Asian voters tended to identify as independent or Republican at higher rates than those in younger generations. Vietnamese Americans, who make up a large proportion of Asian residents in Orange County, also leaned more to the right.Asian American voters dominate the electorate in this Orange County district.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesBoth candidates in the race have made tackling inflation the centerpiece of their campaigns, and both have also focused on safety amid an increase in reports of hate crimes against Asian Americans — themes that are top of mind for many Asian voters, according to analysts.Karthick Ramakrishnan, the founder of AAPI Data, which helps conduct the annual Asian American Voter Survey, said the economy and crime were top issues for respondents, which could give an advantage to Republicans. But health care has also been a major issue, he said, which could boost Democrats, who recently pushed through Congress sweeping climate, health and tax legislation that would lower prescription drug costs and subsidize health insurance, among other benefits.“The ethnicity of the candidate is a bit of a wash in terms of how much it will make a difference here, so it’ll be important to see the kind of appeals each of these candidates make,” Mr. Ramakrishnan said.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries winding down, both parties are starting to shift their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Abrams’s Struggles: Stacey Abrams has been trailing her Republican rival, Gov. Brian Kemp, alarming those who celebrated her as the master strategist behind Georgia’s Democratic shift.Battleground Pennsylvania: Few states feature as many high-stakes, competitive races as Pennsylvania, which has emerged as the nation’s center of political gravity.The Dobbs Decision’s Effect: Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the number of women signing up to vote has surged in some states and the once-clear signs of a Republican advantage are hard to see.How a G.O.P. Haul Vanished: Last year, the campaign arm of Senate Republicans was smashing fund-raising records. Now, most of the money is gone.Still, race has hung heavily over the contest, sometimes in ugly ways.Ms. Steel, who was born in South Korea and raised in Japan, has accused Mr. Chen of mocking her accent; he said at a campaign event in April that people need “an interpreter to figure out exactly what she’s saying.” Mr. Chen said in an interview that his comments were misconstrued and that he meant he did not understand her policies.In the campaign feud, he has accused Ms. Steel of “red-baiting” by painting him as sympathetic to China’s authoritarian government. An accusation of communist sympathies may be particularly resonant to the county’s many refugees who still have bitter memories of fleeing a communist regime.Mr. Chen, the Harvard-educated son of immigrants who is a member of the board of trustees of Mt. San Antonio Community College and owns a local real estate business, said he has tried to appeal to right-leaning voters with his military experience. He served stints in the Middle East and the Korean Peninsula with the Seventh Fleet, which helped evacuate refugees after the Vietnam War.“Whenever I mention that, it really resonates,” Mr. Chen said.Jay Chen, the Harvard-educated son of immigrants who owns a real estate business, is challenging Ms. Steel.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesMs. Steel became one of the first Korean American women to serve in Congress in 2020.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesMs. Steel, a former member of the county board of supervisors and a local business owner, is fighting to hold onto her seat in a changed political environment. She narrowly defeated Representative Harley Rouda, a Democrat, in 2020 in a district along the California Coast that leaned Republican, becoming one of the first three Korean American women to serve in Congress. But she was displaced by redistricting and opted to run in a new district that tilts slightly toward Democrats.Lance Trover, the communications director for Ms. Steel’s campaign, said in a statement that she was focused on standing up to China and lowering taxes.“Michelle is the campaign’s greatest asset because AAPI voters know and trust her,” Mr. Trover said in the statement, using the abbreviation for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Ms. Steel declined to be interviewed.Orange County was once described by President Ronald Reagan as a place “where the good Republicans go before they die.” Its partisan bent has since shifted as a younger, more diverse population has moved from the Los Angeles metropolitan area seeking more affordable living. Now, Democrats outnumber Republicans in voter registration, and there is a sizable no-party preference voter bloc, according to the latest statistics from the county voter registrar.The pendulum swung for the first time in 2018, when Democrats swept into the House majority by flipping four seats in the area, giving Democrats control of all seven congressional seats in the county. It swung in the other direction in 2020, when Republicans reclaimed two seats in Orange County.But the shifts reshaping the area are lasting, and they reflect similar ones underway in suburban enclaves across the country, as immigrant communities relocate out of cities, said Christine Chen, the executive director of Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote, which helps conduct the Asian American Voter Survey.As immigrant communities around the country move from cities to the suburbs, the politics of those areas are shifting.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesThe same trend is underway in Virginia, a state that has leaned toward Democrats in recent years, and in Georgia, she said. Mr. Ramakrishnan added that districts in New Jersey and the suburbs of Houston and Dallas are experiencing a similar dynamic.“The Asian American population, in all of those instances, has increased so much that, really, elected officials have no choice but to make sure they engage and develop a relationship with the Asian American voters, because they’re coming out to vote,” said Ms. Chen, who is not related to the Democratic candidate challenging Ms. Steel.Asian Americans make up over a fifth of residents of Orange County, which is known for having the largest concentration of Vietnamese people outside of Vietnam, many of whom sought refuge in the region after the Vietnam War.The district encompasses Little Saigon, a stretch of Vietnamese-owned homes and businesses in the city of Westminster, which looks like most aging suburbs in Southern California: palm trees, stucco single-family homes and sun-bleached signs. Vietnamese and occasionally Korean and Chinese characters are predominantly featured on storefronts, and the political signage clogging up street corners feature mainly candidates with Asian surnames. Both campaigns and local organizations have been investing heavily on advertisements in Vietnamese.The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced in July that it planned to make a seven-figure investment to reach Asian voters in California, and the Republican National Committee has opened several Asian Pacific American community centers across the county, a multimillion-dollar investment aiming to recruit volunteers for voter outreach to support Republican candidates, with one of the first in Little Saigon.John Le, 57, a Vietnamese American Microsoft engineer from Lake Forest who described himself as a traditional Republican, said that, partisan politics aside, he was proud to be in a district with two Asian American candidates. He said he planned to vote for Ms. Steel.“It’s the American dream,” Mr. Le said. “We should be proud of these people who are giving back to the community. I will look at who will represent me the most.” More

SPRINGFIELD, Pa. — Dr. Mehmet Oz, trailing in the polls and still contending with an image as an out-of-touch, carpetbagging elitist, is seeking to reboot his Senate campaign in Pennsylvania in the final sprint to November. In recent weeks, Dr. Oz has sharpened his attacks against his Democratic rival, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, blasting him for his initial refusal to debate and claiming that Mr. Fetterman was trying to conceal the extent of the damage done by a stroke in May. He has enlisted help from prominent Republicans, campaigning with Senator Patrick J. Toomey and, on Thursday, bringing in Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador and South Carolina governor, for a town-hall-style event. On Tuesday, he even appeared to distance himself from his political benefactor, former President Donald J. Trump, by suggesting that he would have rejected Mr. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged.The Senate race in Pennsylvania is one of the most closely watched in the country. Its outcome could not only determine which party controls the chamber after the fall elections but illustrate just how firm of a grasp Mr. Trump has on his voters in 2022. Mr. Trump endorsed Dr. Oz and has held two rallies for him in recent months, but how deep Dr. Oz’s support runs among working-class Trump supporters in the state remains a question mark. In addition to mocking Mr. Fetterman’s stroke recovery last week by listing bogus “concessions” he would make in a potential debate, Dr. Oz has been attacking his opponent as soft on crime, hitting him in particular over his support for “second chances” for felons as the head of the state’s Board of Pardons.Dr. Oz has enlisted help from prominent Republicans like Nikki Haley, whose blood pressure he checked at their town-hall-style event in Springfield, Pa., on Thursday.Hannah Beier for The New York TimesOn Thursday afternoon, at the event with Ms. Haley, Dr. Oz enacted a “mock debate” in which he interrogated an absent Mr. Fetterman, asking, “Why do you believe that life sentences aren’t right even in cases of murder?” Speaking in the suburban Philadelphia community of Springfield, he recalled his years as a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania as he continued to criticize Mr. Fetterman on crime. “I lived in West Philly,” Dr. Oz said. “I could walk to school. It wasn’t a problem. I can’t make that walk today. You can’t either.” Dr. Oz has sought to put his campaign on a more aggressive footing as polls show a tightening race. Mr. Fetterman’s double-digit lead in the polls at midsummer has shrunk to single digits in two surveys late last month. One reason may be that some independent voters are breaking for Dr. Oz. He led in late August with those voters in the two surveys — by 10 percentage points in a Susquehanna Polling and Research survey and by 12 points in an Emerson College Poll.Christopher Nicholas, a Republican consultant in the state, said there was a model of how a Republican candidate wins a statewide race in purple Pennsylvania.