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      How Much Damage Have Marjorie Taylor Greene and the ‘Bullies’ Done to the G.O.P.?

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      Curious to know how the two more extreme wings of the Democrats and Republicans in the House differ, I asked a high-ranking Republican staff member with decades of government experience — who requested anonymity in order to speak openly — for his take:They are different in that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the “Squad” seem to me to be more “idealist.” They actually do want to legislate/accomplish the very far-left social ideas they propose. They are willing to cause Pelosi headaches, but they have shown they are not going to go so far as to jeopardize the government (operations) and safety net that so many families depend on from a working government.On the other hand, the staff member continued,I hate to use a loaded word here but I can’t think of another one, the “MAGA Caucus” members operate more like bullies — legislative bullies. If they have the opportunity, they will gladly hold bills/government funding hostage for the sake of populism and social media. They would take pride in “shooting the hostage” as that would be very popular with their tribal base and their social media.Both blocs have thrived in an era of social media and small-dollar funding, skilled in winning publicity, often shaping public perceptions of partisan competition on Capitol Hill. In this respect, the Squad and the MAGA caucus have come to epitomize partisan hostility, the refusal of the parties to cooperate, and, more broadly, the intense political polarization that afflicts America today.The Squad and the MAGA caucus are best known for their most visible members, Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia.Both factions have caused major headaches for their respective party leaders.Centrist Democrats contend — citing poll data from USA Today Ipsos, Pew Research, a FiveThirtyEight polling summary and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst Survey — that support from members of the Squad and their allies for defunding the police has undermined the re-election chances of moderate House Democrats running in purple districts.The participation of members of the MAGA caucus in events linked to white supremacists have increased the vulnerability of the Republican Party to charges of racism, alienating moderate suburban voters.But these are hardly equivalent in the first place, and there are other, major dissimilarities.John Lawrence, who retired in 2013 as chief of staff for the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, took a position to my Republican informant’s in his email contrasting the two blocs:The MAGA people seem far more focused on personal celebrity and staking out extremist stances whereas the Squad, while pushing the policy envelope to some extent, remain reliable party members.The difference, Lawrence argued,comes from a fundamental distinction between the parties at this point in history: Democrats approach government as an agent of making public policy across a wide swath of subjects whereas Republicans — and the MAGA people are the extreme example of this — not only have a very hostile view of government but embrace inaction (and therefore obstruction), especially at the national level.Here are some examples that illuminate the differences to which the political veterans I spoke to were referring.In a widely publicized struggle that continued for over two months in the fall of 2021, the Squad, along with the House Progressive Caucus, held the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a centerpiece of the Biden agenda, hostage in order to force House Democrats to pass a separate but more controversial measure, the $2.2 trillion Build Back Better bill (for spending on education, the environment, health care and in other areas).The tactic worked — in part. On Nov. 15, the House and Senate both voted to enact, and send to President Biden, the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill — with the support of a majority of the Progressive Caucus. Four days later, the House approved the $2.2 trillion Build Back Better bill by a slim vote (220-213). Although House Democratic leaders kept their promise to pass the $2.2 trillion Build Back Better bill, it remains stalled in the Senate as negotiations between the administration and Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who at times allies himself with the Republican Party, have failed to bear fruit.Compare that lengthy struggle, to which the Squad lent its strength, to the more frivolous votes cast by members of the Republican MAGA caucus — not a formal organization in the manner of the Progressive Caucus but a loose collection of representatives on the hard right.On May 18, the House voted 414-9 to pass the Access to Baby Formula Act, which would authorize the Department of Agriculture “to waive certain requirements so that vulnerable families can continue purchasing safe infant formula with their WIC (the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children).”Who cast the nine votes against the infant formula bill? The core of the MAGA caucus: House Republican Representatives Andy Biggs of Arizona, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Louie Gohmert of Texas, Paul Gosar of Arizona, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Clay Higgins of Louisiana, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Chip Roy of Texas.Or take the House vote last year to fast-track visas for Afghans who provided crucial assistance to the U.S. military, which went 407-16. “Those Afghans knew the risk that their service posed to them and their families, and yet they signed up to help because they believed that we would have their back,” Representative Jason Crow, Democrat of Colorado, told the House. “They have earned a path to safety.”Who cast the 16 no votes? Five of the nine who voted against the baby formula bill — Biggs, Boebert, Gosar, Greene and Roy, plus Mo Brooks, Scott DesJarlais, Jeff Duncan, Bob Good, Kevin Hern, Jody Hice, Barry Moore, Scott Perry, Bill Posey and Matt Rosendale.Philip Bump, a Washington Post reporter, has covered what he calls the “Nay caucus,” writing “The emerging far-right ‘no’ caucus in the House” on March 19, 2021; “What’s the unifying force behind the House’s far-right ‘nay’ caucus?” on June 16, 2021; and “The House Republican ‘no’ caucus is at it again” on April 6, 2022.In his most recent article, Bump wrote:Perhaps the best description of this group is that it constitutes a highly pro-Trump, deeply conservative and often individualistic subset of a very pro-Trump, very conservative and very individualistic Republican caucus. It is a group that includes a number of legislators who go out of their way to draw attention to themselves; one way to do so is to oppose overwhelmingly popular measures.Bump ranked members of this caucus on the basis of voting no on a roll-callin which no more than a tenth of the House cast a vote in opposition. The top ten were Massie, who cast 99 such votes, Roy 93, Biggs 85, Greene 79, Ralph Norman 73, Good 57, Rosendale 56, Boebert 56, Matt Gaetz 51 and Perry 49.Members of the MAGA caucus have been sharply critical of the Squad, to put it mildly. In November 2021, Gosar posted an animated video in which, as CNN put it, he is “portrayed as a cartoon anime-type hero and is seen attacking a giant with Ocasio-Cortez’s face with a sword from behind. The giant can then be seen crumbling to the ground.”Gosar issued a statement defending the video, which shows the cartoon image of himself flying by jetpack to slay the giant Ocasio-Cortez: “The cartoon depicts the symbolic nature of a battle between lawful and unlawful policies and in no way intended to be a targeted attack against Representative Cortez,” it says, before adding, “It is a symbolic cartoon. It is not real life. Congressman Gosar cannot fly.”Ruth Bloch Rubin, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, outlined in an email the differences between the Squad and the MAGA caucus:There are a lot of ways that lawmakers can be extreme. They can be extremist in their policy preferences, extremist in their preferred tactics, and extremist in their political messaging. When it comes to policy, it isn’t exactly clear what folks like Greene and Gosar want — they aren’t exactly policy wonks. Members of the Squad have done more to communicate their policy priorities — e.g., on issues like policing and climate change — and there, what they want is generally more liberal than what some (perhaps many) in the party are likely to support.In terms of political messaging, Rubin argued, “it is undeniable that Greene and Gosar have done more to deviate from normal politics — likening vaccination requirements to Nazi rule or running violent ad campaigns — than anything ever said by any member of the Squad.”I asked Rubin which group has done more damage to its own party:If/when the Democrats lose big in the midterms, I think it likely that the Squad will face a lot of criticism for pushing progressive policies that are not sufficiently popular with voters (police reform) over those that have greater public support (expanding Medicare, for example).But, Rubin contended, Biden will also bear responsibility if Democrats suffer badly in November:In this day and age, it is unreasonable to expect that you can be an FDR-figure without the kind of sizable and stable majorities in Congress he benefited from. The upshot of being an experienced politicians is that you should anticipate this and plan accordingly.Conversely, Rubin continued:There is little evidence that Republicans like Gosar and Greene are doing any short-term damage to the Republican Party — long-term damage is less clear. And one way we can tell is that Republican leaders (and voters) wasted no time getting rid of the one member whose conduct wasn’t burnishing the party’s brand: Madison Cawthorne. The fact that this hasn’t happened to Greene or Gosar or other MAGAish members suggests they aren’t perceived to be enough of a problem.Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, argued in an email that extremists can in fact play a constructive role in legislative proceedings:While not defending the excesses and demagoguery that some of the members you list have engaged in, a couple examples come to mind:Massie has strenuously objected to the continued use of proxy voting in Congress two+ years into the pandemic as undermining the traditions and character of the institution. For those of us who have long worried about the huge share of members who are only in Washington from Tuesday to Thursday, are such perspectives out of bounds?Was there any value in Massie’s insistence on holding public debate before Congress passed the $2.2 trillion CARES Act, a stance that drew harsh denunciation from President Trump himself?Lee acknowledged:Members who incite violence against other members or the institution cannot be countenanced. But I would encourage a tolerant attitude toward legitimately elected representatives, even those who hold views far outside the mainstream. It’s always worth considering what their constituents see in them and what, if anything, they contribute to debate. Such members do make Congress a more fully representative body.Michael B. Levy, who served as chief of staff to former Senator Lloyd Bentsen, Democrat of Texas, pointed out, “There are many similarities in that both groups live and die by their primaries because their districts are one-party districts and neither has to worry much about the median voter in their states.”Beyond that, Levy continued, there are significant differences: “The Squad’s agenda is a basic international social democratic left agenda which joins an expanding social welfare state to an expanding realm of cultural liberalism and identity politics.”The Squad, Levy wrote, “while willing to attack members of their own party and support candidates in primaries running against incumbents in their own party, continues to exhibit loyalty to basic democratic norms in the system at large.”In contrast, Levy argued, “The MAGA caucus has a less coherent ideology, even if it has a very distinct angry populist tone.” That may be temporary, Levy suggested,as more and more intellectuals try to create a type of coherent “integralist” ideology joining protectionism, cultural and religious traditionalism, and an isolationist but nationalist foreign policy. Arguably theirs is also a variant of identity politics, but that is less clearly articulated. As best I can tell, they do not have a coherent approach to economic policy or the welfare state.Two scholars who have been highly critical of developments in the Republican Party, Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute and Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution, co-authors of the book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism,” were both far more critical of the MAGA caucus than of the Squad.Mann was adamant in his email:The MAGA Caucus is antidemocratic, authoritarian, and completely divorced from reality and truth. The Squad embraces left views well within the democratic spectrum. What’s striking about the MAGA Caucus is that they are closer to the Republican mainstream these days, given the reticence of Republican officeholders to challenge Trump. We worry about the future of American democracy because the entire Republican Party has gone AWOL. The crazy extremists have taken over one of our two major parties.The MAGA group, Ornstein wrote by email, is composed ofthe true believers, who think Trump won, that there is rampant voter fraud, the country needs a caudillo, we have to crack down on trans people, critical race theory is an evil sweeping the country and more. The Squad is certainly on the left end of the party, but they do not have authoritarian tendencies and views.Ocasio-Cortez, Ornstein wrote, “is smart, capable, and has handled her five minutes of questioning in committees like a master.”William Galston, a senior fellow at Brooking and a co-author with Elaine Kamarck, also of Brookings, of “The New Politics of Evasion: How Ignoring Swing Voters Could Reopen the Door for Donald Trump and Threaten American Democracy,” wrote by email:How does one measure “extreme”? By two metrics — detachment from reality and threats to the democratic process — the nod goes to the MAGA crowd over the Squad, whose extremism is only in the realm of policy. I could argue that the Squad’s policy stances — defund the police, abolish ICE, institute a Green New Deal — have done more damage to the Democratic Party than the MAGA crowd has to the Republicans. President Biden has been forced to back away from these policies, while Republicans sail along unscathed. By refusing to criticize — let alone break from — the ultra-MAGA representatives, Donald Trump has set the tone for his party. A majority of rank-and-file Democrats disagree with the Squad’s position. There’s no evidence that the Republican grassroots is troubled by the extremism in their own ranks.I asked Galston what the implications were of Marjorie Taylor Greene winning renomination on May 24 with 69.5 percent of the primary vote.He replied:Trumpists hold a strong majority within the Republican Party, and in many districts the battle is to be seen as the Trumpiest Republican candidate. This is especially true in deep-red districts where winning the nomination is tantamount to winning the general election. A similar dynamic is at work in deep-blue districts, where the most left-leaning candidate often has the advantage. Candidates like these rarely succeed in swing districts, where shifts among moderate and independent voters determine general election winners. In both parties, there has been a swing away from candidates who care about the governance process, and toward candidates whose skills are oratorical rather than legislative. I could hypothesize that in an era of hyperpolarization in which gridlock is the default option, the preference for talkers over doers may be oddly rational.They may be talkers rather than doers, but if, as currently expected, Republicans win control of the House on Nov. 8, 2022, the MAGA faction will be positioned to wield real power.Joshua Huder, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute, explained in an email that there has beenchange in lawmaking that amplifies the extremes of majority parties. In previous generations, extreme progressives or conservatives were more easily excluded from rooms where policy and procedural decisions were made. Either committee leaders would craft deals away from their party caucuses or leaders had an easier time finding moderates in the other party to craft solutions that the extreme wings of their caucus might oppose.In contrast, Huder wrote:Today’s partisan-cohort legislative style inherently incorporates more extreme voices. Decisions are made within the caucus or negotiated with various caucus factions through leadership offices. Put simply, the influence of extreme wings of each party are more intimately woven into legislative negotiations. And as a result, intense partisan warfare is more common.In this environment, Huder continued, “undeniably, their influence on congressional decision making has grown. They don’t get what they want all the time, but many congressional fights and tactics can be explained by the influence of the more extreme wings of each party.”Recent history suggests that the MAGA caucus and the overlapping but larger Freedom Caucus have Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican minority leader who is favored to become speaker of the House if his party takes control, firmly in their grip. The Freedom Caucus played a key role in forcing Speaker John Boehner out of office in 2015 and a central role in pushing Boehner’s successor, Paul Ryan, to retire three years later.“The Freedom Caucus has become the political home of right-wing troublemakers who often embarrass and even defy the party leadership,” Ed Kilgore wrote in the Intelligencer section of New York magazine. “A group of experienced ideological extortionists answering to gangster leadership of Trump is going to be hard to handle for the poor schmoes trying to keep the G.O.P. from falling into a moral and political abyss.”If McCarthy takes the speaker’s gavel next year, he will be in the unenviable position of constantly addressing the demands of a body of legislators who at any moment could turn on him and cut him off at the knees.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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      Best- and Worst-Case Outcomes of the Jan. 6 Public Hearings

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      On Thursday, a bipartisan House select committee will begin public hearings on the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. The weeks ahead will be awash with news as the committee reveals what happened in the days and weeks before the attack — and to what extent the rioters were emboldened, or enabled, by the White House and Republican lawmakers.To wade through the news and help us understand what to pay attention to as the hearings unfold, host Jane Coaston calls upon two experts on the Republican Party.[You can listen to this episode of “The Argument” on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]Nicole Hemmer is an author and historian of conservative media. Ross Douthat is a Times Opinion columnist. They give their takes on what narratives might play out in the hearings and comment on the danger of far-right extremism in the G.O.P. “I don’t see an incentive structure that pulls the Republican Party in general away from procedural extremism, or even really at the moment, anything that pulls them back to a majoritarian democratic process,” Hemmer says.Mentioned in this episode:“What Oprah Winfrey Knows About American History That Tucker Carlson Doesn’t” by Nicole Hemmer in The New York Times“Are We Witnessing the Mainstreaming of White Power in America?” episode from The Ezra Klein Show“Why Would John Eastman Want to Overturn an Election for Trump?” by Ross Douthat in The New York Times(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Samuel Corum/Getty ImagesThoughts? Email us at argument@nytimes.com or leave us a voice mail message at (347) 915-4324. We want to hear what you’re arguing about with your family, your friends and your frenemies. (We may use excerpts from your message in a future episode.)By leaving us a message, you are agreeing to be governed by our reader submission terms and agreeing that we may use and allow others to use your name, voice and message.“The Argument” is produced by Phoebe Lett, Elisa Gutierrez and Vishakha Darbha. Edited by Alison Bruzek and Anabel Bacon. With original music by Isaac Jones and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta with editorial support from Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. More

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      There Has to Be a Tipping Point on Guns, Right?

