Storming of the US Capitol (Jan, 2021)

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      Meet the People Working on Getting Us to Hate Each Other Less

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      Affective polarization — “a poisonous cocktail of othering, aversion and moralization” — has prompted an explosion of research as the threat to democratic norms and procedures mount.Intensely felt divisions over race, ethnicity and culture have become more deeply entrenched in the American political system, reflected in part in the election denialism found in roughly a third of the electorate and in state legislative initiatives giving politicians the power to overturn election results.Many researchers have begun to focus on this question: Is there a causal relationship between the intensification of hostility between Democrats and Republicans and the deterioration of support for democratic standards?“Growing affective polarization and negative partisanship,” Jennifer McCoy and Murat Somer, political scientists at Georgia State University and Koç University-Istanbul, write in a 2019 essay, “Toward a Theory of Pernicious Polarization and How It Harms Democracies: Comparative Evidence and Possible Remedies,”contribute to a perception among citizens that the opposing party and their policies pose a threat to the nation or an individual’s way of life. Most dangerously for democracy, these perceptions of threat open the door to undemocratic behavior by an incumbent and his/her supporters to stay in power, or by opponents to remove the incumbent from power.What is affective polarization? In 2016, Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, wrote that when a voter’s “partisan social identity” merges with his or her racial, religious, sexual and cultural identities, “these various identities work together to drive an emotional type of polarization that cannot be explained by parties or issues alone.”Mason argues that “threats to a party’s status tend to drive anger, while reassurances drive enthusiasm” so thata party loss generates very negative, particularly angry, emotional reactions. This anger is driven not simply by dissatisfaction with potential policy consequences, but by a much deeper, more primal psychological reaction to group threat. Partisans are angered by a party loss because it makes them, as individuals, feel like losers too.One optimistic proposal to reduce partisan animosity is to focus public attention on the commonality of Democratic and Republican voters in their shared identity as Americans. Matthew Levendusky, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, has written extensively on this subject, including in his 2018 paper “Americans, Not Partisans: Can Priming American National Identity Reduce Affective Polarization?” and in his soon-to-be-published book, “Our Common Bonds: Using What Americans Share to Help Bridge the Partisan Divide.”“I show,” Levendusky contends in his 2018 paper, “that when subjects’ sense of American national identity is heightened, they come to see members of the opposing party as fellow Americans rather than rival partisans. As a result, they like the opposing party more, thereby reducing affective polarization.”There are serious problems, however, with a depolarization strategy based on American identity, problems that go to the heart of the relentless power of issues of race, ethnicity and immigration­ to splinter the electorate.In their December 2022 paper, “ ‘American’ Is the Eye of the Beholder: American Identity, Racial Sorting, and Affective Polarization among White Americans,” Ryan Dawkins and Abigail Hanson write thatWhite Democrats and White Republicans have systematically different ideas about what attributes are essential to being a member of the national community. Second, the association between partisanship and these competing conceptions of American identity among White Americans has gotten stronger during the Trump era, largely because of Democrats adopting a more racially inclusive conception of American identity. Lastly, appeals to American identity only dampen out-partisan animosity when the demographic composition of the opposing party matches their racialized conception of American identity. When there is a mismatch between people’s racialized conception of American identity and the composition of the opposition party, American identity is associated with higher levels of partisan hostility.Dawkins and Hanson acknowledge that “national identity is perhaps the only superordinate identity that holds the promise of uniting partisans and closing the social distance between White Democrats and White Republicans,” but, they continue,If conceptions of national identity itself become the subject of the very sorting process that is driving affective polarization, then it can no longer serve as a unifying identity that binds the entire country together. In fact, frames that highlight the association of American identity to historic norms of whiteness can ultimately divide the country further, especially as the United States transitions into a majority-minority country. Indeed, continued demographic change will likely make the schism between White Democrats and White Republicans wider before things have any hope to improve.I asked Levendusky about the Dawkins-Hanson paper. He replied by email that he was now “convinced that there is no simple path from animosity (or affective polarization) to far downstream outcomes (albeit important ones)” — adding that “there’s a long way from ‘I dislike members of the other party’ to ‘I will vote for a candidate who broke democratic norms rather than a candidate from the other party’ and the process is likely complex and subtle.”In an August 2022 paper, “Does Affective Polarization Undermine Democratic Norms or Accountability? Maybe Not,” David E. Broockman, a political scientist at Berkeley, Joshua L. Kalla, a political scientist at Yale, and Sean J. Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, pointedly reject the claim made by a number of scholars “that if citizens were less affectively polarized, they would be less likely to endorse norm violations, overlook copartisan politicians’ shortcomings, oppose compromise, adopt their party’s views, or misperceive economic conditions. A large, influential literature speculates as such.”Instead, Broockman, Kalla and Westwood contend, their own studies “find no evidence that these changes in affective polarization influence a broad range of political behaviors — only interpersonal attitudes. Our results suggest caution about the widespread assumption that reducing affective polarization would meaningfully bolster democratic norms or accountability.”Broockman and his co-authors measured the effect of reducing affective polarization on five domains: “electoral accountability, adopting one’s party’s policy positions, support for legislative bipartisanship, support for democratic norms, and perceptions of objective conditions.”“Our results,” they write, “run contrary to the literature’s widespread speculation: in these political domains, our estimates of the causal effects of reducing affective polarization are consistently null.”In an email, Westwood argued that the whole endeavor “to fix anti-democratic attitudes by changing levels of partisan animosity sounds promising, but it is like trying to heal a broken bone in a gangrenous leg when the real problem is the car accident that caused both injuries in the first place.”Westwood’s point is well-taken. In a country marked by battles over sex, race, religion, gender, regional disparities in economic growth, traditionalist-vs-postmaterialist values and, broadly, inequality, it is difficult to see how relatively short, survey based experiments could produce a significant, long-term dent in partisan hostility.Jan G. Voelkel, a sociologist at Stanford, and eight of his colleagues, report similar results in their October 2022 article “Interventions Reducing Affective Polarization Do Not Necessarily Improve Anti-democratic Attitudes.” “Scholars and practitioners alike,” they write, “have invested great effort in developing depolarization interventions that reduce affective polarization. Critically, however, it remains unclear whether these interventions reduce anti-democratic attitudes, or only change sentiments toward outpartisans.”Why?Because much prior work has focused on treating affective polarization itself, and assumed that these interventions would in turn improve downstream outcomes that pose consequential threats to democracy. Although this assumption may seem reasonable, there is little evidence evaluating its implications for the benefits of depolarization interventions.In “Megastudy Identifying Successful Interventions to Strengthen Americans’ Democratic Attitudes,” a separate analysis of 32,059 American voters “testing 25 interventions designed to reduce anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity,” however, Voelkel and many of his co-authors, Michael N. Stagnaro, James Chu, Sophia Pink, Joseph S. Mernyk, Chrystal Redekopp, Matthew Cashman, James N. Druckman, David G. Rand and Robb Willer significantly amended their earlier findings.In an email, Willer explained what was going on:One of the key findings of this new study is that we found some overlap between the interventions that reduced affective polarization and the interventions that reduced one specific anti-democratic attitude: support for undemocratic candidates. Specifically, we found that several of the interventions that were most effective in reducing American partisans’ dislike of rival partisans also made them more likely to say that they would not vote for a candidate from their party who engaged in one of several anti-democratic actions, such as not acknowledging the results of a lost election or removing polling stations from areas that benefit the rival party.Voelkel and his co-authors found that two interventions were the most effective.The first is known as the “Braley intervention” for Alia Braley, a political scientist at Berkeley and the lead author of “The Subversion Dilemma: Why Voters Who Cherish Democracy Participate in Democratic Backsliding.” In the Braley intervention, participants are “asked what people from the other party believe when it comes to actions that undermine how democracy works (e.g., using violence to block laws, reducing the number of polling stations to help the other party, or not accepting the results of elections if they lose).” They are then given “the correct answer” and “the answers make clear the other party does not support actions that undermine democracy.”The second “top-performing intervention” was to give participants “a video showing vivid imagery of societal instability and violence following democratic collapse in several countries, before concluding with imagery of the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol attack.”