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      How the Price of Gas Became America’s Most Important Political Issue

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      President Biden knows the political power of the price of gasoline.About two weeks ago, fearing what an uptick in gas prices might do to Democrats at the ballot box in the midterms, Mr. Biden announced the release of 15 million barrels from the United States’ emergency petroleum stockpile in an effort to drive down prices. A gallon now costs $3.78 on average compared with $5.03 five months ago, but that is still higher than what Americans want to pay.To show he means business, Mr. Biden went a step further this week, calling on Congress to consider a windfall profits tax on oil companies, which are reaping record gains since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and a spike in oil prices. “It’s time for these companies to stop war profiteering,” Mr. Biden said.As he contemplates whether these measures will be enough to save his party on Tuesday, he seems to be recalling the early days of his political career. Mr. Biden entered the Senate in 1973, at the age of 30, just as the energy crisis of the 1970s was changing life as Americans had known it. In October of that year, in response to America’s support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War, OPEC’s Arab members imposed an embargo on the United States, sending prices soaring by more than sevenfold.To understand the consequences of this price hike, the young senator from Delaware hitched a ride on a 47,000-pound big rig hauling hollow-shell pipe for a 15-hour, 536-mile journey through five states. After talking to hundreds of angry truckers at a stop in Shiloh, Ohio, Mr. Biden was sympathetic. The winter storm he had just driven through was, he said, “nothing compared to the snow job truck drivers I met believe the government is handing them.”The energy situation would spell political trouble for President Richard Nixon, already deeply wounded by Watergate, as Americans blamed elected officials for their troubles. Millions of Americans were waiting in lines to fill up their tanks and feeling the pinch of higher prices on their family budgets. “What is worse than ‘Watergate’ and all the various charges against the president? Answer — the gas crisis in Bergen County,” a suburban New Jersey man wrote to his senator. “We the American People are tired of the lack of competent and effective leadership,” the Concerned Citizens of Maryland told Mr. Nixon.Jimmy Carter, then the governor of Georgia, accused his predecessors of “gross mismanagement” as he ran for president seeking to quell the energy crisis. But after his 1976 election, Mr. Carter wasn’t so lucky: A second oil shock struck in 1979, this one triggered by unrest in Iran. Prices soared again, up more than 1,000 percent since the start of the decade. “I’ll give it to you straight,” Mr. Carter said in 1979. “Each one of us will have to use less oil and pay more for it.”There was a “panic at the pumps,” as a New York service station representative called it at the time, leading to gas riots, violence, economic chaos and more. Long lines lasted for hours and soaring prices broke the dollar-a-gallon barrier, resulting in a sense of defeat and national decay. Americans are being “crucified on the cross of inflation,” a group of Chicago truckers said. “People are freaking out,” the California Energy Commission’s chairman said. No one came in for more blame than Mr. Carter. “Energy affects the life of every goddamn American, and most of them are mad at us,” a White House aide told Newsweek. “Energy is our Vietnam,” another official said.In 1980, Ronald Reagan defeated Mr. Carter — the first Democratic president of Mr. Biden’s political career — in a landslide.By the end of the 1970s, the price of a gallon of gasoline had become one of the most explosive issues in American political life. It still is. When presidents see gas prices tick up, they inevitably get a sick feeling in their stomachs. Rising gas prices tend to correlate with a decline in presidential approval ratings, which in turn erodes support for the incumbent party at the polls.In times of economic instability, gas prices are the most visible and easily understandable gauge of how the nation is faring: Outsize placards on every street corner and at every rest stop are a constant reminder for many citizens that times are tough, neon signs that shine projections of pocketbook pain down to the thousandth of a decimal. You don’t need to know much about macroeconomics or public policy to know that you’re being squeezed.America lives under the shadow of King Oil because our lives are organized around our cars and our cars run on gasoline.The roots of this dependence go back to before the 1970s oil shocks, to the postwar years when America’s economy boomed, thanks to cheap and plentiful gas. The country was building a massive system of interstate highways made possible by the 1956 Interstate Highway Act; developers erected single-family suburban homes that required a car trip just to pick up a pint of milk; the government failed to invest in mass transit. Gas stations competed with giveaways and free windshield washings. The drive-in movie theater and the drive-through restaurant had become icons of American culture. Cars grew and grew in size until they became living rooms on wheels. With their tail fins, luxurious interiors and powerful engines, cars were the embodiment of American freedom.Until they weren’t. “The great American ride is ending,” the title character in “Rabbit Is Rich,” John Updike’s iconic novel of late-’70s America, thinks to himself as he surveys his car lot. Instead of singing about the open road, Johnny Cash made commercials, paid for by oil companies, about the need to “drive slow and save gas.”Gas lines in Midtown Manhattan in May 1979.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAppeals to conservation went unheeded. Americans refused to consume less; we resisted developing new forms of energy. As a result, the nation was running in place. Americans wanted everything to be the same.By the time Mr. Reagan left office in 1989, there were over 30 million more cars on the road than there had been at the start of the energy crisis in 1973. And in spite of calls for energy independence, America got more and more of its oil from the Persian Gulf. It was not a surprise, then, that President George H.W. Bush, himself an oilman, launched a military operation in 1991, Operation Desert Storm, in response to Saddam Hussein’s attack on Kuwait. “We cannot allow any tyrant to practice economic blackmail,” he said.President Bill Clinton’s term did little to wean America off its oil addiction. During his administration, S.U.V.s, which were not subject to fuel efficiency standards, were coming to dominate the market. No wonder that in 2000, as gas prices spurted up, in advance of the election, Mr. Clinton released oil from the strategic reserve, a fail-safe created in the 1970s. His solution to higher prices was to flood the market with product rather than to stem demand, hoping to bolster the electoral prospects of Al Gore, his vice president and a passionate environmentalist.That story has continued to play out. In 2008, congressional Republicans attempted to lay the blame for record-high prices on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, calling it the “Pelosi Premium.” The strategy failed, given the collapse of the economy when George W. Bush was in the White House. But the effort reflected the political reality of prices at the pump, still the case today. The question is: How long can this last?Mr. Biden has watched as his party’s political fortunes have been driven by the ups and downs of energy prices since the early 1970s. Over those nearly 50 years he has undoubtedly discovered the tension at the heart of this: While politicians live and die in the short term, it’s only long-term policies that can offer an enduring solution.Gas prices are down now, but are they down enough to help his party next week? And will they stay down ahead of the 2024 presidential election? Those questions are most likely on the top of Mr. Biden’s mind.In 1981, when Mr. Reagan, soon after taking office, used his executive authority to get rid of the price controls on oil that had come into effect during the crisis, Mr. Biden objected. “We must continue to fight for more responsible energy economic policy,” he wrote in an op-ed. By that he meant a “permanent” windfall tax on oil companies, which at the time were reaping record profits. The taxes would pay for relief from the “excessive costs” of energy.In the 1970s, Democrats thought the oil hikes that followed war and revolution in the Middle East required an equally drastic political response: price controls, rationing and corporate profit caps. Today, with OPEC price hawks taking advantage of another war, polls suggest that Mr. Biden would see enormous political and electoral dividends by imposing temporary price and profit controls on the industry. Some economists, like the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, agree.So, too, do many members of Congress. “We know that big oil companies are exploiting Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to drive up prices at the pump for American families,” Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a Democrat, recently told me. “This sort of profiteering is unacceptable and we need to put a stop to it. A windfall profits tax would help us take on corporate power and deliver relief directly to families.”Now Mr. Biden is listening to the lessons of his long career. His release from the strategic petroleum reserve comes after a similar move nearly a year ago, followed up by a failed effort to get OPEC to increase its production and the jawboning of oil companies. “You should not be using your profits to buy back stock or for dividends,” the president said. “Not now. Not while a war is raging.” Instead, he said, “Bring down the price you charge at the pump.” Or else — as he told the companies this week.But just as he is trying to ease Americans’ pain, he also recognizes that the permanent solution comes from weaning ourselves off fossil fuels from foreign powers, like Russia and Saudi Arabia, that see oil as a geopolitical weapon. Even a young Joe Biden understood this: In the weeks after the 1973 Arab embargo, he was one of five senators who voted against the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and instead supported funding mass transit.What was never really on the table was using less gas and driving fewer cars. President Carter tried to solve the energy crisis, in part, with a famous prime-time speech asking the United States to change its wasteful, self-indulgent ways, as Americans were waiting in gas lines. It was a colossal failure. The installation of solar panels on the White House roof, when Mr. Carter promised that 20 percent of all energy would come from the sun and other renewable sources by 2000, also fell flat.Mr. Biden knows this. That’s why he has worked hard to make renewable alternatives a reality with the Inflation Reduction Act, a climate bill investing historic amounts into a green transition. And as much as he, like so many presidents, champions himself as a “car guy” who loves his 1967 Corvette Stingray, he has also celebrated recent pushes like Ford’s to phase out combustion engines.But those changes take time. Just as they have since the 1970s, voters want relief and they want it now. In 1973, Mr. Biden said his constituents felt that “the federal government isn’t listening.” Nearly half a century later, as Americans take to the polls, Mr. Biden wants them to know “who is standing with them and who is only looking out for their own bottom line.”Even as Mr. Biden might get minimal short-term benefits from his energy and climate policies — and minimal relief in gas prices in the near future — history may look back on his record as a turning point, when America didn’t just start ending its gas addiction but went further into alternatives that began making our country and our politics less in thrall to King Oil.Meg Jacobs teaches history and public affairs at Princeton and is the author of “Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America” and “Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Kari Lake and the Rise of the Republican Apostate

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

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      Truss Takes a Bold Economic Gamble. Will It Sink Her Government?

