BY HARVEY C. MANSFIELD
CONSTRUCTION IS OUR BUSINESS, BUT WE MAKE IT PERSONAL
When we look to the future, we don’t aim to be the biggest general contractor. We aim to be the general contractor that is big enough to handle the needs of your project. The secret to our success is that we do not differentiate between large and small. We believe every client and every project deserves the same level of service and attention to detail. Every project we undertake is critical for you and our commitment is to treat you that way. Your project is Big Enough for us to treat it like it is our most important project. Because it is.
WHEN A CONSPIRACY THEORIST BECOMES A CONSPIRACY THEORY HIMSELF. by megan feldman bettencourt
It’s never been easier for people to cherry-pick facts that match their beliefs — or fabricate them altogether. THE UNDERCOVER AGENT WHO WASN’T
CONEY BARRETT
THE SUPREME COURT’S MOST ENIGMATIC JUSTICE MAY BECOME AN ICON. by mariya manzhos
52
BEATING THE BUZZER
THIS MAY BE JIMMER FREDETTE’S LAST DANCE. HE’S HAVING A BALL. by ethan bauer
JUSTIN COLLINGS
Amar is the Sterling professor of law and political science at Yale University. He is the award-winning author of “The Bill of Rights” and “America’s Constitution.” An excerpt from his latest book, “The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 17601840,” is on page 15.
Goldblatt is a writer, journalist and academic based in Bristol, England. His work has been published in The Guardian, The New York Times and the London Review of Books. He has written several books on sports, including “The Games: A Global History of the Olympics.” His essay on the Olympic spirit is on page 28.
Wakau is a New York-based illustrator and classically trained artist. Among her awards are the Best in Show Red Dot Prize at the Art Students League of New York Annual Concours and second prize from the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize — iCan Digital Art Award. Her work appears on page 32.
Mansfield is a political philosopher and retired professor of government at Harvard University. A recipient of the National Humanities Medal and the Bradley Prize, his most recent book is “Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth: Creating the Modern World.” His essay on the perils of government by the people is on page 62.
Collings is academic vice president at Brigham Young University, where he also teaches at the law school and is a Wheatley Institute scholar. His most recent book is “Scales of Memory: Constitutional Justice and Historical Evil.” His essay on a warning by Abraham Lincoln that applies today is on page 70.
Bettencourt is an award-winning author whose writing has appeared in Psychology Today, Salon, Business Insider and Harper’s Bazaar. She is the author of “Triumph of the Heart: Forgiveness in an Unforgiving World,” and her feature about Ray Epps, an unwitting victim of a conspiracy theory, is on page 42.
MEGAN FELDMAN BETTENCOURT
AKHIL REED AMAR
ELIZABETH WAKAU
DAVID GOLDBLATT
HARVEY C. MANSFIELD
THE MIDDLE CONSTITUTION
If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” James Madison famously wrote in Federalist No. 51. Any hope of America becoming an “angelocracy” in the near future has surely been stamped out by the state of our polarized politics. Knowing the United States would be led by mere mortals, the Founders put in place systems — checks and balances, enumerated rights, etc. — to guard against both the abuse and concentration of political power. They mixed and dispersed the power instead.
Ancient philosophers saw the virtue of mixed government. Whereas aristocracy and monarchy exalted the few and direct democracy exalted the many, the “middle constitution,” as Aristotle put it, held promise to help balance governance. The U.S. Constitution is a “middle constitution,” designed to give the nation its best shot at fostering civic harmony through robust federalism, varied branches, a bicameral legislature and an electoral college.
John Adams invoked Cicero’s analogy of civic harmony, according to Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center. Rosen’s essay on page 58 in this issue draws from his latest book “The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.” Adams, Rosen writes, “compared the harmony of a well-tempered state constitution to the harmony of a well-tempered orchestra. ‘As the treble, the tenor, and the bass exist in nature, they will be heard in the concert.’” If a composer is skilled, say like Handel, they can bring these elements in nature together to “produce rapture the most exquisite that harmony can excite.” But, Adams cautions, “if they are confused together, without order, they will ‘Rend with tremendous sound your ears asunder.’”
For more than two centuries, the Constitution has succeeded
in creating a successful, though at times imperfect and certainly tested, harmony. Whether that harmony holds is perhaps the most pressing question of our time.