“To our knowledge,” Willer wrote in his email, “this is the first evidence that the same stimuli could both reduce affective polarization and improve some aspect of Americans’ democratic attitudes, and it suggests these two factors may be causally linked, more than prior work — including our own — would suggest.”Kalla disputed the conclusions Willer drew from the megastudy:The most successful interventions in the megastudy for reducing anti-democratic views were interventions that directly targeted those anti-democratic views. For example, Braley et al.’s successful intervention was able to reduce anti-democratic views by correcting misperceptions about the other party’s willingness to subvert democracy.This intervention, Kalla continued,was not about affective polarization. What this suggests is that for practitioners interested in reducing anti-democratic attitudes, they should use interventions that directly speak to and target those anti-democratic views. As our work finds and Voelkel et al. replicates, obliquely attempting to reduce anti-democratic views through the causal pathway of affective polarization does not appear to be a successful strategy.I sent Kalla’s critique to Willer, who replied:I agree with Josh’s point that the most effective interventions for reducing support for undemocratic practices and candidates were interventions that were pretty clearly crafted with the primary goal in mind of targeting democratic attitudes. And while we find some relationships here that suggest there is a path to reducing support for undemocratic candidates via reducing affective polarization, the larger point that most interventions reducing affective polarization do not affect anti-democratic attitudes still stands, and our evidence continues to contradict the widespread popular assumption that affective polarization and anti-democratic attitudes are closely linked. We continue to find evidence in this newest study against that idea.One scholar, Herbert P. Kitschelt, a political scientist at Duke, contended that too much of the debate over affective polarization and democratic backsliding has been restricted to the analysis of competing psychological pressures, when in fact the scope in much larger. “The United States,” Kitschelt wrote in an email,has experienced a “black swan” confluence, interaction and mutual reinforcement of general factors that affect all advanced knowledge societies with specific historical and institutional factors unique to the U.S. that have created a poisonous concoction threatening U.S. democracy more so than that of any other Western society. Taken together, these conditions have created the scenario in which affective polarization thrives.Like most of the developed world, the United States is undergoing three disruptive transformations compounded by three additional historical factors specific to the United States, Kitschelt suggests. These transformations, he wrote, are:“The postindustrial change of the occupational structure expanding higher education and the income and status educational dividend, together with a transformation of gender and family relations, dismantling the paternalist family and improving the bargaining power of women, making less educated people — and especially males — the more likely socio-economic and cultural losers of the process.”“The expansion of education goes together with a secularization of society that has undercut the ideological foundations of paternalism, but created fierce resistance in certain quarters.”“The sociocultural and economic divisions furthermore correlate with residential patterns in which the growing higher educated, younger, secular and more gender-egalitarian share of the population lives in metropolitan and suburban areas, while the declining, less educated, older, more religious and more paternalists share of the population lives in exurbia or the countryside.”The three factors unique to this country, in his view, are:“The legacy of enslavement and racial oppression in the United States in which — following W.E.B. DuBois — the white lower class of less skilled laborers derived a ‘quasi-wage’ satisfaction from racist subordination of the minority, the satisfaction of enjoying a higher rank in society than African Americans.”“The vibrancy of evangelical ‘born again’ Christianity, sharply separated from the old European moderate, cerebral mainline Protestantism. The former attracts support over-proportionally among less educated people, and strictly segregates churches by race, thereby making it possible to convert white Evangelical churches into platforms of white racism. They have become political transmission belts of right-wing populism in the United States, with 80 percent of those whites who consider themselves ‘born again’ voting for the Trump presidential candidacy.”“The institutional particularities of the U.S. voting system that tends to divide populations into two rival parties, the first-past-the-post electoral system for the U.S. legislature and the directly elected presidency. While received wisdom has claimed that it moderates divisions, under conditions of mutually reinforcing economic, social, and cultural divides, it is likely to have the opposite effect. The most important additional upshot of this system is the overrepresentation of the countryside (i.e. the areas where the social, economic, and cultural losers of knowledge society tend to be located) in the legislative process and presidential elections/Electoral College.”Kitschelt argues that in order to understand affective polarization it is necessary to go “beyond the myopic and US-centric narrow vision field of American political psychologists.” The incentives “for politicians to prime this polarization and stoke the divides, including fanning the flames of affective polarization, can be understood only against the backdrop of these underlying socio-economic and cultural legacies and processes.”Kitschelt is not alone in this view. He pointed to a 2020 book, “American Affective Polarization in Comparative Perspective,” by Noam Gidron, James Adams and Will Horne, political scientists at Harvard, the University of California-Davis and Georgia State University, in which they make a case thatAmericans’ dislike of partisan opponents has increased more rapidly than in most other Western publics. We show that affective polarization is more intense when unemployment and inequality are high, when political elites clash over cultural issues such as immigration and national identity and in countries with majoritarian electoral institutions.Writing just before the 2020 election, Gidron, Adams and Horne point out that theissue of cultural disagreements appears highly pertinent in light of the ongoing nationwide protests in support of racial justice and the Black Lives Matter movement which has sparked a wider cultural debate over questions relating to race, police funding and broader questions over interpretations of America’s history. In a July 4th speech delivered at Mt. Rushmore, President Trump starkly framed these types of “culture war” debates as a defining political and social divide in America, asserting “our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children.”The study of affective polarization sheds light on how vicious American politics has become, and on how this viciousness has enabled Trump and those Republicans who have followed his lead, while hurting Democrats whose policy and legislative initiatives have been obstructed as much as they have succeeded.Richard Pildes, a professor of constitutional law at N.Y.U., addressed this point when he delivered the following remarks from his paper “Political Fragmentation in Democracies of the West” in 2021 at a legal colloquium in New York:There is little question that recent decades have seen a dramatic decline in the effectiveness of government, whether measured in the number of important bills Congress is able to enact, the proportion of all issues people identity as most important that Congress manages to address, or the number of enacted bills that update old policies enacted many decades earlier. Social scientists now write books with titles like Can America Govern Itself? Longitudinal data confirm the obvious, which is the more polarized Congress is, the less it enacts significant legislation; in the ten most polarized congressional terms, a bit more than 10.6 significant laws were enacted, while in the ten least polarized terms, that number goes up 60 percent, to around 16 significant enactments per term. The inability of democratic governments to deliver on the issues their populations care most about poses serious risks.What are the chances of reversing this trend?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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      Donald Trump Isn’t the Only One to Blame for the Capitol Riot. I’d Know.

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      I spent 12 months holed up in a windowless cubical den or locked in my home office investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the United States Capitol and working on a report that my fellow investigators and I thought would blow open the story. When it was released, the press described it as “monumental.” This paper called it “damning.” And it was — for former President Donald Trump, since he bears primary responsibility for the attempted insurrection. But the report could only tell part of the story.Other political, social, economic and technological forces beyond the former president had a hand, whether intentionally or not, in radicalizing thousands of people into thinking they needed to attack the seat of American democracy. Only by understanding how those people lost faith in our governing institutions can we as a country figure out how to protect our democracy from threats like the attack on the Capitol.As an investigative counsel for the Jan. 6 Committee’s “Red” Team, which investigated the people who planned and attended the riot, as well as the domestic extremist groups responsible for much of the violence, I tracked more than 900 individuals charged by the Department of Justice with everything from parading in the Capitol to seditious conspiracy. We interviewed roughly 30 of those defendants about their motives. What my team and I learned, and what we did not have the capacity to detail with specificity in the report, is how distrust of the political establishment led many of the rioters to believe that only revolution could save America.It wasn’t just that they wanted to contest a supposedly stolen election as Mr. Trump called them to do, they wanted to punish the judges, members of Congress, and law enforcement agencies — the so-called political elites — who had discredited Mr. Trump’s claims. One rioter wondered why he should trust anything the F.B.I., D.O.J., or any other federal entity said about the results. The federal government had worked against everyday Americans for years, the rioters told us, favoring entrenched elites with its policies. For many defendants — both those awash in conspiracy theories, as well as some of the more reasonable Trump supporters at the Capitol that day — a stolen election was simply the logical conclusion of years of federal malfeasance.With the legitimacy of democracy so degraded, revolution appeared logical. As Russell James Peterson, a rioter who pleaded guilty to “parading, demonstrating, or picketing” in the Capitol, said on Dec. 4, 2020, “the only way to restore balance and peace is through war. Too much trust has been lost in our great nation.” Guy Reffitt, who earned seven years in prison for leading the charge up the Capitol steps while carrying a firearm, made a similar case later that month: “The government has spent decades committing treason.” The following week, he drove 20 hours to “do what needs to be done” because there were “bad people,” “disgusting people,” in the Capitol. Oath Keepers convicted of seditious conspiracy and other crimes, like their leader Stewart Rhodes, had long believed that a corrupt group of left-wing elites were preparing to upend American freedoms and that only militias like themselves could save the Constitution. Their loss of faith in the federal government had led them to the delusion that their seditious behavior to keep Mr. Trump in power was patriotic.Strikingly, these comments came not only from domestic violent extremists; some came from people who appeared to be ordinary Americans. Dona Sue Bissey, a grandmother and hair salon owner from Indiana, said shortly after the attack that she was “very glad” to have been a part of the insurrection; Anthony Robert Williams, a painter from Michigan, called Jan. 6 the “proudest day of my life.”Since the 1960s, political scientists have surveyed Americans and measured the steady decline of public faith in the federal government. Again and again, they have described the predictable consequences of people believing that the deliberative system has lost its legitimacy; almost always, they will