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    DeSantis Signs Tall Stack of Right-Wing Bills as 2024 Entrance Nears

    The Florida governor is making a grab for national attention ahead of his expected presidential campaign rollout.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, an all-but-declared presidential candidate, has stepped up his headline-hunting travel and events ahead of an official announcement, traversing the state and trying to hoover up national attention as he signs the sharply conservative legislation he believes can propel him to the Republican Party’s nomination.On Wednesday, Mr. DeSantis signed a slew of measures that hit all the culture-clash notes his base has rewarded him for, including bills banning gender-transition care for minors, preventing children from attending “adult live performances” like drag shows and restricting the use of preferred pronouns in schools.“We need to let our kids just be kids,” Mr. DeSantis said at a Christian school in Tampa. “What we’ve said in Florida is we are going to remain a refuge of sanity and a citadel of normalcy.”It was his third consecutive day of holding public bill-signing ceremonies across the state. The ceremonies, which he hosts in his official capacity as governor, allow Mr. DeSantis to promote his political message in settings that he carefully stage-manages as a veritable M.C., calling up additional speakers and then thanking them for their contributions. These events sometimes take on the feel of political rallies.Such a platform gives Mr. DeSantis an advantage over his potential rivals for the presidency — many of whom are either out of office or hold legislative roles — as he sprints toward declaring his candidacy, which is likely to happen by the end of the month.On Monday, his signing of a bill defunding diversity and equity programs at public colleges and universities drew a robust round of news coverage — as well as loud protesters. He and other Republicans who shared the stage mocked the demonstrators, many of them students at New College of Florida, a public liberal arts school in Sarasota that the governor has sought to transform into a conservative bastion.The signing of bills aimed at the L.G.B.T.Q. community on Wednesday was “an all-out attack on freedom,” Joe Saunders, the senior political director of Equality Florida, an advocacy organization, said in a virtual news conference. He noted that Mr. DeSantis had already signed a six-week abortion ban as well as bills that allowed physicians to decline to provide care based on moral or religious grounds.Mr. DeSantis sees freedom “as a campaign slogan in his bid for the White House,” Mr. Saunders said. “The nation should be on high alert, because, today, we are all Floridians.”Some centrist Republicans say the way Mr. DeSantis has pushed Florida to the right on social issues is a potential weakness in a general election. Representatives for Mr. DeSantis did not immediately respond to requests for comment.As he travels the state, the lines between Mr. DeSantis’s roles as governor and potential presidential candidate can sometimes seem blurred.On Tuesday, after he signed several bills near Fort Lauderdale aimed at curbing human trafficking, an issue that the right has tried to weaponize in national politics, Mr. DeSantis received a boost from Florida’s two top Republican legislative leaders, Kathleen Passidomo, the Senate president, and Paul Renner, the House speaker.After the signing concluded, Ms. Passidomo and Mr. Renner stepped up to a lectern — embossed with Florida’s state seal, rather than the “Stop Human Trafficking” sign that the governor had used moments earlier — to endorse Mr. DeSantis for president, an office he is not yet formally seeking.Katie Betta, a spokeswoman for Ms. Passidomo, said that the endorsement was a matter of convenience because the governor and legislative leaders had not been together since the lawmaking session ended on May 5. “It was a good opportunity to answer a question they have both been getting from the press since the day they were sworn in last November,” Ms. Betta wrote in an email, referring to Ms. Passidomo and Mr. Renner.On Wednesday, the main super PAC backing Mr. DeSantis unveiled endorsements from nearly 100 state lawmakers. Behind the scenes, the governor’s allies and political operatives have been jostling with former President Donald J. Trump’s team to secure those pledges. At the federal level, members of Florida’s congressional delegation have swung heavily for Mr. Trump.Mr. DeSantis has now held an official event on every weekday this month. He spends his weekends on political travel, including to the crucial early-voting state of Iowa last Saturday.Since winning re-election in a rout in November, Mr. DeSantis has regularly faced questions at state events about his national political ambitions. For months, he usually fended them off with quips about how he was not interested in petty infighting and how it was too soon to be talking about future campaigns with the annual lawmaking session pending.No more. On Tuesday, Mr. DeSantis jumped at the chance to call out Mr. Trump for dodging a question about abortion. The former president had criticized Florida’s six-week ban as too harsh while remaining noncommittal about what restrictions he might support.“I signed the bill. I was proud to do it,” Mr. DeSantis told reporters. “He won’t answer whether he would sign it or not.”This time, it was the swipe at Mr. Trump that made headlines. More

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    When Their Idea of Liberty Is Your Idea of Death

    At the heart of the American ethos is the contested idea of freedom.In the video announcing his 2024 re-election bid — pointedly called “Freedom” — President Biden staked out his vision, declaring:Around the country, MAGA extremists are lining up to take on bedrock freedoms, cutting Social Security that you’ve paid for your entire life, while cutting taxes from the very wealthy, dictating what health care decisions women can make, banning books and telling people who they can love all while making it more difficult for you to be able to vote.“The question we’re facing,” Biden told viewers, “is whether in the years ahead, we will have more freedom or less freedom. More rights or fewer,” adding:Every generation of Americans will face the moment when they have to defend democracy. Stand up for our personal freedom. Stand up for the right to vote and our civil rights. And this is our moment.The 2024 election shows every sign of becoming a partisan battle to claim ownership of the ideal of freedom, with each side determined to persuade voters that the opposition’s assertions are not just false but a threat to individual and group rights.This dispute is possible because freedom as an abstraction is fraught with multiple and often conflicting meanings. The debate over where to draw the lines between freedom, liberty, rights, democracy, responsibility, autonomy, obligation, justice, fairness and citizenship has been going on for centuries, but has steadily intensified with the success of the liberation movements of the past seven decades — the civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights and sexual rights revolutions.In sharp contrast to Biden, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, in “The Courage to Be Free” — his campaign book, published in February — warns that “the threat to freedom is not limited to the actions of governments, but also includes a lot of aggressive, powerful institutions hellbent on imposing a woke agenda on our country.”The enemies of freedom, DeSantis contends, are “entrenched elites that have driven our nation into the ground,” elites that “control the federal bureaucracy, lobby shops on K Street, corporate media, Big Tech companies and universities.”These privileged few, DeSantis argues, “use undemocratic means to foist everything from environmental, social, and governance (E.S.G.) policies on corporations, forcing as well critical race theory on public schools,” in what the Florida governor calls “an attempt to impose ruling class ideology on society.”This debate fits into a larger context famously described by the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin in his 1958 Oxford University speech, “Two Concepts of Liberty”:If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved.Positive freedom, Berlin continued,derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master. I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not of other men’s, acts of will. I wish to be a subject, not an object.Jefferson Cowie, a history professor at Vanderbilt, captured the intensity and depth of division over freedom during the civil rights movement in his book “Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for history this week.Cowie wrote that the governor of Alabama, George Wallace, in his “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever” inaugural speech, on Jan. 14, 1963,invoked “freedom” 25 times — more than Martin Luther King Jr. used the term later that year in his “I Have a Dream” address at the March on Washington. “Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us,” Wallace told his audience, “and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South.”For Wallace, in other words, the right to maintain segregation was a form of freedom.The dichotomy between the notions of freedom promulgated by George Wallace and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. continues to polarize the nation today.Rogers M. Smith, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote by email in response to my inquiry about the contest over freedom:Biden stands in the liberal tradition going back to F.D.R., which holds that to be truly free, people have to be able to meet their material needs, so that they have opportunities for their diverse pursuits of happiness; and they also need democratic institutions giving them a share in shaping their collective destinies.Ronald Reagan, according to Smith, “thought freedom meant being largely free of government interference in people’s lives, whether through regulation or assistance. He did believe in freedom as democratic self-governance.”For Trump and DeSantis, Smith argued, freedom is more constrained and restrictive. For these two:Freedom means having governmental policies that protect the ways of life they favor against those they don’t. Their notion of freedom is the narrowest: in fact, it is primarily an argument for using coercive governmental power, and in Trump’s case private violence, against all who they see as threats to their preferred ways of life. They support democracy as long as, but only as long as, it produces the results they want.Jack Citrin, a political scientist at Berkeley, pointed out in his email that different types of freedom can impinge on each other as well as create different winners and losers:Negative liberty is freedom from external constraints, particularly from the government. This is the dominant idea, I think, in the Bill of Rights. It is linked to individualism and libertarianism. So I am free to carry a gun on the right, free to have an abortion or change my sex on the left. Positive liberty means the freedom to act to provide collective goods so it is easy to see that there can be a tension between the two.As with many political concepts, Citrin continued:There is an elasticity in this term that allows competing parties to stake a claim for their version of freedom. Biden paints Trump as a threat to one’s freedom to have an abortion or to vote; Trump claims the deep state is a threat to your privacy or legal rights. In addition, one group’s freedom constrains another’s.On April 29, Conor Friedersdorf published “Ron DeSantis’s Orwellian Redefinition of Freedom” in The Atlantic. As its headline suggests, the essay is a wide-ranging critique of the policies adopted under the DeSantis administration in Florida.Friedersdorf cited a recent DeSantis speech — “I don’t think you have a truly free state just because you have low taxes, low regulation, and no Covid restrictions, if the left is able to impose its agenda through the education system, through the business sphere, through all these others. A free state means you’re protecting your people from the left’s pathologies across the board” — which, Friedersdorf remarks, he would describe instead “as an anti-woke nanny state, not a state that values and protects freedom.”Friedersdorf does not, however, limit his critique to the conservative governor and quite likely presidential candidate, pointedly noting that in his own state of California, a Democratic bastion,Our dearth of freedom to build new dwellings has burdened us with punishing housing costs and immiserating homelessness. Our dearth of educational freedom consigns kids from poor families to failing schools. Our higher-than-average taxes do not yield better-than-average public services or assistance. And during the coronavirus pandemic, far from being a refuge of sanity, California responded with a lot of unscientific overzealousness, like the needless closure of beaches and parks.In practice, neither the left nor right has clean hands on the question of freedom.Conservative Republicans, including but not limited to DeSantis, have enacted restrictions on teaching about race and sex in public schools; have banned books in public libraries; barred cities from passing ordinances on the minimum wage, paid sick leave, firearms policy, plastic bags and marijuana decriminalization; and purposefully sought to suppress voting by minorities and college students.While certainly not equivalent, left-leaning students and faculty have led the charge in seeking to “cancel” professors and public figures who violate progressive orthodoxy, in disrupting conservative speakers on campuses and in seeking to bar or restrict teaching material considered hurtful or harmful to marginalized groups.Isabel V. Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, proposed in an email that Biden and the Democratic Party are well positioned to claim the freedom mantle:I want to suggest two reasons why this focus may not only be warranted but also have great appeal. The first is the battle over abortion rights. The second is the new attitude of Republicans toward the business community.On abortion, she continued, “I would argue that the ability to choose whether or not to have a child is a fundamental right,” adding her belief that:Before the Dobbs decision, we had found a workable compromise on this issue: no or limited abortions after fetal viability around 24 weeks. But the kind of six-week limit that is now the law in Florida and Georgia, not to mention the total ban in 14 other states, is an almost complete abrogation of the rights of women.On the treatment of business, Sawhill wrote: “Republicans have always been the party of corporate America, dedicated to limiting regulation and keeping taxes low. Gov. DeSantis’s attack on Disney and other so-called ‘woke’ companies is beginning to undermine the party’s reputation.”The bottom line, she concluded, was that “when Democrats talk about freedom, it’s not just rhetoric. There is substance behind the message.”Francis Fukuyama, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford, makes the case that the threats to freedom from the right are far more dangerous than those from the left.In an April 24 essay, “When Conservatives Used to be Liberals,” he argues that traditionally American conservatives differed from their European counterparts in “their emphasis on individual liberty, a small state, property rights and a vigorous private sector.” These principles, he continued, “defined the Republican Party under Ronald Reagan, which wanted lower taxes, deregulation, federalism and multiple limits on state power.”This understanding of conservatism, Fukuyama writes, “has been upended with the rise of Trumpist populism.”The result: “American conservatives are now talking more like older European ones,” older ones “like Spain’s Francisco Franco or Portugal’s Antonio Salazar, who were happy to see democracy abolished in their countries altogether.”Fukuyama acknowledged:There is plenty to criticize on the woke left, but this new type of conservative is not talking about rolling back particular policies; they are challenging the very premises of the liberal state and toying with outright authoritarianism. They are not simply deluded by lies about the 2020 election, but willing to accept nondemocratic outcomes to get their way.How, Fukuyama asks, could such a dire situation occur in this period of American history?The new illiberal conservatives talk about an “existential” crisis in American life: how the United States as traditionally understood will simply disappear under pressure from the woke left, which then justifies extreme measures in response.In fact, Fukuyama counters:It is hard to think of a time when the United States has been more free than it is in 2023. The much-feared tyranny of the woke left exists only in certain limited sectors of U.S. society — universities, Hollywood, and other cultural spaces, and it only touches on certain issues related to race, ethnicity, gender and sexual identity. It can be bad in these spaces, but most Americans don’t live there.Fukuyama is correct in citing the right’s exaggerated fears of the “woke” political agenda to justify authoritarian assaults on democracy, but he underestimates the adverse consequences of what many voters view as the freedom-threatening excesses of unrestrained liberalism.These include progressive policies that support the release of potentially violent criminals without bail; progressive prosecutors who refuse to press gun cases; the presence of homeless camps with open drug dealing on the sidewalks of Democratic cities; and the mentally ill roaming urban neighborhoods.For many voters, the consequences of these policies and situations are experienced as infringing on their own freedom to conduct their lives in a safe and secure environment, protected from crime, disease and harassment.Homelessness has become the subject of an ongoing debate over the meaning of freedom, a debate taking place now in New York City, where Mayor Eric Adams provoked angry protests — even before the chokehold death of a homeless man, Jordan Neely, by a passenger on an F train in Manhattan on May 1 — with his call to “involuntarily hospitalize people” who are a danger to themselves.In city centers large and small across the country, advocates for the homeless argue that street people without homes should be allowed to live and camp in public places, while others argue that the state should be empowered to close camps that allegedly pose threats to sanitation and public health — with no resolution in sight.William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings, argues in a 2005 essay, “Taking Liberty,” that “for much of the 20th century, progressives took the lead in both defining freedom and advancing its borders.”From Teddy Roosevelt’s expansion of “the 19th-century laissez-faire conception of freedom to include the liberties of workers and entrepreneurs to get ahead in the world” to F.D.R.’s redefinition “to include social protection from the ills of want and fear,” to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s appeal to a “civil and political freedom that included all Americans,” Galston maintains that liberals have successfully argued that freedom often can “be advanced only through the vigorous actions of government.”Liberals began to lose command of freedom in the 1960s, Galston concludes:What began honorably in the early 1960s as the effort to expand freedom of speech and self-fulfillment was transformed just a decade later into an antinomian conception of freedom as liberation from all restraint. Enthusiasts could no longer distinguish between liberty and license, and so lost touch with the moral concerns of average citizens, especially parents struggling to raise their children in what they saw as a culture increasingly inhospitable to decency and self-restraint.“As progressives abandoned the discourse of freedom,” Galston writes, “conservatives were more than ready to claim it.”I asked Galston whether he stood by what he wrote 18 years ago. He replied by email:Mostly, but some of it is dated. I did not anticipate that a commitment to fairness and equality of results would morph into a culture of intolerance on college campuses and other areas where a critical mass of progressives has been reached.Looking toward Election Day, Nov. 5, 2024, there are conflicting signs favoring both left and right in the competition to determine which side is a more effective proponent of freedom.On the right, conservatives can point to two positive developments, both reflected in polls.The first was the May 7 ABC News/Washington Post survey that suggested Joe Biden is more vulnerable than previously recognized. Both Donald Trump and DeSantis led Biden — Trump by 45 percent to 38 percent, DeSantis by 42 percent to 37 percent.The second survey was a May 5 Washington Post-KFF poll showing that “Clear majorities of Americans support restrictions affecting transgender children” and “Most Americans (57 percent) don’t believe it’s even possible to be a gender that differs from that assigned at birth.”By nearly two-to-one margins, respondents said, “trans women and girls should not be allowed to compete in sports with other women and girls” — in high school sports, 66 percent to 34 percent, and in college sports, 65 percent to 34 percent.These data points are politically significant because Biden is a strong proponent of trans rights, committed to protecting the “fundamental rights and freedoms of trans Americans,” including challenges to state laws barring transgender students from “playing on sports teams” consistent with their gender identity.Conversely, there is no question that Republican state legislators and governors have initiated concerted attacks on freedoms supported by liberals, and that many of these freedoms have wide backing among the public at large.These attacks include book banning, opposed by at least four to one, and bans on abortion as early as six weeks into pregnancy. A Wall Street Journal poll in September 2022 found that “62 percent opposed an abortion ban at 6 weeks of pregnancy that only included an exception for the health of the mother, and 57 percent opposed a ban at 15 weeks with an exception only for the health of the mother.”The outcome of the election will determine, at least for a brief period, the direction in which the nation is moving on freedom and liberty. Given the near parity between Republicans and Democrats, neither side appears to be equipped to inflict a knockout blow. But the ABC/Washington Post survey showing both Trump and DeSantis easily beating Biden is a clear warning signal to the Democratic Party and to liberals generally that they cannot — and should not — take anything for granted.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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    How Randi Weingarten Landed at the Heart of America’s Political Fights

    Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmWhen the former secretary of state and C.I.A. director Mike Pompeo, a man who had dealt firsthand with autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, described Randi Weingarten as “the most dangerous person in the world” last November, it seemed as though he couldn’t possibly be serious.Weingarten is 65 and just over five feet tall. She is Jewish and openly gay — she’s married to a rabbi — and lives in Upper Manhattan. She is the longtime president of the American Federation of Teachers, which is not even the country’s biggest union of public-school educators. (The A.F.T. has 1.7 million members; the National Education Association has three million.) The A.F.T. did give in excess of $26 million to Democratic candidates and causes in the 2022 election cycle, but the Carpenters and Joiners union gave more than twice as much.Pompeo, whose remarks appeared in a widely quoted interview with the online news site Semafor, had nevertheless put his finger on something: The pandemic and the ongoing culture wars over race and gender had shifted America’s educational landscape, and with it the political landscape. “It’s not a close call,” Pompeo elaborated. “If you ask, ‘Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?’ It would be the teachers’ unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids, and the fact that they don’t know math and reading or writing.”Other Republicans quickly piled on. Pompeo had set the bar high, and they needed to invoke equally hot rhetoric and florid imagery to ensure headlines of their own. “Big labor unions have taken over public education,” Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina told Fox News in late January. “That’s bad for parents, bad for kids, bad for America.” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida mounted his attack in The American Conservative magazine: “Our schools are a cesspool of Marxist indoctrination. Dangerous academic constructs like critical race theory and radical gender theory are being forced on elementary school children.” Gov. Ron DeSantis, who had already garnered national attention with his book bans, Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” and its so-called Don’t Say Gay legislation, unveiled a new proposal designed to rein in “overreaching teachers’ unions,” which a column on the Fox website enthusiastically embraced as “a blueprint to dominate union bosses.” Donald Trump, declaring that public schools “have been taken over by the radical left maniacs” and “pink-haired communists,” released his own plan to Save American Education. It was clear that Weingarten had come to stand for something much larger than herself.Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who has been described as “the most dangerous person in the world” by former C.I.A. director Mike Pompeo.Michal Chelbin for The New York TimesThe last few years have been historically convulsive ones for education in America. Some 1.3 million children left the public schools during the pandemic. The results from the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress — known as the nation’s report card — revealed the largest average score decline in reading since 1990 and the first average score decline in math since 1969. Schools have reported major increases in rates of student depression, anxiety and trauma. School districts around the country are experiencing severe teacher shortages. Last fall, a Gallup poll found that the percentage of adults who are satisfied with the nation’s public schools had fallen to 42 percent, a 20-year low.This crisis has political consequences. The pandemic closures and classroom culture wars have fueled the revival of the dormant school-choice movement, with Republican-led states around the country passing an array of far-reaching school-voucher bills. These bills come in different forms but share a common goal: to enable parents to move their children out of America’s government-run education system en masse. All of the prospective Republican presidential candidates for 2024 have committed to building on this growing movement, whose roots can be traced back more than 50 years, to the battle over desegregation. The same pandemic closures that demonstrated how central public schools are to the communities they serve also became the inciting event for an unprecedented effort to dismantle them.The public-education system may not be very popular right now, but both Democrats and Republicans tend to like their local schools and their children’s teachers. The unions that represent those teachers, however, are more polarizing. One reason for this is that they are actively involved in partisan politics, and, more specifically, are closely aligned with the Democrats, a reality powerfully driven home during the pandemic. A study by Brown University’s Annenberg Institute found that Democratic districts, with correspondingly strong teachers’ unions, returned to in-person learning more slowly and gradually than Republican districts with weaker unions. In some ways, Randi Weingarten and the A.F.T. — the union “boss” and “big labor” — are a logical, even inevitable target for the G.O.P.It’s no longer possible to separate education from politics, and public schools are more vulnerable than they’ve ever been.A frequent knock on the A.F.T. is that it puts teachers before students, a framing neatly encapsulated by a quote attributed to the union’s former president Al Shanker: “When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of schoolchildren.” Shanker’s biographer, Richard Kahlenberg, found no record of Shanker’s ever saying this and doesn’t think he ever did, but that hasn’t stopped the union’s critics from citing it. Weingarten has a rebuttal: Good working conditions for teachers make good learning conditions for students. But Weingarten does in fact represent teachers, not students. Often, such as when it comes to issues like classroom size or school budgets, their interests align. Sometimes they don’t. For a period during the pandemic, the two groups’ apparent interests diverged, and a series of fault lines started opening across the country, separating not only Republicans from Democrats but also parents from teachers, centrist Democrats from progressives and urban Black parents from suburban white parents, and even dividing the teachers’ union itself. These fault lines widened as the reopening debates merged into fights over how schools should deal with the teaching of the country’s racial history as well as sexuality and gender identity.What became increasingly clear to me over the last several months, as I spoke to dozens of politicians, political consultants, union leaders, parent activists and education scholars about the convulsions in American education, is that it’s no longer possible to separate education from politics, and that public schools are more vulnerable than they’ve ever been. How did Randi Weingarten wind up at the center of the 2024 Republican primary? The only way to answer that question is to re-examine America’s education wars and the competing political agendas that are driving them. “Oh, goodness, no! Not at all!” Pompeo answered when I asked if he was, perhaps, being hyperbolic in his remarks about Weingarten. “It’s not just about Ms. Weingarten, but she has been the most visible face of the destruction of American education.”In the chaotic early months of the pandemic, teachers were celebrated as essential workers, heroically continuing to serve America’s children from their homes, often with limited resources and inadequate technology. But during the summer of 2020, things started to shift. There was already early research showing that students were suffering academically from remote learning. Schools across Europe had begun reopening without any major outbreaks, and many of America’s private and parochial schools were making plans to resume in-person learning at the start of the new school year. A lot of public-school parents wanted their children to be back in the classroom, too. But many teachers seemed resistant to the idea.Because of the decentralized structure of America’s public-education system, which has some 14,000 different school districts, the federal government could not order schools to reopen for in-person learning, but in July 2020, President Trump threatened to withhold federal funds from those that didn’t. His education secretary, Betsy DeVos, echoed his sentiments, demanding that the nation’s schools be “fully operational” by the fall without providing a specific plan for doing so.Protesters carrying a makeshift coffin in New York City in 2020.Associated PressMany members of the A.F.T. remained worried about putting themselves, their families and their communities at risk. The A.F.T. had issued its own reopening plan in late April, calling for adequate personal protective equipment, a temporary suspension of formal teacher performance evaluations, a limit on student testing, a cancellation of student-loan debt and a $750 billion federal aid package to help schools prepare to reopen safely and facilitate “a real recovery for all our communities.” Weingarten did not believe the Trump administration was giving schools what teachers needed to return to work safely. She publicly denounced Trump and DeVos’s call to reopen as “reckless,” “callous” and “cruel,” and the A.F.T. passed a resolution supporting local strikes if schools were forced to reopen in areas where a variety of safety conditions hadn’t been met. As if to underscore the point, some teachers took to the streets in protest with mock coffins.Florida became a test case. Even as the state’s Covid death rate was surging in July, its Department of Education issued an emergency order requiring schools to fully reopen in August. The state’s largest teachers’ union, the Florida Education Association, affiliated with both the A.F.T. and the N.E.A., sued DeSantis and his education commissioner, Richard Corcoran, among others, to block the reopenings, arguing that the order violated the state’s Constitution, which guarantees Florida residents the right to “safe” and “secure” public schools. At a virtual news conference announcing the lawsuit, Weingarten accused DeSantis of being in “intense denial.” After some Florida schools started reopening, an A.F.T. political action committee produced a TV ad attacking Trump, citing claims that schools were becoming superspreader sites and that children were being used as “guinea pigs.” As the lawsuit was working its way through the legal system — the union won in the lower court but lost on appeal — Florida was holding its biannual school-board elections, and the prospective return to in-person learning became the defining issue in many races. In Brevard County, Tina Descovich, the incumbent, was in favor of an immediate return to the classroom and opposed mask mandates. She was challenged by a public-school speech-language pathologist, Jennifer Jenkins, who called for a more cautious approach, including a mask mandate for all but the youngest children. Jenkins easily won the late-August election, but Descovich was just getting started. She called Tiffany Justice, a fellow school-board member in nearby Indian River County, to suggest that they create their own parents’ rights group, Moms for Liberty. “We’ve got to do something here,” Justice recalled Descovich’s telling her. “We have to help these parents because they’re trying to step up and speak out, and the schools are just slamming them at every turn.”Tina Descovich, right, who was on the Brevard County school board and opposed mask mandates, started the parents’ rights group Moms for Liberty with a fellow former school-board member, Tiffany Justice.Octavio Jones/Getty ImagesOther parents across the political spectrum started organizing, too. Many public schools hadn’t fully reopened for the start of the new school year, and they were frustrated. They wrote op-eds, held rallies or met via Zoom with school-board members and other elected officials, often finding themselves at odds with local teachers’ unions and union-backed school-board members. The first fault lines had started to open.By the fall of 2020, the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement had prompted a national reckoning over race, as well as an ensuing backlash. The politics of the pandemic had begun to merge with the culture wars, and both were playing out most vividly in the American classroom. An esoteric academic term — critical race theory, or C.R.T. — had improbably become the rallying cry for a conservative campaign focused on the teaching of the nation’s racial history. President Trump, running for re-election, eagerly took up the cause, blaming “decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools” for the Black Lives Matter protests and urging America’s parents to fight back against efforts to teach their children “hateful lies about this country.”The A.F.T. championed the new movement for racial equity, committing publicly to the fight to end “systemic racism in America.” Some of the A.F.T.’s locals went further. The Chicago Teachers Union took to the streets to demand that the city’s board of education cancel a $33 million contract between Chicago’s public schools and its Police Department for the safety officers who staff the city’s public schools. United Teachers Los Angeles helped lead a successful fight to press its school district to slash its police budget by $25 million and use the money instead to hire more counselors, psychologists and social workers.That October, Weingarten embarked on a cross-country bus tour to get out the vote for Joe Biden. His Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, had not always been in sync with the A.F.T.; the union opposed elements of Obama’s Race to the Top program, which sent money to states that reformed their public-education systems by, among other things, weakening teacher tenure, introducing data-driven accountability measures and adding more nonunionized charter schools. Biden, by contrast, vowed to focus on neighborhood public schools rather than charters and criticized the standardized-testing regimes and teacher evaluations that were a hallmark of Race to the Top. Weingarten’s name was even floated as a candidate for secretary of education. She didn’t get the job, but she and the head of the N.E.A., Becky Pringle, were invited to the White House on the day after Biden’s inauguration. The teachers’ unions finally had a true ally in the Oval Office. The first lady, Jill Biden, taught at a public community college herself. (“I sleep with an N.E.A. member every night,” President Biden would later quip.) The new administration gave teachers preferential access to the Covid vaccine, behind some other essential workers but ahead of the general population. Biden had pledged to quickly reopen America’s schools, and the A.F.T. was communicating with top officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about its guidelines for doing so, suggesting that the agency add a provision allowing for its recommendations to be revisited if a highly contagious Covid variant emerged. But the anger that had been unleashed by the pandemic closures and the culture wars had not abated.Justice and Descovich, the former Florida school-board members, incorporated Moms for Liberty in early 2021 with a far more ambitious and political agenda than simply advocating a return to maskless, in-person classes. As the group’s mission statement explained, it was “dedicated to fighting for the survival of America by unifying, educating and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government.” The group built its brand with bumper magnets and T-shirts emblazoned with the motto “We Do NOT Co-Parent With the Government.” It was embraced by the right-wing media and then by donors eager to turn it into a national movement, while nurturing its grass-roots image, mirroring the model created by the Tea Party, the quasi-populist uprising fueled by conservative billionaires and Fox News. The former Fox host Megyn Kelly headlined a fund-raising event in Florida, speaking about, as Justice recalled, “the woke ideology” coming out of America’s classrooms. Moms for Liberty soon expanded beyond Florida. That summer, a chapter in Tennessee presented an 11-page letter of complaint to the state’s Department of Education, objecting to a curriculum that it said “focuses repeatedly and daily on very dark and divisive slivers of American history” and works to “sow feelings of resentment, shame of