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      Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. I know we’ll talk about Joe Biden’s gun-control proposals, but I wanted to ask how Dan is feeling — about Covid and the Celtics.Gail Collins: Thanks for asking, Bret. I can now march around with a little badge saying “My husband’s testing negative!” He didn’t have a major Covid case, but it was a reminder of how any illness can really lay a family low. And what a disaster it must be for, say, single mothers or poor seniors. And how important it is to have good social services for those folks and …Bret: And a timely prescription of Paxlovid, I presume. Glad he’s better.Gail: OK, not gonna try to lure you into an activist-government argument today. Will move on instead to the championship-contender Boston Celtics and my theory that professional sports, while cheesy in many ways, are an extremely useful part of the culture, not only providing diversion but also uniting folks who would otherwise have absolutely nothing in common.Anybody you’re rooting for?Bret: The Celtics, of course. What’s your over-under on the series, now that it’s tied? Or your bet on Biden getting anything passed on gun legislation?Gail: Sports-wise, I don’t like the idea of betting on whether some team will score over X points or under. Just tell me who you think is going to win.Bret: The Men in Green. Not only does God root for them, he also used to play for them.Gail: However, when it comes to betting on the Senate, God help us, I guess you need to look for ways to celebrate minimal achievement. I can imagine them passing a bill to raise the age for buying an assault rifle to 21, but don’t expect me to throw a party.Bret: I’m hardly the first person to suggest that no one should be able to legally buy a gun in the United States who can’t legally buy a beer in the United States. I’d also argue that every would-be gun buyer should be required to purchase a gun safe while also passing a criminal-background check, a psychiatric evaluation, a three-day waiting period and an extensive gun-safety course. Perhaps a few of the conservatives who argue that school shootings are part of a mental-health crisis might be persuaded to sign on.Gail: Can I also say how it drives me crazy when lawmakers respond to these gun crises by ranting about police efficiency or school construction?Bret: Well, the performance of the police in Uvalde was shameful and I hope the episode lives on as an example to cops everywhere of how not to act when the lives of children and teachers are at risk.Gail: Of course you want well-trained security officers, but that’s not going to stop all these horrors. And kinda amazed by the idea of eliminating entrances to reduce the chance of a murderer sneaking into a school. Could pose a problem if you’re down to one door and the building catches fire.Bret: Which sort of brings us to the nub of the problem: Conservatives want policies that don’t work in practice and liberals want policies that don’t work in politics.Our news-side colleague Nate Cohn had an eye-opening analysis last week on the wide disparity between the way gun-control measures poll and how people actually vote on them. Turns out, gun control just isn’t as popular at the ballot box as many liberals contend. And every time there’s a gun massacre, gun sales go up, not down. Liberals need to reconsider the way they make their case. Your thoughts?Gail: Well, my first idea would be to … ask an extremely talented communicator with ties to the right. Take it, Bret!Bret: Hmmm. Can I start with what doesn’t work?When Beto O’Rourke says, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15s,” it just encourages people to buy them. When Jimmy Kimmel makes a moving plea for gun control, he is preaching to the converted, but he isn’t moving the needle. When hyper-progressives say “abolish the police,” they are tacitly encouraging people — especially in low-income communities — to purchase weapons as a logical means of self-defense. When coastal elites denigrate gun culture, they foster precisely the kinds of cultural resentments that lead people to “cling to guns,” to use Barack Obama’s famous phrase. When Biden pleads “do something,” he merely invites the question: do what, exactly?Gail: As someone who is in favor of getting rid of every assault weapon in the world, I have to protest. Let’s open a conversation about what kind of guns are good for hunting and target shooting and separate them from the ones that are ideal for mowing down students or shoppers or whoever turn out to be the next heartbreaking mass murder victims.The major barrier is the profit-making gun manufacturers and the culture they subsidize. But I understand I’m not exactly moving many AR-15 owners. Give me a better strategy.Bret: Imagine a TV ad from a moderate Democrat like Ohio’s Tim Ryan or Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger that goes something like this:“I believe in the Second Amendment. But not for this guy,” followed by a picture of the Tucson, Ariz., mass murderer Jared Lee Loughner, “or this guy” — a picture of Aurora, Colo., mass murderer James Holmes, “or this guy” — a picture of Newtown, Conn., mass murderer Adam Lanza.It would continue: “I also believe in the right to own firearms responsibly for hunting and self-defense. But not for this” — a picture of the scene outside the Uvalde school, “or this” — a picture of the scene from the Buffalo grocery store, “or this” — scenes from the Parkland massacre.And it could conclude: “Justice Robert Jackson once told us that the Bill of Rights cannot become a suicide pact. That includes the Second Amendment. We can protect your guns while keeping them out of the hands of crazy and dangerous people by using common-sense background checks, 21-years-of-age purchasing requirements, three-day waiting periods and mental-health exams. It’s not about denying your constitutional rights. It’s so your children come home from school alive.”What do you think?Gail: I’m sold. And I have a feeling we’ll be talking about this much, much more as this election year goes on.Bret: Let’s hope it’s not after the next school shooting. Though, considering what we saw over the weekend in Philadelphia or Chattanooga, it may not be long.Gail: Let’s take a rest and talk about politics in the old, non-profound sense. I was fascinated when Mike Pence made a very public endorsement of Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp in the primary. Kemp was perhaps Donald Trump’s top target — he hates him for allowing the state’s presidential vote to go, accurately, to Joe Biden.Bret: At least Pence has better political acumen than Trump. Kemp won his primary over David Perdue by more than 50 points, which was a very satisfying humiliation of one of Trump’s favorite bootlickers.Gail: And our colleague Maggie Haberman recently posted a story from her upcoming book, about the vice president’s security being warned that Trump was going to turn on Pence before Pence went on to accurately record the results of the presidential election.Are we looking at Pence as a hero in a possible primary with his old boss in 2024?Bret: I don’t see how a man whose political theme song might as well have been the Meat Loaf classic, “I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)” can sell himself as any kind of hero, much less as a plausible Republican nominee. He’s too close to Trump not to be tainted by his presidency and too alienated from Trump not to be diminished by his wrath.Frankly, Trump’s only serious opponent for the nomination at this point is Ron DeSantis, who seems to be beating the former president in the straw polls, at least in some states. Between those two, who would you prefer as the G.O.P. candidate?Gail: Well DeSantis made a trademark move last week when he canceled funding for a Tampa Bay Rays training facility because the team issued an anti-mass-shooting tweet. (They dared to say: “This cannot be normal.”) He’s horrible, and his advantage is that he’s smarter than Trump. But he doesn’t have nearly as much of that raise-the-rafters-split-the-country creepy charisma.Bret: You have to admire the ideological flexibility of self-described conservatives who are for free speech, until they aren’t, and who think corporations have speech rights, until they don’t. Still, DeSantis is very effective.Sorry, go on.Gail: Not quite sure who scares me more. Especially in an era when people are being encouraged to doubt the whole electoral system. Did you see the story in Politico about Republican poll workers being prepared to contest the Election Day process rather than making it work properly?Bret: This is the mental infection Trump has unleashed on the republic. The notion that elections are a case of “heads I win, tails you lose.”Gail: Just looking forward, I’m imagining an election this fall where either the Republicans win everything or the whole process gets blocked from even taking place. Or both.OK, I’m being way too negative. Be a pal and cheer me up.Bret: Here’s what my crystal ball tells me: ​​Democrats get hammered in the midterms. Biden realizes he has to announce he isn’t running in 2024 so that a savior can appear. Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, beats Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina for the Democratic nomination, and then chooses the widely respected retired Adm. Jim Stavridis as her running mate.Meanwhile, Republicans split acrimoniously between DeSantis and Trump. A brokered convention produces a compromise ticket headed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia with Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina as his veep choice. On Election Day, Americans breathe a little easier knowing that none of the candidates is out to destroy the Constitution, and we’re back to politics as it was before Trump.Reality check: Naaaaaaaaaaaaaah.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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      Chris Jacobs Drops Re-Election Bid After Bucking His Party on Guns

