In May 1856, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner rose on the Senate floor to denounce the law that opened Kansas to slavery. In excoriating one of the bill’s architects, South Carolina’s Andrew Butler, Sumner all but accused the southern senator of raping the Black women he had enslaved, claiming that Butler had “chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean the harlot, Slavery.”

Sumner’s words highlighted a major, ugly scandal—and they provoked another. Three days after Sumner’s speech, Butler’s relative, South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks, approached Sumner in the Senate chamber with a heavy cane and beat him mercilessly about the head. Sumner was so horribly injured he could not return to the Senate full-time for three years. The House failed to muster a two-thirds vote to expel Brooks, who was treated like a hero in the South. To prove he retained the support of his constituents, Brooks resigned and then was quickly returned to office in a special election. Hundreds of southerners sent him canes as gifts, some inscribed with the words “Hit Him Again.”

Neither Brooks nor Butler appears in the University of Houston political scientist Brandon Rottinghaus’s excellent new study, Scandal: Why Politicians Survive Controversy in a Partisan Era. That’s because the book is concerned with the period from Watergate to the present. But Butler’s and Brooks’s successful defiance of scandal in an earlier era provides important additional context, reminding us that our current era of impunity and partisanship for even the vilest behavior is not unprecedented.

Rottinghaus’s book concludes that today’s entrenched political polarization helps politicians overcome scandal. This is hardly shocking; everyone knows that Donald Trump was elected president months after a felony fraud conviction, after being held liable for a sexual assault the presiding judge described as rape, and after attempting to interfere with a free and fair election. It’s almost a shibboleth to say “nothing matters” anymore. But Rottinghaus provides evidence and nuance for what has become conventional wisdom.

In the first place, impunity is not, in fact, all encompassing. Using a definition of scandal as “allegations of illegal, unethical, or immoral wrongdoing”—and excluding incompetence, unpopular actions, or policy failures—Rottinghaus identifies 156 presidential scandals between 1972 and 2021, as well as numerous congressional and gubernatorial scandals. To determine if scandals have more or less politically fatal impact today, Rottinghaus looked at resignation rates across time.

The results puncture some of the fatalism. In the Watergate era, resignation rates were 47 percent; in the 1980s—with Iran-Contra and the Keating Five scandal—resignation rates were about 50 percent. In the Bush years, resignation rates dropped to 43 percent, and in the first Trump term they were 45 percent. The low point was the Clinton era, when only about 40 percent of scandals produced resignations. From that vantage, today looks less like a collapse in accountability than a modest decline from already-low baselines.

One can fairly argue that Trump’s scandals are more serious—soliciting foreign election interference and trying to overturn elections have much more sweeping consequences for democracy than consensual but still improper sex with a subordinate. And Rottinghaus also notes that officials accused of impropriety now tend to stay in office longer even if they do eventually resign. Trump’s secretary of the interior in his first term, Ryan Zinke, survived in office for 16 months despite a series of corruption scandals involving the use of government resources for private travel. He even lasted for weeks after he lost the support of the Trump administration itself—though he was subsequently reelected to the House. Still, Zinke did step down, suggesting that some things do matter, at least for cabinet officers, even if only slowly. 

Curiously, the arena where scandal matters least isn’t the presidency—it’s the states. Gubernatorial scandals have dropped markedly since 2011, not because governors have grown more virtuous but because oversight has weakened. Single-party control at the state level has increased substantially over the past 15 to 20 years; today 38 states have unified one-party government. When one party controls both the governorship and the legislature, each has little incentive to scrutinize the other. Fewer investigations mean that fewer scandals become public, and fewer still result in resignations.

Increasing polarization also coincides with increasing partisan hostility. In 2016, for example, 47 percent of Republicans and 35 percent of Democrats viewed the opposing party as more immoral than other Americans. By 2022, that number had jumped to 72 percent of Republicans and 63 percent of Democrats. 

This political landscape makes it possible for politicians to leverage partisanship to survive scandals or even to literally capitalize on them. Rottinghaus points to the day Trump was convicted of felony campaign finance violations related to hush-money payments to silence news of his affair with the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels. Trump claimed that he was the target of a witch hunt, and his partisans agreed, showering him with tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions in a 24-hour period. “Claims of misinformation generate larger gains for politicians than simply ignoring the scandal or apologizing, making it a preferred strategy and more politically effective than a simple denial,” Rottinghaus observes drily.

That dynamic echoes the antebellum South’s reaction to Brooks. Then, as now, intense partisanship enabled supporters to celebrate transgression as heroism. Political scientists do not have surveys of partisanship from the 1850s, but you don’t need surveys to figure out that the era was characterized by increasing regional and partisan tensions. The country at the time was more divided than it has ever been; that’s why there was a civil war. In such a situation, Rottinghaus’s analysis suggests that you should see partisans willing to ignore and even cheer on scandals—which is exactly what happened with Butler and Brooks.

Like many political scientists and pundits, Rottinghaus tends to present increased polarization as a bad thing or as a threat to American democracy. He notes, for example, that cross-partisan friendships “can establish better boundaries for political wrongdoing by public officials and give people of all ideologies a rounder perspective.” He also conducted a survey showing that people with politically diverse friendships have less of a desire to see the other party engulfed in scandal.

What Rottinghaus emphasizes less is that polarization waxes and wanes—and that bipartisanship carries its own dangers. He repeatedly notes that partisanship has increased over time—which is true from the 1970s to the present. But the past 50 years is just the past 50 years; partisanship over a longer horizon has not trended in a single direction. For example, the extremely partisan post–Civil War Reconstruction era ended with the bipartisan Compromise of 1877. To resolve the disputed presidential contest from the prior year, white Republicans and white Democrats agreed to abandon Reconstruction-era efforts at fostering racial equality and joined together in suppressing Black rights and Black people—Democrats through open violence, Republicans more often through refusing to offer aid to those targeted. This bipartisan agreement on tacitly codifying white supremacy lasted for almost a century. Jim Crow was enabled in no small part by cross-party compromise and agreement. 

As the scholars Daniel Kreiss and Shannon McGregor argue, polarization is only a “threat to democracy” if one ignores inequality; from a nonwhite perspective, racial repression has been far more destructive to democratic life than partisan division. 

Again, Sumner’s speech provides important context. Rottinghaus notes in passing that in the past politicians expressing racism and sexism would not have generated scandals. In fact, in the early Republic, rape of Black women was considered normal, unexceptionable, and unworthy of mention—or as the scholar Shannon Eaves puts it, “the antebellum South was deeply rooted in a rape culture.”