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      Three weeks into her term, Prime Minister Liz Truss’s financial plans have thrown the markets and Britain’s currency into chaos and put her future in peril.LONDON — Prime Minister Liz Truss of Britain campaigned as a tax cutter and champion of supply-side economics, and she won the race to replace her scandal-scarred predecessor, Boris Johnson. Now she has delivered that free-market agenda, and it may sink her government.Four days after Ms. Truss’s tax cuts and deregulatory plans stunned financial markets and threw the British pound into a tailspin, the prime minister’s political future looks increasingly precarious as well.Her Conservative Party is gripped by anxiety, with a new poll showing that the opposition Labour Party has taken a 17 percentage point lead over the Tories. It’s a treacherous place for a prime minister in only her third week on the job.Labour is seizing the moment to present itself as the party of fiscal responsibility. With some experts predicting the pound could tumble to parity with the dollar, economists and political analysts said the uncertainty over Britain’s economic path would continue to hang over the markets and Ms. Truss’s government.“It’s entirely possible she could be replaced before the next election,” said Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, who is an expert on the Conservative Party. “It would be very, very difficult to conduct a full-blown leadership contest again, but I wouldn’t rule anything out.”That Ms. Truss should find herself in this predicament so soon after taking office attests to both the radical nature and awkward timing of her proposals. Cutting taxes at a time of near-double-digit inflation, when central banks in London and elsewhere are raising interest rates, was always going to mark Britain as an economic outlier.But the government compounded the shock last Friday when the chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, unexpectedly announced that the government would also abolish the top income tax rate of 45 percent applied to those earning more than 150,000 pounds, or about $164,000, a year.And Mr. Kwarteng did not submit the package to the scrutiny a government budget normally receives, deepening fears that the tax cuts, without corresponding spending cuts, will blow a hole in Britain’s public finances.Cutting taxes at a time of near-double-digit inflation, when central banks in London and worldwide are raising interest rates, has made Britain an economic outlier.Carl Court/Getty ImagesOn Tuesday, the pound stabilized briefly against the dollar, as did 10-year rates on British government bonds, though both began to gyrate later in the day after a senior official at the Bank of England signaled an aggressive rise in interest rates.The International Monetary Fund, which bailed out Britain in 1976, added to the deepening sense of anxiety when it urged the British government to reconsider the tax cuts. In a statement, it said the cuts would exacerbate inequality and lead to fiscal policy and monetary policy working at “cross purposes.”Rising Inflation in BritainInflation Slows Slightly: Consumer prices are still rising at about the fastest pace in 40 years, despite a small drop to 9.9 percent in August.Interest Rates: On Sept. 22, the Bank of England raised its key rate by another half a percentage point, to 2.25 percent, as it tries to keep high inflation from becoming embedded in the nation’s economy.Energy Bills to Soar: Gas and electric charges for most British households are set to rise 80 percent this fall, further squeezing consumers and stoking inflation.Investor Worries: The financial markets have been grumbling with unease about Britain’s economic outlook. The government plan to freeze energy bills and cut taxes is not easing concerns.Already, the specter of higher interest rates was causing the housing market to seize up. Two major British mortgage lenders announced that they would stop offering new loans because of the market volatility. Higher rates will hurt hundreds of thousands of homeowners who need to refinance fixed-term mortgages — property owners, analysts noted, who are the bedrock of the Conservative Party.“It’s not like the U.S., where people are on 30-year mortgages,” said Jonathan Portes, a professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London.An estimated 63 percent of mortgage holders have either floating rate mortgages or loans that will expire in the next two years. And the steep decline of the pound means that interest rates will have to rise even further than they would have merely to curb inflation.Ms. Truss, he said, could have taken a more cautious approach: rolling out the supply-side measures first, like plans to untangle Britain’s cumbersome residential planning rules and build more housing, which are hurdles to economic growth. Then, when inflationary pressures had eased, the government could have cut taxes.But that was never in the cards, Professor Portes said, because Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng are free-market evangelists who ardently believe that cutting taxes will reignite growth, and because they have little more than two years to turn around the economy before they face voters in a general election.“This is ‘shock and awe,’” he said. “Truss, Kwarteng, and the people around them think they had to act quickly. The longer they wait, the more the resistance will build up.”Kwasi Kwarteng, Britain’s chancellor of the Exchequer, announced tax cuts that some fear will blow a hole in Britain’s public finances.Clodagh Kilcoyne/ReutersDuring the campaign, Ms. Truss modeled herself on Margaret Thatcher, who also announced a series of free-market measures after taking office as prime minister and endured a turbulent couple of years. Unlike Ms. Truss, though, Thatcher worried about curbing inflation and shoring up public finances; she even raised some taxes during a recession in 1981 before reducing them in later years.But Thatcher came in after an election victory over an exhausted Labour government, which gave her more time to weather the downturn and for her deregulatory measures to take effect. She also got a lift after Britain vanquished Argentina in the Falklands War in 1982, which uncorked a surge of patriotism.“Thatcher was thinking in 1979 that I only need to give voters something they like by 1982,” said Charles Moore, a former editor of The Daily Telegraph who wrote a three-volume biography of the former prime minister. “Liz Truss hasn’t got this amount of time.”The better analogy to Ms. Truss, he said, is Ronald Reagan, with his emphasis on tax cuts and other supply-side policies, as well as his relative lack of concern for their effect on public deficits. Like Thatcher, Reagan weathered a recession before the United States began growing again in 1983. And like her, he had a cushion before he had to face voters.Ms. Truss, by contrast, has taken office after 12 years of Conservative-led governments, and three years into Mr. Johnson’s tenure. She will have to call an election by the beginning of 2025, at the latest. The Labour Party, which had been divided by Brexit and internal disputes, has been galvanized by the new government’s chaotic start, in particular Mr. Kwarteng’s plan to cut the top tax rate, which has allowed Labour to stake out a clear contrast on issues of economic equity.Speaking at the party’s annual conference in Liverpool on Tuesday, the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, declared that the Conservatives “say they do not believe in redistribution. But they do — from the poor to the rich.”Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is seizing the moment to present itself as the party of fiscal responsibility.Henry Nicholls/ReutersLabour’s lead of 17 percentage points in a new poll by the market research firm, YouGov, is the largest advantage it has had over the Conservatives in two decades. The Tories won the support of just 28 percent of those surveyed, raising questions about its ability to hold on to its existing seats, according to Professor Bale.That forbidding political landscape only adds to the challenge facing Ms. Truss. For the tax cuts to have one of their desired effects — which is to encourage businesses to invest more — economists said companies would need some reassurance that the policy is not going to be reversed by a new government in two years.“This is a very inexperienced government swinging for the fences in a situation where Labour is the strong favorite in the next election, if they don’t swing too far left,” said Kenneth S. Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard. “If one believes that the tax cuts are going to be reversed under Labour, and that there is a high chance of a Labour government, why would they influence long-term investment?”Britain, Professor Rogoff said, was also rowing against much greater forces in the global economy. After years of low inflation and extremely low interest rates, the flood of public spending because of the coronavirus pandemic has brought back the scourge of inflation and a shift toward higher rates.