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      In the wake of deadly mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas, Representative Chris Jacobs of New York, a congressman serving his first full term in the House, stunned fellow Republicans by embracing a federal assault weapons ban and limits on high-capacity magazines.Speaking from his suburban Buffalo district a week ago, about 10 miles from the grocery store where 10 Black residents were slaughtered, Mr. Jacobs framed his risky break from bedrock Republican orthodoxy as bigger than politics: “I can’t in good conscience sit back and say I didn’t try to do something,” he said.It took only seven days for political forces to catch up with him.On Friday, facing intense backlash from party leaders, a potential primary from the state party chairman and a forceful dressing down from Donald Trump Jr., Mr. Jacobs announced that he would abandon his re-election campaign.“We have a problem in our country in terms of both our major parties. If you stray from a party position, you are annihilated,” Mr. Jacobs said. “For the Republicans, it became pretty apparent to me over the last week that that issue is gun control. Any gun control.” Citing the thousands of gun permits he had issued as Erie County clerk, Mr. Jacobs emphasized that he was a supporter of the Second Amendment, and said he wanted to avoid the brutal intraparty fight that would have been inevitable had he stayed in the race. But he warned Republicans that their “absolute position” on guns would hurt the party in the long run and urged more senior lawmakers to step forward.“Look, if you’re not going to take a stand on something like this, I don’t know what you’re going to take a stand on,” Mr. Jacobs added, citing the pain of families in Buffalo, Uvalde and elsewhere.The episode, which played out as President Biden pleaded with lawmakers in Washington to pass a raft of new laws to address gun violence, may be a portent for proponents of gun control, who had welcomed Mr. Jacobs’s evolution on the issue as a sign that the nation’s latest mass tragedies might break a decades-old logjam in Washington.It also serves as a crisp encapsulation of just how little deviation on gun policy Republican Party officials and activists are willing to tolerate from their lawmakers, despite broad support for gun safety measures by Americans.Mr. Jacobs’s decision to go against his party on gun control drew an immediate and vitriolic response: Local gun rights groups posted his cellphone number on the internet, and local and state party leaders began pulling their support, one by one.Understand the 2022 Midterm Elections So FarAfter key races in Georgia, Pennsylvania and other states, here’s what we’ve learned.Trump’s Invincibility in Doubt: With many of Donald J. Trump’s endorsed candidates failing to win, some Republicans see an opening for a post-Trump candidate in 2024.G.O.P. Governors Emboldened: Many Republican governors are in strong political shape. And some are openly opposing Mr. Trump.Voter Fraud Claims Fade: Republicans have been accepting their primary victories with little concern about the voter fraud they once falsely claimed caused Mr. Trump’s 2020 loss.The Politics of Guns: Republicans have been far more likely than Democrats to use messaging about guns to galvanize their base in the midterms. Here’s why.Just last week, Mr. Jacobs, who is the scion of one of Buffalo’s richest families and was endorsed by the National Rifle Association in 2020, had been an easy favorite to win re-election, even after a court-appointed mapmaker redrew his Western New York district to include some of the state’s reddest rural counties, areas he does not currently represent.Now, his choice to not seek re-election has set off a scramble among Republicans in Western New York to fill his seat, including Carl Paladino, the Buffalo developer and the party’s nominee for governor in 2010, who said Friday that he would run. Mr. Paladino, who has had to apologize for making insensitive and racist remarks, immediately gained the endorsement of Representative Elise Stefanik, the powerful Republican congresswoman from New York’s North Country. After a mass shooting at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, Mr. Jacobs backed a federal assault weapons ban and limits on high-capacity magazines.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesParty leaders and allies who spoke to Mr. Jacobs in recent days said he clearly understood the political ramifications of his decision to support powerful gun control measures — but he nonetheless refused to back away from it.Mr. Jacobs, 55, announced his support for a federal ban on assault weapons last week without having first consulted many of his political advisers, according to a person familiar with his decision who was not authorized to discuss it.After making his remarks, he conducted a poll that suggested he might have still had a path to re-election, though not an easy one.“His heart is in a good place, but he’s wrong in his thinking as far as we are concerned,” Ralph C. Lorigo, the longtime chairman of the Erie County Conservative Party, said before Friday’s announcement. “This quick jump that all of the sudden it’s the gun that kills people as opposed to the person is certainly not 100 percent true.”Mr. Lorigo said he had vouched for Mr. Jacobs earlier this year when other conservatives doubted him. But this past Monday, he demanded the congressman come to his office and made clear he would encourage a primary challenge.“He understood that this was potentially political suicide,” Mr. Lorigo said.Even before he made his decision not to run again, several Republicans were already lining up to face off against Mr. Jacobs, angered at both his comments and the way in which he had surprised fellow members of his party, including some who had already endorsed him.In addition to Mr. Paladino, other potential Republican challengers included Mike Sigler, a Tompkins County legislator; Marc Cenedella, a conservative businessman; and State Senator George Borrello.“We deserved the courtesy of a heads up,” said Mr. Borrello, a second-term Republican from Irving, N.Y., south of Buffalo.Mr. Borrello added that Mr. Jacobs’s actions were particularly galling considering the congressman had “actively and aggressively” sought out the support of pro-gun groups like the N.R.A. and the 1791 Society.“And those people rightfully feel betrayed,” he said.The most formidable threat to Mr. Jacobs, though, may have come from Nicholas A. Langworthy, a longtime Erie County Republican leader who currently serves as the chairman of the state’s Republican Party.Mr. Langworthy, who has yet to formally announce whether he will seek the seat, had been a supporter of Mr. Jacobs, helping him secure former President Donald J. Trump’s endorsement, but he began circulating petitions to get on the ballot himself in recent days and told associates that he would consider challenging Mr. Jacobs.Mr. Langworthy declined to comment on Friday.Gun control advocates and Democrats denounced the reaction to the congressman’s remarks, saying it showed the intolerance of Republicans’ hard-line approach to gun rights.Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More

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      We Can’t Even Agree on What Is Tearing Us Apart

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      Today, even scholars of polarization are polarized.This was not always the case.In 1964, Philip Converse of the University of Michigan wrote a groundbreaking paper, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” that attempted to determine the size of the share of the electorate that could reasonably be described as having a consistent set of political convictions.Converse, a political scientist, was interested in figuring out how many people have what he called “a belief system, a configuration of ideas and attitudes in which the elements are bound together by some form of constraint or functional interdependence.”For Converse, such a system suggested that if “an individual holds a specified attitude, he holds certain further ideas and attitudes.” For example, “If a person is opposed to the expansion of Social Security, he is probably a conservative and is probably opposed as well to any nationalization of private industries, federal aid to education, sharply progressive income taxation, and so forth.” Converse called voters who fit this description “ideologues.”At the time he was writing, Converse noted, only 3.5 percent of voters could be described as “ideologues,” 12 percent as “near ideologues,” and the remaining 84.5 percent cast their ballots on the basis of whether their group would benefit, the state of the economy or, in Converse’s words, “no issue content.”Now, nearly six decades later, the issue is not the lack of an ideological and partisan electorate but the dominance of polarized elected officials and voters, some driven by conviction, others by a visceral dislike of the opposition, and still others by both.This turbulence has proved to be a gold mine for scholars seeking to find order in the disorder.Take two papers, both published in August 2021: “Constrained Citizens? Ideological Structure and Conflict Extension in the U.S. Electorate, 1980-2016,” by Christopher Hare, a political scientist at the University of California, Davis, and “Moderates” by six political scientists, Anthony Fowler, Seth Hill, Jeff Lewis, Chris Tausanovitch, Lynn Vavreck and Christopher Warshaw.Hare, in his paper, argues that polarization is present throughout the electorate:As among elites, the left-right dimension has come to encompass a wide range of policy, partisan, and value divides in the mass public. Further, these trends hold for voters at all levels of political sophistication. Widespread conflict extension appears to be a defining feature of mass polarization in contemporary U.S. politics.The level of conflict, Hare continued,speaks to a fundamental trade-off in a pluralistic democracy. On the one hand, the presence of reinforcing policy cleavages — particularly those involving emotional, “high heat” social and cultural matters — changes the tenor of democratic deliberation. Political competition becomes Manichaean: less transactional and more messianic. This environment fosters partisan-ideological antipathy, resistance to compromise, and other manifestations of affective polarization.Citizens with low and moderate levels of political sophistication, Hare argues, “are catching up to their highly sophisticated counterparts in terms of ideological constraint,” and thisconflict extension tends to reinforce itself through a positive feedback loop. Overlapping conflicts provide multiple pathways to the same partisan-ideological configuration. Better-sorted voters, in turn, further clarify party differences. Each process feeds into the other, and partisan competition engulfs both a wider set of conflicts and a larger segment of the electorate. Consequently, when the same political opponents repeatedly clash over emotional issues and fundamental values with messianic zeal, it becomes easier to view the other side as evil rather than