In this special Constitution issue of Deseret Magazine, we’ve assembled a collection of essays and reported features exploring the stress tests facing America’s civic harmony. Constitutional scholar Justin Collings draws on Abraham Lincoln’s “Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois” (page 70) to remind us why Lincoln revered law and the Constitution as America’s civic religion. Noted Harvard political philosopher Harvey C. Mansfield explores the perils of populism (page 62) and James C. Phillips of BYU’s Wheatley Institute examines the problems when the Supreme Court becomes a venue for deciding conflicts best resolved by legislative means (page 66). And Deseret staff writer Mariya Manzhos gives a behind-the-scenes look at Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s unexpected and growing influence on the Supreme Court (page 32). Megan Feldman Bettencourt’s feature article on Ray Epps, an unwitting victim of conspiracy, exposes the state of institutional mistrust in America (page 42). And, finally, social entrepreneur Frank H. McCourt Jr. advocates for new solutions to the steep challenges presented by an increasingly digital civic space (page 72).
At the Constitutional Convention, Alexander Hamilton observed that in every society there will be a division between “the few” and "the many.” If you give all power to “the many, they will oppress the few.” And if you give “all power to the few, they will oppress the many.” The Solomonic solution then was to divide power and thereby, paradoxically, unite a nation. Whether that solution holds depends on the better angels of our nature.
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AWARD-WINNING JOURNALISM
OUR READERS RESPOND
THE MAY ISSUE cover story featured a stunning photo essay by Chris Carlson on the Great Salt Lake (“A Place of Reflection”), offering readers a unique visual perspective of the vegetation, wildlife and industry that rely on the endangered body of water. Readers expressed amazement at Carlson’s images and shared what should be done to preserve the lake. “Nature doesn’t need human intervention, it needs humans to tread lightly and leave its resources alone,” wrote Chris Nieman. What would happen if no presidential candidate receives enough Electoral College votes to take office? Ethan Bauer explored how the Constitution addresses that unlikely circumstance (“Detour from Democracy”). The piece ignited a lively debate that took its own detours into republic versus democracy, coastal population centers versus the rural interior and other liberal and conservative takes on representative government. “With the growth of federal power it is all the more important that it is responsive to an actual majority of citizens as opposed to a minority in swing states,” wrote Mike Witting . “You don’t solve an expansion of federal power by giving it to a minority. You solve it by limiting federal power.” Regardless of how Bauer’s analysis provoked readers, Beau Tremitiere , counsel at the nonprofit Protect Democracy, called the piece “absolutely fantastic. You have done, without question, a better job of engaging with these issues than any other public writer I’ve encountered.”
Bestselling author Glynnis MacNicol examined the risks of relying on artificial intelligence to inform and teach us about literature and language, showing what AI developers leave out can be as harmful as what they include. Reader Mike Richards shared this long-standing advice: “A computer processes information. The worth of that information depends on the data input into the computer. If the data is wrong or if it lacks important facts, then the computer can never output worthwhile data. Unfortunately, those who use computers for their own purposes are not interested in outputting worthwhile information; they are interested in promoting their viewpoint of the world. ‘Garbage in, garbage out.’”
“Nature doesn’t need human intervention, it needs humans to tread lightly and leave its resources alone.”
ST. ANTHONY DUNES, IDAHO
PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOHN HAYMORE
ORIGINAL INTENT
WHY THE CONSTITUTION IS OUR COMMON CORE
BY AKHIL REED AMAR
As a legal scholar, I am worried about the widespread constitutional illiteracy that surrounds me, among young and old, left and right. A nation that does not understand its history is like a person who suffers amnesia. Without a strong memory of one’s own past, how can a person live a meaningful life? Without a deep understanding of our collective constitutional past, how can Americans live together? In 1860-1861, South Carolinians forgot what they had in fact agreed to in 1787-1788: an indissoluble union. And the war came.
This historical point can be recast as a legal one. Without a shared understanding of the basic rules of constitutional interpretation, how can Americans live free and thrive? Return once again to the secession question. The Constitution’s terse text and overarching structure really do prohibit unilateral secession. But to see this clearly, we need to read the document through a proper legal prism, with attention to both letter and spirit, noting how the text’s precise syntax and panoramic structure reinforce each other.
We Americans are a famously diverse and contentious lot. Today’s citizens bear myriad ethnic backgrounds and skin colors. We profess a multitude of faiths, and some profess agnosticism or atheism. We speak countless different languages. Our forebears came to this land at wildly different times and in profoundly different ways, some with bullwhips, some in chains. Some of us are male, others female, still others neither or both; some are gay, others straight, still others in between or beyond. We passionately embrace a wide range of ideologies and viewpoints.