Sumner, by alluding to sexual assault on Black women as scandalous, was expressing and contributing to heightened partisanship. But in highlighting this grotesque tradition, Sumner was also highlighting the benefits of exposing scandals. In Sumner’s case, he drew attention to the systemic problem of slavery. His words, and the South’s violent reaction, did not result in accountability for Brooks. But it did help bring about the Civil War, giving enslaved people a chance to flee plantations and bring about their own emancipation.

Rottinghaus admits that scandals can be healthy: They raise public attention, spur reform, and expose systemic rot. He also argues that polarization has made scandals less damaging, though not irrelevant. But widening the historical frame reveals a deeper truth. The most consequential scandals are often those that clarify injustices long normalized by bipartisan consensus. Partisanship can enable impunity—but bipartisanship can conceal horrors.

Sumner’s example reminds us that scandals don’t always bring down politicians. But sometimes they force the country to see what it once refused to admit was scandalous at all.

The post The Scandal About Scandals appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Lanky and awkward, Nicholas Thompson joined his high school’s indoor track team in his sophomore year. At first, he was just an average runner, but he trained hard, eager to improve. That winter, to his surprise, the coach entered him in a two-mile race at the New England Prep School Championships. Thompson did not anticipate being a top finisher. Indeed, expectations for his performance were so low that no one had bothered to tell him that the dimensions of the course were different from those at his own high school’s track; mid-race, he was puzzled by his own split times, even as he noticed that he was lapping other, more accomplished runners.  

To his astonishment, Thompson set a school record. For the first time, he had not allowed his expectations to determine his performance. Years later, Thompson reflected, “If I had understood how fast I was running, I wouldn’t have been able to run that fast. Because I didn’t know the track, because I didn’t know how long the laps were, I didn’t get scared and shut down my body. I just kept going. To do it, I had to first forget that I couldn’t do it.” 

Today, Nick Thompson is a trailblazer in the worlds of technology journalism and magazine publishing. A former editor at the Washington Monthly, Thompson oversaw The New Yorker’s website before becoming editor in chief of Wired. Now, as the CEO of The Atlantic, he has engineered a remarkable turnaround, steering the magazine to profitability, growing its subscriber base to more than 1 million, and overseeing a hiring spree of Pulitzer Prize–winning writers.  

He is also an exceptional, record-holding long-distance runner, who has achieved his greatest success in his 40s, long after most athletes have hit their prime. At age 44, he completed the Chicago Marathon in 2:29, a speed that elevated him to elite status, ranking him among the world’s fastest runners in his age group. Having achieved his goals as a marathon runner, he set his sights on ultramarathons—races of more than 26 miles. At 46, he set an American age group record for the 50K, and then became the top-ranked runner in the world for his age group for the 50-mile run.  

Thompson’s athletic life—and the way it has fueled his professional success and shaped his personal life—is the focus of The Running Ground, an engrossing, unconventional memoir. The book traces a serpentine course, simultaneously a family history, an autobiography, an inspirational guide to middle age, and, most meaningfully, a meditation on running and its lessons for a life fully lived.  

Thompson frames the book, subtitled “A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports,” around his relationship with his father, W. Scott Thompson, an avid runner and occasional marathoner, who introduced Nick to the sport. One of Thompson’s earliest memories is from the age of seven, when he stood in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge clutching a bottle of orange juice and a fresh pair of sneakers to hand to his dad, who was competing in the New York City Marathon.

In a poignant moment of reflection, Thompson writes, “I run because of my father. Running connects me to my father; it reminds me of my father; and it gives me a way to avoid becoming my father.” 

Thompson paints a vivid and compassionate portrait of Scott Thompson, a complex, flamboyant, inexhaustible figure of tremendous talent and intellect, who emerged from a hardscrabble childhood in rural Oklahoma to become a Rhodes scholar, a White House fellow, and a celebrated academic. But at midlife, the elder Thompson’s life careened off track. He came out of the closet and walked out on his family, including seven-year-old Nick. Thompson writes with remarkable frankness about his father’s foibles during the subsequent decades—Scott was an alcoholic and a self-proclaimed sex addict with a proclivity for very young men. He grew unable to hold a job, and spent his later years living in Asia, where he had fled to avoid the IRS and an unpaid tax bill of over $300,000.  

In Nick’s 20s, the two lived together—more like roommates than father and son—and even collaborated on a book. Their home was a Washington salon, with raucous parties filled with diplomats, congressmen, and young journalists. The two shared professional interests in foreign policy and politics, a passion for music and, most meaningfully, running. Thompson writes, “My father led a deeply complicated and broken life. But he gave me many things, including the gift of running—a gift that opens the world to anyone who accepts it.” 

A love of running connects The Running Ground’s two primary narratives—the father-son memoir, and the story of Thompson’s athletic life. Little in Thompson’s early life foreshadowed the great success he has achieved as a marathoner and ultramarathoner in his 40s. At Stanford, a preseason stress fracture derailed his college running career. After graduation, he returned to the sport, flirting with longer distances, including the occasional marathon. Throughout his 20s, Thompson writes, “running was my unrequited crush. I trained like a dilettante and searched for physiological shortcuts that don’t exist. I humiliated myself in races.” Likewise, Thompson comments wryly that his “professional life was the same goat rodeo as my running. I had fallen in love with journalism. But journalism hadn’t fallen in love with me.” 

At 29, he got serious, about both running and his career. On the brink of quitting journalism and starting law school, he applied for a job as an editor of the technology magazine Wired. A week before enrolling at school, he took a grueling, 20-mile predawn run up Cadillac Mountain in Maine, and returned with a renewed focus. “I had just done the hard thing of running up a mountain,” Thompson told his wife. “And it convinced me that I could do this much harder thing of betting on myself. If I didn’t get the job at Wired, I’d write a book.” He de-matriculated from law school, got the job at Wired, then wrote a book. Then he found a coach, established a training regimen, and focused on achieving a major goal, breaking the three-hour time at the New York City Marathon. But just one year later, two weeks after smashing that goal with a 2:43 time (finishing in 146th place out of 37,000 entrants), he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Upon recovery, he was determined to repeat that finish, and did so triumphantly two years later, shaving 13 seconds off his personal record. 

