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      The Politics of Fear Show No Sign of Abating

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      “The story of the 21st century is less a story about exponential population growth than it is a story about differential growth — marked by a stark divide between the world’s richest and poorest countries,” Jennifer Sciubba, a professor of international studies at Rhodes College, writes in her new book, “8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death and Migration Shape Our World.”In some regions, Sciubba continues,Population pressures are blowing the top off of a pot already boiling with poor governance, civil war and environmental destruction. At best, there’s only dim hope for a peaceful future. When the pot boils over, countries across the globe feel the effects in the form of refugees and terrorist extremism.The resulting turmoil is empowering the ethnonationalist right — propelling Viktor Orban’s re-election to a fourth term on April 3 in Hungary and Marine Le Pen’s 41.5 percent showing in the April 24 French presidential election. In the United States, immigration has become a primary driver of the polarization between Republican and Democratic voters, crucial to Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and his continuing lead in the polls for the 2024 presidential nomination.As far back as 2006, David Coleman, a professor of demography at Oxford, described what he called a “third demographic transition” in “Immigration and Ethnic Change in Low-Fertility Countries”:A third demographic transition is underway in Europe and the United States. The ancestry of some national populations is being radically and permanently altered by high levels of immigration of persons from remote geographic origins or with distinctive ethnic and racial ancestry, in combination with persistent sub-replacement fertility and accelerated levels of emigration of the domestic population.Low fertility and high immigration, according to Coleman, “are significant because they are changing the composition of national populations and thereby the culture, physical appearance, social experiences and self-perceived identity of the inhabitants.”The British demographer Paul Morland, in an interview this year with the BBC, addressed the race issue head on in describing politically volatile population trends:The huge expansion in white populations we previously took for granted is now retreating, and historically majority-white countries are becoming much more diverse. Mass migration into Europe and America has changed the face of those continents, and identities will surely continue to shift in these nations over time. Toward the middle of the current century, the percentage of the U.S. population that belongs to minority groups is expected to be more than 50 percent, and that will surely have an impact. If you look at the ethnic makeup of Trump voters and his slim electoral victory, it’s clear he would not have been elected if America was less white.At the same time, Morland noted,Africa is about to have a huge population explosion — by 2100, there are very likely to be six or seven times as many Africans as Europeans. We’re in the middle of a massive shift in the global balance. The world is set to become much more African, and it will be very interesting to see how that will affect things.In his 2019 book, “The Human Tide,” Morland wrote: “If the biggest global news story of the last 40 years has been China’s economic growth, the biggest news story of the next 40 years will be Africa’s population growth.” It’s striking, Morland continues, “to realize that in the continent as a whole in 1950 there were far less than half as many people as there were in Europe. Today, Africa’s population is around a third larger than Europe’s and by 2100 it is likely to have quadrupled again, while Europe’s will have shrunk.”A graphic in Sciubba’s book illustrates the emergence of below-replacement fertility rates in Europe and North America — rates that have led to what my Times colleague Charles Blow has described as “white extinction anxiety.”Immigration, of course, does not engender only political responses. The psychological reaction to immigration — to the influx of new and unfamiliar populations — varies widely across the electorate.In a 2012 paper, “Tracing the threads: How five moral concerns (especially Purity) help explain culture war attitudes,” Spassena P. Koleva, Jesse Graham, Ravi Iyer, Peter H. Ditto and Jonathan Haidt argued thatindividuals who view illegal immigrants as weakening the U.S. economy (the socially conservative position) might also fear that immigrants will bring in dangerous and polluting foreign elements (Purity) and subvert American traditions and order (Authority).In an email to me, Ditto took this concept a step further:For some people immigration is conceived as akin to contamination, as allowing impure foreign elements into a sacred and pure “American” body politic — and those apprehensions about contamination drive their resistance to immigration — perhaps legal as much as illegal.But, Ditto cautioned, “this should not be taken to mean that these people view immigrants in a dehumanized way (as some kind of vermin) — that would be taking it too far. It is much more implicit than that — just a general valuation of purity and discomfort with contamination.”Along related lines, in 2014, Randy Thornhill, a professor of biology at the University of New Mexico, and Corey Fincher, of the Face Research Lab at the University of Glasgow, published “Democracy and Other Governmental Systems.” They develop a germ-related stress theory that in many respects complements Ditto’s emphasis on the crucial role of purity. “The psychological dimension of xenophobia, ethnocentrism, traditionalism, and authoritarianism,” Thornhill and Fincher contend, joins these features to pathogen-linked threat.Conversely, Thornhill and Fincher argue, “individualism (hence, liberalism), democracy, anti-authoritarianism, and women’s rights and freedom” are found more commonly in countries with relatively low health-related hazard.In an earlier paper, Fincher and Thornhill argued:In contemporary societies, collectivists and individualists differ significantly in their view of the social structure of the society in which they reside. Collectivists emphasize the boundary between in-group and out-group and are distrusting of and unwilling to contact out-group members; individualists make less distinction between in- and out-groups, and are more trusting of and show more willingness to contact out-groups.While it remains the subject of intense debate in academic circles, this line of argument has been gaining adherents.I asked Lene Aaroe, a professor of political science at Aarhus University in Denmark, about growing opposition to immigration, and she wrote back, first citing “two of the classical explanations” that underscore “concerns over cultural integration and competition over economic resources, respectively, as major drivers of attitudes on immigration.”She noted that in addition to these classical explanations there is “a growing line of research that emphasizes that psychological motivations for disease avoidance shape opposition to immigration. I have contributed actively to this line of work.”Aaroe described the premise of her research:That over human evolutionary history pathogens and infections have constituted a central threat to our species. In addition to the physiological immune system which fights infections once they have entered the body, our species has therefore evolved psychological motivations to help us avoid coming into contact with infections in the first place. These psychological mechanisms are typically referred to as the so-called behavioral immune system.These psychological mechanisms, according to Aaroe, “operate automatically at the unconscious level. They work through emotions of disgust and fear of disease and motivate people to respond with avoidance and distance-taking in the face of potential infection risk.” Aaroe noted that the fear of disease is often a misperception not based on reality but on a psychological trait prompting prejudicial judgments.In modern diverse and multicultural societies, Aaroe continued, “facial birthmarks, physical disabilities, or something as innocent as differences in skin color and ethnicity are subconsciously misinterpreted as cues of potential infection risk with skepticism and