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      Do You Live in a ‘Tight’ State or a ‘Loose’ One? Turns Out It Matters Quite a Bit.

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      Political biases are omnipresent, but what we don’t fully understand yet is how they come about in the first place.In 2014, Michele J. Gelfand, a professor of psychology at the Stanford Graduate School of Business formerly at the University of Maryland, and Jesse R. Harrington, then a PhD. candidate, conducted a study designed to rank the 50 states on a scale of “tightness” and “looseness.”Appropriately titled “Tightness-Looseness Across the 50 United States,” the study calculated a catalog of measures for each state, including the incidence of natural disasters, disease prevalence, residents’ levels of openness and conscientiousness, drug and alcohol use, homelessness and incarceration rates.Gelfand and Harrington predicted that “‘tight’ states would exhibit a higher incidence of natural disasters, greater environmental vulnerability, fewer natural resources, greater incidence of disease and higher mortality rates, higher population density, and greater degrees of external threat.”The South dominated the tight states: Mississippi, Alabama Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, South Carolina and North Carolina. With two exceptions — Nevada and Hawaii — states in New England and on the West Coast were the loosest: California, Oregon, Washington, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont.In both 2016 and 2020, Donald Trump carried all 10 of the top “tight” states; Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden carried all 10 of the top “loose” states.Gelfand continued to pursue this line of research, publishing “Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World” in 2018, in which she described the results of a 2016 pre-election survey she and two colleagues had commissioned:The results were telling: People who felt the country was facing greater threats desired greater tightness. This desire, in turn, correctly predicted their support for Trump. In fact, desired tightness predicted support for Trump far better than other measures. For example, a desire for tightness predicted a vote for Trump with 44 times more accuracy than other popular measures of authoritarianism.The 2016 election, Gelfand continued, “turned largely on primal cultural reflexes — ones that had been conditioned not only by cultural forces, but by a candidate who was able to exploit them.”In a 2019 interview, Gelfand said:Some groups have much stronger norms than others; they’re tight. Others have much weaker norms; they’re loose. Of course, all cultures have areas in which they are tight and loose — but cultures vary in the degree to which they emphasize norms and compliance with them.Cultural differences, Gelfand continued, “have a certain logic — a rationale that makes good sense,” noting that “cultures that have threats need rules to coordinate to survive (think about how incredibly coordinated Japan is in response to natural disasters). But cultures that don’t have a lot of threat can afford to be more permissive and loose.”The tight-loose concept, Gelfand argued,is an important framework to understand the rise of President Donald Trump and other leaders in Poland, Hungary, Italy, and France, among others. The gist is this: when people perceive threat — whether real or imagined, they want strong rules and autocratic leaders to help them survive. My research has found that within minutes of exposing study participants to false information about terrorist incidents, overpopulation, pathogen outbreaks and natural disasters, their minds tightened. They wanted stronger rules and punishments.There are significantly different costs and benefits to tight and loose communities. In her book, Gelfand writes that tightness encourages conscientiousness, social order and self-control on the plus side, along with close-mindedness, conventional thinking and cultural inertia on the minus side. Looseness, Gelfand posits, fosters tolerance, creativity and adaptability, along with such liabilities as social disorder, a lack of coordination and impulsive behavior.I recently contacted Laura Niemi, a professor of psychology at Cornell, posing a series of questions that included these two:If liberalism and conservatism have historically played a complementary role, each checking the other to constrain extremism, why are the left and right so destructively hostile to each other now, and why is the contemporary political system so polarized?Along the same lines, if liberals and conservatives hold differing moral visions, not just about what makes a good government but about what makes a good life, what turned the relationship between left and right from competitive to mutually destructive?In her emailed reply, Niemi contended that sensitivity to various types of threat is a key factor in driving differences between the far left and far right. She cited research thatfound 47 percent of the most extreme conservatives strongly endorsed the view that “The world is becoming a more and more dangerous place,” compared to 19 percent of the most extreme liberals. Being threatened by the world, in turn, correlated with support for the Muslim ban and building a U.S.-Mexico wall. But if perceived threat were measured by endorsement of the statement “The U.S. is becoming a more and more dangerous place,” the results would likely look different — liberals, thinking of gun violence, may appear very high in threat perception.Conservatives and liberals, Niemi continued,see different things as threats — the nature of the threat and how it happens to stir one’s moral values (and their associated emotions) is a better clue to why liberals and conservatives react differently. Unlike liberals, conservatives strongly endorse the binding moral values aimed at protecting groups and relationships. They judge transgressions involving personal and national betrayal, disobedience to authority, and disgusting or impure acts such as sexually or spiritually unchaste behavior as morally relevant and wrong.Underlying these differences are competing sets of liberal and conservative moral priorities, with liberals placing