Approaching 40, profoundly grateful for his health, and as a busy professional and devoted husband and father, Thompson had little additional time for training and assumed that he had reached his potential as a runner. Even so, he maintained his fitness and speed with remarkable consistency throughout the next decade, completing eight marathons within a minute or two of his pre-cancer time. 

In 2018, at age 43, Thompson received an email from a team at Nike, inviting him to participate in an experimental program to pair “regular” runners with elite coaches, to maximize performance. The email had landed at an opportune moment—Thompson was grieving the death of his father and contemplating the meaning of middle age. 

Thompson’s father had warned him repeatedly that his life would fracture at around age 40. His paternal grandfather’s life had also splintered in middle age, when a scandal derailed his career as a minister. For Thompson, the pattern was a cautionary tale—if middle age was a point of inflection, how might he avoid the fate of his father and grandfather before him?  

Running, he thought, might be the key. Scott Thompson had run his fastest race at age 40, before his life spun out of control. In his 40s and 50s, he continued to run, but sporadically, for shorter distances, and at slower speeds. Still, it was a healthy habit in an increasingly unhealthy life, and offered structure and discipline. Nick recalls, “As my father descended into mania, the days when he ran were the days he kept everything else in control. If he had run more, could he have done more?” 

Thompson committed to the training program. The Nike coaches challenged common assumptions about the inevitability of runners’ declines in their 30s and 40s, pointing to certain biological advantages that come with age, like the strengthening of tendons and the trade-off of speed for endurance. They offered new technologies that sharpened Thompson’s understanding of his gait, and pushed him to collect data that informed his training. They stressed the need for more intense practices—time spent running fast—rather than additional mileage, and the importance of key metrics Thompson had long ignored, along with recommendations for a healthier diet and a nonnegotiable eight hours of sleep.  

Thompson also benefited from the psychological insights of the training program, particularly a theory coined by the sports physiologist Tim Noakes, the “Central Governor Model,” which posits that pain and fatigue can be psychological phenomena, with the unconscious mind seeking to protect the body. This phenomenon explains racers’ ability to sprint at the end of a long race, despite physical exhaustion. Thompson had learned a similar lesson in his high school race 30 years earlier: “We all can go faster. We just need to persuade our brains not to start the subconscious shutdown process right away. But the only thing we can use to trick our brains is our brains. Training becomes a hide-and-seek with oneself.” 

Thompson came to realize that his relatively modest running goals had held him back. Reflecting on the decade following his cancer recovery, he recalled that all he had wanted to do was “to match the Nick I had been before the diagnosis.” The goal was to maintain his prior speed, not exceed it. He recalls, “I hadn’t been able to run a fast marathon in the past because I hadn’t wanted to. Or, more precisely, I hadn’t really cared about going that fast because all I really wanted was something else.”  

Within a year, Thompson had broken his own record in the New York City Marathon by five minutes and then exceeded his highest expectations for the next seven races. He has done so despite training “only” 65 to 70 miles a week, far less than the mileage of a professional marathoner.  

Thompson muses about the reasons for his success—perhaps his body responds to training better than others’, and he has been remarkably free of injuries—but it is hard to escape the conclusion that he simply works harder and smarter than most. To lean on a cliché, Thompson reminds us that we can do hard things. He runs even in the most miserable weather, and regardless of the location—he has run through Times Square at midnight, through cities to the airport, and to black-tie events with a tuxedo tucked in his backpack. He runs despite aches and pains, nausea and fatigue. “The deeper truth,” he reminds readers, is that “you have to learn to run when you hurt, and you have to learn to hurt when you run.”  

Thompson’s own pre-race rituals and preparation offer a window into his own intensity and the arcana of the sport, in which an improvement of just a few seconds can be meaningful. For instance, before each race, Thompson pays careful attention to his feet, clipping his toenails, shaving the hairs on his toes, and applying Vaseline. As an ultramarathoner, he has taught himself to urinate while running. 

The reader is left craving more such details, both about the sport—for instance, that it is tradition for a record-breaker to drink champagne from his sweaty running shoe—and also the ways it has impacted Thompson’s professional life. The reader who comes to this memoir with a familiarity with Thompson’s storied career and reputation for a relentless work ethic and talent for untangling knotty problems will be disappointed by the virtual absence of workplace anecdotes. While he describes his major career pivots (and the long, contemplative runs he often takes while weighing his options), Thompson writes in a too-broad fashion about the ways in which running has improved his professional life. For example, he muses, “I had learned that our minds create limits for us when we’re afraid of failure, not because it’s actually time to slow or stop.” The memoir is filled with similar axioms about the instructive lessons from running, like teaching concentration, the value of discipline, and the need for setting goals, but is disappointingly light on specifics about the impacts on his own professional life.  

Thompson’s prose is lean and spare, like the strides of a runner. At times, he veers into inspirational cliché, but at its best, the writing is almost Zen-like, when he captures the quality of running in nature, perfectly in sync with the rhythm of each step. He describes being so in touch with his body’s rhythms that he can run a mile and, without glancing at his watch, predict the time within a second or two. While most of Thompson’s training is on mundane urban courses, including his daily eight-mile round trip commute, his description of runs among the mountains of New England exude sheer joy: “To run through the Andover bird sanctuary in October is to cross into a Winslow Homer painting. The palette changes subtly each day as the maple trees flip from green to scarlet while the oak trees stubbornly hold on to their russet leaves.” 

Thompson intersperses his own narrative with five excellent chapters profiling other exceptional long-distance runners. The profiles interrupt the biographical flow of the memoir, but they are among the most compelling stories in the book and serve as a reminder that not all runners are motivated by a competitive drive.  

The most interesting of those profiled is Suprabha Beckjord, a world-record-holding ultramarathoner. For 13 years, Beckjord completed the 3,100-mile Self-Transcendence Race, organized by the Indian guru Sri Chinmoy. This astonishing race course—a distance greater than from San Francisco to New York—consists simply of circumnavigating around a public high school occupying a single square block in Queens, New York. Successful runners complete approximately 60 miles per day—day after day, for nearly two months—throughout the hot New York City summer. For Beckjord, the race is one of spiritual transcendence and self-awareness, and the mundane course offers an opportunity to notice the tiniest variations in one’s surroundings—an insect on a tree, a subtle change in the weather, a chip in the sidewalk. 

