Elections

Rome has defied efforts to make basic services work, and the incumbent mayor lags in the polls, with no shortage of rivals hoping to take her place.ROME — In the five years since Virginia Raggi became mayor, Rome has had some problems. Garbage has piled up on sidewalks, attracting swarms of sea gulls and crows. A pothole epidemic has riddled city streets. Public buses, already unreliable, have started combusting. And the city’s Christmas tree has looked so sad that Romans nicknamed it “Mangy.”Now, in the days leading up to Rome’s mayoral election on Sunday, the city’s newspapers, frustrated residents and a long list of candidates jostling to replace Ms. Raggi have attacked her on an issue that they say encapsulates just how uncivilized it has become: marauding packs of wild boars. Her critics call them “Raggi’s Boars,” swapping viral videos of pigs in Roman dumpsters.“If we want to make a zoo, we are on a good path,” Carlo Calenda, one of the candidates running against Ms. Raggi, said on Italian television.The perceived weakness of Ms. Raggi has drawn 21 opponents across the political spectrum. The main challengers in her re-election bid include a conservative lawyer and two center-left politicians with national profiles. But fringe characters, including “Dr. Seduction” and a Gladiator re-enactor who calls himself “Nero,” have also jumped at the chance of replacing Ms. Raggi, who trails badly in the polls.Virginia Raggi, the incumbent mayor.Fabio Frustaci/EPA, via ShutterstockLocal Italian elections, especially in the major cities, are often considered bellwethers for the broader national mood. Ms. Raggi’s landslide victory in 2016 as the candidate of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement anticipated Five Star’s success at the 2018 national elections.But Five Star’s popularity has plummeted, and Italy is enjoying a rare period of political stability under Prime Minister Mario Draghi, an independent, stripping Rome’s election of such broad ramifications this time around. Winning here is still seen as a measure of strength of the national parties, but this time, municipal issues — traffic, trash and unwanted wildlife — have come to the fore.It is unlikely that any candidate will win a majority of the vote when polls close on Monday, prompting another round of voting and possibly weeks of horse trading that could very well turn Ms. Raggi into a power broker.But she is not conceding anything and has campaigned vigorously in the closing days. She blames the larger region of Lazio, which includes Rome and is run by the center-left Democratic Party, for all of the trash and invasive species. After a stint on Rome’s City Council, and pledging, according to her party’s original rules, that she would never serve more than two terms in public office, Ms. Raggi now argues that five full years running the city is not enough time to change Rome.Carlo Calenda, a center-left candidate for mayor and a former national economic minister.Tiziana Fabi/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA full decade, she says, will do the trick.Romans do not seem so sure. The latest polls favor Enrico Michetti, a lawyer and last-minute candidate supported by several center-right parties and by the far-right leader Giorgia Meloni, who is Roman and has a significant base. Mr. Michetti has gained attention for his knack of ducking the news media (Italian reporters call him “Houdini”) and speaking largely about ancient Rome when asked about modern-day problems.“When Caesar died, it looked like everything was over,” Mr. Michetti said in July during a rare appearance in an electoral debate when asked about his idea for the future of Rome. “But then Caesar Octavian Augustus put institutions in the center.”In a telephone interview on Friday, Mr. Michetti defended his talk of Rome’s glory days, which he described as a time of civic-minded governance. “Rome would never have built the pyramids; too much effort in the interest of one individual,” he said. “Instead, Rome built bridges, roads, aqueducts, theaters — anything to serve the collective well-being.”Enrico Michetti, the right-wing alliance candidate. He is leading in the latest polls.Tiziana Fabi/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Michetti is trailed by Roberto Gualtieri, the candidate of the center-left Democratic Party. Mr. Gualtieri was Italy’s minister of economy and finance from 2019 until early this year, and before that, he was the chairman of the Economic Affairs Committee in the European Parliament. A historian partial to gray suits, he has emphasized his competence and expertise as a contrast to what critics consider Ms. Raggi’s ineptitude.“Rome can have a rebirth,” he said in a telephone interview, “after the bad administration of these years.”Mr. Gualtieri has campaigned, sometimes with a guitar to liven things up, on the promise to turn Rome, where it often takes roughly forever to get anything done, into a “15-minutes city” where residents can quickly reach any service.But in a familiar dynamic in Italian politics, the center-left vote is split. One of Mr. Gualtieri’s rivals is Mr. Calenda, who was once the country’s economic development minister and who now sits in the European Parliament. A former member of the Democratic Party, Mr. Calenda broke with the party to protest an alliance it made with its former enemy Five Star, which he loathes.Roberto Gualtieri, the center-left candidate of the Democratic Party. He has promised to turn Rome into a “15-minutes city” where residents can quickly reach any service.Tiziana Fabi/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Calenda has been more full-throated in his critique of Ms. Raggi, calling her administration “an apocalypse” and “a cosmic disaster,” and seizing on Rome’s reputation as an ungovernable city to argue that only a proven manager like him could get it under control.He said he would spend the first year and a half of his administration fixing the “decorum” of Rome’s streets, focusing on basic services like garbage removal and attending to trees to prevent falling branches from crashing onto cars.He also rejected the speculation of political insiders that, if necessary, he would form an alliance with Mr. Michetti. “I have never heard him say anything intelligent, not even anything normal,” Mr. Calenda said of him.Lorenzo de Sio, the director of the Italian Center of Electoral Studies, said the number of candidates running made the election difficult to call.Many Romans have become so accustomed to blaming Ms. Raggi’s incompetence for the city’s travails that her very name — “La Raggi,” they say — has become a shorthand for everything that is wrong in the city.But many Romans were once captivated by Ms. Raggi, the first woman to hold the office and, at 37 when she took office, Rome’s youngest mayor. She campaigned on promises to break the city’s special interests and make it work for everyone, an appeal that worked especially well in the city’s outermost and least affluent neighborhoods.Wild boars roaming a street in Rome. Ms. Raggi’s critics say the boars encapsulate just how uncivilized the city has become.Remo Casilli/ReutersMany of those voters remain undecided, and candidates like Mr. Michetti and Mr. Calenda, who visited every Roman neighborhood, have sought to woo them. But even at this late hour, Ms. Raggi’s supporters are hopeful that they would eventually come home to her.On Friday morning, a small group of supporters joined Ms. Raggi at a neighborhood market where the mayor inaugurated a municipal food bank for residents struggling to make ends meet. It is the fourth such center to open in Rome since May 2020, a pet project of the mayor’s, as the number of people needing assistance has soared during the pandemic.She arrived to applause and made some remarks. Her supporters complained that despite the mayor having opened kindergartens and gyms and improved parks in the neighborhood, “all people talk about is the boars.”But as Ms. Raggi left, another woman complained to her about how filthy her street had become. The mayor, she said, had furious taxpayers to answer to.Ms. Raggi blamed the problems on what she called corrupt transportation and sanitation agencies. Previous administrations had swept the dirt under the rug, she said, “but when you lift it up, mounds of mud emerged.”“Brava, Virginia!” a supporter shouted. More

An analysis found that a hand recount of votes by Republican investigators missed thousands of ballots, and possibly many more.The circuslike review of the 2020 vote commissioned by Arizona Republicans took another wild turn on Friday when veteran election experts charged that the very foundation of its findings — the results of a hand count of 2.1 million ballots — was based on numbers so unreliable that they appear to be guesswork rather than tabulations.The organizers of the review “made up the numbers,” the headline of the experts’ report reads.The experts, a data analyst for the Arizona Republican Party and two retired executives of an election consulting firm in Boston, said in their report that workers for the investigators failed to count thousands of ballots in a pallet of 40 ballot-filled boxes delivered to them in the spring.The final report by the Republican investigators concluded that President Biden actually won 99 more votes than were reported, and that former President Donald J. Trump tallied 261 fewer votes.But given the large undercount found in just a sliver of the 2.1 million ballots, it would effectively be impossible for the Republican investigators to arrive at such precise numbers, the experts said.Rod Thomson, a spokesman for Cyber Ninjas, the company hired to conduct the inquiry in Arizona, rejected the experts’ claim. “We stand by our methodology and complete final report,” he said.Investigators went through more than 1,600 ballot-filled boxes this summer to conduct their hand recount of the election in Maricopa County, the most populous county in the state. Both they and the Republican-controlled State Senate, which ordered the election inquiry, have refused to disclose the details of that hand count.But a worksheet containing the results of the hand count of 40 of those boxes was included in a final report on the election inquiry released a week ago by Cyber Ninjas.The three election experts said the hand count could have missed thousands or even hundreds of thousands of ballots if all 1,600 boxes of ballots were similarly undercounted. Their findings were earlier reported in The Arizona Republic.For months, the Cyber Ninjas effort had been the lodestar of the conservative movement, the foundational investigation that would uncover a litany of abuses and verify countless conspiracies, proving a stolen election. But the review was criticized from the start for unprofessional and unorthodox methods and partisan influence.Now, the experts’ findings on the vote review compound withering analyses debunking a wide range of questions raised in the review about the counting of votes and conduct of the election. Nonetheless, the review has been embraced by Mr. Trump and his followers even as its findings have been overwhelmingly refuted.Noting that the leaders of the Arizona review had “zero experience in election audits,” the experts concluded, “We believe the Ninjas’ announcement that they had confirmed, to a high degree of accuracy, the election results” of one of the largest U.S. counties “is laughable.”Laughable or not, none of it changed the fact that Mr. Biden won the state by about 10,500 votes and Maricopa County by roughly 45,000 in several official tallies of the vote.Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state in Arizona, said the report’s findings vindicated criticisms about the Cyber Ninjas process.“It was clear from the start that the Cyber Ninjas were just making it up as they went,” Ms. Hobbs said in a statement. “I’ve been saying all along that no one should trust any ‘results’ they produce, so it’s no surprise their findings are being called into question. What can be trusted are actual election officials and experts, along with the official canvass of results.”The results of the review were presented to the Arizona State Senate last week.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesThe inquiry into the election has been repeatedly condemned as a sham by election experts and denounced by the Republican-dominated Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which oversaw the 2020 vote.Critics note that the chief executive of Cyber Ninjas had spread false allegations that Arizona voting machines were rigged to ensure Mr. Trump’s defeat. The summer-long investigation was financed almost entirely by nearly $7 million in donations from Trump supporters.The experts based their conclusion on a worksheet containing a slice of the hand-count results that the Republican investigators published in the report on their inquiry. The worksheet shows that investigators counted 32,674 ballots in 40 of the 1,634 boxes of ballots they were reviewing.But official records show — and the investigators’ own machine count of the 2.1 million ballots effectively confirmed — that those 40 boxes actually contained 48,371 ballots, or 15,692 more than were counted.The worksheet indicated that nine of the boxes had not been counted at all. But even if those boxes were excluded from the tally, the count of the remaining boxes fell 4,852 ballots short of the correct total, the experts said.The charge of a ballot undercount comes atop the debunking by experts and Maricopa officials of virtually all of 22 implications of voting irregularities, involving more than 50,000 voters, in the Cyber Ninjas report.Among them: A claim that 23,434 mail-in ballots may have come from addresses that voters no longer occupied was based on research using a commercial address database that itself did not include 86,391 of the county’s registered voters and, like most lists, relied on sources that are often inaccurate. It also ignored the fact that voters may legally cast ballots and then move. And moving is common: More than 280,000 Maricopa County households moved in 2019 alone.Another claim that thousands of voters returned more ballots than they received misconstrued a data file that makes a new entry every time a damaged or incomplete ballot is corrected.Yet another claim that precincts counted 836 more votes than were recorded ignored the fact that the records of some 3,600 voters, such as abused spouses and police officers, are not made public for security reasons. And an insinuation that 5,295 Maricopa County voters may have double-voted because residents of other counties had the same names and birth years was spot-checked by county officials and found baseless; the outsiders were in fact other people.With similar reviews now set for Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Texas, it is increasingly clear that Arizona’s partisan review succeeded while it failed — by amplifying baseless talking points while failing in any factual way to back up Mr. Trump’s claims of a rigged election.The Arizona-style reviews in other states seem likely to follow the same script with the blessing of the Republican political leaders who are promoting them, said Nate Persily, a Stanford University law professor, elections expert and scholar of democracy.“For those who are pushing the fraud narrative, the actual truth is beside the point,” he said. “The idea that the election was stolen is becoming a tribe-defining belief. It’s not about proving something at this point. It’s about showing fealty to a particular description of reality.”Indeed, in the wake of the initial Cyber Ninjas report, Republicans in the Pennsylvania Senate only furthered their resolve to press ahead with a review of the election, one that includes a request for drivers’ license numbers and partial Social Security numbers of all seven million Pennsylvania voters.“The historic audit in Maricopa County is complete and significant findings have been brought to light,” State Senator Doug Mastriano, a Republican and leading proponent of the election review, said in a statement last week. “If these types of issues were uncovered in Maricopa County, imagine what could be brought to light from a full forensic audit in other counties around the U.S. who processed mass amounts of mail-in ballots.”On Friday, Robin Vos, the speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly, signed multiple subpoenas issued to the head of the elections commission in Milwaukee, the biggest city in the state and home to the largest concentration of Democratic voters, with a substantive request for documents, including communication between the city and state elections boards.Mr. Vos, in an interview this week, reiterated his commitment to investigating the 2020 election, with a presumption that there were mistakes in the administration.“I think we kind of have to accept that certain things were done wrongly — figure out how to correct them, or else we’re never going to have public confidence,” Mr. Vos said.Reid J. Epstein More

The arresting title of Fiona Hill’s new book, “There Is Nothing for You Here,” is what her father told her when she was growing up in Bishop Auckland, a decaying coal-mining town in North East England. He loved her, and so he insisted that she had to leave.Hill took his advice to heart — studying Russian and history at St. Andrews in Scotland, sojourning in Moscow, getting a Ph.D. at Harvard and eventually serving in the administrations of three American presidents, most recently as President Trump’s top adviser on Russia and Europe. “I take great pride in the fact that I’m a nonpartisan foreign policy expert,” she said before the House in November 2019, when she delivered her plain-spoken testimony at the hearings for the (first) impeachment of President Trump. But for her, “nonpartisan” doesn’t mean she’s in thrall to bloodless, anodyne ideas totally disconnected from her personal experience. She wrote this book because she was “acutely aware,” she says, “of how my own early life laid the path for everything I did subsequently.”Sure enough, “There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century” weaves together these two selves, slipping back and forth between the unsentimental memoir reflected in its melancholy title and the wonkish guide promised in its inspirational subtitle. The combination, however unlikely, mostly works — though by the end, the litany of policy prescriptions comes to sound a bit too much like a paper issued by the Brookings Institution, where Hill is currently a fellow. When recounting her life, Hill is a lucid writer, delivering her reminiscences in a vivid and wry style. As much as I wanted more of Hill the memoirist and less of Hill the expert, I began to sense that giving voice to both was the only way she could feel comfortable writing a book about herself.Looked at from afar, Hill’s story seems like a triumphant tale of striving and accomplishment. Born in 1965, she grew up in a “blighted world.” Her father followed the men in his family into the mines when he was 14; as the industry started to collapse in the 1960s, he found a job as a hospital porter. Hill’s mother worked as a midwife. As late as the 1970s, Hill’s grandparents lived in a subsidized rowhouse without “mod cons,” or modern conveniences, including indoor plumbing. Her grandfather had been pierced by the “windy pick” — the pneumatic drill — and had to wear a brace around his pelvis “to keep his battered insides in” for the rest of his life..Hill recounts all of this with immediacy, tenderness and a good bit of gallows humor. She recalls how the people of Bishop Auckland started calling the crumbling town “Bish Vegas” — finding scraps of comedy in their depleted circumstances was how they reconciled a degraded present with a once-bustling past. She describes working a string of part-time jobs to help her family, including one at a medieval banquet hall, where she had to wear a ruffled costume that kept falling down her skinny frame. Her mother crafted a bosom for her from pantyhose stuffed with tissue — “this worked well enough,” Hill writes, until she slipped on a patch of “wayward mashed potato” and fell to the floor, thereby “dislodging the boobs.”Costumes are a recurring motif in the book, as are self-deprecating glances at previous humiliations. Growing up, Hill wanted her clothes to disguise her family’s financial need, but they were more likely to give it away. Her mother sewed her a pair of trousers from heavy fabric left over after making window treatments — earning Hill the school nickname of “Curtain Legs.” Hill interviewed for a university spot wearing a homemade skirt with a heraldic pattern and a cardigan that was “nice,” she writes, “if you were 80.” Later, she had the resources to fashion the kind of self-presentation she wanted. She recalls being in a shop in 2019 with her mother, who yelled out: “Hey, Fiona, there are some suits on sale over here — might you need one for that impeachment thingy you’re doing?”As for that “impeachment thingy,” Hill doesn’t say much about the actual hearings, though she has plenty to say about Trump. Instead of making the usual insider-memoir move of fixating on all the brazenly outrageous behavior — the bizarre comments, the outlandish tweets — Hill notices his insecurities, the soft spots that, she says, made him “exquisitely vulnerable” to manipulation. Yes, she writes, the Kremlin meddled in the 2016 election — but unlike the #Resistance crowd, which insists that such meddling was decisive, Hill is more circumspect, pointing out that Vladimir Putin wasn’t the force that tore the country apart; he was simply exploiting fissures that were already there.Just as concerning to her was the way that people around Trump would wreak havoc on one another by playing to his “fragile ego” — spreading rumors that their rivals in the administration had said something negative about Trump was often enough to land those rivals on what the president called his “nasty list.” Hill says that watching Trump fulminate made her feel like Alice in Wonderland watching the Queen of Hearts, with her constant shouts of “Off with their heads!” In Hill’s telling, Trump’s norm-breaking was so flagrant and incessant that she compares him, in her matter-of-fact way, to a flasher. “Trump revealed himself,” she writes, “and people just got used to it.”But neither Trump nor Putin — who was the subject of one of Hill’s previous books — is what she really wants to talk about. What she sees happening in the United States worries her. Economic collapse, structural racism, unrelieved suffering: Even without Trump, she says, none of the country’s enormous problems will go away without enormous efforts to address them. Hill the expert points to heartening examples of benevolent capitalism at work. But Hill the memoirist knows in her bones that the neoliberal approach, left to its own devices, simply won’t do.The 1980s were a pivotal decade — for Hill, and for the world she knew. Her own career was on the rise, but the people around her were losing hope. “Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan helped to drive the nail into the coffin of 20th-century industry,” she writes, combining her memories and expertise, “while ensuring that those trapped inside the casket would find it practically impossible to pry the lid off.” More