distance-taking as outcomes.”People vary in the sensitivity of their behavioral immune systems, Aaroe wrote, so “some are more prone to experience disgust in situations that involve potential infection risk (e.g. drinking from another person’s water bottle). Our cross-national research conducted in the United States and Denmark” — “The Behavioral Immune System Shapes Political Intuitions: Why and How Individual Differences in Disgust Sensitivity Underlie Opposition to Immigration” and “The Behavioral Immune System Shapes Partisan Preferences in Modern Democracies: Disgust Sensitivity Predicts Voting for Socially Conservative Parties” — “supports” the idea that “these individuals are also more likely to be skeptical toward immigration and to identify and vote for social conservative political parties that prioritize social conformity, order, and exclusionary policies toward out-groups and unfamiliar others.”Let’s take a look at some of the consequences of the line of reasoning developed by Ditto, Thornhill and Aaroe. Someone with an elevated fear of pathogens, who has more or less unconsciously translated that fear into opposition to immigration, may view liberals who want to open the nation’s doors as a threat to his or her health and, at the extreme, to his or her life.If this logic holds true, we have entered a new moral universe.Morteza Dehghani, a professor of psychology and computer science at the University of Southern California, emailed that he and his colleagues have found that “extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice against marginalized groups could be understood as morally motivated behaviors grounded in people’s moral values and perceptions of moral violations.”In a 2021 paper, “Investigating the role of group-based morality in extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice,” Joe Hoover, Mohammad Atari, Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Brendan Kennedy, Gwenyth Portillo-Wightman, Leigh Yeh and Dehghani concluded:Across five studies, ranging from geospatial analysis of 3,108 U.S. counties to social psychological experiments with over 2,200 participants, we found evidence that group-level moral concerns (i.e., loyalty, authority, and purity) are predictive of extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice even after controlling for county-level confounders, such as political ideology.The moral legitimization of violence is the focus of Alan Fiske, a professor of anthropology at U.C.L.A., and Tage Shakti Rai, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, in their 2014 book, “Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships.”They write that violence isconsidered to be the essence of evil: it is the prototype of immorality. But an examination of violent acts and practices across cultures and throughout history shows just the opposite. When people hurt or kill someone, they usually do so because they feel they ought to: they feel that it is morally right or even obligatory to be violent.Fiske and Rai argue that people “are morally motivated to do violence to create, conduct, protect, redress, terminate or mourn social relationships with the victim or with others. We call our theory virtuous violence theory.”Political conflict, scholars have found, can move into the zone of morally justified violence when elected officials and candidates focus their campaigns on grievance. As Ditto put it by email:When groups interact with each other, exchange things, this creates the potential for feelings of grievance to develop — they screwed us in some way. Once you feel that a group has wronged you or your group, then you are in moral territory.In a February 2021 paper, “Populism and the Social Psychology of Grievance,” Ditto and Cristian G. Rodriguez, a professor of psychology at the Universidad de los Andes, in Chile, write: “Populist political movements seek to gain power by leveraging feelings of grievance, a sense that ‘the people’ have been treated unfairly by ‘the elite.’” Evoking past grievance, they write, “has two clear collateral costs: it can be used to justify undemocratic means to gain political power, and its evocation risks initiating a self-escalating cycle of inter-factional political conflict.”As conflicts escalate, so do the perils of grievance politics:Feelings of grievance can lead people to feel licensed to abandon previous moral and procedural constraints. Although sometimes these constraints feel arguably bendable, abandoning other moral rules, such as adherence to democratic political tactics or prohibitions against violence, can be substantially more problematic. Research on highly contentious and moralized political environments has found them to foster an increased willingness to condone undemocratic means to achieve desired political ends, up to and including violence. In the U.S., partisan anger is associated with tolerance of cheating, lying and voter suppression as acceptable political tactics.I asked Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard, how partisanship can become moralized, legitimating opposition and even violence. He replied:Politics plays a tremendous role in this. It is politicians who give action to latent attitudes and can organize collective action or even harness the power of the state. For example, Trump supporters might have had a latent tendency to be opposed to immigration but when Trump comes along and tells them that we need to “build a wall,” this made them think that immigration must really be a problem and, so, this latent tendency is activated. Then, when the state gets involved in building this wall and aggressively enforcing immigration, it brings power and action to these tendencies.Hostility to immigration, Enos wrote,seems to be tightly related to a person’s larger worldview, so that a person that tends to be right-wing will also tend to have hostility to immigration and a person who is left-wing will tend to be more open. Scholars don’t agree on how to characterize the differences between these worldviews, but notice that much of the language used to describe the differences has implications for acceptance of immigrants — for example, people on the right are described as seeing the world as ‘threatening’ or having a ‘closed’ worldview.Peter Howley, a professor of behavioral economics at Leeds University, shared Enos’s view of the crucial role of closed- and open-mindedness. “Openness is strongly correlated with immigration attitudes,” he wrote in an email, “and our own research demonstrates how openness strongly moderates the relationship between inflows of migrants into one’s local area and the self-reported well-being of existing residents.”This openness, Howley continued,captures the degree to which people are attracted by novel stimuli and entails a preference for variety and new experiences. For people comparatively low on openness, demographic change and all it entails from exposure to new cuisine, music and amenities may be a daunting prospect, but for people with high scores on openness, demographic change offers the potential for exciting new experiences.The political scientists Christopher D. Johnston of Duke and Howard G. Lavine and Christopher M. Federico, both of the University of Minnesota, write in their book “Open Versus Closed”:As partisan conflict has been extended to cultural and lifestyle issues, engaged citizens have organized themselves into parties by personality, a process we refer to as “dispositional sorting.” In particular, those with “closed” personality traits have moved into the Republican column over the past few decades, and those with “open” traits have become Democrats. More generally, open citizens now take their economic policy cues from trusted elites on the cultural left, while closed citizens adopt the positions of those on the cultural right.The conflicts within this country reflect in miniature the global tensions of the 21st century. Sciubba puts the predicament in context in her introduction to a new collection of essays, “A Research Agenda for Political Demography.”At one extreme:In high- and middle-income countries, the most recent transition is to extremely low fertility and low mortality, leading to a shift in the composition of various age groups — far more elderly than youth and declining proportions of those in the middle ages. For the world’s most developed countries, national goals of economic growth of 2 percent or more are mismatched with shrinking populations — the idea of