The Running Ground crackles with big ideas, about intergenerational inheritance, the power of love and forgiveness, the inevitability of aging, the mind-body connection, and the value of hard work. The memoir’s intertwined stories—Thompson’s relationship with his father alongside Thompson’s own journey as a marathon runner hitting his stride midlife—are compelling narratives. There is so much of interest in this lean, slim memoir. The downside is that Thompson races toward the finish line, without offering sufficient time to fully explore each of these individual themes. He writes, “One can run as a way to seek spiritual awakening, and one can run to fulfill ambition. It’s often hard to do both.” Perhaps a memoir, too, is best written as a journey of spiritual awakening, a meandering journey of self-knowledge, rather than a sprint to conclusion.  

The post Hitting His Stride  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

A paradox haunts books by contemporary Supreme Court justices. Publishers give the justices huge sums—$2 million, in the case of Justice Amy Coney Barrett—to write monographs insisting that Supreme Court judging is apolitical. Publishers provide these guarantees because Supreme Court judging in the United States is hyperpolitical: Partisans can be trusted to buy and praise the books written by justices on their side of the political fence. 

This paradox has a predictable literary consequence: The books are almost always bad. Recent books by Justice Neil Gorsuch and former Justice Stephen Breyer were widely and rightly panned by reviewers, though purchased in large numbers by partisan readers. Neither book explained why publishers, bookstores, producers, and influencers roll out red carpets for people whose primary job is supposedly to follow, to the letter, instructions given in past centuries.

Justice Barrett’s new book, Listening to the Law, meets the low bar set by her colleagues. She promises an accessible (not scholarly) insider’s guide to Supreme Court practice. The justices, Barrett tells us, like one another, attend parties together, and manage to disagree without rancor. Judging, she insists, is a matter of humility, of listening carefully to the law made by others. Apart from an informative discussion of textualism, the method with which Barrett is most associated, the book offers no account of why serious scholars—including, one suspects, Professor Barrett—think actual judicial practice is far more complicated than simply discovering (or “listening to”) the law made by others. The effect is less analysis than campaign biography, a self-presentation in the style of politicians explaining why they can be trusted with power.

The resemblance to political memoir is not accidental. Barrett, like her colleagues, aims to humanize herself. She assures readers that her pre-Court “life was good, but like anyone’s, it was not perfect”; that “these last years of being in the public eye have toughened me up”; that “all human relationships depend on kindness and humility.” Such bromides could have been lifted from a stump speech. Justices, like candidates, must persuade their audiences that they are relatable, trustworthy, and possessed of the moral fiber to do their jobs. The difference is that candidates eventually face voters. Justices, armed with life tenure, face only history.

Indeed, one of Barrett’s most insistent themes is precisely that life tenure guarantees independence. “The Constitution’s guarantees of life tenure and salary protection for federal judges,” she writes, “are designed to fortify a judge’s resolve to stand firm against the tide of public opinion.” The only evidence she provides for this claim is Alexander Hamilton’s assertion, made more than 200 years ago in Federalist no. 78, that “nothing will contribute so much as [life tenure] to that independent spirit in the judges which must be essential to the faithful performance of so arduous a duty.” Throughout, Listening to the Law celebrates the “genius” of the Framers. What was good enough for 18th-century minds ought to be good enough for 21st-century citizens.

An accessible guide to constitutional practice might note that very few constitutional democracies grant judges life tenure, and those that do (Canada and the United Kingdom) still require retirement no later than 75. Those judiciaries seem at least as independent as federal courts in the United States. A Brennan Center for Justice study by Lisa Hilbink of the University of Minnesota found that other democracies achieve judicial independence through shorter terms, mandatory retirement, or both, with no decline in performance. Indeed, the supreme court of Israel, which imposes mandatory retirement no later than 70, has far more aggressively challenged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies than the U.S. Supreme Court has challenged Donald Trump’s policies. Similarly, the lack of life tenure has not inhibited the supreme courts of India and Germany from declaring constitutional amendments unconstitutional. 

Equally central to Barrett’s civics is the notion that judicial review exists to protect minorities from majority tyranny. Aware of our fallibility, the wise Framers of the Constitution created an institution that would ultimately declare segregated schools unconstitutional, protect free speech from local censors, and prevent police officers from physically abusing persons suspected of crime. The trouble, which Barrett conveniently neglects, is that the most difficult and consequential cases pit one minority against another. Consider Fulton v. Philadelphia (2021), which concerned whether the city could exclude a Catholic foster care agency that refused to work with same-sex couples. Both parties plausibly claimed to be protecting vulnerable minorities. Philadelphia argued that it was protecting LGBTQ families from discrimination; the Catholic agency argued that it was being discriminated against for its religious beliefs. 

History also undermines the slogan. Before Brown v. Board of Education (1954), it is difficult to identify a Supreme Court decision striking down a federal law most Americans would now say protected deserving minorities. More often it went the other way: Dred Scott (1856) denied Congress the power to ban slavery in the territories; the Civil Rights Cases (1883) voided Reconstruction-era protections; Pollock (1895) struck down the federal income tax; Carter Coal (1936) invalidated New Deal reforms. Slaveholders, too, claimed the mantle of an oppressed minority. As today, one person’s “worthy minority” was another’s entrenched interest, and few historians would tally the Court’s record as consistently protective of the vulnerable.

The deeper problem is not just that the Court often failed in practice, but that it has never had a clear method for identifying which minorities deserve protection. That choice is inherently political, so Barrett just ignores it. Listening to the Law never even hints at the difficulty of identifying the minorities that merit judicial protection, or whether the history of judicial review evinces any tendency for courts to make the right choices in this regard. Once one looks at the actual record of judicial review, what emerges is less a steady defense of the downtrodden minorities than a scattershot series of interventions, many of them on behalf of entrenched elites. 

As Mark Tushnet has noted, judicial review amounts to “noise around zero,” producing essentially random deviations—sometimes good, often bad—from what the political system would otherwise generate. When a pattern can be discerned, it is a tendency to side with the executive over Congress and with legal elites when they differ from the less educated or less wealthy. Professor Barrett is almost certainly aware of this scholarship, but Justice Barrett leaves readers with the comforting civics textbook version, assuring them that courts stand reliably with the powerless when in fact the historical record points to something closer to the opposite.

Listening to the Law likewise assures readers that justices decide cases on law, not politics. A few anecdotes about particular justices, Barrett’s willingness to sustain death sentences despite her moral opposition to capital punishment, and statistics demonstrating that approximately half the decisions the justices make are unanimous constitute the entire evidence for this assertion. No scholar paints with so broad a brush. A high percentage of the Supreme Court’s unanimous decisions concern matters such as the proper interpretation of the Employment Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), a matter on which most people who are not retired have weak if any policy preferences. 