But despite — or rather precisely because of — all these differences, there must be a common core. E Pluribus Unum. The United States Constitution and its history are what We (with a
capital W) have in common, and if We don’t like the document as is, We can amend it, as indeed previous generations of Americans have made amends and amendments. This terse text and the saga that underlies it are what make us Americans. Without broad agreement on the constitutional basics — not on every detail, but on the big picture, the main narrative — we are lost. We are Babel. We are not a We. And We may ultimately lose the republic that Ben Franklin hoped we could keep.
Every four years, We must pick a president. This is a constitutional decision. We cannot make this decision well without an understanding of the presidency as an office structured by the Constitution, which both empowers and limits the person who holds this unique and uniquely dangerous post. The first thing that a president must do in office is swear an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” For this system to work, an oath-taking president — and We Americans who pick that oath-taking president — must understand the basic outlines of our Constitution.
Too few law professors know history, and too few history professors know law. (Even historians familiar with the legal issues of their own main period of study often know little about the legal issues of earlier or later eras.) Quite often when I turn on the television, I hear scholars and pundits on cable TV saying silly things. On C-SPAN, distinguished Civil War historians airily opined that the Constitution of 1787-1788 was indeterminate on the secession question. Nonsense. On MSNBC, radical-chic intellectuals proclaimed that Americans revolted in 1776 mainly to protect slavery, which the British government was seeking to abolish. Ridiculous. On Fox News, pundits told viewers that the founders loathed “democracy” as a word and as a concept, and embraced only “republics,” which were always and everywhere sharply contradistinguished from “democracies.” Baloney.
Today’s Hillsdale graduates say that America’s founders never did anything wrong, and today’s Harvard graduates say that America’s founders never did anything right. (OK — that’s a gross oversimplification, but it felt good to blow off some steam.) We need facts and analysis, not reflexive right-wing boosterism or knee-jerk leftist hooting. Of course, the truth is not always and necessarily in the middle. On some issues, today’s conservatives are absolutely right on the law and the facts; on other issues, today’s liberals are 100 percent correct. But we can only decide which is which, and see when the truth is instead somewhere in between or something entirely different, once we know the key historical facts of America’s constitutional conversation and the basic legal rules for assessing those facts. And that is why studying and understanding our history, and the history of the Constitution in particular, is as urgent today as it has been in any time in American history. ADAPTED FROM “THE WORDS THAT MADE US: AMERICA’S CONSTITUTIONAL CONVERSATION, 1760-1840” BY AKHIL REED AMAR. COPYRIGHT ©
AKHIL REED AMAR IS THE STERLING PROFESSOR OF LAW AND POLITICAL SCIENCE AT YALE UNIVERSITY.
BOILING POINT
GRAPPLING WITH A WARMER WORLD
IT’S GETTING HOT. Last summer, people were hospitalized with third-degree burns after slipping and falling onto sidewalks in Arizona. The Atlantic Ocean reached hot tub levels off the Florida coast, hitting 101 degrees. Headlines warned of power outages as people cranked the air conditioning to get through the warmest year on record — and 2024 is projected to be even hotter. Heat is reshaping lifestyles, damaging economies and making people sick. In fact, extreme temperatures kill more Americans each year than even the most destructive natural disasters. How is this kind of heat changing our lives and how are we dealing with it?
NATALIA GALICZA
200 MILLION AMERICANS
More than two-thirds of the population lived through heat alerts last year. These alerts typically signal conditions above 100 degrees on the national heat index, which combines humidity and air temperature to estimate how it actually feels. Anything past 103 degrees is considered dangerous; 125 degrees is extremely so. Last August, several states in the southern Plains surpassed 130 degrees, rivaling global hot spots like Death Valley and the Middle East.
$100 BILLION
2,302 DEAD
Americans today face heat waves — when temperatures surpass historical averages for consecutive days — three times more often than they did in the 1960s. Recent heat waves saw roads splitting open in Salt Lake City and hospital workers placing overheated patients in ice-filled body bags in Phoenix. Even worse, a high-pressure “heat dome” settled over the Pacific Northwest for five days in 2021, killing about 650 people as temperatures soared to 119 degrees in Portland, Oregon, hot enough to melt electrical cables.
That’s how many were killed by heat in the United States last year — up from 1,602 in 2021 and 1,722 in 2022. The annual average is 1,300, more than hurricanes, floods and tornadoes combined. Temperatures above 104 degrees can damage the brain, nervous system and vital organs, while exacerbating other illnesses. Heat can even cause heart attacks, as dilated blood vessels and active sweat glands generate a dangerous combination of low blood pressure and dehydration.