merely incorrect.In an email, Hare argued that the current trends in partisanship “all seem to contribute to a feedback loop.” The sorting of voters into two camps, Democrats and liberals versus Republicans and conservatives, is notan innocuous form of polarization, especially when the attitudes and attributes on which voters are being sorted are such deep wellsprings of dispute (religion, race, urban vs. rural, core values such as moral traditionalism and egalitarianism, etc.). As these divisions overlap with each other and an increasing number of diverse policy issues (including value-laden issues like abortion, immigration, guns, etc. that also expose cultural fault lines and are much less amenable to compromise and standard political horse trading), it’s little surprise that politics becomes more combustible.Fowler and his co-authors, on the other hand, contest the view that voters are deeply polarized:We find that a large proportion of the American public is neither consistently liberal nor consistently conservative but that this inconsistency is not because their views are simply random or incoherent. Instead, we estimate that many of those who give a mix of liberal and conservative responses hold genuine views in the middle of the same dimension of policy ideology that explains the views of consistent liberals and consistent conservatives.There are, Fowler and his collaborators point out,many genuine moderates in the American electorate. Nearly three in four survey respondents’ issue positions are well-described by a single left-right dimension, and most of those individuals have centrist views. Furthermore, these genuine moderates are a politically important group. They are highly responsive to the ideologies and qualities of political candidates.In an email responding to my inquires, Fowler wrote:Elites are highly polarized, but members of the general public are not. Of course, there is sorting in the sense that liberals are more likely to identify as Democrats and conservatives are more likely to identify as Republican. So there are differences between the opinions of the average Democrat and the average Republican, but unlike for members of Congress, the distribution of ideology in the American public is unimodal, with most people close to the middle.There is a second crucial area of disagreement among scholars over what is known as “affective polarization,” the idea that there has been a steady increase in the level of animosity among voters toward members of the opposite party.Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, described affective polarization in a 2016 paper, “A Cross-Cutting Calm: How Social Sorting Drives Affective Polarization”:In recent decades, a particular type of partisan sorting has been occurring in the American electorate. American partisan identities have grown increasingly linked with a number of other specific social identities. These include religious, racial, and other political group identities, such as the Tea Party.For those whose social identities have become deeply entwined with their partisan identities as Democrats or Republicans, political defeat can produce intense anger. “This anger,” Mason writes, “is driven not simply by dissatisfaction with potential policy consequences, but by a much deeper, more primal psychological reaction to group threat. Partisans are angered by a party loss because it makes them, as individuals, feel like losers too.”In a separate 2018 paper, “Ideologues Without Issues: The Polarizing Consequences of Ideological Identities,” Mason argued that “American identities are better than American opinions at explaining conflict,” noting:Identity-based ideology can drive affective ideological polarization even when individuals are naïve about policy. The passion and prejudice with which we approach politics is driven not only by what we think, but also powerfully by who we think we are.Two political scientists, Lilla V. Orr at Stanford and Gregory Huber at Yale, dispute Mason’s portrayal of affective polarization in their 2019 paper, “The Policy Basis of Measured Partisan Animosity in the United States.” They argue that policy and ideology play a strong role in the level of dislike or hatred between members of opposing parties and that policy agreement can moderate much of the hostility:In a series of survey experiments asking participants to rate the warmth they feel toward people described in vignettes, we find that issue positions influence interpersonal evaluations more than partisanship. Issue effects remain strong even when partisanship is also presented (they decrease by about 12 percent), but the effect of partisanship decreases substantially in this setting (by about 60 percent).Perhaps most striking, Orr and Huber found that “respondents more favorably evaluate out-partisans who hold a shared policy position than co-partisans who disagree on policy.”In an email, Huber wrote that there is “a very simple alternative” to explain growing partisan animosity:People pick which party to be in on the basis of issues, (and) animosity is based in policy disagreement. We know people disagree about stuff, and of course that is the basis of politics. If we all agreed, we wouldn’t need a political system to manage our disagreements. But, disagreement needn’t be elite driven or linked to being in a tribe; it might just be that we have preferences.Huber elaborated:Because the parties are clearly defined ideologically, we tend on average to (correctly) assume that the mass public’s views are also linked to their partisanship. So if I want to understand why people are affectively polarized, it is because they are correct that on average Republicans and Democrats disagree about issues, and not just random issues, but the issues that lead us to pick which party we belong to. I wouldn’t call that tribal — that sounds like issue-based politics.Orr contended in an email:Several experiments have successfully manipulated feelings toward people from the opposing party and found no effects on anti-democratic attitudes or other predicted consequences of affective polarization. These results imply that affective polarization might not be as inherently dangerous as many researchers previously assumed. I don’t mean to downplay the harm caused by partisan-motivated violence or dismiss efforts to combat blind partisan hostility, but a widespread failure to be upset by some of the things our fellow U.S. residents are trying to accomplish through politics can also put people in physical danger.In an effort to clarify the relationship between ideological and affective polarization, I queried a number of political scientists and received some thoughtful responses.Sean Westwood of Dartmouth stressed the importance of “sorting”:Sorting argues that citizens and elites proactively move themselves to parties that best capture their views. By consequence this should reduce the prevalence of misaligned senators like Joe Manchin. Sorting makes the parties more cohesive and moves the party toward more extreme positions on average, increasing ideological polarization. Evidence for sorting among elites is very strong. The best way to think of this, I think, is that sorting causes polarization.What, then, about affective polarization?Affective polarization is more widespread than principled ideological polarization among voters. Even voters entirely ignorant of the policy positions of their party can develop an emotional attachment to co-partisans and a negative view of the opposition.Unfortunately, Westwood continued,We don’t really know where affective polarization comes from or why it is surging. Some argue that it comes from ideological sorting, but this isn’t very satisfying because many people have affective preferences and are simultaneously unable to correctly identify the policy positions of the parties.How do sorting, ideological polarization and affective polarization interact?Sorting among elites makes it less likely for more conservative voices to exist within the Democratic Party and for more liberal voices to exist in the Republican Party. This makes the parties more ideologically cohesive and more likely to adopt more extreme policy positions, increasing ideological polarization. This is magnified by the lack of centrists running for and winning office. Polarization is the consequence of the complementary phenomenon of growing ideological cohesion among the parties and fewer moderates to temper the movement of parties to ideological extremes.At the same time, Westwood argues:Voters are becoming more affectively polarized. The connection between elite ideological polarization and citizen affective polarization seems credible on face value, but evidence to support such a relationship is very hard to come by. This is what makes research on the causes of affective polarization so important and our current understanding so frustrating. I would see ideological polarization and affective polarization as two parallel and related phenomena, but with different antecedents and different effects on behavior.Yphtach Lelkes, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania, addressed my queries from a different angle, emphasizing ideological constraint:With the risk of sounding overly academic, researchers sometimes say polarization can be thought of as a loss of dimensionality in the issue space. That is, if I knew your position on abortion, I didn’t necessarily know your position on health care. Among elites, the dimensionality of the issue space has completely collapsed. If I know where a senator stands on abortion, I know where that senator stands on health care, gun rights, immigration, etc.Political scientists, he continued,have long argued that a sign of the disconnect between the mass public and elites is that the mass public’s attitudes are multidimensional (knowing where someone stands on abortion doesn’t necessarily tell me where they stand on health care), while elites’ attitudes are unidimensional.That is changing, Lelkes argued, citing the work of Chris Hare in the paper I already mentioned: “Hare (who knows a ton about this stuff) has recently shown that public opinion is now collapsing onto one dimension.”Affective polarization can have substantial real-world consequences.James Druckman, Samara Klar, Yanna Krupnikov, Matthew Levendusky and John Barry Ryan, of Northwestern, the University of Arizona, Stony Brook, the University of Pennsylvania and Stony Brook, studied partisan responses to the Covid-19 pandemic in their 2021 paper, “Affective polarization, local contexts and public opinion in America,” and found:For worry about Covid-19 and support