more stress than conservatives on caring, kindness, fairness and rights — known among scholars as “individualizing values” — while conservatives focus more on loyalty, hierarchy, deference to authority, sanctity and a higher standard of disgust, known as “binding values.”As a set, Niemi wrote, conservative binding values encompassthe values oriented around group preservation, are associated with judgments, decisions, and interpersonal orientations that sacrifice the welfare of individuals. For example, binding values are associated with Machiavellianism (e.g., status-seeking and lying, getting ahead by any means, 2013); victim derogation, blame, and beliefs that victims were causal contributors for a variety of harmful acts (2016, 2020); and a tendency to excuse transgressions of ingroup members with attributions to the situation rather than the person (2023).Niemi cited a paper she and Liane Young, a professor of psychology at Boston College, published in 2016, “When and Why We See Victims as Responsible: The Impact of Ideology on Attitudes Toward Victims,” which tested responses of men and women to descriptions of crimes including sexual assaults and robberies.Niemi and Young wrote:We measured moral values associated with unconditionally prohibiting harm (“individualizing values”) versus moral values associated with prohibiting behavior that destabilizes groups and relationships (“binding values”: loyalty, obedience to authority, and purity). Increased endorsement of binding values predicted increased ratings of victims as contaminated, increased blame and responsibility attributed to victims, increased perceptions of victims’ (versus perpetrators’) behaviors as contributing to the outcome, and decreased focus on perpetrators.In summary, Niemi wrote:Numerous factors potentially influence the evolution of liberalism and conservatism and other social-cultural differences, including geography, topography, catastrophic events, and subsistence styles. What happened to people ecologically affected social-political developments, including the content of the rules people made and how they enforced them. Just as ecological factors differing from region to region over the globe produced different cultural values, ecological factors differed throughout the U.S. historically and today, producing our regional and state-level dimensions of culture and political patterns.Not everybody buys this.Joshua Hartshorne, who is also a professor of psychology at Boston College, took issue with the binding versus individualizing values theory as an explanation for the tendency of conservatives to blame victims:I would guess that the reason conservatives are more likely to blame the victim has less to do with binding values and more to do with the just-world bias (the belief that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people, therefore if a bad thing happened to you, you must be a bad person).Belief in a just world, Hartshorne argued, is crucial for those seeking to protect the status quo:It seems psychologically necessary for anyone who wants to advocate for keeping things the way they are that the haves should keep on having, and the have-nots have got as much as they deserve. I don’t see how you could advocate for such a position while simultaneously viewing yourself as moral (and almost everyone believes that they themselves are moral) without also believing in the just world. Conversely, if you generally believe the world is not just, and you view yourself as a moral person, then you are likely to feel like you have an obligation to change things.I asked Lene Aaroe, a political scientist at Aarhus University in Denmark, why the contemporary American political system is as polarized as it is now, given that the liberal-conservative schism is longstanding. What has happened to produce such intense hostility between left and right?Aaroe replied by email:There is variation across countries in hostility between left and right. The United States is a particularly polarized case which calls for a contextual explanation. For example, my own country, Denmark, has a multiparty system and now for the first time since 1978-79 has a coalitional government which includes both the main party on the political left and the party on the political right. A central explanation typically offered for the current situation in American politics is that partisanship and political ideology have developed into strong social identities where the mass public is increasingly sorted — along social, partisan, and ideological lines.I then asked Aaroe why surveys find that conservatives are happier than liberals. “Some research,” she replied, “suggests that experiences of inequality constitute a larger psychological burden to liberals because it is more difficult for liberals to rationalize inequality as a phenomenon with positive consequences.”Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, elaborated in an email on the link between conservatism and happiness:It’s a combination of factors. Conservatives are likelier to be married, patriotic, and religious, all of which make people happier. They may be less aggrieved by the status quo, whereas liberals take on society’s problems as part of their own personal burdens. Liberals also place politics closer to their identity and striving for meaning and purpose, which is a recipe for frustration.At the same time, Pinker continued,Some features of the woke faction of liberalism may make people unhappier: as Jon Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have suggested, wokeism is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in reverse, urging upon people maladaptive mental habits such as catastrophizing, feeling like a victim of forces beyond one’s control, prioritizing emotions of hurt and anger over rational analysis, and dividing the world into allies and villains.Why, I asked Pinker, would liberals and conservatives react differently — often very differently — to messages that highlight threat?