infinitely expanding economies is rubbing up against demographic reality. In some states with low fertility, immigration is eroding the advantages of longtime ethnic majorities and political tensions are high. Rising support for anti-immigrant far-right parties and populists, particularly in the U.S.A. and Europe, are demonstrations of the connection between demographics and politics.At the other extreme:In lower-income countries, fertility remains high, but declining mortality means that these populations are growing exponentially — a different transformation. Population density is increasing as the amount of available land stays constant and the number of people who inhabit it grows two- or threefold. Climate change is accelerating strains on the land itself, and economic forces like globalization are restructuring economies, often toward production for export, rather than for subsistence. Economic crises too often turn into civil conflict, which then pushes populations into new communities and across borders, and creates a new set of problems for both senders and receivers.By this reasoning, the prospect, globally, is for worsening conflict between rich and poor countries and between the rich and the poor within countries. In many respects, politics is about organizing fear. Democracies break down and republics dissolve when fear is used too often as a motivating tool, a partisan weapon. The issue now is whether the political system can begin to organize our fear of one another in a constructive fashion that resolves rather than exacerbates conflicts.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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      French Lessons for the Biden Administration

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      You probably breathed a deep sigh of relief when you heard that Emmanuel Macron trounced Marine Le Pen by a 17-point margin in Sunday’s French presidential election. A Le Pen victory would have been a boon to Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban and Steve Bannon and a disaster for NATO, Europe and France.The center held, thank God — because Macron governed from the center. He was hated by the far left and the far right and never entirely pleased those closer to the center. But he also became the first president to be re-elected in France in 20 years.There’s a lesson in that for the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress, especially when it comes to immigration.It has become an article of progressive faith in recent years that efforts to control immigration are presumptively racist.A border wall is “a monument to white supremacy,” according to a piece published in Bloomberg. The “remain in Mexico” policy is “racist, cruel and inhumane,” according to the Justice Action Center. An essay published by the Brookings Institution calls U.S. immigration policy “a classic, unappreciated example of structural racism.”It wasn’t long ago that Bernie Sanders was an avowed restrictionist on the view that immigration depresses working-class wages. Did that position make him a racist? The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, where I once worked, used to make the case for open borders with Mexico. Were we left-wing progressives? People of good will should be able to take different and nuanced views on immigration — and change their minds about it — without being tagged as morally deficient.But that’s no longer how it works in progressive circles. The results are policy choices that are bad for the country and worse for Democrats and are an unbidden gift to the far right.The issue is now acute with the Biden administration simultaneously seeking to end the Trump administration’s “remain in Mexico” policy in a case before the Supreme Court while accepting a recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to let the use of Title 42, which allowed border authorities to expel illegal immigrants as a public health measure, expire on May 23.There’s not much doubt as to what will happen if the administration gets its way: An already straining southern border will burst. In fiscal year 2020 there were 646,822 “enforcement actions” at the border. In 2021 the number was a little shy of two million. Without the authority of Title 42, under which 62 percent of expulsions took place in 2021, the number of migrants being released in the United States will increase drastically. You don’t have to be opposed to immigration as a general matter to have serious doubts about the administration’s course.Is there a practical and available legal alternative to regulating immigration through Title 42 enforcement? Where is the logic of ending Title 42 even as the administration seeks to extend mask mandates because the pandemic is far from over? Given housing shortages, how much capacity is there to absorb the next wave of migrants? Even if an overwhelming majority of migrants are merely seeking a better life, what system is there to find those with less honorable intentions?More to the point: What does the administration’s utter failure at effective control of the border say about its commitment to enforcing the rule of law?To raise such questions should be an invitation to propose balanced and practical immigration legislation and try to win over moderate Republicans. Instead it tends to invite cheap accusations of racism, along with policy paralysis in the White House. As Politico reported last week, some think the administration’s secret policy is to call for an end to Title 42 to satisfy progressives while crossing fingers that the courts continue it — which a federal judge did on Monday, at least temporarily.Leading from behind Trump-appointed judges is probably not what Americans elected Joe Biden to do.Which brings us back to the example of France. When Jean-Marie Le Pen made his first presidential bid on an anti-immigration platform in 1974, he took 0.75 percent of the ballot in the first round — fewer than 200,000 votes. When his daughter Marine ran on a similar platform this year, she took 41.5 percent in the second round, or more than 13 million. The Le Pens are thoroughgoing bigots.But decades of pretending that only bigots had worries about immigration only made their brand of politics stronger.As president, Macron tacked right on immigration — not to weaken France’s historic position as an open society, friendly to newcomers, but rather to save it. He has cracked down on some asylum seekers, demanded that immigrants learn French and get jobs and taken a hard line against Islamic separatism. But he’s also tried to make France a more welcoming place for legal immigration. The left thinks of him as Le Pen lite, the right as a feckless impostor. Maybe he’s both. Then again, he also saved France for the free world.Democrats could stand to brush up on their French.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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      Emmanuel Macron Defeats Marine Le Pen for Second Term as French President

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      The result was a relief to allies in Europe and Washington wary of a far-right challenger who was hostile to the European Union and NATO.PARIS — Emmanuel Macron won a second term as president of France, triumphing on Sunday over Marine Le Pen, his far-right challenger, after a campaign where his promise of stability prevailed over the temptation of an extremist lurch.Projections at the close of voting, which are generally reliable, showed Mr. Macron, a centrist, gaining 58.5 percent of the vote to Ms. Le Pen’s 41.5 percent. His victory was much narrower than in 2017, when the margin was 66.1 percent to 33.9 percent for Ms. Le Pen, but wider than appeared likely two weeks ago.Speaking to a crowd massed on the Champ de Mars in front of a twinkling Eiffel Tower, a solemn Mr. Macron said his was a victory for “a more independent France and a stronger Europe.” He added: “Our country is riddled with so many doubts, so many divisions. We will have to be strong, but nobody will be left by the side of the road.”Ms. Le Pen conceded defeat in her third attempt to become president, but bitterly criticized the “brutal and violent methods” of Mr. Macron, without explaining what she meant. She vowed to fight on to secure a large number of representatives in legislative elections in June, declaring that “French people have this evening shown their desire for a strong counter power to Emmanuel Macron.”Mr. Macron addressed supporters in front of the Eiffel Tower after his victory.