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      A MAGA America Would Be Ugly

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      If you aren’t feeling a sense of dread on the eve of the midterm elections, you haven’t been paying attention.We can talk about the conventional stakes of these elections — their implications for economic policy, major social programs, environmental policy, civil liberties and reproductive rights. And it’s not wrong to have these discussions: Life will go on whatever happens on the political scene, and government policies will continue to have a big impact on people’s lives.But I, at least, always feel at least a bit guilty when writing about inflation or the fate of Medicare. Yes, these are my specialties. Focusing on them, however, feels a bit like denial, or at least evasion, when the fundamental stakes right now are so existential.Ten or 20 years ago, those of us who warned that the Republican Party was becoming increasingly extremist and anti-democracy were often dismissed as alarmists. But the alarmists have been vindicated every step of the way, from the selling of the Iraq war on false pretenses to the Jan. 6 insurrection.Indeed, these days it’s almost conventional wisdom that the G.O.P. will, if it can, turn America into something like Viktor Orban’s Hungary: a democracy on paper, but an ethnonationalist, authoritarian one-party state in practice. After all, U.S. conservatives have made no secret about viewing Hungary as a role model; they have feted Orban and featured him at their conferences.At this point, however, I believe that even this conventional wisdom is wrong. If America descends into one-party rule, it will be much worse, much uglier, than what we see in today’s Hungary.Before I get there, a word about the role of conventional policy issues in these elections.If Democrats lose one or both houses of Congress, there will be a loud chorus of recriminations, much of it asserting that they should have focused on kitchen table issues and not talked at all about threats to democracy.I don’t claim any expertise here, but I would note that an incumbent president’s party almost always loses seats in the midterms. The only exception to that rule this century was in 2002, when George W. Bush was able to deflect attention from a jobless recovery by posing as America’s defender against terrorism. That record suggests, if anything, that Democrats should have talked even more about issues beyond economics.I’d also say that pretending that this was an ordinary election season, where only economic policy was at stake, would have been fundamentally dishonest.Finally, even voters who are more worried about paychecks and living costs than about democracy should nonetheless be very concerned about the G.O.P.’s rejection of democratic norms.For one thing, Republicans have been open about their plan to use the threat of economic chaos to extract concessions they couldn’t win through the normal legislative process.Also, while I understand the instinct of voters to choose a different driver if they don’t like where the economy is going, they should understand that this time, voting Republican doesn’t just mean giving someone else a chance at the wheel; it may be a big step toward handing the G.O.P. permanent control, with no chance for voters to revisit that decision if they don’t like the results.Which brings me to the question of what a one-party America would look like.As I said, it’s now almost conventional wisdom that Republicans are trying to turn us into Hungary. Indeed, Hungary provides a case study in how democracies can die in the 21st century.But what strikes me, reading about Orban’s rule, is that while his regime is deeply repressive, the repression is relatively subtle. It is, as one perceptive article put it, “soft fascism,” which makes dissidents powerless via its control of the economy and the news media without beating them up or putting them in jail.Do you think a MAGA regime, with or without Donald Trump, would be equally subtle? Listen to the speeches at any Trump rally. They’re full of vindictiveness, of promises to imprison and punish anyone — including technocrats like Anthony Fauci — the movement dislikes.And much of the American right is sympathetic to, or at least unwilling to condemn, violence against its opponents. The Republican reaction to the attack on Paul Pelosi by a MAGA-spouting intruder was telling: Many in the party didn’t even pretend to be horrified. Instead, they peddled ugly conspiracy theories. And the rest of the party didn’t ostracize or penalize the purveyors of vile falsehoods.In short, if MAGA wins, we’ll probably find ourselves wishing its rule was as tolerant, relatively benign and relatively nonviolent as Orban’s.Now, this catastrophe doesn’t have to happen. Even if Republicans win big in the midterms, it won’t be the end for democracy, although it will be a big blow. And nothing in politics, not even a full descent into authoritarianism, is permanent.On the other hand, even if we get a reprieve this week, the fact remains that democracy is in deep danger from the authoritarian right. America as we know it is not yet lost, but it’s on the edge.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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      What Has Happened to My Country?