Center-left parties have won a string of victories, capped by Olaf Scholz’s win in Germany. Yet, France’s struggling Socialists threaten hopes for a broader social democratic revival. PARIS — For France’s venerable Socialist Party, languishing at 4 percent support ahead of next year’s presidential elections, news of a surprise win last Sunday by its center-left counterpart in Germany offered a glimmer of hope.The slim victory by Olaf Scholz and Germany’s Social Democratic Party, along with the expected return to power of Norway’s Labor Party following a recent win, have underscored the recent success of Europe’s long-embattled social democrats. If Mr. Scholz succeeds in forming a government, social democrats in Europe’s most powerful nation will join center-left governments in Spain, Portugal and the Nordic nations of Sweden, Denmark and Finland, as well as Norway.Attention will then turn to France, where presidential elections are scheduled for next April. But in France, experts say, the social democrats’ hopes of a continent-wide revival are likely to dim.Socialist Party officials were nevertheless quick to seize on the German results as a sign that Europe’s political tides may be turning.“Never assume the battle’s already lost,’’ the Socialists’ leader, Olivier Faure, said in a Twitter post. The party’s presidential candidate, Anne Hidalgo, noted that Mr. Scholz “had beaten the odds’’ thanks to policies common to both social democratic parties.But it will take more than that to reverse the fortunes of a party that not so long ago utterly dominated French politics.After months of hinting that she would run for president, Ms. Hidalgo, 62, the second-term mayor of Paris, finally announced her candidacy in mid-September. But instead of getting an expected bounce in the polls, her approval ratings have drifted lower.Her polling is now far below not only the two favorites to meet in a showdown — President Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, of the far-right National Rally — but also well below candidates from the center-right and Éric Zemmour, a writer and TV star known for his far-right views, who is not yet an official candidate.Ms. Hidalgo and President Emmanuel Macron of France in Paris this month. Mr. Macron has tried to draw voters from the left, weakening the Socialists’ position. Pool photo by Ludovic MarinOn the other side of the political spectrum, she trails the far-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon and is neck and neck with the newly designated presidential candidate of the Greens, Yannick Jadot, polls show.The Socialists’ collapse is even more noteworthy because, less than a decade ago under the Socialist President François Hollande, the party controlled the Élysée Palace, both chambers of Parliament, a majority of big cities and nearly all the regions.“Nine years ago, this party held all the cards,’’ said Pascal Delwit, a political scientist specializing in social democracy at the Free University of Brussels. “Nine years later, it has none.’’In what became a symbol of its fall, the Socialist Party had to abandon its longtime headquarters, in one of the toniest neighborhoods of Paris, for cheaper real estate in a suburb, or banlieue, that many members never bothered visiting.Alain Bergounioux, a historian who is an expert on the Socialist Party, said that beyond crumbling at the ballot box, Socialists seem to have lost the ability to push forward their ideas and themes in a fast-moving political landscape.“They really don’t influence the national debate any longer, as public opinion has shifted to the right,’’ Mr. Bergounioux said.He added, “If it was premature to say that social democracy was dead, it would be overstating it to say that there is a renaissance.’’Seven months before the presidential elections, issues dear to the right — like immigration, crime and national identity — are dominating the political discourse. While Mr. Macron ran as a centrist in 2017, he has tacked right in a bid for the biggest slice of the electorate.The focus on these themes has only increased in recent weeks, with the intense news media attention on a possible candidacy by Mr. Zemmour. Styling himself as a Trump-like populist outsider, he has been visiting different regions on a book tour that has doubled as a campaign. A poll released this week showed that his support among potential voters in the first round of the elections has kept climbing, to 13 percent, or just three percentage points below Ms. Le Pen.Marine Le Pen at a National Rally event in Frejus in September.Daniel Cole/Associated PressFrance is an extreme, though revealing, example of the problems afflicting social democratic parties across Europe, experts say.While social democratic parties have lost support nearly everywhere amid the political fragmentation on the continent, France’s Socialist Party was also decimated by Mr. Macron’s successful creation of his centrist La République en Marche party. Some Socialist leaders abandoned their old party to join Mr. Macron, who had served as Mr. Hollande’s economy minister. In forming his government, Mr. Macron also poached from the center-right, which was less weakened than the center-left and remains a force in French politics.For decades, social democratic parties appealed to a core base of unionized, industrial workers and urban professionals with a vision of social justice and an equitable economy.But many longtime French supporters felt betrayed by Mr. Hollande’s business-friendly policies as French Socialists, like their counterparts elsewhere, were unable to protect their traditional base from globalization.While French Socialists hark back to their traditional values and now emphasize their commitment to the environment, their vision for society lacks a “strong spine,’’ Mr. Bergounioux said. In France, like elsewhere, the constituencies supporting social democratic parties tend to be made up of “aging, loyal voters who have voted for them their entire lives,’’ Mr. Delwit said.In Germany and elsewhere in Europe, the recent success of social democratic parties rested on successful jockeying — and not on the attraction of a fresh social democratic vision, experts said.Ernst Stetter, a member of the Social Democratic Party in Germany and former secretary general of the Foundation for European Progressive Studies, an umbrella group of social democratic think tanks across the continent, said the party’s victory last Sunday was “first and foremost a strategic victory” by Mr. Scholz.As vice chancellor and finance minister in the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel, Mr. Scholz offered “change in continuity by offering a little bit more social programs, a little bit more on the environment and continuity in European and international affairs,’’ said Mr. Stetter, who is also an analyst at the Fondation Jean-Jaurès research institute in Paris.Narrow as it was, Mr. Scholz’s victory represented “the center of the Social Democratic Party, not the left,’’ said Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a French-German politician and former Green member of the European Parliament.Olaf Scholz and Ms. Hidalgo at a campaign event for Germany’s Social Democratic Party in  Cologne, Germany, this month. The French Socialists have been reassured by Mr. Scholz’s victory in last month’s election, but their chances of matching his victory appear slim.Uta Wagner/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSocialists in Spain, Portugal and the Nordic nations also owed their success to responding to local needs, not a common vision of social democracy, Mr. Cohn-Bendit said.“On immigration policy, social democrats in Denmark are to the right of many centrist parties,’’ Mr. Cohn-Bendit said, referring to a series of hard-line immigration measures adopted by Denmark’s Social Democrats.Following years of a rise in right-wing parties, social democrats now lead governments in Sweden, Finland and Denmark, and are poised to do so in Norway. But their hold on power is far more tenuous than in the past.In Norway, the Labor Party, led by Jonas Gahr Stoere, came in first in last month’s parliamentary election, but won only a little over a quarter of the total seats, one of the party’s lowest scores on record. After talks to form a broad center-left coalition failed in recent days, Mr. Stoere is now expected to become prime minister of a minority government.“There isn’t a new definition yet of what social democracy could be in today’s world,’’ Mr. Cohn-Bendit said.Mr. Stetter said he, too, was skeptical of a broad revival of social democracy. Over the past decade, social democrats had worked unsuccessfully for a revival under the banner of the “Next Left,’’ he said.Still, Mr. Stetter said he hoped that last Sunday’s election results in Germany could presage positive developments for social democrats in Europe.“If Scholz succeeds in forming a government as a social democratic chancellor, there would be a dynamic force at the heart of Europe, and that could give energy to the French Socialist Party in the campaign period before the presidential elections in April,’’ Mr. Stetter. “We have to remain optimistic.’’Members of Jeunes Socialistes, the youth organisation of the Socialist Party, at an event in August. European socialist parties tend to rely heavily on aging voters, putting them on the wrong side of the demographic tide.Andrea Mantovani for The New York Times More