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesAt a critical moment in Europe, with fighting raging in Ukraine after the Russian invasion, France rejected a candidate hostile to NATO, to the European Union, to the United States, and to its fundamental values that hold that no French citizens should be discriminated against because they are Muslim.Jean-Yves Le Drian, the foreign minister, said the result reflected “the mobilization of French people for the maintenance of their values and against a narrow vision of France.”The French do not generally love their presidents, and none had succeeded in being re-elected since 2002, let alone by a 17-point margin. Mr. Macron’s unusual achievement in securing five more years in power reflects his effective stewardship over the Covid-19 crisis, his rekindling of the economy, and his political agility in occupying the entire center of the political spectrum.Ms. Le Pen, softening her image if not her anti-immigrant nationalist program, rode a wave of alienation and disenchantment to bring the extreme right closer to power than at any time since 1944. Her National Rally party has joined the mainstream, even if at the last minute many French people clearly voted for Mr. Macron to ensure that France not succumb to the xenophobic vitriol of the darker passages of its history.Ms. Le Pen is a longtime sympathizer with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, whom she visited at the Kremlin during her last campaign in 2017. She would almost certainly have pursued policies that weakened the united allied front to save Ukraine from Russia’s assault; offered Mr. Putin a breach to exploit in Europe; and undermined the European Union, whose engine has always been a joint Franco-German commitment to it.Marine Le Pen conceded to Mr. Macron, but bitterly criticized his “brutal and violent methods” without explaining what she meant.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesIf Brexit was a blow to unity, a French nationalist quasi-exit, as set out in Ms. Le Pen’s proposals, would have left the European Union on life support. That, in turn, would have crippled an essential guarantor of peace on the continent in a volatile moment.Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, declared that Mr. Macron’s win was “a vote of confidence in Europe.” Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, congratulated the French leader and called France “one of our closest and most important allies.”Mr. Scholz and two other European leaders had taken the unusual step last week of making clear the importance of a vote against Ms. Le Pen in an opinion article in the daily newspaper Le Monde. The letter was a reflection of the anxiety in European capitals and Washington that preceded the vote.“It is the choice between a democratic candidate, who believes that France is stronger in a powerful and autonomous European Union, and a far-right candidate, who openly sides with those who attack our freedom and our democracy,” they wrote.Mr. Macron’s second victory felt different from his first. Five years ago, he was a 39-year-old wunderkind bursting on the French political scene with a promise to bury sterile left-right divisions and build a more just, equal, open and dynamic society. He organized a massive celebration in the main courtyard of the Louvre to mark the dawn of a new political era in France.Sunday night, given the war in Europe, he asked for sobriety from his supporters. As Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” the European hymn, played (but much more softly than in 2017), he walked onto the Champ de Mars holding the hand of his wife, Brigitte. Children surrounded the couple; the choreography conveyed simplicity and humility.Supporters of Mr. Macron celebrated on the Champ de Mars.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesMr. Macron has often been criticized for an aloofness bordering on arrogance during his first term.“We avoided a certain form of violence. I am relieved,” said Eric Maus, 64, a Macron supporter. “But I feel like I am handing my daughter an uncertain world where the extreme right scores so high.”Mr. Macron succeeded in spurring growth, slashing unemployment and instilling a start-up tech culture, but was unable to address growing inequality or simmering anger among the alienated and the struggling in areas of urban blight and rural remoteness. Societal divisions sharpened as incomes stagnated, prices rose and factories moved abroad.As a result, Mr. Macron’s political capital is more limited, even if his clear victory has saved France from a dangerous tilt toward xenophobic nationalism and given him momentum ahead of the June legislative elections.Still, many of the 7.7 million voters who had supported the left-wing candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the first round of the presidential election on April 10 voted only reluctantly for Mr. Macron to keep Ms. Le Pen from power. Assina Channa, a Muslim of Algerian descent voting in the suburb of Saint-Denis north of Paris, said, “Nothing is going to change but I had no choice.”Ms. Le Pen had proposed a ban on the Muslim head scarf and has regularly equated Islam with violence in the country with the largest Muslim community in western Europe. “At least he doesn’t threaten us like she does,” Ms. Channa said.A polling station in Saint-Denis.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesMr. Macron acknowledged that “many of our compatriots voted for me today not to support my ideas but to form a dam against the extreme right.” He thanked them and said “I am now entrusted with their sense of duty, their attachment to the Republic and their respect for the differences expressed these past weeks.”Some 28 percent of the electorate abstained, three percentage points higher than in 2017, and it appeared that more than 13 million people had voted for Ms. Le Pen and the extreme right. “The anger and the disagreements that led my compatriots to vote for this project must also find an answer,” Mr. Macron said.It was a speech not of soaring rhetoric but of sober realism, almost at times contrition, reflecting his recognition of a starkly divided France and perhaps also his inattention to those for whom life has been hardest.The dreams of radical change of 2017 have been supplanted by fears of political confrontation over the summer, in part because the dislike of Mr. Macron among his opponents is strong, and in part because the legislative elections in June could result in a National Assembly less pliant to his will.Constantly adjusting his positions, extending the circle of his allies and refining his ideas, Mr. Macron has proved himself a consummate politician, suffocating any would-be moderate challengers. He engineered the near total demise of the center-left Socialist Party and the center-right Republicans, the two political forces at the heart of postwar French politics. It was a remarkable feat.Supporters of Mr. Macron celebrating in Paris on Sunday.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesBut there was a price to pay for all this. The old structure of French politics has collapsed, and it is less clear how the violent conflicts of society can be mediated.Those conflicts have become more acute as anger has grown in the parts of France that have felt neglected, even forgotten, by the elites in major cities. By addressing these concerns, and promising a series of tax cuts to help people cope with rising prices for gas and electricity, Ms. Le Pen built an effective campaign.Her message, for some voters, was that she would care for and protect them while their president seemed to have other concerns. But her nationalist message also resonated among people angered by undocumented immigrants entering the country and seeking scapegoats for the country’s problems.The president’s problems have reflected both his personality and political choices. His highly personalized top-down style of government owed more to Bonaparte than to the democratic opening he had said he would bring to the French presidential system. His attempts to force march Europe toward a vision of “strategic autonomy” backed by its own integrated military has met resistance in the countries like Poland that are most attached to America as a European power.Emerging from the moderate left of the political system, and supported by many Socialists five years ago, Mr. Macron veered to the right both in his initial economic policy and in a much-criticized decision to confront what he called “Islamist separatism” by shutting down several mosques and Islamic associations — often on flimsy legal grounds.He judged that he had more to gain on the right than to fear on the fragmented left of the political spectrum in a country whose psyche has been deeply marked by several Islamist terrorist attacks since 2015. In a sense, his victory proved him correct, the master of a broad web of adjustable allegiances that left his opponents floundering.Aida Alami More