DEATHS
1,602 1,722
2,302
That’s what excessive heat cost the American economy alone in 2020, in terms of lost productivity. That number is projected to reach $500 billion by 2050. Rising temperatures slow people down, increase absenteeism and cause almost 23 million workplace injuries each year. This cuts across industries, indoors and out, from agriculture and construction to manufacturing and food service. The U.S. has no federal regulations to protect workers from heat, but five states do: California, Colorado, Minnesota, Oregon and Washington.
5.7% MORE VIOLENT CRIME
It’s not just a Hollywood trope: Heat makes people more aggressive. As the brain devotes more energy to regulating the body’s internal temperature, it sends less resources to the prefrontal cortex, which manages impulse control and behavior. This can cause adrenaline spikes that activate a fight-or-flight response. One study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that violent crime in Los Angeles climbs almost 6 percent on days above 85 degrees.
“EXPERTS SAY EXTREME HEAT IS ALREADY COSTING AMERICA
$100 BILLION A YEAR. AND IT HITS OUR MOST VULNERABLE THE HARDEST: SENIORS, PEOPLE EXPERIENCING HOMELESSNESS WHO HAVE NOWHERE TO TURN, DISADVANTAGED COMMUNITIES THAT ARE LEAST ABLE TO RECOVER FROM CLIMATE DISASTERS. AND IT’S THREATENING FARMS, FISHERIES, FORESTS THAT SO MANY FAMILIES DEPEND ON TO MAKE A LIVING.”
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN, JULY 2023
50 GATORADE BOTTLES
That’s the average volume of sports drinks purchased by each American in 2021, totaling 1.8 billion gallons. Enough to fill almost 3,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools with the sweet liquid rich in electrolytes. As temperatures rise, our bodies need to replenish these minerals, including sodium and potassium, to stay hydrated and fend off heat exhaustion and heat stroke. The electrolyte market is projected to reach $59 billion by 2032.
15 DEGREES OF RELIEF
1.8 billion
3,000
Simple remedies like painting LA roadways a lighter shade of gray can lower surface temperatures this much. Asphalt and concrete typically absorb and reflect 95 percent of the energy from sunlight. This can contribute to urban heat islands, where about 41 million Americans live in temperatures up to 7 degrees higher than rural areas and tree-dense neighborhoods.
3X HEAT WAVES
Gallons of sports drinks
Olympic-sized swimming pools
TICK, TOCK
IS TIME UP FOR THIS SOCIAL MEDIA DARLING?
YOUNG AMERICANS LOVE TikTok. Launched in 2016, the video-sharing app built a global audience with fun, visually stimulating and often musical clips especially popular among teens and 20-somethings. Many use it to promote businesses or pursue corporate sponsorships. Some also share news, analysis and first-hand accounts, with no vetting or filtering — a compelling alternative to mainstream media. But intelligence agencies call the app a threat to national security, a potent tool in the hands of its Chinese parent company for data harvesting and information warfare. A new law would ban TikTok unless ByteDance, which owns TikTok, sells the company. When national security collides with freedom of information, where do we draw the line? ETHAN BAUER
BUSINESS AS USUAL A LOADED GUN
TIKTOK IS BEING singled out for behaving like a social media platform: collecting user data, selling or leveraging that data and using an algorithm to promote engagement on content that users respond to. Critics fret over its Chinese ownership and, more recently, the prevalence of pro-Palestine content amid the ongoing conflict with Israel in Gaza. These complaints should not invalidate the principles of the free market. But what’s truly at stake is the freedom of Americans to access information and the free flow of ideas protected by the First Amendment.
Social media companies don’t just use data to sell targeted ads. They also sell or license data to third parties. This system can be abused. In 2019, Facebook was fined $5 billion for privacy violations after it collected data on 87 million profiles without users’ consent and sold it to Cambridge Analytica; the British firm used the data to assist certain U.S. presidential campaigns. TikTok is no outlier. A 2021 analysis by the University of Toronto found that its data practices are unremarkable in this industry. All platforms profit from engagement. Their algorithms prioritize content that keeps users plugged in, often leveraging outrage or alarm. Factual veracity is largely irrelevant here. Unlike magazines and newspapers, platforms under U.S. Code Section 230 cannot be sued for false information posted on their sites. This makes them all fertile ground for conspiracy theories and other forms of disinformation. “A better solution,” as writer Julia Angwin argued in The New York Times, “would be to pass laws that force all of our tech to serve us better.”