As politically conscious citizens observe, when the justices decide major cases on which the political parties divide, the justices appointed by Republican presidents almost always take positions favored by the Republican Party and the justices appointed by Democratic presidents almost always take positions favored by the Democratic Party. Consider abortion, campaign finance, and the recent Supreme Court practice of using the emergency, or shadow, docket to block lower federal court rulings temporarily enjoining Trump administration executive orders. A citizen who bet at even odds that the justices would vote consistently with the president that appointed them would gain a fortune. When exceptions exist, the tendency is for the justice to side with more moderate members of the party against more extreme members. That some Roberts Court justices may side with the Wall Street Journal editorial page over Donald Trump when the justices rule on tariffs hardly demonstrates a court above politics.

The free exercise clause offers perhaps the starkest example of politics shaping judicial decision making. During the second half of the 20th century, conservative originalists were committed to the proposition that the free exercise clause as originally understood provided religious believers with no exemptions from generally applicable laws. This point was emphasized in the Reagan administration’s Guidelines on Constitutional Litigation in 1988, a core statement of conservation constitutional principles at the time. Justice Antonin Scalia made it explicit in Employment Division v. Smith (1990), holding that worshippers had no right to use peyote in religious ceremonies when Oregon law banned the drug entirely. 

By the early 21st century, however, evangelical Protestants—core members of the Republican coalition—became the typical free exercise claimants. A miracle promptly occurred. Republican-appointed justices discovered that the 1791 clause had always guaranteed exemptions, or that laws burdening evangelicals were exceptions to the no-exemptions principles. Who knew? Religious organizations may now engage in what would otherwise be considered employment discrimination by designating employees or teachers as ministers, as decided in Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru (2020). 

The near-perfect correlation between partisan affiliation and votes goes unacknowledged in Listening to the Law. The message is simple: Trust us.

This, finally, is the problem with the genre itself. By presenting judging as a realm of pure law, insulated from politics, the justices offer a picture so implausible that it makes the opposite claim—that judging is nothing but politics—more credible. In their effort to inspire confidence, they deepen cynicism. If the only choices are civics class pieties or unvarnished partisanship, many readers will conclude, not unreasonably, that the latter is closer to the truth. Publishers, of course, will not mind. Judicial celebrity sells, and the market for reassurance is deep. Barrett closes with optimism that the constitutional project will endure, with no hint of constitutional crisis or recognition that many Americans believe one already exists. That is for serious studies of law and politics. Barrett’s purpose, like that of her colleagues’ books, is to persuade readers that all will be well so long as the justices remain in charge.

The post Justice Barrett’s Campaign Biography appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Lanky and awkward, Nicholas Thompson joined his high school’s indoor track team in his sophomore year. At first, he was just an average runner, but he trained hard, eager to improve. That winter, to his surprise, the coach entered him in a two-mile race at the New England Prep School Championships. Thompson did not anticipate being a top finisher. Indeed, expectations for his performance were so low that no one had bothered to tell him that the dimensions of the course were different from those at his own high school’s track; mid-race, he was puzzled by his own split times, even as he noticed that he was lapping other, more accomplished runners.  

To his astonishment, Thompson set a school record. For the first time, he had not allowed his expectations to determine his performance. Years later, Thompson reflected, “If I had understood how fast I was running, I wouldn’t have been able to run that fast. Because I didn’t know the track, because I didn’t know how long the laps were, I didn’t get scared and shut down my body. I just kept going. To do it, I had to first forget that I couldn’t do it.” 

Today, Nick Thompson is a trailblazer in the worlds of technology journalism and magazine publishing. A former editor at the Washington Monthly, Thompson oversaw The New Yorker’s website before becoming editor in chief of Wired. Now, as the CEO of The Atlantic, he has engineered a remarkable turnaround, steering the magazine to profitability, growing its subscriber base to more than 1 million, and overseeing a hiring spree of Pulitzer Prize–winning writers.  

He is also an exceptional, record-holding long-distance runner, who has achieved his greatest success in his 40s, long after most athletes have hit their prime. At age 44, he completed the Chicago Marathon in 2:29, a speed that elevated him to elite status, ranking him among the world’s fastest runners in his age group. Having achieved his goals as a marathon runner, he set his sights on ultramarathons—races of more than 26 miles. At 46, he set an American age group record for the 50K, and then became the top-ranked runner in the world for his age group for the 50-mile run.  

Thompson’s athletic life—and the way it has fueled his professional success and shaped his personal life—is the focus of The Running Ground, an engrossing, unconventional memoir. The book traces a serpentine course, simultaneously a family history, an autobiography, an inspirational guide to middle age, and, most meaningfully, a meditation on running and its lessons for a life fully lived.  

Thompson frames the book, subtitled “A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports,” around his relationship with his father, W. Scott Thompson, an avid runner and occasional marathoner, who introduced Nick to the sport. One of Thompson’s earliest memories is from the age of seven, when he stood in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge clutching a bottle of orange juice and a fresh pair of sneakers to hand to his dad, who was competing in the New York City Marathon.  

In a poignant moment of reflection, Thompson writes, “I run because of my father. Running connects me to my father; it reminds me of my father; and it gives me a way to avoid becoming my father.” 

Thompson paints a vivid and compassionate portrait of Scott Thompson, a complex, flamboyant, inexhaustible figure of tremendous talent and intellect, who emerged from a hardscrabble childhood in rural Oklahoma to become a Rhodes scholar, a White House fellow, and a celebrated academic. But at midlife, the elder Thompson’s life careened off track. He came out of the closet and walked out on his family, including seven-year-old Nick. Thompson writes with remarkable frankness about his father’s foibles during the subsequent decades—Scott was an alcoholic and a self-proclaimed sex addict with a proclivity for very young men. He grew unable to hold a job, and spent his later years living in Asia, where he had fled to avoid the IRS and an unpaid tax bill of over $300,000.  

In Nick’s 20s, the two lived together—more like roommates than father and son—and even collaborated on a book. Their home was a Washington salon, with raucous parties filled with diplomats, congressmen, and young journalists. The two shared professional interests in foreign policy and politics, a passion for music and, most meaningfully, running. Thompson writes, “My father led a deeply complicated and broken life. But he gave me many things, including the gift of running—a gift that opens the world to anyone who accepts it.” 

