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      In Affluent Greenwich, It’s Republicans vs. ‘Trumplicans’

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      Over the summer, the Greenwich Country Day School sent out an invitation for its annual Cider and Donuts event. To emphasize its commitment to diversity, the school noted that the autumn gathering was open to families “who identify as Black, Asian, Latinx, multiracial, indigenous, Middle Eastern, and/or people of color.”But to the alarm of the local Republican Town Committee, the invitation left out a demographic not often thought of as marginalized in this affluent community.“You listed nearly every group but white people … was that on purpose?” the committee asked in an Instagram post. “Is that how you bring people together? Inclusion …?”Stunned, the private school’s administrator graciously said the letter could have more clearly conveyed that all were welcome for cider, after which the Republican committee congratulated itself for striking a blow for civil rights: “Glad the RTC has helped our community become more inclusive.”The culture wars were destined to spill someday into the rarefied precincts of Greenwich. But who in the name of George Bush would have expected the charge to be led by a band of Trump acolytes who have taken control of the town’s Republican committee?The electoral worth of the party’s far-right swerve will be tested nationwide in next week’s midterm elections. Here in Greenwich, long a bastion of moderate Republicans like the elder Mr. Bush — a Greenwich Country Day alum — the takeover has people asking: Who are these Greenwich Republicans? And did they lock the town’s traditional Republican leaders in the hold of some yacht in Greenwich Harbor?The answer: They are a small, well-organized group that essentially applied the “precinct strategy” espoused by the former Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon, which calls for toppling local political establishments to clear the way for like-minded Republican candidates who will one day guide the country’s future.Beth MacGillivray, the chairwoman of the new Republican Town Committee, which stands by its “inclusion” moment, said the previous committee was too moderate and lackadaisical. She promised a “red wave coming in the midterm elections.”But some Greenwich Republicans worry that their party may venture so far right it will fall off the political cliff. For them, former President Donald J. Trump is the unpredictable uncle who could turn the family barbecue into a three-alarm fire. You don’t deny the relationship, but you don’t volunteer it either.This ambivalence was highlighted in 2019 — even before the committee’s rightward lurch — when Republicans became apoplectic over a sudden sprouting of campaign signs linking Mr. Trump with Fred Camillo, their candidate for the mayor-like position of first selectman. “Trump/Camillo,” the signs said. “Make Greenwich Great Again.”The signs turned out to be the satirical handiwork of Mark Kordick, a registered Democrat and Greenwich police captain with 31 years on the force. According to court records, Mr. Camillo texted a supporter: “He better pray I do not win because I would be the police commissioner and he will be gone.”A satirical sign linking a Republican politician, Fred Camillo, to former President Donald J. Trump.Leslie Yager/Greenwich Free PressMr. Camillo did win, and Mr. Kordick was fired. In suing the town and several officials, Mr. Kordick said that the signs were “to remind undecided voters and moderate Republicans unhappy with Trump that Camillo and Trump were members of the same party.”The lawsuit, like the midterm elections, is pending.‘Clowns’ Against ‘Outsiders’Greenwich, with its increasingly diverse population of 63,000, is no longer a Republican stronghold known for fiscal conservatism and social moderation. Just five years ago, the town had considerably more registered Republicans than Democrats; today, Democrats outnumber Republicans, while unaffiliated voters, including more than a few disaffected Republicans, outnumber both.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.House Democrats: Several moderates elected in 2018 in conservative-leaning districts are at risk of being swept out. That could cost the Democrats their House majority.A Key Constituency: A caricature of the suburban female voter looms large in American politics. But in battleground regions, many voters don’t fit the stereotype.Crime: In the final stretch of the campaigns, politicians are vowing to crack down on crime. But the offices they are running for generally have little power to make a difference.Abortion: The fall of Roe v. Wade seemed to offer Democrats a way of energizing voters and holding ground. Now, many worry that focusing on abortion won’t be enough to carry them to victory.A central reason: the divisive Mr. Trump, who was trounced here by Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. He was vilified by the town’s progressives and disliked by most moderate Republicans, though he found support among some wealthy and influential residents.It was against this backdrop that the Republican Town Committee chose Dan Quigley, 50, as its new chairman in early 2020. A financial services consultant, stay-at-home father and party moderate, he said he benefited from being a political neophyte: “No baggage. No animosity.”No such luck.Dan Quigley, the former chairman of the Greenwich Republican Town Committee, found himself at loggerheads with outspoken Trump supporters.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesBefore long, Mr. Quigley found himself at odds with Carl Higbie, a local Trump stalwart who, in 2018, had resigned his position with the Trump administration after CNN reported his history of offensive statements, including: “I believe wholeheartedly, wholeheartedly, that the Black race as a whole, not totally, is lazier than the white race, period.”Mr. Higbie, who said these past comments were either “flat-out stupid” or taken out of context, contacted Mr. Quigley about delivering Trump signs to party headquarters for the 2020 campaign, only to have Mr. Quigley explain that he had quietly prohibited Trump material, so as not to hurt the chances of the party’s local candidates. (Mr. Trump would be crushed here by Joseph R. Biden Jr., who would win 62 percent of the vote.)This irked Mr. Higbie, which led to internal bickering, which led to a compromise of sorts. Some Trump signs were delivered to party headquarters, only to be consigned to a corner and covered with a tarp.Mr. Higbie, 39, is now the host of a morning weekend program on the right-wing broadcaster Newsmax. He said recently that he had long been unhappy with the “very establishment Jeb Bush-style Republican Party” in his hometown — “historically squishy,” he said — and he was still annoyed by Mr. Quigley’s suppression of Trump signs.Carl Higbie, a Newsmax host and former member of the Trump administration, clashed with the committee’s leadership.Tyler Sizemore/Hearst Connecticut Media“Look, dude, if you’re not going to support our presidential nominee, the sitting president, we have a problem with that,” Mr. Higbie said. “It turned a lot of people off.”Mr. Quigley called the moment “the first altercation I had with this group.”It was not the last.Months later, some Republicans vehemently opposed one of the Town Committee’s nominees for the Board of Education: Michael-Joseph Mercanti-Anthony, a longtime educator with a doctorate in education leadership whose employment in the New York City school system made him suspect. What’s more, he had donated about $400 to the Biden campaign.“They saw that as unforgivable,” said Mr. Mercanti-Anthony, 47, who described himself as “a conservative who does not believe Trump possesses the competence to be president.”Mr. Higbie used his Newsmax platform to criticize Mr. Quigley and Mr. Mercanti-Anthony as Republicans in name only. He showed their photographs to his national audience, including one of Mr. Mercanti-Anthony with his two young sons — their faces blurred, Mr. Higbie said, “because we’re civil here.”“We can’t let these clowns get away with this anymore,” Mr. Higbie told his viewers.Mr. Mercanti-Anthony won more votes than any other school board candidate in last November’s local elections, part of a Republican sweep that included retaining control of the town’s powerful finance board. An unqualified success for Mr. Quigley, it would seem.Michael-Joseph Mercanti-Anthony was elected to the school board despite his opposition to Mr. Trump and being portrayed as a Republican in name only.Leslie Yager/Greenwich Free PressDays later, in an opinion piece in the local paper, Mr. Quigley urged Republicans to move on from Mr. Trump — an “ego-driven political opportunist,” he wrote — and described the party’s right wing as “angry outsiders” who base their conclusions “on dodgy facts and conspiracy theories.”Most Greenwich Republicans do not share their values, he wrote with confidenceOusting the Old GuardOrganizations like the Greenwich Republican Town Committee may seem more like vanity projects than vehicles of power. But they decide who appears on a party’s endorsed ballot for the school board, the town council, the state legislature — the steppingstones to higher office.Normally, the committee’s underpublicized meetings attract few people. But on two frigid nights in early January, hundreds of registered Republicans showed up for caucuses to elect their committee members for the next two years — after some stealthy coordination by an anti-moderate contingent that included sending out “Dear Neighbor” leaflets vowing to “protect Greenwich from turning into San Francisco.”The insurgent slate overwhelmed the Republican caucuses, winning 41 of the 63 committee seats.