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      NASHVILLE — There I was, snug in my own bed in the middle of the night, turning to sleep on my side, when wham! the room slid sideways. Then it took off, spinning and spinning as though a sadistic carnival barker had flipped a switch and pushed the speed to max.Reader, I will spare you the details except to say that I have lately learned how delicate an instrument is the human ear, how many ways there are to disrupt its functions. As when, say, a lump of wax detaches itself from the ear canal through an exactly wrong combination of angles and gravity, lodges itself in the eardrum, and transforms the human vestibular system into a Tilt-A-Whirl. For days I lay in bed, trying not to move my head and reciting to myself lines from “The Second Coming,” a poem by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats:Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer.At the otolaryngologist’s office, the source of my torture finally emerged after half an hour of patient manipulations by a doctor wielding tiny power tools. In the newly stationary room, I looked at it, amazed. How fragile the human body is that it can be thrown into chaos by something so small!The same can be said for the body politic. Right-wing politicians and media outlets have turned American democracy upside down through nothing more than a lie. They put forth Supreme Court candidates who assure Congress that they respect legal precedent but who vote to overturn Roe vs. Wade the instant they have a majority on the court. They endorse political candidates who openly state that they will accept only poll results leading to their own election.Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.They denounce calamities where no calamities exist, turning public schools into battlegrounds and library books and bathrooms into weapons. But their “answer” to the real calamity of children being slaughtered in their classrooms is to arm teachers, to bring even more guns into the classroom. Political violence and threats are rising, and so is the intimidation of voters and voting officials.The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned.Here in blue Nashville, the Tennessee General Assembly carved the city into three different voting districts this year, hoping to send yet another Republican to Congress from a state where both senators are Republicans, and the entire congressional delegation, not counting the current representatives from Memphis and Nashville, is Republican.Seeing the handwriting on the wall, Representative Jim Cooper, a Blue Dog moderate, opted not to run for re-election, but Heidi Campbell, a state senator, stepped up. Ms. Campbell is a progressive who has significantly outpaced her MAGA opponent in fund-raising, but it would take a miracle turnout in Nashville for her to win in a district expressly drawn to make her lose.While Republicans are skilled at suppressing votes in districts that don’t favor Republicans, they have proven to be incompetent at administering the vote in these newly redrawn districts, which divide neighborhoods and sprawl out into the surrounding red counties. Last week, Nashville election officials — and keep in mind that the Davidson County Election Commission is regulated by the Republican state government and controlled by a Republican majority — distributed the wrong ballots to at least 200 Nashville voters. The error was caught not by voting officials but by The Associated Press.This may well be an honest mistake. Nevertheless, when you gerrymander a district out of recognizability with the express purpose of subverting the will of the political majority, and yours is the party screaming nonstop about nonexistent voter fraud, and you send people to the wrong district to vote, too, you deserve to be held accountable.On Friday, ACLU Tennessee filed a lawsuit on behalf of the League of Women Voters and two voters affected by the error. By Friday night, election officials had agreed to abide by a court order to address the error, though the solutions are complicated and will no doubt leave votes uncounted anyway.This chaos could’ve been avoided simply by allowing Nashville to continue to vote as a district and by honoring the will of the voters. “This is the result of a racist, bigoted, money-hungry Republican Legislature who is doing everything to hoard power to keep the system rigged against everyday working-class people,” said Odessa Kelly, the Democratic candidate in the redrawn Seventh Congressional District.Surely some revelation is at hand;/Surely the Second Coming is at hand.Americans belong to an electorate in which those who are most affected by voter suppression laws and extreme gerrymandering are so full of despair they may see no point in trying. Meanwhile, in the rest of America, voters aren’t especially concerned about the possibility of losing their own democracy.The best lack all conviction, while the worst/are full of passionate intensity.People often think I’m an optimist because I believe that human beings are mostly good, because I know that reasons for hope are everywhere if you look for them.The good people of Kansas voted to preserve abortion rights, for instance, and polls indicate that they would be far from alone if other red-state voters were given the chance to choose. The chaos agent formerly known as Kanye West has discovered the cost of antisemitism in the wide world, even if it mostly goes unchallenged in his squalid corner of the political sphere. The chaos agent known as Elon Musk may be on track to kill the hellsite known as Twitter. Best of all, a new report suggests that we haven’t yet lost the chance to prevent this verdant and teeming planet from becoming completely uninhabitable.Even so, I am not an optimist. I spend much of my life with my heart in my throat, and at this moment I am terrified. What has happened to my country that 20 percent of Americans believe political violence is justified? That an entire political party increasingly relies on lying and cheating to win elections? That Vladimir Putin, of all people, has become a Republican hero?And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?“I get why people are anxious,” Barack Obama said last week on the stump for Democrats in Georgia. “I get why you might be worried. I understand why it might be tempting sometimes just to tune out, to watch football or ‘Dancing With the Stars.’ But I’m here to tell you that tuning out is not an option. Despair is not an option.”Despair is not an option, but vertigo appears to be inescapable.My mother, too, was prone to both debilitating vertigo and frequent dizzy spells. At Mass one Sunday, in line for communion, she stepped up to the priest and started to tilt. Before she even had time to stumble, I put my hands on her shoulders and gently righted her. The priest looked over her head and met my eyes in understanding. Elder care is hard, he seemed to be saying, but this is what we do for one another. Somebody begins to fall. Somebody else catches the falling one.If only it were so in other realms. If only we could be counted on to catch one another before we fell. If only American voters will stand up for democracy and vote to restore the equilibrium of our fragile body politic. That would be the true answered prayer.Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the books “Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South” and “Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss.”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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      Election Workers Have to Keep Volunteering to Do This