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      Marine Le Pen’s Message Finds a Strong Audience in the North

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      HARDECOURT-AUX-BOIS, France — Marine Le Pen spent the last two days of her campaign in the deindustrialized, economically struggling areas in the north of France that, along with a Mediterranean stretch in the south, form her strongholds.Exhorting her core supporters to vote on Sunday, Ms. Le Pen held events in the Somme department, home to towns and villages where her attacks against her rival, Emmanuel Macron, as an “arrogant” president full of “disdain” for ordinary people resonated powerfully.“To me, Emmanuel Macron is a president who has made the rich richer,” said Gaëtan François, 40, a construction tractor operator and a village councilor, outside the City Hall in Hardecourt-aux-Bois. “Marine Le Pen is the only one to defend the workers.”In Hardecourt-aux-Bois, a village of 85 people in the Somme, only three people voted for Mr. Macron in the first round earlier this month. Ms. Le Pen got 78 percent of the votes, her highest score nationwide.The village, like the rest of the region, has drifted rightward in the past decade.Maurice Clément, 82, a retired truck driver, said he had voted for Socialists most of his life. In 2017, he voted for Ms. Le Pen in the first round, but for Mr. Macron in the runoff because he was worried about the extreme right.This time, he had no such worries. Mr. Macron’s policies, he said, had plunged France in a “hole,” citing the record government debt accumulated during his presidency. He was angry about Mr. Macron’s proposal to raise the retirement age to 65 from 62 as part of his plans to overhaul the pension system. For those who had done hard manual labor all their lives, retiring at 65 was the equivalent of retiring in “crutches,” he said.Ms. Le Pen, he said, “is the only choice.”About 24 miles away, Ham, a town of about 5,000 people, has also shifted rightward in recent years. In the 2012 presidential election, people in Ham voted like the rest of the nation by choosing François Hollande, the Socialist Party candidate, over the center-right Nicolas Sarkozy.But in 2017, Ham picked Ms. Le Pen over Mr. Macron. Ms. Le Pen won 56 percent of the votes in Ham, compared with only 34 percent nationwide.On Sunday, Ms. Le Pen was expected to handily defeat Mr. Macron in Ham once again. In the first round of voting two weeks ago, she had 41 percent of the votes, with Mr. Macron getting only 24 percent.Beyond Ms. Le Pen’s focus on the working class, her longstanding tough talk on crime and immigration appealed to voters like Hubert Bekaert, 68, a retired optician.“I’m sick of using taxpayer money to house terrorists in prison,” he said, adding that he wanted the death penalty restored. “Marine Le Pen is the only one who’s tough on crime.” More

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      Inside Le Pen Territory as France Votes in a Runoff Election

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      Whatever happens in the runoff election on Sunday, France has changed, and the winner may face a turbulent season.ST. RÉMY-SUR-AVRE, France — Eternal France, its villages gathered around church spires, its fields etched in a bright patchwork of green and rapeseed yellow, unfolds as if to offer reassurance in troubled times that some things do not change. But the presidential election on Sunday, an earthquake whatever its outcome, suggests otherwise.France has changed. It has eviscerated the center-left and center-right parties that were the chief vehicles of its postwar politics. It has split into three blocs: the hard left, an amorphous center gathered around President Emmanuel Macron, and the extreme right of Marine Le Pen.Above all, with Ms. Le Pen likely to get some 45 percent of the vote, it has buried a tenacious taboo. In a country that for four wartime years lived under the racist Nazi-puppet Vichy government, no xenophobic, nationalist leader would be allowed into the political mainstream, let alone be able to claim the highest office in the land.Unlikely to win, but well within the zone of a potential surprise, Ms. Le Pen has shattered all of that. She is no outlier. She is the new French normal. If Mr. Macron does edge to victory, as polls suggest, he will face a restive, fractured country, where hatred of him is not uncommon. The old nostrum that France is ungovernable may be tested again.In St. Rémy-sur-Avre, Ms. Le Pen took 37.2 percent of the vote in the first round of the election, pushing Mr. Macron into a distant second with 23.6 percent.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesSt. Rémy-sur-Avre, a small town of some 4,000 inhabitants about 60 miles west of Paris, is Le Pen territory. In the Maryland cafe, named for a cigarette brand that is no more, the prevailing view is that something has to give in a France that has lost its way under a president too privileged and remote to know anything of the burden of struggle.Customers buy lottery tickets, or bet on the harness racing on television, in the hope of unlikely relief from hardship. A kir, white wine with a little black current liqueur, is a popular morning drink. The streets are deserted; most stores have disappeared, crushed by the hypermarkets out on the highway. In this town, Ms. Le Pen took 37.2 percent of the vote in the first round of the election on April 10, pushing Mr. Macron into a distant second with 23.6 percent.Jean-Michel Gérard, 66, one of the kir drinkers, worked in the meat business from age 15, as a butcher, in slaughterhouses, or as a trucker hauling beef carcasses. But he had to stop at 60, when his knees gave out from regularly carrying several tons of meat a day on his back, the record being a single 465-pound rear of a bull.“Now we have a generation of slackers,” he said. “When I was young, if you did not work, you did not eat.”The old France of solidarity and fraternity had disappeared, he lamented, gone like the horse butchers where he started work and replaced by a new France of individualism, jealousy and indulgence.The old France of solidarity and fraternity has disappeared and been replaced by a new France of individualism, jealousy and indulgence, said Jean-Michel Gérard, who worked in the meat industry until a few years ago.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesHe voted for the left until François Mitterrand, the former Socialist president, imposed limits on work hours, and then switched his allegiance to the far-right National Front party, now Ms. Le Pen’s National Rally. What infuriated him, he said, was foreigners collecting social benefits and handouts without working.“We didn’t want to work less, we wanted to work more to earn more. What’s the use of free time without money?” he asked. “If foreigners work, they have their place. If not, no.”Mr. Gérard gazed out at the church. That jogged a memory. The other day, he said, he saw a young man from the Maghreb urinating on the church wall. He shouted at the man, who looked about 17. “What would you do if I urinated on a mosque?”The fraught relationship between France and Islam — in the country with the largest Muslim population in Western Europe and a recent history of terrorist attacks — has been one of the themes of the election campaign. Mr. Macron has called Ms. Le Pen’s program racist for wanting to make head scarves illegal on the grounds that they constitute a threatening “Islamist uniform” — on the face of it, an extraordinary claim, given that an overwhelming majority of Muslims in France just want to live peacefully.Muslims attending Friday Prayer this week at a mosque in an eastern suburb of Paris. The fraught relationship between France and Islam has been one of the themes of the election campaign.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times“If women are wearing them just for their religion, OK,” Mr. Gérard said, “but I think in general it’s a provocation.”Maryvonne Duché, another firm supporter of Ms. Le Pen, was seated at a table close by. She started work at 14 as a sales clerk, before spending 34 years on the production line at a nearby Philips electronics factory, which closed 12 years ago.“Apart from two pregnancies, I worked nonstop from age 14 to 60, and now I have a pension of 1,160 euros a month,” she said — or about $1,250. “It’s pathetic, with almost half going in rent, but Macron doesn’t care.”And Ms. Le Pen? “I don’t love her, but I will vote for her to get rid of Macron.”The view of Mr. Macron in this town was of near-universal disdain: a man with no respect for French people, removed from reality, so cerebral he has no idea of “real life,” insensitive to the everyday problems of many people, from a class that has “never changed a kid’s diaper,” in Mr. Gérard’s words.Ms. Le Pen, by contrast, is seen as someone who will protect people from the disruptive onslaught of the modern world.What to Know About France’s Presidential ElectionCard 1 of 4Heading to a runoff. More