one’s skin color and/or fear.” After several Republican states passed laws limiting the teaching of race-related subjects and banning C.R.T., Weingarten gave a speech citing a historian who had compared their efforts to the censorship of the Soviet regime. A clip of the speech spent days in heavy rotation on Fox News, and it inspired an editorial in The Wall Street Journal: “The Teachers Unions Go Woke.”It was not Glenn Youngkin’s plan to turn Virginia’s 2021 governor’s race into a referendum on America’s battles over education. Initially, he was just hoping to prevent his opponent, Terry McAuliffe, from owning an issue that historically favored Democrats. “We couldn’t afford to let them take the fight to us,” Jeff Roe, one of Youngkin’s chief strategists, told me.By almost every measure, Youngkin, a former private-equity executive with no political experience, was the underdog. McAuliffe, a Democratic stalwart dating back to the Clinton presidency, served as Virginia’s governor between 2014 and 2018. (A state law barring governors from serving consecutive terms prevented him from running for re-election.)Biden had beaten Trump by 10 points in Virginia, and McAuliffe led in the early polls. But Virginia’s schools had been among the last on the East Coast to fully reopen, and the lingering bitterness from these pandemic closures had formed a politically combustible mix with the rising culture wars. Amid the national racial reckoning of 2020, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County — one of the top public high schools in the nation — had jettisoned its admissions exam, prompting a lawsuit by 17 families, many of them Asian American, who viewed the change as a form of discrimination against their children.Glenn Youngkin, Republican candidate for governor in Virginia, at a campaign event in Leesburg in 2021.Al Drago, via Getty ImagesSome of the most bitter fights were unfolding in suburban Loudoun County, where a proposal to allow transgender children to choose which bathrooms and pronouns they wished to use had sparked an angry backlash among conservative parents. The tensions were later exacerbated by news of a sexual assault in a high school girls’ bathroom perpetrated by a boy who was wearing a skirt at the time. Loudoun’s increasingly contentious school-board meetings became spectator events, attracting the sustained attention of right-wing media outlets like Fox News and The New York Post.Youngkin held “Save Our Schools” rallies and pledged to ban C.R.T. from the state’s schools. But his campaign’s internal education polls revealed a wide range of voter priorities across the state. The race and gender issues that resonated with his base — Trump voters — weren’t going to be enough to win. He microtargeted other education voters with different ads; it was a scattershot approach, though, at least until a gubernatorial debate in late September.During his tenure as governor, McAuliffe had vetoed a bill — prompted by a mother who objected to her high school senior son’s reading Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” in an A.P. English class — that would have enabled parents to prevent their children from studying material they deemed sexually explicit. When Youngkin criticized that decision on the debate stage, McAuliffe shot back, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”Recognizing that they had just been handed a political gift, Youngkin’s staff cobbled together a digital and TV ad that very night, hoping to take advantage of the apparent gaffe before McAuliffe tried to clarify it. “I was sure he was going to walk it back on ‘Morning Joe,’” Roe told me. Instead, McAuliffe stood by his comment, saying that states and local school boards should have authority over what’s taught in schools.Youngkin unified his diffuse education campaign under a new phrase, “Parents Matter,” printing up T-shirts and bumper stickers and holding Parents Matter rallies in suburban and exurban counties that supported Biden in 2020. McAuliffe’s quote became the centerpiece of a rolling series of ads accusing him of going “on the attack against parents.” A longtime critic of organized labor, Youngkin also sought to drive a wedge between teachers and their unions, promising to devote at least $100 million to raise teacher salaries while at the same time saying that McAuliffe would bow to his special-interest allies rather than doing what’s best for children.A vast majority of Virginia’s teachers belong to the N.E.A., which tends to cover more rural areas, not the A.F.T., whose members are generally concentrated in big cities. But Weingarten was friendly with McAuliffe from the Clinton days and was supporting his candidacy on Twitter and cable news, and the A.F.T. was helping him develop his education platform. Weingarten told me that she called McAuliffe after the debate to tell him that he was wrong — that parents should have a role in their children’s education. “Terry made a very bad mistake, which Youngkin capitalized on,” she said. (Through a spokesman, McAuliffe said that he talked to Weingarten regularly during the campaign but has no recollection of her criticizing his remark.)By the fall of 2021, America’s public schools were fully open, but mask mandates were still being hotly contested. Weingarten had been working to try to rebuild trust between some families and their schools. In late September, just a couple of days after the McAuliffe debate, she held a virtual town hall on mask mandates with Open Schools USA, an anti-masking right-wing parents’ rights group that was rallying families to pull their children out of public schools, in an effort to foster open dialogue with the union’s critics.Under Weingarten, who was elected president of the A.F.T. in 2008, the national union has gone all in on electoral politics, significantly increasing its political spending in the belief that the best way to serve its rank and file is by electing Democrats. The A.F.T. gave more than $1 million to McAuliffe, and Weingarten even knocked on doors for him in Alexandria. But Youngkin had the momentum in the final weeks of the race. His candidacy received another boost in October when Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered the F.B.I. to help address the rising threats of violence toward some school-board members. The order stemmed from a letter written to the Biden administration by the National School Boards Association, asking that federal law enforcement address threats against public school officials that “could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism.” But Republican lawmakers and the right-wing media seized on the language in the letter to falsely accuse Garland of labeling parents “domestic terrorists.” Youngkin quickly exploited the opportunity, releasing an ad claiming that the F.B.I. was trying to “silence parents.”On the night before the election, Weingarten headed down to Virginia to warm up the crowd at McAuliffe’s closing rally in Fairfax County. She was eager to be on hand for the final push, and her staff asked for her to be given a speaking role at the rally. Because she had been such a generous and loyal supporter of McAuliffe’s, the campaign didn’t want to say no, even though some Democrats worried that they could be handing Youngkin another gift.Politically speaking, Weingarten played perfectly into Youngkin’s Parents Matter campaign. That spring, a right-wing watchdog group, Americans for Public Trust, had gotten hold of email communications between top officials at the A.F.T. and the C.D.C. about the agency’s school-reopening guidelines through the Freedom of Information Act and had passed them on to The New York Post. The tabloid, which had been gleefully attacking Weingarten for years — dubbing her Whine-garten — trumpeted the story: “Powerful Teachers Union Influenced C.D.C. on School Reopenings, Documents Show.” The rest of the right-wing media and numerous Republican officials instantly jumped on the narrative. Senator Susan Collins of Maine grilled the C.D.C.’s director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, at a committee hearing over what she called the C.D.C.’s “secret negotiations” with the teachers’ union. Weingarten told me that the C.D.C. had solicited the A.F.T.’s input and that the union hadn’t suggested anything that the agency wasn’t already considering incorporating into its guidelines. But the appearance of a partisan union leader who had privately discussed the future of the nation’s schools with a government agency could be counterproductive in Virginia’s charged political climate.Weingarten at a strike by faculty members and their supporters at the University of Illinois Chicago in January. Associated PressYoungkin’s staff was giddy at the prospect. “I wanted to send them a gift basket,” Kristin Davison, another senior Youngkin strategist, told me. “It was almost as good as when Stacey Abrams came.” Republican elected officials around the country took potshots at their emerging villain. “The union boss responsible for shutting down schools is the final surrogate for Terry McAuliffe’s failing campaign,” Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas wrote on Twitter. “Virginians should vote accordingly!”Youngkin won narrowly, motivating the G.O.P. base and making critical inroads in Loudoun, which had voted overwhelmingly for Biden. “For a closer for a campaign, you would think you would bring in a showstopper,” Betsy DeVos gloated on Fox News on election night. “I guess, in this case, he did bring in a showstopper in Randi Weingarten, because she definitely stopped the show for kids across the country.”To Republicans, Weingarten may be too progressive, but to some members of her own union, she is not progressive enough. As the pandemic dragged on, she found herself caught between the wishes of the Democratic establishment she did not want to alienate and the left-leaning rank and file she represented. In Chicago, this tension came down, in early 2022, to the most elemental question for unions: whether or not to strike.At the time, the new Omicron variant was surging, and Illinois was experiencing a record number of Covid cases and hospitalizations. The A.F.T.’s left-wing local, the Chicago Teachers Union, was concerned about sending its 25,000 members back to the classroom after winter break. The union was hearing similar worries from the Black families whose children make up a large percentage of the 320,000 students in Chicago’s public schools. Many white suburban and exurban parents had been desperate to see their children return to the classroom and were now committed to keeping them there; but many urban Black parents — who tended to live in smaller homes with more family members, had generally lower vaccination rates and had lost more loved ones to the pandemic — had been and remained wary, especially with a new variant spiking.The union demanded mandatory testing for all teachers and students or a temporary return to remote learning. Mayor Lori Lightfoot, a Democrat, balked. President Biden and other prominent Democrats had been unambiguous about their desire for the nation’s schools to remain open. And the recent governor’s election in Virginia had underscored the political danger of introducing more disruptions to in-person learning, especially with the 2022 midterms just around the corner. For Weingarten and the national union, a strike in the country’s third-largest school system would obviously be politically costly.The insurgent group that leads the C.T.U. first came together in 2008, when the bipartisan education-reform movement was sweeping across the country, dividing the Democratic Party. Centrist billionaires and centrist Democrats joined forces to lead the effort to introduce more testing, accountability and free-market competition to the public schools. But the more progressive wing of the party viewed these measures as an attack on the very institution of public education, unleashing the forces of capitalism on what is supposed to be a public good.In Chicago, the reform efforts were led by Arne Duncan, the chief executive of the city’s public-school district and President Obama’s future education secretary. “Neoliberal education reform hit Chicago like a ton of bricks,” Jesse Sharkey, a high school history teacher, told me. Sharkey was a leader of this insurgency and would go on to become president of the C.T.U. from 2018 to 2022. “You’d flip on the TV or pick up a newspaper, and you couldn’t avoid hearing our so-called leaders trashing our schools, talking about their culture of failure,” he says. “It was an environment that was downright hostile to public education.”Sharkey and his fellow insurgents didn’t believe the national union was fighting aggressively enough against these Democratic reformers. Tapping into Chicago’s long history of community-based organizing, they built their own grass-roots movement within the union called the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, or CORE. Led by Karen Lewis, a chemistry teacher and union activist, CORE challenged the C.T.U.’s incumbent leadership in 2010 and won control of the Chicago union. Two years later, after the city’s new Democratic mayor, President Obama’s