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      DURHAM, N.C. — One of the challenges of being alive right now is making sense of the threat to the American election system: It’s hard to determine, conclusively, how widespread that threat is, how much chaos and danger we’re living through and what to do next.How bad are things? In an October Reuters/Ipsos poll, 43 percent of voters said they worried about threats of violence or intimidation while voting. New York Times/Siena College polling has found that insofar as people worry about threats to democracy in the United States, they attribute the problem to the opposing party — an untenable situation that is tough to resolve. Recently, people have shown up, armed, to watch voter drop boxes. Many, many Republican candidates continue to advance false claims about the 2020 election. All over the country, election officials and workers have quit, citing threats and demands on them. One violent episode can alter individual lives forever, as well as reverberate through politics in deep and unexpected ways. You can picture a grim scenario in which voting and election work moves, like other facets of American life, into a permanent siege posture.Nobody really wants to live like that; nobody likes to think we could. But understanding the tangible, everyday scale of these problems — what’s changed and what hasn’t — genuinely isn’t easy.In endless tension with more abstract questions about the big picture is the practical reality that in a democratic republic, real people, with real lives, set up the voting equipment in a middle school gym somewhere, check you in, hand you a ballot, hand you a sticker, make sure the tabulator is empty before the count begins — the full battery of mundane procedures that start in your neighborhood and filter up through the county and the state and, in a presidential year, all the way up through the country.This fall, I spent two days in Durham, N.C., talking with four election workers with whom the county’s board of elections connected me. This ended up being as far from violence and conspiracy theories as you can get: drinking coffee outside in prime North Carolina fall weather, crystal clear mornings and warm afternoons, talking about how people got involved and how the process unfolds in the days leading up to Election Day.The four workers, who are paid, ranged in age from 30s to 70s. Two signed up in more recent election cycles, and two started working at the suggestion of a friend more than a decade ago. All worked early voting and Election Day before. We talked about things like provisional ballots, process checklists and local safeguards. The tenor here was brightness and practicality.One of them said that if someone has concerns about election fraud, one way to alleviate the feeling, to trust elections again, would be to undergo the formal training to be a poll worker or watcher and to see the whole thing unfold. The cut-and-dried nature of the process appeals to him. “Like, here are the laws you must follow. Here are the rules and the process that you must go through,” he said.Asked what she wanted people to know about election workers in Durham, one woman, who’s been working elections since she moved there in the 1970s and whose two sisters are election workers where they live, too, said, “They’re everyday people. A lot of them are retired. A lot of them love the system. They’ve been working for years, so they enjoy doing the work. They know the work.” She said she likes the variety of the tasks, meeting workers and voters and seeing the process at the end, confirming the accuracy of the count. Another election worker mentioned that he liked the community nature of the endeavor, in which workers sometimes bring Bojangles and coffee to the precinct for the group.One mentioned the possibility of a violent episode and the bewildering question of what she would do if that happened at her site. But this was just one possible scenario she thinks about and plans for. “When we start a shift, I always like to start with: The voter walks in, what is that voter’s experience?” In precincts where she works, she said, she advises everyone to put down their book or magazine, even if the voter isn’t at their station, to ensure a sense of seriousness and value in the room. “That’s the only reason we’re there.”This is, probably, in the past two decades of American life, the more median experience with voting and election work: commonplace, uneventful, mechanical, populated by your neighbors. But we live in 2022. People like this in other cities or towns have become the subject of conspiracy theories and threats, frequently over a politician’s misrepresentation of a routine voting or counting procedure.This is a really big country. What’s happening in one place isn’t always happening in another, which is what makes it difficult to genuinely understand if the problems we have right now are temporary, existential or somewhere in between. In a democratic republic, we all are joined by both law and broader, harder-to-pin-down concepts like trust and fear. Preserving the uneventful and calm aspects of an election system while still recognizing its flaws and vulnerabilities is difficult in a moment of possibly deep peril.Ultimately, elections are administered by regular people who opt into the process. This prospect could make you nervous or, depending on your perspective, could deeply reassure you. The system requires people to continue to want to do this, and the fact that we’re talking about violence and intimidation at all highlights how fragile this arrangement could be. In North Carolina, for a couple of days, real life briefly felt normal: talking with four people about how the system works, about their lives, about doing that work and about voters who walk through the door.Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.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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      Dancing Near the Edge of a Lost Democracy

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      One of the most sobering statements from President Biden’s speech last week on protecting democracy was one that might well have gone unnoticed by many who heard it or read about it.In the speech, Biden pointed out, “The remarkable thing about American democracy is this: Just enough of us, on just enough occasions, have chosen not to dismantle democracy but to preserve democracy.”The sentence is damning. The dismantling of our democracy is just one apathetic electorate, one slate of voter suppression laws or one barrage of misinformation away.Modern presidential elections don’t often end in landslides. In fact, no president has won by a margin of the popular vote greater than 10 percentage points since Ronald Reagan in 1984. Biden’s margin of victory over Donald Trump was only four percentage points.These slim margins are obscured by the flaws and peculiarities of our electoral process, how small states are overrepresented and most states award electors on a winner-take-all basis.Biden won Georgia by just over 12,000 votes, which was just 0.2 percent of the votes cast in the state, but Biden got all 16 of the state’s electoral votes. That’s how we elect presidents in this country.But that same fluke means that the country’s last two Republican presidents were able to win the Electoral College while losing the popular vote — George Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016.This is all to say that we are always a cat’s whisker away from calamity.And that doesn’t go only for presidential elections. The same dilemma has plagued this year’s midterms as control of Congress hangs in the balance, with the antidemocracy barbarians at the door.It is widely believed that Republicans will retake control of the House of Representatives, the only question being by what margin. But the control of the Senate is very much in play, with some of the most hotly contested races playing out in states that often swing presidential elections, like Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Wisconsin.In each of these states, the Republican candidates for the Senate have at one time either openly