A love of running connects The Running Ground’s two primary narratives—the father-son memoir, and the story of Thompson’s athletic life. Little in Thompson’s early life foreshadowed the great success he has achieved as a marathoner and ultramarathoner in his 40s. At Stanford, a preseason stress fracture derailed his college running career. After graduation, he returned to the sport, flirting with longer distances, including the occasional marathon. Throughout his 20s, Thompson writes, “running was my unrequited crush. I trained like a dilettante and searched for physiological shortcuts that don’t exist. I humiliated myself in races.” Likewise, Thompson comments wryly that his “professional life was the same goat rodeo as my running. I had fallen in love with journalism. But journalism hadn’t fallen in love with me.” 

At 29, he got serious, about both running and his career. On the brink of quitting journalism and starting law school, he applied for a job as an editor of the technology magazine Wired. A week before enrolling at school, he took a grueling, 20-mile predawn run up Cadillac Mountain in Maine, and returned with a renewed focus. “I had just done the hard thing of running up a mountain,” Thompson told his wife. “And it convinced me that I could do this much harder thing of betting on myself. If I didn’t get the job at Wired, I’d write a book.” He de-matriculated from law school, got the job at Wired, then wrote a book. Then he found a coach, established a training regimen, and focused on achieving a major goal, breaking the three-hour time at the New York City Marathon. But just one year later, two weeks after smashing that goal with a 2:43 time (finishing in 146th place out of 37,000 entrants), he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Upon recovery, he was determined to repeat that finish, and did so triumphantly two years later, shaving 13 seconds off his personal record. 

Approaching 40, profoundly grateful for his health, and as a busy professional and devoted husband and father, Thompson had little additional time for training and assumed that he had reached his potential as a runner. Even so, he maintained his fitness and speed with remarkable consistency throughout the next decade, completing eight marathons within a minute or two of his pre-cancer time. 

In 2018, at age 43, Thompson received an email from a team at Nike, inviting him to participate in an experimental program to pair “regular” runners with elite coaches, to maximize performance. The email had landed at an opportune moment—Thompson was grieving the death of his father and contemplating the meaning of middle age. 

Thompson’s father had warned him repeatedly that his life would fracture at around age 40. His paternal grandfather’s life had also splintered in middle age, when a scandal derailed his career as a minister. For Thompson, the pattern was a cautionary tale—if middle age was a point of inflection, how might he avoid the fate of his father and grandfather before him?  

Running, he thought, might be the key. Scott Thompson had run his fastest race at age 40, before his life spun out of control. In his 40s and 50s, he continued to run, but sporadically, for shorter distances, and at slower speeds. Still, it was a healthy habit in an increasingly unhealthy life, and offered structure and discipline. Nick recalls, “As my father descended into mania, the days when he ran were the days he kept everything else in control. If he had run more, could he have done more?” 

Thompson committed to the training program. The Nike coaches challenged common assumptions about the inevitability of runners’ declines in their 30s and 40s, pointing to certain biological advantages that come with age, like the strengthening of tendons and the trade-off of speed for endurance. They offered new technologies that sharpened Thompson’s understanding of his gait, and pushed him to collect data that informed his training. They stressed the need for more intense practices—time spent running fast—rather than additional mileage, and the importance of key metrics Thompson had long ignored, along with recommendations for a healthier diet and a nonnegotiable eight hours of sleep.  

Thompson also benefited from the psychological insights of the training program, particularly a theory coined by the sports physiologist Tim Noakes, the “Central Governor Model,” which posits that pain and fatigue can be psychological phenomena, with the unconscious mind seeking to protect the body. This phenomenon explains racers’ ability to sprint at the end of a long race, despite physical exhaustion. Thompson had learned a similar lesson in his high school race 30 years earlier: “We all can go faster. We just need to persuade our brains not to start the subconscious shutdown process right away. But the only thing we can use to trick our brains is our brains. Training becomes a hide-and-seek with oneself.” 

Thompson came to realize that his relatively modest running goals had held him back. Reflecting on the decade following his cancer recovery, he recalled that all he had wanted to do was “to match the Nick I had been before the diagnosis.” The goal was to maintain his prior speed, not exceed it. He recalls, “I hadn’t been able to run a fast marathon in the past because I hadn’t wanted to. Or, more precisely, I hadn’t really cared about going that fast because all I really wanted was something else.”  

Within a year, Thompson had broken his own record in the New York City Marathon by five minutes and then exceeded his highest expectations for the next seven races. He has done so despite training “only” 65 to 70 miles a week, far less than the mileage of a professional marathoner.  

Thompson muses about the reasons for his success—perhaps his body responds to training better than others’, and he has been remarkably free of injuries—but it is hard to escape the conclusion that he simply works harder and smarter than most. To lean on a cliché, Thompson reminds us that we can do hard things. He runs even in the most miserable weather, and regardless of the location—he has run through Times Square at midnight, through cities to the airport, and to black-tie events with a tuxedo tucked in his backpack. He runs despite aches and pains, nausea and fatigue. “The deeper truth,” he reminds readers, is that “you have to learn to run when you hurt, and you have to learn to hurt when you run.”  

Thompson’s own pre-race rituals and preparation offer a window into his own intensity and the arcana of the sport, in which an improvement of just a few seconds can be meaningful. For instance, before each race, Thompson pays careful attention to his feet, clipping his toenails, shaving the hairs on his toes, and applying Vaseline. As an ultramarathoner, he has taught himself to urinate while running. 

The reader is left craving more such details, both about the sport—for instance, that it is tradition for a record-breaker to drink champagne from his sweaty running shoe—and also the ways it has impacted Thompson’s professional life. The reader who comes to this memoir with a familiarity with Thompson’s storied career and reputation for a relentless work ethic and talent for untangling knotty problems will be disappointed by the virtual absence of workplace anecdotes. While he describes his major career pivots (and the long, contemplative runs he often takes while weighing his options), Thompson writes in a too-broad fashion about the ways in which running has improved his professional life. For example, he muses, “I had learned that our minds create limits for us when we’re afraid of failure, not because it’s actually time to slow or stop.” The memoir is filled with similar axioms about the instructive lessons from running, like teaching concentration, the value of discipline, and the need for setting goals, but is disappointingly light on specifics about the impacts on his own professional life.  