“It’s difficult to pin down the psychological underpinnings of liberals and conservatives,” he said,because a predominantly liberal social science establishment tends to analyze conservatism as a kind of pathology and apply a double standard to the characterizations. It may be liberals (or at least the social-justice wing) who are more sensitive to threats, such as white supremacy, climate change, and patriarchy; who may be likelier to moralize, seeing racism and transphobia in messages that others perceive as neutral; and being likelier to surrender to emotions like “harm” and “hurt.”While liberals and conservatives, guided by different sets of moral values, may make agreement on specific policies difficult, that does not necessarily preclude consensus.Robb Willer, a sociologist at Stanford, agreed that research “consistently finds differences in the moral values endorsed by liberals and conservatives,” but, he argued in an email, there are ways to persuade conservatives to support liberal initiatives and to persuade liberals to back conservative proposals:While liberals tend to be more concerned with protecting vulnerable groups from harm and more concerned with equality and social justice than conservatives, conservatives tend to be more concerned with moral issues like group loyalty, respect for authority, purity and religious sanctity than liberals are. Because of these different moral commitments, we find that liberals and conservatives can be persuaded by quite different moral arguments. For example, we find that conservatives are more persuaded by a same-sex marriage appeal articulated in terms of group loyalty and patriotism, rather than equality and social justice.In a 2015 paper, “From Gulf to Bridge: When Do Moral Arguments Facilitate Political Influence?” Willer and Matthew Feinberg, a professor of organizational behavior at the University of Toronto, contend that “political arguments reframed to appeal to the moral values of those holding the opposing political position are typically more effective. We find support for these claims across six studies involving diverse political issues, including same-sex marriage, universal health care, military spending, and adopting English as the nation’s official language.”In one test of persuadability on the right, Feinberg and Willer assigned some conservatives to read an editorial supporting universal health care as a matter of “fairness (health coverage is a basic human right)” or to read an editorial supporting health care as a matter of “purity (uninsured people means more unclean, infected, and diseased Americans).”Conservatives who read the purity argument were much more supportive of health care than those who read the fairness case.Conversely, in a test of liberals, Feinberg and Willer measured support for maintaining high levels of military spending, with respondents reading either an editorial making the case “in terms of fairness (through the military, the disadvantaged can achieve equal standing and overcome the challenges of poverty and inequality)” or an editorial citing “a combination of loyalty and authority (the military unifies us and ensures that the United States is the greatest nation in the world).”Liberals who read the fairness argument were substantially more supportive of military spending than those who read the loyalty and authority argument.Willer is the co-author of a separate 2020 paper that focuses on a concept the authors call “neural polarization.”In “Conservative and Liberal Attitudes Drive Polarized Neural Responses to Political Content,” Willer, Yuan Chang Leong of the University of Chicago, Janice Chen of Johns Hopkins and Jamil Zaki of Stanford address the question of how partisan biases are encoded in the brain:Partisan biases in processing political information contribute to rising divisions in society. How do such biases arise in the brain? We measured the neural activity of participants watching videos related to immigration policy. Despite watching the same videos, conservative and liberal participants exhibited divergent neural responses. This “neural polarization” between groups occurred in a brain area associated with the interpretation of narrative content and intensified in response to language associated with risk, emotion, and morality. Furthermore, polarized neural responses predicted attitude change in response to the videos.The four authors argue that their “findings suggest that biased processing in the brain drives divergent interpretations of political information and subsequent attitude polarization.” These results, they continue, “shed light on the psychological and neural underpinnings of how identical information is interpreted differently by conservatives and liberals.”The authors used neural imaging to follow changes in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (known as DMPFC) as conservatives and liberals watched videos presenting strong positions, left and right, on immigration.“For each video,” they write,participants with DMPFC activity time courses more similar to that of conservative-leaning participants became more likely to support the conservative position. Conversely, those with DMPFC activity time courses more similar to that of liberal-leaning participants became more likely to support the liberal position. These results suggest that divergent interpretations of the same information are associated with increased attitude polarization. Together, our findings describe a neural basis for partisan biases in processing political information and their effects on attitude change.Describe their neuroimaging method, the authors point out that theysearched for evidence of “neural polarization” activity in the brain that diverges between people who hold liberal versus conservative political attitudes. Neural polarization was observed in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), a brain region associated with the interpretation of narrative content.The question is whether the political polarization that we are witnessing now proves to be a core, encoded aspect of the human mind, difficult to overcome — as Leong, Chen, Zaki and Willer suggest — or whether, with our increased knowledge of the neural basis of partisan and other biases, we will find more effective ways to manage these most dangerous of human predispositions.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: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Don’t Be Fooled. Ron DeSantis Is a Bush-Cheney Republican.