denied the results of the 2020 election or pushed false claims of fraud about that election.Those candidates have a chance to win, but even if they don’t, the damage their election denialism has done will linger. We are witnessing a generational curse being cast.Faith and doubt are opposites, but they operate using the same emotional energy, much like love and hate. And they are sticky.Republicans have turned doubt about the 2020 election — and about the legitimacy of any elections they lose — into a test of faith. It is the crucible through which one must pass to be a modern Republican in good standing. You are true only if you swallow the lie.Many elected officials and operatives are simply being opportunists, using the lie to excite voters or to benefit from the zealotry the lie has spawned. But for many Trump followers, the lie is gospel. It is being welded not only to the psyche but also to the soul.This mass delusion will not be easy to dislodge.When we have a deep faith in something, we find a comfort in it. Faith is precious, an improbable thing, a gift the mind created to soothe and assure. We do not relinquish it lightly.Faith and doubt linger like the ghosts of a lost soul. Even when we accept evidence that renders the idea in which we placed our faith false, the mind very often clings to a bit of what it had felt and believed.This is natural. This is human. But this is a problem for our democracy. The people fighting to save democracy are doing so with fact, but the people willing and working to destroy it are operating on a feeling. The former is relying on data and the latter on dogma.These are different languages speaking to different facets of the human experience. The antidemocracy faithful cannot and will not be dissuaded by facts. Faith, which doesn’t require evidence, can be fed and affirmed by things that aren’t true. And that is precisely what is happening.That faith doesn’t even allow for the notion that destroying democracy would be bad, or markedly worse than present conditions. So people may even believe that they will benefit from democracy’s demise.This is Trump’s twisted legacy, something that will endure, no matter what happens during these midterms and whether he runs once more for president. The damage he has done and continues to do will, in the end, be far bigger than he ever was.He has given birth to a distortion that will long outlive him.As Biden pointed out, the country is perilously close to installing officials who want to undo it and remake it, who want a partial democracy or none at all. America is one bad election away from being a memory.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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      The Marjorie Taylor Greene-ing of America

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      WASHINGTON — Are we ready for our new Republican overlords?Are we ready for an empowered Marjorie Taylor Greene?Are we ready for a pumped-up, pistol-packing Lauren Boebert?“How many AR-15s do you think Jesus would have had?” Boebert asked a crowd at a Christian campaign event in June. I’m going with none, honestly, but her answer was, “Well, he didn’t have enough to keep his government from killing him.”The Denver Post pleaded: “We beg voters in western and southern Colorado not to give Rep. Lauren Boebert their vote.”The freshman representative has recently been predicting happily that we’re in the end times, “the last of the last days.” If Lauren Boebert is in charge, we may want to be in the end times. I’m feeling not so Rapturous about the prospect.And then there’s the future first female president, Kari Lake, who lulls you into believing, with her mellifluous voice, statements that seem to emanate from Lucifer. She’s dangerous because, like Donald Trump, she has real skills from her years in TV. And she really believes this stuff, unlike Trump and Kevin McCarthy, who are faking it.As Cecily Strong said on “Saturday Night Live” last weekend, embodying Lake, “If the people of Arizona elect me, I’ll make sure they never have to vote ever again.”Speaking of “Paradise Lost,” how about Ron DeSantis? The governor of Florida, who’s running for a second term, is airing an ad that suggests that he was literally anointed by God to fight Democrats. God almighty, that’s some high-level endorsement.Much to our national shame, it looks like these over-the-top and way, way, way out-of-the mainstream Republicans — and the formerly normie and now creepy Republicans who have bent the knee to the wackos out of political expediency — are going to be running the House, maybe the Senate and certainly some states, perhaps even some that Joe Biden won two years ago.And it looks as if Kevin McCarthy will finally realize his goal of becoming speaker, but when he speaks, it will be Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan and Lauren Boebert doing the spewing. It will be like the devil growling through Linda Blair in “The Exorcist” — except it will be our heads spinning.Welcome to a rogue’s gallery of crazy: Clay Higgins, who’s spouting conspiracy theories about Paul Pelosi, wants to run the House Homeland Security Committee; Paul Gosar, whose own family has begged Arizonans to eject him from Congress, will be persona grata in the new majority.In North Carolina, Bo Hines, a Republican candidate for the House, wants community panels to decide whether rape victims are able to get abortions or not. He’s building on Dr. Oz’s dictum that local politicians should help make that call. Even Oprah turned on her creation, Dr. Odd.J.D. Vance, the Yale-educated, former Silicon Valley venture capitalist and author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” who called Trump “America’s Hitler” in 2016, before saluting him to gain public office, could join the Senate in January. Talk about American Elegy.Even though he wrote in his best seller that Yale Law School was his “dream school,” he now trashes the very system that birthed him. Last year, he gave a speech titled “The Universities Are the Enemy”: His mother-in-law is a provost at the University of California San Diego.It’s disturbing to think of Vance side by side with Herschel Walker. Walker was backed by Mitch McConnell, who countenanced an obviously troubled and flawed individual even if it meant degrading the once illustrious Senate chamber.Overall, there are nearly 300 election deniers on the ballot, but they will be all too happy to accept the results if they win.People voting for these crazies think they’re punishing Biden, Barack Obama and the Democrats. They’re really punishing themselves.These extreme Republicans don’t have a plan. Their only idea is to get in, make trouble for President Biden, drag Hunter into the dock, start a bunch of stupid investigations, shut down the government, abandon Ukraine and hold the debt limit hostage.Democrats are partly to blame. They haven’t explained how they plan to get a grip on the things people are worried about: crime and inflation. Voters weren’t hearing what they needed to hear from Biden, who felt morally obligated to talk about the threat to democracy, even though that’s not what people are voting on.As it turns out, a woman’s right to control her body has been overshadowed by uneasiness over safety and economic security.To top it off, Trump is promising a return. We’ll see if DeSantis really is the chosen one. In Iowa on Thursday night, Trump urged the crowd to “crush the communists” at the ballot box and said that he was “very, very, very” close to deciding to “do it again.”Trump, the modern Pandora, released the evil spirits swirling around us — racism, antisemitism, violence, hatred, conspiracy theories, and Trump mini-mes who should be nowhere near the levers of power.Heaven help us.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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      They Are Betting $100 Million on Pluralism. Will It Work?