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      Republicans Say, ‘Let Them Eat Hate’

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      So Donald Trump has endorsed J.D. Vance in the race for Ohio’s Republican Senate nomination. Will Trump’s nod tip the balance? I have no idea, and frankly I don’t care.Ohio’s G.O.P. primary has, after all, been a race to the bottom, with candidates seemingly competing to see who can be crasser, who can do the most to dumb down the debate. Vance insists that “what’s happening in Ukraine has nothing to do with our national security” and that we should focus instead on the threat from immigrants crossing our southern border. Josh Mandel, who has been leading in the polls, says that Ohio should be a “pro-God, pro-family, pro-Bitcoin state.” And so on. Any of these candidates would be a terrible senator, and it’s anyone’s guess who’d be worst.But the thing about Vance is that while these days he gives cynical opportunism a bad name, he didn’t always seem that way. In fact, not that long ago he seemed to offer some intellectual and maybe even moral heft. His 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” drew widespread and respectful attention, because it offered a personal take on a real and important problem: The unraveling of society in Appalachia and more broadly for a significant segment of the white working class.Yet neither Vance nor, as far as I can tell, any other notable figure in the Republican Party is advocating any real policies to address this problem. They’re happy to exploit white working-class resentment; but when it comes to doing anything to improve their supporters’ lives, their implicit slogan is, “Let them eat hate.”Let’s talk for a minute about the reality Vance was writing about back when many took him seriously.I still encounter people who imagine that social dysfunction is mainly a problem involving nonwhite residents of big cities. But that picture is decades out of date. The social problems that have festered in 21st-century America — notably large numbers of prime-age males not working and widespread “deaths of despair” from drugs, suicide and alcohol — have if anything fallen most heavily on rural and small-town whites, especially in parts of the heartland that have been left behind as a knowledge-centered economy increasingly favors high-education metropolitan areas.What can be done? Progressives want to see more social spending, especially on families with children; this would do a lot to improve people’s lives, although it’s less clear whether it would help revive declining communities.Back in 2016 Trump offered a different answer: protectionist trade policies that, he claimed, would revive industrial employment. The arithmetic on this claim never worked, and in practice Trump’s trade wars appear to have reduced the number of U.S. manufacturing jobs. But back then Trump was at least pretending to address a real issue.At this point, however, neither Trump nor any other important Republican is willing to go even that far. I’d say that G.O.P. campaigning in 2022 is all culture war, all the time, except that this would be giving Republicans too much credit. They aren’t fighting a real culture war, a conflict between rival views of what our society should look like; they’re riling up the base against phantasms, threats that don’t even exist.This isn’t hyperbole. I’m not just talking about things like the panic over critical race theory, although this has come to mean just about any mention of the role that slavery and discrimination have played in U.S. history. Florida is even rejecting many math textbooks, claiming that they include prohibited topics.That’s bad. But we’re seeing a growing focus on even more bizarre conspiracy theories, with frantic attacks on woke Disney, etc. And roughly half of self-identified Republicans believe that “top Democrats are involved in elite child sex-trafficking rings.”What people may not realize is that Vance’s anti-immigrant rhetoric is almost as detached from reality as QAnon-type theories about Democratic pedophiles. I mean, yes, undocumented immigrants do exist. But the idea that they pose a major threat to public order is a fantasy; indeed, the evidence suggests that they’re considerably more law-abiding than native-born Americans.And making the alleged insecurity of the southern border your signature campaign issue is especially bizarre if you’re running for office in Ohio, where immigrants make up only 4.8 percent of the population — around a third of the national average. (Almost 38 percent of the population of New York City, and 45 percent of its work force, is immigrant. It’s not exactly a dystopian hellhole.)But look, none of this is a mystery. Republicans are following an old playbook, one that would have been completely familiar to, say, czarist-era instigators of pogroms. When the people are suffering, you don’t try to solve their problems; instead, you distract them by giving them someone to hate.And history tells us that this tactic often works.As I said, I have no idea whether Trump’s endorsement of Vance will matter. What I do know is that the G.O.P. as a whole has turned to hate-based politics. And if you aren’t afraid, you aren’t paying attention.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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      Macron Sets Out to Build a ‘Dam’ Against Le Pen. Can It Hold?

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      After Sunday’s vote, when nearly a third of ballots went to the extreme right, a united front of mainstream voters looked more precarious than ever. PARIS — A day after Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader, emerged as his challenger for the final round of France’s presidential election in less than two weeks, President Emmanuel Macron immediately set about on Monday to build the “dam.”Dams are the mainstream French voters who, time and again, have put political differences aside in the second round and voted for anyone but a Le Pen in a so-called “Republican front” to deny the far right the presidency.But after Sunday’s first round, when 32 percent of French voters supported candidates on the extreme right — a record — the dam may be more precarious than ever.Mr. Macron, widely criticized for a listless campaign, moved quickly Monday to shore it up, directly challenging Ms. Le Pen and her party, the National Rally, in the economically depressed north where she dominated Sunday.In Denain, a city won by Ms. Le Pen, Mr. Macron spoke of the worries of the youth in Denain and other social issues. He tried to remind voters of the extremist roots of Ms. Le Pen’s party, referring to it by its old name, the National Front.At a campaign stop of her own in a rural area, Yonne, Ms. Le Pen said that the dam was a dishonest strategy to win an election, adding that “it’s a way to save yourself when you don’t deserve it.’’In a triumphant speech against the majestic backdrop of the Louvre Museum five years ago, Mr. Macron had launched his presidency by pledging to unite the French so that there would be “no reason at all to vote for the extremes.’’But in addition to Ms. Le Pen’s second-place finish, with 23 percent of the vote, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leftist veteran, won 22 percent of Sunday’s votes to finish a strong third. Mr. Mélenchon’s supporters — split in their attitudes toward Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen — could now help determine the election’s final outcome on April 24.Outside a small market in Amiens, France, in March. Mr. Macron quickly moved Monday to challenge Ms. Le Pen in the economically depressed north where he lost to her even in Amiens, his hometown.