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      Vivek Ramaswamy Is a LinkedIn Post Come to Life

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      Last year, for a column I was writing about the power that large asset managers like BlackRock and Vanguard exert over the global economy, I called up Vivek Ramaswamy. He was delighted to hear from me.I don’t mean this as self-aggrandizement. Ramaswamy was set to start Strive, an asset management company he hoped would take on the BlackRocks and Vanguards of the world, and was about to publish his second book, so he had good reason to court media attention. Still, I found his enthusiasm noteworthy; as a journalist who covers Silicon Valley, I’m used to chatting up smooth-operator entrepreneurs eager for coverage, but Ramaswamy’s media hustle was of a different order.He told me I could call him anytime I’d like to bounce ideas off a “thought partner.” He sent me a PDF of his upcoming book — “No one has seen an advance copy yet” — and followed up to ask, seemingly earnestly, for my thoughts on his thesis. And when I joked, in my piece, that the title of his first book, “Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam,” sounded “as if it had been formulated in a lab at Fox News to maximally tickle the base and trigger the libs,” he texted me with an explanation that he suggested I append to the published column:My publisher (Hachette) and I selected the book title long before the word “woke” had become weaponized in the culture wars. Today, I mostly don’t even use that word anymore; it’s not part of my vernacular today. It was suggested to me as a title by a self-identified “far-left” friend in early 2020. The word took on a different valence between then and late 2021 when my book was published. I just wanted you to know that, since I saw you mused about the etymology of the title in your piece. It certainly wasn’t cooked up in a Fox News lab, and in all honesty the goal wasn’t to trigger anyone. If anything, my goal with the book was to provide a unifying voice across culturally fraught questions, and I think most left-wing readers of the book would agree that it was at least clear I tried to do that.Maybe that was all really the case. But I got the impression that he was also trying — a little too hard — to paint himself in a light that he thought might appeal to a lefty Times columnist.In the wake of his breakout performance at last month’s Republican primary debate, much has been made of Ramaswamy’s irrepressible annoyingness — is it a bug that could prevent him from winning the G.O.P. presidential nomination, or is it the feature that could help him secure it? But what I found striking about Ramaswamy, both in our conversations and on the debate stage, was not that he’s especially irritating (how many people who run for president aren’t?) but that he represents a distinct, very familiar flavor of irritation: He’s the epitome of millennial hustle culture, less a Tracy Flick know-it-all than a viral LinkedIn post come to life. The guy who’s always mining and nurturing new connections, always leveraging those connections into the next new thing, always selling and always, always closing.Seen this way, Ramaswamy’s otherwise quixotic-seeming presidential run makes perfect sense. Whether or not it wins him elected office, running for the White House is the ultimate rise and grind, and it probably offers far more upside than down. Incessant, glad-handed striving has already made Ramaswamy a wealthy man. According to a report in Politico this year, his campaign said he’s ready to put more than $100 million into his presidential bid, but because this latest side hustle feeds so neatly into his other projects, it’s hardly clear that the run will be so costly. Measured in name recognition, the expansion of his network or future moneymaking opportunities, running for president could well add to his riches.Take Strive, the management company he co-founded. In “Woke, Inc.,” Ramaswamy lamented what he saw as the pollution of capitalist principles with social justice activism. Rather than focus on the bottom line, he argued, the leaders of America’s largest corporations had allowed their employees and other elites to goad them into adopting what he said are costly political stances on race, gender, climate and other charged issues.This isn’t exactly a groundbreaking position on the right — combating corporate wokeness is basically Ron DeSantis’s whole thing. But whereas DeSantis’s fixation on all things woke is primarily a vehicle for his political ascent, Ramaswamy saw in wokeness a larger opportunity. He would write a book and guest essays assailing corporate E.S.G. (environmental, social and governance) practices, and he was also considering a political run, but to really “move the needle,” he told me, would also require taking on “the asset management ideological cartel.” And backed with a reported $20 million from billionaire investors and tech entrepreneurs he’d courted, among them Bill Ackman and Peter Thiel, he started Strive.That’s not a lot of money with which to take on the giants of asset management — BlackRock and Vanguard each manage trillions in assets — but Ramaswamy’s hustle was unceasing. Three months after it opened for business, Strive announced that it had already attracted $500 million in investments for its anti-woke E.T.F.s, or exchange-traded funds. In June it reported $750 million in assets under management, and this week it reported crossing the $1 billion mark. That’s minuscule compared with the giants, but its growth is significant; in July, Semafor’s Liz Hoffman noted that it took J.P. Morgan two years to reach $1 billion in assets after it started offering E.T.F.s in 2014.“It is a rare feat for any indie issuer to hit $1 billion in first year,” Eric Balchunas, a Bloomberg Intelligence analyst, told Bloomberg News of Strive’s accomplishment. “Ramaswamy’s wealthy backers helped a lot, and running for president probably can’t hurt, either.” You think?Ramaswamy no longer works at Strive. Via email, the company told me that he was the executive chairman of the board and ran day-to-day operations until February, when he stepped down to run for president.But he still has a huge interest in its success. In an S.E.C. filing last month, Ramaswamy is identified as the company’s majority shareholder. In a financial disclosure form filed in June, Ramaswamy valued his stake in Strive at over $50 million — a remarkable amount for a company that’s just about a year old, where he worked for just months. His disclosure listed his stake in Roivant Sciences, a biotech company he was previously the chief executive of, at over $50 million as well. (Forbes recently calculated Ramaswamy’s net worth at around $950 million.)Looking back on my exchange with Ramaswamy, I find it interesting how hard he pushed back on his association with the word “woke”; he hasn’t shied away from it on the campaign trail. In February, when he announced his candidacy in The Wall Street Journal, he wrote that “America is in the midst of a national identity crisis” and that “the Republican Party’s top priority should be to fill this void with an inspiring national identity that dilutes the woke agenda to irrelevance.”But his current comfort with “woke” works for winning over a G.O.P. primary audience. When he needs to cultivate a broader base, whether in the general election or in hopes of expanding his Rolodex for whatever side hustle comes next, I’m sure he won’t hesitate to reach out and tell me just what he thinks I want to hear.Office Hours With Farhad ManjooFarhad wants to chat with readers on the phone. If you’re interested in talking to a New York Times columnist about anything that’s on your mind, please fill out this form. Farhad will select a few readers to call.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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      Biden Is Old and Trump Is on Trial. Will Anything Else Matter?