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      In February 2020, in the midst of a vitriolic presidential election, an idealistic group of donors from across the ideological spectrum met to plan an ambitious new project. They called themselves the New Pluralists and pledged to spend a whopping $100 million over the next decade to fight polarization by funding face-to-face interactions among Americans across political, racial and religious divides.Fixing what is broken in American democracy requires more than changing voter ID laws or the shape of our congressional districts, they argued. It requires forging deep personal connections that will change hearts and minds and ultimately American culture itself.Their experiment rests on a basic idea: Far too many Americans lack the skills, the opportunity and even the inclination to work together across lines of difference toward a common goal. Part of the solution, these donors believe, is embracing a very old idea that has fallen out of fashion: pluralism.The term “cultural pluralism” was coined in the early 1900s by Horace Kallen, a Jewish philosopher who proposed it in the midst of a huge wave of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. He argued that rather than try to stamp out their Polishness, Italianness or Jewishness, as many white Anglo-Saxon Protestants wanted, America should be a “nation of nationalities” where people learn to work together across lines of difference. The freedom to be different but still participate in political life as a vital part of the whole was key to the country’s genius, he argued. Mr. Kallen thought of the American people not as a melting pot, where everyone turns into the same bland stew, but as an orchestra, where distinct sounds join harmoniously.That notion fuels the New Pluralists, too. Although it’s hard to find two people who describe the project the same way, respecting difference, not papering it over, is seen as central.In his era, Mr. Kallen drew fierce criticism from those who accused him of promoting a Balkanization of the country. A scathing review of his book in The New York Times in 1924 declared that the nation faced a stark choice: “Is it to remain one in spirit, tradition and language, or is it to become a hodgepodge boardinghouse for alien groups?” It wasn’t until the 1980s, with the rise of the idea of multiculturalism, that his ideas were widely embraced.Today the New Pluralists project is grappling with a similar set of challenges as the ones Mr. Kallen wrote about over a century ago. An influx of immigrants is once again challenging prevailing notions of who Americans are and what it takes to make a country harmonious and whole. At the same time, the country does indeed feel Balkanized along a host of fault lines: rural versus urban, young versus old, religious versus secular and, of course, red versus blue.But the critiques that pluralism faces today are different. Far from being considered too radical, pluralism might not sound radical enough in an era of insurrection and potential coups. To some activists, pluralism sounds like both-sides-ism or a call to meet in the mushy middle. And yet pluralism feels more crucial than ever. Our multiracial democracy can’t survive without it.I discovered the New Pluralists this summer after I attended an online workshop on depolarizing hosted by one of its grantees, a group called Braver Angels. I found the group online because, at a time when so much attention is paid to toxic politics, I wanted to know more about groups that stood for just the opposite.Co-founded by Bill Doherty, a Minneapolis-based marriage counselor, Braver Angels is an organization with grass-roots chapters across the country that teach conservatives and liberals to debunk lazy stereotypes and clarify disagreements without yelling. In the workshop I attended, reds and blues wrestled with how they typecast the other side. Nearly all the participants were white and looked to be over the age of 40. And they were, by definition, open to reaching across the partisan divide. In other words, they were low-hanging fruit. I came away feeling more hopeful about the country nonetheless.I realized then that there was a whole ecosystem of groups, created during the Trump years, that is dedicated to bridging divides: the People’s Supper, which helps communities host potluck dinners and other events that promote racial and political reconciliation; the One Small Step project at StoryCorps, which brings together strangers for recorded conversations about their lives; More in Common, which surveys public opinion and put out an influential paper about the country’s “exhausted majority.” The New Pluralists help fund them all.The idea for the New Pluralists came about in the wake of Donald Trump’s election. Jennifer Hoos Rothberg, the New York-based executive director of the Einhorn Collaborative, a foundation started by a Wisconsin-bred hedge fund manager, said it kept getting calls from people who were alarmed by the level of polarization and thought they could help fix it. One call came from Melissa Weintraub, a longtime conflict resolution practitioner who had worked with Israelis and Palestinians.