former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, embarked on an ambitious program to close public schools and replace them with charters, the C.T.U. called Chicago’s first teachers’ strike in 25 years. While the C.T.U. was voting on the strike authorization, Weingarten arrived in Chicago to appear on a panel with Emanuel at a conference hosted by the Clinton Global Initiative. It was a stunning turn of events that spoke to the tension between the A.F.T. and its left wing. For the political health of the union, Weingarten felt she needed to preserve her relationships with the country’s most powerful Democratic leaders, many of whom, like Emanuel, were centrist reformers.As the 2012 strike wore on, Emanuel tried to turn the city against the teachers, accusing them of using Chicago’s children as “pawns,” and unsuccessfully sought a court order to force them to return to work. After seven days, the city backed down; the union won major concessions, including a 16 percent raise over four years and the right for teachers who were laid off as part of Emanuel’s ongoing school closures to be given priority for positions at other schools. The strike instantly became a galvanizing event for the union’s more progressive members. Not only does CORE still control the C.T.U., but like-minded left-wing slates have since taken control of A.F.T. locals in several other cities, too, including Los Angeles and Baltimore.These insurgent caucuses are unified by what they call “social justice unionism.” They see public schools’ ongoing struggles to educate their students as inseparable from the larger societal and economic issues facing their working-class members and the poor communities whose children dominate their classrooms. “We are trying to promote a brand of unionism that goes all out in its fight for educational justice and is brave about taking on conflicts,” Sharkey says. “In some ways, we’re less careful about who we piss off nationally.”There is a natural tension between these insurgent movements and the more establishment-oriented national union. In 2015, some rank-and-file members protested the A.F.T.’s decision to issue an early endorsement of Hillary Clinton, to whom Weingarten is close, who was running against the pro-labor Bernie Sanders. But the tension is about more than just politics; it also goes to the heart of the A.F.T.’s identity. To these caucuses, the union’s power comes from the collective strength of its members — from the bottom up — which can conflict with the top-down leadership style of Weingarten, who has cultivated a distinct public profile, sometimes characterized by her own tendency toward political hyperbole. An impulsive user of Twitter, she has been known to send out the occasional overheated message. During the pandemic, when DeSantis supporters were selling “Don’t Fauci My Florida” merchandise, including beer koozies, on the G.O.P.’s WinRed website, she wrote: “Disgusting. Millions of Floridians are going to die from Ron DeSantis’ ignorance.” She later apologized for the tweet. Two days after returning from winter break in January 2022, with their demands still unmet, the C.T.U. called a strike. “The union isn’t stupid,” Sharkey, who was president at the time, told me. “We knew people were sick of the pandemic.” But, he went on, “for better or for worse we’re a union that strikes. We didn’t think it would be an easy or strategically wise thing, but there was a principle around it. It was something we had to do.”The union already had a contentious relationship with Lightfoot, dating back to an 11-day strike over wages and class sizes in 2019 that ended with the city making major concessions. This time, though, the mayor had public opinion on her side, and she leveraged it in a flurry of media interviews, accusing the C.T.U. of holding Chicago’s children “hostage.” Lightfoot had long seen the A.F.T.’s local as a “political movement” whose ambitions extended well beyond protecting the rights of its workers. “I think, ultimately, they’d like to take over not only Chicago Public Schools, but take over running the city government,” she told The Times in 2021.The 2022 strike quickly became a political nightmare for national Democrats: A Democratic mayor was at war with a Democratic union, shutting down Chicago’s schools at a moment when children were finally back in the classroom and the country was just beginning to confront the learning loss and emotional trauma caused by the pandemic. Splinter groups of teachers in Northern California were also planning sickouts in the face of the Omicron surge. The Chicago strike put Weingarten in a difficult position. Publicly, she supported the C.T.U., while also saying that children needed to be in the classroom. Behind the scenes, she was calling and texting Sharkey constantly, offering to do anything she could — even arrange a call with people at the White House — to help press Lightfoot and end the strike. After a few days, under intensifying public pressure, the C.T.U.’s members voted to return to work. They had lost this battle, but they already had their sights on a bigger one: the city’s upcoming mayoral election.In late October, just before the 2022 midterms, the results from the first full National Assessment of Educational Progress since the start of the pandemic were released, revealing that 40 percent of the country’s eighth-grade public-school students were not proficient in math, and 32 percent were not proficient in reading. The strikingly low scores instantly became a G.O.P. talking point: The culprit wasn’t the pandemic, schools or teachers but the unions and Democratic politicians beholden to them. “We cannot let the nation forget how teachers’ unions tried to hold our children’s futures for ransom,” said Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, then the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. “These union bosses, and the politicians who enabled them, must be held accountable.” Republicans up and down the ballot accused their Democratic opponents of carrying water for the teachers’ unions. A week before the election, Fox News ran a segment headlined “Have the Teachers Unions Sold Out Your Kids to the Democrats?”Christopher Rufo, the right-wing activist who manufactured the obsession with C.R.T. two years earlier, was now on Fox News railing against another crisis — the “academic queer theory” that he charged was being “mainlined” into America’s public schools — while Republican candidates condemned the “grooming” of children to identify as different genders in the nation’s classrooms. Many Republican candidates pledged their allegiance to a “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” requiring schools to provide information on reading lists, curriculums and whether a family’s child used another name or pronoun in school.The A.F.T. spent in excess of $20 million in the 2022 midterms, more than it ever had in an off-year election, and Weingarten campaigned tirelessly with high-profile Democrats around the country, her arrival on the stump invariably inspiring glee among local Republican leaders. When she appeared in Michigan with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, one G.O.P. pundit, Kaylee McGhee White, described her on Fox Business Network as “the kiss of death.” Whitmer won easily, as did many other Democrats whose opponents had railed against drag-queen shows for children or L.G.B.T.Q.-themed books in school libraries. But Republican candidates who campaigned on another education issue — school choice — fared much better.As a political matter, all the education battles that had erupted since the start of the pandemic — over school closures, over how the country’s racial history should be taught, over what sort of role parents ought to have in the classroom — were really about the same thing: whether America’s children should continue to be educated in government-run public schools. Did the pandemic and the culture wars reveal the indispensability of these schools to their communities and to the broader fabric of the nation, or did they only underscore their inherent limitations — in effect, making the case for school choice?It was the University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman who first proposed the modern concept of school vouchers in a paper in 1955. Friedman was a champion of free markets, and his idea was to leverage the transformative power of capitalism to prod schools to compete for families’ dollars. But vouchers served another purpose too. The Supreme Court had just ruled on Brown v. Board of Education, and many white Americans were worried about the looming prospect of being forced to send their children to desegregated schools. Friedman saw an opening for his proposal, writing, “Under such a system, there can develop exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools and mixed schools.”Thirty years later, with Friedman serving as an economic adviser, President Reagan tried repeatedly to introduce federal school-voucher legislation. One of his most vocal opponents was Al Shanker, then the A.F.T.’s president, who argued that choice might be the point of “shopping malls,” but it was not the point of education, nor was it the reason taxpayers were expected to fund the nation’s public schools: “We do so not to satisfy the individual wants of parents and students but because of the public interest in producing an educated citizenry capable of exercising the rights of liberty and being productive members of society.”Even Congress, where Republicans held the Senate majority, considered Reagan’s voucher proposals too radical. But the concept endured. In the 1990s, vouchers were championed by Christian conservatives like Paul Weyrich, a founder of the Heritage Foundation and mentor to Justice Clarence Thomas. Weyrich believed that the nation’s public schools had become “morally decadent institutions” and argued that the only answer was for Christians to educate their children themselves, ideally with government money. Over the years, some states experimented with limited voucher programs, typically designed to target discrete populations like children with special needs. But the pandemic created an opening for voucher advocates to think more ambitiously and move more aggressively. In fact, this had been the plan almost from the very beginning. Two months into the school closures, in the spring of 2020, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Catholic archbishop of New York, asked DeVos — then the education secretary and a longtime supporter of school choice — in an interview on SiriusXM radio if she intended to “utilize this particular crisis to ensure that justice is finally done to our kids and the parents who choose to send them to faith-based schools.” DeVos answered unequivocally: “Yes, absolutely.”In 2021, at least 18 states created new school-choice programs or expanded existing ones, and more followed suit in 2022. Some of these new programs represent a significant departure from those of the past. Known collectively as universal voucher programs, they are available to everyone and can be applied toward any kind of school. The goal is not merely to disrupt public education but to defund and dismantle it. For years, the country’s lower courts largely agreed that spending taxpayer money on religious schools was unconstitutional. But last summer, the Supreme Court created a new precedent, ruling that it was in fact unconstitutional for voucher programs — in this case, one in rural Maine — to exclude religious schools.Secretary of Education in an indoor seeting, at a White House Coronavirus Task Force press briefing at the U.S. Department of Education in 2020.Alex Wong/Getty ImagesDeVos, now back in the private sector, is one of the leading funders of this new national voucher campaign, primarily through an organization that she helped found called the American Federation for Children. The group and its affiliates spent $9 million on school-choice campaigns in 2022, at least $2.5 million of which came directly from DeVos and her husband. They spent much of this money in the primaries, turning support for school choice into a litmus test and targeting Republican incumbents opposed to it. Three-quarters of the candidates they supported won. “There wasn’t a red wave or a blue wave in the midterms, but there was a school-choice wave,” Corey DeAngelis, a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children, wrote to me in an email. Echoing Weyrich’s sentiments about the moral decadence of American public education, DeAngelis quoted Voddie Baucham, a Christian home-schooling advocate: “We cannot continue to send our children to Caesar for their education and be surprised when they come home as Romans.”DeAngelis identified Weingarten as a useful political foil long before Mike Pompeo. He has been trolling her relentlessly on Twitter since 2021, ostentatiously thanking her for starting “the school choice revolution.” In March, at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in suburban Washington, he posed with a life-size cardboard cutout of her clutching an award labeled “Threat to America’s Children,” his left thumb raised in approval.Lori Lightfoot, the mayor of Chicago, was right about the local teachers’ union’s