“A complete, total blood bath,” acknowledged Mr. Quigley, who commended the winners for being “well organized” but also accused them of a “political coup.”“It made no sense,” he said. “We weren’t Democrats, we weren’t socialists, but people who previously were not engaged in politics believed that narrative.”Five self-described working mothers took over the executive committee, including Mr. Quigley’s successor as chair, Ms. MacGillivray, 60, who was fairly new to politics. She later recalled that when asked in 2020 to help Kimberly Fiorello, a conservative Republican, run for state representative, she initially balked, joking, “It’s golf season, for God’s sake.”Ms. MacGillivray, more seasoned now, wrote in an email that despite the electoral success under Mr. Quigley, people were dissatisfied with his “inactions” and wanted a “more dynamic and responsive” leadership. Others said that dissatisfaction with the “woke” direction of the public schools also played a role.Beth MacGillivray, the committee chairwoman, attended a Greenwich Republican clambake in September with Senator Rick Scott of Florida, right.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesThe new committee cites the familiar guiding principles of limited government, parental rights and individual freedom, as well as “America First,” the catchall trope of Mr. Trump. Still, the abrupt change in tone has been like golf cleats clattering on a country club’s marbled floor.There was the perceived need to champion white inclusion in mostly white Greenwich, for example. And the time Ms. MacGillivray, in opposing transgender athletes in scholastic sports, told the school board that the men on her college ski team were consistently stronger and faster — and “even one of the male ski racers” who was “gay,” she said, “out-skied any girl or woman on the racecourse every time.”There is also the committee’s connection to the Greenwich Patriots, a hard-right group that at times seems like the id to the Town Committee’s ego. The Patriots contend that Covid-19 vaccines are unsafe, rail against “highly sexualized, pornographic and profanity-laced content” in schools, and serve as a conduit for Mr. Trump, promoting his events and sharing his specious claim that the 2020 election was stolen.“In case you are wondering,” the group’s daily newsletter once advised, “election fraud was rampant in the 2020 election in all 50 states, including in Connecticut.”False. More than 1.8 million Connecticut residents voted in the 2020 election, but the state’s Elections Enforcement Commission has received just 31 complaints alleging irregularities. Three resulted in fines, with the rest dismissed, pending or found inconclusive.A Different Kind of PlatformOne way that the Town Committee severed its moderate past was by declining to participate in the candidate debates sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Greenwich. The league’s local chapter was “clearly biased” and dominated by Democrats, Ms. MacGillivray said, with a tendency to take “strident, vocal positions on political issues” like voting rules.The chapter’s president, Sandy Waters, a former Republican member of the Greenwich school board, disputed every point. The nonpartisan organization’s not-for-profit status allows it to support policy issues such as early voting, she said, and the decision by Republicans not to participate hindered the pursuit of an informed electorate.Republican committee members spoke to voters outside Town Hall in August.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesCandidates around the country are increasingly sidestepping events like debates. But some critics said that by doing so, Greenwich Republicans had managed to avoid questions about Covid vaccinations, abortion rights, the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, false claims of electoral fraud — and Mr. Trump.Ms. MacGillivray said that the subject of Mr. Trump played no role in the caucuses. She also wondered why, in 2022, the media remained obsessed with the man.Perhaps because Mr. Trump’s ideology and style influence local politics so profoundly that John Breunig, editorial page editor of The Stamford Advocate and Greenwich Time, described Greenwich as a three-party town: Democrat, Republican and “Trumplican.”The Greenwich Republican ecosystem is such that James O’Keefe, the founder of the conservative activist group Project Veritas, is practically a local celebrity.In March, Mr. O’Keefe promoted his latest book at a gathering in a Greenwich hotel that was organized with the help of Jackie Homan, the founder of the Greenwich Patriots and an unsuccessful candidate on the caucus slate that ousted the moderate Quigley group.Months later, Project Veritas released hidden-camera video of a Greenwich elementary school vice principal boasting to an unseen woman that he tried to block the hiring of conservatives, Roman Catholics and people over 30. The circumstances behind the heavily edited video are unclear, and the vice principal, since suspended, did not make unilateral hiring decisions.Still, some Greenwich Republicans asserted that the video reflected a larger effort to “indoctrinate students with specific political ideologies.” This would include antiracism training and social emotional learning, which aims to nurture mental well-being, among other goals, but which some on the right believe is intended to make white children feel guilty for being white.Such positions have baffled more moderate Greenwich Republicans like Mike Basham, a former member of the first Bush administration who recently moved to South Carolina after many years as a prominent local leader of the party.“How can people that bright believe some of this stuff?” he asked. “Who indoctrinated them?”An Ex-President’s ShadowMr. Trump’s name doesn’t need to appear on campaign signs for him to have sway in Greenwich.For example, there is Ms. Fiorello, 47, the state representative, who is up for re-election. A participant in the effort to replace Mr. Quigley, she has moderated events with doctors accused of spreading misinformation about Covid, as well as with No Left Turn in Education, a group opposed to what it calls “the radical indoctrination and injection of political agendas” in schools.Kimberly Fiorello, a Republican state representative, helped to push out the local committee leadership.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesAfter the Federal Bureau of Investigation executed a search warrant at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida — collecting boxes of material, including highly classified documents, that he had failed to return to the government — Ms. Fiorello posted a video expressing concern over the “raid.”“We have to secure this republic,” she said. “Active and engaged citizens is what it takes. Peaceful protest. But citizens, we need to speak out and protect what this country is founded on. There are some things that are happening right now that are simply unacceptable and truly un-American.”There is also Leora Levy, a wealthy Greenwich Republican who, in supporting Jeb Bush for president in 2016, described Mr. Trump as “vulgar” and “ill mannered.” When Mr. Trump won the nomination, she set aside her concerns to become an enthusiastic supporter, and he later nominated her to be ambassador to Chile (the nomination never received Senate approval).When Ms. Levy, 65, decided to challenge the Democratic incumbent, Richard Blumenthal, for the Senate this year, the state Republican committee declined to endorse her. But her local Republican committee did, as did Mr. Trump, during a phone call shared at a crowded party function.Six days later, Ms. Levy won the primary.Leora Levy, a Trump-backed Greenwich Republican, is running to unseat Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesSince then, she has joined her Greenwich compatriots in trying to navigate the tricky Trump terrain.“I was honored to win his endorsement,” Ms. Levy told The CT Mirror, a nonprofit news organization. “He and I agree completely on policy, but I’m Leora Levy … Trump is not on the ballot. Leora Levy is.”Last month the Levy campaign held a fund-raising event at Mar-a-Lago that featured Mr. Trump. For $25,000, you could have your photograph taken with the man who lost Greenwich twice. More

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      In 2022, Reality Has a Conservative Bias