At a time when the basic power structures of the art world are being questioned, collectives and individuals are fighting against the very institutions funding and displaying their work.I.It’s a sunny Tuesday afternoon, and Eyal Weizman is at his central command — his London living room, which has been his base of operations since the outset of the pandemic. A vase of peonies is visible on the table behind him. His dog, Bernie, leaps into the frame, something about his shaggy visage evoking his eponym. His teenage daughter wanders through, making goofy faces to distract her father. His phone buzzes incessantly.It’s a stressful time for Weizman, the founder of Forensic Architecture, a roughly 30-member research group comprising architects, software developers, filmmakers, investigative journalists, artists, scientists and lawyers that he started at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2010, and which has become well known in the art world for data-driven museum exhibitions that serve as detailed investigations into human atrocities that history has tended to ignore; he describes their headquarters as a cross between an artist’s studio and a newsroom.This summer at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Forensic Architecture unveiled a new investigation into the cybersurveillance of human rights workers; at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, it presented new evidence in its inquiry into the 2011 shooting by London police of Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old Black man (thanks to F.A.’s investigation, Duggan’s family was able to negotiate a financial settlement). A third show, “Cloud Studies,” at Manchester’s Whitworth Gallery, included a major new investigation in Louisiana linking the development of land on the Mississippi River by petrochemical plants — land on which burial grounds of enslaved people have been found — to centuries of human and environmental exploitation. The day of our conversation in May, Weizman had just gotten off the phone with the Colombian Truth Commission, and had earlier taken a call from a lawyer involved in an inquiry into London’s 2017 Grenfell Tower fire. (Forensic Architecture is making a film recreating the event, which killed 72 people, a disaster that evidence seems to show was partly caused by the construction’s failure to meet fire-resistance requirements.) Meanwhile, bombs had been falling on Gaza for over a week, and colleagues and sources there and in the West Bank were in danger. His own world had shrunk, too, the cost of doing the kind of work he does; he’d been advised not to travel to Russia or Turkey after investigations involving those countries; even the United States was off the table.Welcome to the life of a 21st-century activist artist, whose work is as likely to be exhibited at an international human rights tribunal as it is a museum, and in which death threats and cyberattacks are all in a day’s work. Forensic Architecture was a finalist for the 2018 Turner Prize in part for an investigation it presented at Documenta in 2017 involving the 2006 murder of a German man of Turkish descent by a neo-Nazi group in Kassel, Germany — in the presence, as F.A. proved, of a national intelligence agent. “In the art world, the reviews were saying, ‘This is evidence, this is not art,’” Weizman recalls. Later, it became part of a parliamentary inquiry. “And when it was taken to the tribunal, the tribunal said, ‘That’s art, that’s not evidence, you cannot have it here. How can you pull out a piece of art from Documenta, which we know is an art exhibition, and put it in a parliamentary commission?’ But it didn’t help them, and the agent that we found complicit in killing was actually made to watch the artwork at the parliamentary commission. So to a certain extent, we love it, being not this and not that. It’s part of our power.” A 2020 work by Decolonize This Place about how to topple a racist monument. The New York-based group campaigns against systemic racism and human rights violations in museums.Content by Sarah Parcak, 2020, courtesy of Decolonize This PlaceActivism has become a powerful force in contemporary art of late — exciting, resonant, even potentially reparative in nature, rather than irritatingly salubrious. In recent years, the photographer Nan Goldin helped popularize this new era of cultural institutions as the site of active protest by staging die-ins at museums including the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to highlight the philanthropic support of the Sackler family, owners of the company that produces OxyContin. This led to a host of institutions, including the Guggenheim, the Met and the Tate galleries embargoing further donations from the family. This year, the art collective Decolonize This Place, which has organized actions at the Brooklyn Museum and the American Museum of Natural History, among other institutions, was one of the groups involved in Strike MoMA, which originated as an effort to call attention to the ties of the former board chairman and hedge fund billionaire Leon Black to the accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. In March, days after Strike MoMA announced a series of protests calling for an end to “toxic philanthropy” and for Black’s resignation, he told colleagues that he would not seek re-election for his position. The tipping point for these shake-ups in institutional power came in 2019 when Warren B. Kanders, the C.E.O. of the munitions company Safariland, stepped down as vice chair of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s board of trustees. The movement, in this case, came from inside the museum: After articles connecting Kanders to the company appeared online, staff members at the Whitney wrote a letter to the museum’s leadership condemning his position; Decolonize This Place organized protests to support those efforts and the sculptor Michael Rakowitz declined his invitation to participate in that year’s Whitney Biennial. Forensic Architecture, for its part, showed what is probably its best-known work in the United States: the 2019 11-minute film “Triple-Chaser,” a collaboration with Laura Poitras’s Praxis Films that illuminates the link between Kanders and Safariland. It includes unsparing footage of migrant families being tear-gassed at the U.S.-Mexican border and a protester being shot in Gaza, his leg ripped apart by a bullet. (The film’s title comes from the name of the tear-gas grenade that separates into three pieces in order to allow “increased area coverage.”) This synergistic response to a war profiteer’s effort to launder his reputation with philanthropic efforts felt galvanizing.II.We’ve always been fascinated by art that has a real-world impact. But why is there so much of it now, and why is it suddenly so effective? Art is, as Barbara Kruger puts it in a 1990 essay, “What’s High, What’s Low — and Who Cares?,” a way of showing and telling, through an eloquent shorthand, how it feels to be alive at a particular point in time. But certain times are more volatile than others, and art has risen, once again, to meet the politically charged moment, in which desire for accountability has taken hold across the culture, from #MeToo to Black Lives Matter. This fall marks the 10-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, which led to a greater understanding of the structures that uphold inequality, including the cultural institutions that prop up the forces degrading the values art and culture purport to protect. The very concept of freedom has been co-opted by bare-chested men in coonskin caps storming the U.S. capital, or legislators constraining teachers’ discussions of the racism endemic to American history. We’re free to be killed by a lunatic wielding a military-style weapon at the supermarket; we’re free to be taxed a quarter of our incomes while the wealthiest pay one-tenth of 1 percent. What use is freedom these days, really? As a concept, it’s always been of limited use, depending on where you were born or the color of your skin. It’s no wonder, then, that the conversation around art is one that calls for reckoning and repair.Hans Haacke’s “MoMA Poll” (1970) asked visitors of New York’s Museum of Modern Art whether or not they would support Governor Nelson Rockefeller, whose family remains one of MoMA’s major donors.Hans Haacke/Artists Rights Society (Ars), New York/Vg Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy of the Paula Cooper Gallery, New YorkThese groups operate in different modes — Decolonize This Place recognizes the emotional impact of protest and spectacle (close to a thousand people attended a 2018 protest at the American Museum of Natural History), while Forensic Architecture seeks to build a legal case — but they share a belief in art as a revolutionary practice, and an emphasis on the value of collaborative efforts between artists and the public. They recognize common cause across a host of issues, including police brutality, Indigenous rights, income inequality and gentrification. (Both groups have also stoked controversy among their ideological opponents, most recently pro-Israel activists, who have said their support of Palestine has helped contribute to antisemitic violence, an accusation that members of Decolonize This Place and Forensic Architecture vehemently deny.) In the same way that Safariland tear gas can be used in Palestine, Ferguson, Baltimore, Egypt and at the southern border of the United States, or that ultranationalism and self-victimization have global reach, this new fusion of art and human rights work crosses borders of geography and identity, rather than siloing causes. As with other social justice movements worldwide, there is a collective structure to this work that serves as a rebuke to the artist as superstar, the narrative of the great man or woman as creator. Anticommercial and antiauteur, the emphasis is on the relational, a recognition that by working synergistically and across areas of professional expertise, everyone becomes emboldened to address entrenched asymmetries of power. What these groups also share is a belief in art that’s self-aware — transparent about process, explanatory in nature, seeking to pierce the fog of complication and misinformation with data — the tool by which we hold people, institutions and corporations accountable. That so much contemporary activist art is centered around marshaling and corralling data also speaks to our moment, in which willful ignorance is arguably more widespread than at any other time in history. In a fake news, post-truth world, in which conspiracy theories and foolishness (rigged elections, space lasers) have flourished faster than Silicon Valley coders can intercept them, data has become the de facto authority, summoned up to debate everything, from the pandemic to critical race theory to bias in general, not just within