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      Thirty-six years in the Senate, eight as vice president, nearly three in the White House — President Joe Biden has a long record to be judged by, a deep familiarity with Washington that Americans can decide to see as an asset or an impediment. But what happens in November 2024 may have significantly less to do with how he has navigated the corridors of power than with how he moves from the edge of the stage to the lectern and from subject to verb.Is there a wobble in his step? A quiver in his voice? He’s 80, and that’s not just a number. In a poll published by The Wall Street Journal on Monday, 73 percent of registered voters said that Biden had too many years on him to seek four more. In a survey by The Associated Press and NORC released last week, 77 percent of adult Americans, including 69 percent of Democrats, said that he’s too old to be effective during a second term.But that doesn’t mean they won’t give him one, because their alternative would probably be Donald Trump, who has been charged with an array of felonies, 91 in all. That, too, is not just a number. It’s an irrefutable measure of his indecency and his rapacity, no matter what jurors decide about the criminality of his conduct.It’s also a preview of how Trump will spend much if not most of the 14 months between now and Election Day — preparing his defense, railing about prosecutors and judges, and possibly sitting and seething through testimony about his transgressions. His legal odyssey overshadows everything else about his bid to return to the White House, which could come down to what the small group of persuadable swing voters make of the evidence against him and the spectacle of it all.Biden’s age. Trump’s trials. One man’s attempt to manage the rigors of a presidential campaign without being or seeming depleted by them. Another man’s challenge to manage any kind of presidential campaign at all with the sword of imprisonment dangling over his head. I can’t shake the feeling that the 2024 presidential election hinges on those anomalies, with all the usual dynamics minimized or rendered irrelevant by the uncharted terrain that both Biden and Trump are traversing.Granted, there could be an eventual matchup other than Biden versus Trump. The seeming inevitability of that face-off prompts me to distrust it: Life in general and politics in particular are seldom as tidy and predictable as that.And even if it does turn out to be the choice before us, we’ll hear plenty about matters other than Biden’s health and Trump’s indictments — about inflation, Hunter Biden, migrants, Hunter Biden, NATO, Hunter Biden, abortion, Hunter Biden. In terms of values and policy as well as demeanor, Biden and Trump have governed and will govern as differently as two leaders can.But questions about Biden’s physical and cognitive fitness aren’t going away. In private and in whispers, many Democrats express doubts about his robustness and crispness. They entertain the possibility of — and in some cases, wish for — a turn of events by which someone else becomes the party’s nominee. They contemplate how much is at risk.As well they should. “If Trump beats Biden next year, there won’t be another free and fair election,” A.B. Stoddard wrote in The Bulwark recently, an assessment that I find as correct as it is blunt.Trump’s chances of prevailing are bound up in what happens with his indictments and how they mature in the public mind. Until now, they seem to have helped him with the Republican primary electorate by feeding his martyr act, by supporting his portrayal of himself as a proxy for Americans who don’t meekly obey elite liberals’ orders.But that could change. I suspect it will. Even a part played as well as Trump’s poor, persecuted me suffers from overexposure, and even an electorate as polarized as ours includes some voters who make their decisions along practical lines. The uncertainty of Trump’s legal fate and the mess and melodrama of every second of his existence will matter to them.If they’re wise, it will matter more — much, much more — than Biden’s diminished brio. Picking between Biden and Trump wouldn’t be about surrendering to the lesser of two evils. It would be about distinguishing imperfection from evil, about recognizing that one route preserves democracy while the other opens the door to autocracy, about realizing that there would be remedies for Biden’s limitations but no reprieve from Trump’s excesses.Old is workable. Depravity is a dead end.Words Worth Sidelining (the Iconic Edition)Buyenlarge/Getty ImagesWhen I started working at The Times, way back in the Mesozoic Era, I learned quickly that certain sloppily used words rankled the news organization’s vigilant copy editors much more than others. “Unique” was prominent among them.We overexuberant writers regularly tried to shuttle it into our articles to ramp up their drama and puff up their significance, and we were repeatedly and rightly slapped down: Was the “unique” sequence of events or the “unique” political actor really one of a kind? Without peer? Without replica?The answer, almost always, was no. “Unique” didn’t apply. So “unique” didn’t survive. We grudgingly settled for “unusual.” We made peace with “atypical.”Why hadn’t we started out there? I think there’s a reason beyond a reflexive purpling of our prose. Regardless of our professions, many of us humans — certainly, many of us Americans — tend to see the circumstances and challenges of our own moment in the grandest, most self-inflating terms. And so we tend to describe them in the grandest, most self-inflating terms.“Unique” isn’t unique. It belongs to a whole lexicon of hyperbole, an entire brood of overstatements. Two in particular rankle you. I know that because they pop up frequently in emails that you send me, urging me to call them out. You’ve had quite enough of “unprecedented.” And the ubiquity of “iconic” is driving you mad.Like “unique,” “unprecedented” is fitting only under strict conditions, and after Donald Trump stormed onto the presidential scene in 2015, news events met them more often than usual. But once writers and commentators extracted “unprecedented” from their verbal tool kits, many used it indiscriminately. It was a hammer with such a resounding, rewarding thwack. Enamored of that sound, they reduced it to white noise.To overuse a word is to undermine it, and “iconic” illustrates that as well. Recently, I did a Google search of its mention in news sources over the prior week. I found references not only to “iconic” hotels (fair enough) and “iconic” dishes (ditto) but also to “iconic” raincoats, “iconic” images of the track star Usain Bolt and “iconic” beauty serums. There was even a list of the actress Blake Lively’s seven “most iconic roles.” Seven?! One was her shark-terrorized surfer in “The Shallows.” I’ve seen “The Shallows” (don’t ask), and I can vouch that her character musters considerable courage and ingenuity. But that doesn’t make her some soggy Erin Brockovich.It’s time for restraint — with “unprecedented,” with “iconic” and with another exaggeration that has been making the rounds. How many “unicorns” can there be? They’re multiplying like deer in the suburbs. Here a unicorn, there a unicorn, everywhere a unicorn, chomping on linguistic purity like a doe on my neighbor’s hostas. Let’s end the feast.Words Worth Sidelining is a recurring newsletter feature. Thanks to Shane Sahadi of Brentwood, Calif., and Kathy Simolaris of Wilbraham, Mass., among many others, for flagging “unprecedented,” and to Adam Eisenstat of Pittsburgh and Norma Howard of Seattle, among many others, for sounding the alarm about “iconic.”For the Love of SentencesJimmy Buffett in the 1970s on his sailboat in Key West.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesThe musician Jimmy Buffett died last week, and journalists paid vivid tribute to a colorful character. In The Washington Post, Amy Argetsinger and Hank Stuever framed him in terms of the rock band that gave us “Hotel California,” writing that Buffett “looked like an Eagle, or at least someone an Eagle might have hired to replace the kitchen cabinets in a house on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, who winds up staying the weekend, playing guitar.” (Thanks to Tom Davis of Green Bay, Wis., and Augusta Scattergood of Washington, D.C., for nominating this.)In The Times, Guy Trebay appraised Buffett’s sartorial style by what he eschewed: “not for Mr. Buffett the hippie-adjacent suedes and leathers of his musical contemporaries.” (Alan Stamm, Birmingham, Mich.)The Times also resurfaced Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s 2018 profile of Buffett as a late-blooming and lavishly compensated entrepreneur: “Jimmy Buffett — the nibbling on sponge cake, watching the sun bake, getting drunk and screwing, it’s 5 o’clock somewhere Jimmy Buffett — has been replaced with a well-preserved businessman who is leveraging the Jimmy Buffett of yore in order to keep the Jimmy Buffett of now in the manner to which the old Jimmy Buffett never dreamed he could become accustomed.” (Charles Ellis Harp, Victoria, B.C., and Chip Pearsall, Greenville, N.C., among others)The past week was a good one for spirited takes on college football. On ESPN’s website, David Hale provided context for the Colorado Buffaloes’ upset victory, in the first weekend of college football, over the T.C.U. Horned Frogs, who played in the national championship game some eight months ago: “Sure, this wasn’t last year’s T.C.U. That team was like the guitar solo in ‘Free Bird’ — chaotic, rollicking, lasting far longer than it had any right to, but never truly earning the respect of the cultured class of critics. But those Frogs had a host of N.F.L.