“You know that tool kit I use in the Middle East? I want to bring that to Wisconsin and Iowa,” Ms. Rothberg recalled Ms. Weintraub saying.Right then and there, Ms. Rothberg told me, “we set up a rapid response organizing around bridging divides.” The Einhorn Collaborative gave away $6 million in one-off funds but wanted to do something bigger. In 2019, Ms. Rothberg invited other donors involved in similar work to a meeting in New York to see if they could pool their money to fund these projects on a larger scale. She purposefully invited donors from across the political spectrum. Stand Together Trust, formerly the Charles Koch Institute, which funds social ventures to solve common problems, agreed to join. But that made some social justice funders on the left balk because they didn’t want to be in the same room, Fay Twersky, who attended that meeting as a representative of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, told me.In the end, about a dozen donors stuck with it. They landed on the name the New Pluralists, partly because pluralism felt neutral in an era when so many words have taken on a partisan flavor. This past summer, they brought together a group of grantees for a retreat in Atlanta in an attempt to foster relationships among them. They included the civil rights thinker john powell of the Othering & Belonging Institute and Rachel Peric of Welcoming America. They are called field builders in the New Pluralists’ overly cerebral parlance. The big idea here is to turn pluralism into a coherent field — like public health — with clearly defined norms and practices that can be replicated, measured and improved.Lennon Flowers, a co-founder of the People’s Supper, told me that the gathering felt like a salve. She said the money and credibility her organization gets from the New Pluralists filter down to the local partners, showing that “this work matters and this proves we’re not alone.”But a big question remains: Can a group of wealthy donors change American culture from above? How exactly does that work? If you are trying to change a law, you hire a lobbyist. To change American culture, whom do you hire?Nevertheless, the group is doubling down on its vision. Over the summer, it put out a request for grant proposals from grass-roots groups engaged in this work. Eight hundred applications poured in — too many to fund. That’s when the New Pluralists began an effort to challenge donors to devote $1 billion over the next decade to pluralism, an initiative it announced at a White House unity summit in September.“The need is so great, and the opportunity is so great that we need more of philanthropy to take this seriously,” the New Pluralists’ executive director, Uma Viswanathan, told me.Even the most fervent of the New Pluralists admit that they aren’t sure they will succeed. But I hope they do. After all, orchestras don’t sound good by accident. People have to practice.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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      Moderate House Democrats Are at Risk, Putting the Majority Up for Grabs

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      Several Democrats elected in 2018 with an anti-Trump message in conservative-leaning districts are centering their closing argument on protecting democracy as they try to buck national trends.NORFOLK, Va. — In her final campaign ad, Representative Elaine Luria, a Democrat and Navy veteran who sits on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, practically dares her constituents to replace her in Congress with her Republican opponent, who has refused to condemn former President Donald J. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen.Representative Abigail Spanberger, a former C.I.A. officer, has blanketed her central Virginia district with ads portraying her challenger as a supporter of the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.In Michigan, Representative Elissa Slotkin, herself a former C.I.A. analyst, has been campaigning with Representative Liz Cheney, a Wyoming Republican who is the vice chairwoman of the Jan. 6 committee and has made combating threats to democracy the focus of her final year in Congress.The three Democrats, all of whom are in difficult re-election races in swing districts with conservative leanings, are at risk of being swept out in next week’s midterm elections, possibly costing Democrats the House majority.They are part of a class of moderates — many of them women with national security credentials who ran for Congress to counter the threat they saw from Mr. Trump — who flipped Republican districts in the 2018 election, delivering Democrats the House majority. Now they are centering their closing campaign argument on protecting democracy.For two election cycles, these Democrats have largely managed to buck Republican attempts to brand them as liberal puppets of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, but the challenge has grown steeper in 2022.President Biden’s popularity has sagged. State redistricting has shifted some of their districts, including Ms. Luria’s on the eastern shore of Virginia, to include higher percentages of conservatives. And polls indicate that the issues at the top of mind for voters across the political spectrum are inflation and the economy, even though they overwhelmingly believe that American democracy is under threat.“This is the first time they’ve had to run in a hostile political environment,” David Wasserman, the House editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, said of the group. “The class of 2018 — we’re going to see some losses this year. But it’s remarkable that many of them are doing as well as they are given the president’s approval rating.”A dozen of Ms. Luria’s 2018 classmates lost their bids for re-election in 2020, and as many as a dozen more are at risk of being swept out next week. Two of them — Representatives Cindy Axne of Iowa and Tom Malinowski of New Jersey — are behind in the polls, and analysts believe more are headed for defeat.But these frontline Democrats believe if anyone can buck the national trends, it is them.“It’s a lot of pressure,” Ms. Luria said of holding onto a pivotal seat. A recent poll from Christopher Newport University showed her tied with her Republican opponent, Jen A. Kiggans.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Biden’s Speech: In a prime-time address, President Biden denounced Republicans who deny the legitimacy of elections, warning that the country’s democratic traditions are on the line.State Supreme Court Races: The traditionally overlooked contests have emerged this year as crucial battlefields in the struggle over the course of American democracy.Democrats’ Mounting Anxiety: Top Democratic officials are openly second-guessing their party’s pitch and tactics, saying Democrats have failed to unite around one central message.Social Security and Medicare: Republicans, eyeing a midterms victory, are floating changes to the safety net programs. Democrats have seized on the proposals to galvanize voters.As they battle for political survival, they have worked to dramatize the stakes for voters.