“You run to the right of Democrats on social issues, especially in the western part of the state, which helps you get conservative Democrats,” Mr. Nicholas said. “You hold your Republican base, and you get close to 60 percent of the independents.”The challenge for Dr. Oz is coalescing that Republican base.Both recent polls showed him winning only 77 to 78 percent of Republican voters, compared with Mr. Fetterman winning close to nine out of 10 Democrats. Some in the crowd at a Trump rally in May booed Dr. Oz, reflecting the views of certain Republicans that he is not conservative enough.While the response to Dr. Oz at the former president’s rally on Saturday was largely more receptive, some jeers of “RINO,” a conservative insult meaning Republican in Name Only, could be heard.Barney Keller, a spokesman for Dr. Oz, said the latest public polling predated the campaign’s messaging “about Fetterman dodging debates.” Mr. Keller added that internal polling showed Dr. Oz “fully consolidating Republicans and making excellent progress” with independents and some Democrats.The Fetterman campaign has found itself in the unusual position of playing defense after seeming to get the better of Dr. Oz for months with social-media attacks about his New Jersey mansion and penchant for “crudités.”At an event that Dr. Oz held in Philadelphia on Tuesday with Senator Patrick J. Toomey, aides set up posters of Dr. Oz’s opponent, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesOn Wednesday, Mr. Fetterman, who acknowledges ongoing “auditory” and language issues since his stroke, agreed to debate Dr. Oz after weeks of needling criticism by Dr. Oz and his allies. Mr. Fetterman said he would debate Dr. Oz in mid- to late October, with details to be worked out. He said there was no recent precedent in Pennsylvania for debates in September, dismissing an Oz attack that he had ducked a debate this week proposed by a Pittsburgh TV station.“But let’s be clear, this has never really been about debates for Dr. Oz,” Mr. Fetterman said in a statement. “This whole thing has been about Dr. Oz and his team mocking me for having a stroke because they’ve got nothing else.”Since returning to the campaign trail on Aug. 12, Mr. Fetterman has kept a light schedule of appearances, greeting supporters on rope lines after short speeches but avoiding open questions from attendees or from the news media. He and his campaign have attributed his verbal stumbles in speeches and one-on-one interviews to “auditory processing” issues in his brain, which are common in stroke survivors. He has said that he may use a closed-caption monitor in the debate to make sure he does not miss any words. During the Republican primary, Dr. Oz seemed to contort himself, downplaying or disavowing some liberal views from earlier in his life — on abortion, guns — to curry favor with conservative voters. He scraped out a primary victory by fewer than 1,000 votes, aided by the Trump endorsement.Now, with the general election in full stride after Labor Day, Dr. Oz may be trying to resume his earlier ideological shape as he seeks out independents and conservative Democrats.The votes of suburban women in particular will be crucial in an election in which Democrats have gained fresh energy since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The Emerson College survey found that abortion access ranked five points higher as an issue for Pennsylvania voters than it did nationwide.Recently, Dr. Oz struck a mainstream conservative position on abortion, describing himself as “pro-life with the three usual exceptions, especially the health of the mother, but incest and rape as well.”But his effort to distance himself from the fringe on the issue has been complicated. A recording surfaced recently from a primary event in which Dr. Oz suggested that life began at conception and any attempt to end a pregnancy was the same as murder. “It’s, you know, it’s still murder if you were to terminate a child, whether their heart’s beating or not,” he said in the recording.Andy Reilly is a Pennsylvania member of the National Republican Committee whose home is in Delaware County, where Dr. Oz’s Thursday event took place. Mr. Reilly said it was crucial — and within reach — for Dr. Oz to improve on Mr. Trump’s low share of suburban voters in 2020, which cost him victory in the state.“For Republicans to win in Pennsylvania, they don’t need to win the suburbs, but they need to compete,” Mr. Reilly said.The Oz campaign’s attacks on Mr. Fetterman and crime have been another attempt to appeal to suburban and female voters. As lieutenant governor, Mr. Fetterman leads the Board of Pardons, where his advocacy has helped increase the number of felons leaving prison with commutations or pardons.Mr. Fetterman, right, headed to the stage to speak at a Labor Day event that President Biden attended.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesThe Oz campaign and its allies have called Mr. Fetterman “dangerously liberal on crime,” as one television ad puts it, and have criticized him for statements he has made in the past, including that “we could release a third of our inmates and not make anyone less safe.”Mr. Fetterman has said that he was repeating a statement that a former Republican-appointed state corrections secretary made to him.A spokesman for Mr. Fetterman said that the candidate proved his dedication to fighting violent crime while mayor of Braddock, Pa., where he began his political rise.“Dr. Oz lives in a mansion on a hill. What does he know about confronting crime?” said the spokesman, Joe Calvello. “John Fetterman has actually done it, and done it successfully. So he’s not going to be taking pointers from a guy who just moved here and has absolutely no understanding of the problems facing Pennsylvania.” More

Plus the Solomon Islands postpones its election and tycoons leave China.Queen Elizabeth II was the longest-serving monarch in British history.Eddie Mulholland/Agence France-Presse, via Pool/AFP Via Getty ImagesQueen Elizabeth II is dead at 96Queen Elizabeth died peacefully yesterday afternoon after more than 70 years as the British head of state. She was Britain’s longest-reigning monarch. Here is her obituary, photos from her reign and live updates.The queen was widely revered as she presided over Britain’s adjustment to a post-colonial era and saw it through its divorce from the E.U. Her years as sovereign were a time of upheaval. Still, she sought to project the royal family as a bastion of permanence in a world of shifting values, and to preserve the mystique that underpinned its survival.“There is no analogous public figure who will have been mourned as deeply in Britain — Winston Churchill might come closest — or whose death could provoke a greater reckoning with the identity and future of the country,” writes Mark Landler, our London bureau chief.Two days before her death, Queen Elizabeth II saw Britain through a fraught government transition. After months of scandal and a divisive campaign, Boris Johnson resigned on Tuesday, and the queen met with Liz Truss, making her the 15th and final prime minister to serve during her reign.What’s next: Charles, her eldest son, is now king, and will be known as King Charles III. The country will now begin its “London Bridge” plan for the days after her death. (The Guardian has a fascinating explanation.)Details: British news media outlets switched to rolling coverage after news of her deteriorating health yesterday. Family members rushed to Balmoral Castle, in Scotland, where she died.Economy: The queen’s death comes at a precarious time for Britain. A cost-of-living crisis and fears of skyrocketing energy costs have gripped the nation, and fears of a recession are growing. Yesterday, Truss laid out a broad plan to freeze gas and electricity rates for two years.Manasseh Sogavare, the leader of the Solomon Islands, pushed a constitutional amendment through Parliament to postpone national elections.Mark Schiefelbein/Associated PressSolomon Islands delays its electionThe Solomon Islands will delay next year’s national elections until 2024, which could give an advantage to Manasseh Sogavare, its prime minister.Sogavare claims the country can’t afford to hold national elections next year because it also plans to host the Pacific Games, an international sporting event. Sogavare reportedly sees the games as his crowning achievement, and hopes to win over the public with a sports spectacular.His opponents see a power grab linked to Beijing’s influence. Sogavare bet big on China, cutting the Solomon Islands’ ties with Taiwan and signing secretive agreements with Beijing. Critics have worried that the budding friendship will weaken the Pacific Island nation’s young democracy and expand Beijing’s influence in the region.Diplomacy: Australia’s foreign minister said that her government had offered to pay for the elections to be