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      One of the strangest ads of the 2022 election cycle was an homage to “Top Gun,” featuring Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. In it, DeSantis is the “Top Gov,” setting his sights on his political enemies: “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. This is your governor speaking. Today’s training evolution: dogfighting, taking on the corporate media.”The ad concludes with DeSantis in the cockpit of a fighter aircraft, rallying viewers to take on the media’s “false narratives.”The imagery plays on the governor’s résumé. He was never a pilot, of course, but he was in the Navy, where he was a member of the Judge Advocate General Corps of military lawyers from 2004 to 2010. DeSantis served in Iraq and at the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay and made his military career a centerpiece of his 2018 campaign for governor. “Service is in my DNA,” he wrote at the time. “My desire to serve my country has been my goal and my calling.”In recent weeks, we have learned a little more about what that service actually entailed, details that weren’t more widely known at the time of his 2018 race.As a lawyer at Guantánamo Bay, according to a report by Michael Kranish in The Washington Post, DeSantis endorsed the force-feeding of detainees.“Detainees were strapped into a chair, and a lubricated tube was stuffed down their nose so a nurse could pour down two cans of a protein drink,” Kranish wrote. “The detainees’ lawyers tried and failed to stop the painful practice, arguing that it violated international torture conventions.”The reason to highlight these details of DeSantis’s service at Guantánamo is that it helps place the Florida governor in his proper political context. The standard view of DeSantis is that he comes out of Donald Trump’s populist Republican Party, a view the governor has been keen to cultivate as he vies for leadership within the party. And to that end, DeSantis has made himself into the presumptive heir apparent to Trump in look, language and attitude.But what if we centered DeSantis in Guantánamo, Iraq and the war on terrorism rather than the fever house of the MAGA Republican Party, a place that may not be a natural fit for the Yale- and Harvard-educated lawyer? What if we treated DeSantis not as a creature of the Trump years but as a product of the Bush ones? How, then, would we understand his position in the Republican Party?For a moment in American politics — before Hurricane Katrina, the grinding occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the financial crisis that nearly toppled the global economy — George W. Bush represented the clear future of the Republican Party.And what was Bush Republicanism? It promised, despite the circumstances of his election in 2000, to build a new, permanent Republican majority that would relegate the Democratic Party to the margins of national politics. It was ideologically conservative on most questions of political economy but willing to bend in order to win points with key constituencies, as when Bush backed a large prescription drug program under Medicare.Bush’s Republicanism was breathtakingly arrogant — “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” one unnamed aide famously told The New York Times Magazine in 2004 — contemptuous of expertise and hostile to dissent, as when the president condemned the Democratic-controlled Senate of 2002 as “not interested in the security of the American people.”Bush’s Republicanism was also cruel, as exemplified in the 2004 presidential election, when he ran, successfully, against the marriage rights of gay and lesbian Americans, framing them as a threat to the integrity of society itself. “Marriage cannot be severed from its cultural, religious and natural roots without weakening the good influence of society,” he said, endorsing a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.Perhaps the most distinctive quality of Bush’s Republicanism — or rather, Bush’s Republican Party — was that it was still an elite-driven institution. He ran a Brooks Brothers administration, whose militarism, jingoism and cruelty were expressed through bureaucratic niceties and faux technical language, like “enhanced interrogation.”To me, DeSantis looks like a Bush Republican as much as or more than he does a Trump one. He shares the majoritarian aspirations of Bush, as well as the open contempt for dissent. DeSantis shares the cruelty, with a national political image built, among other things, on a campaign of stigma against trans and other gender-nonconforming Americans.Despite his pretenses to the contrary, DeSantis is very much the image of a member of the Republican establishment. That’s one reason he has the almost lock-step support of the organs of that particular elite, for whom he represents a return to normalcy after the chaos and defeat of the Trump years.It is not for nothing that in the fight for the 2024 Republican nomination, DeSantis leads Trump among Republicans with a college degree — the white-collar conservative voters who were Bush stalwarts and Trump skeptics.The upshot of all of this — and the reason to make this classification in the first place — is that it is simply wrong to attribute the pathologies of today’s Republican Party to the influence of Trump alone. If DeSantis marks the return of the Bush Republican, then he is a stark reminder that the Republican Party of that era was as destructive and dysfunctional as the one forged by Trump.You could even say that if DeSantis is the much-desired return to “normal” Republicans, then Republican normalcy is not much different from Republican deviancy.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: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Trump Could Stand in the Middle of Fifth Avenue and Not Lose Mike Pence

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      Mike Pence wants to have it both ways.He wants to be the conservative hero of Jan. 6: the steadfast Republican patriot who resisted the MAGA mob and defended the institutions of American democracy. “Make no mistake about it,” Pence said at the Gridiron Club Dinner in Washington, D.C., this month. “What happened that day was a disgrace, and it mocks decency to portray it in any other way. President Donald Trump was wrong. I had no right to overturn the election and his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day.”But Mike Pence also wants to be president. And he can’t fully repudiate the previous Republican president if he hopes to win the Republican presidential nomination, especially when that president is still on the stage, with a commanding role in Republican politics.The result is that Mike Pence has to talk out of both sides of his mouth. With one breath, he takes a righteous stand against the worst dysfunction of the Trump years. “We have to resist the politics of personality, the lure of populism unmoored by timeless conservative values,” Pence said last week while speaking to an audience of Republican donors in Keene, N.H.With his next