“I believe that our democracy is the ultimate kitchen table issue,” Ms. Slotkin said during a sold-out event with Ms. Cheney in East Lansing. “It’s not even the kitchen table; our democracy is the foundation of the home in which the kitchen table sits.”Ms. Luria has campaigned on her reputation as one of the most bipartisan members of Congress, and her record of using her perch on the Armed Services Committee to secure tens of millions of shipbuilding dollars for her district.On a recent Tuesday, as she walked through the Dante Valve manufacturing plant in Norfolk, a small business where workers build key parts for submarines, executives said her support for the Navy fleet had proved “critical” for providing steady paychecks in a town where the economy is inextricably tied to the U.S. military.Republican strategists concede that this group of Democrats has proved tough to knock off, having built brands in their districts that outperform the typical Democrat. Their internal polling shows some of them outperforming Mr. Biden by double digits in favorability.To counter the Democrats’ national security credentials, Republicans have recruited military and law enforcement veterans of their own.Ms. Slotkin is facing off against Tom Barrett, a state senator and Army veteran who served in Iraq.“I have no idea if I’m going to win my election — it’s going to be a nail biter,” she said recently.Ms. Spanberger, who has frequently criticized her party’s leadership, is also in a close race with Yesli Vega, a law enforcement officer.Ms. Luria won election to Congress in 2018 as part of a wave of Democrats who flipped Republican districts and turned the House blue.Shuran Huang for The New York TimesMs. Luria’s challenger, Ms. Kiggans, is also a Navy veteran and has run a campaign focused on pocketbook issues.“They talk to me about the gas prices that are too much even this past week,” Ms. Kiggans said of voters during a recent debate. “They talk to me about their grocery prices. They talk to me about their savings account. People don’t have as much as they used to in their savings account.”She has also tried to tarnish Ms. Luria’s independent credentials, portraying her as a stooge of Ms. Pelosi.Ms. Luria has not allowed the attacks to go unanswered. She has repeatedly cast Ms. Kiggans, who opposes abortion rights and has dodged questions about the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, as an extremist and an election denier.“If standing up for what’s right means losing an election, so be it,” Ms. Luria says in her recent ad, adding: “If you believe the 2020 election was stolen, I’m definitely not your candidate.”Jen A. Kiggans is running to take Ms. Luria’s seat.Kristen Zeis for The New York TimesMs. Kiggans answered this line of argument with an ad of her own, in which she is shown sitting at a kitchen table and surrounded by family photographs, and declares that she is no “extremist.”Interactions between the two candidates have been testy.“She’s an election denier,” Ms. Luria said of Ms. Kiggans, with a note of contempt in her voice. “She has never clearly said in public that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.”Ms. Kiggans shot back at a recent debate, while not specifically denying the charge: “Shame on you for attacking my character as a fellow female Naval officer.”One reason some of the swing-state Democrats remain competitive in their races, despite the national headwinds, is their ability to raise enormous sums of money.Ms. Luria, for instance, has posted some of the highest fund-raising totals this cycle, raking in three times as much as her challenger in the most recent quarter.But national Republicans are working to counter that cash advantage, with political action committees pumping huge amounts of money into districts to prop up challengers, including about $5 million to aid Ms. Kiggans.“Frontline Democrats promised voters they’d be bipartisan problem solvers, but they came to D.C. and voted in lock step with Nancy Pelosi,” said Michael McAdams, a spokesman for the National Republican Campaign Committee. “Now their constituents are dealing with record-high prices and soaring violent crime.”For better or worse, Ms. Luria’s image is now bound up in confronting threats to democracy. She sought a seat on the Jan. 6 committee — a move she knew could cost her her seat — calling it an outgrowth of her life’s work serving in the military.Supporters of Ms. Kiggans at a rally in Smithfield, Va.Kristen Zeis for The New York TimesHer supporters have cheered the decision.“The people who serve in our Congress, they were at great risk,” said Melanie Cornelisse, a supporter who was on hand outside a Norfolk television studio for Ms. Luria’s final debate with Ms. Kiggans. “And I think it’s really admirable that she is one of the people who is leading that investigation.”Ms. Luria has posted some of the highest fund-raising totals this cycle, and raised three times as much as her challenger in the most recent quarter. Kristen Zeis for The New York TimesA reporter asked Ms. Luria recently why she had focused so intently on threats to democracy rather than, say, the price of gasoline. Ms. Luria has supported measures to make the nation “energy independent,” through increased use of nuclear and wind energy.But also, as a Navy veteran, Ms. Luria said, she felt she had to be true to herself — and that meant continuing to call out Mr. Trump’s lies.“To me, there’s really two things that keep me up at night: One is China and the other is protecting our democracy and our democratic institutions,” Ms. Luria said. “As a candidate, I’m going to talk about the things that I think are the most important for our future. There’s still a clear and present danger.” More

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      What if Every Moment Since Jan. 6 Was Just the Calm Before the Storm?