turn to alternative means to get what they want, even if it means destroying their government in the process. The attack on the Capitol was a perfect example. William Dunfee, an Ohio pastor facing felony and misdemeanor charges, told his congregation on Dec. 27, 2020, that settling “your differences at the ballot” did not work, so they should make the “government, the tyrants, the socialists, the Marxists, the progressives, the RINOs” in Washington “fear” them.Some have criticized our report because it focused on Mr. Trump and his Big Lie instead of diving more deeply into other causes, such as declining faith in government or racial resentment or economic inequality, which pushed people to believe patriotism required storming the Capitol. Far from ignoring those concepts, we have released many of our documents publicly and archived the rest so that historians, political scientists, sociologists and many others can scrutinize our findings in ways we could not, examining the causes and consequences of Jan. 6 with a longer time horizon than we had.Our report proposed several straightforward fixes to prevent another sitting president from contesting a fair election. But solving the core problem — lost faith in government — will take more time, and a battery of far more complex remedies.The most important step elected officials can take — aside from choosing not to undermine our institutions for their own political gain — is to advance a comprehensive set of election and campaign finance reforms to make politicians more responsive to their constituents than to the money and voices of the few. Congress could also create universal election rules that encourage all citizens to vote while reassuring a skeptical public that the elections are secure. But beyond that, our leaders need to build trust broadly by tackling economic inequality and reinvesting in communities devastated by globalization and technological changes. At the most basic level, politicians should refocus locally on building roads, lowering crime and revitalizing small business districts, instead of looking for votes by harping on divisive national topics.Such reforms would not be a silver bullet. A few of the defendants we interviewed complained of being misled by social media, which seems to have pushed them into conspiracy theory rabbit holes like QAnon. Many also had not-quite-veiled racial resentments that drove their lack of faith in government. But at the very least, these reforms might begin to convince citizens that their government works for them, not just the rich and powerful. Once we can restore that baseline trust, we can better avoid future attacks, both physical and intangible, on our democracy.Mr. Trump did not appear out of a vacuum to upend democracy. His presidency was the culmination of years of political degradation during which voters watched our political institutions rust to the point of breaking. Like any good liar, Mr. Trump succeeded by building his lies off a truth; people no longer trust the federal government because they see its corroded institutions as corrupted for the few against the many. Until we fix that problem, we will not free ourselves from the threat of future political violence and upheaval worse than Jan. 6.James Sasso served as senior investigative counsel for the Jan. 6 committee.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      How Kevin McCarthy Forged a Bond With Marjorie Taylor Greene

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      The close alliance that has developed between the speaker and the hard-right Georgia Republican explains his rise, how he might govern and the heavy influence of the extremes on the new House G.O.P. majority.WASHINGTON — Days after he won his gavel in a protracted fight with hard-right Republicans, Speaker Kevin McCarthy gushed to a friend about the ironclad bond he had developed with an unlikely ally in his battle for political survival, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.“I will never leave that woman,” Mr. McCarthy, a California Republican, told the friend, who described the private conversation on the condition of anonymity. “I will always take care of her.”Such a declaration from Mr. McCarthy would have been unthinkable in 2021, when Ms. Greene first arrived on Capitol Hill in a swirl of controversy and provocation. A former QAnon follower who had routinely trafficked in conspiratorial, violent and bigoted statements, Ms. Greene was then widely seen as a dangerous liability to the party and a threat to the man who aspired to lead Republicans back to the majority — a person to be controlled and kept in check, not embraced.But in the time since, a powerful alliance developed between Ms. Greene, the far-right rabble-rouser and acolyte of former President Donald J. Trump, and Mr. McCarthy, the affable fixture of the Washington establishment, according to interviews with 20 people with firsthand knowledge of the relationship, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss it.Their political union — a closer and more complex one than has previously been known — helps explain how Mr. McCarthy rose to power atop a party increasingly defined by its extremes, the lengths to which he will go to accommodate those forces, and how much influence Ms. Greene and the faction she represents have in defining the agenda of the new House Republican majority.“If you’re going to be in a fight, you want Marjorie in your foxhole,” Mr. McCarthy said. Both he and Ms. Greene agreed to brief interviews for this article. “When she picks a fight, she’s going to fight until the fight’s over. She reminds me of my friends from high school, that we’re going to stick together all the way through.”It is a relationship born of political expediency but fueled by genuine camaraderie, and nurtured by one-on-one meetings as often as once a week, usually at a coffee table in Mr. McCarthy’s Capitol office, as well as a constant stream of text messages back and forth.Mr. McCarthy has gone to unusual lengths to defend Ms. Greene, even dispatching his general counsel to spend hours on the phone trying to cajole senior executives at Twitter to reactivate her personal account after she was banned last year for violating the platform’s coronavirus misinformation policy.Ms. Greene, in turn, has taken on an outsize role as a policy adviser to Mr. McCarthy, who has little in the way of a fixed ideology of his own and has come to regard the Georgia congresswoman as a vital proxy for the desires and demands of the right-wing base that increasingly drives his party. He has adopted her stances on opposing vaccine mandates and questioning funding for the war in Ukraine, and even her call to reinvestigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol to show what she has called “the other side of the story.”Mr. McCarthy’s agenda, Ms. Greene said, “if he sticks to it, will easily vindicate me and prove I moved the conference to the right during my first two years when I served in the minority with no committees.”When Ms. Greene entered Congress in January 2021, she was viewed by Republican leaders as a headache.Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times‘Kevin Did This to You’It was a right-wing conspiracy theory that first came between Mr. McCarthy and Ms. Greene, but not in the way that many people think.When Ms. Greene entered Congress in January 2021, Republican leaders viewed her as a headache, and Mr. McCarthy regarded her as potentially beyond redemption. During her primary, social media posts had emerged in which she embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory and warned of “an Islamic invasion of our government.”A Divided CongressThe 118th Congress is underway, with Republicans controlling the House and Democrats holding the Senate.A Wide-Ranging Inquiry: The House approved the creation of a committee to scrutinize what Republicans say is the “weaponization” of government against conservatives. Democrats and historians see dark historical parallels.Abortion: As part of an anti-abortion rights effort, House Republicans pushed through a bill that could subject doctors who perform abortions to criminal penalties.I.R.S. Funds: Republicans in the House voted to cut funding for the Internal Revenue Service, as conservative lawmakers try to kneecap President Biden’s $80 billion overhaul of the agency.Nebraska: Former Gov. Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, a Republican, was appointed as the state’s next senator, replacing Ben Sasse, who resigned to become president of the University of Florida.Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican, had intervened to oppose Ms. Greene — an affront she would not forget — but Mr. McCarthy, who eschews confrontation and conflict, would not go that far. He issued a statement through a spokesman condemning the statements, but did not endorse her opponent.Weeks after Ms. Greene was sworn in, more conspiracy-laden posts surfaced, including diatribes in which she had questioned whether a plane really flew into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, and endorsed the executions of Democratic politicians including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Barack Obama.Outraged Democrats demanded that Mr. McCarthy oust her from congressional committees, and when he made no move to do so, they scheduled a vote to do it themselves. As the pressure built, some of Ms. Greene’s far-right allies told her yet another conspiratorial story that she believed: Mr. McCarthy, they said, was secretly working with Ms. Pelosi to strip her of power.Enraged, Ms. Greene stormed into Mr. McCarthy’s office in the Capitol late one night in February 2021 and handed him a letter signed by local Republican leaders in her district, urging him to keep her on her committees. They had received “countless” messages, they said, from their voters who were intent on supporting her.It served as a not-so-subtle warning to Mr. McCarthy that the Republican base would be outraged if he did not ensure she kept her committee seats. Mr. McCarthy tried to explain to Ms. Greene that he agreed that what Democrats were doing was outrageous, but that as minority leader, he had neither the power nor the votes to stop it..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.Learn more about our process.But Ms. Greene did not believe Mr. McCarthy, a person familiar with her thinking said. After she was booted off the Education and Budget Committees, members of her inner circle told her, “Don’t forget: Kevin did this to you.”Mr. McCarthy has gone to unusual lengths to defend Ms. Greene.Tom Brenner for The New York Times‘The Principal’s Office’The relationship remained fraught throughout Ms. Greene’s first year in Congress, as the same pattern played out again and again in their interactions. A controversy would erupt over an outrageous comment Ms. Greene had made, then Mr. McCarthy would summon her to deal with the matter privately.Ms. Greene would joke to friends, “Uh-oh, I’ve been called to the principal’s office.”But even as she continued to traffic in offensive conspiracy theories and spoke at a white nationalist rally, Mr. McCarthy refused to punish her and often refrained from even criticizing her comments until pressed by reporters. It was a calculated choice by Mr. McCarthy, who leads more by flattery and backslapping than through discipline.And by early 2022, Ms. Greene had begun to believe that Mr. McCarthy was willing to go to bat for her. When her personal Twitter account was shut down for violating coronavirus misinformation policies, Ms. Greene raced to Mr. McCarthy’s office in the Capitol and demanded that he get the social media platform to reinstate her account, according to a person familiar with the exchange.Instead of telling Ms. Greene that he had no power to order a private company to change its content moderation policies, Mr. McCarthy directed his general counsel, Machalagh Carr, to appeal to Twitter executives. Over the next two months, Ms. Carr would spend hours on the phone with them arguing Ms. Greene’s case, and even helped draft a formal appeal on her behalf.The efforts were unsuccessful at the time, but they impressed Ms. Greene and revealed how far Mr. McCarthy was prepared to go to defend her. It was part of a broader and methodical courtship of the hard right by Mr. McCarthy that included outreach to conservative media figures and Mr. Trump’s hard-line immigration adviser Stephen Miller.He had studied the two previous Republican speakers of the House, former Representatives John A. Boehner of Ohio and Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, a person familiar with his thinking said, and concluded that one of their fatal errors had been unnecessarily isolating far-right members, who in turn made their lives miserable. So Mr. McCarthy set out to do the opposite.Ms. Greene whipped votes on the House floor to support Mr. McCarthy during his fight to become speaker.