political ambitions. In February, Brandon Johnson, a former middle-school teacher and paid union organizer, challenged her in the city’s mayoral election. It was a long shot — one early poll put his support at 3 percent — but for the C.T.U., the Johnson campaign was a natural progression. To pursue their broader agenda, which reaches beyond education into areas like housing and policing, they needed the kind of power that can come only from winning partisan political elections. And they had both a powerful grass-roots movement and a source of campaign funds, in the form of members’ dues, that could be leveraged to support Johnson’s candidacy.Johnson’s campaign was underwritten largely by the teachers’ unions. Though the A.F.T. and the C.T.U. had their differences in the past, they have become more closely aligned in recent years. While there are still some divisions within the Democratic Party over education policy, the bipartisan education-reform movement that once posed such a formidable existential threat to the A.F.T. is a shadow of its former self. The threat to the A.F.T. is now partisan, which means that Weingarten is no longer facing as much pressure from centrist Democrats. Backed by the financial and organizational muscle of the national and local teachers’ unions, Johnson knocked Lightfoot out of the two-person runoff, making her the first incumbent mayor in Chicago to be unseated after a single term in 40 years.The Chicago mayoral candidate Brandon Johnson at a rally at the Chicago Teachers Union Foundation in March.John J. Kim, via Getty ImagesBy now, Pompeo, Tim Scott, Marco Rubio, Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump and the rest of the Republican Party were busy elevating education to a central plank in its 2024 platform and in the process transforming Weingarten into the new Hillary — a G.O.P. stand-in for everything that was wrong with America. The Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic was continuing to build its case that Weingarten and the A.F.T. exerted undue influence over the C.D.C.’s school-reopening guidelines, summoning Weingarten to appear in Washington on April 26 at a hearing titled “The Consequences of School Closures.”But Weingarten was building her own case. Public education was now itself a hyperpartisan issue, and she addressed it in hyperpartisan terms in a fiery speech at the National Press Club. Calling out by name some of the people who had demonized her since the pandemic, including Betsy DeVos, she described the ongoing effort to defund public schools as nothing less than a threat to “cornerstones of community, of our democracy, our economy and our nation.” She pointed to studies that have shown that vouchers don’t improve student achievement, characterizing them as a back door into private and parochial schools that are not subject to the same federal civil rights laws as public institutions and can therefore promote discrimination. “Our public schools shouldn’t be pawns for politicians’ ambitions!” she thundered, moving toward her emotional conclusion. “They shouldn’t be defunded or destroyed by ideologues.”Like the Virginia’s governor’s race one and a half years earlier, Chicago’s mayoral runoff became, at least in part, a referendum on education. The effects of the pandemic on Chicago’s public schools have been profound. More than 33,000 students have left the school system since the fall of 2020, and the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress scores showed steep declines in math and a widening achievement gap between white and Black students.Brandon Johnson’s opponent, Paul Vallas, ran Chicago’s public schools in the late 1990s. Chicago has no Republican Party to speak of, but Vallas, a vocal proponent of charter schools and vouchers, was the conservative candidate. In 2009, he said he was “more of a Republican than a Democrat.” He was supported by the local business community and endorsed by the city’s police union. A group affiliated with the American Federation for Children spent $60,285 on a pro-Vallas digital media effort. But Arne Duncan and a number of other centrist Democrats endorsed Vallas, too.On the eve of the April runoff election, Weingarten headed to Chicago to speak at a Johnson political rally headlined by Bernie Sanders. Both the A.F.T. and the C.T.U. continued to funnel money into Johnson’s campaign as the election approached, their combined contributions totaling $4.6 million. “All of this stuff is about power,” observed a local community activist, Ja’Mal Green, who had run in the first round of the election but didn’t make the runoff and was now supporting Vallas.When Johnson narrowly won, it was a stunning upset, not just for the candidate but for the left. Even as the Republicans were ramping up their attacks on Weingarten and on the institution of public education, the teachers’ unions had effectively elected the mayor of America’s third-largest city, who was himself an avowedly progressive union organizer promising to raise taxes on the rich, reform the police and increase funding for the city’s schools. Maybe Pompeo hadn’t been wrong, at least as far as his own party was concerned. It was those who had underestimated the political power of the unions who were mistaken. “They said this would never happen,” Johnson said in his victory speech. “If they didn’t know, now they know!”Jonathan Mahler is a staff writer for the magazine. He has written about Donald Trump’s legal accountability, the post-pandemic future of New York City and the state of politics in Wisconsin. More

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    Republicans Are Forgetting One Crucial Truth About People and Their Bodies

    In the homestretch of the epic Wisconsin Supreme Court race that ended last week with a blowout victory for liberals, voters’ cellphones pinged incessantly with text message ads.“Woke trans activists have their candidate,” one text message said, according to Wisconsin Watch, a local nonprofit news site. “Schools across Wisconsin are stripping away parental rights and trans kids behind parents backs. There’s only one candidate for the Supreme Court who will put an end to this. Vote for Judge Daniel Kelly by April 4 and protect your children from trans madness.”For a judicial race that centered on two big issues the Wisconsin Supreme Court is likely to consider soon, abortion and voting, it might seem odd that these ads in support of the conservative candidate chose to focus on an issue nowhere near the top of the agenda on the court’s upcoming docket.For reasons that are now obvious, conservative groups supporting Kelly largely avoided touting his opposition to abortion. That’s a sure loser, as the G.O.P. is rapidly learning. It probably wouldn’t have been a good idea to run on preserving the right-wing gerrymander that gives conservatives a total lock on Wisconsin’s Legislature and congressional delegation either. So some supporters reached for the wedge issue du jour: transphobia.An article of faith has emerged among hard-right conservatives — and has been worried over by some centrist pundits — that parental concerns about health care and social support for transgender children make for a potent wedge issue. After all, it has all the hallmarks of an effective culture war hot button: It involves strange new social and medical practices and unfamiliar ways of life, and children are sometimes concerned. But it’s not working the way conservatives expected.The end of Roe has reversed the tides of the culture war. The right has now lost it by winning the biggest victory of all. State legislatures across the country are enacting draconian abortion bans that are producing predictably tragic outcomes. Americans don’t have to imagine what the right will do with its power over women’s lives because we see it in every headline about women risking death because a doctor is too scared of running afoul of an anti-abortion law to provide a necessary medical procedure. It has become blindingly obvious what happens when Republicans legislate what Americans do with their sex organs. And voters, understandably, don’t like what they see.For years even before the fall of Roe, conservatives have used hard-edge anti-trans messaging in both red and swing state races, only to come up short. They tried it in North Carolina’s 2016 governor’s race, in the aftermath of a controversial bill requiring people to use the bathroom associated with their sex assigned at birth. The Democrat, Roy Cooper, won despite a hail of anti-trans ads. They tried it against Andy Beshear, the Democratic candidate for governor in deep-red Kentucky in 2019, and failed. In 2022, G.O.P. candidates tried to use L.G.B.T. issues as a wedge in races in swing states from the Midwest to the Sunbelt to New England. The data suggest that opposition to trans rights cannot overcome — or possibly even make a dent in — the advantage that comes to Democrats in swing states for supporting abortion rights. It’s not even close.“Transphobia was, and is, the dog that couldn’t hunt,” wrote the anonymous but eerily prescient polling analyst who writes a Substack newsletter under the name Ettingermentum.Wisconsin was the most recent example of this failure. The American Principles Project, a Virginia organization that is a driving force behind the harsh anti-transgender laws sweeping red states, spent almost $800,000 on ads supporting Kelly in the State Supreme Court race, according to Wisconsin Watch. A video paid for by the organization’s PAC accompanied text messages that described his liberal opponent, Judge Janet Protasiewicz, as “endorsed by all the woke activists that are stripping parents of their rights in Wisconsin schools and forcing transgenderism down our throats,” Wisconsin Watch reported.In one mendacious video advertisement the narrator claims that a 12-year-old was medically transitioned without parental consent. The video shows images of surgical scarring and implies that this child underwent surgery at the behest of school officials. This is absolutely false. The child in question merely changed their name and pronouns.But any hopes that this messaging would drive swing voters seems to have fallen flat. Indeed, the margin of victory in Wisconsin exceeded predictions. Joe Biden won the state by just 20,000 votes in 2020. Protasiewicz won by 200,000.The failure of anti-trans messaging as a wedge issue may seem surprising because the Democratic Party really does seem to have a problem when it comes to parents and schools. Resentment over Democrats’ support for school closures during the pandemic has become a liability for the party among educated suburbanites, as the 2021 governor’s race in Virginia demonstrated.But Republicans seem to be making the grave error of assuming that someone angry about school closures in the fall of 2021 is a potential conscript in their war today against drag queens and trans people. So far there appears to be little appetite among swing-state voters for laws that could — if our worst fears are realized — allow school officials to demand inspections of their child’s genitals before soccer matches and swim meets. Besides, there’s a far more urgent issue when it comes to students’ safety: In a country where child shooting deaths went up 50 percent from 2019 to 2021, who would trust their children to the political party that opposes gun regulation?There is no doubt that attitudes about gender are changing quickly, and changing especially quickly among young people. But it’s hard to draw firm conclusions about how Americans really feel about this. In a Pew poll last June, a large majority of respondents said they favor legal protections for trans people from discrimination in jobs, housing and public spaces. Other findings suggest unease: 43 percent said gender identity norms were changing too quickly. Majorities support requiring athletes to compete as their sex assigned at birth. Depressingly, 46 percent said they supported criminalizing gender-affirming care for minors.But one finding from that same poll stood out to me: 68 percent of respondents aren’t paying close attention to the trans bills popping up across the country, and three-quarters of self-identified moderates said they weren’t following the issue closely. But that doesn’t mean they are interested in restrictive or repressive laws, much less willing to vote on the basis of support for such policies.Of course, this lack of attention can cut both ways. Voters who aren’t paying attention to the issue are unlikely to be drawn to the polls to vote against a transgender care ban, either. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, presumed to be a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, has been able to defy post-Roe gravity and increase his support despite prosecuting an aggressive culture war campaign against queer people. It remains to be seen how this would play out in a presidential election, which would run smack into swing states that have recently rejected in statewide elections both anti-abortion and anti-trans candidates.Democrats — and all Americans — should support the rights of all queer people, not just for electoral advantage but as a matter of principle. There is a clear line from the fight over bodily autonomy in reproductive rights to the fight for access to medical care for trans people. It’s a matter of dignity, too. Trans rights, much like abortion, present a profound challenge to the gender binary, which upholds the world’s oldest and most persistent hierarchy. People who don’t want to or cannot fit within their traditionally prescribed roles — mother, father, woman, man, boy, girl — increasingly have the freedom to live their lives beyond those circumscribed identities.The right has responded to this flowering of freedom with a barrage of repression. In states where Republicans have an ironclad grip on power, they have been incredibly successful. There are hundreds of bills passed or pending that vary in their intrusion on personal liberty but share the goal of giving right-wing politicians the power to control the bodies of citizens through law. On Thursday, this frenzy reached cruel new heights when the attorney general of Missouri issued new emergency rules that put up steep barriers to transgender care, not just for children but also for adults. These barriers could amount to a virtual ban on gender-affirming care for most transgender people in the state.In the face of this onslaught, some centrists seem determined to keep flirting with trans skepticism. It is easy to see why trans issues have become the place for certain centrists to try to perform their moderation — queer people have served this purpose for decades. While other forms of open bigotry became taboo, homophobia and the view that queer people’s rights were a marginal concern has persisted. It has happened before. Bill Clinton heavily courted the gay vote to win the presidency in 1992, only to turn around and sign into law two odious policies: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act. Clinton has since rent his garments over his regrets, but the fact remains that he enshrined discrimination against queer people into federal law.Republicans like to say they are the party of common sense. But what they seem to have forgotten is the commonest sense of all: Most people do not want the government making personal decisions for them. People want to control their own bodies. People want the freedom to decide when and how to form families. Suddenly, after years of pointing fingers at the left for so-called cultural totalitarianism, Republicans have now decisively revealed themselves to be the “jackbooted thugs” wanting details on your teenage daughter’s menstrual cycle. It’s hard to imagine a less appealing message to swing voters than that.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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    After His Arraignment, Trump Lashes Out

    More from our inbox:‘A Great Day for Liberals’ in Wisconsin and ChicagoA Renewed Interest in Freudian PsychoanalysisLos cargos contra Trump representan la culminación de una investigación de casi cinco años de duración.Dave Sanders para The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Trump Charged With 34 Felonies” (front page, April 5):After Judge Juan M. Merchan warned at Donald Trump’s arraignment that all parties must refrain from making statements about the case with the potential to incite violence and civil unrest, what does the former president who can’t keep his mouth shut do during his speech a few hours later?He says hateful things about Judge Merchan and his family, and vilifies District Attorney Alvin Bragg, District Attorney Fani Willis in Georgia and the special counsel Jack Smith.And one of the former president’s sons put a photograph of Judge Merchan’s daughter on social media — a clear invitation to violence.It’s time for the former president to be gagged. And when he speaks out with hateful words again, a contempt order and jail time may put a sock in his mouth. About time.Gail ShorrWilmette, Ill.To the Editor:Crowd size has always been important to Donald Trump. It is the metric he uses, along with TV ratings, to measure his impact, to gauge his popularity, to feed his ego.The crowd that showed up Tuesday at his arraignment was hardly composed overwhelmingly of Trump supporters. It looked as if the media and anti-Trump people more than countered his base.No matter how Mr. Trump spins it, no matter how many times at his future rallies he proclaims an overwhelming showing of support in New York City, the camera doesn’t lie.It was good to see him cut down to size Tuesday. For the first time in his adult life he could not control the narrative. He called for a massive protest, he predicted “death and destruction” if he was charged, and he got neither.Len DiSesaDresher, Pa.To the Editor:The April 5 front-page headline “Even as Biden Has Oval Office, Predecessor Has the Spotlight” is a statement that is true only because your newspaper and other media outlets allow Donald Trump to occupy center stage.This behavior of the media has been mentioned many times before, and many believe that the tens of millions of dollars’ worth of free publicity provided to Mr. Trump during the 2016 campaign contributed to his winning the election.It is now 2023 and we are facing an election that could well decide the future of America. I am therefore requesting that The Times stop paying so much attention to Mr. Trump (we’ve heard everything he has to say many times before) effective immediately.David SommersKensington, Md.To the Editor:I felt a real jolt seeing the photo of former President Donald Trump seated at the table in a Manhattan courtroom. It was the jolt of the norms of American justice falling back into alignment.Christopher HermanWashington‘A Great Day for Liberals’ in Wisconsin and ChicagoJanet Protasiewicz, the liberal candidate in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election, during her election night party in Milwaukee on Tuesday. She ran on her open support of abortion rights.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Liberal Wins Wisconsin Court Race, in Victory for Abortion Rights Backers” (news article, April 5):While New York and the nation were fixated on the circus that was Donald Trump’s arraignment, a special election was held in Wisconsin that decided whether conservatives or liberals would control that state’s Supreme Court. Janet Protasiewicz, a Milwaukee County judge, won the race and gave liberals control of the highest court in Wisconsin.Wisconsin is an important swing state, and this new balance of power in the court will have dramatic effects on abortion rights, potential election interference and how election districts are drawn. Conservatives, who have had control of the Supreme Court, will no longer be able to gerrymander voting districts to favor Republicans, nor will they be able to successfully challenge the results of a free and fair election.While this is only one state, we may see similar results in other swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and, yes, even Texas. Donald Trump is to Democrats the gift that just keeps on giving.Henry A. LowensteinNew YorkTo the Editor:Three news stories from your newspaper indicate that Tuesday was a great day for liberals and progressives: “Trump Charged With 34 Felonies,” “Liberal Wins Wisconsin Court Race, in Victory for Abortion Rights Backers” and “Rejecting a ‘Republican in Disguise,’ Chicago Voters Elect Johnson as Next Mayor.”While conservative Republicans are obsessed with culture wars and MAGA, progressives are making political headway. Let’s hope that we continue on this march to liberalism till our nation is free from prejudices, curbs on reproductive and gender freedoms, relentless gun-related violence, etc.Michael HadjiargyrouCenterport, N.Y.A Renewed Interest in Freudian Psychoanalysis Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Renstrom for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Back to the Couch With Freud” (Sunday Styles, March 26):It is true that people “see what they want in Freud.” Thus, a younger generation might think Freud “gay friendly” because a 1935 letter declared, “Homosexuality is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation.”However, the article omits that Freud went on to describe homosexuality in that same letter as an “arrest of sexual development.”Freud’s theory that gay people suffered from psychological stunted growth rationalized many decades of discrimination in which openly gay men and women were refused psychoanalytic training because they were “developmentally arrested.” Only in 1991 did the American Psychoanalytic Association change its policies refusing admission to gay candidates.I am glad that Freud is having a renaissance. However, any reading or interpretation of his work should not ignore the historical context in which he lived and the ways, for better or worse, in which some of his theories have been used to discriminate.Jack DrescherNew YorkThe writer, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, is the author of “Psychoanalytic Therapy and the Gay Man.”To the Editor:I was pleased to see New York Times coverage of the “Freudaissance,” which I have been a joyful participant in for more than a decade now, both personally and professionally.One of the understandings I have come to, having spent countless hours on both sides of the proverbial couch, in both psychoanalytic and cognitive behavioral contexts, is that these two approaches do not really diverge from each other as much as many tend to assume that they do.I see the C.B.T. founder Aaron Beck’s three levels of cognition (automatic thoughts, core beliefs and cognitive schemas) mapping neatly onto Freud’s topographical model of the mind (the conscious, preconscious and unconscious, respectively).And I see the dialectic behavioral therapy founder Marsha Linehan’s construct of the “wise mind” as an integration of the rational and emotional minds matching Freud’s structural model of the ego as a synthesis of superego and id.Different terms resonate differently in different generations and with different individuals, but rather than disproving or undermining Freud’s theories, I see today’s evidence-based approaches as indications that the father of modern psychology was apparently onto something more than a century ago.Rachel N. WynerWest Hempstead, N.Y.The writer is a clinical psychologist. More

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

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

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    Your Thursday Briefing: Key Meetings for Biden and Putin

    Also, another deadly Israeli raid in the West Bank and South Korea’s fight over L.G.B.T.Q. rights.In this photograph, provided by Russian state media, President Vladimir Putin meets with China’s top foreign policy official at the Kremlin.Anton Novoderezhkin/Sputnik, via ReutersBiden and Putin build up alliancesPresident Biden met with leaders from NATO’s eastern flank in Warsaw, while President Vladimir Putin welcomed China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, in Moscow. As Russia’s war in Ukraine appears set to drag on, both are trying to shore up allegiances.Biden reminded Eastern European leaders that they know “what’s at stake in this conflict, not just for Ukraine, but for the freedom of democracies throughout Europe and around the world.” He vowed to defend America’s NATO allies, which are most at risk from Russia’s aggression.In his talks with Wang, Putin noted that President Xi Jinping of China was expected to visit Russia, but indicated that the meeting had yet to be confirmed. The Kremlin is working to keep China in Russia’s corner amid a flurry of diplomacy across Europe by Beijing. The threat of U.S. sanctions looms if China were to increase its economic support for Russia.A pro-war rally: Putin told a crowd of tens of thousands of people gathered at a Moscow stadium that “there is a battle underway on our historical borders, for our people.” It was probably the most public celebration of war that Russia has mounted since the invasion.The battleground: A barrage of Russian missiles struck Kharkiv, in northeastern Ukraine, and nearly a dozen explosions were reported overnight in Russian-held territory, including in Mariupol, which suggests that Ukraine has increased attacks on Russian positions deep behind the front lines.The aftermath of clashes in the West Bank city of Nablus.Majdi Mohammed/Associated Press10 Palestinians killed in Israeli raidPalestinian officials said at least 10 Palestinians were killed and more than 100 others wounded in an hourslong gun battle between Israeli security forces and armed Palestinian groups in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The region is bracing for more unrest.Israel’s military said that the rare daytime firefight occurred during an operation to arrest Palestinian gunmen in Nablus. Six of the dead were fighters, several armed Palestinian groups said. But four had no known affiliation with any armed faction. Videos circulating on social media seemed to show that at least two people were shot with their backs to gunfire.Palestinian officials say this has been the deadliest start to a year for Palestinians in the West Bank since 2000, prompting comparisons with the Palestinian insurgency known as the second intifada. Nearly 60 Palestinians have been killed