held as scheduled, expanding on similar past assistance. Sogavare described it as “an attempt to directly interfere into our domestic affairs.”The State of the WarZaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant: After United Nations inspectors visited the Russian-controlled facility last week amid continuing shelling and fears of a looming nuclear catastrophe, the organization released a report calling for Russia and Ukraine to halt all military activity around the complex.Russia’s Military Supplies: According to newly declassified American intelligence, Russia is buying millions of artillery shells and rockets from North Korea — a sign that global sanctions have severely restricted its supply chains and forced Moscow to turn to pariah states.Far From the War: Though much of Russia’s effort on the battlefield has not gone as Mr. Putin had planned, at home he has mostly succeeded in shielding Russians from the hardships of war — no draft, no mass funerals, no feelings of loss or conflict.The Road to Rebuilding: With a major conference on post-war reconstruction scheduled for next month, Ukraine’s allies face complicated questions about the process and the oversight of the funds.Beijing’s efforts to rein in a housing bubble, together with frequent pandemic lockdowns, have caused the entire real estate market to stumble.Pool photo by Selim ChtaytiChina’s tycoons leave the countryChina’s billionaire tycoons helped build the country’s economy into a powerhouse. Now, they are keeping low profiles — or leaving the country.In the latest exodus, two of China’s best-known entrepreneurs, Pan Shiyi and Zhang Xin, resigned this week as leaders of their struggling real estate empire, Soho China. The husband-and-wife team moved to the U.S. during the pandemic and had tried to manage their business remotely.Their resignations underscore the growing concern among private entrepreneurs that China is veering away from an era of freewheeling capitalism, toward an increasingly state-driven economy that prioritizes politics and security over growth.Resignations: Other very wealthy entrepreneurs have also stepped down from top jobs in recent months, including Jack Ma, co-founder of Alibaba; Colin Huang, founder of Pinduoduo, a rival to Alibaba; and Zhang Yiming, founder of TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance.Departures: Zhou Hang, a prominent tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist, recently left Shanghai’s lockdown for Canada. There, he denounced China’s current policies.THE LATEST NEWSAsia and the PacificStudents went on strike in Sydney, Australia, in May to demand action on climate change.Loren Elliott/ReutersAustralia passed a new climate bill that codified a pledge to cut its carbon emissions by 43 percent by 2030, and to be net zero by 2050, BBC reports.The Philippines rejected a request from the International Criminal Court to resume an inquiry into Rodrigo Duterte’s deadly war on drugs. The death toll from a fire at a karaoke bar in Vietnam has risen to 33. It is the country’s deadliest fire since 2002.Here’s an explanation of China’s “zero-Covid” policy.The War in UkraineUkraine has begun to gain ground with a counteroffensive.Ivor Prickett for The New York TimesAntony Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State, visited Kyiv and announced another $2 billion in long-term support to Ukraine and other countries in the region, bringing the total U.S. aid to $13.5 billion.The C.I.A. director said Russia’s invasion looked like a “failure” after six grinding months of fighting.The U.S. accused Moscow of forcibly deporting up to 1.6 million Ukrainians to Russia or Russian-controlled territory.The head of the Ukrainian national energy company said conditions at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant were getting “worse and worse and worse.”Around the WorldThere is no real effort to improve public services in Iraq.Emily Garthwaite for The New York TimesIraq’s instability is deepening. The government is still paralyzed, militias have fought in Baghdad and — despite its oil wealth — the state can’t provide basic services.The second suspect in a deadly stabbing rampage in Canada died after being taken into police custody.Europe is suffering through economic turmoil. Yesterday, the European Central Bank raised interest rates, an aggressive move to fight inflation. Here are key takeaways.Steve Bannon, who was pardoned by Donald Trump, was charged with two felony counts of money laundering, two felony counts of conspiracy and a felony count of scheming to defraud.A Morning ReadPetro Fedorovych’s bees had to fly to the front lines to find sunflowers.Tyler Hicks/The New York TimesThe war has devastated Ukraine’s vast fields. One surprise consequence: Bees are flying toward the front lines to gather nectar.One 71-year-old beekeeper, Petro Fedorovych, has stayed put and is still gathering honey. “I built this house with my hands,” he told The Times late last month. “I will never leave.”Lives Lived: For a time, Anne Garrels was the only U.S. network reporter broadcasting from Baghdad, where she said she subsisted on Kit Kat bars. She died at 71.ARTS AND IDEASClimate change roils supply chainsChinese factories were shuttered again in late August, a frequent occurrence in a country that has imposed intermittent lockdowns to fight the coronavirus.But this time, the culprit was extreme weather, exacerbated by climate change. A record drought crippled economic activity across the southwest, freezing international supply chains for automobiles, electronics and other goods that have been routinely disrupted over the past three years.The interruptions could be a sign of the toll that climate change will most likely continue to wreak on the global economy. Many major companies source parts and products from places routinely affected by worsening extreme weather. Academics say the effect of these disasters, and of higher temperatures in general, will be particularly obvious when it comes to food trade.“What we just went through with Covid is a window to what climate could do,” one expert said.In other climate news:Prescribed burns are crucial to reducing the risk of major wildfires. But in a warming world, they are harder to do safely.Europe is burning wood pellets in the name of clean energy. But much of the wood comes from ancient, protected forests.PLAY, WATCH, EATWhat to CookJoe Lingeman for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne.Dal adas, a red lentil and tamarind soup from southern Iran, is a spicy and warming meal.What to WatchIn “The Bengali,” a travelogue-meets-mystery documentary, an African American woman seeks out her Indian grandfather’s past.What to ReadHere are 33 books coming this fall.Now Time to PlayPlay today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Brainiac (four letters).Here are today’s Wordle and today’s Spelling Bee.You can find all our puzzles here.That’s it for today’s briefing. See you next time. — AmeliaP.S. Happy 126th birthday to The Times Magazine, which debuted this week in 1896.The latest episode of “The Daily” is on electric vehicles.You can reach Amelia and the team at [email protected]. More

It doesn’t seem like a titillating photograph: an orderly queue of Germans, waiting to enter a nondescript industrial site. It is dark. Just a single light illuminates the door. What does it look like? Like a color remake of Depression-era imagery: the factory entrance, the bread line.But the men in single file — they are all men — are at this factory not to work but to play. This old train shed in the former East Berlin has been reborn as Snax, a raunchy gay nightclub, and that light in the darkness is the gateway to pleasure. It’s 2001 now, the wall is a memory. The world is flat, we are young and proud. We got here on a train, there are no more border controls, or maybe we got here on a cheap new airline called easyJet.We are ready to dance, and to do other things in the dark. The party will go on well past sunrise. It feels like it might go on forever.Wolfgang Tillmans, “Outside Snax Club,” 2001.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, London“Outside Snax Club” (2001) is one little star in a constellation of photographs by Wolfgang Tillmans at the Museum of Modern Art: one node in a life’s network of tender portraits, straightforward still lifes and streaky abstractions. The sky from a window seat. A boy’s feet in tube socks. An apple tree in the London morning, a kiss stolen in the London night. The German photographer has been taking these deceptively natural pictures since 1986, and linking them in exhibitions and books that absorb different modes of photography into idiosyncratic associations. These have made Tillmans (especially to gay audiences) not just a renowned artist, but someone we feel we know personally. He is just “Wolfgang,” even to many who have never met him; his photos are intimacy enough.