Outlawing TikTok doesn’t only hurt ByteDance. It threatens American livelihoods and eliminates a venue for dissent, with a chilling effect on free expression. Thinkers from Noam Chomsky on the left to conservative stalwart George Will have warned us that this is simply censorship. “Government will, as usual, say that its steadily enlarged control of our lives is for our own good,” Will wrote in The Washington Post. “Regarding TikTok, the government says its control is to protect us from influences we cannot be trusted to properly assess.”
THERE CAN BE no freedoms if we can’t protect the country itself. And modern warfare is often waged on a digital front. Enemy states and terrorist groups can wreak more havoc through destabilization and influence campaigns than they ever could on a physical battlefield, at a fraction of the cost. This might have seemed unthinkable even 20 years ago, but technology — social media in particular — has changed the terrain of conflict. Americans need to realize that these changes require us to rethink the delicate balance between civil liberties and national security.
Many see social media as the new “town square,” a modern variation on the public commons, where they can be heard and hear new voices. But the marketplace of ideas cannot be free when it’s manipulated by nefarious powers. We’ve already seen Russia inserting itself into U.S. elections and even generating real-life conflict between Americans, organizing both a protest and its counterprotest from afar. TikTok has admitted that it stopped 15 covert influence campaigns in four months this year — including one from China. America has to defend itself.
The TikTok legislation fits alongside federal restrictions on microchip exports, limits on tech investment in China and earlier bans of companies like Huawei, ZTE and China Mobile. One reason: China has made its intentions clear, spending $280 million to influence American elections and sway our perceptions between 2016 and 2022 — more than any other country. TikTok could be a powerful weapon in China’s hands. “Where I’m concerned is the overall ability to do large-scale influence,” NSA Cybersecurity Director Rob Joyce told reporters last December. He compared TikTok not to a smoking gun, but a loaded one.
A loaded gun should be removed from hostile hands before it’s fired. China doesn’t just have access to TikTok; it can control the app through its power over ByteDance. In the tension between freedom and national security, governments often must lean one way or the other. It’s not censorship to protect citizens from being weaponized in the service of a foreign power. TikTok can persist, but it can’t be a tool for China’s influence and ambitions.
AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE
A WORLD FERTILITY CRISIS SPELLS TROUBLE
BY ERIC SCHULZKE
Not long ago, Sweden was the poster child for having children. Delegations from other nations that were struggling to sustain their birth rates flocked to Stockholm to pick the brains of local demographers and family policy experts.
As recently as 2010, Sweden’s total fertility rate (the estimated number of children a woman has in childbearing years) stood at 1.98, very close to the replacement rate of 2.1. But then fertility began tumbling year on year, now at a current low of 1.45.
Fertility has been declining in this region since 2010, says Sunnee Billingsley, a social demographer and a professor of sociology at Stockholm University. “No one knows why, but it’s widespread in all the Nordic countries, which had relatively high fertility in the last decade. So it’s a bit of a surprising situation here.”
If there is a silver lining for the Nordics in all this, it’s that they are far from alone.
Earlier this year, The Lancet, the world’s premier medical journal, predicted that the global total fertility rate will drop from 2.2 in 2021 to 1.8 in 2050 and 1.6 in 2100. Demographers are now projecting that
nearly every country outside of sub-Saharan Africa will soon be failing to replace their people. This will, in turn, leave them struggling with an inverted pyramid of care as fewer working people will pay into public programs that support aging populations who are living longer.
The Economist last year warned that hu-
THE FIRST STEP TOWARD A SOLUTION IS TO SIMPLY START TELLING THE TRUTH. “THERE HAS BEEN A WILLFUL DENIAL OF THE FACTS.”
man civilization faces a “dire demographic trajectory” with “profound economic consequences,” noting ominously that “the number of people on the planet could shrink for the first time since the Black Death.”
Another Economist report published in May of this year lays out the stakes: “Sooner or later, therefore, every big economy will
collide with a demographic wall. The bill from pensions and hospitals will pile on fiscal pressure. Sapped of workers and ideas, economic growth could collapse while public debt balloons. Just how catastrophic the situation becomes depends on whether policymakers … are willing to inflict pain on populations now in order to save future generations from more later on.”
Clearly, demographers and policymakers now face some tough questions. What is happening to the world’s birth rates? How far and how fast will this go? Should we panic? And what can be done?
THIS ISN’T THE future we were warned about.
“Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death” and “nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate,” wrote Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich in his 1968 blockbuster book, “The Population Bomb.”