so far.The State of the WarBiden’s Kyiv Visit: President Biden traveled covertly to the besieged Ukrainian capital, hoping to demonstrate American resolve and boost shellshocked Ukrainians. But the trip was also the first of several direct challenges to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.Contrasting Narratives: In sharply opposed speeches, Mr. Biden said Mr. Putin bore sole responsibility for the war, while Mr. Putin said Russia had invaded in self-defense. But they agreed the war would not end soon.Nuclear Treaty: Mr. Putin announced that Russia would suspend its participation in the New START nuclear arms control treaty — the last major such agreement remaining with the United States.In the North: A different sort of war game is playing out in northern Ukraine, where Russian shelling is tying up thousands of Ukrainian troops that might otherwise defend against attacks farther south.A heavy toll: Palestinians say there’s an increased readiness among Israeli soldiers to shoot to kill. Israelis attribute the high death toll to a proliferation of guns and an increased readiness among Palestinians to fire instead of surrendering. Analysts said the timing of the raids — during the day instead of during the night, when the army usually conducts its operations — was a factor. During the day, residents are more likely to get caught in the crossfire or join the clashes.A Pride event in Seoul last year.Anthony Wallace/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSouth Korea’s stalled same-sex equality billL.G.B.T.Q. people in South Korea got a welcome victory this week when a court ordered the national health insurance service to provide spousal coverage to same-sex couples. But a broader bill that aims to prevent discrimination against sexual minorities is being blocked in the National Assembly.The Anti-Discrimination Act, which was first introduced decades ago, has faced tough opposition from a powerful Christian conservative lobby, despite the growing social acceptance of sexual minorities in South Korea. Opponents of the bill say their ranks are growing. They have prayed in public against the bill, flooded politicians’ phones with texts and persuaded school boards to remove books with transgender characters from libraries.Public support: A recent Gallup poll found that about 57 percent of adults in South Korea were in favor of the broader bill. Supporters see the failure to pass it as an example of how laws are out of step with the times.Region: Legislation recognizing same-sex equality has found support in other Asian countries. In Thailand, a law protecting queer rights took effect in 2015. In Taiwan, discrimination against sexual minorities has been illegal for about 15 years.THE LATEST NEWSAsia PacificThe chip maker announced the factory expansion in December.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesA Taiwanese computer chip giant’s $40 billion investment in an Arizona factory has stoked apprehension among employees.The disappearance of Bao Fan, a deal maker in China’s tech industry, threatens to upend Beijing’s promise to support private enterprise, our columnist Li Yuan writes.A U.S. judge rejected a bid by families of Sept. 11 victims to seize $3.5 billion in frozen Afghan funds as compensation for their losses.Around the WorldA British court upheld a ruling that stripped a woman of her citizenship after she left the country to join ISIS in Syria as a teenager.The U.S. government could run out of cash by summer if it doesn’t raise the debt limit, according to a new estimate.Nearly all of the U.S. is experiencing ice, snow or unseasonably warm temperatures this week. Air travel has been disrupted.An alligator killed an 85-year-old woman on a walk with her dog in Florida.Science NewsNew research shows that PFAS compounds, linked to cancer, are turning up in wild animal species around the world.In people with advanced H.I.V., mpox has a death rate of about 15 percent, researchers reported.Scientists say a drought in Argentina last year was not directly caused by climate change, but global warming was a factor in the extreme heat that made it worse.A Morning ReadNate Ryan for The New York TimesRaghavan Iyer has by some estimations taught more Americans how to cook Indian food than anyone else. For five years, he has been living with cancer. Now, in his final days, Iyer is building a database of comfort-food recipes, organized by cuisine and medical condition, for other terminally ill patients.He’s also getting ready for the release of his final book, an exploration of curry powder, which comes out next week.ARTS AND IDEASRam Charan, left, and N.T. Rama Rao Jr., dancing during “Naatu Naatu.”DVV EntertainmentHow a dance hit came together“Naatu Naatu,” from the Indian blockbuster “RRR,” is nominated for the Academy Award for best original song, a first for an Indian production.Set in 1920s colonial India, the film features “Naatu Naatu” in a scene where two friends square off against a British bully who wants to eject them from a lawn party. The director, S.S. Rajamouli, conceived the musical number as a kind of fight sequence, with fiery steps instead of punches. (You can watch it here.)The giddy choreography and propulsive rhythm draw from local traditions. The song’s composer used Indian skin drums called duffs, whose sound he compared to the traditional beats of folk songs celebrated in villages. In Telugu, the language of the film, “naatu” means “raw and rustic.”For more: Read our review of “RRR.”PLAY, WATCH, EATWhat to CookAndrew Scrivani for The New York TimesThese vegan banana cookies are a good breakfast treat.What to Read“Sink,” a memoir, recounts a Black boyhood in Philadelphia.What to Listen toSZA’s “SOS” is now the longest-running No. 1 album by a woman since Adele’s “25” seven years ago.Where to GoSki in Sälen, a snowy Swedish fairy tale.Now Time to PlayPlay the Mini Crossword, and here’s a clue: Cried (four letters).Here are the Wordle and the Spelling Bee.You can find all our puzzles here.That’s it for today’s briefing. See you next time. — AmeliaP.S. A.O. Scott, The Times’s longtime film critic, will move to the Book Review to write essays and reviews that grapple with literature, ideas and intellectual life.“The Daily” is about U.S. moves to legalize psychedelics as a medical treatment.We welcome your feedback. Please email thoughts and suggestions to briefing@nytimes.com. More

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    The Relentless Attack on Trans People Is an Attack on All of Us

    Over the past year, we have seen a sweeping and ferocious attack on the rights and dignity of transgender people across the country.In states led by Republicans, conservative lawmakers have introduced or passed dozens of laws that would give religious exemptions for discrimination against transgender people, prohibit the use of bathrooms consistent with their gender identity and limit access to gender-affirming care.In lashing out against L.G.B.T.Q. people, lawmakers in at least eight states have even gone as far as to introduce bans on “drag” performance that are so broad as to threaten the ability of gender nonconforming people simply to exist in public.Some of the most powerful Republicans in the country want to go even further. Donald Trump has promised to radically limit transgender rights if he is returned to the White House in 2024. In a special video address to supporters, he said he would push Congress to pass a national ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth and restrict Medicare and Medicaid funding for hospitals and medical professionals providing that care.He wants to target transgender adults as well. “I will sign a new executive order instructing every federal agency to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age,” Trump said. “I will ask Congress to pass a bill establishing that the only genders recognized by the United States government are male and female, and they are assigned at birth.”There is plenty to say about the reasoning and motivation for this attack — whether it comes from Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida or Gov. Greg Abbott in Texas — but the important thing to note, for now, is that it is a direct threat to the lives and livelihoods of transgender people. It’s the same for other L.G.B.T.Q. Americans, who once again find themselves in the cross-hairs of an aggressive movement of social conservatives who have become all the more emboldened in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last year.This is no accident. The attacks on transgender people and L.G.B.T.Q. rights are of a piece with the attack on abortion and reproductive rights. It is a singular assault on the bodily autonomy of all Americans, meant to uphold and reinforce traditional hierarchies of sex and gender.Politicians and those of us in the media alike tend to frame these conflicts as part of a “culture war,” which downplays their significance to our lives — not just as people living in the world, but as presumably equal citizens in a democracy.Democracy, remember, is not just a set of rules and institutions, but a way of life. In the democratic ideal, we meet each other in the public sphere as political and social equals, imbued with dignity and entitled to the same rights and privileges.I have referred to dignity twice now. That is intentional. Outside of certain select phrases (“the dignity of labor”), we don’t talk much about dignity in American politics, despite the fact that the demands of many different groups for dignity and respect in public life has been a driving force in American history since the beginning. To that point, one of the great theorists of dignity and democracy in the United States was none other than Frederick Douglass, whose experience in bondage gave him a lifelong preoccupation with the ways that dignity is either cultivated or denied.“Douglass observed,” the historian Nicholas Knowles Bromell writes in “The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass,” “that although dignity seems to be woven into human nature, it is also something one possesses to the degree that one is conscious of having it; and one’s own consciousness of having it depends in part on making others conscious of it. Others’ recognition of it then flows back and confirms one’s belief in having it, but conversely their refusal to recognize it has the opposite effect of weakening one’s confidence in one’s own dignity.”It is easy to see how this relates to chattel slavery, a totalizing system in which enslaved Black Americans struggled to assert their dignity and self-respect in the face of a political, social and economic order that sought to rob them of both. But Douglass explored this idea in other contexts as well.Writing after the Civil War on women’s suffrage, Douglass asked his readers to see the “plain” fact that “women themselves are divested of a large measure of their natural dignity by their exclusion from and participation in Government.” To “deny women her vote,” Douglass continued, “is to abridge her natural and social power, and to deprive her of a certain measure of respect.” A woman, he concluded, “loses in her own estimation by her enforced exclusion from the elective franchise just as slaves doubted their own fitness for freedom, from the fact of being looked down upon as fit only for slaves.”Similarly, in her analysis of Douglass’s political thought — published in the volume “African-American Political Thought: A Collected History” — the political theorist Sharon R. Krause shows how Douglass “clearly believed that slavery and prejudice can degrade an individual against his will” and generate, in his words, “poverty, ignorance and degradation.”Although Douglass never wrote a systematic account of his vision of democracy, Bromell contends that we can extrapolate such an account from the totality of his writing and activism. “A democracy,” Douglass’s work suggests, “is a polity that prizes human dignity,” Bromell writes. “It comes into existence when a group of persons agrees to acknowledge each other’s dignity, both informally, through mutually respectful comportment, and formally, through the establishment of political rights.” All of our freedoms, in Bromell’s account of Douglass, “are means toward the end of maintaining a political community in which all persons collaboratively produce their dignity.”The denial of dignity to one segment of the political community, then, threatens the dignity of all. This was true for Douglass and his time — it inspired his support for women’s suffrage and his opposition to the Chinese Exclusion Act — and it is true for us and ours as well. To deny equal respect and dignity to any part of the citizenry is to place the entire country on the road to tiered citizenship and limited rights, to liberty for some and hierarchy for the rest.Put plainly, the attack on the dignity of transgender Americans is an attack on the dignity of all Americans. And like the battles for abortion rights and bodily autonomy, the stakes of the fight for the rights and dignity of transgender people are high for all of us. There is no world in which their freedom is suppressed and yours is sustained.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