“Wolfgang Tillmans: To Look Without Fear,” which opens to museum members this weekend and to the public Monday, is one of the most anticipated exhibitions of the year; actually, it’s been anticipated longer than that. Roxana Marcoci, a MoMA senior curator, has been working since 2014 on this tremendous, pandemic-detained overview, the largest of Tillmans’s career. It rambles across the museum’s sixth floor, vacant for more than a year and a half. It includes 417 works (mostly photographs, though there are a few minor videos) displayed, as always with Tillmans, in asymmetric arrays of large and small prints. He affixes the majority to the wall with Scotch tape or bulldog clips — although, as with the soft lighting and easy cropping of his photography, the ostensibly “informal” hang is actually calculated to the quarter-inch.Tillmans presents his photographs taped to or clipped to the wall, and prints them anew for each exhibition. Left, “Deer Hirsch” (1995). Right, “Smokin’ Jo” (1995). Emile Askey/The Museum of Modern Art, New York“Omen” (1991), printed at small scale and taped to the side of a free-standing gallery wall of the Museum of Modern Art.Lila Barth for The New York TimesThe show is candid, unaffected, breezily intelligent; moralistic, too, in the later galleries. It is required viewing for both photography scholars and sportswear fetishists, and a worthy retrospective of one of the most significant artists to emerge at the end of the last century. (The show will tour next year to Toronto and San Francisco.)It is also — in a way I was not prepared for — one of the saddest museum exhibitions I have ever attended. It is a show of friends lost, of technologies abandoned, of cities grown insular, of principles forsaken. It maps, over 35 years, the ascent of a photographer to the height of his profession, and then the disintegration of almost everything he loved, the art form of photography not least among them.We follow the fragile peace of the ’90s into a century of war, extremism, post-truth and privation. We follow the artist through the last days of the darkroom and the rise of digital cameras, which he adopted with only moderate success. A sunset in Puerto Rico, a club night in Hackney, the transit of Venus, liquid concrete before it hardens: “To Look Without Fear” confirms that Tillmans has always been a photographer of transience, of things here today and gone tomorrow. Now his two hometowns, Berlin and London, are both facing frigid winters with life-threatening power shortages, and his whole world feels on the cusp of vanishing.Tillmans was born in 1968 in the industrial heartland of West Germany. He had a childhood love of astronomy, acquiring his first telescope at age 12, and of British pop groups like New Order and Culture Club that inspired a lifelong passion for London. (In 1983, on an exchange program in the British capital, the 14-year-old Tillmans somehow got past the bouncer at the gay nightclub Heaven, but left early to get the last Tube home.)The artist considers “Lacanau (self),” from 1986, to be his first self-portrait. Lila Barth for The New York Times“Selbstportrait (Self-portrait),” from 1988, when Tillmans was 20.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, London“Faltenwurf (Keithstrasse),” a 2021 example of Tillmans’s drapery studies.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, London.Photography came more accidentally. On the beach in France one summer, Tillmans aimed a point-and-shoot camera at his flexed knee and silky black Adidas shorts: a first, abstracted self-portrait. That picture is in the first room at MoMA, and one of the funnier leitmotifs of “To Look Without Fear” is the three stripes of the Adidas logo, a queer sportswear fixation that endures even as cities and bodies change. At the show’s entrance we see the 20-year-old Tillmans in a skimpy red Adidas bathing suit. At its exit is a photograph from three decades later of another, crumpled pair of glistening red Adidas shorts: a drapery study, a memento mori.He moved to Britain for art school but got his break in magazines, shooting raves, festivals, and also fashion editorials. The London indie magazine i-D first published this show’s well-traveled photographs of his friends Lutz and Alex, gripping each other’s androgynous bodies. A giant portrait of the British DJ Smokin’ Jo, her silver sequined dress twinkling in the golden hour, was a commission for Interview. There were new gay magazines like Attitude, for which he photographed Tony Blair, and Butt, which printed his images of half-dressed fashion designers on pink paper, like a not-safe-for-work Financial Times.“Lutz & Alex sitting in the trees” (1992), a double portrait of Tillmans’s childhood friends.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, LondonHe was shooting on 35 mm rather than in large formats; he disdained the tripod, abjured conspicuous lighting. Nan Goldin comes to mind before some of his halcyon ’90s pictures, and she herself appears with two nudes in a 1996 Tillmans idyll: a millennial remake of Manet’s “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe.” But he’s far less diaristic than Goldin, and a more relevant influence may be the New Objectivity of 1920s Berlin, where painters and photographers like Christian Schad and Otto Dix made a virtue of hard surfaces and louche life.His partyers are often standing still. His nudes are almost always staged. The same cool, surface-level gaze falls upon the windows of London skyscrapers, the water of pools and oceans, and the great love of his youth, the painter Jochen Klein. Klein appears in two of this show’s largest prints: “Deer Hirsch” (1995), a rare black-and-white photograph of Klein and a young buck, staring wondrously at each other on an empty beach, and “Jochen taking a bath” (1997), shot months before his death from AIDS-related pneumonia. (The memory of that photo haunts a 2015 image of the singer Frank Ocean, another sad young man with closely cropped hair against white tiles.)Wolfgang Tillmans, “Jochen taking a bath,” 1997.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, London“Frank, in the shower” (2015), depicting the singer Frank Ocean.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, LondonWhat mattered more than the photographer’s subjects was the photographer’s regard. It was applied equally, unobtrusively, across genres — portrait, landscape, nude, still life — and united in the taped-up arrangements he first tried out in 1993. All together, on the gallery wall, the modest photographs could express a new, politically and sexually charged way of being in the world. They were promiscuous: not (or not only) in the word’s libertine sense, but freely mixing, ready to be rearranged, most themselves when with others. They were urban, too, and came to typify a newly vibrant and international London, where the mammoth Tate Modern opened in 2000 and, in the same year, Tillmans became the first non-British laureate of the Turner Prize.Later, in the 2005 exhibition “Truth Study Center,” Tillmans introduced a new display module that mixed his photographs with newspaper clippings (about war, fundamentalism, and also scientific breakthroughs) on low wooden tables. With these didactic works he meant to resist the absolutes of Bush-Blair rhetoric, but they ended up as preachy show-and-tell displays: a first act in the 21st-century domestication of Tillmans’s youthful freedom. Anyway, by the time of “Truth Study Center,” different and more disruptive photographic arrangements were coming into view on our (desktop) screens. The tacked-up pictures and the carefully laid-out tables would give way to the image-search grid and the social feed. Tillmans’s unframed printouts were becoming atavistic. The independent magazines where he found his voice were on their last legs.“Freischwimmer 26,” 2003. The abstract work is one of a series of pictures Tillmans has made without a camera, by exposing photo paper to lasers and other light sources.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, LondonHis most powerful response to this century’s explosion of images has been the cameraless “Freischwimmer” abstractions, begun in 2003. So beautiful, these pictures: grand, streaky expanses of color, suggesting bodies or currents, made by exposing photosensitive paper to lasers and other hand-held lights. Yet something began to go sour in the Tillmans method around the time of his adoption of a digital camera in 2008. Large, colorful prints of a Shanghai street or an Argentine shantytown are too crisp, artificially alienated. Recent portraits, such as the Frank Ocean photograph, forsake the soft-focus intimacy of the ’90s for hard-candy sheen. The later party pictures are really dreadful: The black tones have lost all their mystery, the sex appeal has drained, and in a time of ubiquitous cameraphones his no-style style feels redundant.Absent at MoMA, though discussed in Marcoci’s catalog, is Tillmans’s most widely seen digital endeavor: his posters for the 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. Made in a season of now justified panic, these balmy images of jet-trail-crossed skies or the cliffs of Dover, overlaid with pleas for apathetic youth to vote Remain, were freely distributed online. “What is lost is lost forever,” read the caption on the most ethereal of these posters, and he wasn’t kidding. With Brexit, the imagery of borders introduced earlier that decade — the concrete walls of Gaza, the customs line at Gatwick — arrived at Tillmans’s doorstep. He thought the lack of artifice, the pictures everyone could read, might inspire people to live together; it turned out he was speaking a language narrower than he’d ever known. A 2021 photo of worn-out maroon passports (the color of all E.U. member states’ travel documents; the Johnson government replaced Britain’s with a blue one) might as well be a grave marker for Tillmans’s London. Some people really did have more freedoms when they were young.Recent works by Wolfgang Tillmans at MoMA, including, at center, “Kae Tempest” (2021).Lila Barth for The New York TimesWe all age. We all lose things. And yet I don’t blame Tillmans at all for considering, as he tells my colleague Matthew Anderson in this Sunday’s New York Times, that he might take a sabbatical and leave art for electoral politics. The democratic impulse in his photography, manifested through simple commercial lenses and unpretentious printouts, has receded into self-righteousness now, and his collisions of self-portraits, celebrity pictures, handsome sunsets and political slogans — well, how can these retain their force when a hundred million social media profiles do the same? He has reached the end of something, summed up with panache and great melancholy in this important show, and his accomplishment, not unlike E.U. membership, is easier to appreciate once it’s lost. Those late, sweaty ’90s nights: then, we were sure we had met the chronicler of a new millennium’s freedoms. What if Tillmans was instead a harbinger of the artist as entrepreneur of the self, and of how we would all go on posting pictures even as our misfortunes piled up offscreen?Wolfgang Tillmans: To Look Without FearOpens to members Sept. 9 and to the public Sept. 12 through Jan. 1, 2023, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, Manhattan, (212) 708-9400, moma.org. More