for Covid-19 policies, the marginal effect of animus is significant and negative for Republicans in counties with few cases; the confidence intervals for the other marginal effects overlap with zero. Increases in animus are statistically significant only for Republicans in counties with low cases, suggesting that, for worry and support, partisan gaps are largely a function of Republicans with considerable animus towards Democrats.Gary Jacobson, of the University of California, San Diego, summarized the evolution of polarization in his emailed reply:Over the past four decades, largely in response to the more sharply differentiated alternatives presented by the national parties and their leaders, voters have sorted themselves into increasingly distinct and discordant political camps. As partisan identities, ideological leanings, and policy preferences have moved into closer alignment, individuals’ political attitudes have become more internally consistent and more distinct from those of partisans on the other side, leaving ordinary Republicans and Democrats in disagreement on a growing range of issues.Political cleavages that once split the public in diverse ways, Jacobson continued,now tend to coincide. Affective reactions to parties and candidates have diverged, largely because of partisans’ growing antipathy toward the other party’s adherents and leaders. Widening demographic differences between the parties’ identifiers — differences in race, age, sex, religiosity, education, community and marital status — have also contributed to partisan “tribalism,” as has the increasing partisan homogeneity of the states and districts.Sorting, in Jacobson’s view,is a primary source of affective polarization. If people on the other side are consistently “wrong” on all the important political questions, you’ll find it harder to like or respect them. This is especially the case if some of the issues have a large moral component (abortion, civil rights), where the other side is viewed as not just misguided but immoral, even evil.Demographic sorting by race, education and geography “contributes to affective polarization by clarifying who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them,’” Jacobson wrote: “The more the parties appear to be differentiated by morality and identity, the more intense the partisan conflict and the greater the likelihood of violence.”Jacobson was not sympathetic to the findings in Fowler’s “Moderates” paper:My analysis is orthogonal to the findings of “Moderates.” Fowler et al. find that electorate is largely moderate in ideology, but they have little to say about how their findings relate to the data (like Hare’s) that regularly find that Americans have become increasingly divided along party lines on ideology, issues, and party affect, and so forth.Jacobson stressed that the authors of “Moderates”are all first-rate scholars and their methodological skills far surpass my own, so I take the empirical work seriously. But they haven’t yet related it to the wider literature or explained why so many centrist voters seem unable to elect centrists, or why it is when there is a national tide running against a party, it’s mostly moderates who lose.As a sign of the schisms in the American electorate, Jacobson recalled a defeated congressman “complaining that voters showed their desire for moderating national politics by voting out all the moderates.”There is another key factor underpinning growing polarization and the absence of moderate politicians.“Most legislative polarization is already baking into the set of people who run for office,” Andrew Hall, a political scientist at Stanford, wrote in his book, “Who Wants to Run: How the Devaluing of Political Office Drives Polarization”: “Indeed, when we look at the ideological positions of who runs for the House, we see the set of all candidates — not just incumbents — has polarized markedly since 1980.”This trend results from the fact that since “the winning candidate gets to influence ideological policies” in increasingly polarized legislatures and the Congress, “the ideological payoffs of running for office are not equal across the ideological spectrum.” As a result, “when costs of running for office are high or benefits of holding office are low, more moderate candidates are disproportionately less likely to run.”In other words, polarization has created its own vicious circle, weeding out moderates, fostering extremists and constraining government action even in times of crisis.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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      Why Would John Eastman Want to Overturn an Election for Trump?

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      The figure of John Eastman, a constitutional theorist, former law professor and legal adviser to Donald Trump, looms increasingly large in retrospectives on the events of Jan. 6, and for good reason: Out of all the characters who floated through the White House in the aftermath of the 2020 election, only Eastman appears to have been fully serious about keeping Trump in office.Other people certainly imagined themselves to be serious, figures like Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell of MyPillow fame, but really they inhabited a fantasy world and mostly just invited Trump to live there with them. Then another set of figures — including various White House advisers and United States senators — lived in reality while pretending to believe the fantasy, either in the hopes of managing the president’s moods until his term ended or for cynical political reasons of their own.Only Eastman seemed to partly bridge the divide. True, his belief that Trump ought to remain in office depended on many of the same voter-fraud speculations — mutable, adaptable, an assumption in search of confirmation — that the outright fantasists embraced. But his legal plan of action was intended to be as plausible as possible, linked to interpretations of election law and the U.S. Constitution that were radical but not purely fanciful, and devised to exploit points of tension or contradiction where a constitutional crisis might genuinely be forced.Trump didn’t have the cooperators or the capacities required to reach that destination. But Eastman, unlike the clowns and cynics, actually drew up a road map for getting there, devoting real legal and constitutional knowledge to the goal of throwing the American presidential succession into crisis.John Eastman in Colorado in 2021.Andy Cross/MNG/The Denver Post, via Getty ImagesIn this, he embodied in the strongest form a tendency shared by others in his intellectual home base, the Claremont Institute — a conservative institution with many mansions, but one known lately for its hospitality to the reactionary internet and its enthusiasm for a politics of crisis.That enthusiasm first took shape in the “Flight 93 Election” essay, published in the Claremont Review of Books in 2016, in which the future Trump administration official Michael Anton made the case that the American Republic was in such dire shape that it would be preferable to elect a man who might literally crash the plane rather than to allow it to continue in its current course. Eastman’s eagerness for a constitutional crisis was a kind of bookend to that essay, infused with the same spirit but applied to a presidential transition rather than the presidential vote.This tendency has made Claremont an object of special fascination to hostile interpreters of Trump-era conservatism. At this point, you can read a wide range of critical essays trying to tease out how an institution formally devoted to the genius of the founding fathers and the ideals of Abraham Lincoln ended up harboring so much sympathy for a demagogue like Trump.I have my own interpretation, which goes back to my personal experience as a youthful “Publius fellow” at Claremont 20 years ago, when along with a brace of other young right-of-center nerds I was given a summer crash course in the thought of Harry Jaffa, the Claremont eminence (then living, now deceased), and his various disciples.The Jaffa school offered an interpretation of American history that might be described as Inception, Consummation and Corruption. Its Great Consummator was Lincoln, who restored the promise of the founding by fully establishing the “all men are created equal” absolutism of the Declaration of Independence. Its villains were John C. Calhoun and the progressives of the early 20th century, the former for defending slavery and inequality, the latter for replacing a constitutional republic with a bureaucratized administrative state, and both for displaying a philosophical and moral relativism that Jaffa despised (and that, as his intellectual feuds multiplied, he claimed to discern in many of his fellow conservatives as well).But one thing you noticed hanging around with Claremont folks was that while they were obviously interested in the good and bad of each American regime change, from the original founding (great) to the Lincolnian re-founding (even better) to the progressive re-foundings of Woodrow Wilson (their great villain, the “Lost Cause” sympathizer turned arrogant technocrat) and Franklin Roosevelt, they were also just really interested in the idea of founding itself, when moments of crisis bring new orders out of old ones.At one point, as a break from reading founding-era texts, we were treated to a screening of “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” the great John Ford western whose theme is the Old West’s transition into political modernity, passing from the rule of the gun (embodied by John Wayne’s Tom Doniphon) to the rule of the lawbook (embodied by Jimmy Stewart’s Ransom Stoddard).In the movie, the transition can’t happen without a dose of chaos, a mixture of violence and deception. Lee Marvin’s outlaw, Valance, challenges the peaceable lawyer Stoddard to a duel; Doniphon saves the lawyer by shooting the outlaw from the shadows — and then the killing is mistakenly attributed to Stewart’s character, who is lionized for it and goes on to be a great statesman of the New West while the cowboy and his vigilante code recede.The not-so-subtle implication of the Claremont reading of American history is that this kind of fraught transition doesn’t happen once and for all; rather, it happens periodically within the life of any nation or society. Whenever change or crisis overwhelms one political order, one version of (in our case) the American republic, you get a period of instability and rough power politics, until the new era or the new settlement is forged.But it doesn’t happen without