Ehrlich’s predicted dystopian future — deadly famine, depleted resources and debilitating pollution — stemmed from an out-of-control birth rate and helped spark
an enduring preoccupation with population control in the early 1970s that spread over much of the world.
China jumped in with its notorious one-child policy, fixed in law from 1980 until 2015. Less remembered is that India launched a massive sterilization program. In 1976 alone, 6.2 million Indian men were forcibly sterilized.
Both China and India now have cause to regret their coercive reaction.
India’s fertility rate, now already below replacement level, is on a path to drop drastically further. The Lancet study predicts India will hit 1.0 total fertility by 2100 — more than 50 percent below replacement levels.
China is in an even tougher squeeze. Two years ago, its population fell for the first time since 1961 — which happened to be the last year of a disastrous famine. China’s population fell again in 2023, with its fertility rate dipping to new historic lows of around 1.23.
Elsewhere in the developed world, coercion to force fertility down has proven unnecessary. We now know that as health, wealth and education levels rise, fertility rates will fall of their own accord. The real question is whether it will ever stop.
“There seemed to be this idea that fertility was going to fall in the same way that mortality fell, and then we’re gonna hit this equilibrium,” says Ashley Larsen Gibby, a social demographer at Brigham Young University. But she says experts were surprised in the 1980s when fertility continued to fall, well past that elusive equilibrium point.
SOMETHING WAS HAPPENING that had nothing to do with falling infant mortality. A new explanation was needed to understand the ongoing decline.
This led to the theory of a second demographic transition, as formulated by Belgian demographer Ron Lesthaeghe, which Gibby describes as eroded barriers and new pathways that allowed for new ways of being human, and these new possibilities all competed with childbearing for time and space and money. Childbearing was now
just one of many ways one could seek fulfillment in one’s 20s or 30s.
Children themselves now took on a very different meaning. “So instead of having children who could help you economically,” Gibby says, “we’re having children in a way where it’s going to be huge investments on your part that you probably won’t get back.”
Faced with this array of choices and priorities, women who did want children began to put off that fork in the road until much later in their lives, says Éva Beaujouan, a demographer at the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital in Vienna.
DEMOGRAPHERS PROJECT THAT NEARLY EVERY COUNTRY OUTSIDE OF SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA WILL SOON BE FAILING TO REPLACE THEIR PEOPLE. THIS MEANS FEWER WORKING PEOPLE WILL PAY INTO PUBLIC PROGRAMS THAT SUPPORT AGING POPULATIONS.
She studies the gap between women who desire to have a child and those who actually do. She spends a lot of time thinking about what precisely it means to want to have a child, and what variables would deter or encourage someone.
On the deterrent side, both Gibby and Beaujouan paint a picture in which perfect parenting is the natural flip side of an abundance of choices, with both driving toward postponement. There’s been a shift in the perceived prerequisites that people would need to achieve before they could have children, Beaujouan explains.
For those who are likely to only have one or two children, there seems to be pressure to mold the perfect child as an expression of oneself, as a kind of trophy child.
“In many countries,” she says, “there is an impression that you really need to be the perfect mother, the perfect father, and that then you need to have many, many things before you can have a child. And so you just wait and you wait and you wait and you wait. And then one day it’s too late.”
SO WHAT IS to be done?
If Sweden still has anything left to teach us, it may be that solutions are elusive and cross-national comparisons are difficult.
The fertility pilgrims still come to Stockholm University, says Billingsley. But these days, the questions are more skeptical, the answers less glib. There is less swagger in Sweden.
Yet the social demographers soldier onward. Billingsley’s research focuses on subtle variations in child and family policy, trying to make useful cross-national comparisons out of a mishmash of usually incommensurate data.
She notes, for starters, that even though the Nordic states are generally seen as a homogenous bloc on family policy, there are great differences among them. Sweden prioritizes “reattaching” new parents back to the workforce after the first year, while Finland provides parental income replacement for even longer periods.
One concern with the Finnish approach is that potential mothers may balk at putting their skills on hold so long that their reentry to the workplace is stifled. “There’s a lot of research going on as to how this works later for her and how it affects her career,” she says, adding that her research is not focused on what prospective mothers ought to prefer, but what they in fact do prefer, and what policies might smooth or hinder the choice to become a parent.
But even if policy details were identical, Billingsley adds, cultural variables are hard to account for. In the early 2000s, both South Korea and Germany borrowed Swedish pro-natal policies. South Korea saw no benefit in birth rates. But Germany’s fertility rates rebounded, seemingly confirming the Swedish model that was now struggling at home.