Thompson’s prose is lean and spare, like the strides of a runner. At times, he veers into inspirational cliché, but at its best, the writing is almost Zen-like, when he captures the quality of running in nature, perfectly in sync with the rhythm of each step. He describes being so in touch with his body’s rhythms that he can run a mile and, without glancing at his watch, predict the time within a second or two. While most of Thompson’s training is on mundane urban courses, including his daily eight-mile round trip commute, his description of runs among the mountains of New England exude sheer joy: “To run through the Andover bird sanctuary in October is to cross into a Winslow Homer painting. The palette changes subtly each day as the maple trees flip from green to scarlet while the oak trees stubbornly hold on to their russet leaves.” 

Thompson intersperses his own narrative with five excellent chapters profiling other exceptional long-distance runners. The profiles interrupt the biographical flow of the memoir, but they are among the most compelling stories in the book and serve as a reminder that not all runners are motivated by a competitive drive.  

The most interesting of those profiled is Suprabha Beckjord, a world-record-holding ultramarathoner. For 13 years, Beckjord completed the 3,100-mile Self-Transcendence Race, organized by the Indian guru Sri Chinmoy. This astonishing race course—a distance greater than from San Francisco to New York—consists simply of circumnavigating around a public high school occupying a single square block in Queens, New York. Successful runners complete approximately 60 miles per day—day after day, for nearly two months—throughout the hot New York City summer. For Beckjord, the race is one of spiritual transcendence and self-awareness, and the mundane course offers an opportunity to notice the tiniest variations in one’s surroundings—an insect on a tree, a subtle change in the weather, a chip in the sidewalk. 

The Running Ground crackles with big ideas, about intergenerational inheritance, the power of love and forgiveness, the inevitability of aging, the mind-body connection, and the value of hard work. The memoir’s intertwined stories—Thompson’s relationship with his father alongside Thompson’s own journey as a marathon runner hitting his stride midlife—are compelling narratives. There is so much of interest in this lean, slim memoir. The downside is that Thompson races toward the finish line, without offering sufficient time to fully explore each of these individual themes. He writes, “One can run as a way to seek spiritual awakening, and one can run to fulfill ambition. It’s often hard to do both.” Perhaps a memoir, too, is best written as a journey of spiritual awakening, a meandering journey of self-knowledge, rather than a sprint to conclusion.  

The post Hitting His Stride  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In a moment when the President of the United States is trying to use the power of the state to intimidate critics in academia and the media (not to mention his political opponents), some may think that a new book like Thomas Chatterton Williams’s Summer of Our Discontent, which focuses mainly on the illiberalism of the left, is terribly timed. They will fault the author for not “meeting the moment,” or worse, for “enabling” an autocrat by articulating “right-wing talking points.” Liberal critics have already panned the volume in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and New York magazine.  

In fact, the book by Williams, an iconoclastic writer for The Atlantic, could not have come at a better moment. It is precisely because Donald Trump is wreaking havoc daily that it’s crucial to comprehend why so many of our fellow Americans came to dislike the Democrats even more than the unlikable and chaotic man they elected president. How is it that a November 2024 survey of working-class Americans found that 58 percent believed Democrats have moved “too far left,”  a share that is 11 points higher than the share that believed Republicans have moved “too far right” (47 percent)? 

As Williams writes: “If the purpose is to understand the political and moral disaster in which we now find ourselves—and not merely to signal our enlightenment in relation to it—an unsentimental assessment of the social justice left, and the agenda-setting institutions that repeatedly caved and pandered to its excesses, is not only reasonable but obligatory.” Although Williams does not provide a complete explanation of our current predicament, he supplies a number of powerful clues about what went wrong. 

It is important to note at the outset that Williams supports many liberal goals. He believes the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements were initially animated by a healthy desire to extend “dignity and recognition” to more Americans. He favors police reform and “a floor of universal dignity that expands access to health care, day care, and quality public education.” The son of a Black father and a white mother, Williams says “the story of American racism is not merely an abstraction to me.” And Williams labels Trump “a pathologically dissembling and race-baiting con man lacking basic curiosity and qualifications.” 

But just as socialists hated Communists for ruining their egalitarian dream, Williams’s dismay with rising left-wing illiberalism is acutely felt. The book, which examines the period between the reelection of Barack Obama in 2012 and of Trump in 2024, abounds with examples of betrayals, especially after George Floyd’s murder in May 2020. 

A healthy concern about racial equality, particularly among white elites, morphed into an unbalanced focus that many Americans, including many Americans of color, found alienating on a host of issues. 

Most Americans believe in the rule of law, but in August 2020, NPR published what Williams calls “a wildly credulous interview” with a white author whose book was entitled In Defense of Looting. The publisher’s blurb claimed, “Our beliefs in the innate righteousness of property and ownership … are built on the history of anti-Black, anti-Indigenous oppression.” At a time when minority-owned businesses burned to the ground,  the book’s author explained to NPR, “without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.” The mindset had disastrous results in the real world. After a majority of Minneapolis’s city council pledged to “dismantle” the police department, homicides increased 50 percent amid an overall police staffing shortage. To his credit, Joe Biden denounced the “defund the police” slogan and pushed for more cops on the streets. But left-leaning social activists left a powerful impression with voters. According to a November 2024 Blueprint survey, 68 percent of swing voters who chose Trump said the Democrats were “not doing enough to address crime.” 

In 2019, a Pew survey showed that the vast majority of Americans—74 percent—believed that people of all races should be treated equally in employment and education. Yet, among progressive activists, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist became all the rage.  Kendi famously argued, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” 

Surveys found that many Americans—including 84 percent of Black Americans—worried about not being able to speak their minds. Yet, when Williams and other leading authors and artists organized a July 2020 letter in Harper’s magazine, making what Williams called a “frankly anodyne”  statement about free speech, they received an enormous backlash among progressive activists. The critics, Williams says, failed to understand a fundamental lesson: “Free speech is the bedrock for all subsequent rights and assurances, particularly those of ethnic, numerical, ideological, and other minorities.” 

In the summer of 2020, average Americans were bewildered by the conflicting advice provided by progressive experts about whether or not it was safe to congregate in large numbers outdoors with a pandemic in full swing. Progressives chastised Florida sunbathers for their reckless behavior. Still, shortly thereafter, when thousands  of protesters gathered in response to George Floyd’s murder, a number of public health officials approved of the gatherings. Williams observed, “In the space of two weeks and without really thinking it through, we went from shaming people for being in the street to shaming them for not being in the street.” 