“The verdict will almost certainly be that governments borrowed too much and should have raised taxes on the wealthy more,” he said.In the short term, Ms. Truss is likely to find herself increasingly at odds with the Bank of England. The bank was already expected to raise rates at its next meeting in November. On Tuesday, its chief economist, Huw Pill, said the government’s new fiscal policies would require a “significant monetary policy response.”Adam S. Posen, an American economist who once served on the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, said, “The government’s policies are not only outrageously irresponsible, but they don’t seem to understand that the bank has to respond to these policies by raising interest rates a lot.”The Bank of England, like many other banks worldwide, is expected to raise rates at its meeting next month.Andy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Posen, who is the president of the Peterson Institute of International Economics, likened Britain’s loss of credibility in the markets to that of Britain and other European countries in the 1970s and Latin American countries in the 1980s. The best course, he said, would be for the government to reverse its fiscal policy, though he said Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng seemed “willfully committed to it.”Certainly, they have given no indication that they plan to back down. On Tuesday, Mr. Kwarteng told bankers and asset managers that he was confident the government’s plan would work.After the turmoil that led to Mr. Johnson’s ouster in July, and the protracted contest to replace him, few in the Conservative Party have the stomach to move against Ms. Truss now. But analysts note that the new prime minister has a shallow reservoir of support among lawmakers. Barely a third of them voted for her in the final ballot against her primary opponent, Rishi Sunak, and she won the subsequent vote among party members by a closer margin than expected.Taking note of the new YouGov poll, Huw Merriman, a Conservative lawmaker, may have spoken for many of his colleagues when he said on Twitter, “Those of us who backed Rishi Sunak lost the contest, but this poll suggests that the victor is losing our voters with policies we warned against.”“For the good of our country, and the livelihoods of everyone in our country,” he added, “I still hope to be proven wrong.” More

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      How a Storied Phrase Became a Partisan Battleground

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      A touchstone of political and social discourse, the nearly 100-year-old phrase “the American dream,” is being repurposed — critics say distorted — particularly by Republicans of color.Juan Ciscomani, a Republican who washed cars to help his Mexican immigrant father pay the bills and is now running for Congress in Arizona, has been leaning on a simple three-word phrase throughout his campaign — “the American dream.”To him, the American dream, a nearly 100-year-old idea weighted with meaning and memory, has become something not so much to aspire to but to defend from attack.President Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are, he says in one ad, “destroying the American dream” with “a border crisis, soaring inflation and schools that don’t teach the good things about America.”For decades, politicians have used the phrase “the American dream” to describe a promise of economic opportunity and upward mobility, of prosperity through hard work. It has been a promise so powerful that it drew immigrants from around the world, who went on to fulfill it generation after generation. Political figures in both parties employed the phrase to promote both their own policies and their own biographies.Now, a new crop of Republican candidates and elected officials are using the phrase in a different way, invoking the same promise but arguing in speeches, ads and mailings that the American dream is dying or in danger, threatened by what they see as rampant crime, unchecked illegal immigration, burdensome government regulations and liberal social policies. Many of these Republicans are people of color — including immigrants and the children of immigrants, for whom the phrase first popularized in 1931 has a deep resonance.To politicians of old, “the American dream” was a supremely optimistic rhetorical device, albeit one that often obscured the economic and racial barriers that made achieving it impossible for many. To the Republican candidates embracing it today, the phrase has taken on an ominous and more pessimistic tone, echoing the party’s leader, former President Donald J. Trump, who said in 2015 that “the American dream is dead.” In the same way that many Trump supporters have tried to turn the American flag into an emblem of the right, so too have these Republicans sought to claim the phrase as their own, repurposing it as a spinoff of the Make America Great Again slogan.A crowd at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit in Tampa, Fla., waited for former President Donald J. Trump to speak.Todd Anderson for The New York TimesPoliticians have long warned that the American dream was slipping away, a note struck from time to time by former President Barack Obama, former President Bill Clinton and other Democrats. What has changed is that some Republicans now cast the situation more starkly, using the dream-is-in-danger rhetoric as a widespread line of attack, arguing that Democrats have turned patriotism itself into something contentious.“Both parties used to celebrate the fact that America is an exceptional country — now you only have one that celebrates that fact,” said Jason Miyares, a Republican and the child of Cuban immigrants. The American dream was a part of his successful campaign to become Virginia’s first Latino attorney general.In Texas, Representative Mayra Flores, a Mexican immigrant who became the state’s first Latina Republican in Congress, ran an ad that declared, “Democrats are destroying the American dream.” Antonio Swad, an Italian-Lebanese immigrant running for a House seat in the Dallas suburbs, said in an ad that he washed dishes at the age of 15 before opening two restaurants, telling voters the American dream does not “come from a government handout.”More Coverage of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsLiz Cheney’s Lopsided Loss: The Republican congresswoman’s defeat in Wyoming exposed the degree to which former President Donald J. Trump still controls the party’s present — and its near future.2024 Hint: Hours after her loss, Ms. Cheney acknowledged that she was “thinking” about a White House bid. But her mission to thwart Donald J. Trump presents challenges.The ‘Impeachment 10’: With Ms. Cheney’s defeat, only two of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump remain.Alaska Races: Senator Lisa Murkowski and Sarah Palin appeared to be on divergent paths following contests that offered a glimpse at the state’s independent streak.Television ads for more than a dozen Republican candidates in statewide, House and Senate campaigns — more than half of whom are people of color — cite the phrase, according to AdImpact, the ad-tracking firm. Several other House hopefuls, many of them Latinas, frequently cite the words in social media posts, digital ads, campaign literature and speeches.“In Congress, I will fight to defend the American dream,” said Yesli Vega, a former police officer who is the daughter of civil-war refugees from El Salvador and who is running for a House seat in Virginia, posted on Twitter.“The American dream” was a marquee theme in two winning Republican campaigns in Virginia last year: the races by Winsome Earle-Sears, a Jamaica-born Marine veteran who is now the first woman of color to serve as the state’s lieutenant governor, and Mr. Miyares, the attorney general.“On the campaign trail, I used to say, if your family came to this country seeking hope there is a good chance that your family is a lot like my family, and it would be the biggest honor of my life to be your attorney general,” said Mr. Miyares.Attorney General Jason Miyares of Virginia during the inaugural celebration in January.Steve Helber/Associated PressThe Republicans relying on the phrase show the extent to which the party is diversifying its ranks and recruiting candidates with powerful come-from-behind stories. But historians and other scholars warn that some Republicans are distorting a defining American idea and turning it into an exclusionary political message.