institutions but in one-on-one arguments. No one really has credibility anymore; we assume everyone is distorting information to suit their interests until we see hard proof. Accompanying the dissemination of untruths are the constant undermining and defunding of those who do, in fact, buttress factual information, such as universities, scientists and journalists. The desire for something resembling definitive truth is all-encompassing. It makes sense, then, that we would want art that not only incites empathy or starts a conversation but that makes our fragmentary, mediated world graspable and actionable. Thinking of art — in this hyperverified form, meticulously crafted — as a kind of tool against injustice is undoubtedly like bringing a flash drive to a sword fight. But it may be the best weapon we have.III.Inequalities are visible everywhere we go in the modern world. It’s the West Bank security wall; it’s which neighborhood gets a beautiful new park and which one gets the petrochemical plant. Weizman, 51, who is Jewish and grew up in Haifa, Israel, has written at length about the ways in which the structures of power and politics manifest themselves. “Israeli apartheid is evident in everything in the built environment, from the way the city is organized to the way that communities are clustering, in where roads go and where forests are being planted. It’s in where new settlements are being established. It’s in where there is a flyover, and where there is a tunnel. Politics is actually a physical architectural reality, it has that sort of immersive dimension. You’re in politics. It’s not something you read about; you can bump your head into it,” he says. As an architecture student, he was drawn to writing and researching; as a young adult, he volunteered at the Palestinian government’s Ministry of Planning in Ramallah, where he was tasked with photocopying Israeli documents like maps and aerial images that Palestinians could not access.A 2019 protest in front of the Pyramid of the Louvre in Paris, opposing the museum’s ties to the Sackler family. The demonstration was organized by the activist group P.A.I.N., or Prescription Addiction Intervention Now, which was founded by Nan Goldin.Stephane De Sakutin/AFP via Getty ImagesOften, though, the powerful forces that shape our lives and well-being can be difficult to see and touch. We can pull down racist monuments (the statue of Theodore Roosevelt in front of New York’s Natural History museum, a locus of D.T.P. protests, is set to be replaced next year), but structural racism remains. Over the past decade, a number of prominent artists have been focused on making those unseen forces visible and tangible. Think of Trevor Paglen’s work in artificial intelligence that “sees” us, or Hito Steyerl’s 2019 video installation at the Park Avenue Armory, “Drill,” which was built around gun violence testimonials. In the case of Forensic Architecture, this “making visible” often involves deploying the very technologies that surveillance states and corporate entities use against us. Compiling data fragments of all kinds — witness accounts, leaked footage, photographs, videos, social media posts, maps and satellite imagery — they create platforms to compile the information, cross-reference it and uncover the hidden connections between dispersed events. In the 21st century, revolution is still about winning hearts and minds, but it’s also a technology war.When I ask Weizman if he considers himself an artist, he brings up the German filmmaker Harun Farocki, an early inspiration for F.A.; Farocki was making a film about Forensic Architecture when he died in 2014. “He compared what we do to a bird building a nest,” Weizman says. “You take a little bit of reed, you take some nylon, you take some plastic, you take some leaves, and somehow one assembles shape from there. So there’s an act of construction, and in an act of construction there’s always imagination that comes into it, but it does not mean that it reduces its truth value. The truth comes out of that aesthetic work.” Using satellite imagery, aerial photographs and centuries-old historical records, F.A. creates a timeline of evidence; that evidence is used to close the gaps between probable and provable, meeting a burden of truth (something that, Weizman has said, we need like air and water). Unlike Farocki, who used security camera footage in his work to make a point about our disembodied reality, or documentary filmmakers such as Errol Morris, who creates re-enactments to show us the subjective nature of memory and testimony, F.A. makes video work that strives to bear the scrutiny of judicial interpretation. Protecting sources is paramount to F.A.; meetings involving sensitive information are conducted in a special room called the Fridge, in which cellphones aren’t allowed; identifying information on vulnerable sources is written down instead of stored on computers.Forensic’s work assists the imagination by pulling together vast quantities of fragmentary evidence, moving backward in time to establish a record of accounting. Sometimes, this timeline can be short — the shooting of Mark Duggan, for example, transpires over the course of a few seconds; other times, it can be vast: The Louisiana investigation involves a time span of three centuries, from the first arrivals of enslaved people on the Mississippi River to today’s Cancer Alley, so named in the 1980s for the skyrocketing cancer rates among the largely Black communities living there. Increasingly, the area is referred to as Death Alley, making the history of exploitation clearer. “Our ancestors are ultimately at the front line of resistance to this industry,” says Imani Jacqueline Brown, the project’s coordinator. “Slavery,” she notes, “not only established this notion of sacrificing populations from whom life and labor can be extracted in order to produce profit for others but also literally lay the grounds for the petrochemical plants to come in.”A rally, organized in part by Decolonize This Place, outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2019.Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty ImagesF.A.’s work often physically manifests itself as short videos that closely examine their source material and their methodology. It is not visually unappealing, but it has the look of a formal presentation, almost like an exhibit at a criminal trial. The Louisiana project was, tellingly, unveiled this past June to the public not in a gallery or museum but on The New York Times home page, in a short film produced with the paper’s video team. The fact that a phase of the project, which includes 3-D models and detailed cartography that illustrate how the Louisiana landscape has changed over time, was part of an exhibition at an art space across the Atlantic from the actual site the group is investigating is also not an accident: Nearly every cultural institution in Louisiana is funded by the oil and gas industry. One irony of contemporary art that critiques or transcends the institution is just how central the institution remains to it. Indeed, the complexity of the art ecosystem as a reflection of global power is at the heart of F.A.’s origin story. In 2002, Weizman was asked, along with his partner in his Tel Aviv practice, Rafi Segal, to represent Israel at the World Congress of Architecture in Berlin. But their project, which examined in detail the spatial form of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and how their physical layout is informed by politics, was abruptly withdrawn by the Israel Association of United Architects. That widely reported censorship created an immediate buzz, and the work was exhibited instead at New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture in 2003. In 2004, Weizman co-curated with Anselm Franke an exhibition called “Territories,” which focused on spatial warfare — the way in which dominion is built into the construction and destruction of the landscape, housing and infrastructure. It was part of a shift in architecture away from flashy luxury developments and toward a more politically engaged construction, practiced over the past decade by everyone from Shigeru Ban to Rem Koolhaas, which explicitly tries to respond to issues like climate change and inequality. When Goldsmith’s hired Weizman to establish an architecture program in 2005, it was with the goal of creating an alternative paradigm to existing studio-based architectural education models, a refuge for architects that want to take part in reform and activism.“We thought, ‘Art will allow us to do what we need,’” Weizman tells me wryly. “And then we realized, ‘No, we have another war to wage here.’” F.A. had already been invited to contribute to the Whitney Biennial when he read the articles linking Kanders to Safariland. Weizman immediately thought of a 2016 demonstration in the West Bank in which he’d participated. “I was running with a young woman toward the Israeli army, and they shot a tear-gas canister at us, and she got hit in the head,” he recalls. “And after tending to her, I looked at the thing, I took a photo of it. And when we heard about Kanders, I realized that that canister was actually something I had breathed: You breathe with your eyes and with your nose, and it’s kind of like everything is watering, an extremely unpleasant, intense sort of sensation. Fast-forward to 2017, and we realized, ‘OK, hold on, that stuff that was thrown at me is now funding our contribution.’ We knew that we had a slightly different role than other artists because we had a capacity: We had people on the ground, we had the technology, we knew that we could investigate. We wanted to turn the art world into a site of accountability.” The Death Alley investigation will be exhibited in October in Louisiana at community spaces, and eventually, Brown hopes, the platform will be handed off to local activist groups. While the stories F.A. tells aren’t designed to elicit emotion or push aesthetic boundaries, these things have a way of seeping in. If violence has an aesthetic, so do the physical traces it leaves behind. Looking at the aerial imagery Brown and her team scour for anomalies, clues that might indicate the site of an unmarked burial ground, she points out a lone oak — the last remaining descendant of trees once planted by people who didn’t have access to stone to mark the graves of their loved ones — and for a moment, neither of us can speak.Forensic Architecture’s “Cloud Studies” (2008-2021), at Manchester’s Whitworth Gallery.Courtesy Forensic Architecture and the Whitworth, the University of ManchesterIV.It’s impossible, in thinking about what transpired at the Whitney, not to recall one of the earliest examples of what would later be called institutional critique, Hans Haacke’s 1970 installation “MoMA Poll.” Visitors to New York’s Museum of Modern Art were asked to deposit their answers to a question — “Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon’s Indochina policy be a reason for you not to vote for him in November?” — into one of two transparent plexiglass ballot boxes, one for “Yes” and another for “No.” Nelson Rockefeller, whose family money had funded MoMA in the first place, was up for re-election, and was a major donor and board member at the museum, but in this case his reputation went relatively unharmed, even though, by the end of Haacke’s exhibition, there were twice as many “Yes” ballots as there were “No” ballots. While the flow of money hasn’t changed much since Haacke’s day (several Rockefeller family members remain on the museum’s board), the call for transparency has grown very loud; hence, the rise of the term “artwash” to describe the way in which art and culture are used — by institutions, by the state, by individuals — to normalize and legitimize their reputations.Activist art has a way of capturing our attention during culture wars. By the 1960s, conceptual art movements had taken art out of museums and into the wider world; that inspired the political art movement of the 1970s, as well as the ecological and feminist art movements. Institutional critique reached its apotheosis in the 1980s, when artists historically excluded from museum spaces began to take on the mainstream. In 1989, Andrea Fraser made “Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk,” in which she performed the role of a museum docent in order to mock the robber baron mentality of art connoisseurship; the video work was produced at a time when federal cuts to cultural funding meant that museums increasingly had to rely on corporate sponsorship and private donors. But in the years since, that irreverence has fallen away. In 2016, Fraser published a 950-page study titled “2016 in Museums, Money and Politics,” breaking down the donations of 5,458 museum board members to party-aligned organizations during the general election. There was no wit, or cheekiness, here, only the numbers telling their own inarguable story: The people who support cultural institutions that fly the flag of diversity and inclusion are also major donors to conservative politicians who fight against those very causes.Then there’s the rebirth of collectives, a mainstay of ’60s-era art, which have also taken up the cause of post-institutional work. In the 1990s, the Artnauts, a group founded by the sociologist and artist George Rivera, created actions and self-curated installations in locations that drew attention to issues that generally fell outside of art’s traditional purview, from post-Pinochet Chile to the closed borders at the Korean DMZ Museum. Decolonize This Place, with its sit-ins and eye-catching graphics, draws from a lineage of activist art established by the Situationist International, or S.I., which was founded in 1957 after the French theorist Guy Debord brought together a number of art collectives in Alba, Italy, for a meeting of the First World Congress of Free Artists. The Situationist manifesto draws from philosophers like Gyorgy Lukacs to examine culture as a rigged game dominated by powerful interests that squelches dissent or commodifies subversive thinking, and now feels uncannily current.A 1987 poster, “Guerrilla Girls Review the Whitney,” by the Guerrilla Girls, an anonymous feminist collective that has spent decades examining gender disparity at arts institutions across the world. © Guerrilla Girls, Courtesy guerrillagirls.comOne of the more iconic progenitors of today’s data-driven activist art collectives is the Guerrilla Girls, which arose in 1985 amid a frustration with the commercialism of art. The Guerrilla Girls, who wear gorilla masks and use the names of deceased female artists as noms de guerre, targeted spectators in public with posters and slogans that challenged the status quo using language borrowed from advertising. “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?” one 1989 poster asked, beside a graphic of an odalisque wearing a gorilla mask, noting in the text that while less than 5 percent of the artists in the Modern section were women, 85 percent of the nudes were female. Then, as now, critics of these movements suggested there was a certain hypocrisy afoot, given that many artists involved in institutional critique were having their work funded by and exhibited at those very institutions. But this was, according to the artists, always the point: Rather than purifying the art world, it’s about liberating it.“We still do street posters and banners dissing museums, but we also diss them right on their own walls,” Käthe Kollwitz, a longtime Guerrilla Girls member, wrote to me in an email (her name is a pseudonym). Their latest project, “The Male Graze” (2021), is a series of billboards that reveal a history of exploitative behavior by male artists. Their focus remains largely unchanged: “We say to everyone who cares about art: ‘Don’t let museums reduce art to the small number of artists who have won a popularity contest among big-time dealers, curators and collectors,’” Kollwitz writes. “Unless institutions show art as diverse as the cultures they represent, they’re not showing the history of art, they’re just preserving the history of wealth and power.”Revolutions, like art, begin as works of imagination: a reshaping of the world in a new image. Nitasha Dhillon, a co-founder, along with Amin Husain, of Decolonize This Place, points me to a 1941 essay by the surrealist theorist Suzanne Césaire, in which she envisions a “domain of the strange, the marvelous and the fantastic. … Here are the poet, the painter and the artist, presiding over the metamorphoses and the inversion of the world under the sign of hallucinations and madness.” We can all agree that the world has gone mad; can the art of reckoning and trauma show us a way forward? The fact is, there’s no blueprint for decolonization; nothing involving people working together for greater justice is especially utopian or marvelous. There will always be disagreement, imperfection, more to learn, more work to be done. This kind of art is nothing if not effortful; it comes at a personal cost. And so, while groups like Forensic Architecture and Decolonize This Place have already had their proven successes — in courts of law, in art spaces — I can’t help but think that it’s the less measurable impact that might, in the end, be the more powerful one, as models of cooperation and correction in a cynical, self-interested and often violent world. If nationalism and greed are globally transmissible, then so, perhaps, is idealism. Accountability, in the end, means paying attention to whose suffering is footing the bill for our lifestyle, our comfort, even our beauty. The fear of being canceled is, after all, about the fear of facing those hard truths and being found complicit. The question, maybe, has never really been whether or not art can heal us but rather to what extent we have the courage to heal ourselves. More

In July, Eric Adams narrowly won the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York, making him the odds-on favorite to win in November. And he won the nomination by running directly against the verities of today’s progressives: asserting that the police are the answer, not the problem; that “defund the police” misjudged what communities of color actually want; that Democrats had lost touch with the multiracial working-class voters they claim to represent.Adams won on that message. He won in deep-blue New York City. It’s made him a national figure, and he’s been emphatic on what that means. “I am the face of the new Democratic Party,” he said. And “if the Democratic Party fails to recognize what we did here in New York, they’re going to have a problem in the midterm elections and they’re going to have a problem in the presidential election.”[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]When politicians become national stories, they often release, or rerelease, a book. Adams is no exception. But instead of a campaign manifesto or an autobiography, “Healthy at Last” is a book about the health benefits of plant-based eating. “Outspoken vegan” isn’t a political identity I tend to associate with ambitious politicians at odds with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, but that’s Adams for you. He doesn’t shy away from a fight.In this conversation, Adams and I talk about the fights he is picking, or will have to pick, in the coming years: with progressives who he thinks have lost their way, with police unions he wants to reform, with wealthy communities where he wants to build more housing, with critics who think plant-based eating is a hobby for foodie elites and with voters who may not be willing to wait for Adams’s “upstream” approach to social problems to pay off.You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Tommy Thomas“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin. More

A recent indictment suggested that researchers who found strange internet links between a Russian bank and the Trump Organization did not really believe their own work. They are pushing back.WASHINGTON — The charge was narrow: John H. Durham, the special counsel appointed by the Trump administration to scour the Russia investigation, indicted a cybersecurity lawyer this month on a single count of lying to the F.B.I.But Mr. Durham used a 27-page indictment to lay out a far more expansive tale, one in which four computer scientists who were not charged in the case “exploited” their access to internet data to develop an explosive theory about cyberconnections in 2016 between Donald J. Trump’s company and a Kremlin-linked bank — a theory, he insinuated, they did not really believe.Mr. Durham’s version of events set off reverberations beyond the courtroom. Trump supporters seized on the indictment, saying it shows that suspicions about possible covert communications between Russia’s Alfa Bank and Mr. Trump’s company were a deliberate hoax by supporters of Hillary Clinton and portraying it as evidence that the entire Russia investigation was unwarranted.Emails obtained by The New York Times and interviews with people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss issues being investigated by federal authorities, provide a fuller and more complex account of how a group of cyberexperts discovered the odd internet data and developed their hypothesis about what could explain it.At the same time, defense lawyers for the scientists say it is Mr. Durham’s indictment that is misleading. Their clients, they say, believed their hypothesis was a plausible explanation for the odd data they had uncovered — and still do.The Alfa Bank results “have been validated and are reproducible. The findings of the researchers were true then and remain true today; reports that these findings were innocuous or a hoax are simply wrong,” said Jody Westby and Mark Rasch, lawyers for David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist and one of the researchers whom the indictment discussed but did not name.Steven A. Tyrrell, a lawyer for Rodney Joffe, an internet entrepreneur and another of the four data experts, said his client had a duty to share the information with the F.B.I. and that the indictment “gratuitously presents an incomplete and misleading picture” of his role.Mr. Durham’s indictment provided evidence that two participants in the matter — Mr. Joffe and Michael Sussmann, the cybersecurity lawyer accused of falsely saying he had no client when he brought the findings of the researchers to the F.B.I. — interacted with the Clinton campaign as they worked to bring their suspicions to journalists and federal agents.A spokesman for Mr. Durham declined to comment. The special counsel’s office issued a fresh grand jury subpoena to Mr. Sussmann’s former law firm, Perkins Coie, sometime after Mr. Sussmann was indicted on Sept. 16, in a development first reported on Thursday by CNN and confirmed by a person familiar with the matter. It is unclear whether the subpoena pertained to Alfa Bank or whether Mr. Durham has finished his investigation into that case.Mr. Durham uncovered law firm billing records showing that Mr. Sussmann, who represented the Democratic National Committee on issues related to Russia’s hacking of its servers, had logged his time on the Alfa Bank matter as work for the Clinton campaign. Mr. Sussmann has denied lying to the F.B.I. about who he was representing in coming forward with the Alfa Bank data, while saying he was representing only Mr. Joffe and not the campaign.Mr. Durham also found that Mr. Joffe had met with one of Mr. Sussmann’s law firm partners, Marc Elias, who was then the Clinton campaign’s general counsel, and researchers from Fusion GPS, an investigative firm Mr. Elias had commissioned to scrutinize Mr. Trump’s purported ties to Russia. Fusion GPS drafted a paper on Alfa Bank’s ties to the Kremlin that Mr. Sussmann also provided to the F.B.I.Mr. Durham was appointed in 2019 to scour the Russia investigation for any wrongdoing.Justice Department, via Associated PressIn the heat of the presidential race, Democrats quickly sought to capitalize on the research. On Sept. 15, four days before Mr. Sussmann met with the F.B.I. about the findings, Mr. Elias sent an email to the Clinton campaign manager, Robbie Mook, its communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, and its national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, whose subject line referred to an Alfa Bank article, the indictment said.Six weeks later, after Slate ran a lengthy article about the Alfa Bank suspicions, the Clinton campaign pounced. Mrs. Clinton’s Twitter feed linked to the article and ran an image stating the suspicions as fact, declaring, “It’s time for Trump to answer serious questions about his ties to Russia.”The F.B.I., which had already started its Trump-Russia investigation before it heard about the possible Trump-Alfa connections, quickly dismissed the suspicions, apparently concluding the interactions were probably caused by marketing emails sent by an outside firm using a domain registered to the Trump Organization. The report by the Russia special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, ignored the issue.The data remains a mystery. A 2018 analysis commissioned by the Senate, made public this month, detailed technical reasons to doubt that marketing emails were the cause. A Senate report last year accepted the F.B.I.’s assessment that it was unlikely to have been a covert communications channel, but also said it had no good explanation for “the unusual activity.”Whatever caused the odd data, at issue in the wake of the indictment is whether Mr. Joffe and the other three computer scientists considered their own theory dubious and yet cynically went forward anyway, as Mr. Durham suggests, or whether they truly believed the data was alarming and put forward their hypothesis in good faith.Earlier articles on Alfa Bank, including in Slate and The New Yorker, did not name the researchers, and used pseudonyms like “Max” and “Tea Leaves” for two of them. Mr. Durham’s indictment did not name them, either.But three of their names have appeared among a list of data experts in a lawsuit brought by Alfa Bank, and Trump supporters have speculated online about their identities. The Times has confirmed them, and their lawyers provided statements defending their actions.The indictment’s “Originator-1” is April Lorenzen, chief data scientist at the information services firm Zetalytics. Her lawyer, Michael J. Connolly, said she has “dedicated her life to the critical work of thwarting dangerous cyberattacks on our country,” adding: “Any suggestion that she engaged in wrongdoing is unequivocally false.”The indictment’s “Researcher-1” is another computer scientist at Georgia Tech, Manos Antonakakis. “Researcher-2” is Mr. Dagon. And “Tech Executive-1” is Mr. Joffe, who in 2013 received the F.B.I. Director’s Award for helping crack a cybercrime case, and retired this month from Neustar, another information services company.In addition, the Alfa Bank suspicions were only half of what the researchers sought to bring to the government’s attention, according to several people familiar with the matter.Their other set of concerns centered on data suggesting that a YotaPhone — a Russian-made smartphone rarely seen in the United States — had been used from networks serving the White House, Trump Tower and Spectrum Health, a Michigan hospital company whose server had also interacted with the Trump server.Mr. Sussmann relayed their YotaPhone findings to counterintelligence officials at the C.I.A. in February 2017, the people said. It is not clear whether the government ever investigated them.The involvement of the researchers traces back to the spring of 2016. DARPA, the Pentagon’s research funding agency, wanted to commission data scientists to develop the use of so-called DNS logs, records of when servers have prepared to communicate with other servers over the internet, as a tool for hacking investigations.DARPA identified Georgia Tech as a potential recipient of funding and encouraged researchers there to develop examples. Mr. Antonakakis and Mr. Dagon reached out to Mr. Joffe to gain access to Neustar’s repository of DNS logs, people familiar with the matter said, and began sifting them.Separately, when the news broke in June 2016 that Russia had hacked the Democratic National Committee’s servers, Mr. Dagon and Ms. Lorenzen began talking at a conference about whether such data might uncover other election-related hacking.Ms. Lorenzen eventually noticed an odd pattern: a server called mail1.trump-email.com appeared to be communicating almost exclusively with servers at Alfa Bank and Spectrum Health. She shared her findings with Mr. Dagon, the people said, and they both discussed it with Mr. Joffe.As a candidate in 2016, President Trump publicly called for Russia to hack Hillary Clinton.Todd Heisler/The New York Times“Half the time I stop myself and wonder: am I really seeing evidence of espionage on behalf of a presidential candidate?” Mr. Dagon wrote in an email to Mr. Joffe on July 29, after WikiLeaks made public stolen Democratic emails timed to disrupt the party’s convention and Mr. Trump urged Russia to hack Mrs. Clinton. By early August, the researchers had combined forces and were increasingly focusing on the Alfa Bank data, the people said. Mr. Joffe reached out to his lawyer, Mr. Sussmann, who would take the researchers’ data and hypothesis to the F.B.I. on Sept. 19, 2016.Defense lawyers contend the indictment presented a skewed portrait of their clients’ thinking by selectively quoting from their emails.The indictment quotes August emails from Ms. Lorenzen and Mr. Antonakakis worrying that they might not know if someone had faked the DNS data. But people familiar with the matter said the indictment omitted later discussion of reasons to doubt any attempt to spoof the overall pattern could go undetected.The indictment says Mr. Joffe sent an email on Aug. 21 urging more research about Mr. Trump, which he stated could “give the base of a very useful narrative,” while also expressing a belief that the Trump server at issue was “a red herring” and they should ignore it because it had been used by the mass-marketing company.The full email provides context: Mr. Trump had claimed he had no dealings in Russia and yet many links appeared to exist, Mr. Joffe noted, citing an article that discussed aspirations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Despite the “red herring” line, the same email also showed that Mr. Joffe nevertheless remained suspicious about Alfa Bank, proposing a deeper hunt in the data “for the anomalies that we believe exist.”He wrote: “If we can show possible email communication between” any Trump server and an Alfa Bank server “that has occurred in the last few weeks, we have the beginning of a narrative,” adding that such communications with any “Russian or Ukrainian financial institutions would give the base of a very useful narrative.”Mr. Tyrrell, his lawyer, said that research in the weeks that followed, omitted by the indictment, had yielded evidence that the specific subsidiary server in apparent contact with Alfa Bank had not been used to send bulk marketing emails. That further discussion, he said, changed his client’s mind about whether it was a red herring.“The quotation of the ‘red herring’ email is deeply misleading,” he said, adding: “The research process is iterative and this is exactly how it should work. Their efforts culminated in the well-supported conclusions that were ultimately delivered to the F.B.I.”Michael E. Sussmann during a cybersecurity conference in 2016. He was charged by Mr. Durham with lying to the F.B.I.via C-SPANThe indictment also quoted from emails in mid-September, when the researchers were discussing a paper on their suspicions that Mr. Sussmann would soon take to the F.B.I. It says Mr. Joffe asked if the paper’s hypothesis would strike security experts as a “plausible explanation.”The paper’s conclusion was somewhat qualified, an email shows, saying “there were other possible explanations,” but the only “plausible” one was that Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization had taken steps “to obfuscate their communications.”The indictment suggested Ms. Lorenzen’s reaction to the paper was guarded, describing an email from her as “stating, in part, that it was ‘plausible’ in the ‘narrow scope’ defined by” Mr. Joffe. But the text of her email displays enthusiasm.“In the narrow scope of what you have defined above, I agree wholeheartedly that it is plausible,” she wrote, adding: “If the white paper intends to say that there are communications between at least Alfa and Trump, which are being intentionally hidden by Alfa and Trump I absolutely believe that is the case,” her email said.The indictment cited emails by Mr. Antonakakis in August in which he flagged holes and noted they disliked Mr. Trump, and in September in which he approvingly noted that the paper did not get into a technical issue that specialists would raise.Mr. Antonakakis’ lawyer, Mark E. Schamel, said his client had provided “feedback on an early draft of data that was cause for additional investigation.” And, he said, their hypothesis “to this day, remains a plausible working theory.”The indictment also suggests Mr. Dagon’s support for the paper’s hypothesis was qualified, describing his email response as “acknowledging that questions remained, but stating, in substance and in part, that the paper should be shared with government officials.”The text of that email shows Mr. Dagon was forcefully supportive. He proposed editing the paper to declare as “fact” that it was clear “that there are hidden communications between Trump and Alfa Bank,” and said he believed the findings met the probable cause standard to open a criminal investigation.“Hopefully the intended audience are officials with subpoena powers, who can investigate the purpose” of the apparent Alfa Bank connection, Mr. Dagon wrote.In the end, Mr. Durham came to investigate them. More