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesApproaching SymbiosisStill, the alliance between Mr. McCarthy and Ms. Greene did not truly begin to flourish for several more months. At a party in the Dallas suburbs at the home of Arthur Schwartz, a G.O.P. consultant and outside adviser to Mr. McCarthy, Ms. Greene found herself in the corner of a great room chatting with Devin Nunes, the former top Republican on the Intelligence Committee and a committed Trump ally.Mr. Nunes told Ms. Greene about the time he had witnessed Mr. McCarthy yelling at Representative Steny H. Hoyer, the Maryland Democrat who was then the majority leader, for his party’s decision to remove Ms. Greene from her committees, and threatening that he would do the same to Democrats when Republicans came to power.Ms. Greene recalled it as the first time she had heard from somebody she trusted that Mr. McCarthy had defended her, rather than conspired with Democrats to blackball her. “That conversation had a big impact on me,” she said.From then on, the two settled into a kind of symbiotic relationship, both feeding off what the other could provide. Ms. Greene began regularly visiting Mr. McCarthy, frequently dropping by his office, and he began inviting her to high-level policy discussions attended by senior Republicans and praising her contributions.He was impressed not only by Ms. Greene’s seemingly innate understanding of the impulses of the party’s hard-right voters, but also by her prowess at building her own brand. He once remarked to allies with wonder at how Ms. Greene, as a freshman, was already known by a three-letter monogram: M.T.G. “She knows what she’s doing,” Mr. McCarthy marveled privately. “You’ve got A.O.C. and M.T.G.”After Republicans underperformed expectations in the midterm elections, winning only a narrow majority and guaranteeing that Mr. McCarthy would have a tough fight to become speaker, Ms. Greene was quick to begin barnstorming the right-wing media circuit as one of his top surrogates, using her conservative credentials to vouch for his. As her peers on the far-right flank of the party refused to support Mr. McCarthy, subjecting the Republican leader to a four-day stretch of defeats, Ms. Greene was unflinching in her support, personally whipping votes on the House floor and strategizing on calls with Mr. Trump.Ms. Greene’s support for Mr. McCarthy created a permission structure for other G.O.P. lawmakers to do the same.Representative Barry Moore, Republican of Alabama, said in an interview that when conservatives back home sought an explanation for his support for Mr. McCarthy, he would comfort them by replying: “Well, Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene are standing with Kevin McCarthy. And so am I.”The relationship has also paid off for Ms. Greene, no longer the fringe backbencher stripped of her power. Republican leaders announced last week that she would serve on two high-profile committees: Oversight and Homeland Security. She is also likely to be appointed to a new Oversight select subcommittee to investigate the coronavirus, according to a source familiar with Mr. McCarthy’s thinking who was not authorized to preview decisions that have yet to be finalized.It is already clear that she is influencing Mr. McCarthy’s policy agenda.Ms. Greene has taken on an outsize role as an adviser to Mr. McCarthy.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesAfter Ms. Greene had told Mr. McCarthy that vaccine mandates were morally wrong and that he needed to stop them, he fought vociferously — and successfully — to include the repeal of the military coronavirus vaccine mandate in last year’s defense bill. After she told him that the party faithful could not understand why Congress continued to send money to help Ukraine secure its borders, when the United States’ southern border was not secure, Mr. McCarthy helped pave the way for Republicans on the Foreign Affairs Committee to put forward and support a bill sponsored by Ms. Greene, who does not sit on the panel, demanding that Congress audit American aid sent to Ukraine.And after she told Mr. McCarthy that many people imprisoned for their actions during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol were being victimized, he signaled that Republicans would start an inquiry of their own digging into the work of the panel that was investigating the assault.“People need to understand that it isn’t just me that deserves credit,” Ms. Greene said. “It is the will and the voice of our base that was heard, and Kevin listened to them. I was just a vehicle much of the time.”In the early hours of Jan. 7, after Mr. McCarthy had finally clinched the speakership on the 15th ballot and pallets of champagne were being wheeled into his new office, Ms. Greene opted not to join the celebration. But she sent him a text message the next day telling Mr. McCarthy how happy and proud she was — and how she could not wait to get started.Kitty Bennett More

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      John Eastman Is Defiant as Trump-Related Investigations Proliferate

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      A legal reckoning awaits a chief architect of Donald Trump’s effort to reverse his election loss. But in Mr. Eastman’s telling, he was far from a criminal.WASHINGTON — John C. Eastman, a legal architect of Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times under questioning by the House Jan. 6 committee.But in recently released testimony from the committee’s investigation, other witnesses had plenty to say about him.Many White House lawyers expressed contempt for Mr. Eastman, portraying him as an academic with little grasp of the real world. Greg Jacob, the legal counsel to former Vice President Mike Pence, characterized Mr. Eastman’s legal advice as “gravely, gravely irresponsible,” calling him the “serpent in the ear” of Mr. Trump. Eric Herschmann, a Trump White House lawyer, recounted “chewing out” Mr. Eastman. Pat A. Cipollone, the chief White House counsel, is described calling Mr. Eastman’s ideas “nutty.”In the coming months, Mr. Eastman will be facing a legal reckoning. He has been drawn into the criminal investigation into election interference in Atlanta, which is nearing a decision on potential indictments. The F.B.I. seized his iPhone. And the Jan. 6 committee, in one of its last acts, asked the Justice Department to investigate Mr. Eastman on a range of criminal charges, including obstructing a congressional proceeding. For good measure, he faces a disciplinary bar proceeding in California.A once-obscure scholar at the right-wing Claremont Institute, Mr. Eastman joined the Trump camp shortly after the election and was soon among a group of lawyers who, with the president’s blessing, largely commandeered decision-making from lawyers at the White House and on the Trump campaign.He championed a two-pronged strategy that the Jan. 6 committee portrayed as a coup plot. The first was enlisting party officials to organize slates of bogus electors in swing states where Mr. Trump lost, even after the results had been certified and recertified, as in Georgia. The second was pressuring Mr. Pence to deviate from the vice president’s traditionally ceremonial role and decline to certify all the electoral votes on Jan. 6.While Mr. Eastman refused to answer most of the committee’s questions, he has hardly been at a loss for words. At the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021, held on the Ellipse moments before Trump supporters marched toward the Capitol, he spoke ominously of stolen elections, voting machine chicanery and ballots stuffed in a “secret folder.” Over the last two years he has remained defiant in a string of public appearances and interviews, and painted a picture sharply at odds with other accounts, most notably those of Mr. Pence and two of his aides who cooperated with the House committee.In Mr. Eastman’s telling of the lead-up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, he was far from a criminal. In fact, in a recent interview — a fuller version of one he gave to The New York Times in the fall of 2021 — he says he was helping to head off a potentially more perilous outcome.Mr. Eastman spoke of voter fraud at the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021, just before Trump supporters marched toward the Capitol.Jim Bourg/ReutersHe claims that in an Oval Office meeting on Jan. 4, he helped convince Mr. Trump that Mr. Pence did not have the power to pick whomever he wanted as president. And Mr. Eastman said his advice to the president and vice president was only that Mr. Pence should pause the certification of the election, giving legislatures more time to consider fraud allegations in certain states where Mr. Trump had lost.“I think my greatest contribution to this conversation is to have backed Trump away from the notion that Pence could just simply gavel him as re-elected,” Mr. Eastman said during the interview at his lawyer’s office in Washington, just blocks from the White House. “And, you know, you look at some of his tweets before that Jan. 4 meeting, he’s saying things like that, because that’s what people out there are saying. But if you look at his speech on Jan. 6, after I weigh in at that meeting, he’s saying exactly the opposite.”Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.Few in the White House, however, saw him as anything close to a voice of moderation amid the riot that followed. And Mr. Eastman’s account differs in significant ways from those provided by Mr. Pence and his aides.The former vice president refused to cooperate with the Jan. 6 committee but addressed the issue in a recent opinion essay in The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Pence wrote that on Jan. 5, a day after first meeting with Mr. Eastman in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump summoned the vice president for another meeting where “the president’s lawyers, including Mr. Eastman, were now requesting that I simply reject the electors.