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      “Reality,” Stephen Colbert remarked at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2006, “has a well-known liberal bias.” That was back when he played a caricature of a conservative instead of a caricature of a liberal (I assume that’s the point of his current late-night role, at least), and the line rolled out brilliantly into the midst of a decade where reality was delivering some punishing blows to the Republican Party’s theories of the world.In that period, the years from the invasion of Iraq through the re-election of Barack Obama, the G.O.P. staked itself to the conceit that the Iraq war would disarm a dictator (the armaments in question mostly did not exist) and revolutionize the Middle East (it did, but not for the better). It staked its domestic policy on tax cuts and a housing bubble, touting the strength of the George W. Bush-era economy right up to the point when the worst financial crisis since the 1920s hit.Then in Obama’s first term, the G.O.P. staked itself to the claims that deficit spending and easy money would lead to runaway inflation or debt crisis (they did not), that Obamacare would wreck the health care market (flaws and all, it didn’t), that entitlement reform was an appropriate prescription in a slowly recovering economy (it was a good long-term goal but not an ideal 2010 priority). And as a small capstone, the G.O.P. assumed that the polls were skewed against Mitt Romney in 2012, which they emphatically were not.I was a participant in some of this, overestimating the urgency of the deficit problem and the risks of Obamacare. So I have experience from which to observe that the Democrats in 2022 find themselves struggling because reality has finally changed sides, and now has a conservative bias.What has reality delivered? To a Democratic Party that convinced itself there were few near-term limits on how much stimulus could be pumped into the economy, it has delivered the worst inflation since the 1980s.To a Democratic Party that spent the Trump era talking itself into a belief that immigration enforcement is presumptively immoral and that a de facto amnesty doesn’t have real downsides, it has delivered the southern border’s highest-recorded rate of illegal crossings.And to a Democratic Party whose 2020 platform promised to “end the era of mass incarceration and dramatically reduce the number of Americans held in jails and prisons while continuing to reduce crime rates,” it has delivered a multiyear spike in homicide rates that’s erased at least 20 years of gains.The key thing to stress about all of these developments is that they don’t prove that liberals are simply “wrong about crime” or “wrong about inflation,” any more than the events of 2003-12 simply proved that conservatives are “wrong about foreign policy” or “wrong about entitlements.”Rather, ideological and partisan commitments exist in a dynamic relationship with reality. You can get things right for a while, sometimes a long while, and then suddenly you pass a tipping point and your prescription starts delivering the downsides that your rivals warned about and that you convinced yourself did not exist.Thus in the current situation, the fact that right now America is suffering a serious crime wave doesn’t prove that Democrats (and many Republicans) were wrong about criminal justice reform 10 or 15 years ago. It just suggests that there’s a point at which de-carceration or decriminalization may need a tough-on-crime corrective.Likewise Democrats weren’t wrong about the risks of inflation being low in the Obama era or in the recent past. It’s just that except for a few Cassandras like Larry Summers they were wrong to imagine that those risks could be forever minimized, that there was no upper bound on Covid-era spending. In the same way today’s inflation doesn’t retrospectively vindicate the Obama era’s deficit hawks — but it does suggest that some of their proposals might be worth revisiting.So the question for the aftermath of Tuesday’s election isn’t whether Democrats will abandon their ideology but whether that ideology can adapt itself to what reality is saying.And whether for Joe Biden or for his possible successors, a recent model is available: Just after the era when Colbert’s quip had bite, a leader emerged who persuaded the G.O.P. to abandon its fixation on deficits and just run the economy hot, who endorsed universal health insurance and pledged to protect entitlements, and who acknowledged that the Iraq war had been a grave mistake and promised a less utopian, more realistic foreign policy.That’s right: It was Donald Trump who closed the gap — in rhetoric, if not always in his eventual policymaking — between the Republican Party and reality. Now the Democrats, facing a cold rendezvous with reality’s conservative bias, need leaders who can do the same.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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      The Unruly Heirs of Sarah Palin

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      Whether for her pathbreaking role as the first woman on a Republican presidential ticket or for rapping “Baby Got Back” on the Masked Singer, Sarah Palin has, since her debut on the national scene in 2008, made an art of attracting the spotlight.But fame — even in America — can get you only so far, and Ms. Palin’s campaign this year for Alaska’s only House seat has exposed the limits of her celebrity. Her fund-raising has lagged. Her campaign schedule has been unusually light for a candidate heading into a competitive election. And she announced recently that she’d received “crappy advice” from advisers and was no longer trying to raise money. In an unexpectedly close ranked-choice race, she has had to endure the indignity of encouraging voters to support her Republican opponent, in a last-ditch effort to prevent the Democrat, Mary Peltola, from running away with the seat.Ms. Palin may be about to fade once again from national politics, but the “mama grizzly” brand she invented is here to stay. Already, a group of female leaders is embracing and iterating on Ms. Palin’s trademark mom-knows-best Republicanism. Some are politicians, railing against the powers-that-be; others are activists, speaking out against school closures and vaccine mandates. As these new mama bears enter the political sphere, they are transforming American discourse, harnessing motherhood itself as a political asset, just as Ms. Palin did before them. Even if she loses her battle to make it to Washington next week, in a broader cultural sense, Ms. Palin has already won the war. And a new generation of GOP women stand poised to carry her complex legacy forward.When John McCain chose Ms. Palin as his running mate in 2008, she was in her 40s and had only served less than two years as governor. Her many doubters noted, correctly, that she wasn’t ready for the job of vice president. But their criticisms were often shot through with a condescension and sexism that had less to do with Ms. Palin’s experience than with her looks, clothes and identity as a mother of five.Few female politicians before her had emphasized their lives as mothers to the extent she did. She held her baby onstage right after accepting the nomination, deliberately presenting herself as a down-to-earth “hockey mom” and later on as a protective “mama grizzly.” Ms. Palin’s folksy demeanor was often ridiculed as a gimmick and Ms. Palin herself as an ignoramus. But the course of political events soon proved that she was on to something. The Tea Party wave during Barack Obama’s first term swept Palin imitators like Michele Bachmann and Christine O’Donnell to national prominence, women who were likely to be found in jeans at the gun range, when they weren’t giving a speech in stilettos. Rather than leaving family life at home the way men always had, which a previous generation of women had seen as a necessity to succeed professionally, this new generation saw how womanhood and motherhood added significantly to their brand. By signaling their tenacity in the domestic sphere, they implied their toughness in the political arena. And they increased their populist appeal.Among those who noticed their potential was Donald Trump’s future adviser, Steve Bannon, who made a 2010 documentary called “Fire from the Heartland” glorifying Mrs. Bachmann and other Tea Party women, as well as a 2011 documentary about Ms. Palin herself called “The Undefeated,” framing her femininity and Everywoman image as an unsung asset for the GOP.Of course, Mr. Bannon and the right as a whole eventually found a different champion, and while Mr. Trump left little room for also-rans like Ms. Palin, his time in office helped her particular strain of conservatism mutate and spread — giving rise to a new, Trumpier version of Ms. Palin’s mama grizzly.This new generation’s pugnaciousness makes Ms. Palin’s “Going Rogue” days look subdued. Conservative moms from all over the country have turned local school board meetings into contentious showdowns over policy and curriculum, organized by groups like Moms for Liberty who say they are “on a mission to stoke the fires of liberty.” “We do NOT co-parent with the government,” reads the back of one of the T-shirts for sale in the moms’ online merch store.Shades of Ms. Palin can be seen in Representatives Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, whose