Republicans’ amoral alliance with the former president may well be a midterms curse.Ben WisemanDemocrats were doomed. We prediction-mad pundits felt predictable certainty about that. The recent history of midterm elections augured disaster for the party in power. Inflation would make the damage that much worse.So why are Republicans sweating?Their overreach on abortion and the subsequent mobilization of women voters explain a great deal but not everything. There’s another prominent plotline. Its protagonist is Donald Trump. And its possible moral is a sweet and overdue pileup of clichés — about reaping what you sow, paying the piper, lying in the bed you’ve made.Republicans chose to kneel before him. Will he now bring them to their knees?Thanks in large part to Trump, they’re stuck with Senate candidates — Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, Herschel Walker in Georgia, Blake Masters in Arizona — whose ineptness, inanity, immoderation or all three significantly diminish their chances in purple states at a propitious juncture.Thanks in even larger part to Trump, voters ranked threats to democracy as the most pressing problem facing the country in a recent NBC News poll. That intensifying concern is among the reasons that President Biden went so big and bold last week in his intensely debated speech about extremism in America. He was eyeing the midterms, and he was wagering that Republican leaders’ indulgence of Trump’s foul play and fairy tales might finally cost them.Trump is also a factor in Republicans’ vulnerability regarding abortion rights. For his own selfish political purposes, he made grand anti-abortion promises. He appointed decidedly anti-abortion judges, including three of the Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. He as much as anyone fired up the anti-abortion movement to the point where Republicans may now get burned.With two months until Election Day, Republicans want to focus voters’ attention on unaffordable housing, exorbitant grocery bills and the generally high cost of living. They want to instill deeper and broader fear about immigration and crime. They want to portray Democrats as the enemies of the American way.But that’s more than a little tricky when Trump had America’s secrets strewn throughout the bowels of Mar-a-Loco. When his excuses for mishandling those classified documents change at a dizzying clip, contradict previous ones and often boil down to his typical infantile formula of I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I. When he uses Truth Social, the media penal colony to which Twitter and Facebook sentenced him, for all the old falsehoods plus new ones. When criminal charges against him aren’t out of the question.The progressive excesses of some Democrats pale beside the madness of this would-be monarch.Democrats could still have a bad, even brutal, November. That is indeed how the pendulum historically swings, and two months is plenty of time for political dynamics to change yet again. Biden could overplay his hand, a possibility suggested by that speech.But for the moment, Republicans are spooked. Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, has decided to try to recapture the party’s long-ago Contract-With-America magic by detailing a “Commitment to America” that will no doubt omit what should be the most important commitment of all — to the truth. It also won’t erase the fact that 196 of the 529 Republican nominees running for the House, the Senate, governor, attorney general or secretary had “fully denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election,” according to a chilling FiveThirtyEight analysis of the party’s nominees as of Wednesday.That morally corrupt position was probably a political asset in their primaries, just as having Trump’s endorsement usually was. But in the general election? As Republican nominees pivot toward that, at least a few of them are realizing that it’s a different ballgame — and that Trump is trouble. They’re taking baby steps away from the world’s biggest baby.Good luck with that. He’ll never let them go, never muffle himself long enough or behave well enough for there to be a Republican narrative that doesn’t revolve around him. That was clear to Republicans from the start. To hang with him is to hang with him.Words Worth SideliningSean Penn in his early, star-making role as the stoner Jeff Spicoli in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”PhotofestThe debut of “Words Worth Sidelining” last month prompted a tsunami of emails, which I’m sure I told friends was “amazing.”Gabriela Kegalj of Toronto would have my head for that.Her email was one of the many droplets of water in that great wave, and its purpose was the classification of “amazing” as “a linguistic sickness,” used so promiscuously that it means nothing anymore.“Human birth is amazing,” she wrote. “The images captured by the James Webb telescope are amazing. Toast is not amazing — neither is hair, your shoes or your new enamel-coated cast-iron made-in-France skillet.”She’s right, of course. To be “amazing” something should genuinely “amaze” you or a saner analogue of you, and that’s a high bar, suggesting that the thing in question almost defies belief, leaves you dumbfounded, perhaps casts a sort of spell on you, maybe even flabbergasts you. (No, I did not just take out a thesaurus, though that litany probably would have been better if I had consulted one.) In its purest form, “amaze” has an aura of magic, a touch of grandeur. It’s squandered on a skillet. (On a top-notch air fryer, however …)“Amazing” as a ubiquitous catchall encomium seems to be most popular among young adults. It’s another thing for which we can thank Generation Y or Z. (I lose my bearings at the end of the generational alphabet.) It’s to 20-somethings today what “awesome” was to 20-somethings of my time, and both words belong to an ignoble tradition of overstatement that’s fetchingly playful and theatrical at first but then just reflexive and banal.That tradition includes “brilliant,” which is the British version of “amazing.” It includes “perfect,” an adjectival crime of which I’m guilty. The brunch plans that a friend just floated? “Perfect,” I say, though they’re not. They’re convenient. They’re sensible. Maybe they’re even mildly exciting. But “perfect” would be Thomas Keller waltzing into my bedroom with his finest Gruyere omelet and a pitcher of mimosas on a brushed nickel tray that enables me to eat and drink while still under the covers, deep in a gripping mystery novel. That’s a brunch you can’t improve on. And that’s what “perfect” means.Of course, “perfect” is polite. “Brilliant” and “amazing,” too. “Awesome” at this late date just sounds like the sub-articulate raving of a stoner — but that could be because I’ll always associate it with Jeff Spicoli, the dazed and bemused character brought to unforgettable life by Sean Penn in the 1982 movie “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” I loved his performance.I might even call it amazing.“Words Worth Sidelining” will appear every month or so, at least for a while. To suggest a term or phrase, please email me here, please put “Words Worth Sidelining” in the subject line and please include your name and place of residence.For the Love of SentencesThe walrus Freya was a harbor fixture.Tor Erik Schroder/NTB Scanpix, via Associated PressWhen we met here three weeks ago, many of you were aptly besotted with Dwight Garner’s review of Jared Kushner’s White House memoir, “Breaking History,” in The Times. Although I showcased one sentence from it, I could have showcased half a dozen. That review yielded more nominations for this feature than any article ever had.So it feels right to begin today with a favorite line of yours from Elizabeth Spiers’s subsequent review of Kushner’s MAGA opus in The Washington Post. She called the book “a portrait of a man whose moral compass has been demagnetized.” (Thanks to Barry Bergen of Lisbon, Portugal, and Lois DiTommaso of Rutherford, N.J., among many others, for nominating this.)Also in The Post, Michael Gerson contrasted Christianity at its best with what Trump’s evangelical supporters have not only accepted but also embraced: “It is difficult for me to understand why so many believers have turned down a wedding feast to graze in political dumpsters.” (Carol Mack, Minneapolis, and Peggy Somermeyer, Richmond, Texas, among others)And Dan Zak wondered why, during a water crisis, we cling to a certain sponge. “Lawns: burned out, blond and dead, in the air fryer of August,” he wrote. “Lawns: emerald green — no, alien green — and kept that way by maniacal vigilance and an elaborate system of pipes and potions, organic and otherwise, in defiance of ecology. And for what? To have, in this chaos, dominion over something?” (Judy Morice, Lansdale, Pa.)In The Guardian, Andrew Rawnsley fashioned a deft start to a recent plaint about Britain’s political woes: “I have an issue with the phrase ‘zombie government.’ Say what you like about the walking dead, they occasionally get their teeth into things.” (Marianne Valentine, Johannesburg, South Africa)In The Tampa Bay Times, John Romano reflected on the predominance of passing over rushing for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, led by the phenomenal quarterback Tom Brady: “When you have Eric Clapton in your band, you don’t schedule a lot of drum solos.” (Tom Akins, Trinity, Fla.)As for the abundance of standout sentences from my colleagues at this fine news organization, here’s Jason Horowitz on Norwegian officials’ killing of the female walrus Freya: “On Friday, they decided that she would no longer swim with the fishes.” (Anne Melanson, Manhattan, and Jeff Hiday, Vienna, Va., among others)Libby Watson on Amazon versus a challenge famously resistant to efficiency and ingenuity: “Put it up against the problems of the American health care system, and it looks like David with a slingshot made of wet spaghetti.” (Marianne Lambelet, Farmington, Conn.)Bret Stephens on Trump’s evolving excuses for absconding with classified documents: “With Trump, the line between the shambolic and the sinister is often blurred. His entire being is like Inspector Clouseau doing an impression of Jack Nicholson in ‘The Shining,’ or maybe vice versa.” (Mark Fenske, Moraga, Calif., and Marci Imbrogno, Charlotte, N.C., among others)Maggie Haberman, Glenn Thrush and Alan Feuer on that dark bumbler’s deathless tantrums: “Even as he fuels outrage in sympathetic media outlets and tries to turn attention to Mr. Biden and the so-called deep state, Mr. Trump is to some extent walking on the phantom limbs of his expired presidency.” (Margaret Akin, San Diego, and Donae Ceja, Akron, Ohio, among others)And Charles Blow on what Mike Pence, the former vice president, is selling to voters who thrilled to Trump but might prefer a saner alternative: “someone who has touched the hem of the garment but has not put on the straitjacket.” (Helen Mooty, Seabrook, Texas, and Linda McCray, Dayton, Ohio, among others)To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here, and please include your name and place of residence.On a Personal NoteJohn Houseman (far right) in his Oscar-winning role as an intimidating, exacting professor in “The Paper Chase.”20th Century Fox/Jagarts, via PhotofestA new semester just began, my third at Duke University, and last week I met the dozen students in my writing seminar. Three of them I was really reconnecting with — I’ve had them in classes of mine before, and I apparently didn’t screw up too badly.I’m still a novice at this professor gig, still wondering how it’s done best, still hitting up colleagues for their wisdom and, above all, still asking the question: What do we owe students — in general and, specifically, at this moment in time?We owe them candor. We always have. But one of the greatest challenges of teaching is calibrating the optimal mix of candor and kindness, because we owe them the latter, too. Even college-age students are relatively raw, with undiscovered or unrealized talents whose development depends on encouragement, so “The Paper Chase” model of supposedly constructive effacement seems wrong to me. It might toughen some of them. It might break others.Unearned or exaggerated praise, though, isn’t the answer. It can make students believe that they’ve aced something they haven’t and found a calling when they didn’t. That’s not kindness. That’s cowardice. It’s also deception.We owe students something else, too — or at least I think, in my novicehood, that we do. We owe them doubt.In our world now, there’s a tug toward premature and excessive certainty, even stridency. (Or, worse yet, snark.) Social media rewards that.It fuels our politics, too. Many leaders and voters alike rush toward judgments and then won’t back off them, and those judgments are often just the borrowed opinions of their chosen clique. They’re the fruits of identity, not inquiry.In that context, shouldn’t we professors be wary of modeling anything akin to voice-of-God omniscience? Yes, there are things we know — facts and insights that we must share with students, skills that we’re there to show them how to acquire. We mustn’t be shy about those.But there are also things that we don’t know, things that no one can fully know, subjects that aren’t quickly reducible to tidy talking points. “It’s complicated,” I say constantly to students. “It’s debatable.” “Maybe.” “Possibly.” “Probably.”“Definitely” is more alluring. But that’s precisely the reason to resist it. More

In May 1992, Pat Buchanan made his way to Smuggler’s Canyon along the U.S.-Mexico border, where migrants passed into the United States. A motley crowd had gathered for his news conference there: reporters still following his flagging campaign for president, Mexican migrants curious about the event (some of whom were running a pop-up refreshment stand to sell soda to Buchanan supporters), members of a far-right white-power group eager to hear a credible candidate make the case for sealing the border.“I am calling attention to a national disgrace,” he told the crowd. “The failure of the national government of the United States to protect the borders of the United States from an illegal invasion that involves at least a million aliens a year.” Mr. Buchanan blamed that “illegal invasion” for a host of problems, ranging from drugs to the recent riots in Los Angeles. He called for a “Buchanan fence,” a trench and a barrier that would block migration from the south and become part of the infrastructure of what critics called Fortress America: a nation bound by impregnable barriers that kept out foreign people, foreign goods and foreign ideas.By the time he arrived at Smuggler’s Canyon, it had been clear for months that Mr. Buchanan stood no chance of wresting the nomination from the sitting president, George H.W. Bush. But Mr. Buchanan was no longer aiming to win the presidency, if he ever was — he was aiming to win the party. He had long believed that “the greatest vacuum in American politics is to the right of Ronald Reagan,” that Reaganism’s days were numbered and that a new right was anxious to be born. He would be the midwife to that new right, a pessimistic, media-savvy, revolution-minded conservatism that took root in the 1990s.And while the new conservatism Mr. Buchanan hashed out in the 1992 campaign never attracted the impressive majorities that Reagan and Bush had won in the 1980s, it nonetheless dislodged Reaganism as the core of the party in the decades that followed. In the process, the right learned that unpopular populist politics could win power even when they couldn’t win majorities. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 showed that a Buchananite politician could seize the presidency; his loss in 2020 showed how tenuous that hold on power could be. The question facing Republicans now is whether, having adopted the Buchanan model, they can rework it to win elections outright, or whether they will continue to rely on its vision of democracy without majorities — or worse, no democracy at all.The notion that the Republican Party would abandon Reaganism seemed absurd in the late 1980s. The wildly popular president left office with what was then the highest approval rating of any departing president since Gallup began tracking it under Harry Truman. For conservatives, Reagan wasn’t just popular — he had redeemed the Cold War conservative movement by blending it with optimism, charisma and an emotional defense of pluralistic democracy.While that defense was often more rhetorical than real — Reagan backed authoritarian regimes as long as they were anti-Communist and dog-whistled about race throughout his presidency — it had genuine policy implications. He regularly emphasized the need for the free movement of people and goods, calling for a North American accord in his 1980 campaign that would lower the trade and migration borders between Mexico, Canada and the United States. He also spoke in stirring terms about the value of immigration and cultural pluralism. “I think it’s really closer to the truth to say that America has assimilated as much as her immigrants have,” he said at a naturalization ceremony in 1984. “It’s made for a delightful diversity, and it’s made us a stronger and a more vital nation.”Yet even as he won back-to-back landslide elections — sweeping 44 states in 1980 and 49 in 1984 as he expanded the party to include the newly designated Reagan Democrats — his broad appeal lost him the support of some on the right. In 1982, Mr. Buchanan bemoaned “the transformation of Ronald Reagan from a pivotal and revolutionary figure in American politics into a traditional, middle-of-the-road pragmatic Republican president.” In fact, Mr. Buchanan was brought in as communications director for the Reagan White House in 1985 to appease a group that called itself the New Right, Reagan-skeptical conservatives who believed the president was too pragmatic and soft, particularly on social issues.Mr. Buchanan’s skepticism remained throughout his years as communications director. He even toyed with the idea of running for president in 1988 to test his theory about the political vacuum to Reagan’s right. But he ultimately left the sideshow campaign to another Pat, the televangelist Pat Robertson. What Mr. Buchanan understood was that 1988 was too soon: Reagan’s star shone so brightly on the right that coming out against his policies, even while praising the man himself, would do little to win over conservatives.But as he watched Bush win the nomination that would end in a third straight landslide win for Republicans, Mr. Buchanan delivered a diagnosis that would shape his own presidential campaigns in the years that followed. Writing about the future of the party for National Review in 1988, Mr. Buchanan concluded, “The Republican moment slipped by, I believe, when the G.O.P. refused to take up the challenge from the Left on its chosen battleground: the politics of class, culture, religion and race.” He would return in four years to take up that fight.When Mr. Buchanan announced his campaign for president in 1991, the world looked very different than it had just a few years earlier. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union brought the Cold War to a sudden end. The geopolitical reality that had governed American politics for nearly 50 years, and defined the Cold War conservative movement that Reagan had led, disappeared overnight. Mr. Buchanan grasped that a new conservatism — or rather, an old conservatism renovated for a new age — was possible.Mr. Buchanan found a freedom in the end of the Cold War. For decades, that geopolitical battle had led to a widespread belief among Americans that the country had to actively engage with the world to halt the spread of Communism, had to embrace a more open and pluralistic society to model the righteousness of the West, had to affirmatively embrace ideas of democracy and freedom and, eventually, equality.As the Cold War came to an end, Mr. Buchanan saw a chance to slip the bonds of those commitments. At the very moment democratic triumphalism was in full force and commentators were musing about the end of history, he began questioning whether democracy really was the best form of government. “The American press is infatuated to the point of intoxication with ‘democracy,’ ” he wrote in 1991. To make his point, he compared the Marine Corps and corporations like IBM to the federal government. “Only the last is run on democratic, not autocratic, principles. Yet, who would choose the last as the superior institution?”He harkened back to pre-Cold-War foreign policy as well. While Bush’s approval ratings soared to unprecedented heights during Operation Desert Storm in Iraq (they would only be surpassed by his son’s approval rating after the Sept. 11 attacks), Mr. Buchanan denounced the invasion and Bush’s plans to construct a “new world order.” His presidential campaign even borrowed the slogan “America First” from the anti-interventionist group that had opposed U.S. involvement in World War II, a provocative move given that the group had been tainted by its ties to antisemites like the aviator Charles Lindbergh.Yet Mr. Buchanan’s retro politics was also thoroughly modern. He built his political reputation not through service but through media, a novel approach for a presidential candidate. In 1982, he debuted as a regular panelist on the new PBS series “The McLaughlin Group,” a shouty round-table show that eventually drew millions of viewers. That same year, he also became host of the show “Crossfire” on the fledgling cable news network CNN. The show pitted him against the liberal commentator Tom Braden for a weekly left-right brawl. It quickly became one of CNN’s highest-rated shows.It was that Pat Buchanan, the feisty, anti-democratic, outrageous, race-baiting figure, that Americans came to know over the course of the 1980s and early 1990s. They got to know him not in the echo chamber of right-wing media but through mainstream political programming — the place, in fact, where modern right-wing punditry would be born in the 1990s. Some of today’s most notable right-wing voices became household names not on Fox News but on cable news outlets and political comedy shows like Bill Maher’s “Politically Incorrect.” (Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson got their television start on CNN, Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter on MSNBC.)But Mr. Buchanan was not content to be a television star. He wanted to be in the arena, to vie for power in the national spotlight of a presidential campaign. Routinely trading his host chair for the campaign trail, he helped construct the revolving door between punditry and the presidency that now characterizes Republican politics in the United States.In his efforts to fill the vacuum to the right of Reagan, Mr. Buchanan also borrowed directly from the far right. The New Right had drawn inspiration from the campaigns of the Alabama segregationist George Wallace; Mr. Buchanan now drew from the candidacy of David Duke, a former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan who had become a national name for his efforts to win office in Louisiana. (Mr. Buchanan would disavow him during his 1996 campaign, removing a campaign adviser with ties to Mr. Duke.) After attempting to run as a Democrat for most of the 1980s, Mr. Duke became a Republican in the late 1980s. He then ran in — and won — a special election for a seat in the Louisiana House. (He would go on to lose a campaign for U.S. Senate in 1990, running as a Republican and winning 43 percent of the vote in the general election.)Republican leaders denounced Mr. Duke during the special election campaign, which drew even Reagan out of retirement to make clear the former Klan leader did not have the party’s support. But while Republican elites scrambled to distance the party from Duke, Mr. Buchanan sought to learn from him. “David Duke walked into the political vacuum left when conservative Republicans in the Reagan years were intimidated into shucking off winning social issues so we might be able to pass moral muster with Ben Hooks and Coretta King,” he wrote, naming two Black civil rights leaders. That, he argued, was the wrong approach. Instead, the party should look at why Duke was so attractive to voters and work to appeal to his base.It was a tricky maneuver. Mr. Buchanan seemed to want to mainstream the Klan leader’s issues without the baggage of the white hood, to win the extremist vote without attracting charges of extremism. As his visit to Smuggler’s Canyon in 1992 showed, that was not an easy task.There, mixed in with the crowd at the border for Mr. Buchanan’s news conference, was a group that made clear the cost of courting the Duke vote. Tom Metzger, a former Klan grand dragon and founder of the White Aryan Resistance, gathered with other white-power activists to support Mr. Buchanan’s anti-immigrant speech. The campaign quickly clarified to reporters that the white-power activists were not part of the event. But their presence served as a warning that Mr. Buchanan had little control over how much extremism he invited into the Republican Party. He was not siphoning off extremist ideas; he was opening a floodgate.Mr. Metzger also served as a reminder of Mr. Buchanan’s own extremism. For years, Mr. Buchanan faced accusations of antisemitism: He wondered aloud whether people had really been gassed to death at the concentration camp at Treblinka, denounced efforts to round up fugitive Nazis and called Congress “Israeli-occupied territory.” In an early version of the Great Replacement Theory, he railed against nonwhite immigration as fundamentally anti-American, asking in 1990, “Does this First World nation wish to become a Third World country?”There was more than enough on Mr. Buchanan’s record for reporters to expose his extremism and make clear the roots of his candidacy. Yet it seemed to some, like the Washington Post columnist David Broder, that journalists were going easy on Mr. Buchanan. “The press has treated his campaign lightly, presuming that it is just an interlude before he goes back on CNN’s ‘Crossfire’ and the speaking circuit. That’s a mistake,” he wrote in a piece comparing Mr. Buchanan to Mr. Wallace. “Like George Wallace,” he wrote, “he has a deadly knack for finding the most divisive issues in American life, including race, and a growing skill in exploiting them.” Too many journalists, Mr. Broder feared, believed Mr. Buchanan couldn’t be a crackpot because he was a colleague.Though Mr. Buchanan lost in 1992, and again in 1996 and 2000, his ideas took root immediately. In reaction to his surprisingly strong showing in the 1992 New Hampshire primary, the Republican Party adapted its platform to call, for the first time, for “structures” on the border. California activists took note as well, and a year later, they began working on what would become Proposition 187, a harsh measure that would cut undocumented immigrants off from almost every nonemergency government service, including public education. And while Republican politicians like George W. Bush and John McCain attempted to tamp down that nativist streak in the party, it was the nativists who ultimately won.Mr. Buchanan’s style, too, became a central mode of politics, as politicians learned that headline-grabbing outrage could build a base far more easily than shoe-leather politicking could. Likewise, thinning the line between extremism and presidential politics, which had been considered a vice since the disastrous 1964 campaign of Barry Goldwater, slowly became a virtue: a way of expanding the base and injecting enthusiasm into a campaign.Those dynamics are all at play in today’s Republican Party. Once the party of Ronald Reagan, it is now in thrall to the politics of Mr. Buchanan. Yet it is also at a crossroads. Buchananism was never truly popular. Neither was Trumpism: With Donald Trump, Republicans won power but not popularity — at least, not a popularity they could translate into clear electoral majorities. The simple solution would be to return to Reaganism, to reconstruct that big, if still exclusionary, tent and win huge majorities. But recent efforts to recreate Reaganism and establish a more inclusive Republican Party, like George W. Bush’s appeals to compassionate conservatism and Senator John McCain’s insistence on immigration reform, met fierce opposition from the party’s base.So the party has instead tried to strike a tenuous balance, strengthening counter-majoritarian institutions, appealing to nonwhite men in an effort to bolster its numbers, and scouting for candidates who can speak with a Trumpian patois without the Trumpian excesses that drive more moderate voters away. It is a near-impossible balance to strike, and if it fails, it carries not only the threat of more pseudo-legal efforts to rewrite election outcomes but also the threat of escalating political violence. This is the path the party chose when it traded Reaganism for Buchananism, making Mr. Buchanan’s endless campaign for the presidency, despite its losses, one of the most consequential in American history.Nicole Hemmer (@pastpunditry) is an associate professor of history and the director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for the Study of the Presidency at Vanderbilt University and the author of “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s” and “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.”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 their first visit as a couple to the White House since leaving office in 2017, the former president Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama unveiled their portraits at a ceremony in the East Room