moments like Doniphon shooting Valance — or Lincoln suspending habeas corpus, say, or Roosevelt threatening to pack the Supreme Court — when norms and niceties need to be suspended for the sake of the new system that’s waiting to be born.When I try to understand what Eastman imagined himself doing in serving Donald Trump even unto constitutional crisis, this is where my speculations turn. I don’t think this is the necessary implication of Claremont thought; indeed, you can find in the latest issue of The Claremont Review of Books an essay by William Voegeli critiquing conservatives who seem “enthused about chaos” and overeager to re-found rather than conserve. But I think it’s an understandable place for the Claremont reading of American history to turn at a time when the American republic does appear sclerotic, stalemated, gridlocked and in need of some kind of conspicuous renewal.Nor is it a coincidence that Claremont conservatives would turn this way at the same time that their adversaries on the American left nurture plans to expand the Supreme Court, add new states to the Union and abolish the Senate and the Electoral College. Both right and left are reacting, in different ways and with different prescriptions, to the sense of crisis and futility in our politics, the feeling that surely some kind of revolution or transformation is due to come around — that God in his wisdom is overdue to send us a Lincoln or a Roosevelt and that the existing norms of our politics probably won’t survive the change.What makes this sentiment particularly understandable is that the Claremont history of America’s multiple regime changes is generally correct: Our country really has periodically transformed itself, for better or worse (sometimes both at once), through the actions of strong leaders and strong movements that risked crisis to overturn and transform and even, yes, re-found.The problem — well, on the right, there are three problems.First, the part of the right that imagines a re-founding can’t agree on what shape its imagined new American regime should take. (Are we demolishing the administrative state or turning it to conservative ends? Restoring lost liberties or pursuing the common good? Building a multiethnic working-class majority or closing the border against future Democratic voters?) Which is one reason the Trump presidency, infused by these conflicting impulses, ended up being such a shambolic mess.The second obvious reason it was a mess was just the character of the president himself. It’s here that my attempt to imagine my way into Eastman’s crisis mind-set collapses: I just can’t fathom the idea that it could be worth pushing our constitutional system into chaos when your candidate to play the role of Lincoln or Roosevelt is Donald Trump.To cast a vote for Trump as a defensive measure against Hillary Clinton is one thing. But to nominate yourself to play Tom Doniphon in a political shootout so that a decadent order can give way to something new, when your candidate to lead the new order is a sybaritic reality-television star who shambled through his first presidential term … no, there my attempt at imaginative sympathy fails.But then finally, even deeper than the folly of risking so much for Trump himself is the folly of doing so without democratic legitimacy and real majority support. At past moments of American renewal or regime change the leaders of the emergent order have been able to claim a popular mandate for their project. Yes, Lincoln’s case is exceptional: He was a plurality president in 1860 and won a big majority in 1864 with the South still in rebellion. But he obviously won both elections, the outcomes weren’t particularly close, and the other transformative presidents in our history, from Andrew Jackson down through Roosevelt to Claremont’s own beloved Ronald Reagan, won a clear or resounding mandate for a second term.No complaints about a rigged election can change the fact that Trump did not — that despite ample opportunities for statesmanship, he never persuaded a majority of Americans to support whatever his project was supposed to be.And this is where the various indictments of Claremont Trumpism draw the most blood. If your intellectual project champions Lincoln over Calhoun, but you end up using constitutional legerdemain to preserve the power of a minority faction against an American majority, then whatever historical part you imagine yourself playing, you have betrayed yourself.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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      Donald Trump Is Desperate for Vindication in Georgia

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      ELLIJAY, Ga. — In some ways, Brian Kemp looks the part of a popular incumbent governor currently kicking butt in a high-stakes, high-profile re-election race. Decked out in boots and jeans, his checked shirt crisp and his gray hair flawless (despite the cyclonic ceiling fans), he has a casual manner as he addresses the crowd standing around the market shop of BJ Reece Orchards, one of the many orchards tucked into the Appalachian foothills of North Georgia. Standing beside a counter laden with crispy fried pies, Mr. Kemp runs through a laundry list of accomplishments from his first term: signing a fetal-heartbeat law and a parents’ bill of rights, successfully crusading for a permitless-carry gun law, keeping schools and businesses open during most of the pandemic and so on.From a conservative viewpoint — the prevailing viewpoint in these parts — it is a catalog worth cheering. Yet the governor’s expression remains serious bordering on concerned, and he sounds defensive at times, especially when talking about the new “election integrity” measures the state put in place after the uproar over the 2020 elections. There were “a lot of decisions that were made by other people” that he “never got to weigh in on,” Mr. Kemp insists, obviously uneasy about the entire topic. “So it was proper that we had discussions and talked to people about those issues to make sure everybody has confidence in the elections.”The edge of anxiety and defensiveness makes sense, though. After all, the reason Mr. Kemp has been campaigning so hard this primary season — running a bus tour through some of the state’s most conservative corners — is that he has been targeted for removal in the primary by Donald Trump, who is hellbent on punishing him for refusing to help overturn the 2020 election results.Mr. Trump’s chosen vessel for revenge is former Senator David Perdue, who lost a runoff with Democrat Jon Ossoff in January 2021. Mr. Perdue has servilely fashioned his campaign around Mr. Trump’s election-fraud nonsense — and little else — basically acting as a proxy for the former president and his Big Lie. But Mr. Perdue threatens to become one of Mr. Trump’s biggest disappointments. Mr. Kemp has been dominating the polls and is expected to come out on top in Tuesday’s primary — very possibly hitting 50 percent and avoiding a runoff. (Mr. Perdue’s situation is considered so dire that even Mr. Trump has reportedly given up on him, according to NBC News.) This would be a humiliating defeat for the former president, who has worked to turn the race into the ultimate grudge match between himself and his nemesis Mr. Kemp.Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia joining Chris Christie onstage at a rally in Alpharetta.Damon Winter/The New York TimesDavid Perdue at a campaign event on Thursday.Damon Winter/The New York TimesThanks to Mr. Trump’s machinations, Georgia’s elections are once again freighted with outsized import, its primaries having become something of a referendum on the health of the Republican Party — and of American democracy. A Kemp win would be a blow not only to Mr. Trump but also to the election denialism with which he has infected the G.O.P. Just this week, “stop the steal” truthers, determined to prove that Joe Biden cheated his way into the White House, won key primaries in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Another election denier with Mr. Trump’s endorsement, Representative Jody Hice, is running for Georgia secretary of state against the Republican incumbent Brad Raffensperger.A strong win by Mr. Kemp would be the most promising signal to date that many Republican voters, at least in Georgia, are ready to move on — not from Mr. Trump per se, but from his toxic fixation on 2020. It could also provide a hopeful model for other results-oriented Republican governors, evidence that they can thrive even without bowing to the former president’s anti-democratic obsessions. And if Mr. Trump plays things wrong, he could wind up damaging his own political fortunes as well.Georgia is a sore subject for Mr. Trump. Voters didn’t simply reject him as president; they followed up by handing control of the Senate to the Democrats. Outside the ultra-MAGA bubble, within the state and beyond, even many Republicans recognize that Mr. Trump’s election-fraud ravings most likely helped depress turnout here among his followers. The former president is desperate for vindication — and, of course, vengeance.It’s not simply that Mr. Trump persuaded Mr. Perdue to take on Mr. Kemp. Nor that he worked to clear the field of other challengers, disrupting several races in the process. Nor that he took the unprecedented step of cracking open the coffers of his Save America PAC, forking over $500,000 to an anti-Kemp PAC. On a more personal level, Mr. Perdue is this election cycle’s purest stand-in for Mr. Trump: a 2020 loser desperate to reframe his failure as a theft perpetrated by nefarious Democrats and enabled by weak RINOs. His political brand exemplifies that awkward MAGA posture of strength coupled with victimhood.A troubling percentage of Republicans tell pollsters they believe the stolen-election fiction. But it can be hard to know precisely what that means — or how much they really care. For many, “it’s more of a vibe than anything else,” said Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican strategist. It has become a cultural signifier, something Republicans grumble to their friends about but “don’t hold to that firmly,” she said. “There’s an element of voters kind of being like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, the election was stolen, but do we have to keep talking about it?’”In Georgia, this ambivalence seems to be reflected in an April poll of Republican-primary voters, only 5 percent of whom cited election integrity as their top issue.Certainly, this sentiment is prevalent among Kemp supporters. Andy and Patricia Bargeron were among the attendees at a breakfast