-caliber players. This year’s team — well, it’s a little like seeing Skynyrd today. There’s no one from the original band left.” (Chris Wheatley, Port Ludlow, Wash.)And in The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., Luke DeCock questioned the wisdom of the Atlantic Coast Conference’s admission of S.M.U., the University of California and Stanford University into its fold. “It was a late-night deal at Food Lion: Buy one irrelevant football program, get two free,” he wrote. (Eric Walker, Black Mountain, N.C.)Moving on to politics, Peter Sagal in The Atlantic explained that abducting and deprogramming MAGA cultists wasn’t a workable strategy, given the cult’s size: “It would take half the country kidnapping the other half of the country, and then who would feed the pets?” (Donna Cameron, Brier, Wash.)In The Times, Vanessa Friedman pondered the moral to the promiscuous use of Donald Trump’s mug shot in merchandise produced not only by his supporters but also by his critics: “What does it mean, exactly, that no matter our allegiances at this particular moment, or our different versions of recent history, we share a common ground right in the middle of an ocean of consumer kitsch? That while we may have lost the skill of constructive dialogue, we all still speak T-shirt?” (Barbara Buswell, Oakland, Calif.)And this is how Jack Shafer, in Politico, described Mitch McConnell’s most recent incident of sudden speechlessness: “The top Republican powered down for 30 seconds as if an unseen hand had removed the lithium ion battery from his chassis.” (Tim White, Moncure, N.C.)To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.On a Personal NoteLaysan albatrosses on Laysan Island, Hawaii.NetflixWhen it’s close to bedtime and I’m too tired to read or to follow the plot of a movie or series, I favor nature documentaries. I luxuriate in images of scenery inaccessible to the casual traveler. I marvel at the patience and prowess of whoever managed to capture footage of a mature lion at the moment it killed, a young albatross at the instant it took flight.But what we humans can do is arguably paltry next to the animals’ feats. That’s always one of my takeaways. Operating on ancient instinct, birds migrate across or between entire continents. Salmon make that crazy trek upstream. Polar bears swim for miles and miles, from ice floe to ice floe, in the frigid hope of sneaking up on a seal.All those phenomena appear in resplendent color and breathtaking detail in “Our Planet II,” a four-part documentary that began streaming on Netflix in June. It means to awe, and it succeeds. But it does something even more powerful and important: It humbles.I don’t know how any person can behold the diversity and majesty of the wildlife on display in “Our Planet II,” or in many similar celebrations of the natural world, and not question the presumptuousness and recklessness with which we often disturb and destroy what’s around us. I don’t know how anyone can shake off the reminder that we share the Earth with creatures too extraordinary to be taken for granted.As a warming planet melts ice floes, those polar bears swim longer and harder, at risk of starvation. As our garbage pollutes the oceans, albatrosses sometimes choke on plastics that they mistake for food. They have no say in our behavior, but they’re often at the mercy of it. Maybe that makes some people feel godlike. In light of how we’ve comported ourselves, it makes me feel ashamed. More

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      The Contagious Corruption of Ken Paxton

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      Let’s talk about leadership again. Last week, I wrote about Vivek Ramaswamy and the power of unprincipled leaders to exploit civic ignorance. This week, I want to address the power of leadership to shape character and the problem of corruption in the era of Trump. And for this discussion, we’ll turn to Texas.A very good thing is belatedly happening in the Lone Star State. Republicans are on the verge not merely of expelling one of their own from office, but of expelling someone with the most impeccable of MAGA credentials. The suspended Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, is facing an impeachment trial in the Texas Senate, and if the early votes are any indication, it’s not going well for him. He’s already lost a number of motions to dismiss the case by margins approximating the two-thirds majority that will be necessary to convict him — and this is an upper chamber that Republicans control 19 to 12.Paxton faces impeachment in large part because seven of his top deputies blew the whistle on him in 2020, claiming that he had engaged in bribery and abuse of office. The charges against Paxton, to which he pleads not guilty, center primarily on his relationship with an investor named Nate Paul. Paxton is accused of providing favors to Paul, including using the power of his office in an attempt to stop foreclosure sales of Paul’s properties, ordering employees not to assist law enforcement investigating Paul and even providing Paul with “highly sensitive information” about an F.B.I. raid on his home.And what did Paxton get in return? Paul reportedly helped Paxton remodel his home and employed Paxton’s mistress. (Paxton’s wife, Angela Paxton, is a Republican state senator who is attending the hearings but is barred from voting on the charges against her husband.)But that’s hardly the complete list of Paxton’s misdeeds. He’s still facing criminal charges — which I’ve long considered questionable — stemming from a 2015 state indictment for securities fraud, and his treatment of the whistle-blowers is also under public scrutiny. Soon after coming forward, every whistle-blower either resigned, was fired or was placed on leave. When they sued for retaliation and improper firing, Paxton attempted to use $3.3 million in taxpayer funds to settle the lawsuit.In addition, following the 2020 election, Paxton filed one of the most outrageous lawsuits in the entire Republican effort to overturn the presidential result. He sued Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, seeking an order preventing those states from voting in the Electoral College. The suit was so transparently specious that Texas’ respected then-solicitor general, Kyle Hawkins — who was appointed to the post by Paxton — refused to add his name to the complaint. The Supreme Court dismissed the case without even granting it a hearing.Naturally, none of these scandals truly hurt Paxton with Texas Republican voters. He won his 2022 primary runoff against George P. Bush by 36 points. He defeated Democrat Rochelle Garza in the general election by 10 points. Texas primary voters — like Republican primary voters in many other states — decided once again that character is irrelevant so long as their candidate fights the right enemies.But that’s not the end of the story. What’s happening now is a Texas-size version of the civil war that rages across the right. Is it possible for Republicans to police their own, or does Paxton’s devotion to Donald Trump and his zealous commitment to the culture wars excuse his misconduct, however egregious? Is it possible for Republicans to potentially start the slow and painful process of healing the G.O.P.?I date my interest in the moral power of leadership back to 1998, when I was shocked that a number of my progressive friends could shrug their shoulders not just at Bill Clinton’s affair with a White House intern (though I could see their argument that his adultery was a personal matter) but also at his dishonesty under oath. The country was at peace and prosperous, they noted. Besides, weren’t Republicans hypocrites? Newt Gingrich was an adulterer. Bob Livingston, the Louisiana Republican and speaker-designate to succeed Gingrich, also confessed to extramarital affairs and stepped down.In the midst of these revelations, the Southern Baptist Convention — the nation’s largest Protestant denomination — gathered at its annual convention in Salt Lake City and tried to make the simple case to the American people that character counts. It passed a resolution on the moral character of public officials containing this memorable line: “Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.”Putting aside the words about God’s judgment, I suspect that a broad range of Americans, regardless of faith, would agree with the basic premise: Corruption is contagious.But why? Consider the relationship between leadership and our own self-interest. Most of us belong to organizations of some type, and unless we’re leading the organization, our income, our power and even our respect within the community can depend a great deal on the good will of the men and women who lead us. In very tangible ways, their character creates our path through our careers, our churches and our civic organizations.Thus, if