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.He said that he “later learned that Mr. Eastman had conceded to my general counsel that rejecting electoral votes was a bad idea and any attempt to do so would be quickly overturned by a unanimous Supreme Court. This guy didn’t even believe what he was telling the president.”The crux of Mr. Eastman’s defense is that he was simply a lawyer offering advice, and that he was acting in good faith, since he still believes many of the fraud claims that were made. “I’m not backing down on that,” he said. “I mean, the amount of evidence, even if I’m wrong about it, was certainly enough to have warranted further review.”In an email to Mike Pence’s lawyer on the night of Jan. 6, Mr. Eastman urged that the vice president should not certify the electoral vote.House Select Committee, via Associated PressAsked what he based such claims on, he cited a report issued last year by Michael J. Gableman, a former Wisconsin judge who was hired, and later fired, by the Republican speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly, Robin Vos. The report endorsed a host of debunked claims. He also cited the deeply flawed documentary “2000 Mules,” directed by Dinesh D’Souza, a conservative activist who once pleaded guilty to felony campaign finance fraud. (He was later pardoned by Mr. Trump.)In recent weeks, Mr. Eastman has continued to assert himself as a far-right stalwart, signing a letter endorsing dissident Republicans’ ultimately failed efforts to block Representative Kevin McCarthy of California from becoming speaker of the House. Among the other signatories to the letter was Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, for whom Mr. Eastman once clerked. In her own testimony to the Jan. 6 committee, Ms. Thomas referred to Mr. Eastman as “an active participant with the ‘Thomas clique’ clerks” who keep in touch.Perhaps Mr. Eastman’s most immediate potential exposure comes in the criminal investigation into election interference in Fulton County, Ga., which encompasses most of Atlanta. One of Mr. Eastman’s lawyers said last year that his client was “probably a target” in the inquiry, but his lawyers said this month that he had received no notification that he is one.Robert Sinners, the Trump campaign’s state director of Election Day operations in Georgia, testified to the Jan. 6 committee that he later felt “ashamed” at having taken part in the plan orchestrated by Mr. Eastman and Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, to assemble bogus slates of Trump electors in Georgia and other states that Mr. Trump had lost.“I don’t think Rudy Giuliani’s intent was ever about legal challenges,” he said. “It was clear to me that he was working with folks like John Eastman and wanted to put pressure on the vice president to accept these slates of electors just regardless, without any approval from a governor, without any approval from, you know, the voters or a court, or anything like that.”Clark D. Cunningham, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law, said in an email that “if Sinner’s testimony, or similar testimony, is deemed credible, then John Eastman faces considerable risk of prosecution.”“If Eastman was part of a conspiracy to trick Georgia citizens into signing false election documents, neither his role as an attorney nor a personal belief that election results were tainted by fraud could justify such criminal conduct,” he added.In addition to his central role in the electors plan, Mr. Eastman appeared remotely before a Georgia State Senate panel on Dec. 3, 2020, and made several false claims about the election. Among them was the assertion that “the number of underaged individuals who were allowed to register” in the state “amounts allegedly up to approximately 66,000 people.”Asked about the claim during the interview last month, Mr. Eastman said that he had relied on a consultant who made an error that was later corrected, and that the actual number was about 2,000 who “were only 16 when they registered.” The new figure, he said, came from the same consultant. In a statement, the Georgia Secretary of State’s office said that “the system literally does not allow a person to register if they don’t have a birth date that makes them at least 17.5 years old.”A review of the data used by Mr. Eastman showed that he was referring to any Georgians who were recorded as having registered early going back to the 1920s; data entry errors appeared to be a common culprit, with many people’s registration year listed in place of their birth year. A review by The Times found only about a dozen Georgians who were recorded as having registered in 2020 when they were 16, in what appeared most likely to be another data-entry problem. Norman Eisen, special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first Trump impeachment and co-author of a lengthy report on the Fulton County inquiry, said Mr. Eastman “was referred for criminal prosecution by the Jan. 6 committee, with good reason,” adding that if charges are brought in Georgia “it’s hard to imagine that D.A. Fani Willis does not include him.”Jack Begg More

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      ‘You Don’t Negotiate With These Kinds of People’

      by

      Over the past eight years, the Republican Party has been transformed from a generally staid institution representing the allure of low taxes, conservative social cultural policies and laissez-faire capitalism into a party of blatant chaos and disruption.The shift has been evident in many ways — at the presidential level, as the party nominated Donald Trump not once but twice and has been offered the chance to do so a third time; in Trump’s — and Trump’s allies’ — attempt to overturn the 2020 election results; in his spearheading of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol; and most recently in the brutal series of votes from Jan. 3 to Jan. 7 in the House of Representatives, where 20 hard-right members held Kevin McCarthy hostage until he cried uncle and was finally elected speaker.What drives the members of the Freedom Caucus, who have wielded the threat of dysfunction to gain a level of control within the House far in excess of their numbers? How has this group moved from the margins to the center of power in less than a decade?Since its founding in 2015, this cadre has acquired a well-earned reputation for using high-risk tactics to bring down two House speakers, John Boehner and Paul Ryan. During the five-day struggle over McCarthy’s potential speakership, similar pressure tactics wrested crucial agenda-setting authority from the Republican leadership in the House.“You don’t negotiate with these kinds of people,” Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Alabama and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, declared as the saga unfolded. “These are legislative terrorists.”“We have grifters in our midst,” Representative Dan Crenshaw, Republican of Texas, told the Texas Liberty Alliance PAC.One of the key factors underlying the extremism among Republicans in the House and their election denialism — which has confounded American politics since it erupted in 2020 — is racial tension, not always explicit but nonetheless omnipresent, captured in part by the growing belief that white Americans will soon be in the minority.As Jack Balkin of Yale Law School noted, “The defenders of the old order have every incentive to resist the emergence of a new regime until the bitter end.”In his paper “Public Opinion Roots of Election Denialism,” published on Jan. 6, the second anniversary of the storming of the Capitol, Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at M.I.T., argues that “among Republicans, conspiracism has a potent effect on embracing election denialism, followed by racial resentment.”According to Stewart’s calculations, “a Republican at the 10th percentile of the conspiracism scale has a 55.7 percent probability of embracing election denialism, compared to a Republican at the 90th percentile, at 86.6 percent, over 30 points higher. A Republican at the 10th percentile on the racial resentment scale has a 59.4 percent probability of embracing denialism, compared to 83.2 percent for a Republican at the 90th percentile on the same scale.”In other words, the two most powerful factors driving Republicans who continue to believe that Trump actually won the 2020 election are receptivity to conspiracy thinking and racial resentment.“The most confirmed Republican denialists,” Stewart writes, “believe that large malevolent forces are at work in world events, racial minorities are given too much deference in society and America’s destiny is a Christian one.”Along parallel lines, Neil Siegel, a law professor at Duke, argues in his 2021 article “The Trump Presidency, Racial Realignment and the Future of Constitutional Norms,” that Donald Trump “is more of an effect than a cause of larger racial and cultural changes in American society that are causing Republican voters and politicians to perceive an existential threat to their continued political and cultural power — and, relatedly, to deny the legitimacy of their political opponents.”In this climate, Siegel continues, “It is very unlikely that Republican politicians will respect constitutional norms when they deem so much to be at stake in each election and significant governmental decision.”These developments draw attention to some of the psychological factors driving politics and partisan competition.In a 2020 paper, “Dark Necessities? Candidates’ Aversive Personality Traits and Negative Campaigning in the 2018 American Midterms,” Alessandro Nai and Jürgen Maier, political scientists at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Koblenz-Landau in Germany, argue that the role of subclinical “psychopathy” is significant in the behavior of a growing number of elected officials:Psychopaths usually show “a cognitive bias towards perceiving hostile intent from others” and are impulsive, prone to callous social attitudes, and show a strong proclivity for interpersonal antagonism. Individuals high in psychopathy do not possess the ability to recognize or accept the existence of antisocial behaviors, and thus should be expected to more naturally adopt a more confrontational, antagonistic and aggressive style of political competition. Individuals high in psychopathy have been shown to have more successful trajectories in politics. They are furthermore often portrayed as risk-oriented agents. In this sense, we could expect individuals that score high in psychopathy to make a particularly strong use of attacks, regardless of the risk of backlash effects.Narcissism, Nai and Maier continue,has been shown to predict more successful political trajectories, also due to the prevalence of social dominance intrinsic in the trait. Narcissism is, furthermore, linked to overconfidence and deceit and hyper competitiveness, which could explain why narcissists are more likely to engage in angry/aggressive behaviors and general incivility in their workplace. Narcissism is furthermore linked to reckless behavior and risk-taking and thus individuals high in this trait are expected to disregard the risk of backlash effects.Nai and Maier also refer to a character trait they consider politically relevant, Machiavellianism, which they describe as havingan aggressive and malicious side. People high in Machiavellianism are “characterized by cynical and misanthropic beliefs, callousness, a striving for argentic goals (i.e., money, power, and status), and the use of calculating and cunning manipulation tactics,” and in general tend to display a malevolent behavior intended to “seek control over others.”In an email, Nai argued that structural and ideological shifts have opened the door to “a greater tolerance and preference for political aggressiveness.” First, there is the rise of populism, which “strongly relies on a very aggressive stance against established elites, with a more aggressive style and rhetoric.”“Populists,” Nai added, “are very peculiar political animals, happy to engage in more aggressive rhetoric to push the boundaries of normality. This helps them getting under the spotlight, and explains why they seem to have a much greater visibility (and perhaps power) than they numerically should.”Second, Nai contended thata case can be made that contemporary politics is the realm of politicians with a harsh and uncompromising personality (callousness, narcissism, and even Machiavellianism). Trump, Bolsonaro, Duterte, all share a rather “nasty” character, which seems indicative of a contemporary preference for uncompromising and aggressive leaders. Such political aggressiveness (populism, negativity, incivility, dark personality) is perfectly in character for a political system characterized with high polarization and extreme dislike for political opponents.Other scholars emphasize the importance of partisan polarization, anti-elitism and the rise of social media in creating a political environment in which extremists can thrive.