meet-n-greet that Mr. Kemp held in Chatsworth — part of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district — before heading to Ellijay. After 64 years of marriage, the Bargerons know the value of agreeing to disagree on certain issues. She believes that the 2020 election was stolen. He remains unconvinced and thinks Mr. Trump has “gone too far” in pressing the issue.No matter: Both are voting for Mr. Kemp because they feel he has done a crackerjack job. And even if he could have done more to deal with the 2020 monkey business, Ms. Bargeron reasons, “No one’s perfect.”Debra Helm — who quips that she is “one of those right-wing” evangelicals — claims to still be undecided in the race. Waiting around for the Chatsworth event to start, she says she has no idea if Mr. Kemp handled the 2020 election mess well. But after listening to his sales pitch, she is clearly impressed by his record. “To use lower-class language,” she says, “he’s pretty ballsy.”A small crowd gathered for Governor Kemp at a campaign stop in Thomaston.Damon Winter/The New York TimesPretty much everyone at Mr. Kemp’s events spoke approvingly of Mr. Trump’s presidency, and plenty had lingering doubts about the 2020 election. But they had other, more pressing items on their lists of concerns as well — many of which their governor has been busy addressing.Herein lies Mr. Kemp’s advantage over many of the candidates targeted by Mr. Trump. Governors, more than most public officials, have high-profile posts and clear records to run on. Voters expect concrete results from them. And, for better or worse, they are known quantities — a little like presidents. This can reduce the need for, and in some cases the impact of, outside endorsements, even from someone like Mr. Trump.Mr. Kemp might be in a tougher spot if Mr. Perdue were a fantastic retail politician or a charismatic speaker. But he’s not. In this matchup, the former senator has little to offer beyond his Trump ties and his Stop the Steal blather. Worse, the stench of his 2021 loss is still fresh. “Perdue didn’t beat Ossoff,” Mr. Bargeron reasons. “How is he going to beat Stacey Abrams?”In the Trump Republican Party, anything can happen come Election Day. But plenty of Republicans are poised, eager even, for Mr. Perdue to crash and burn so that they can point to the failure as proof that Mr. Trump’s Big Lie has run its course — or, better still, that Mr. Trump’s grip on the party is slipping. Some are actively working to help the cause, including former President George W. Bush, who was scheduled to attend a fund-raiser for Mr. Kemp this month.Supporting Mr. Kemp is also a way for some party players to put some breathing room between themselves and Mr. Trump without taking him on directly. Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, and former Vice President Mike Pence are among the boldfaced names hitting the trail with the governor. Both men have evinced an interest of late in fashioning themselves as independent, principled conservatives — a brand they may anticipate will play well in a future presidential contest.The more it looks as though Georgia voters will reject Mr. Perdue, the more Republicans feel empowered to criticize his campaign. A recent CNN piece featured a parade of his former Senate colleagues expressing dismay over his election-fraud focus — again, a far safer route than directly criticizing Mr. Trump.If Mr. Kemp trounces Mr. Perdue, and by extension Mr. Trump, the key question then becomes how the former president responds — especially as people play up the Trump-is-losing-his-juice narrative. The sensible course would be for him to shrug off the taunting and walk away, letting the loss fade to just another entry in his long endorsement record.But if he bows to his ego and continues assailing Mr. Kemp deep into the general election, many Republicans could start having ugly flashbacks to 2021, posits Jay Williams, a Republican strategist in Georgia. If the party winds up faring less well in November than expected, part of the blame will most likely fall on the former president. And if Stacey Abrams wins, Mr. Williams adds, that could be traumatic enough to sour many Republicans on Mr. Trump’s Big Lie — and possibly the man himself.Georgia Republicans may still be enamored of Mr. Trump. But that doesn’t mean they want to carry his 2020 burden around with them forever — or even into November.“The people who are supporting Perdue are living in the past,” said Brian Wilson, a Kemp supporter at the breakfast event. “I want to live in the future.”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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      Abortion and America’s Polarized Politics

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      More from our inbox:A Threat to DemocracyU.S. Should Focus on Diplomacy, Not Arms Shipments to UkraineDon’t Name the Gunman Damon Winter/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “How Roe Warped the Republic,” by Ross Douthat (column, May 8):Mr. Douthat argues that the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision was “an inflection point where the choices of elite liberalism actively pushed the Republic toward our current divisions,” but he ignores three glaring facts.First, Roe v. Wade still aligns well with the American people’s best sense about the complexity of abortion: that it be safe, legal and rare. Second, it was deliberate decisions by conservative elites that weaponized minority opposition to abortion for their own goals. Third, it is the unyielding minority religious belief that personhood begins at the moment of conception that has been driving the divisive politics of abortion for decades.Frederick CivianDedham, Mass.To the Editor:Ross Douthat lays the social divisions of this country at the feet of the liberal elites who foolishly made the mistake of codifying a constitutional right not specifically delineated in our Constitution. He overlooks the deliberate choice of abortion as a politically galvanizing issue by movement conservatives who, seeking to unite a party in disarray after the “Southern strategy” and Watergate, fixed on abortion as a standard to unite under.Abortion was not originally a significant concern of evangelicals and was simply one tool they picked to create and sustain the quest for political control. Mr. Douthat, while thoughtful, is simply dead wrong on this one.Andrew MishkinPortland, MaineTo the Editor:Ross Douthat’s column about Roe was exceptionally brilliant. In an age when so much opinion content is designed to simplify complex issues, to create easy distillations that fit into previously established convictions, it takes courage to present issues with nuance and complexity and trust that readers will reward you for it.Well done, Ross!Ben LincolnMount Desert Island, MaineTo the Editor:I am a strongly pro-choice feminist, and I understand and respect the perspective of people who are opposed to abortion. However, opposition to abortion has taken on an element that is not pro-life. Not making an exception for instances of rape and incest suggests a lack of compassion, rather than reverence for life. Criminalizing and instigating vigilante injustice suggest not just lack of compassion, but also punishment and vindictiveness.Where in this response is the love and mercy that are at the heart of the message of Jesus?Berne WeissEstoril, PortugalA Threat to Democracy Bernardo BagulhoTo the Editor:“Running for Office to ‘Stop the Steal,’” by Barbara McQuade (Opinion guest essay, Sunday Review, May 15), should strike fear in the heart of every patriotic American.Between now and November, honest Americans of every political stripe need to get the word out that Donald Trump is working frantically to elect “his” state legislators, secretaries of state and election officials who will replace the honest bipartisan ones who said there was no election fraud in 2020. His apparent goal is to have Trump electors tallied instead of legally chosen ones in what could be our last free election.People need to be reminded how Mr. Trump attempted to cajole officials — even his own vice president — into overturning an honest election. Now he’s learned a better way to do it, and only the voters can prevent this electoral calamity and national tragedy.Two years from now our democracy could be in as much danger as Ukraine’s is now, but without one missile being launched or one shot being fired.Bobby BraddockNashvilleU.S. Should Focus on Diplomacy, Not Arms Shipments to Ukraine Ivor Prickett for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “The Perils of 2 Ukraine War Endgames” (column, May 15):Ross Douthat is right to envision these endgame scenarios. He fears that if the Ukrainian military (with U.S. weapons support) should come close to expelling the Russian forces, “nuclear escalation suddenly becomes more likely than it is right now.”If the Russians should decide to end a protracted war with a tactical nuclear strike on Ukraine, the U.S. might be tempted to retaliate against Russia with its own nukes. Both sides have put the nuclear option back on the table.Even short of World War III, a continuing military stalemate in the Donbas would likely have serious consequences: global grain shortages, starvation in poor countries and eventual upheavals and mass migration. U.S. arms aid would also come with high domestic costs, including the likely abandonment of needed social programs.The U.S. and NATO should make the reduction of nuclear war risk a top priority. They should stop stoking the conflict with arms shipments. Instead, they should encourage Volodymyr Zelensky to engage in meaningful negotiations with Vladimir Putin, even if it means territorial concessions in the Donbas region.President Biden’s objective should now be peace through diplomacy, not endless war through the continuing supply of weapons.L. Michael HagerEastham, Mass.The writer is co-founder and former director general of the International Development Law Organization.Don’t Name the GunmanFBI agents stand outside the supermarket in Buffalo where a racist attack occurred Saturday. Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesTo the Editor:According to the F.B.I. expert who spoke to my synagogue on Sunday about how to survive an attack by an “active shooter,” we should not encourage mentally ill bigots by giving them heroes, that is, by naming other shooters they can emulate.In other words, every time the news media repeats the shooter’s name, sick folks will have another person to admire. So stop saying those names. What is horrific to us is cool to them. Don’t name them.Emily FarrellPhiladelphia More