breath, however, Pence rejects any effort to hold Trump accountable, especially when it asks him to do something more than give the occasional sound bite. Asked to testify about the events surrounding Jan. 6, Pence says no. Faced with a grand jury subpoena forcing him to testify, Pence says he’ll challenge it, under the highly dubious theory that as president of the Senate he was a legislative officer who, like other lawmakers, was covered by the “speech or debate” clause of the Constitution and thus free of any obligation to testify.When asked this past weekend about potential criminal charges against the former president — possibly for falsifying records of a hush money payment to Stormy Daniels, a porn star whose real name is Stephanie Clifford — Pence deflected, telling ABC News, “At the time when there’s a crime wave in New York City, the fact that the Manhattan D.A. thinks that indicting President Trump is his top priority I think just tells you everything you need to know about the radical left.”Who will hold Trump accountable, according to Pence? No one living. “History will hold Donald Trump accountable,” he said, as if “history” has agency separate from the people who make or write it.In fairness to Pence, he’s not the only Republican hedging his bets. None of Trump’s rivals — or anyone else who hopes to have a future in Republican politics — views either the investigation into his behavior or the potential charges against him as legitimate.“Here we go again — an outrageous abuse of power by a radical D.A. who lets violent criminals walk as he pursues political vengeance against President Trump,” tweeted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.“I’m directing relevant committees to immediately investigate if federal funds are being used to subvert our democracy by interfering in elections with politically motivated prosecutions,” he added, without irony.“The Manhattan district attorney is a Soros-funded prosecutor. And so he, like other Soros-funded prosecutors, they weaponize their office to impose a political agenda on society at the expense of the rule of law and public safety,” said the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, the pot calling the kettle black.Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and current presidential aspirant, has been silent on the matter, and the long-shot candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, a venture capitalist, condemned the potential Trump indictment as a “disastrously politicized prosecution.”Whether or not you think it is a good idea to indict Trump in this particular case, it is striking to see how Republicans commit to the former president when asked to speak to his alleged crimes.But it speaks to a larger point, beyond the double-talk of Pence or the deflection and avoidance of other Republican politicians. Trump may not be as strong as he was as president. He may have been wounded by the long investigations into Jan. 6 and diminished by the failure of many of his handpicked MAGA candidates in the midterm elections. And yet, Trump is still the dominant figure in Republican politics. He still occupies the commanding heights of the Republican Party. And there’s no one — not DeSantis or Haley or any other potential contender — ready to challenge Trump for control of the party.There was hope, after the 2020 presidential election, that after his defeat Trump would somehow fade away. He didn’t. There was hope, after his failed putsch, that his time in the spotlight was over. It wasn’t. And there was hope, after the 2022 elections, that MAGA had run its course and Trump along with it. Wrong again.The only way to remove Trump from the board — to neutralize his influence in the Republican Party and to keep him out of power — is for Republicans to move against him with as much force as they can muster. It was true in 2015, when Republican elites could have coordinated themselves against him when he was still a curiosity and not the leading candidate for the nomination; it was true in 2019 and 2021 when he was impeached by the House, and it’s true now.Republicans can’t avoid conflict if they want to be free of Trump. They have no choice but to condemn him, reject his influence and refuse to defend his criminality.We can see, of course, in this instance and so many others that they won’t. Among Republicans with an ambition to lead, there’s no one who will take that step. Which tells us all we need to know about the state of the Republican Party. It was Trump’s when he was president, it is Trump’s while he’s still a private citizen, and it will be Trump’s next year, when the presidential race starts in earnest.Put differently, if there’s no voter Trump could lose if he stood in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shot somebody, as Trump famously said, there are probably no leading Republican politicians who would leave his camp, either. Hell, they might even say the victim deserved it.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: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Ron DeSantis’s Ukraine Stance Angers G.O.P. Hawks

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      The Florida governor, who joined Donald Trump in declaring that defending Ukraine from Russia was not a vital interest, drew swift condemnations from establishment Republicans.Declaring this week that defending Ukraine against Russia’s invasion was not a vital interest for the United States, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida cemented a Republican shift away from hawkish foreign policy that has played out over the past decade and accelerated with Donald J. Trump’s political rise.Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis — whose combined support makes up more than 75 percent of Republican primary voters in the nascent 2024 presidential contest — are now largely aligned on Ukraine, signaling a sharp break from the interventionist approach that drove former President George W. Bush’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.Republican foreign policy hawks recoiled at Mr. DeSantis’s statement on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Fox News on Monday night, in which the governor deviated from the position held by most of the Republican establishment on Capitol Hill, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader. Mr. McConnell and other top congressional Republicans have framed the invasion by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as a fight to defend the post-World War II international security framework.“DeSantis is wrong and seems to have forgotten the lessons of Ronald Reagan,” said former Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who led the House select committee investigating Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.“This is not ‘a territorial dispute,’” she said in a statement, echoing Mr. DeSantis’s phrasing. “The Ukrainian people are fighting for their freedom. Surrendering to Putin and refusing to defend freedom makes America less safe.”She went on: “Weakness is provocative and American officials who advocate this type of weakness are Putin’s greatest weapon. Abandoning Ukraine would make broader conflict, including with China and other American adversaries, more likely.”Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said in an interview on Tuesday morning that he “could not disagree more” with Mr. DeSantis’s characterization of the stakes attached to the defense of Ukraine.“The Neville Chamberlain approach to aggression never ends well,” said Mr. Graham, comparing Mr. DeSantis to the British prime minister who appeased Adolf Hitler. “This is an attempt by Putin to rewrite the map of Europe by force of arms.”Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also took issue with Mr. DeSantis’s comments — a significant rebuke from the senior Republican in Mr. DeSantis’s home state.“I don’t know what he’s trying to do or what the goal is,” Mr. Rubio, a former presidential candidate, told the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt.And Senator John Cornyn of Texas told Politico he was “disturbed” by Mr. DeSantis’s comments.Mr. Trump has long made his views on foreign intervention clear, railing against the Iraq war in his 2016 campaign, but Mr. DeSantis had sought to avoid being pinned down on one of the most important foreign policy questions facing the prospective Republican presidential field.His choice of words, describing the conflict as a “territorial dispute,” was telling. By referring to Russia’s unprovoked invasion that way, he dismissed the argument that Mr. Putin’s aggression threatened the postwar international order. Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Trump have unequivocally rejected the idea that the conflict is a war to defend “freedom,” a position espoused by two of their potential rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, former Vice President Mike Pence and Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador.Mr. DeSantis left himself some wiggle room in his statement, which came in response to a questionnaire that Mr. Carlson had sent to all of the major prospective Republican presidential candidates. The governor did not promise to end all U.S. aid to Ukraine — an omission noticed by some hard-line opponents of support for Ukraine, who criticized Mr. DeSantis for leaving open the possibility that he would keep up the flow of American assistance.Leading congressional Republicans have framed the Russian invasion as a fight to defend the post-World War II international security framework.Daniel Berehulak/The New York TimesYet by downplaying the stakes of the conflict to the extent he did, Mr. DeSantis angered many Republicans in the foreign policy establishment who said he had talked himself into a corner. Even if he were to change his mind about Ukraine, how would a President DeSantis rally the public and Congress to send billions of dollars and high-tech weapons for a mere “territorial dispute” of no vital interest to America?Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, said that the remarks were “a naïve and complete misunderstanding of the historical context of what’s going on,” and that authoritarians would fill the void if the U.S. retreated from global leadership.Charles Kupperman, who served under John R. Bolton as a deputy national security adviser in the Trump administration, said Mr. DeSantis had shown “a very poor understanding of our national security interests,” adding, “I’m surprised he’s gone so far so fast.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.It was unclear who, if anyone, helped Mr. DeSantis write the statement.Ms. Haley, one of the three major Republicans who have announced a 2024 campaign, released her response to Mr. Carlson on Tuesday, offering an unequivocal “yes” to the question of whether stopping Russia was of vital interest to the U.S.“America is far better off with a Ukrainian victory than a Russian victory, including avoiding a wider war,” she said. “If Russia wins, there is no reason to believe it will stop at Ukraine.”“History has shown us that telling the enemy what you won’t do leads to more aggression, not less,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said in an interview on Tuesday. Julia Nikhinson for The New York TimesConservatives who want the United States to shift its focus away from Europe to focus on combating China were delighted by Mr. DeSantis’s statement.“Americans desperately need a foreign policy that understands what’s really in their interests and pursues those interests strategically and realistically in a dangerous world,” said Elbridge Colby, a former senior official at the Defense Department who recently briefed Senate Republicans on China policy.“That’s clearly the approach Governor DeSantis laid out in his response to Tucker Carlson,” Mr. Colby added. “He prioritized the top threats to America, such as China and narcotics streaming over the border, rightly seeing Ukraine as a distraction from these top challenges, while also rejecting the Wilsonian radicalism that has led us to disaster before and would be catastrophic if pursued today.”And there is a sharp divide between elite Republican opinion and the views of party voters. While many top Republicans were outraged by Mr. DeSantis’s statement, he and Mr. Trump stand closer to the average G.O.P. voter than Republicans like Mr. McConnell who are urging Mr. Biden to do more to support Ukraine.A January poll from the Pew Research Center showed that 40 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning independent voters thought the U.S. was giving too much support to Ukraine. Only 17 percent thought the U.S. was not doing enough.Conservative interventionists had held out hope that Mr. DeSantis would split with Mr. Trump on Ukraine policy. Mr. DeSantis spooked them late last month when he suggested on Fox News that he was not committed to defending Ukraine.But Mr. DeSantis’s comments in that interview were brief and vague enough for these conservatives to stay hopeful that he would end up on their side. They searched for positive signs, finding solace in Mr. DeSantis’s record in Congress. In 2014 and 2015, after Mr. Putin annexed Crimea from Ukraine, Mr. DeSantis criticized President Barack Obama as not doing enough to support Ukraine. In Florida, Mr. DeSantis recently hosted the historian William Inboden, the author of a recent book about President Ronald Reagan’s efforts during the Cold War, to exchange thoughts about foreign policy, according to two people familiar with the meeting.Dr. Inboden and an associate did not respond to emails seeking comment. An aide to Mr. DeSantis did not respond to a request for comment.Several hawks went into overdrive as they tried to lobby Mr. DeSantis. Kimberley A. Strassel, the Wall Street Journal columnist, urged him not to join what she called Mr. Trump’s “G.O.P. surrender caucus.”“The governor has an opportunity to contrast a bold, well-thought-out foreign policy with Mr. Trump’s opaque retreatism,” Ms. Strassel wrote.But pro-Ukraine Republicans who had observed Mr. DeSantis closely had more reasons to be alarmed. They were unsettled by his ties to the Claremont Institute, an influential conservative think tank that promotes foreign policy views broadly aligned with Mr. Trump’s. On Monday night, only the most optimistic interventionists could have still been hopeful that Mr. DeSantis would end up on their side. More