a leader exhibits moral courage and values integrity, then the flawed people in his or her orbit will strive to be the best versions of themselves.But if a leader exhibits cruelty and dishonesty, then those same flawed people will be more apt to yield to their worst temptations. They’ll mimic the values of the people who lead them.Let me use an analogy I’ve used before: Think of a leader as setting the course of a river. It’s always easier to swim with the current. Yes, you can swim against the current for a while, but eventually you’ll exhaust yourself, and you’ll either yield to the current or leave the stream altogether.And what is the moral current of Trumpism? For Donald Trump’s supporters, tactics that would normally be utterly unacceptable on moral grounds instead become urgent priorities. In this moral calculus, Paxton’s absurd lawsuit against Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin isn’t a mark of shame, but rather a badge of honor.Paxton’s aggressive loyalty to Trump, in other words, acts as a form of indulgence that grants him license in his personal and professional life. Paxton’s acknowledged sins, including his affair, are cheap and tawdry. Yet a constellation of Republican stars are rallying to his side, led by Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Ted Cruz and Steve Bannon. Because he’s a fighter. He goes to war against the left, and if the age of Trump teaches us anything, it’s that the current of his leadership flows eternally toward conflict and self-interest, consequences be damned.It’s hard to overstate how much this ethos contradicts the Christianity that Paxton purports to proclaim. In fact, scriptures teach that the role of the godly man or woman isn’t to yield to power, but to confront power when that power is corrupt. The mission is to swim against the cultural current. That brings me to one of the most grievous abuses of scripture during the Trump presidency — the constant comparison of Trump to King David.Trump is flawed, his supporters acknowledge. But so was David, they argue, and God blessed David. Scripture calls him a man after God’s own heart. But David’s virtues did not excuse his vices. In one of scripture’s most memorable passages, the prophet Nathan not only directly confronted the king but also declared a harsh judgment for David’s sins. And what was David’s response? Repentance. “I have sinned against the Lord,” he said. He then penned a poignant, penitent psalm. “God, create a clean heart for me,” he begs. “Do not banish me from your presence,” he pleads.Does any of that sound like Donald Trump? Does that bear any resemblance to the religious right in the age of Trump? Of course not. The contagious corruption of a broken president and a broken party has turned the hearts of millions of Christians away from scripture’s clear moral commands. They have chosen not to swim against the tide.But the battle is not lost, not entirely. In Ken Paxton’s office there were people who had the courage to confront their leader. They put their careers on the line to confront Texas’ legal king. And even if Paxton himself doesn’t have the integrity to repent and accept the consequences, there are other Republican leaders who can impose consequences themselves. They can start the process of altering the current of the Republican river, away from corruption and deception and back toward integrity and respect for the rule of law.The trial of Ken Paxton may well be the most important political trial of the year. It is in Austin that the G.O.P. directly confronts the enduring legacy of Donald Trump and asks itself, will we completely remake ourselves in his malign image? Or do we possess enough lingering moral fortitude to resist his leadership and at least begin respecting the truth once again?America needs two healthy political parties, and not just because healthy parties create better policies. Healthy parties create better leaders, and better leaders can help repair the fabric of a party, a nation and a culture that has been torn and frayed by a man who told America that the road to power was paved with mendacity, self-indulgence and conflict. Defeating Trump and his imitators is the first step onto a better path. More

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      McConnell, Dismissing Health Concerns, Says He Will Finish His Senate Term

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      The Kentucky Republican said he would finish his term as leader, which runs through 2024, and in the Senate, where he was elected to serve through 2026.Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the longtime Republican leader whose recent medical episodes have raised questions about his ability to continue steering his party in the Senate, declared on Wednesday that he had no intention of relinquishing his top post or leaving Congress ahead of schedule.“I’m going to finish my term as leader and I’m going to finish my Senate term,” Mr. McConnell, wan in appearance and defiant in tone, told reporters at the Capitol as he took questions outside the Senate chamber.In a crowded news conference, Mr. McConnell’s first at the Capitol since two alarming episodes in which he froze midsentence on camera while addressing the media, the 81-year-old minority leader refused to engage with questions about his health or his political future, even as he appeared to leave the door open to giving up his leadership post after 2024.Still, Mr. McConnell, whose seventh term in the Senate lasts through 2026, would say nothing about the spells he experienced on camera in recent weeks that left him staring vacantly into space without speaking, appearing temporarily paralyzed.“Dr. Monahan covered the subject fully,” Mr. McConnell said Wednesday, referring to a letter his office released from Dr. Brian P. Monahan, the attending physician of Congress. Mr. McConnell, who appeared notably thinner since leaving Washington six weeks ago for the summer recess, said the brief statement from Dr. Monahan, which said there was no evidence the senator had a seizure disorder or had experienced a stroke, adequately put to bed any “reasonable questions.”Several medical professionals who watched video of Mr. McConnell’s episodes suggested he had been experiencing focal seizures or mini strokes. They cast doubt on Dr. Monahan’s assessment that the incidents were merely part of a normal recovery from a concussion Mr. McConnell had sustained in March after falling at a Washington hotel.But on Wednesday, after three consecutive questions about his health, Mr. McConnell abruptly ended the news conference.Famously tight-lipped and difficult to read even in his prime, Mr. McConnell offered his colleagues little more detail in the semi-privacy of the weekly Senate Republican lunch, the first time G.O.P. senators had gathered since returning to Washington amid rumblings about a potential change at the top of the leadership ladder.There, he gave his colleagues a rundown of his medical evaluations and said he had been given a clean bill of health, according to Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, as well as others who attended. Mr. McConnell told them that he had only frozen up twice, and simply had the misfortune of doing it both times on camera.The update was enough to reassure most of his colleagues that he was healthy enough to continue leading the conference and that it was time to move on, at least for the moment. They asked him no follow-up questions during the private lunch and later lauded him publicly for what they called a high level of transparency about his condition.“For him, this is unusual,” Senator John Cornyn of Texas, one of Mr. McConnell’s potential successors, said after the lunch. “Senator McConnell is famous for keeping his cards close to the vest; he’s very good at it. Usually it serves him well, but not in this case. I think transparency does serve him well.”“I think transparency does serve him well,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, praising Mr. McConnell for updating his colleagues.Kent Nishimura for The New York TimesSenator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, described his comments during the lunch as a detailed report of his doctor’s evaluation, and said that Mr. McConnell had his full support. Mr. Graham was one of 10 G.O.P. senators who voted last fall for a change at the top of party leadership, supporting an unsuccessful challenge to Mr. McConnell by Senator Rick Scott of Florida.Senator Todd Young of Indiana said the doctor’s note had reassured him that Mr. McConnell was in “decent health,” though he signaled some uncertainty about how long that would continue.“I trust Senator McConnell will continue to lead our conference in the coming weeks, months, perhaps even years,” Mr. Young said. “But should Republicans have to choose a different leader, I’m confident we’ll settle on positive leadership that places a great emphasis on issues of national security.”Others were more skeptical of the idea that Mr. McConnell would go anywhere anytime soon.“It’ll happen when you see donkeys fly,” Mr. Kennedy said.Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, an ophthalmologist, was one of the few Republicans on Capitol Hill to raise an eyebrow about Dr. Monahan’s brief and carefully worded statements regarding the minority leader’s health, both of which have suggested dehydration might have played a role.“I’m not questioning his ability to be in the Senate,” Mr. Paul said of Mr. McConnell. “My question is with the diagnosis. I think when you have misinformation put out there, like ‘just dehydration,’ it leads to further conjecture, well, maybe there’s something else we’re not telling.”Kayla Guo More