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesAfter five years of Mr. Macron, who trounced Ms. Le Pen in the 2017 runoff, the far-right leader emerged stronger than ever. She has softened her image in a successful process of “undemonizing’’ and focused relentlessly on ordinary voters’ economic hardship.In Yonne, Ms. Le Pen hammered away at the themes that carried her through to the second round. Meeting with a cereal farmer, she spoke of how rising prices of fuel and fertilizers following the war in Ukraine would raise the cost of staples at supermarkets and hurt the most vulnerable.The far right’s record performance on Sunday resulted from a combination of factors, including Ms. Le Pen’s own efforts to revamp her image, a successful cultural battle waged by conservative forces in recent years, and a series of Islamist attacks in France since 2015. But critics say that it also reflected Mr. Macron’s continued strategy of triangulating France’s electoral landscape. While Mr. Macron was regarded as a center-left candidate five years ago, he shifted rightward during his presidency, sensing that his main challenge would come from Ms. Le Pen. That shift was embodied by a series of laws toughening France’s stance on immigration, empowering the police, and combating Islamist extremism. Many working French also felt that his economic policies unfairly favored the rich and have left them more adrift.If Mr. Macron’s intention was to defuse Ms. Le Pen’s appeal by stripping her of her core issues, critics say the approach backfired by ushering the talking points of the far right deeper into the mainstream political debate. Then, Ms. Le Pen also shifted her message to pocketbook issues that have now resonated even more broadly as energy prices spike because of the war in Ukraine.Sacha Houlié, a lawmaker and a spokesman for Mr. Macron’s campaign, said that the president was aiming to strengthen the dam strategy. He acknowledged that there have been “some mistakes” and “blunders,” noting that some government ministers had picked up themes and expressions promoted by the far right. Supporters of Ms. Le Pen singing the national anthem at her rally after voting results were announced on Sunday. Mr. Macron has described the far-right leader as a danger to French democracy.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesBut Mr. Houlié denied that Mr. Macron had normalized far-right ideas, saying his government had mainly tried to respond to people’s growing concerns on crime and immigration. “We cannot sweep the dust under the carpet,” he said, referring to the issues. But many, especially Mr. Mélenchon’s supporters of the left, feel so betrayed that Mr. Macron may have a harder time in this next election persuading them to join his call for unity by building a dam against Ms. Le Pen, whom the president has called a danger to democracy. Alexis Lévrier, a historian who has written about Mr. Macron’s relations with the news media, said that as Mr. Macron tried to reshape French politics around a strict divide between his mainstream movement and Ms. Le Pen, he “contributed to the rise in power of the far right.” Unwittingly, “he’s a pyromaniac firefighter,” Mr. Lévrier said.A resident of Guyancourt — a well-off, left-leaning city southwest of Paris where Mr. Mélenchon came in first Sunday — Stéphanie Noury said that, in 2017, she gave Mr. Macron her vote as part of a dam against the far right. But this time, she planned to stay home for the final round.“Macron played into the hands of the extreme right,’’ said Ms. Noury, 55, a human resources manager who voted Sunday for Mr. Mélenchon. “He told himself that he would always win against the extreme right.’’Compared to 2017, Ms. Le Pen’s share of the first-round vote went up by a couple of percentage points despite the direct challenge of a new rival, the far-right TV pundit Éric Zemmour, who urged his supporters to vote for Ms. Le Pen in the upcoming showdown.On Sunday, Ms. Le Pen, Mr. Zemmour and a third far-right candidate, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, together got 32 percent of the vote. In 2017, Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Dupont-Aignan collected 26 percent in the first round.Ms. Le Pen meeting supporters at a rally in Stiring-Wendel, France, on April 1. The far-right candidate has sought to soften her image.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesVoters first formed a dam against the extreme right in 2002 when Ms. Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, shocked the political establishment by making it into a runoff against Jacques Chirac. Another dam helped defeat Ms. Le Pen in 2017.To gain credibility on the right, in 2019, Mr. Macron gave his first long interview on the sensitive issues of immigration and Islam to Valeurs Actuelles, a magazine that straddles the right and far right.“By talking to us, Emmanuel Macron came to seek some legitimacy on these subjects, from right-wing people who felt he was doing nothing,” said Geoffroy Lejeune, the publication’s editor. “He knows that by doing this, he’s sending a big signal.” Aurélien Taché, a lawmaker once allied with Mr. Macron, said the president was elected in 2017 thanks to voters who put aside their political differences and united against Ms. Le Pen. He said Mr. Macron should have taken those votes — mainly from the left — into account in his policies afterward.“He did not consider them,” he said, adding that Mr. Macron instead worked to “set up this cleavage’’ between him and Ms. Le Pen, leading to a “high-risk rematch.”“There have been, on a whole range of topics, very strong concessions made to the far right,” Mr. Taché said, also citing tougher immigration rules and the application of a stricter version of French secularism, called laïcité.A migrant family waiting for emergency accommodation with a host family in front of the Paris City Hall last year. Some allies distanced themselves from Mr. Macron after he toughened his stance on immigration.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesBut Mr. Taché, who quit Mr. Macron’s party in 2020 over the president’s shift to the right, was especially critical of the government’s landmark law against separatism, which has been criticized inside and outside France, including by the U.S. envoy on international religious freedom. The law amounted to “making Islam and Muslims invisible,” Mr. Taché said. Some academics, political opponents and Muslim organizations have also criticized the law as discriminating against French Muslims by leading to the widespread closing of mosques, Muslim associations and schools.That resentment may now also complicate Mr. Macron’s dam-building effort. To be re-elected this time, for instance, he will have to persuade voters in places likes Trappes, a working-class city with a large Muslim population southwest of Paris, to join the dam against Ms. Le Pen. A longtime stronghold of Mélenchon supporters, Trappes strongly backed Mr. Macron in the 2017 runoff. But comments by voters Sunday suggested that the dam might not be as effective this time. Frédéric Renan, 47, a computer programmer, said he would abstain or cast a blank vote in a showdown between Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen.“Macron opened the door to the extreme right,’’ Mr. Renan said, adding that the president’s economic policies hurt the poor and fueled the rise of the far right. “I don’t see how voting for Macron is a vote in a dam against the extreme right,” he said. “Some people will say that not participating in the dam against the extreme right is irresponsible, that the threat of the extreme right is greater than what Emmanuel Macron proposes, but I’m not convinced.’’The Islamic Center of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines in Trappes, a Paris suburb, on Sunday. To be re-elected, Mr. Macron will need to woo voters in places likes Trappes, a working-class city with a large Muslim population.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesAdèle Cordonnier More

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      Is Trump the Democrats’ Secret Weapon?