This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays.Nearly nine months after rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election, a question still lingers over how to place it in history: Were the events of Jan. 6 the doomed conclusion of an unusually anti-democratic moment in American political life, or a preview of where the country is still heading?Richard L. Hasen, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law and an expert in election law, believes the second possibility shouldn’t be ruled out. In a paper published this month, he wrote that “The United States faces a serious risk that the 2024 presidential election, and other future U.S. elections, will not be conducted fairly, and that the candidates taking office will not reflect the free choices made by eligible voters under previously announced election rules.”It could be a bloodless coup, he warns, executed not by rioters with nooses but “lawyers in fine suits”: Between January and June, Republican-controlled legislatures passed 24 laws across 14 states to increase their control over how elections are run, stripping secretaries of state of their power and making it easier to overturn results.How much danger is American democracy really in, and what can be done to safeguard it? Here’s what people are saying.How democracy could collapse in 2024In Hasen’s view, there are three mechanisms by which the 2024 election could be overturned:State legislatures, purporting to exercise the authority of either the Constitution or an 1887 federal law called the Electoral Count Act, swapping in their own slate of electors for president, potentially with the blessing of a conservative Supreme Court and a Republican-controlled Congress.Fraudulent or suppressive election administration or vote counting by norm- or law-breaking officials.Vigilante action that prevents voting, interferes with ballot counting or interrupts the legitimate transfer of power.These mechanisms are not outside the realm of possibility:Recent reporting from Robert Costa and Bob Woodward revealed that the previous administration had a plan, hatched by the prominent conservative lawyer John Eastman, for former Vice President Pence to throw out the electoral votes of key swing states on the basis that they had competing slates of electors. Next time around, “with the right pieces in place, Trump could succeed,” the Times columnist Jamelle Bouie writes. “All he needs is a rival slate of electoral votes from contested states, state officials and state legislatures willing to intervene on his behalf, a supportive Republican majority in either house of Congress, and a sufficiently pliant Supreme Court majority.”On top of passing voting administration laws, Republicans have also recruited candidates who espouse election conspiracy theories to run for positions like secretary of state and county clerk. According to Reuters, 10 of the 15 declared Republican candidates for secretary of state in five swing states have either declared the 2020 election stolen or demanded its invalidation or investigation.Skepticism of or hostility toward election administration is widespread among Republican voters as well, 78 percent of whom still say that President Biden did not win in November. That conviction, Reuters reported in June, has sparked a nationwide intimidation campaign against election officials and their families, who continue to face threats of hanging, firing squads, torture and bomb blasts with vanishingly little help from law enforcement. One in three election officials feel unsafe because of their job and nearly one in five listed threats to their lives as a job-related concern, according to an April survey from the Brennan Center.“The stage is thus being set for chaos,” Robert Kagan argues in The Washington Post. Given a more strategically contested election, “Biden would find himself where other presidents have been — where Andrew Jackson was during the nullification crisis, or where Abraham Lincoln was after the South seceded — navigating without rules or precedents, making his own judgments about what constitutional powers he does and doesn’t have.”Some experts worry about democratic backsliding even in the event of a legitimate Republican victory in 2024, Ashley Parker reports for The Washington Post. In such a scenario, Trump or a similarly anti-democratic figure might set about remaking the political and electoral system to consolidate power.“We often think that what we should be waiting for is fascists and communists marching in the streets, but nowadays, the ways democracies often die is through legal things at the ballot box — so things that can be both legal and antidemocratic at the same time,” said Daniel Ziblatt, a Harvard political scientist. “Politicians use the letter of the law to subvert the spirit of the law.”Experts told Parker that perhaps the most proximate example is Hungary under Viktor Orban, who returned to power in 2010 after being ousted in 2002 and over the past decade has transformed the country into a soft autocracy. Admirers of the country’s government include Tucker Carlson, who in August extolled it as a model for the United States, and the high-profile Conservative Political Action Committee, which will host its next gathering in Budapest.Brian Klaas, a political scientist at University College London, believes there are many reasons — the threat of primary challenges against Republicans who defy “Stop the Steal” orthodoxy, gerrymandering, the influence of social media — that the Republican Party’s anti-democratic turn might not just continue but accelerate: “There are no countervailing forces. There’s nothing that rewards being a sober moderate who believes in democracy and tries to govern by consensus.”‘The quicksand we’re already in’Could a plan of the kind Eastman devised to manipulate the Electoral College count really have succeeded? Teri Kanefield, a lawyer, doesn’t think so. The plan was “alarming,” to be sure, but “It was never within the realm of possibility that Americans would passively tolerate” a de facto dictatorship, she writes in The Washington Post, “and at any rate, U.S. military leaders had no interest in using force to keep Trump in power, either.”The same argument could apply to the other methods of subversion Hasen outlines. After all, if Republicans feel they must change election rules to win, might they not be said to be operating from a place of weakness rather than strength? “The only person or party that attempts a coup d’état is the one that cannot win by other means,” Jack Shafer writes in Politico. “It would only inspire a counter-coup by the majority, and maybe a counter-counter coup, and a counter-counter-counter coup.”But some analysts worry that U.S. elections are already so undemocratic that an anti-democratic movement doesn’t need to subvert them. Consider, for example, that the Senate now heavily favors, more than it has before, a minority of voters controlling a majority of the seats, while the Electoral College has become more likely to deny victory to the winner of the popular vote. Conceivably, an Orban-like candidate without a popular mandate could win legitimately in 2024, without violence or fraud, and feel little need to transform these institutions much further.“As things already stand today, the Republican Party can return to power in Washington without the support of the majority of the American electorate,” Osita Nwanevu writes in The New Republic. “Democrats, by contrast, had to win more than simple majorities or pluralities to gain the power they tenuously hold now — if Joe Biden had defeated Donald Trump by any less than 3.2 points in the popular vote, he would have lost outright in November. None of this is privileged information; these and other related facts have been widely disseminated in recent years by academics, analysts, and journalists who also tend to imply, nevertheless, that an undemocratic America is merely a hypothetical looming ahead of us. It isn’t. It is the quicksand we’re already in.”What happens next? It’s up to the DemocratsThe partisan biases of the Electoral College and the Senate are not easily altered, and whether they should be is a debate all its own. But at the very least, members of Congress could act to prevent the kind of explicit subversion of existing election rules that Hasen warns of: In the House of Representatives, Democrats have passed a new voting rights act aimed at stemming the tide of restrictive new election laws from Republican state legislatures. It would reverse two Supreme Court rulings that gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, reviving the Justice Department’s power to bar some discriminatory election changes and easing the path to challenge others in court.In the Senate, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota has introduced a bill that promises to “expand protections for election administrators by extending existing prohibitions on intimidating or threatening voters to include election officials engaged in the counting of ballots, canvassing, and certifying election results.”To guard against an Eastman-style plan to overturn the Electoral College vote, Congress could modernize the ambiguous Electoral Count Act that governs the counting procedure — far too ambiguously, Meredith McGehee and Elise Wirkus argue in The Hill.All of these measures would require changing the Senate filibuster, but doing so is completely within Democrats’ power, as the Times columnist Ezra Klein has noted. “In that way,” he argues, “Republicans perceive the threat correctly: A country that is far closer to being truly democratic, where the unpopularity of their ideas would expose them to punishing electoral consequences.” More