‘Telling that fuller story’: Michelle and Barack on their White House portraits More

BAGHDAD — On most days in the Iraqi capital, jackhammers and electric drills provide the soundtrack to a construction boom, with multistory restaurants taking shape and a new $800 million central bank building rising above the skyline.But this apparent prosperity in parts of Baghdad belies what many Iraqi officials and citizens see as the crumbling foundation of the state — an oil-rich Middle Eastern country that the United States had intended to be free and democratic when it led an invasion 19 years ago to topple the dictator Saddam Hussein.After the invasion, Iraq’s long-sidelined Shiite Muslim majority came to dominate government, and the power struggle between Shiite and Sunni political groups fueled a sectarian war. Now, in a dangerous threat to the country’s already tenuous stability, rival Shiite armed groups, the most powerful among them tied to neighboring Iran, are fighting each other, and are beyond the control of the central government.“Internally, externally, at the political level and at the security level, Iraq is now a failed state,” said Saad Eskander, an Iraqi historian. “The Iraqi state cannot project its authority over its territory or its people.”A street in an impoverished neighborhood of Baghdad, where many live below the poverty line and do not have access to enough clean water or government-supplied electricity.Sleeping through the midday heat in Baghdad.Iraq’s weaknesses once again came into sharp relief last week when a stalemate over forming a new government — almost a year after the last elections — exploded into violence in the heart of the capital.Followers of the influential Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr stormed the heavily guarded Green Zone in an antigovernment protest after Mr. Sadr announced he was withdrawing from politics. Then rival pro-Iranian Shiite paramilitary fighters on the public payroll began shooting at the protesters, and armed members of a Sadr militia emerged to fight them.Ordered by the prime minister not to shoot at the demonstrators, government security forces were largely sidelined while the rival militias fought it out. After two days of fighting killed 34 people, Mr. Sadr ordered his followers to withdraw from the Green Zone, restoring an uneasy calm.The violence was rooted in a stalemate over forming a government that has dragged on since the elections in October 2021.Mr. Sadr’s followers won the largest bloc of seats in Parliament, although that was not enough to form a government without coalition partners. When he failed to put together a ruling coalition, the major Iran-backed parties with paramilitary wings — Shiite political rivals to Mr. Sadr — stepped in and tried to sideline him.Mr. Sadr then turned to his power on the street rather than at the negotiating table, ordering his followers to set up a protest camp at Parliament — a tactic he has used in the past.“If we discuss post-2003 Iraq, then we have to say it has never actually been a functioning state,” said Maria Fantappie of the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, a Swiss-based conflict management organization. “We never had a prime minister with total control of the security forces or the borders.”Relatives of patients await news at a Baghdad hospital that treats poorer communities.Muhammed Said Jihad received oxygen while his cousin watched over him at a Baghdad hospital.That Iraq has not collapsed is thanks largely to the country’s immense oil wealth. But most citizens never see the benefit of that wealth, suffering through daily electricity cuts, decrepit schools and a lack of health care or even clean water.Last month, the country’s respected finance minister, Ali Allawi, resigned with a stark warning that staggering levels of corruption were draining Iraqi resources and posed an existential threat.“Vast underground networks of senior officials, corrupt businessmen and politicians operate in the shadows to dominate entire sectors of the economy and siphon off literally billions of dollars from the public purse,” Mr. Allawi wrote in his resignation letter to the prime minister. “This vast octopus of corruption and deceit has reached into every sector of the country’s economy and institutions: It must be dismantled at all costs if this country is to survive.”Mr. Allawi, who also served as finance minister in 2006, said he was shocked when he returned at “how far the machinery of government had deteriorated” under the domination of special interest groups tied to various countries in the region.“You have the people who fly off to Tehran, fly off to Amman, fly off to Ankara, fly off to the U.A.E., fly off to Qatar,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in June. “Before, they used to fly off to Washington, but they don’t do that anymore.”A garbage truck dumping trash in a Baghdad area that is home to generations of Iraqis who migrated from the south seeking better prospects. A street vendor fixing a fan for a customer in Baghdad.The United States, meanwhile, has increasingly disengaged from the Arab world, focusing mainly on containing Iran and fostering normalization with Israel. For years the target of hostility over its occupation of Iraq, the country now appears to be losing relevance as Shiite militias battle it out for primacy.Iraq sits on the world’s fourth-largest oil reserves, and oil revenues have both fed corruption and propped up the economy.According to state and local officials, militias and tribal groups siphon off customs revenue from Iraq’s Gulf port of Umm Qasr. Crossings along the 1,000-mile border with Iran are another source of illicit revenue. Iran-backed militias in Iraq control sectors like scrap metal, and they extort payments for protection from businesses.Government contracts are another major source of corruption.Iraq’s health ministry, traditionally run by officials loyal to Mr. Sadr, is the monopoly buyer of almost half the medications imported into Iraq and is considered one of the most corrupt ministries, according to Iraqi officials and outside experts.Three years ago, Ala Alwan, a former World Health Organization official, resigned as health minister, saying he could no longer fight corruption in the ministry or ward off threats.Mr. Allawi, in the interview in June when he was still finance minister, described a country that had essentially become ungovernable.“You can’t do anything but manage daily affairs, given that in this country, there’s a crisis every day,” he said.Baghdad residents on a city bus. Iraq has one of the youngest populations in the Middle East, and there are fears that the economy will not be able to support them.Medical waste flowing into the Tigris River near a hospital in Baghdad.With the war in Ukraine driving up oil prices state revenue has recently come from oil exports — a lack of diversification that could prove disastrous as the world increasingly turns to alternative energy sources.But with dysfunctional ministries and a weak central government, there is no real effort to improve public services or life for the one-quarter of the population estimated by the government to live in poverty.Large parts of the country suffer from shortages of electricity or clean water — a continuing crisis that fueled widespread protests three years ago, leading to the fall of the government.Few sectors are as blatantly dysfunctional as the country’s once-respected educational system. For almost seven years, thousands of temporary teachers have worked without pay, waiting for a chance to be hired by the education ministry. The ministry has now begun making payments.Schools are so overcrowded they operate in shifts, offering only half a day of classes to students. Many schools lack running water or enough toilets. Most are lucky if they have fans in the 100-degree heat.More than half of Iraqi students drop out before high school. In Baghdad and other cities, children who have left school push wooden carts in outdoor markets or hawk bottles of water to drivers in traffic.Relatives of patients lining up to collect prescriptions at a Baghdad hospital.A classroom for trainee doctors at a Baghdad hospital.“We didn’t receive new textbooks this year,” said Um Zahra, a primary schoolteacher who was doing paperwork at the education ministry this week. “We are trying to use old ones,” she added, saying she did not want to give her full name because she did not have her husband’s permission to speak.Um Zahra said her own neighborhood in Baghdad, the second biggest city in the Middle East, had not had regular running water since 2014.There is so little faith in the political system that in Baghdad, voter turnout was about 30 percent in the last elections. Many expect the same corrupt politicians to remain in power thanks to a post-2003 system that ensures key posts for specific religious and ethnic groups.With neighboring Iran and Turkey both frequently breaching Iraqi sovereignty, the weakness of the Iraqi government and state institutions poses a threat to regional stability — as it did in 2014 when the Iraqi army collapsed in the face of an Islamic State assault that conquered large parts of the country.Mr. Eskander, the historian, said Iraq’s instability can be traced back to before Saddam was toppled, when it lost control of some of its borders and territory in the Iran-Iraq war. But he said he still had hope that the country would survive.“A change of leaders — a change of generations — is the only way,” Mr. Eskander said.Open sewage in a poor neighborhood in Baghdad. More