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      Colorado Lawsuit Seeks to Keep Trump Off Ballots Under 14th Amendment

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      The amendment says anyone who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution after taking an oath to defend it is ineligible to hold office, and a long-shot effort to employ it is growing.Six Colorado voters filed a lawsuit on Wednesday seeking to keep former President Donald J. Trump off the state’s ballots under the 14th Amendment, which says anyone who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution after taking an oath to defend it is ineligible to hold office.The lawsuit, which was filed in a state district court in Denver with the help of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, demands that the Colorado secretary of state not print Mr. Trump’s name on the Republican primary ballot. It also asks the court to rule that Mr. Trump is disqualified in order to end any “uncertainty.”The theory that the 14th Amendment disqualifies Mr. Trump has gained traction among liberals and anti-Trump conservatives since two prominent conservative law professors argued in an article last month that his actions before and during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol constituted engagement in an insurrection. But it remains a legal long shot. Mr. Trump would surely appeal any ruling that he was ineligible, and a final decision could rest with the Supreme Court, which has a conservative supermajority that includes three justices he appointed.A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to a request for comment.Jena Griswold, the Colorado secretary of state, said in a statement, “I look forward to the Colorado court’s substantive resolution of the issues, and am hopeful that this case will provide guidance to election officials on Trump’s eligibility as a candidate for office.”The plaintiffs are Republican and unaffiliated voters who argue that Mr. Trump is ineligible and that they will be harmed if he appears on primary ballots. They aim to ensure “that votes cast will be for those constitutionally qualified to hold office, that a disqualified candidate does not siphon off support from their candidates of choice, and that voters are not deprived of the chance to vote for a qualified candidate in the general election,” the suit says.Similar efforts are unfolding in other states. Last month, the liberal group Free Speech for People wrote to the secretaries of state of Florida, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio and Wisconsin, urging them not to include Mr. Trump on ballots. And an obscure presidential candidate, John Anthony Castro, a Republican, has sued in New Hampshire.These attempts are separate from the criminal cases against Mr. Trump. They do not depend on his being convicted, and convictions would not trigger disqualification.The legal questions instead include what counts as engaging in an insurrection, who has standing to challenge Mr. Trump’s eligibility and who has the authority to enforce his disqualification if he is disqualified.“Section 3 of the 14th Amendment is old — it has not been truly stress-tested in modern times,” said Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School who specializes in election law. “There are some big forks in the road where you can argue both ways.”The first fork in the Colorado case will be whether individual voters have the right to sue. Challenges to a candidate’s eligibility — on any basis, not just the 14th Amendment — often come from opposing candidates, who are directly affected by the challenged candidate’s presence.Derek Muller, a professor at Notre Dame Law School, emphasized that standing requirements are looser in state courts than in federal courts, especially when it comes to voters’ ability to challenge candidates’ eligibility. But Richard Collins, an emeritus professor of law at the University of Colorado, said that the Colorado Supreme Court had become increasingly restrictive in its interpretation of standing.And beyond standing, Professor Muller said, a big hurdle could be “ripeness”: Because candidates haven’t formally filed for ballot access yet, a judge could decide that the legal questions are not ready for review. More

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      Pence Calls Trump’s Populism a ‘Road to Ruin’ for the G.O.P.

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      The former vice president used a speech in New Hampshire on Wednesday to call on Republicans to choose between conservatism and Donald Trump’s brand of populism.Former Vice President Mike Pence devoted an entire speech on Wednesday to what he called a “fundamental” and “unbridgeable” divide within the Republican Party — the split between Reaganite conservatives like himself and propagators of populism like former President Donald J. Trump and his imitators.Mr. Pence, who is polling in the single digits in the G.O.P. presidential primary race and lags far behind the front-runner Mr. Trump, has been warning about the dangers of populism for nearly a year. But his speech on Wednesday went further than he has gone before, casting Mr. Trump’s populism as a “road to ruin.”“Should the new populism of the right seize and guide our party, the Republican Party as we have long known it will cease to exist,” Mr. Pence said at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College in Manchester. “And the fate of American freedom would be in doubt.”In his plea to Republicans to abandon populism and embrace conservatism, Mr. Pence said that “we have come to a Republican time for choosing.” The line echoed his hero Ronald Reagan’s 1964 televised address, “A Time for Choosing,” in which the former Hollywood actor framed that year’s presidential election as a choice between individual freedom and governmental oppression.“Republican voters face a choice,” Mr. Pence said. “I believe that choice will determine both the fate of our party and the course of our nation for years to come.”He asked if the G.O.P. will be “the party of conservatism or will we follow the siren song of populism unmoored to conservative principles? The future of this movement and this party belongs to one or the other — not both. That is because the fundamental divide between these two factions is unbridgeable.”Mr. Pence defined Republican populism as a trading away of time-honored principles for raw political power. He said populists trafficked in “personal grievances and performative outrage.” And he said they would “abandon American leadership on the world stage,” erode constitutional norms, jettison fiscal responsibility and wield the power of the government to punish their enemies.He connected Mr. Trump’s populist movement to a long line of progressive populists, including Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Huey Long, the former governor of Louisiana. He said that progressivism and Republican populism were “fellow travelers on the same road to ruin.”And Mr. Pence named names.“Donald Trump, along with his imitators,” he said, “often sound like an echo of the progressive they would replace in the White House.”In response to Mr. Pence’s speech, Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said in a statement, “President Trump’s victory in 2016 exposed the massive divide between voters around the country and the establishment Beltway insiders who made terrible trade deals, allowed our southern border to become overrun and never missed an opportunity to play world cop. The conservative movement and the Republican Party have changed for the better, and nobody wants it to go back to the way it was before.”Mr. Pence, in his speech, also called out Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida for using state power to punish corporations for taking political stands he disagreed with — a reference to Mr. DeSantis’s efforts to strip Disney of its special tax status.Mr. Pence said he understood the frustrations that had led to populist movements both on the left and the right. He listed income inequality caused by globalization and increased automation, the opioid epidemic and the cultural demonization of conservatives. He did not include on his list the invasion of Iraq — which, unlike most Republicans, he still defends to this day.But he glossed over his own role in promoting Trumpism as Mr. Trump’s vice president as well as his traveling booster, a role Mr. Pence served throughout the 2016 campaign and all four years of the Trump presidency. Mr. Pence finally broke with him by refusing Mr. Trump’s demand that he overturn the results of the presidential election on Jan. 6, 2021.In Mr. Pence’s telling, it is Mr. Trump who has changed. He said Mr. Trump ran as a conservative in 2016 and governed as one with Mr. Pence’s help. But that story ignores inconvenient facts, including that the Trump-Pence administration added around $8 trillion to the national debt, enacted a protectionist trade policy and laid the groundwork for a complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan that Mr. Pence opposed.The former vice president has woven warnings about populism into many of his speeches and off-the-cuff remarks since at least last October, when he condemned “Putin apologists” in the Republican Party. But at the first Republican debate last month in Milwaukee, the split between New Right populism and Reaganite conservatism came under a brighter spotlight in the onstage clashes between Mr. Pence and the businessman Vivek Ramaswamy.In recent weeks, Mr. Pence and his team decided the subject was important enough to warrant its own speech, according to a person familiar with the planning, who was not authorized to discuss it publicly. His invocation of Mr. Reagan as an inspirational figure — a common theme of Mr. Pence’s speeches but done at length on Wednesday — comes as Mr. Pence and other Republican presidential candidates prepare for their second debate, which will be held on Sept. 27 at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif.As he extolled his hero, Mr. Pence all but pleaded for Republicans to remember there was a time before Mr. Trump. And that it was a time worth returning to.