“The Republican Party is using it as a dog whistle,” said Christina Greer, an associate professor of political science at Fordham University. “They are saying here is the potential of what you can have, if we can exclude others from ‘stealing it’ from you.”Republicans dispute that their references to “the American dream” promote exclusion and say they are using the phrase the same way politicians have used it for decades — to signal hope and opportunity. “I think the left is far more pessimistic than Republicans are about the American dream,” said Representative Yvette Herrell, a New Mexico Republican who is Cherokee and the third Native American woman ever elected to Congress.But this latest iteration of the dream has become a rhetorical catchall for Republicans’ policy positions.Barbara Kirkmeyer, a Republican state lawmaker in Colorado running in a heated House race, embraces the American dream as the theme of her personal story. Ms. Kirkmeyer grew up on a dairy farm, the sixth of seven children in a family that often struggled. She paid her way through college by raising and selling a herd of eight milk cows, yearlings and heifer calves.The American dream, Ms. Kirkmeyer said, was not only about economic opportunity but freedom, connecting the words with Republican opposition to Covid-related mask mandates. “I don’t see the mandates as part of the American dream,” she said. “People felt that was an infringement on their rights and personal dreams.”The earliest mention in print of the words “American dream” appears to have been in a 1930 ad for a $13.50 marked-down bed spring from an American mattress company.Historians and economists, however, credit the writer James Truslow Adams with popularizing the phrase in his best seller published a year later in 1931, “The Epic of America.” His Depression-era definition was a “dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone.” To Mr. Adams, it was part of a liberal vision in which government was seen as a force to fight big business. His symbol of the American dream at the time was the Library of Congress.For decades, politicians have used the phrase the American dream to describe a promise of economic opportunity and upward mobility, of prosperity through hard work. Bettman, via Getty ImagesFor later generations, Mr. Adams’ phrase came to be defined by an image — a house with a white picket fence — as presidents, companies and popular culture pushed homeownership. But with the chances of owning a home diminishing after the 2008 economic crash, Democrats and Republicans once more sought to redefine it. Now, much of the phrase’s progressive history has been lost, as Republicans argue that big government is the enemy.“That has been the real shift,” said Sarah Churchwell, the author of a 2018 book, “Behold, America: The Entangled History of ‘America First’ and ‘the American Dream.’”The roots of this more conservative vision of the American dream can be traced to Ronald Reagan, who often invoked the phrase and also used it in his appeals to Latino voters, extolling family, religion and an opposition to government handouts. It was a strategy later followed by George W. Bush.“It married conservative values with economic opportunity: ‘We recognize you for your contribution to America and we will give you the opportunity to get ahead if you are willing to do the work,’” said Lionel Sosa, a retired media consultant in San Antonio who is a Republican and who created ads for Mr. Reagan and Mr. Bush.Republicans still use the American dream in the way Mr. Reagan and Mr. Bush did, underscoring a strong work ethic, Christian values and entrepreneurialism. But many Hispanic Republicans now add a harder edge — stressing that they came to the country legally, decrying “open borders” and calling for the completion of the U.S.-Mexico border wall.“In all the time we worked on it, we didn’t say anything having to do with building a wall,” Mr. Sosa said of the past messaging aimed at Hispanic Republicans. “There was no message that you have to be here legally or that if you are not here legally, we don’t want you here.”The politicization of the phrase comes as studies show the American public has become more pessimistic about achieving the American dream. Historians say that in recent years Republicans have been using the phrase far more frequently than Democrats in ads and speeches. While more than a dozen Republican candidates across the country cite the phrase in their TV ads this midterm season, only four Democrats have done so, according to AdImpact.One of the Democratic candidates who has relied on the theme in his ads is Shri Thanedar, an Indian American state lawmaker in Michigan and the Democratic nominee for a House seat. “We have ceded that ground to Republicans and other corporate politicians,” Mr. Thanedar said, referring to areluctance by some Democrats to emphasize the phrase.To Gabe Vasquez, a Democratic congressional candidate in Albuquerque, N.M., the American dream is about ensuring that the economic ladder “is there for everybody and that everyone can climb with you.”Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesGabe Vasquez, a Democrat who is facing Ms. Herrell in New Mexico in the fall, has also embraced the phrase. He tells supporters that his late grandfather — Javier Bañuelos, who taught himself to fix broken televisions with an old manual and eventually opened his own repair shop — made it possible for him to run for Congress. The American dream is not about buying a house, but ensuring that the economic ladder “is there for everybody and that everyone can climb with you,” he said.Yet even Democrats find themselves speaking of the dream as pessimistically as Republicans. Just as Republicans blame Democrats for destroying the American dream, Democrats believe the fault lies with Republicans. They say Republicans are making it harder to obtain by attacking the social safety net and blocking efforts to raise the minimum wage, and that they have co-opted the symbols of patriotism — including words like patriot — and turned them into partisan weapons.“That American dream,” Mr. Vasquez said, “is becoming a hallucination.” More

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      What President Biden Could Learn from Ronald Reagan

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      Blame is a hallmark of American politics. Ronald Reagan couldn’t escape it in his first midterm elections 40 years ago. Can Biden?They’re called election cycles for a reason. In politics, everything’s on repeat.In 1982, a new president faced his first midterm elections after he was swept into office amid an economic slump, high inflation and deep dissatisfaction with the previous occupant of the White House.Sound familiar?Forty years later, President Biden is facing a completely different set of problems, including a persisting pandemic and a predecessor who refuses to accept that he was defeated. Yet Biden and Ronald Reagan have shared a similar burden: getting blamed for economic woes that began before either one was elected. Both men won the presidency by promising restoration, but both saw their approval ratings sink when they couldn’t immediately deliver.“Blame in American politics runs through the president,” said Sarah Binder, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Brookings Institution and a political science professor at George Washington University. “He is the most prominent salient actor in American politics.”Reagan began his presidency with a double-digit inflation rate. In the months leading up to the election, as inflation settled down, unemployment rose. Throughout 1982, Reagan’s approval rating hovered in the low 40s, where Biden has been stuck since late last summer. In those November midterms, Republicans lost 26 House seats and gained one Senate seat, by replacing one conservative independent with a Republican.We spoke with several historians and Republicans directly involved with the 1982 campaign, and they all warned that as long as the country feels economic pressure during Biden’s first midterm, it’s nearly impossible to dodge the dictum that the party in power loses House seats. Republicans’ 1982 campaign message — “Stay the course”— might have stemmed their losses, but losses were inescapable.The comparison breaks down in one key way for Democrats. Reagan had already been crowned “the Great Communicator” by the 1982 midterms. Biden’s failure to communicate a clear, compelling message to voters has been one of his biggest liabilities so far.However, there’s still time for an upswing in the economy. And even if the economy doesn’t rebound by November, it’s possible for Biden to cut his losses and even win back seats in 2024.Edwin Meese III, who was counselor to Reagan in 1982 before becoming attorney general, noted that Reagan’s “Stay the course” midterm was followed by his optimistic “Morning in America” re-election. He won a second term in a landslide.“It’s a matter of faith,” said Meese, 90, an emeritus fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “President Ronald Reagan knew that there would be difficult times, and the difficult times were not yet over, but that they would be.”