“There are likely a few factors at play here,” Jay Van Bavel, a professor of psychology and neural science at N.Y.U., wrote by email. “The first is that ideologically extreme people tend to be more dogmatic — especially people who are on the far right.”He cited a 2021 national survey that he and Elizabeth Harris, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted that “found that conservatism and ideological extremity both contributed to an unwillingness to compromise.”The members of the Freedom Caucus, Van Bavel noted,tend to be ideologically extreme conservatives which makes them very good candidates for this type of rigid and extreme thinking. We also found that politically extreme individuals were more likely to have a sense of belief superiority. These traits help explain why this group is very unwilling to cooperate or strike a political compromise.Three years ago, I wrote a column for The Times about a segment of the electorate — and a faction of elected officials — driven by “a need for chaos,” based on the work of Michael Bang Petersen and Mathias Osmundsen, political scientists at Aarhus University in Denmark, and Kevin Arceneaux, a political scientist at Sciences Po in Paris. Since then, the three, joined by Timothy B. Gravelle, Jason Reifler and Thomas J. Scotto, have updated their work in a 2021 paper, “Some People Just Want to Watch the World Burn: The Prevalence, Psychology and Politics of the ‘Need for Chaos.’”In their new paper, they argue:Some people may be motivated to seek out chaos because they want to rebuild society, while others enjoy destruction for its own sake. We demonstrate that chaos-seekers are not a unified political group but a divergent set of malcontents. Multiple pathways can lead individuals to “want to watch the world burn.”The distinction between those seeking chaos to fulfill destructive impulses and those seeking chaos in order to rebuild the system is crucial, according to the authors:The finding that thwarted status-desires drive a Need for Chaos, which then activates support for political protest and violence, suggests that a Need for Chaos may be a key driver of societal change, both currently and historically. While some simply want to “watch the world burn,” others want to the see a new world rebuilt from the ashes.There are, the authors continue,both nihilists and those who have a purpose. Nonetheless, owing to the destructive force of a high Need for Chaos, one of the key challenges of contemporary societies is indeed to meet, recognize and, to the extent possible, alleviate the frustrations of these individuals. The alternative is a trail of nihilistic destruction.In a more recent paper, published last year, “The ‘Need for Chaos’ and Motivations to Share Hostile Political Rumors,” Petersen, Osmundsen and Arceneaux found that the need for chaos “is significantly higher among participants who readily take risks to obtain status and among participants who feel lonely.” At the extreme, the need surpasses partisanship: “For chaos-seekers, political sympathies toward political parties appear to matter little for sharing decisions; instead, what matters is that rumors can be used as an instrument to mobilize against the entire political establishment.”The authors found that “the need for chaos is most strongly associated with worries about losing one’s own position in the social hierarchy and — to a lesser, but still significant extent — the perception that one is personally being kept back from climbing the social status ladder,” noting that “white men react more aggressively than any other group to perceived status challenges.”Van Bavel wrote by email that instead of focusing on a need for chaos, he believes “it might be simpler to assume that they are simply indifferent to chaos in the service of dogmatism. You see some of this on the far left — but we found that it simply doesn’t reach the same extremes as the far right.”Van Bavel pointed to the structural aspects of the contemporary political system that reward the adoption of extreme stances:In the immediate political context, where there is extremely high polarization driven by partisan animosity, there are strong social media incentives to take extreme stances, and an unwillingness for moderate Republicans to break ranks and strike a compromise with Democrats. In this context, the Freedom Caucus can get away with dogmatic behavior without many serious consequences. Indeed, it might even benefit their national profile, election prospects, and fund-raising success.Along similar lines, Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at N.Y.U., stressedthe rapid change in audience and incentives that social media has engineered for congresspeople. The case of Ted Cruz, caught checking his mentions as he sat down from giving a speech on the Senate floor, is illustrative. Why is he making himself so responsive to strangers on Twitter, rather than to his constituents, or to his colleagues in the Senate?Haidt wrote by email that he agrees with Yuval Levin, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, that:Social media has contributed to the conversion of our major institutions from formative (they shape character) to performative (they are platforms on which influencers can perform to please and grow their audiences). When we add in the “primary problem” — that few congressional races are competitive, so all that matters is the primary, which gives outsized influence to politically extreme voters — we have both a road into Congress for social media influencers and the ultimate platform for their performances.Plus, Haidt added:The influence economy may give them financial and career independence; once they are famous, they don’t need to please their party’s leadership. They’ll have opportunities for money and further influence even if they leave Congress.Leanne ten Brinke, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, wrote by email:My research on power and politics focuses on the role of psychopathic personality traits, which is characterized by callousness, manipulation/coercion, impulsivity, and a desire for dominance. When people think of psychopathy they often think of criminals or serial killers, but these traits exist on a continuum, so people can be “high” in these traits without meeting any kind of clinical cutoff, and it will impact the way they move through the world. People with high levels of these traits tend to gravitate toward powerful roles in society to fulfill that desire for dominance and to bully others when in these roles.Brinke noted that she has “no data on the personalities of those in the House Freedom Caucus,” but in “previous research we actually found that U.S. senators who display behaviors consistent with psychopathy were more likely to get elected (they are great competitors!) but are less likely to garner co-sponsors on their bills (they are terrible cooperators!).” In addition, Brinke continued, “they enjoy having power over others, but don’t use it to make legislative progress. They tend to be more self-interested than other-interested.”In a separate 2020 paper, “Light and Dark Trait Subtypes of Human Personality,” by Craig S. Neumann, Scott Barry Kaufman, David Bryce Yaden, Elizabeth Hyde, Eli Tsukayama and Brinke, the authors find:The light subtype evidenced affiliative interpersonal functioning and greater trust in others, as well as higher life satisfaction and positive self-image. The dark subtype reflected interpersonal dominance, competitiveness, and aggression. In both general population samples, the dark trait subtype was the least prevalent. However, in a third sample of U.S. senators (N =143), based on observational data, the dark subtype was most prevalent and associated with longer tenure in political office, though less legislative success.In a separate 2019 paper, “The Light vs. Dark Triad of Personality: Contrasting Two Very Different Profiles of Human Nature,” Kaufman, Yaden, Hyde and Tsukayama wrote that dark personalities are “not associated with exclusively adverse and transgressive psychosocial outcomes” and may, instead, “be considered adaptive.”Those with the more forbidding personal characteristics “showed positive correlations with a variety of variables that could facilitate one’s more agentic-related goals” and they “positively correlated with utilitarian moral judgment and creativity, bravery, and leadership, as well as assertiveness, in addition to motives for power, achievement, and self-enhancement.”In contrast, more sunny and cooperative dispositions were “correlated with greater ‘reaction formation,’ which consisted of the following items: ‘If someone mugged me and stole my money, I’d rather he be helped than punished’ and ‘I often find myself being very nice to people who by all rights I should be angry at.’ While having such ‘lovingkindness’ even for one’s enemies is conducive to one’s own well-being, these attitudes” could potentially make these people “more open to exploitation and emotional manipulation.”In March 2022, Richard Pildes, a law professor at N.Y.U., warned in “Political Fragmentation in Democracies of the West”:The decline of effective government throughout most Western democracies poses one of the greatest challenges democracy currently confronts. The importance of effective government receives too little attention in democratic and legal theory, yet the inability to deliver effective government can lead citizens to alienation, distrust, and withdrawal from participation, and worse, to endorse authoritarian leaders who promise to cut through the dysfunctions of democratic governments.For the Republican Party, the empowerment of the Freedom Caucus will face its first major test of viability this month. According to Janet Yellen, secretary of the Treasury, the United States will hit the $31.4 trillion statutory debt limit on Jan. 19. The Treasury, she continued, would then be forced to adopt stringent cash-management procedures that could put off default until June.At the moment, House Republicans, under pressure from the Freedom Caucus, are demanding that legislation raising the debt ceiling be accompanied by sharp spending cuts. That puts them at loggerheads with the Biden administration and many members of the Senate Democratic majority, raising the possibility of a government shutdown.In other words, the takeover of the Republican Party by politicians either participating in or acceding to tribalism and chaos has the clear potential in coming weeks to put the entire nation at risk.Looking past the debt ceiling to the 2024 elections, Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at U.C.L.A., writes in the April 2022 Harvard Law Review:The United States faces a serious risk that the 2024 presidential election, and other future U.S. elections, will not be conducted fairly and that the candidates taking office will not reflect the free choices made by eligible voters under previously announced election rules. The potential mechanisms by which election losers may be declared election winners are: (1) usurpation of voter choices for president by state legislatures purporting to exercise constitutional authority, possibly with the blessing of a partisan Supreme Court and the acquiescence of Republicans in Congress; (2) fraudulent or suppressive election administration or vote counting by law- or norm-breaking election officials; and (3) violent or disruptive private action that prevents voting, interferes with the counting of votes, or interrupts the assumption of power by the actual winning candidate.What, one has to ask, does this constant brinkmanship and playing to the gallery do to democracy generally?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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      Solomon Peña Cheered Trump on Jan. 6. Now He’s Accused of Targeting Democrats.