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      Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. I was moved by Ketanji Brown Jackson’s remarks last week after her Senate confirmation: “In my family, it took just one generation to go from segregation to the Supreme Court.” What a ringing affirmation of what’s possible in the United States. And how depressing that only three Republican senators could bring themselves to vote for her, if only on the principle that every president deserves to get qualified nominees confirmed. Whatever happened to acknowledging the possibility that we can respect and admire people with whom we also disagree?Gail Collins: Bret, every time we converse, I get to experience that.Bret: Ditto.Gail: But you know what our politics have become. There are a lot of people to blame for the death of bipartisanship in judicial selection, but I’ll never forget Mitch McConnell refusing to bring multiple Barack Obama nominees up for a vote.Bret: I’ll resist the urge to dwell on Harry Reid’s filibustering of George W. Bush’s nominees. The larger question is how we go forward. I don’t think we can endure as a republic if no president of either party can even appoint judges or staff the executive branch unless he has a Senate majority, too. Your thoughts?Gail: I tend to resist the we-can’t-survive-this predictions — we’ve survived a heck of a lot, after all.Bret: Fair point. We defeated Germany twice. What’s one Ted Cruz, more or less?Gail: But this kind of perpetual partisanship certainly isn’t good for the country. I guess the world will be looking toward Alaska to see how the regular public is reacting — of the three Senate Republicans who voted to confirm Judge Jackson, Lisa Murkowski is the only one up for re-election this year.Bret: Murkowski also faces a primary challenge from a Donald Trump-endorsed Republican opponent, meaning that she showed real political courage in voting for Jackson. More than can be said for a bunch of G.O.P. senators who are retiring at the end of the year and could have usefully demonstrated some principle and independence.Gail: Murkowski aside, I suspect the Republican candidates this fall are going to be running on a generally Trumpist line, which will make things worse. Do you disagree?Bret: Not clear yet. Our news-side colleagues Shane Goldmacher and Jonathan Martin reported last month that some of the primary candidates Trump originally preferred — like the Senate candidate Mo Brooks in Alabama and the gubernatorial candidate David Perdue in Georgia — aren’t doing well in the polls. Trump is also getting crosswise with Republican incumbents in the governor’s office like Doug Ducey in Arizona and Pete Ricketts in Nebraska by opposing their favored candidates, or at least favoring ones they don’t like. If anything, Trump may turn out to be the Democrats’ secret weapon this fall by dividing the party or backing candidates who can’t win in the general election. That’s how Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock were able to win their Georgia Senate races the last time around.Gail: I noticed Trump went ahead and withdrew his support for Brooks, claiming he was outraged that Brooks said it was time to stop obsessing about the 2020 election and move on.Bret: Trump is like John Cleese’s Basil Fawlty character from “Fawlty Towers,” except in reverse: You must mention the war. Or at least the “stolen election.”Gail: Still, I bet Trump could have managed to overlook it if Brooks wasn’t also running way behind in the polls.Bret: We’ll see. Right now, the generic polling leans Republican, but it could change if the Supreme Court votes to overturn Roe v. Wade. It could change even further if Ukraine manages to defeat Russia with American help. What else do the Democrats need?Gail: The Democrats need to run on ways to make the country better. One is reducing health care costs, which would include cracking down on waste and government funding for expensive drugs like insulin. Another is reducing the deficit with a tax on the very rich.Bret: The administration seems to be taking your advice on both points, though I’m not sure it will help them all that much by November. I’d like to see them get ahead of a couple of looming surges that will play into G.O.P. hands: the expected migrant surge at the border; the big cost-of-living surge; and the next Covid surge. The last one is actually tied to the first: The administration can help moderate Democrats by extending something called Title 42 to expedite migrant expulsions as a health-emergency measure. As for inflation, how about a sales-tax holiday for necessities and other basic goods for the next 12 months?Gail: Here’s a proposed deal: a sales tax holiday for basics combined with a tax increase for the rich.Bret: I always oppose tax hikes, but that isn’t the worst bargain. How about the immigration issue? The administration doesn’t seem to know its own mind, according to a fascinating piece last weekend in The Times.Gail: Well, another way to think about it is that the administration knows there’s no good answer. Any immigration policy is going to be unpopular with one side or the other — except Biden’s very, very much appreciated halt to building that stupid Trump wall.Bret: A wall I have reluctantly come around to concluding should be built, even as we do more to increase legal immigration.Gail: Oh wow, Bret, you’ve gone over to the wall! Better than going over the wall, I guess, but still …Bret: Bet some of our readers are thinking, “Both things are possible.”A wall won’t stop people from coming here legally and then overstaying their visas. But it will save some of the most vulnerable migrants from taking terrible risks to cross the border while denying right-wing nativists one of their most potent political issues.Gail: And serve as a great symbol to the rest of the world that the days we celebrated our country as a nation of immigrants are long gone. Sigh.Bret: We are and should remain a nation of immigrants. Just lawfully arrived.Gail: It’s certainly important not to encourage illegal immigration. But it’s equally important — actually more important — to raise the number of immigrants we’re bringing into the country. Given the very low birthrate in America, we’ve got to attract all the willing workers we can.Bret: Totally agree on this. Countries that stagnate demographically will eventually stagnate economically. Our Hispanic population is incredibly talented, energetic and diverse, we’ve got plenty of room to grow, and we’re blessed to have Mexico — the country where I grew up — as a neighbor. Anyone who doubts me on this score should consider what it’s like for Ukraine to have Russia as a neighbor.The case I’d make to the administration is to set out three principles for immigration: that it should be lawful, that it should be safe and that it should be compassionate. They need to take care of the first point to guarantee the other two.Gail: No problem there, but there’s a long leap from a commitment to lawful, compassionate immigration and — oh, Lord, that wall. Sorry, still flummoxed. Let’s move on.Bret: The other big domestic story last week was the failure of the Justice Department to win its case against four men accused of conspiring to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. What do you make of it?Gail: Basically you’ve got a bunch of dopey right-wing guys venting about Governor Whitmer’s Covid restrictions and talking about kidnapping her. And some genuine question as to whether they’d have done anything more than posture over lunch at Buffalo Wild Wings if an F.B.I. informant hadn’t become one of their leaders.Bret: It’s a thin line between, um, entrapment and hate, to adapt an old lyric.Gail: This kind of case always poses the question of how far our investigators can go in exposing anti-government nut jobs. Imagine what it’s like to spend months — sometimes years! — pretending to be best pals with paranoid idiots.Bret: My wife and kids know the feeling.Gail: Sooner or later you may be tempted to push things along — and then maybe create a crime that would never have happened otherwise.I’m not an expert in this case, but I do appreciate how very careful the country needs to be in overseeing law enforcement.Any final thoughts on your end?Bret: Given how high-profile this case was, it’s a real black eye for the government and particularly the F.B.I. Bamboozling foolish people into potentially criminal behavior and then prosecuting them for it in a highly politicized way is the sort of thing that fuels precisely the kind of conspiracy thinking that these people were prey to in the first place.Gail: Meanwhile, I’ve been sort of obsessing about what would happen if Russian psycho-hackers managed to figure out a way to take our power grid offline. Imagining what that’d be like gives me the kind of chills I got as a kid in Catholic school when the nuns would spend hours warning us that the end of the world could arrive any day. Then we were supposed to go home and practice hiding in the basement with our parents.Bret: The good news is the Russians haven’t even been able to manage taking out the power grid in Ukraine, so they might have a harder time against us. Perhaps the end of the world isn’t nigh, after all?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