Finally, average Americans were flummoxed by the reaction on elite college campuses to the massacre of peaceful Jewish Israelis on October 7, 2023. “The surprise slaughter of twelve hundred men, women, and children in Israel, as well as the abduction of 250 more,” Williams notes, was not something Hamas tried to hide. “There were no attempts to cover up the revolting evidence or to blame it on rogue ‘bad apples.’” Instead, Hamas videotaped it all and disseminated it proudly. Astonishingly, some students at Harvard, Columbia and elsewhere lay the blame of the massacre entirely at the feet of Israel itself. A group of 34 Harvard student organizations, for example, published a statement days after the attack in which they held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence … the apartheid regime is the only one to blame.” 

To its credit, the Biden administration wholeheartedly rejected the view of these progressive activists who blamed the pogrom on Israel, but Williams is correct that the issue revealed a troubling class divide in which the progressive wing of the Democratic Party was aligned with the well-heeled. As the Washington Monthly’s careful analysis showed, students in predominately working-class colleges, perhaps because many of them were more likely to be focused on trying to get ahead, did not often partake in the 2024 left-wing Gaza protests to the same extent as the students in more privileged elite campuses. 

To be clear, as the war dragged on and civilian casualties in Gaza mounted, most Americans came to recognize that Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct of the war became deeply disturbing. Williams himself notes the “ferocity of Israel’s reaction, which frequently amounted to collective punishment.” Those later developments, however, do not excuse the initial reaction of many progressive activists to Hamas’s attack. 

Some will say activists are always prone to excess. But Williams relentlessly cites examples of how the attitudes of left-wing demonstrators, particularly during the summer of 2020, bled into mainstream institutions—the media, museums, and corporations. 

CNN, for example, seemed to excuse violent protests. Most famously, Williams notes, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, “in front of a large building blanketed by leaping flames,” the CNN chyron read, “FIERY BUT MOSTLY PEACEFUL PROTESTS AFTER POLICE SHOOTING.” The New York Times, which had published op-eds by Muammar Qaddafi, Vladimir Putin, and a leader of the Taliban, pushed an editor to resign for publishing Senator Tom Cotton’s column suggesting that the military should stop the rioting and looting. Cotton’s position is not one I agree with, but it was not beyond the pale. It was a policy supported by “58 percent of registered voters, including nearly half of Democrats and 37 percent of African-Americans,” Williams writes. 

Surprisingly, race essentialist ideas were circulated not just by white nationalists but by mainstream institutions. The venerable Smithsonian Institution published a poster that identified hard work and “the nuclear family” as aspects of “white culture.” Jack Dorsey, one of the founders of Twitter, gave $10 million to an antiracist center at Boston University launched by Kendi, the scholar who called for “discrimination” to counteract racism. Meanwhile, the Academy Awards, Williams notes, required qualifying films “to meet racial quotas in order to be considered during awards season.” 

Biden and Harris were much more reasonable than progressive activists on a host of these issues, but too often, they fell into the same trap. For example, Biden claimed during the 2020 campaign that “if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black”—a statement Williams calls “insulting” and “counterproductive.”   

The decision by many progressives and Democratic politicians to make identity “the single most potent prism through which all matters of discussion and dispute … are now unceasingly filtered” had damaging electoral ramifications, Williams writes, because it didn’t comport with the daily lives of voters. Research from Harvard’s Raj Chetty made clear that parental income, rather than their race, is increasingly dictating the fundamental issue of social mobility. While George Floyd’s murder was seen almost exclusively through a racial lens, says Williams, the fact that he was poor was “the most salient fact about his life.” After all, Williams notes, Floyd “died over a counterfeit banknote the vast majority of black people would never come to possess.”   

When the issue of racial preferences came before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 in a case involving Harvard University, the Biden administration arguably prioritized the interests of upper-middle-class Black and Hispanic families over working Americans of all races.  Harvard’s system of large racial preferences and legacy preferences worked well for economically advantaged students of all races. More than 70 percent of Black and Hispanic students came from the richest 20 percent of the Black and Hispanic families nationally, and the white and Asian students were even richer. Rather than backing a system of affirmative action for economically disadvantaged students of all races, however, Biden backed Harvard. 

After the 2024 election, liberals, who were fixated on race, puzzled over how on earth Trump could appeal to an increasing share of nonwhite voters, yielding what Williams calls “the least racially polarized election since 1972.” But to Williams, the result is not surprising. For nonwhite working-class voters, issues of racial reckoning didn’t touch their most pressing concerns, which centered around economic well-being. The “racial reckoning” of 2020, he writes, became “a professional-class affair, existing on another plane entirely from working-class reality.” 

Although Williams focuses mostly on the shortcomings of the left, he is unsparing about Trump as well. He devotes a chilling chapter to “The Spectacle of January 6,” in which he recounts the horrific day: “the cartoonish shaman; the even-keeled man with ominous-looking zip ties on his waistband; the unshaven fool with his feet up on Speaker Pelosi’s desk” as well as the mob “threatening to exact vengeance on the Vice-President.”   

Why were working-class voters more willing to forgive the extremists on the right? In one of the book’s most glaring shortcomings, Williams doesn’t really advance a theory about this important question. It seems possible that because mainstream establishment institutions were more willing to embrace radical views on the left, voters felt more exposed to them—a phenomenon that Fox News then amplified with glee. It is also possible that the extremism on the right is less difficult for working-class voters to stomach because it doesn’t come with the same strong sense of moral condescension that progressive activists (many of them economically well off) exude. 

Going forward, if Democrats want to win back America’s working class, they need to frame the necessary work of addressing race as a subset of the larger set of challenges facing working people across racial lines. They should emphasize race-neutral policies that serve all Americans who struggle, including working-class whites and underprivileged minorities alike. Such policies could include, for example, boosting funding for regional public and community colleges, as the Monthly’s Paul Glastris has argued.  

Likewise, Democrats need to explicitly and loudly distance themselves from deeply unpopular progressive activist ideas of the type Williams describes. The two most successful Democratic presidents of the last four decades—Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—both did so: Clinton when he denounced Sister Souljah and Obama when he criticized the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Biden and Harris, by contrast, did nothing so dramatic. 

Pundits have pointed to many factors that contributed to Trump’s 2024 election—with inflation and immigration looming large—but cultural disconnect also played an important role. As Democrats take a look in the mirror about what went wrong, Summer of Our Discontent should be high on their reading lists. In America’s continuing discussions of race, liberals can take pride in holding the high moral ground over Donald Trump, but they should also heed the warning from Camus that Williams cites in the book’s epigraph: “I have seen people behave badly with great morality.” 

The post The Eternal Social Justice Summer  appeared first on Washington Monthly.