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      Solomon Peña, who lost his bid to become a New Mexico lawmaker, faces charges in a series of shootings. “He had a belief process that he was cheated,” the Albuquerque police chief said.ALBUQUERQUE — A former Republican candidate accused of orchestrating attacks on the homes of Democratic rivals cited the need to threaten “civil war” to achieve political change, according to police investigators, who said that a bullet fired in the attacks passed close enough to a sleeping girl to leave her face spattered with dust.The series of shootings in the wake of the November elections followed other episodes of politically motivated violence across the country in recent months — including an attack on the husband of Speaker Nancy Pelosi — and rattled the political establishment in New Mexico, where Democrats hold both chambers of the Legislature and the governor’s office.After seeking a state legislative seat, Solomon Peña, 39, a supporter of Donald J. Trump who attended the pro-Trump rally in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, refused to concede, despite losing by 48 percentage points to an incumbent in a district that has long voted for Democrats. He was arrested on Monday in connection with the shootings at the homes of four Democratic officials.“He had a belief process that he was cheated,” Chief Harold Medina of the Albuquerque Police Department said in an interview on Tuesday. The police filed a rash of charges against Mr. Peña, including criminal solicitation, attempted aggravated battery, shooting at an occupied dwelling, shooting from a moving vehicle and conspiracy.Mr. Peña, who previously served time in prison for burglary and other crimes, took part in at least one of the attacks himself, according to the criminal complaint in the case, trying to fire an AR-15 rifle at the home of Linda Lopez, a state senator.“To me, it’s very concerning, what his actions were, and the impact they could have on our democracy,” Chief Medina said. “He was trying to intimidate some of our elected officials.”A voter cast a ballot in Albuquerque in November. Mr. Peña refused to concede his race despite losing by 48 percentage points.Adria Malcolm for The New York TimesMr. Peña, who was still being held on Tuesday, could not be reached for comment, and it was unclear whether a lawyer was representing him in the case.It was uncertain how he came to be the only Republican candidate in the race for a state legislative seat representing part of Albuquerque. But when Democrats sought unsuccessfully to disqualify him from running, citing his criminal record, the spokesman for the state House Republican leadership came to Mr. Peña’s defense, insisting he should be allowed to run.He received 26 percent of the vote, against 74 percent for his opponent, election results showed.In a statement, the Republican Party of New Mexico said “these recent accusations against Solomon Peña are serious, and he should be held accountable if the charges are validated in court. We are thankful that nobody was injured by his actions. If Peña is found guilty, he must be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.Mr. Peña’s arrest comes as concerns over political violence have grown after several high-profile incidents, including the attack on Paul Pelosi, a conspiracy to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and stalking charges filed against an armed man at the Seattle home of Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington.Though there have been some notable attacks and threats of violence from people on the left, scholars who study political violence say that most violent episodes with a political bent in recent years have been committed by right-wing extremists or people with conservative-leaning views.Mr. Peña was in the crowd listening to Mr. Trump’s speech on Jan. 6, 2021, according to videos collected by online sleuths, before Trump supporters attacked the Capitol in a bid to keep the president in power. There is no evidence, however, that Mr. Peña passed into a restricted area on the Capitol grounds or entered the building with the mob that day.Mr. Peña served nearly seven years in prison in New Mexico on charges including burglary and larceny, and then obtained an undergraduate degree in political science from the University of New Mexico after being released from prison in 2016.In July 2010, according to a lawsuit later filed by Mr. Peña, he was working in the cafeteria of the Lea County Correctional Facility when another inmate threw butter at him, and then head-butted him. Mr. Peña responded by gouging the attacker’s eyes before guards separated them.In his lawsuit, Mr. Peña claimed that several prison officials had violated his constitutional rights because he was fired from his kitchen job after the fight. In self-filed, handwritten court papers, he complained that “prison authorities want the prisoners to be stupid, uneducated and uninformed (and drug-addicted) so they can do whatever they want to the prisoners.”A judge dismissed Mr. Peña’s claims.The shootings that appeared to target Democratic officials began on Dec. 4, when someone fired eight rounds at the home of Adriann Barboa, a Bernalillo County commissioner, according to the Albuquerque police. On Dec. 8, shots were fired at the home of State Representative Javier Martinez. Three days later, on Dec. 11, a shooting targeted the home of another Bernalillo County commissioner, Debbie O’Malley. Then came the shooting at Ms. Lopez’s house in early January.State Senator Linda Lopez showed where bullets hit the garage door of her house in Albuquerque.Adolphe Pierre-Louis/The Albuquerque Journal, via Associated PressMs. Lopez’s 10-year-old daughter told her mother after the shooting that she believed “a spider woke her up by crawling on her face,” the complaint against Mr. Peña said. But the next morning, Ms. Lopez found bullet holes in her home. “As it turned out, sheetrock dust was blown onto Linda’s daughter’s face and bed” from a bullet passing through her bedroom above her head, the complaint said.Investigators said in a statement after Mr. Peña was arrested on Monday that they had tied him to the men accused of carrying out the shootings through text messages he sent them “with addresses where he wanted them to shoot at the homes,” as well as cash he had paid them.In a text message that Mr. Peña sent to one of the accused gunmen in November, according to the criminal complaint, he highlighted a cryptic passage from a book that was unknown to investigators: “It was only the additional incentive of a threat of civil war that empowered a president to complete the reformist project.”That quote appears in the book “Stuffing the Ballot Box,” a 2002 academic study about fraud and electoral reform in Costa Rica.The belief that civil war is unavoidable in the United States or should be fought to protect conservative values has been a frequent rallying cry on the right in recent months, if not for years.Ms. Barboa, the county commissioner whose home was targeted in the first attack, said in an interview that Mr. Peña had come to her home after the election to argue that it had been fraudulent. “He was aggressive and seemed to be acting erratic,” she recalled. “He claimed there was no way he could have lost, even though he lost in a landslide.”Ms. Barboa said that Mr. Peña seemed to have visited her home, as well as that of Ms. O’Malley, who was also targeted in the shootings, because the Bernalillo County Board of Commissioners certifies election results. The visit to Ms. Barboa’s home took place before the commission certified the results, she said. (Mr. Peña ran against another Democrat, Miguel Garcia, who does not appear to have been the subject of an attack.)Video surveillance from Ms. O’Malley’s home later showed Mr. Peña driving by in a black 2022 Audi — the same car that a witness saw speeding away from the area around Ms. O’Malley’s home when it was targeted on Dec. 11, the criminal complaint said.According to a confidential witness cited by the police in the complaint, Mr. Peña was not pleased that the first shooting attacks against Democratic officials were carried out late at night, when the politicians and their families might have already been sleeping, and that the shots were fired high up on the walls of some homes.“Solomon wanted the shootings to be more aggressive,” the witness told investigators, according to the complaint. In the last attack, on the home of Ms. Lopez on Jan. 3, the witness said that Mr. Peña and two gunmen he hired got into a stolen red truck and drove there.Mr. Peña was armed with an AR-15, but the gun seems to have jammed and did not fire correctly, according to the complaint. But other shots fired from the vehicle struck Ms. Lopez’s home, including the room where her daughter was sleeping.Shortly after the attack, police officers arrested Jose Trujillo, 21, at a traffic stop and found that shell casings at Ms. Lopez’s home matched a handgun confiscated from Mr. Trujillo, according to investigators. Officers detained Mr. Trujillo on an unrelated felony warrant and found that he was driving a car owned by Mr. Peña, the police said, adding that they also found a large amount of cash, more than 800 pills believed to be fentanyl and numerous firearms in the car.Chief Medina said Mr. Peña could face more charges as the police continued their investigation. “We continue to peel off layers, like an onion,” he said.Kirsten Noyes More

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      Kellyanne Conway’s View of Donald Trump