‘Give the guy a chance’ In 1982, concerns about midterm losses and disagreements over economic policy led to divisions and finger-pointing within the Republican Party. Even so, the party urged voters to “give the guy a chance.”Nancy Dwight, who was running the House Republicans’ campaign arm at the time, cautions against reading too much into the 1982 example, but sees Biden taking a page from Reagan’s playbook in urging patience as he attempts to get the economy back on track. “He wouldn’t dare use that line, but he’s staying the course,” Dwight told us.Reagan was determined to see his economic plans through, even as the public lost confidence. Given the circumstances, Dwight recalled that she felt relieved that Republicans didn’t lose even more House seats. “I knew it could have been much worse,” she said.Joe Gaylord, who worked with Dwight at the House campaign committee in 1982, said Reagan’s economic crisis was more deep-rooted than Biden’s — with interest rates, inflation and unemployment all blocking recovery.But he said the basic contours of the problem that Biden faced were all too similar. Combine Reagan’s low approval rating with a country that believes it’s on the wrong track, and one thing happens, he said: “You get change.”A “huge problem that Biden has right now is that none of the things he’s done is working, either,” Gaylord added.When the unemployment rate surpassed 10 percent in September 1982, Gaylord said, “Republican candidates just dropped like flies,” as voters’ patience with the Reagan administration evaporated. He recalled hearing frustrated Republicans assert that the problem was simply a failure to communicate with voters — that if Republicans had been clearer about their accomplishments, voters would have supported them.That’s a theory that many Democrats, including Biden himself, have repeated in addressing why the public hasn’t been more supportive of his administration.But the message won’t get through if it doesn’t resonate, Gaylord said: “​​It’s a little tough to make a communication work when people don’t feel it.”Still, in some congressional races, Gaylord credited the “Stay the course” message with keeping seats in 1982. Republicans’ House minority shrunk, but they managed to keep control of the Senate and even gain a seat.President Biden arriving in Cleveland on Thursday. He and former President Ronald Reagan have shared one broad challenge: getting blamed for economic woes that began before either was elected.Tom Brenner for The New York TimesThe blame gameThere are plenty of reasons a president struggles in the midterms.Binder, the fellow at the Brookings Institution, ran through some of them. Voters like to distribute party power when they think it’s too concentrated. Supporters of the newly-elected president are more content and therefore less excited to turn out. Voters aren’t following the intricacies of policy.Jill Lepore, the historian and journalist, suggested thinking about the situation not as political intrigue, but as family drama.“You think about some bad situation in your extended family where your cousin and your aunt don’t speak to each other,” she said. But the conflict all began, she added, with a past inflammatory comment from your grandmother, who’s not engaged in the drama but lit the fire in the first place.“You need the whole story. But that’s not how we think politically, right?”Looking back, Meese said that he and Reagan, along with his top advisers, were confident that the policies Reagan enacted would allow Republicans to rebound in 1984. He didn’t see losing about 25 seats as all that bad, but rather “in keeping with historical norms.”“I don’t think anybody likes the idea of losing seats,” Meese said. “But I think the president felt that to do anything other than continue the program he had started was the wrong thing to do.”What to read A judge ruled that New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, can interview Donald Trump as well as two of his adult children as part of an inquiry into Trump’s business practices.Nicholas Kristof, a former New York Times columnist, cannot run for governor of Oregon, according to a Thursday ruling by the state’s Supreme Court. Even though he has connections to Oregon, the court ruled he had not fulfilled the three-year residency requirement to run, reports Mike Baker.The Ottawa protests “will likely live on long after the last trucks depart,” Natalie Kitroeff and Dan Bilefsky report. The protests have evolved into a “wider movement against pandemic restrictions in general and the premiership of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.”in the momentThe police confronting Trump loyalists outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesCriticizing the R.N.C., from the benchA federal judge took a swipe at the Republican National Committee on Thursday, taking issue with the committee’s recent move to condemn two Republican lawmakers for “participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”Key Developments in the Jan. 6 InvestigationCard 1 of 3Piecing the evidence together. More

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      Who Believes in Democracy?

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      “There is no sense in avoiding or diluting the magnitude of this turn in our story: One major political party no longer accepts democracy.”The author of this sentence is the former Obama White House speechwriter Ben Rhodes, writing recently in The Atlantic, but it could have flowed from the keyboard of a hundred different writers in the post-Trump, post-Jan. 6 era. That conservatism and the Republican Party have turned against government by the people, that only the Democratic Party still stands for democratic rule, is an important organizing thought of political commentary these days.So let’s subject it to some scrutiny — and with it, the current liberal relationship to democracy as well.First, there’s a sense in which conservatism has always had a fraught relationship to mass democracy. The fear of mob rule, of demagogues rallying the masses to destroy a fragile social order, is a common theme in many different right-wing schools of thought, showing up among traditionalist defenders of aristocracy and libertarians alike.To these general tendencies, we can add two specifically American forms of conservative anxiety about the franchise: the fear of corrupt urban-machine politics that runs back through the 1960 presidential election to the age of Tammany Hall and the racist fear of African American political power that stamped the segregation-era South.Because all these influences touch the modern G.O.P., conservative skepticism about mass democracy was a somewhat normal part of American politics long before Trump came along — and some of what’s changed in the Trump era is just an events-driven accentuation of existing tendencies.Republicans have long feared voter fraud and noncitizen voting, for instance, but the fear — and for liberals, the oft-discussed hope — that demographic change could deliver permanent Democratic power have raised the salience of these anxieties. Likewise, Republicans have long been more likely to portray America as a republic, not a democracy, and to defend our system’s countermajoritarian mechanisms. But today this philosophical tendency is increasingly self-interested, because shifts in party coalitions mean that those mechanisms, the Senate and Electoral College especially, advantage Republicans somewhat more than in the recent past.But then things get complicated, because the modern Republican Party is also the heir to a strong pro-democracy impulse, forged in the years when Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon won crushing presidential-level majorities but conservatives felt themselves constantly balked by unelected powers, bureaucrats and judges especially.This experience left the right deeply invested in the idea that it represents the true American majority — moral, silent, what have you — while liberalism stands for elite power, anti-democratic forms of government, the bureaucracy and the juristocracy and the Ivy League.And that idea and self-image has remained a potent aspect of the right-wing imagination even as the old Nixon and Reagan majorities have diminished and disappeared: With every new age of grassroots activism, from the Tea Party to the local-education revolts of today, the right reliably casts itself as small-d democrats, standing boldly athwart liberal technocracy singing “Yankee Doodle.”Against this complicated backdrop, Donald Trump’s stolen-election narratives should be understood as a way to reconcile the two competing tendencies within conservatism, the intellectual right’s skepticism of mass democracy and comfort with countermajoritarian institutions with the populist right’s small-d democratic self-image. In Trump’s toxic dreampolitik there’s actually no tension there: The right-wing coalition is justified in governing from a minoritarian position because it deserves to be a true electoral majority, and would be if only the liberal enemy weren’t so good at cheating.So seen from within the right, the challenge of getting out from under Trump’s deceptions isn’t just a simple matter of reviving a conservative commitment to democracy. Trump has succeeded precisely because he has exploited the right’s more democratic impulses, speaking to them and co-opting them and claiming them for himself. Which means a conservative rival can’t defeat or replace him by simply accusing him of being anti-democratic. Instead the only plausible pitch would argue that his populism is self-limiting, and that a post-Trump G.O.P. could potentially win a more sweeping majority than the one his supporters want to believe he won already — one that would hold up no matter what the liberal enemy gets up to.But if that argument is challenging to make amid the smog of Trumpenkampf, so is the anti-Trump argument that casts American liberalism as the force to which anyone who believes in American democracy must rally. Because however much the right’s populists get wrong about their claim to represent a true American majority, they get this much right: Contemporary liberalism is fundamentally miscast as a defender of popular self-rule.To be clear, the present Democratic Party is absolutely in favor of letting as many people vote as possible. There are no doubts about the mass franchise among liberals, no fears of voter fraud and fewer anxieties than on the right about the pernicious influence of low-information voters.But when it comes to the work of government, the actual decisions that determine law and policy, liberalism is the heir to its own not exactly democratic tradition — the progressive vision of disinterested experts claiming large swaths of policymaking for their own and walling