“The truth is,” he said, “the Republican Party did not begin on a golden escalator in 2015.” More

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      Behold the Free Speech Chutzpah of the Republican Party

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      A solid majority of Republicans continues to believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 election — evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Virtually all Democrats believe that Trump did, in fact, lose the 2020 election and that Biden won fair and square.Now in an extraordinary display of chutzpah, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, and fellow Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee have accused Democrats of violating the First Amendment rights of election deniers.In a June 26, 2023, interim staff report, Jordan and his colleagues charged that the Biden administration “colluded with big tech and ‘disinformation’ partners to censor” those who claimed that Trump won in 2020.The report, “The Weaponization of CISA: How a ‘Cybersecurity’ Agency Colluded With Big Tech and ‘Disinformation’ Partners to Censor Americans,” makes the argument thatThe First Amendment recognizes that no person or entity has a monopoly on the truth, and that the “truth” of today can quickly become the “misinformation” of tomorrow. Labeling speech “misinformation” or “disinformation” does not strip it of its First Amendment protection. As such, under the Constitution, the federal government is strictly prohibited from censoring Americans’ political speech.These civil libertarian claims of unconstitutional suppression of speech come from the same Republican Party that is leading the charge to censor the teaching of what it calls “divisive concepts” about race; the same party that expelled two Democratic members of the Tennessee state legislature who loudly called for more gun control after a school shooting; the same party that threatens to impeach a liberal judge in North Carolina for speaking out about racial bias; the same party that has aided and abetted book banning in red states across the country.In other words, it is Republicans who have become the driving force in deploying censorship to silence the opposition, simultaneously claiming that their own First Amendment rights are threatened by Democrats.One of the most egregious examples of Republican censorship is taking place in North Carolina, where a state judicial commission has initiated an investigation of Anita Earls, a Black State Supreme Court justice, because she publicly called for increased diversity in the court system.A June 2 Law360 piece examined the racial and gender composition of the North Carolina judiciary and found “that out of 22 appellate jurists — seven state Supreme Court justices and 15 Court of Appeals judges — 64 percent are male and 86 percent are white.”The article then quoted Earls: “It has been shown by social scientists that diverse decision-making bodies do a better job. … I really feel like everyone’s voice needs to be heard, and if you don’t have a diverse judicial system, perspectives and views are not being heard, you’re not making decisions that are in the interests of the entire society. And I feel like that’s wrong.”On Aug. 15, the North Carolina Judicial Standards Commission notified Earls that it was opening an investigation “based on an interview you since gave to the media in which you appear to allege that your Supreme Court colleagues are acting out of racial, gender, and/or political bias in some of their decision-making.”Earls’s interview, the notification letter continued, “potentially violates Canon 2A of the Code of Judicial Conduct which requires a judge to conduct herself ‘at all times in a manner which promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.’”On Aug. 29, Earls filed suit in federal court charging that there is “an ongoing campaign on the part of the North Carolina Judicial Standards Commission to stifle” her First Amendment free-speech rights “and expose her to punishment that ranges from a letter of caution that becomes part of a permanent file available to any entity conducting a background check to removal from the bench.”At the center of Republican efforts to censor ideological adversaries is an extensive drive to regulate what is taught in public schools and colleges.In an Education Week article published last year, “Here’s the Long List of Topics Republicans Want Banned From the Classroom,” Sarah Schwartz and Eesha Pendharkar provided a laundry list of Republican state laws regulating education:Since January 2021, 14 states have passed into law what’s popularly referred to as “anti-critical race theory” legislation. These laws and orders, combined with local actions to restrict certain types of instruction, now impact more than one out of every three children in the country, according to a recent study from UCLA.Schwartz and Pendharkar also noted that “many of these new bills propose withholding funding from school districts that don’t comply with these regulations. Some, though, would allow parents to sue individual educators who provide banned material to students, potentially collecting thousands of dollars.”What’s more, “Most prohibited teaching a list of ‘divisive concepts,’ which originally appeared in an executive order signed by then-President Donald Trump in fall 2020.”The Trump order, “Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping,” included prohibitions on the following “divisive concepts”:That an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex; that any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex; or that meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by a particular race to oppress another race.The censorship effort has been quite successful.In a February 2022 article, “New Critical Race Theory Laws Have Teachers Scared, Confused and Self-censoring,” The Washington Post reported that “in 13 states, new laws or directives govern how race can be taught in schools, in some cases creating reporting systems for complaints. The result, teachers and principals say, is a climate of fear around how to comply with rules they often do not understand.”Larry Summers, a former president of Harvard who is a professor of economics there, argued in an email that issues of free speech are not easily resolved.The problem, Summers wrote, “comes from both sides. Ron DeSantis’s efforts to limit what he regards as critical race theory is deplorable as are efforts on Ivy League campuses to discredit and devalue those with unfashionable beliefs about diversity or the role of genes or things military.”But, Summers continued,It’s sometimes a bit harder than the good guys make out. What about cultures of intolerance where those who, for example, believe in genetic determinism are shunned, and graduate students all exhibit their academic freedom rights to not be the teaching fellows of faculty with those beliefs. Does ideological diversity mean philosophy departments need to treat Ayn Rand with dignity or biology departments need to hear out creationism?“What about professional schools where professional ethics are part of what is being instilled?” Summers asked:Could a law school consider hiring a lawyer who, while in government, defended coercive interrogation practices? Under what circumstances should one accept, perhaps insist on university leaders criticizing speech? I have been fond of saying academic freedom does not include freedom from criticism but when should leaders speak out? Was I right to condemn calls for divesting in Israel as antisemitic in effect, if not intent? When should speech be attacked?There is, at this moment, a nascent mobilization on many campuses of organizations determined to defend free speech rights, to reject the sanctioning of professors and students, and to ensure the safety of controversial speakers.Graduates of 22 colleges and universities have formed branches of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance “to support free speech, academic freedom, and viewpoint diversity.”At Harvard, 133 members of the faculty have joined the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, dedicated to upholding the free speech guidelines adopted by the university in 1990:Free speech is uniquely important to the university because we are a community committed to reason and rational discourse. Free interchange of ideas is vital for our primary function of discovering and disseminating ideas through research, teaching, and learning.Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at the school and a founder of the group, wrote in an email that achieving this goal is much tougher than generally believed:To understand the recent assaults on free speech, we need to flip the question: Not why diverse opinions are being suppressed, but why they are tolerated. Freedom of speech is an exotic, counterintuitive concept. What’s intuitive is that the people who disagree with me are spreading dangerous falsehoods and must be stifled for the greater good. The realization that everyone feels this way, that all humans are fallible, that however confident I am in my beliefs, I may be wrong, and that the only way we can collectively approach the truth is to allow opinions to be expressed and then evaluate them, requires feats of abstraction and self-control.The example I cited at the beginning of this column — the charge that the Biden administration “colluded with big tech and ‘disinformation’ partners to censor” the claims of election deniers — has proved to be a case study of a successful Republican tactic on several fronts.Republicans claimed the moral high ground as the victims of censorship, throwing their adversaries on the defensive and quieting their opponents.On June 6, The Washington Post reported, in “These Academics Studied Falsehoods Spread by Trump. Now the G.O.P. Wants Answers,” thatThe pressure has forced some researchers to change their approach or step back, even as disinformation is rising ahead of the 2024 election. As artificial intelligence makes deception easier and platforms relax their rules on political hoaxes, industry veterans say they fear that young scholars will avoid studying disinformation.One of the underlying issues in the free speech debate is the unequal distribution of power. Paul Frymer, a political scientist at Princeton, raised a question in reply to my email: “I wonder if the century-long standard for why we defend free speech — that we need a fairly absolute marketplace of ideas to allow all ideas to be heard (with a few exceptions), deliberated upon, and that the truth will ultimately win out — is a bit dated in this modern era of social media, algorithms and most importantly profound corporate power.”While there has always been a corporate skew to speech, Frymer argued,in the modern era, technology enables such an overwhelming drowning out of different ideas. How long are we hanging on to the protection of a hypothetical — that someone will find the truth on the 40th page of a Google search or a podcast with no corporate backing? How long do we defend a hypothetical when the reality is so strongly skewed toward the suppression of the meaningful exercise of free speech?Frymer contended thatWe do seem to need regulation of speech, in some form, more than ever. I’m not convinced we can’t find a way to do it that would enable our society to be more just and informed. The stakes — the fragility of democracy, the increasing hatred and violence on the basis of demographic categories, and the health of our planet — are extremely high to defend a single idea with no compromise.Frymer suggested that ultimatelyWe can’t consider free speech without at least some understanding of power. We can’t assume in all contexts that the truth will ever come out; unregulated speech does not mean free speech.From a different vantage point, Robert C. Post, a law professor at Yale, argued in an email that the censorship/free speech debate has run amok:It certainly has gone haywire. The way I understand it is that freedom of speech has not been a principled commitment, but has been used instrumentally to attain other political ends. The very folks who were so active in demanding freedom of speech in universities have turned around and imposed unconscionable censorship on schools and libraries. The very folks who have demanded a freedom of speech for minority groups have sought to suppress offensive and racist speech.The framing in the current debate over free speech and the First Amendment, Post contends, is dangerously off-kilter. He sent me an article he wrote that will be published shortly by the scholarly journal Daedalus, “The Unfortunate Consequences of a Misguided Free Speech Principle.” In it, he notes that the issues are not just more complex than generally recognized, but in fact distorted by false assumptions.Post makes the case that there is “a widespread tendency to conceptualize the problem as one of free speech. We imagine that the crisis would be resolved if only we could speak more freely.” In fact, he writes, “the difficulty we face is not one of free speech, but of politics. Our capacity to speak has been disrupted because our politics has become diseased.”He specifically faults a widely read March 2022 Times editorial, “America Has a Free Speech Problem,” that warnedAmericans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.Post observes thatNo such right exists in any well-ordered society. If I walk into a room shouting outrageous slurs, I should expect to be shamed and shunned. Only a demoralized community would passively accept irresponsibly hurtful speech.People constantly “balance self-restraint against the need for candor.”Arguments that the protection of free speech is crucial to the preservation of democracy, Post maintains, “encourage us to forget that the fundamental point of public discourse is the political legitimation of the state. Our public discourse is successful when it produces a healthy public opinion capable of making state power answerable to politics.”In Post’s view, polarization “is not a simple question of speech. It is the corrosive dissolution of the political commitments by which Americans have forged themselves into a single nation. If we conceptualize public discourse as a social practice, we can see that its failures stem from this fundamental problem.”In this context, Post concludes,Politics is possible only when diverse persons agree to be bound by a common fate. Lacking that fundamental commitment, politics can easily slide into an existential struggle for survival that is the equivalent of war. We can too easily come to imagine our opponents as enemies, whose victory would mean the collapse of the nation.In such circumstances, Post continues,Political debate can no longer produce a healthy and legitimate democratic will. However inclusive we may make our public discourse, however tolerant of the infinite realms of potential diversity we may become, the social practice of public discourse will fail to achieve its purpose so long as we no longer experience ourselves as tied to a common destiny.“We cannot now speak to each other because something has already gone violently wrong with our political community,” Post writes. “The underlying issue is not our speech, but our politics. So long as we insist on allegiance to a mythical free speech principle that exists immaculately distinct from the concrete social practices, we shall look for solutions in all the wrong places.”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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      Wrestling With Inequality, Some Conservatives Redraw Economic Blueprint

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      A growing number of Republican politicians and theorists are challenging party orthodoxy on pocketbook issues, corporate power and government’s role.More Republicans are coming to the view that economic inequality, or a lack of social mobility, is a problem in the United States — and that more can be done to enable families to attain or regain a middle-class life.Though discussions about inequality tend to be most visible among liberals, about four in 10 Republican or Republican-leaning adults think there is too much economic inequality in the country, according to a Pew Research survey. And among Republicans making less than about $40,000 a year who see too much economic inequality, 63 percent agree that the economic system “requires major changes” to address it.But a growing debate among conservative thinkers, politicians and the party base — online, in books and in public forums — reveals a group divided about how, in practice, to address pocketbook issues and the extent to which the government should be involved.