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      More from our inbox:Russia’s Aggression in UkraineI, Robot Damon Winter/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “The Case for (and Against) Donald Trump in 2024,” by Kellyanne Conway (Opinion guest essay, Jan. 15):A diversity of opinions and perspectives is a fantastic goal, and one reason I’ve been a longtime subscriber. Generally speaking, your opinion guest essays are well written and thoughtful and provide a point of view that makes one examine a topic with fresh eyes.The opinion from Ms. Conway is not that.Time and again she employs sloganeering to sling arrows at Democrats and non-Trumpists in an attempt to burnish the reputation of her former boss.She continues to attempt to turn neighbor against neighbor by perpetuating the othering of Trump detractors and the denial of Mr. Trump’s and her attacks on voting, democracy and simple decency.Hers is not another “opinion”; it is carefully crafted and intentional spin to appeal to people’s sense of grievance and to reaffirm the lies and misinformation they are so ready to believe.Her inclusion in your paper diminishes the quality of debate, and galvanizes a person America would be better off forgetting.Conn FishburnNashvilleTo the Editor:Kellyanne Conway opines that “when it comes to Donald J. Trump, people see what they wish to see,” and then goes on to demonstrate just that, never mentioning his blatant, willful, prolonged lying about the “stolen” 2020 election, which we now know not even he believes.Toss in the further elephants in the room — his central role in the Jan. 6 debacle, his fraudulent and shuttered foundation and university, the conviction of his family business entity’s C.F.O., and on and on, and it would appear that Ms. Conway is indeed a victim of the Trump Derangement Syndrome she decries.Even worse, she is clearly one who should know better, and even worse, likely does.Steve HeiligSan FranciscoTo the Editor:Talk about hedging your bets as a political forecaster and soft selling your qualifications for rehire! Kellyanne Conway’s well-composed essay on Donald Trump’s potential for 2024 felt like the needed equanimity, bipartisan advice and clear thinking the country needs.If Mr. Trump were smart he would rehire Ms. Conway as campaign manager for 2024, or at least pay close attention to her last sentences: “Success lies in having advisers who tell you what you need to know, not just what you want to hear. And in listening to the people, who have the final say.”Lisa BostwickSan FranciscoTo the Editor:Read Kellyanne Conway’s guest essay for what it really is — a job pitch to future Republican presidential candidates (conveniently name-dropped in the article).The pitch: If I could get a buffoon like Donald Trump elected and then get The New York Times to give me a full page to list his imaginary accomplishments, just think what I could do for you.Laura SchumacherSan DiegoTo the Editor:Kellyanne Conway writes: “Success lies in having advisers who tell you what you need to know, not just what you want to hear. And in listening to the people, who have the final say.”Since when has Donald Trump been known as a listener or as one who respects advisers who tell him what he needs to know?Mr. Trump’s overriding egotism and his self-infatuation prevent him from believing that anyone could know more about anything than The Donald himself.Ben MilesHuntington Beach, Calif.To the Editor:Thanks, Ms. Conway, for that delightful nostalgic stroll down the memory lane of alternative facts.Bruce LiptonNew YorkRussia’s Aggression in Ukraine Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Plundering Art, Russia Assaults Soul of Ukraine” (front page, Jan. 15):Like Nazi aggression in World War II, Russian aggression in Ukraine is an expression of absolute evil — a mixture of barbarism that knows no limits, genocide of both a people and their culture, and unremitting, centrally organized propaganda claiming that up is down, that black is white and that Russia is fighting a defensive war.Richard JoffeNew YorkI, RobotA robot prototype being developed by Yuhang Hu, a doctoral student in the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University, where engineers are exploring the possibility of self-aware robots.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Robot, Know Thyself” (Science Times, Jan. 10):Robots with consciousness is an oxymoron. Consciousness is a necessary ingredient to what is usually deemed the defining characteristic of being human: the ability to choose.Computers/robots do not have that ability. Their “choice” is limited to what programmers program them to do. Admittedly that may occur under circumstances not contemplated when the machines are programmed, but the machine’s progression toward making a decision is based on its programming, not on free choice.Steven GoldbergBrooklynTo the Editor:A truly conscious robot will cost a fortune to the company that develops it, but at that level of sophistication it may decide to work on unnecessary projects, or stop working altogether for the company, instead opting to work for a competitor.Kevin J. LongoPutnam, Conn.The writer is a science tutor. More

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      Gary Hart: The “New Church Committee” Is an Outrage

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      To legitimize otherwise questionable investigations, Congress occasionally labels them after a previous successful effort. Thus, the new Republican-controlled House of Representatives’ proposed select committee, which plans to investigate the “weaponization of government,” is being described as “the new Church committee,” after the group of senators who investigated the F.B.I., the C.I.A. and other groups from 1975-76.As the last surviving member of the original Church committee, named after its chairman, the late Senator Frank Church of Idaho, I have a particular interest in distinguishing what we accomplished then and what authoritarian Republicans seem to have in mind now.The outlines of the committee, which Rep. Jim Jordan will assemble, remain vague. Reading between the rhetorical lines, proponents appear to believe agencies of the national government have targeted, and perhaps are still targeting, right-of-center individuals and groups, possibly including individuals and right-wing militia groups that participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrectionist attack on the Capitol.That is almost completely at odds with the purpose of the original Church committee, which was founded in response to widespread abuses by government intelligence agencies. While we sought to protect the constitutional rights and freedoms of American citizens, we were also bound to protect the integrity of the intelligence and security agencies, which were founded to protect those freedoms, too.Our committee brought U.S. intelligence agencies under congressional scrutiny to prevent the violation of the privacy rights of American citizens, and to halt covert operations abroad that violated our constitutional principles. Rather than strengthening the oversight of federal agencies, the new committee seems designed to prevent law enforcement and intelligence agencies from enforcing the law — specifically, laws against insurrectionist activity in our own democracy.It is one thing to intercept phone calls from people organizing a peaceful civil rights march and quite another to intercept phone calls from people organizing an assault on the Capitol to impede the certification of a national election.Rather than weaken our intelligence and law enforcement agencies, the Church committee sought to restore their original mandates and increase their focus away from partisan or political manipulation. Our committee was bipartisan, leaning neither right nor left, and the conservative senators, including the vice chair, John Tower, Barry Goldwater, Howard Baker and others, took pains to prevent liberal or progressive members, including chairman Church, Philip Hart, Walter Mondale and me, from weakening our national security.They needn’t have bothered. We all understood, including me, the youngest member, that attacks on federal law enforcement and national security would not go down well among our constituents. Unlike in the 1970s, today’s threat to domestic security is less from foreign sources and more from homeland groups seeking to replace the constitutional order with authoritarian practices that challenge historic institutions and democratic practices.Among a rather large number of reforms proposed by the Church committee were permanent congressional oversight committees for the intelligence community, an endorsement of the 1974 requirement that significant clandestine projects be approved by the president in a written “finding,” the notification of the chairs of the oversight committees of certain clandestine projects at the time they are undertaken and the elimination of assassination attempts against foreign leaders.Despite the concern of conservatives at the time, to my knowledge, no significant clandestine activity was compromised and no classified information leaked as a result of these reforms in the almost half-century since they were adopted. In fact, the oversight and notification requirements, by providing political cover, have operated as protection for the C.I.A.Evidence was provided of the effectiveness of these reforms in the so-called Iran-contra controversy in 1985-87. The Reagan administration sold arms to Iran and used the proceeds to finance covert operations in Nicaragua against its socialist government. Assigning accountability for this scheme proved difficult until a document authorizing it was located in the White House. President Reagan did not remember signing it; however, it bore his signature. This kind of accountability would not have been possible before our reforms were adopted.The rules of the Senate and the House establish what standing committees and what special committees each house may create. The House is clearly at liberty within those rules to create a committee to protect what it perceives to be an important element of its base. And if its purposes are ultimately to protect authoritarian interests, it is presumably free to do so and accept criticisms from the press and the public. It is outrageous to call it a new Church committee. Trying to disguise a highly partisan effort to legitimize undemocratic activities by cloaking it in the mantle of a successful bipartisan committee from decades ago is a mockery.Gary Hart is a former United States senator from Colorado and the author of, most recently, “The Republic of Conscience.”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