gun-toting photo-ops recall Ms. Palin’s rural, hunting-and-fishing image. But Kari Lake, the hard-right former news anchor running for governor in Arizona, is perhaps the paradigmatic New Mama Bear. One moment, she’s literally vacuuming a red carpet for Mr. Trump; the next, she’s calling her Democratic opponent a coward and the media the “right hand of the Devil.” Ms. Lake shares Ms. Palin’s instinct for the spotlight and feel for optics, as well as her affection for copacetic mama bears (Ms. Lake has often used the term). But while Ms. Palin lost control of her image to a skeptical, often condescending news media (remember the infamous Katie Couric interview in which the candidate couldn’t name any newspapers she read?), the steely, intense Ms. Lake has made a sport of antagonizing the reporters on her trail and excelled at turning the exchanges into content. The rise of the New Mama Bear might not have been possible without the fragmentation of a media now more drawn than ever toward controversy and the outrageous.Ms. Lake, who has a knack for generating outrage, stands a very good chance of winning. And she is far from the only one. In the heated conservative debate over schools, the new mama bears have been racking up some important wins, crashing school meetings to protest critical race theory and banning books with L.G.B.T.Q. themes or other content they deem inappropriate from school libraries. Moms for Liberty has claimed huge growth in membership over the past year and made itself a key player in the education battles that have marked this midterm cycle. Top Republicans have embraced the school controversies, showing just how potent this new paradigm has become on a national scale. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who gave the keynote speech at Moms for Liberty’s “Joyful Warriors” conference this summer, endorsed several of their school board candidates, and they went on to win their primaries. The effect could be that the new mama bears see their trademark political issues high on the agenda for the 2024 Republican primary.It’s ironic that Ms. Palin, the mother of mama bear politicking, should be an afterthought during a moment so clearly borne of her own trailblazing prime. But that’s often how it goes in politics, where an innovation’s impact is obvious only in hindsight — once someone else has perfected it.Rosie Gray (@RosieGray) is a reporter who has covered politics for BuzzFeed News and The Atlantic.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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      Extremism Is on the Rise … Again

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      After all this country has been through — from Donald Trump and his election denial, to the insurrection, to what prosecutors call the “politically motivated” attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband — it still appears poised to elect candidates next Tuesday who deny the results of the 2020 election. There are 291 election deniers on the ballot. And Trump — the greatest threat to democracy — may make a comeback in 2024.It’s hard to believe even though it’s happening right in front of our eyes.In a major speech Wednesday night, President Biden described election denial as “the path to chaos in America.” “It’s unprecedented,” he said. “It’s unlawful. And it’s un-American.” But in truth, the extremism, racism and white nationalism are neither un-American nor unfamiliar.I am personally fascinated by precedents and historical corollaries, the ways that events find a way of repeating themselves, not because of some strange glitch in the cosmos but because human beings are fundamentally the same, unchanged, stuck in rotation of our failings and frailties.The presidential election of 1912 offers a few lessons for our current political moment.William Howard Taft had been elected president in 1908, succeeding the gregarious Theodore Roosevelt, the undisputed leader of the progressive movement of the age, who endorsed Taft’s presidential bid. But Taft was no Teddy. Taft was, as University of Notre Dame professor Peri E. Arnold has written, “a warmhearted and kind man who wanted to be loved as a person and to be respected for his judicial temperament.”I hear echoes there of the differences between Presidents Barack Obama and Biden.Progressives at first seemed satisfied with Taft’s election, as they expected him to simply carry Roosevelt’s legacy forward. But they soon grew disaffected, as did Roosevelt.It wasn’t that Taft was ineffective; he just didn’t do all of what those progressives wanted, much like Biden hasn’t checked the box on all progressive priorities. Riding a wave of progressive anger, Roosevelt challenged Taft in 1912, and when Roosevelt didn’t secure the nomination, he ran as a third-party candidate, taking many of the progressives with him.That split all but guaranteed that their opponent, Woodrow Wilson, would win, becoming the first president from the South since the Civil War.Wilson had not been a favorite to win the nomination of his own party — he only secured it on the 46th ballot after quite a bit of deal-making. But once he reached the general election, he sailed to victory over the quarreling liberals. He would go on to campaign on an “America First” platform, which for him was primarily about maintaining America’s neutrality in World War I. But as Sarah Churchwell, author of “Behold, America,” told Vox in 2018, it soon became associated not just with isolationism, but also with the Ku Klux Klan, xenophobia and fascism.In Wilson’s case, extremists took his language and twisted its meaning into something more sinister. When Trump glommed onto that language over a century later, he started with the sinister and tried to pass it off as benign.Of course, Wilson was no Trump. Trump is one of the worst presidents — if not the worst — that this country has ever had. Wilson at least, as the University of Virginia’s Miller Center points out, supported “limits on corporate campaign contributions, tariff reductions, new and stronger antitrust laws, banking and currency reform, a federal income tax, direct election of senators, a single term presidency.” He was a progressive Southern Democrat. The newly formed N.A.A.C.P. actually endorsed him.But there are eerie similarities between him and Trump. Wilson was a racist. He brought the segregationist sensibility of the South, where he had grown up and where Jim Crow was ascendant, into the White House. He allowed segregation to flourish in the federal government on his watch.And while Wilson didn’t support shutting down all immigration, as long as the immigrants were from Europe, he did embrace ardently xenophobic beliefs. In 1912, he released a statement, saying:“In the matter of Chinese and Japanese coolie immigration I stand for the national policy of exclusion (or restricted immigration). The whole question is one of assimilation of diverse races. We cannot make a homogeneous population out of people who do not blend with the Caucasian race.”It was Wilson who screened “The Birth of a Nation” at the White House, a film that pushed the “Lost Cause” narrative and fueled the rebirth of the Klan.Trump hosted a screening of “2,000 Mules” — a fact-checker-debunked documentary that purported to show widespread voter fraud carried out by “mules” who stuffed ballot boxes with harvested ballots during the last presidential election — at Mar-a-Lago, which Trump has called the Southern White House. That film has helped boost his followers’ belief in his lie about the 2020 election.Allow me a quick aside to dissect the dehumanizing language of the “mule.” Mules were synonymous with captivity and servitude, and as such, a comparison between them and the enslaved — and later, oppressed — Black people was routine. In fact, in “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Zora Neale Hurston famously wrote that the Black woman is the mule of the world.Then came the invention of the “drug mule,” a phrase that first appeared in this newspaper in 1993. Later, the media would often use it to describe Hispanic women.Now we have ballot mules, an extensive cabal of liberal actors bent on stealing elections.Once you animalize people, you have, by definition, dehumanized them, and that person is no longer worthy of being treated humanely.I say all this to demonstrate that we have been here before. We have seen extremism rise before in this country, multiple times, and it often follows a familiar pattern: One party loses steam, focus and cohesion; liberals become exhausted, disillusioned or fractured, allowing racists and nativist conservatives to rise. Those leaders then tap into a darkness in the public, one that periodically goes dormant until it erupts once more.I fear that too many liberals are once again caught up in the cycle, embracing apathy. My message to all of them going into Election Day: Wake up!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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

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      How the Right Became the Left and the Left Became the Right