“I don’t think just having a bigger government is a solution to a lot of these problems,” said Inez Stepman, a senior policy analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum and a fellow with the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank widely credited with giving Trumpism an intellectual framework. “But I do think that we could stand to think a little bit more on the right about how to make that 1950s middle-class life possible for people.”These yearnings and ideological stirrings have picked up as both whites without college degrees and the broader working class have grown as a share of Republican voters. (Hillary Clinton won college-educated white voters by 17 percentage points in her 2016 race against Donald J. Trump; four years earlier, Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, carried that group.)A notable swipe against longtime Republican economic thinking has come from Sohrab Ahmari, a conservative who served as an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal and the opinion editor of The New York Post. The metamorphosis of his worldview is laid out in a recently published book, “Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What to Do About It.”“I was writing editorials preaching the gospel of low taxes, free trade, et cetera,” Mr. Ahmari said in an interview. But Mr. Trump’s election inspired him to research how “American life in general for the lower rungs of the labor market is unbelievably precarious,” he said, and his politics changed.Mr. Ahmari recently endorsed a second term for Mr. Trump, but he has written that “while ferociously conservative on cultural issues,” he is also “increasingly drawn to the economic policies of the left — figures like Senators Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders.”In their own ways, Republican presidential primary candidates are jostling for ways to validate the populist energy and financial unease that Mr. Trump tapped into with a mix of pronouncements and policy promises. Some have set out economic goals that, according to many experts, are hard to square with their promises to reduce public debt and taxes and make deep cuts to government programs — especially now that many Republicans have backed away from calls to cut entitlement benefits.In a campaign speech in New Hampshire this summer called “A Declaration of Economic Independence,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican presidential contender, sharply critiqued China, diversity programming, “excessive regulation and excessive taxes” — a familiar set of modern conservative concerns. Yet he also echoed complaints and economic goals often heard from the left.“We want to be a country where you can raise a family on one sole income,” he told the crowd.“We cannot have policy that kowtows to the largest corporations and Wall Street at the expense of small businesses and average Americans,” he added. “There’s a difference between a free-market economy, which we want, and corporatism.”Critics on the left and the right argue that Mr. DeSantis has failed to clearly define how he would achieve those goals. The DeSantis campaign declined to comment for this article, but he has cited pathways to broader prosperity that include bringing industrial jobs back from abroad, increasing work force education and technical training, removing “red tape” faced by small businesses and aiming for annual U.S. economic growth of at least 3 percent.Though the fissures on the right over economic issues were evident when Mr. Trump upended the political scene eight years ago, the realignments are maturing and deepening, causing fresh tensions as factions disagree on the extent to which inequality, globalization and growing corporate power should be seen as problems.Some conservatives remain more concerned with the trajectory of federal spending and unlocking greater overall prosperity, rather than its distribution.Last year, Phil Gramm, a Republican who steered the passage of major tax cuts and deregulation during his time representing Texas in Congress from the 1970s to the early 2000s, published a book with his fellow economists Robert Ekelund and John Early called “The Myth of American Inequality.” The book — filled with alternative tabulations of impoverishment and living standards — argues that inequality is not high and rising as “the mainstream” suggests.It argues that when including welfare transfers, income inequality has been more stable than government figures suggest, and that the share of Americans living in poverty fell from 15 percent in 1967 to only 1.1 percent in 2017.“The point of the book is to get the facts straight,” Mr. Gramm said in an interview, adding that “we’re having these debates” with numbers that are “verifiably false.” (Some scholars have vehemently disagreed with the authors’ analysis.)Scott Lincicome, a vice president at the libertarian Cato Institute, said that he largely agreed with Mr. Gramm’s thesis and that Americans were mostly wrestling with “keeping up with the Joneses,” not a loss of economic traction.“In general, folks at the bottom, up to the median, are doing better,” Mr. Lincicome concluded. “They’re not winning the game, but they’re doing better than the same group was 30-plus years ago.”He added: “You know, economists can debate all day long whether we’re better off, worse off overall or whatever. But when you factor in all the factors, I personally think things are fine.”To the extent that these debates have popular reach, the most public face of the revisionist camp may be Oren Cass, an adviser to Mr. Romney’s 2012 campaign, who has become immersed in a collective project among some right-leaning thinkers to “rebuild capitalism.”Mr. Cass and his allies want to use government spending and power to promote economic mobility with traditionalist goals in mind — like reducing the cost of living for the heads of married, two-parent households.Mr. Cass praised Mr. Ahmari’s book as one that “bravely goes where few conservatives dare tread, to the ideologically fraught realm in which the market appears inherently coercive and capitalism appears in tension with economic freedom.” (Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, is talking at a book event with Mr. Ahmari this month at the National Press Club in Washington.)Many economists and political scientists contend that the ideological realignment on the right is overblown, confused with a broader, hard-to-quantify loyalty to Mr. Trump rather than an explicit ideology giving life to Trumpism.“In a way,” Mr. Ahmari said, his critics — “the people who say, ‘Yeah, sure, you’re just a couple of guys: you, Oren, and a few others at magazines and think tanks’” — are “not wrong institutionally,” as there is little donor support for their efforts.“But they are wrong in terms of voters,” he added.Ms. Stepman of the Claremont Institute says she is personally “more traditional right” than thinkers like Mr. Ahmari but agrees they are tapping into something real.“There is a very underserved part of the political spectrum that is genuinely left of center on economic issues, right of center on cultural issues,” she said, pointing to issues including immigration, gun laws, education, gender norms and more.Gabe Guidarini is one of them.Growing up in Lake Bluff, Ill., in a working-class household where MSNBC often played in the background at night, Mr. Guidarini felt his view that “the status quo in this country is corrupt” was validated by the “anti-establishment” voices of both Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump. But he came to the view that “you can’t get away with” social views that stray from progressive orthodoxy and still be accepted by Democrats. Now, at 19, he is the president of the University of Dayton College Republicans.In 2022, he worked as a campaign intern for J.D. Vance — the author of “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” who aligned himself with Trumpism after his 2016 book was credited for providing a “reference guide” for Mr. Trump’s electoral success. Mr. Vance, an Ohio Republican, was elected to the U.S. Senate.In line with Tucker Carlson and some other conservatives, Mr. Guidarini thinks the party “should be taking policy samples from Viktor Orban in Hungary, and what he’s doing with family policies that aim to increase family creation, increase childbirth and make it easier to live a decent life as a working or middle-class taxpayer,” he said. “That’s what’s going to return the American dream for so many people, because to young people — and I feel like a lot of other people in America today — the American dream feels dead.”Mr. Guidarini, like many on the right, is wary of achieving those goals by increasing taxes on the wealthy. But according to Pew Research, more Republican or Republican-leaning adults support raising tax rates for those with incomes over $400,000 (46 percent) than say those rates should go unchanged (29 percent) or be lowered (24 percent). And more than half of low-income Republicans support higher taxes on the highest earners.For now, though, all economic debates are “tangential,” said Saagar Enjeti, a conservative millennial who is a co-host of two podcasts that often feature competing voices across the right.“‘What are we going to do when the Trump tax cuts expire?’ These are not the fights that are happening,” Mr. Enjeti said. “I wish they were, but they’re not. They’re just not.”With consensus on policy solutions elusive and “the culture wars” in the campaign forefront, Mr. Enjeti said, Republicans will mostly rally around what he believes will be Mr. Trump’s simple economic message: “Make America 2019 Again” — a time when unemployment, inflation and mortgage rates were low and, for all of life’s challenges, at least cultural conservatives were in the White House. More