them off from the vagaries of public opinion, the whims of mere majorities.This vision — what my colleague Nate Cohn recently called “undemocratic liberalism” — is a pervasive aspect of establishment politics not only in the United States but across the Western world. On question after controverted question, its answer to “Who votes?” is different from its answer to “Who decides?” In one case, the people; in the other, the credentialed experts, the high-level stakeholders and activist groups, the bureaucratic process.Who should lead pandemic decision making? Obviously Anthony Fauci and the relevant public-health bureaucracies; we can’t have people playing politics with complex scientific matters. Who decides what your local school teaches your kids? Obviously teachers and administrators and education schools; we don’t want parents demanding some sort of veto power over syllabuses. Who decides the future of the European Union? The important stakeholders in Brussels and Berlin, the people who know what they’re doing, not the shortsighted voters in France or Ireland or wherever. Who makes important U.S. foreign policy decisions? Well, you have the interagency process, the permanent regional specialists and the military experts, not the mere whims of the elected president.Or to pick a small but telling example recently featured in this newspaper, who decides whether an upstate New York school district gets to retain the Indian as its high school mascot? The state’s education commissioner, apparently, who’s currently threatening to cut funds to the school board that voted to keep it unless they reverse course.Whereas the recent wave of right-wing populism, even when it doesn’t command governing majorities, still tends to champion the basic idea of popular power — the belief that more areas of Western life should be subject to popular control and fewer removed into the purview of unelected mandarins. And even if this is not a wise idea in every case, it is democratic idea, whose widespread appeal reflects the fact that modern liberalism really does suffer from a democratic deficit.Which is a serious problem, to put it mildly, for a movement that aspires to fight and win a struggle on behalf of democratic values. So just as a conservative alternative to Trump would need to somehow out-populist him, to overcome the dark side of right-wing populism, American liberalism would need to first democratize itself.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

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      Why Joe Biden Needs More Than Accomplishments to Be a Success

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      No president since Ronald Reagan has achieved a more ambitious domestic legislative agenda in his first year than Joe Biden. With a razor-thin congressional majority — far smaller than that of Barack Obama — President Biden has delivered two enormous spending bills, with another, the Build Back Better act, likely on its way. Elements of these bills will have a lasting effect on the economy into the next decade; they also push the country to the left.Every president since Reagan has tacked to the rightward winds set in motion by the conservative movement. Even Mr. Obama’s stimulus bill and the Affordable Care Act owed as much to conservative nostrums about the market and runaway spending as they did to liberal notions of fairness and equality. Mr. Biden has had to accommodate the demands of Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, but their intransigence has not had nearly the constraining effect that the voices of austerity and market fetishism had on Bill Clinton or Mr. Obama.Yet over the past several months, Mr. Biden’s presidency has been dogged by a sense of failure. Critics, friendly and not so friendly, point to what he has not delivered — voting rights, immigration reform, a $15 federal minimum wage, labor law reform and a path to freedom from personal debt and fossil fuels. Democrats fear that Mr. Biden’s plummeting approval ratings and the party’s losses in the November elections indicate that the Republicans will take back Congress in the midterms.No president, however, achieves his entire agenda. And presidents have suffered first-term losses greater than those currently anticipated for 2022.The real cause of the unease about Mr. Biden lies elsewhere. There is a sense that however large his spending bills may be, they come nowhere near to solving the problems they are meant to address. There is also a sense that however much in control of the federal government progressives may be, the right is still calling the shots.The first point is inarguable, especially when it comes to climate change and inequality. The second point is questionable, but it can find confirmation in everything from a conservative Supreme Court supermajority to the right’s ability to unleash one debilitating culture war after another — and in the growing fear that Republicans will ride back into the halls of power and slam the doors of democracy behind them, maybe forever.There’s a sense of stuckness, in other words, that no amount of social spending or policy innovation can seem to dislodge. The question is: Why?A prisoner of great expectationsThough it came out in 1993, Stephen Skowronek’s “The Politics Presidents Make” helps us understand how Mr. Biden has become a prisoner of great expectations.American politics is punctuated by the rise and fall of political orders or regimes. In each regime, one party, whether in power or not, dominates the field. Its ideas and interests define the landscape, forcing the opposition to accept its terms. Dwight Eisenhower may have been a Republican, but he often spoke in the cadences of the New Deal. Mr. Clinton voiced Reaganite hosannas to the market.Regimes persist across decades. The Jeffersonian regime lasted from 1800 to 1828; the Jacksonian regime, from 1828 to 1860; the Republican regime, from 1860 to 1932; the New Deal order, from 1932 to 1980.Reagan’s market regime of deference to the white and the wealthy has outlasted two Democratic presidencies and may survive a third. We see its presence in high returns to the rich and low wages for work, continents of the economy cordoned off from democratic control and resegregated neighborhoods and schools. Corporations are viewed, by liberals, as more advanced reformers of structural racism than parties and laws, and tech billionaires are seen as saviors of the planet.Eventually, however, regimes grow brittle. Their ideology no longer speaks to the questions of the day; important interests lose pride of place; the opposition refuses to accept the leading party and its values.Every president presides over a regime that is either resilient or vulnerable. That is his situation. When Eisenhower was elected, the New Deal was strong; when Jimmy Carter was elected, it was weak. Every president is affiliated or opposed to the regime. That is his story. James Knox Polk sought to extend the slavocracy, Abraham Lincoln to end it. The situation and the story are the keys to the president’s power — or powerlessness.When the president is aligned with a strong regime, he has considerable authority, as Lyndon Johnson realized when he expanded the New Deal with the Great Society. When the president is opposed to a strong regime, he has less authority, as Mr. Obama recognized when he tried to get a public option in the Affordable Care Act. When the president is aligned with a weak regime, he has the least authority, as everyone from John Adams to Mr. Carter was forced to confront. When the president is opposed to a weak regime, he has the greatest authority, as Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Reagan discovered. These presidents, whom Mr. Skowronek calls reconstructive, can reorder the political universe.All presidents are transformative actors. With each speech and every action, they make or unmake the regime. Sometimes, they do both at the same time: Johnson reportedly declared that with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Democrats had lost the South for a generation, thereby setting the stage for the unraveling of the New Deal.What distinguishes reconstructive presidents from other presidents, even the most transformative like Johnson, is that their words and deeds have a binding effect on their successors from both parties. They create the language that all serious contestants for power must speak. They construct political institutions and social realities that cannot be easily dismantled. They build coalitions that provide lasting support to the regime. Alexander Hamilton thought every president would “reverse and undo what has been done by a predecessor.” Reconstructive presidents do that — in fact, they reverse and undo the work of many predecessors — but they also ensure that their heirs cannot.Politics is not physics. A president opposed to the established order may seek to topple it, only to discover that it is too resilient or that his troops are too feeble and lacking in fight. Where we are in political time — whether we are in a reconstructive moment, ripe for reordering, or not — cannot be known in advance. The weakness or strength of a regime, and of the opposition to the regime, is revealed in the contest against it.What is certain is that the president is both creature and creator of the political world around him. Therein lies Mr. Biden’s predicament.The language of