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      One of the master keys to understanding our era is seeing all the ways in which conservatives and progressives have traded attitudes and impulses. The populist right’s attitude toward American institutions has the flavor of the 1970s — skeptical, pessimistic, paranoid — while the mainstream, MSNBC-watching left has a strange new respect for the F.B.I. and C.I.A. The online right likes transgression for its own sake, while cultural progressivism dabbles in censorship and worries that the First Amendment goes too far. Trumpian conservatism flirts with postmodernism and channels Michel Foucault; its progressive rivals are institutionalist, moralistic, confident in official narratives and establishment credentials.These reversals are especially evident in a pair of prominent headlines from the last week. If you had been told at any point from, say, 1970 to 2005 that a disturbed-seeming man living in the Bay Area with a history of involvement with nudist activists and the hemp jewelry trade had allegedly followed his paranoid political delusions into a plan to assault an important national politician, the reasonable assumption would have been that his delusions belonged to the farthest reaches of the left and therefore his target was probably some notable Republican.By the same token, if you had been told in George W. Bush’s presidency that a trove of government documents would reveal the Department of Homeland Security essentially trying to collude with major corporations to regulate speech it considers dangerous or subversive, an effort extending from foreign threats to domestic ones, you would have assumed that this was all Republican overreach, a new McCarthyism — and that progressives would be up in arms against it.In our world, though, things are otherwise. The man who allegedly attacked Paul Pelosi while hunting the speaker of the House did, seemingly, belong to left-wing, Left Coast culture in the not-so-distant past. But at some point in his unhappy trajectory, he passed over to the paranoias of the extreme right — probably not in some semi-rational radicalization process in which he watched too many attack ads against Nancy Pelosi but more likely in a dreamlike way, the nightmares of QAnon matching his mental state better‌ than the paranoias of the left.His journey’s violent endpoint was singular and extreme, but this kind of left-to-right migration has more normal correlatives: the New Age-QAnon overlap, the Covid-era migration of formerly left-wing skeptics of Big Pharma onto right-wing shows and platforms, the way that all doubts about the medical establishment are now coded as right-wing, Trumpy, populist.And the political right’s response to the Pelosi attack reflects these shifts as well. The ethos of Fox Mulder in “The X-Files,” “Trust no one,” is a now dominant value on the right, which in this case encouraged a swift leap from reasonable questions about the details of the assault, based on inaccurate initial reports, to a very specific narrative about a gay assignation that the cops and the Pelosis were presumably covering up.As of this writing, several public references to this theory from prominent conservatives have been deleted. But the cover-up narrative will probably survive indefinitely as a reference point, an underground “truth,” like the left-wing conspiracies of old.One of those deleted tweets belonged to Elon Musk, the new impresario of Twitter, and it inevitably became an exhibit in the case for liberal panic over his takeover: What could be more indicative of the platform’s imminent descent into a democracy-destroying hellscape than conspiracy theories spread by the Chief Twit himself?But the alternative to Musk’s reign was clarified by the second recent illustration of our left-right reversal: a story from The Intercept, by Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein, detailing the Department of Homeland Security’s migration into the social-media surveillance and the pressure the department has tried to exert on internet companies to flag and censor content along lines favored by the national security bureaucracy.On the surface, this is not a partisan story: The Intercept is a left-wing publication, and the current version of the D.H.S. anti-disinformation effort got started in the Trump administration.But everyone understands those efforts’ current ideological valence. The war on disinformation is a crucial Democratic cause, the key lawsuit filed against the Biden administration on these issues comes from Republican attorneys general (joined by doctors critical of the public-health establishment), and the most famous flashpoint remains the social-media censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story, which Fang and Klippenstein suggest followed from what one could reasonably call a deep-state pressure campaign.Meanwhile, according to a draft report from the D.H.S. obtained by The Intercept, the list of online subject areas that the department is particularly concerned about includes “the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and the efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine” — mostly areas where, whether in wisdom or in folly, the populist right is more likely to dissent from the establishment position.And for the future of Twitter, in particular, it’s notable that the Intercept story first points out that a committee advising DHS on disinformation policy included Twitter’s then-head of legal policy, trust and safety, Vijaya Gadde, and then notes that Gadde was one of the first people fired by Musk. It’s a tacit nod to the left-right switch: Under Musk the social-media giant is widely seen as moving “rightward,” but that could mean becoming less entangled with an arm of what was once George W. Bush’s national security state.The point of emphasizing this reversal isn’t to suggest that either side is likely to flip back. The evolving attitudes of right and left reflect their evolving positions in American society, with cultural liberalism much more dominant in elite institutions than it was a generation ago and conservatism increasingly disreputable, representing downscale constituencies and outsider ideas.But a stronger awareness of the flip might be helpful in tempering the temptations that afflict both sides. For progressives, that could mean acknowledging that the Department of Homeland Security’s disinformation wars, its attempted hand-in-glove with the great powers of Silicon Valley, would have been regarded as a dystopian scenario on their side not so long ago. So is it really any less dystopian if the targets are Trumpistas and Anthony Fauci critics instead of Iraq War protesters? And if it is a little creepy and censorious and un-American, doesn’t that make some of the paranoia evident on the right these days a little less unfathomable and fascist seeming, even a little more relatable?Then the Fox Mulder right might benefit from recalling the thing that conservatives — or this conservative, at least — used to find most insufferable about the anti-establishment left, which was not its skepticism but its credulity, not the eagerness to question official narratives but the speed with which implausible alternatives took root. (If parts of Oliver Stone’s “J.F.K.” make you understand where conspiracy theories come from, the part where the conspiracy gets “explained” should make you a Nixon Republican.)This is the key problem with the right today, whether the issue is the 2020 election or the Covid-vaccine debate or the attack on Paul Pelosi. Not the baseline of skepticism, not being attuned to weaknesses and inconsistencies in official narratives, not being open to scenarios of elite self-dealing and conspiracy and cover-up, all of which emphatically exist. It’s the swift replacement of skepticism with certainty, the shopping around for any narrative — even if it comes from Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell — to vindicate your initial theory, the refusal to accept that even institutions you reasonably mistrust sometimes get things right.Or to put this in terms of Musk and his hopes for Twitter: The ideal virtual town square would be a place where conservatives could discuss speculative, even conspiratorial theories of the day’s events — but also a place where they could be persuaded to abandon bad theories when the evidence dissolves them.Social-media and tribal incentives being what they are, that seems exceedingly unlikely. But if I had just paid billions to own a social media platform — and become both its main character and arguably the most important right-leaning figure in American life, pending the Donald Trump-Ron De‌ ‌Santis slugfest — I would be thinking about what it would take for a spirit of contrarianism and rebellion to aim, not simply at transgression, but at truth itself.In addition to my two weekly columns, I’m starting a newsletter, which will go out most Fridays and cover some of my usual obsessions — political ideas, religion, pop culture, decadence — in even more detail. You can subscribe here.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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      Can Lee Zeldin Reinvent His Way to the NY Governor’s Mansion?