Why would a borrowed policy that took flight in Germany suddenly crash in its homeland?
One answer is that culture itself is fluid, notes Beaujouan. Sudden shifts in values and behavior driven by fears, uncertainties, new opportunities or even technology could silently, but seismically, shift the foundation of seemingly successful policy regimes or the cultures in which they lie.
There is some evidence of such shifts in the United States, and in some surprising places. Consider Utah. In 2008, the Beehive State’s total fertility rate of 2.6 led the nation, with the next closest state standing at 2.5. But by 2022, Utah had dropped to 1.85, fourth in the nation. In roughly half of one generation, Utah’s fertility fell nearly 29 percent, a sharper decline than all but two other American states.
There are multiple explanations for Utah’s shift. A strong economy during that period was accompanied by a spike in Utah’s formerly modest cost of living. Housing prices skyrocketed, likely sparking uncertainty for prospective parents entering the job market.
But there may be more involved, and Gibby at BYU shared some insight into other factors.
Brigham Young University is owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has always put a high priority on family formation.
Yet Gibby told me that she has had repeated conversations with students who have felt pressure from parents, and even grandparents, to defer marriage and instead pursue more education and economic security.
Gibby, who herself graduated from BYU 10 years ago, describes a marked difference in the cultural tone in her day compared to the present. “When I was an undergrad, I felt a lot of pushback of me wanting to have a career,” she says. “And my students are experiencing the opposite, where if they want to stay home, they’re feeling a huge pushback against that.”
She cites multiple stories of students whose grandparents offered to pay for study abroad, in hopes of distancing them from a serious boyfriend. In other cases, parents
told them that they would stop paying tuition if they got married.
BYU family life professor Dean Busby, who teaches classes on marriage and sexuality, confirms Gibby’s observations. There are multiple vectors pushing students to go slow on marriage and children, Busby notes, and education and economics do play a major role. But he says there has also clearly been a marked shift in the culture surrounding these students. This shift seems to reverberate across the world, cutting across national and subculture boundaries.
“THERE IS AN IMPRESSION THAT YOU REALLY NEED TO BE THE PERFECT MOTHER, THE PERFECT FATHER, AND THAT THEN YOU NEED TO HAVE MANY, MANY THINGS BEFORE YOU CAN HAVE A CHILD. AND SO YOU JUST WAIT AND YOU WAIT AND YOU WAIT AND YOU WAIT. AND THEN ONE DAY IT’S TOO LATE.”
ALL THE DEMOGRAPHERS I spoke with pointed back in some form to this generalized fear of the future — economic, geopolitical, environmental — which seems to have heightened markedly in the last generation. They pointed to intensive parenting expectations as an intimidating factor.
In Stockholm, Billingsley is no stranger to the uncertainty thesis. Swedish policy has always sought to minimize economic barriers to parenthood. But it is increasingly clear that something else is in play.
In Vienna, Beaujouan knows that many of those she studies would prefer to have at least one child. But there, again, she finds that pervasive uncertainty.
“I think that the uncertainty is much, much stronger today than it was in my
generation,” she says. “They really think that they don’t know where the future will be. And for them, maybe it’s not even something they really want to think about, whether they want to have children now or not.”
Beaujouan, who is 46, says that studying such uncertainties is difficult. Demographers deal in numbers, data, probabilities. This, whatever it is, is amorphous. “It may be something that’s really just in the air,” she says. “And so they probably don’t relate it to their behavior because … they don’t perceive it enough to manage to grab it.”
The real question now is whether there are any answers at all.
The recent Lancet study duly modeled different fertility scenarios that give a predicted boost to countries that adopt “pro-natalist” policies. And yet, the authors acknowledge that those policies don’t derive from any evidence of efficacy. There is no such evidence, they say.
The authors tepidly conclude that “implementing pro-natal policies that support parents and children might provide a small boost to fertility rates.”
Darrell Bricker, a political scientist and chief executive officer of the opinion research firm Ipsos Public Affairs, isn’t so hopeful. “The truth is (those policies) don’t work anywhere,” he tells me, “because that’s not the reason people don’t want to have kids. The main reason is they just don’t want to have kids.”
In 2019, Bricker and John Ibbitson published “Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline,” where they predicted that the world’s human population would crest below 9 billion, and then begin falling sharply as soon as 2060 or 2050.
“But now it’s probably looking more like in the 2040s,” he says. “This is just over the horizon. It’s not like a century away. It’s about to happen. I mean the entire global baby boom is going to be 65 in 2030.”
The first step toward a solution is to simply start telling the truth, Bricker says. “There has been a willful denial of the facts.”