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      Richard Ringer, a 69-year-old Democratic state House candidate in Pennsylvania, is an early riser, and on Monday he was up before 5 a.m. when he heard someone at his garage door. He looked out the window, saw a man with a flashlight, and assumed it was the same person who had twice vandalized his house in the past month.Just a couple of weeks earlier, Ringer says, he found a message spray-painted on his garage door; though the rain partly rinsed it off, the words “Your Race” and “Dead” were visible. Then, last Thursday night, he says he came home to a brick thrown through his window.So when Ringer saw the intruder on Monday, he says, he ran outside and tackled him. But the man was quickly able to pin Ringer down, and beat him unconscious. Ringer doesn’t know for certain that the violence was political — the police are investigating — but given the graffiti, and the fact that his neighborhood in Fayette County, in southwestern Pennsylvania, is usually quiet and safe, he suspects it was. “I’m not really surprised that this is happening locally, and is happening to me, just because of what has been going on and the enthusiasm for Trump around here,” he told me.Ringer’s assault made the local news, but hasn’t been much of a story nationally. Perhaps that’s because it’s just a small detail in a growing tapestry of menace. All over this febrile country, intimations of mayhem are gathering. Vigilantes in Arizona, some armed and wearing tactical gear, have harassed and intimidated voters at the sites of ballot drop boxes, cheered on by Mark Finchem, the Republican candidate for secretary of state. In Nevada, where a millionaire far-right Republican official named Robert Beadles has systemically targeted election workers, Reuters reported that the top election officials in 10 of the state’s 17 counties have resigned, retired or declined to run again.And, most notably, a MAGA fanatic named David DePape broke into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home and assaulted her 82-year-old husband with a hammer, leaving him unconscious in a pool of his own blood. More shocking than the attack itself has been the response to it from the Trumpist wing of the Republican Party. Some officials spread lurid lies that Pelosi was attacked by a gay lover. Others jeered about it. “Nancy Pelosi, well, she’s got protection when she’s in D.C. — apparently her house doesn’t have a lot of protection,” Kari Lake, Arizona’s Republican candidate for governor, said to laughter at a campaign event. Donald Trump Jr. retweeted a photo of underwear and a hammer with the caption, “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready.”It’s hard to feel sanguine about a society whose political class cannot muster the solidarity to universally condemn the terroristic bludgeoning of an old man. It’s why Joe Biden’s speech on Wednesday night, in which he spoke about the attack on Pelosi and the role that Trump’s big lie is playing in the midterms, was at once so necessary and so unpromising. He was trying to appeal to a patriotic consensus about democracy that simply no longer exists.“Disunion and chaos are not inevitable,” said Biden, standing at a podium in Union Station. “There’s been anger before in America. There’s been division before in America. But we’ve never given up on the American experiment. And we can’t do that now.”Biden wasn’t warning that America might spiral into either autocracy or low-level civil war. He was trying to offer hope that it might not. The very fact that he had to insist there’s an alternative to disunion and chaos is a sign of how bad things have gotten.Political violence is not exclusively perpetrated by conservatives. The recent beating in Florida of a Marco Rubio canvasser — a man who turned out to have ties to white supremacists — appears to have been motivated by anti-Republican animus. But, as my colleagues on the editorial board wrote on Thursday, the right is far more violent than the left, and Republicans wink at assaults committed by extremists in a way that Democrats do not.The message of all the chuckling about Paul Pelosi is clear: The right believes its enemies have no rights, and no longer sees the need to pretend otherwise. Donald Trump taught the Republican Party that it needn’t bother with hypocritical displays of decency, that it can revel in cruelty, transgression and the thrill of violence. Now it’s taking that lesson into the first post-Jan. 6 election. The tense calm of the last 20 months has often felt like being in the eye of a hurricane. Now the terrible weather is coming back.In a widely cited essay, the centrist pundit Josh Barro criticized Biden’s speech because it implied that voters concerned about democracy must vote for Democrats whatever their policy preferences. “The message is that there is only one party contesting this election that is committed to democracy — the Democrats — and therefore only one real choice available,” he wrote, adding, “This amounts to telling voters that they have already lost their democracy.” I find this argument bizarre. It is simply a fact that only one party tried to overturn the 2020 election, and only one party is trying to insulate itself from the will of voters in future elections. As the Wisconsin Republican candidate Tim Michels put it recently, “Republicans will never lose another election in Wisconsin after I’m elected governor.”It may be that Biden’s efforts to alert the country about what’s coming are doomed. In a recent CBS poll, 56 percent of likely voters said they believe that if Republicans win in the midterms, they will try to overturn Democratic election victories. The same poll showed that, if the election were held today, 47 percent plan to vote for Republicans, and only 45 percent for Democrats. Those who prioritize the preservation of democracy in America are probably already Democratic voters. Still, Biden had an obligation to try to focus our attention on a mounting threat.Though Republicans are likely to do well on Tuesday, many elections will probably remain unsettled. Leigh Chapman, Pennsylvania’s acting secretary of state, wrote that because of a state law prohibiting the counting of mail-in ballots before Election Day, results there will probably take several days. Nevada will also take several days after the election to count mail-in ballots. Some Republicans, including Lake and Finchem, won’t commit to accepting the result if they lose. We can expect others to sow doubt about the process if they start falling behind as mail-in votes come in.As the Democratic strategist Michael Podhorzer put it, “When it comes to the postelection crisis, 2020 was like the beginning of ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,’ and 2022 will be more like the part where the walking mops multiply out of control.” We should be ready for what could soon be unleashed.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