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      ‘History Will Hold Donald Trump Accountable’ for Jan. 6, Pence Says

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      At a Washington dinner event, Mike Pence criticized the president he served under as well as Republicans who are minimizing the Capitol riot.Former Vice President Mike Pence, delivering his strongest public rebuke yet to the president who made him his running mate, said on Saturday night “that history will hold Donald Trump accountable” for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, which he called “a disgrace.”The annual Gridiron Club Dinner in Washington is usually a venue for lighthearted ribbing between political figures, government officials and the district’s media veterans, but Mr. Pence used the occasion on Saturday to dig into Mr. Trump at a moment when conservative media commentators and some Republicans in Congress have again tried to dismiss the seriousness of the Capitol riot.“Tourists don’t injure 140 police officers by sightseeing,” Mr. Pence said, according to media reports from the event, an implicit rebuke of the Fox News host Tucker Carlson and other conservatives who have used selective security camera footage to reframe the riot as a largely peaceful demonstration. Thousands of hours of that footage was released to Mr. Carlson by the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy of California. “Tourists don’t break down doors to get to the speaker of the House or voice threats against public officials.”And Mr. Pence made his reprimand of Mr. Trump personal when he said, “President Trump was wrong; I had no right to overturn the election. And his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day. And I know that history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”The timing of the remarks was significant. Mr. Trump and his ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, are the only two major, declared candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, but other potential challengers are edging closer. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is on a swing through early primary and caucus states, including Iowa and Nevada. Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, is on a “listening tour” in the same states. Mr. Pence is considering a run as well.But until Saturday, any rival jabs at the former president and presumed front-runner for the nomination have been implicit. Mr. Pence called him out by name, setting a new bar for other Republicans hoping to replace Mr. Trump as the party’s leader.Early this month, a group of men imprisoned for their participation in the Capitol attack released a song titled “Justice for All” — the national anthem interspersed with Mr. Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance — and House Republicans on the party’s right flank have started what they are calling an investigation into the treatment of such “political prisoners.”Mr. Pence was unsparing in his condemnation of such efforts, as well as the selective editing of thousands of hours of security footage.“The American people have a right to know what took place at the Capitol on Jan. 6,” he said. “But make no mistake about it, what happened that day was a disgrace, and it mocks decency to portray it in any other way.”He also jokingly hinted at his presidential ambitions.“I will wholeheartedly, unreservedly support the Republican nominee for president in 2024,” he said. “If it’s me.” More

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      Seeking Evangelicals’ Support Again, Trump Confronts a Changed Religious Landscape

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      Evangelicals were wooed by Donald Trump’s promise of an anti-abortion Supreme Court. Now, they’re back playing the field.On a recent Sunday morning at Elmbrook Church, a nondenominational evangelical megachurch in Brookfield, Wis., Jerry Wilson considered the far-off matter of his vote in 2024.“It’s going to be a Republican,” he said, “but I don’t know who.”In 2016 and 2020 he had voted for Donald J. Trump. “He did accomplish a lot for Christians, for evangelicals,” Mr. Wilson, 64, said. But “he’s got a lot of negative attributes, and they make you pause and think, you know? I’d like to see what the other candidates have to offer.”White evangelical voters were central to Mr. Trump’s first election, and he remains overwhelmingly popular among them. But a Monmouth University poll in late January and early February found Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida who has not declared his candidacy for president but appears to be Mr. Trump’s most formidable early rival, leading Mr. Trump by 7 percentage points among self-identified evangelical Republican voters in a head-to-head contest.It was an early sign that as he makes a bid for a return to office, Mr. Trump must reckon with a base that has changed since his election in 2016 — and because of it.Some of the changes clearly benefit Mr. Trump, but others may have weakened his hold on evangelical voters and the prominent evangelical pastors who are often seen as power brokers in Republican politics.The Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in June, which overturned the constitutional right to an abortion, has shifted much of the fight to further roll back abortion rights — the near-singular political aim of conservative evangelicals for more than four decades — to the state level. Last year, Mr. Trump disparaged Republican candidates for focusing too much on the “abortion issue,” a statement that was viewed as a betrayal by some evangelicals on the right and an invitation to seek other options.Conservative evangelical politics have both expanded and moved sharply rightward, animated by a new slate of issues like opposition to race and history curriculums in schools and L.G.B.T.Q. rights, and shaped by the Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, which some pastors rallied against as a grave affront to religious freedom. These are areas where Mr. DeSantis has aggressively staked his claim.Who’s Running for President in 2024?Card 1 of 7The race begins. More

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      Larry Hogan: I’m Not Seeking the Republican Nomination for President