reconstructionHeading into the 2020 Democratic primaries, many people thought we might be in a reconstructive moment. I was one of them. There was a popular insurgency from the left, heralding the coming of a new New Deal. It culminated in the Nevada caucus, where people of color and young voters — an emergent multiracial working class — put Bernie Sanders over the top, ready to move the political order to the left.There also were signs that the Reagan regime was vulnerable. Donald Trump’s candidacy in 2016 suggested that conservative orthodoxies of slashing Social Security and Medicare and waging imperial warfare no longer compelled voters. Mr. Trump’s presidency revealed a congressional G.O.P. that could not unite around a program beyond tax cuts and right-wing judges.As a candidate, Mr. Biden rejected the transformation Mr. Sanders promised and assured wealthy donors that “nothing would fundamentally change” on his watch. Yet there were signs, after he won the nomination and into the early months of his administration, of a new, “transformational” Mr. Biden who wanted to be the next F.D.R. The combination of the Covid economy, with its shocking inequalities and market failures, and a summer of fire and flood seemed to authorize a left-leaning politics of permanent cash supports to workers and families, increased taxes on the rich to fund radical expansions of health care, elder care and child care, and comprehensive investments in green energy and infrastructure, with high-paying union jobs.Most important, the package cohered. Instead of a laundry list of gripes and grievances, it featured the consistent items of an alternative ideology and ascendant set of social interests. It promised to replace a sclerotic order that threatens to bury us all with a new order of common life. This was that rare moment when the most partisan of claims can sound like a reasonable defense of the whole.Yet while Mr. Biden has delivered nearly $3 trillion in spending, with another $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion likely to pass, he has not created a new order. In addition to a transformation of the economy, such an order would require a spate of democracy reforms — the elimination of the filibuster and curbing of partisan gerrymandering, the addition of new states to the union, and national protection of voting rights and electoral procedures — as well as labor law reforms, enabling workers to form unions.What makes such reforms reconstructive rather than a wish list of good works is that they shift the relations of power and interest, making other regime-building projects possible. Today’s progressive agenda is hobbled less by a lack of popular support than by the outsize leverage conservatives possess — in the Senate, which privileges white voters in sparsely populated, often rural states; in the federal structure of our government, which enables states to make it difficult for Black Americans to vote; and in the courts, whose right-wing composition has been shaped by two Republican presidents elected by a minority of the voters. No progressive agenda can be enacted and maintained unless these deformations are addressed.The only way to overcome anti-democratic forces is by seeding democracy throughout society, empowering workers to take collective action in the workplace and the polity, and by securing democracy at the level of the state. That is what the great emblems of a reconstructive presidency — the 14th Amendment, which granted Black Americans citizenship, or the Wagner Act, which liberated workers from the tyranny of employers — are meant to do. They give popular energy institutional form, turning temporary measures of an insurgent majority into long-term transformations of policy and practice.It’s not clear that Mr. Biden wants such a reconstruction. And even if he did, it’s not clear that he could deliver it.What is stopping Biden?The forces arrayed against a reconstruction are many.The first is the Republican Party. Here the party has benefited less from the “authoritarian” turn of Mr. Trump than from the fact that the Trump presidency was so constrained. As Mr. Skowronek argues, “Nothing exposes a hollow consensus faster than the exercise of presidential power.” At critical moments, exercising power was precisely what Mr. Trump was not able to do.Confronting the free fall of the New Deal, Mr. Carter unleashed a stunning strike of neoliberal and neoconservative measures: deregulation of entire industries; appointment of the anti-labor Paul Volcker to the Fed; a military buildup; and renewed confrontation with the Soviet Union. These defied his party’s orthodoxies and unraveled its coalition. Reagan ended the New Deal regime, but Mr. Carter prepared the way.For all his talk of opposition to the Republican pooh-bahs, Mr. Trump delivered what they wanted most — tax cuts, deregulation and judges — and suffered defeat when he tried to break out of their vise. Republicans repeatedly denied him funds to support his immigration plans. They overrode his veto of their military spending bill, something Congress had not been able to do in the Carter, Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama administrations. Mr. Trump’s own administration defied his Russia policy. This combination of weakness and deference to the G.O.P. helped keep the Republicans — and the Reagan regime — together.The second obstacle is the Democratic Party. There’s a reason party elites, led by Mr. Obama, swiftly closed ranks, when the time came, behind Mr. Biden and against Mr. Sanders. They wanted continuity, not rupture.Likewise a portion of the base. Many Democrats are older, with long memories and strong fears of what happens when liberals turn left (they lose). Newer recruits, who gave Mr. Biden the edge in some key districts, usually in the suburbs, are what the Princeton historian Matt Karp calls “Halliburton Democrats,” wealthy defectors from the Republican Party.“A regime is only as vulnerable as the political forces challenging it are robust,” writes Mr. Skowronek. That robustness is yet to be demonstrated. Despite the clarity of the path the Democrats must take if they hope to topple the Reagan order, it’s not clear the party wants to take it.The third obstacle to a Biden reconstruction is what Mr. Skowronek calls the “institutional thickening” of American politics. Since the founding era, the American political system has acquired a global economy, with the dollar as the world’s currency; a government bureaucracy and imperial military; a dense ecology of media technologies; and armies of party activists. While these forces offer the modern president resources that Jefferson never had, they also empower the modern-day equivalents of Jefferson’s opponents to resist a reconstruction. Should Mr. Biden attempt one, could he master the masters of social media? Mr. Trump tried and was banned from Twitter.The real institutions that get in the way of Mr. Biden and the Democrats, however, are not these latter-day additions of modernity but the most ancient features of the American state.The power of Senators Manchin and Sinema is an artifact of the constitutional design of the Senate and the narrowness of the Democratic majority, which itself reflects the fact that the institution was created to defend slave states rather than popular majorities. Their power is augmented by the centuries-old filibuster, which has forced Mr. Biden to jam many programs into one vaguely named reconciliation bill. That prevents him from picking off individual Republicans for pieces of legislation they might support (as he did with the infrastructure bill).Should the Republicans take the House in 2022, it will probably not be because of Tucker Carlson but because of gerrymandering. Should the Republicans take back the White House in 2024, it will probably be because of some combination of the Electoral College and the control that our federalist system grants to states over their electoral procedures.A polarized electorate divided into red and blue states is not novel; it was a hallmark of the last Gilded Age, which put the brakes on the possibility of a presidential reconstruction for decades. As the political scientist E.E. Schattschneider argued, the division of the country into the Republican North and Democratic South made the entire polity “extremely conservative because one-party politics tends strongly to vest political power in the hands of people who already have economic power.”How do we move past Reagan?Every reconstructive president must confront vestiges of the old regime. The slavocracy evaded Lincoln’s grasp by seceding; the Supreme Court repeatedly thwarted F.D.R. Yet they persisted. How?What each of these presidents had at their back was an independent social movement. Behind Lincoln marched the largest democratic mass movement for abolition in modern history. Alongside F.D.R. stood the unions. Each of these movements had their own institutions. Each of them was disruptive, upending the leadership and orthodoxies of the existing parties. Each of them was prepared to do battle against the old regime. And battle they did.Social movements deliver votes to friendly politicians and stiffen their backs. More important, they take political arguments out of legislative halls and press them in private spaces of power. They suspend our delicate treaties of social peace, creating turbulence in hierarchical institutions like the workplace and the family. Institutions like these need the submission of subordinate to superior. By withholding their cooperation, subordinates can stop the everyday work of society. They exercise a kind of power that presidents do not possess but that they can use. That is why, after Lincoln’s election, Frederick Douglass called the abolitionist masses “the power behind the throne.”An independent social movement is what Mr. Biden does not have. Until he or a successor does, we may be waiting on a reconstruction that is ready to be made but insufficiently desired.Corey Robin is a distinguished professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author of “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Donald Trump” and “The Enigma of Clarence Thomas.”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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      Bill Brock, G.O.P. National Chairman After Watergate, Dies at 90