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      SHIRLEY, N.Y. — As a young U.S. Army lawyer of unmistakable ambition, Lee Zeldin could almost see his future unfurling before him. It was his first stint in Iraq, and he was already imagining the kind of distinguished career in uniform that would have laid the groundwork for one in politics.Then a Red Cross message arrived on the base where Mr. Zeldin was embedded as a captain with the 82nd Airborne Division. His girlfriend had gone into dangerously premature labor with twin girls. Doctors were not optimistic about the babies’ survival. His commanding officer sent him home to mourn.“This I vividly remember the emotion of,” Mr. Zeldin, now a conservative congressman, recalled in a recent interview. “My priorities became all about my daughters.”The girls survived after months in the hospital. But rather than returning to Iraq, Mr. Zeldin took a desk job back at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, got married and then was discharged. At just 27, he found that the life he had imagined had veered off course.It was not the first time, nor the last. As a high school senior here on the South Shore of Long Island, Mr. Zeldin sought a prestigious appointment to West Point, only to fall short. After leaving the Army in 2007, he almost immediately entered a race for Congress, hoping to jump-start his political career. He lost in a blowout.But in every case, Mr. Zeldin has shown aptitude for finding a quick path to reinvention that has helped fuel his political ascent. Now, at age 42, it has put him closer than any Republican since George E. Pataki two decades ago to one of the nation’s most influential political posts, the governorship of New York.A few hundred Zeldin supporters attended a rally on Monday in Westchester County, traditionally an area controlled by Democrats. Brittainy Newman for The New York TimesThough Gov. Kathy Hochul, the Democratic incumbent, remains the front-runner, Mr. Zeldin’s late surge in the polls has shocked even political strategists and sent Democrats scrambling to prop up their candidate. With Ms. Hochul’s huge war chest and a vast Democratic registration advantage, few expected Mr. Zeldin to come close to winning, and perhaps with good reason: He does not easily fit the profile of a New York power player.In a state shaped by wealthy business interests and often governed by larger-than-life personalities and family dynasties, Mr. Zeldin is an outlier. He grew up in law enforcement households of modest means. He can be introverted and awkward with voters. And in a state dominated by the political left, he is probably the most conservative serious contender for the governorship in modern memory — even voting to overturn the 2020 election on Jan. 6, 2021.Yet a careful review of his public and private life, including two dozen interviews with family, friends, colleagues and critics, shows that Mr. Zeldin’s emergence as a political force stems from decades of meticulous planning, comfort with taking risks, well-timed alliances with more powerful Republicans and, above all, a knack honed from a young age for what allies call adaptation but his critics view as a more cynical political shape-shifting.Those qualities have been on full display in this fall’s campaign, as Mr. Zeldin moved swiftly to tap into two powerful currents of discontent that Democrats appear to have misjudged and that threaten to scramble the state’s usual political order: painful inflation eroding New Yorkers’ sense of financial well-being and fears about rising crime.“He’s grabbed the right issues and hasn’t let go,” said Rob Astorino, who lost to Mr. Zeldin in this year’s Republican primary.Mr. Zeldin, center, has heavily courted the Hasidic vote during his campaign stops in New York City, including a recent visit to Williamsburg, Brooklyn.Andrew Seng for The New York TimesBut his instincts have also been evident as he tries to execute another on-the-fly transformation, playing down hard-line positions that served him well while he climbed the Republican ranks in Albany and Washington but are now politically inconvenient, while offering scant details on some of his latest policy proposals.Who Is Lee Zeldin Up Against?Card 1 of 5Gov. Kathy Hochul’s rise to power. More

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      Trevor Noah, Samantha Bee, and the Future of Liberal Late Night T.V.

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      Trevor Noah recently surprised fans (and, according to some accounts, also Comedy Central management) when he announced plans to leave “The Daily Show.” His departure is one of many notable personnel changes in late-night television: James Corden will leave “The Late Late Show” next year; TBS canceled “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee”; and Desus and Mero broke up with each other and their hugely successful Showtime late-night show beloved by a diverse viewership of millennials.Prominent entertainers leave jobs all the time; but media watchers see something more systemic in the recent spate of departures. Dylan Byers describes the “contracting genre” as an economic problem: “The eight-figure late-night host increasingly doesn’t match the new economics of the late-night business.” The economics used to look like big advertisers paying for a captive audience that tuned in for pulpy takes on mainstream American culture.But audiences have not been flocking to late night television for some time. Advertisers have continued to support the time slot, not necessarily because it works but because there was little else competing for the late night audience. Throwing good money after bad, as it were. That cannot last forever.This is an economic problem but I suspect the underlying issue is cultural: Americans don’t want to share a living room with each other. We prefer to live and be entertained in ideological encampments.A study using cross-national data found that Americans have become so tied to party identity that race and class polarizes us less than politics. We don’t just want personalized content. We want personalized content that affirms and does not challenge our political identities.Liberals appear to dominate the late-night TV show genre. The reason for that dominance is complex. Audiences have different orientations toward humor and political talk. Those orientations have some underlying psychological needs. And styles of comedy have political and cultural histories. Bluntly, scholars who study political communication and humor often find that liberals are ironic smart alecks and conservatives are outraged moralists. Some of us are a bit of both, but most of us have a psychological need to be one over the other.In terms of humor, you can think of this as “you know you’re a redneck if” on one end of the spectrum and George Carlin on the other. In the 1990s, satirical political infotainment evolved into the late-night television style that we have today. Two things brought politics and infotainment together: the internet and “The Daily Show.”With Jon Stewart as host, “The Daily Show” innovated a formula for liberal satire infotainment. When Trevor Noah took over in 2015, director and supervising producer of “The Daily Show” David Paul Meyer says, he embraced a more holistic style. “Trevor doesn’t necessarily use the edgier form of satire, irony and outrage to drive his approach to the show,” Meyer told me. Noah’s willingness to drop the routine to tackle a subject seriously is good political education.Unfortunately, outrage makes more money, and today’s conservative media is much better at outrage. Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, a communication professor at the University of Delaware, wrote “Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the United States.” She says that “The Daily Show” is an exemplar of what political media became in the 1990s. “Entertainment wasn’t expected to ‘stay in its lane.’ It was expected — encouraged even — to blur the lines between fact and fiction, entertainment and politics, art and social justice,” she writes. The show’s mockumentary style and satirical stance updated 1960s counterculture critique for the post-modern, post-internet age.Young pulls together a lot of research on psychology, history and media to explain why we find funny what we do. The need for closure is a big one. If you have a high need for clear-cut moral rules, then satire, which asks us to skewer our own beliefs, is going to make you pretty anxious. Ouchie stuff if “us versus them” makes you feel safest.As it turns out, political messages play on some similar psychological needs. One that tells you who are “bad” and, even better, how to punish them satisfies the same need as good old-fashioned outrage. Think how Donald Trump and his audience co-wrote one of the most enduring outrage political messages of 21st-century politics: “lock her up.”Liberals may be drawn to ironic humor like satire because it reflects their antagonism toward the status quo. But outrage plays better to the political psychology of conservatives. As outrage has become a more viable media model than satire, it gets harder to sell liberal politics. “All of our political, cultural and economic messages risk being filtered through an identity-driven ecosystem that proportionally rewards not just conservatism and Republicanism,” Young told me, “but also conservative populism on the far right.”The irony isn’t lost on me that conservative audiences complain about how vilified they are in popular culture. Conservative media seems to be doing quite well. Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro are two of the most popular podcast hosts in the nation. There is no liberal counterpart to either. Fox News lost some of its big names when Megyn Kelly and Bill O’Reilly left in 2017. But while MSNBC looks for its footing after Rachel Maddow’s exit on most weeknights and as CNN pivots to centrism, Fox is beating them both in ratings.When you look across media platforms, it is easier to see how conservative psychological preference for outrage bodes better for their growth in satellite radio, lifestyle media and, of course, social media. My Times colleague Zeynep Tufekci is one of many scholars who have documented how social media’s economic models reward outrage-driven content. Conservative social media platforms like Parler are duds. But conservative personalities like Shapiro are hugely popular across Facebook and YouTube. And Elon Musk has promised to turn Twitter into his idea of a free-speech platform. Some observers suspect that means reinstating accounts previously banned for violating Twitter’s terms of service. Outrage comedy has for the most part never found its late-night mojo, but outrage content is doing just fine in every other sector of infotainment.If satirical political content is the liberal audience’s way to stick it to the man, why isn’t the genre exploding right now? Young says the thing about satire is that it asks the audience to take risks. Getting the layered meaning of ironic humor requires a little, well, faith that the payoff will be worth it. “It is hard to be hopeful, even ironically, when everything seems to be going so bad,” she says. The Dobbs decision has radicalized and terrified millions of voters. Many Americans think the Supreme Court is partisan, if not outright corrupt. Biden’s policy achievements do not seem to be capturing voters’ imagination. And he has several significant policy wins. Large swaths of the Republican Party have embraced white identitarian violence. We are too scared to laugh.Whether infotainment should matter to the way politics is communicated is a separate issue from the fact that it does matter. In the meantime, Republicans are set to take over the House and perhaps the Senate with next week’s midterm elections. Many expect Trump to run again in 2024. Election deniers are legitimate G.O.P. candidates. Outrage is the mainstream G.O.P. brand, from the top of the ticket to the bottom. We are heading into a dangerous election cycle with a contracting liberal media ecosystem and conservative media machine optimized for outrage.All of this is only funny in a laugh-to-keep-from-crying kind of way.Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of “Thick: And Other Essays” and a 2020 MacArthur fellow.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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      Kari Lake and the Rise of the Republican Apostate

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      On Apr. 8, 2020, in the chaotic early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Fox News host Laura Ingraham welcomed a little-known state senator onto her prime time show. With his unmistakable Minnesota accent and an aw-shucks bearing, Scott Jensen, a Republican, was the furthest thing from the typical fire-breathing cable news guest. But the message that he wanted to share was nothing short of explosive.He told Ms. Ingraham that he believed doctors and hospitals might be manipulating the data about Covid-19. He took aim at new guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warning that they could lead medical institutions to inflate their fees‌. “The idea that we are going to allow people to massage and sort of game the numbers is a real issue because we are going to undermine the trust” of the public, he said.Ms. Ingraham’s guest offered no evidence or data to back up this serious allegation. Coming from a random state senator, the claim might have been easily dismissed as partisan politics. What gave it the sheen of credibility was his other job: He is a medical doctor.He would go on to make numerous appearances on far-right conservative outlets. In February of this year, Ms. Ingraham invited Dr. Jensen back on to her show. Dr. Jensen was, in Ms. Ingraham’s telling, a truth-teller who had been demonized by the media and the left, a medical professional who’d had the temerity to defy the establishment and call out the corruption when he saw it. “You were vilified,” Ms. Ingraham said. “I was vilified for featuring you.”By that point, Dr. Jensen, 67, had left the State Senate after a single term in office. Instead, he was a leading contender for the Republican nomination for governor of Minnesota. Riding a wave of grass-roots support, he easily won the primary after defeating four other candidates, including the former Republican majority leader of the State Senate, at the party’s endorsement convention. Dr. Jensen’s Covid theories proved central to his message. “I dared to lead when it wasn’t popular,” he said at the G.O.P. convention. “I dared to lead when it wasn’t politically safe.”At the heart of Scott Jensen’s candidacy is a jarring contradiction: a medical doctor who downplays, if not outright denies, the science of a deadly pandemic. And yet Dr. Jensen’s self-abnegation captures something essential about the nature of today’s Republican Party, its voters and its candidates. Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for Arizona governor, is a former journalist who never misses an opportunity to attack the “corrupt, rotten media” that wants to “brainwash” Americans. And there are lawyers like Matthew DePerno, the Republican nominee for Michigan attorney general, who have centered their campaigns on the baseless claim that the 2020 election was fraudulent and that President Biden is therefore an illegitimate president — in other words, lawyers who are campaigning against the rule of law itself.It is possible to see Dr. Jensen, Ms. Lake, Mr. DePerno and their ilk as simply pandering to the MAGA base. But their appeal runs deeper than that. They have tapped into an archetype that’s almost as old as humanity itself: the apostate. The history of American politics is littered with such figures who left one party or faction for another and who profess to have a righteous knowledge that was a product of their transformation.Watching Dr. Jensen’s swift rise from a backbencher to party figurehead and seeing so many other apostates like him on the ballot in 2022, I wanted to know why voters respond so adoringly to them. What about this political moment makes these modern apostates so compelling? Can their rise help explain how the Republican Party has ended up at this dark moment in its history — and where it might be headed next?The apostate evokes images of a distinctly religious variety. The fourth-century Roman emperor Julian, who pushed to abandon Christianity and return to paganism. Freethinkers tortured and burned at the stake for daring to question the official orthodoxy of their era. And yet for as long as the word apostate has existed, it has possessed a certain allure.To become one requires undertaking a journey of the mind, if not the soul, a wrenching transformation that eventually leads one to reject what was once believed to be true, certain, sacred. That journey not only requires a conversion of the mind and soul, resulting in glorious righteousness. They’ve experienced an awakening that few others have, suffered for their awakening, and now believe they see the world for what it is.You can trace the birth of the modern Republican Party to just such a conversion. Before he was a conservative icon and an evangelist for small government, before he so memorably told the American people that “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” Ronald Reagan was a “near-hopeless hemophilic liberal,” as he would later write in his autobiography. As a young man and an up-and-coming actor, Reagan was a loyal Democrat who could recite Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous “fireside chats” from memory. He embraced F.D.R.’s New Deal, the most ambitious social-works program in American history. He campaigned for Richard Nixon’s Democratic opponent in a 1950 Senate race. Two years after that, he urged Dwight Eisenhower to run for president on the Democratic ticket.Yet by the time Reagan embarked on his own political career, he had renounced his liberal past. In his telling, he had no choice but to disavow the party of Roosevelt and Kennedy. “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party,” Reagan liked to say, “the Democratic Party left me.”This was a clever bit of sloganeering by the future president. It was also the testimony of an apostate.Reagan’s ascent transformed the set of beliefs that underpinned the Republican Party. Lower taxes, limited government, less federal spending: These principles animated the party from Reagan onward; they were canon, inviolate. Stray from them — as George H.W. Bush famously did, raising tax rates after his infamous “read my lips” quip — and the voters cast you out.After four decades of Reaganism, a new apostate emerged. Like Reagan, Donald Trump had spent much of his life as a Democrat, only to slough off that association and seek elected office as a freshly minted Republican. But what made Mr. Trump an apostate was not the mere fact of his switch from one party to the other, a move borne out of convenience and opportunism and not any ideological rebirth in the spirit of Reagan.Instead, Mr. Trump’s sacrilege was his willingness to challenge the fundamental premise of America’s greatness. Pre-Trump, it was just about mandatory for any Republican (or, for that matter, Democratic) candidate for office to invoke tired clichés about “American exceptionalism” and the “city upon a hill,” the paeans to a military that was nothing less than the “finest fighting force” the world had ever seen, and so on.Mr. Trump’s trademark slogan — Make America Great Again — put forward the notion that this rah-rah, chest-beating patriotism was wrong. The way he saw it, the country had fallen on hard times, its stature in the world diminished. “We don’t win anymore, whether it’s ISIS or whether it’s China with our trade agreements,” he said in early 2015 as he prepared to run for president. “No matter what it is, we don’t seem to have it.”No major party had nominated a candidate for the presidency in living memory who had described America in such terms. There was the real possibility that such a dark view might backfire. Yet Mr. Trump successfully tapped into the distrust, resentment and grievance that so many Americans had come to feel. This grim mood had its roots in real events: Sept. 11, the grinding war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the housing meltdown and 2008 financial crash, stagnant wages, vast income inequality. Anyone could look around and see a country