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      I truly appreciate all those around the nation who have for many years encouraged me to run for president. After eight years of pouring my heart and soul into serving the people of Maryland, I have no desire to put my family through another grueling campaign just for the experience.I would never run for president to sell books or position myself for a cabinet role. I have long said that I care more about ensuring a future for the Republican Party than securing my own future in the Republican Party. And that is why I will not be seeking the Republican nomination for president.Since Donald Trump won the nomination in 2016, I have fought to make clear that our party cannot be successful if we put personality before principle, if our elected officials are afraid to say publicly what they freely admit behind closed doors, and if we can’t learn from our mistakes because of the political cost of admitting facts to be true. In 2020, the party didn’t even bother passing a campaign platform. For too long, Republican voters have been denied a real debate about what our party stands for beyond loyalty to Mr. Trump. A cult of personality is no substitute for a party of principle.I believe the tides are finally turning. Republican voters are growing tired of the drama and are open to new leadership. And while I’m optimistic about the future of the Republican Party, I am deeply concerned about this next election. We cannot afford to have Mr. Trump as our nominee and suffer defeat for the fourth consecutive election cycle. To once again be a successful governing party, we must move on from Mr. Trump. There are several competent Republican leaders who have the potential to step up and lead. But the stakes are too high for me to risk being part of another multicar pileup that could potentially help Mr. Trump recapture the nomination.I continue to be inspired by the example of our founders. They believed that the work of our democracy was meant to be done by citizen leaders, not a permanent political class. Public service was supposed to be a temporary sacrifice, while the work of citizenship lasts for a lifetime. I’m not a career politician, and that has never been my aspiration. I’ve spent nearly my entire career founding and running businesses, and that’s what I’m going to go back to doing.An encouraging trend for Republican politics lies in the fact that the excesses of progressive elites have created the opportunity to attract more working-class voters from all different backgrounds. But many in the Republican Party falsely believe that the best way to reach these voters is through more angry, performative politics and bigger government. These are just empty calories that can’t sustain the lasting governing coalition necessary to restore America.I still believe in a Republican Party that stands for fiscal responsibility and getting the government off our backs and out of our pockets. I still believe in a Republican Party that celebrates entrepreneurship and economic opportunity for every American. I still believe in a Republican Party that backs law enforcement and the rule of law. I still believe in a Republican Party that works to secure peace through strength in our dangerous world. I still believe in a Republican Party that can win not just the electoral college or the popular vote but sweep landslide elections with an inclusive, broad coalition of Americans and a hopeful, optimistic vision for America’s future. And I still believe in a Republican Party that upholds and honors perhaps our most sacred tradition: the peaceful transfer of power.Some say this Republican Party is a relic of the past, but I disagree. In Maryland over the last eight years, we have earned overwhelming support not just from Republicans and independents but also from Reagan Democrats and Black, Hispanic and Asian voters. We did this by cutting taxes and regulations, turning the state’s record deficit into a record surplus, standing behind our brave police and leading the charge against elitist higher education policies by opening alternative pathways to success.Our nation faces great challenges; we can’t afford to be consumed by the pettiest grievances. We can push back and defeat the excesses of elitist policies on the left without resorting to angry, divisive and performative politics. We can deliver safe streets, more economic opportunity and respect for traditional values without abandoning our limited government conservative principles and America’s role as leader of the free world.I will stand with anyone who shares that common sense conservative vision for the Republican Party and can get us back to winning elections again. Serving as Maryland’s governor and chairing the National Governors Association was the honor of a lifetime, but elected office is not the only way to make a difference.The work to build a Republican Party that can win and deliver for working people, not just talk loudly about it, has only just begun. Though I will not be a candidate for my party’s nomination for president, I’ve only just begun fighting for our future.Larry Hogan is the former governor of Maryland and a former chair of the National Governors Association.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: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      This Is Trump’s ‘Magic Trick’

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      In his effort to outflank Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida — his most potent challenger-in-waiting for the Republican presidential nomination — Donald Trump goes only in one direction: hard right.At the start of this year, Trump announced his education agenda, declaring that he would issue mandates to “keep men out of women’s sports,” end teacher tenure and cut federal aid to any school system that teaches “critical race theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content onto our children.”“As the saying goes,” Trump declared, “personnel is policy and at the end of the day if we have pink-haired communists teaching our kids we have a major problem.”Later in January, Trump revealed his “Plan to Protect Children from Left-Wing Gender Insanity,” in which he promised to bring a halt to “gender-affirming care,” to punish doctors who provide gender-affirming care to minors and to pass legislation declaring that “the only genders recognized by the United States government are male and female and they are assigned at birth.”“No serious country should be telling its children that they were born with the wrong gender,” Trump declared. “Under my leadership, this madness will end.”At one level, these pronouncements reflect Trump’s determination to prevent DeSantis from outflanking him. On a larger scale, they reveal a predicament facing not only the former president as he seeks renomination in 2024, but the conservative movement in general, including white evangelicals, the Republican Party and Fox News.Trump’s strategy requires him to continue his equivocation on white supremacism and his antisemitic supporters and to adopt increasingly extreme positions, including the “termination” of the Constitution in order to retroactively award him victory in the 2020 election. The more he attempts to enrage and invigorate his MAGA base in the Republican primaries, the more he forces his fellow partisans and conservatives to follow suit, threatening Republican prospects in the coming general election, as demonstrated by the poor showing of Trump clones in the 2022 midterm contests.Questions about the pandemicCard 1 of 4When will the pandemic end? More