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      A former senator, he sought to broaden his demoralized party’s base by appealing to women and Black voters and was later labor secretary under Reagan.Bill Brock, the former Tennessee senator who as party chairman revived and broadened the Republican Party machinery after Watergate to pave the way for Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, died on Thursday at a hospital in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 90.The cause was pneumonia, said Tom Griscom, a spokesman for the family.Mr. Brock voted against the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a representative from Tennessee — a vote he later regretted — but as party leader he became an insistent voice for greater Republican efforts to win over Black voters.As chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1977 through 1981, he clashed with Reagan over the Panama Canal treaties and the site of the 1980 national convention. (Mr. Brock argued for Detroit, a Black majority city; Reagan preferred Dallas.) But after winning the nomination, Reagan kept him on as party chairman and later chose him to be the United States trade representative and then secretary of labor.Mr. Brock won the chairmanship of his party at a time when it was demoralized in the wake of the Watergate scandal and the fall of Richard M. Nixon, commanding the allegiance of only 20 percent of Americans, according to New York Times/CBS News polls.Republicans had lost the White House in 1976 and had suffered serious losses in congressional elections that year, as they had in 1974. Mr. Brock himself was among the 1976 casualties, losing his Senate re-election bid to James Sasser, a Democrat.Though he had backed President Gerald R. Ford over Reagan in the 1976 nomination race, Mr. Brock was seen as a compromise candidate between the preferred choices of Ford and Reagan: James A. Baker III, Ford’s 1976 campaign manager, and Richard Richards, the Utah Republican chairman and a Reagan backer.Mr. Brock with Ronald Reagan in Los Angeles during the 1980 presidential campaign. The two clashed at times, but Reagan kept Mr. Brock on as R.N.C. leader in the name of party unity.Associated PressEven before becoming chairman, Mr. Brock said in 1975 that the party had suffered because Republicans were perceived as “old, middle class, upper income.” When he was elected to lead the national committee in 1977, he said: “The party cannot just open its doors. It has to go out and bring people in, and in doing so give them a real voice in our leadership and in the development of our objectives. That means stirring the waters.”He worked to develop a “farm team” of candidates for local and legislative offices and the party operatives to help them win. More visibly, he strove to appeal to blue-collar workers, young people, women and Black Americans. He barnstormed the country in favor of Representative Jack Kemp’s plan for heavy tax cuts in 1978, and two years later put R.N.C. money into television advertisements with the tag line “Vote Republican for a Change.”His effort to expand the party’s appeal, particularly to Black voters, led him to campaign for Detroit to be the site of the 1980 national convention. Reagan’s backers on the national committee had wanted Dallas, but Mr. Brock prevailed narrowly.Mr. Brock had angered Reagan in 1977 by refusing to use party money in a campaign against the treaties, signed by President Jimmy Carter, that turned the Panama Canal over to Panama. Some Reagan allies wanted to punish Mr. Brock for his resistance by blocking his re-election as party chairman in 1980, but Reagan heeded advice to keep Mr. Brock on in the name of party unity.As trade representative, Mr. Brock worked out voluntary quotas on Japanese automobile sales in the United States in 1981, and focused trade energies away from manufacturing and toward services, investments and intellectual property. He began a practice of working on bilateral free trade agreements (a pact with Israel was the only one he completed), and laid the groundwork for the Uruguay Round of trade talks and the World Trade Organization that emerged from it in 1995.Mr. Brock shifted to the Labor Department in 1985. He made friends with labor (and enemies among some Reagan disciples) by supporting affirmative action programs and enforcing the Occupational Health and Safety Act. More broadly, he sought to redirect the department’s efforts toward job training and productivity.He left the Labor Department in 1987 to run Bob Dole’s unsuccessful bid for the 1988 presidential nomination.A native of Chattanooga, Tenn., who later moved to Annapolis, Md., Mr. Brock made his last venture in elective politics to run for the Senate from Maryland. In 1994, a generally great year for Republicans, he was soundly beaten by Paul Sarbanes, the incumbent Democrat.His other major interest after leaving government was working on two national commissions to reform American education with the goal of producing a work force ready for the 21st century. He also started a trade consulting firm in Washington.During the 2016 primary season Mr. Brock opposed Donald J. Trump’s candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination and spoke publicly and ruefully about a loss of civility in American politics.William Emerson Brock III was born on Nov. 23, 1930, to William E. Jr. and Myra (Kruesi) Brock. He grew up in a Democratic family and attended schools in Chattanooga and nearby Lookout Mountain.He graduated from Washington & Lee University in Virginia and served in the Navy, then went into the family business in Tennessee, becoming a vice president of the Brock Candy Company. It had been founded by his grandfather William E. Brock, who served as a Democratic senator from Tennessee from 1929 to 1931, appointed to fill a vacancy.Mr. Brock in his office in Annapolis, Md., in 2000. His last venture in elective politics was to run unsuccessfully for the Senate from Maryland in 1994.Justin Lane for The New York TimesMr. Brock married Laura Handly, who was known as Muffet, in 1957. She died of cancer at 49 in 1985, when Mr. Brock was labor secretary. He later married Sandra Schubert Mitchell.He is survived by his wife; three sons from his first marriage, William E. IV, John and Oscar (who has been active in Republican politics in Tennessee); a daughter, Laura Hutchey Brock Doley, also from his first marriage; two stepchildren, Julie Janka and Stephen Cram; two brothers, Pat and Frank; 17 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.Mr. Brock won a House seat in 1962 and served four terms before challenging Albert Gore Sr. in his bid for a fourth Senate term in 1970. Mr. Gore’s opposition to the Vietnam War had made him a prime target of the Nixon White House, which funneled money and advisers to Mr. Brock.The Brock campaign ran advertisements attacking the incumbent, a Democrat, over busing and prayer in schools, and painted him as out of touch with ordinary Tennesseans, proclaiming in billboards, “Bill Brock Believes in the Things We Believe In.” That message, rather than anything Mr. Brock said himself, led the journalist David Halberstam to write in Harper’s Magazine that the slogan was a coded message to white racists, concluding that Brock had run a “shabby racist campaign.”In an interview for this obituary in 2009, Mr. Brock said that the racism charge had infuriated him. The billboard message, he said, had been intended only to paint Mr. Gore as out of touch with his state.But the accusation, he said, did cause him to engage in “some fairly serious soul-searching” about how some white Tennesseeans might have heard the message approvingly as a racist appeal. His concerns intensified when he became a national party leader. He said his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act — calling his own vote “stupid” in retrospect — had made the party seem “exclusionary.”“I felt, and still do, that any party that does not pay attention to every constituency group in the United States does not deserve support from any of those groups,” he said. “It doesn’t mean you have to get them. But it does mean you have to try. It does mean you have to listen. It does mean you have to understand their concerns, or else you’re in the wrong business. The longer I stay around, the more strongly I feel about that.”Adam Clymer, a reporter and editor at The Times from 1977 to 2003, died in 2018. Alex Traub contributed reporting. More