in trouble. And in the Republican Party especially, fear of a changing country where the white Christian population was no longer the majority and the church no longer central in American life left so many people feeling, as the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild put it, like “strangers in their own land.” Little wonder many people responded to a candidate who broke from every other politician and defied so many norms and traditions by speaking directly to that grievance and fear.Perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise what happened next: As president, Mr. Trump did little to fix the problems or allay the fears he’d tapped into as a candidate. Instead, he governed by stoking them. He presented himself as the one and only leader of his political party, the keeper of truth. His opponents — mainly Democrats — were “un-American” and “evil.” Court decisions he opposed were a “disgrace” and judges who ruled against him were “putting our country in great danger.”By doing so, he accelerated a rupture already underway within the Republican Party. The principles and ideas that had fueled the party for decades — low taxes, small government, free markets — fell away. In their place, Mr. Trump projected his own version of identity politics: He was the party. He was the country. The central organizing force of his presidency was fear of the other. Who better to foment that fear than someone who’d renounced his old ties with that enemy? His success and standing mattered above all else. If democracy didn’t deliver what Mr. Trump wanted, then democracy was the problem.In April, a lawyer named Matthew DePerno appeared before Michigan’s Court of Appeals for his latest hearing in a long-running and quixotic legal battle involving the 2020 election result in Antrim County, a tiny community in the northern part of the state.Antrim had become a rallying cry among Trump supporters who believed human error on election night was in fact evidence of a widespread conspiracy to rig the election for Joe Biden. (The county was initially called for Biden, but after a clerical mistake was caught and corrected, Mr. Trump won the county handily.) There was no evidence to support this wild theory, but Mr. DePerno refused to give up the fight, spending approximately the past year and a half pushing for that audit.A judge had dismissed Mr. DePerno’s suit in a lower court. Now, standing before the appeals court, Mr. DePerno argued that the state Constitution gave every citizen of Michigan the right to demand a statewide audit of any election. A lawyer with the Michigan attorney general’s office replied that such a theory could mean as many as eight million audits every election. It would “mean that no election results would ever be final.” (The court dismissed Mr. DePerno’s suit, saying he had “merely raised a series of questions about the election without making any specific factual allegations as required.”)Mr. DePerno’s argument is extreme. What makes it chilling is that Mr. DePerno is the state Republican Party’s nominee to be attorney general in the 2022 midterms. As a lawyer, he is one of the most vocal and active figures in the movement to find (nonexistent) evidence of rampant illegality or vote-rigging in the 2020 election. If he wins his election this November, he could play a key role in enforcing — or not — his state’s election laws.A lawyer undermining the fundamental premise of democracy — in a bygone era, such a contradiction might have disqualified a candidate from the outset. But in a Republican Party still in thrall to the former president, Mr. DePerno’s legal background only enhances his credibility. “He is a killer,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. DePerno, whom he has endorsed. “We need a killer. And he’s a killer in honesty. He’s an honest, hard-working guy who is feared up here.”Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for Arizona governor, has also won Mr. Trump’s praise with her insistence that Mr. Biden is not the lawful president. Ms. Lake, too, has drawn on her previous career as a local TV anchor to connect with voters even as she attacks the media’s credibility. “I was in their homes for the good times and the bad times,” she told The Times in an interview. “We’ve been together on the worst of days, and we’ve been together on the best of days.” In one campaign ad, Ms. Lake wields a sledgehammer and smashes a stack of TVs playing cable news. “The media isn’t just corrupt,” she says in another spot. “They are anti-American.”As for Dr. Jensen in Minnesota, despite his lack of evidence, his Covid theories spread widely in a country grasping for solid information about the risk of the coronavirus. He opposed the sitting governor’s public-health policies and endorsed unproven treatments such as ivermectin. Dr. Jensen has said he has not been vaccinated (he claimed he would get the vaccine if he did not already have antibodies from a minor case of Covid-19 even though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidelines recommend the vaccine in such cases). He also added his name to a lawsuit filed by a group of vaccine-skeptic doctors seeking to block 12- to 15-year-olds from receiving the shots. Those stances elevated him from an obscure family physician to a sought-after voice in a budding movement.Soon, the idea of an inflated death or case count had become gospel on the far right. Mr. Trump retweeted a QAnon supporter who argued that only 6 percent of Covid-related deaths counted by the CDC were due to the coronavirus itself. Mr. Trump also retweeted a popular conservative pundit who had asked: “Do you really think these lunatics wouldn’t inflate the mortality rates by underreporting the infection rates in an attempt to steal the election?”Dr. Jensen’s popularity almost surely would not have been possible without the Covid-19 pandemic. Millions of people were primed to distrust the C.D.C. and Dr. Anthony Fauci. They didn’t want to believe that locking down civil society was one of the best tools for slowing the spread of the virus and saving lives. When a doctor — one who sometimes wears a white lab coat in his public appearances — showed up on their television screens telling them that the medical establishment was lying to them, they had a strong motivation to believe him.Ms. Lake, Mr. DePerno, Dr. Jensen — what do these apostate candidates tell us? For one, the apostate’s path usually brings a degree of suffering, a requisite for traveling the path from darkness to enlightenment. But these candidates have mostly avoided that fate, with the party faithful rewarding them for their political opportunism masquerading as bravery. While polls suggest that Dr. Jensen faces long odds to win in the general election, Ms. Lake is a competitive candidate with a strong chance of winning in Arizona, and Mr. DePerno has narrowed the gap in his race to unseat Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel.The fact that these three politicians got as far as they did catches something about this political moment. The real danger posed by today’s apostate candidates — Dr. Jensen, Ms. Lake, Mr. DePerno and others — is that they don’t want to start a debate about bigger or smaller government. They seemingly have no desire to battle over tax policy or environmental regulation. Mr. Trump and Trumpism caused a disruption in American politics — and this may be the 45th president’s legacy — that made such clashes over ideology and policy electorally meaningless.It’s why Ivy League graduates like Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz play dumb and feed into election denialism. As Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant and former leader of the Lincoln Project, told me, Trumpism makes ignorance a virtue and rewards fealty as a principle. Fighting the right villains — the “Marxist” left, medical experts, woke corporations — matters more than any well-crafted policy. The Republican Party led by Mr. Trump and his loyal followers is now an organization that will reduce to rubble any institution that stands between it and the consolidation of power.The election of these apostates could see this governing style, as it were, come into practice across the nation. Governors’ mansions would be a new frontier, with potentially enormous consequences. A Governor Jensen could, for example, pack his state’s medical licensing board (which he says has investigated him five times) with his own nominees and refuse to implement any statewide public-health measures in the event of another Covid-19 outbreak. A Governor Lake could approve new legislation to eliminate mail-in voting and the use of ballot-counting machines; come 2024, she could refuse to sign any paperwork certifying the results of the election to appease her party’s most die-hard supporters. An Attorney General DePerno in Michigan, meanwhile, could open criminal investigations into sketchy, unproven claims of election fraud.In the starkest of terms, the rise of these apostate politicians shows how the modern G.O.P. has become more a countercultural movement than a political party of ideas, principles and policies. It reveals how deeply millions of Americans have grown suspicious of the institutions that have made this country the envy of the world — medicine, the rule of law, the Fourth Estate. It’s “a rejection of modernity, rejection of social progress, rejection of social change,” says Mr. Madrid, whose criticism of Trump and the MAGA movement turned him into an apostate himself.There are few more powerful messages in human psychology than that of the apostate: Believe me. I used to be one of them. But the new apostates of the Republican Party have shown no interest in using their credibility to reimagine their party just as Reagan did all those years ago. Indeed, the Republican Party may be just another institution that totters and falls on account of these candidates. If Dr. Jensen, Ms. Lake and Mr. DePerno get into office and make good on their word, the crises facing the country will reach far beyond the Republican Party.Andy Kroll (@AndyKroll) is a reporter at ProPublica and the author of “A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy.”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