A TOUGH SELL
THE FATE OF THE SENATE LIES IN THE WEST. IF ONLY VOTERS CARED
BY SAMUEL BENSON
Not far from where the Colorado River flows into California, a local watering hole in this tiny recreation mecca in western Arizona transformed into America’s political epicenter this spring. Behind the run-down bar, four dozen folding tables were dragged into a gravel parking lot and draped with alternating red, white and blue tablecloths. A stage went up, a giant American flag flanking it. So many other American flags dotted the premises — on tables, on T-shirts and hanging vertically from a crane overhead — that when the audience stood for the national anthem, uncorked beers in hand, everyone was facing different directions.
Then Kari Lake took the stage, and everyone’s attention turned to the woman who has quickly become the most recognizable Republican in Arizona since she traded a career as a Phoenix news anchor for one in politics. She ran for governor in 2022 and lost a close race to Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state. Lake refused to concede, however, claiming election fraud, and filed a series of lawsuits. When the courts offered little reprieve, she decided to run again.
This time, she’s the front-runner for her party’s nomination for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Kyrsten Sinema, the eccentric Democrat-turned-independent who is not running for reelection. Lake views this as a race that goes beyond Arizona. But she needs to convince Arizona voters of that
THIS ELECTION COULD MARK THE FIRST TIME SINCE 1952 THAT BOTH CHAMBERS OF CONGRESS CHANGE HANDS IN A PRESIDENTIAL YEAR.
first. Sporting jeans and well-polished cowboy boots, she told her Lake Havasu City audience to pay attention. “Guess what?” she asks. “The road to the White House and the road to the Senate majority goes right through Arizona. We are the most consequential, important state in this upcoming election. Do you understand that?”
One man offered a half-enthusiastic cheer. The rest of the crowd seemed unenthused, as if Lake were simply regurgitating a well-rehearsed talking point. The bit about Arizona deciding the White House is, by this point in an election year, common parlance — just about every pundit in America has dubbed Arizona one of a handful of swing states that could decide whether Joe Biden or Donald Trump occupies the Oval Office for the next four years. But Lake’s real pitch about why her race matters hasn’t seemed to gain much traction. This group of Lake Havasu, Arizona, voters — coupled with Americans in other far-flung parts of Arizona, Nevada and Montana — could well decide the fate of the U.S. Senate this fall.
At present, Democrats hold a slim 51-49 majority in the Senate. This year, 23 of those seats are up for election. At the time of this writing, the Cook Political Report projected 15 of those seats would remain with Democrats, while West Virginia is expected to flip to Republicans with the retirement of Sen. Joe Manchin, whose recent decision to leave the party and become independent has fueled speculation he may run
for reelection after all. Four others “lean Democrat,” including the race in Arizona, where Congressman Ruben Gallego, a progressive Democrat with deep ties throughout the state, hopes to succeed Sinema. Of the remaining three “toss-up” races, two are in the West: Montana, where three-term Democratic Sen. Jon Tester faces a reelection challenge from Tim Sheehy, an ex-Navy SEAL; and Nevada, where mild-mannered Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen seeks a second term against Sam Brown, a retired Army captain. As they have for months, the
remain in control. If Republicans manage to win even two of them, the new year could open with a Republican-controlled Senate. And that’s not only crucial for the political parties. Voters can be reminded of how a Republican-led Senate during the Trump administration led a conservative transformation of the federal court system, including the U.S. Supreme Court. For better or for worse, depending on your politics, it has been a check on the House of Representatives and the White House agendas. And for voters who have a more provincial perspective on their Senate races, the upper chamber’s ability to legislate for them is only as effective as its political makeup.
“Senate races in the Western states really could usher in, if they go in a Republican direction, a sea change in vital issues like land use, water rights, economic development and even labor rights,” says Wendy Schiller, director of the A. Alfred Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy at Brown University and scholar on the U.S. Senate.
Despite the high stakes, it’s no easy task to convince people that their votes matter. In this kitschy outpost on the California border, where Arizonans and sun-craving tourists mix amid the hum of Jet Skis and wake boats, voters seem oblivious — not to the key role they could play in who wins the White House, but that they will also choose which party controls what has long been called the world’s greatest deliberative body.
three races in the West could again shift from leaning to toss-up and vice versa as Election Day approaches.
Democrats and Republicans will spend the next several months defining Senate races across the country as “critical” in many ways. If Democrats can hold on to a seat in Wisconsin, Biden should win that key battleground, too. The same is true in Pennsylvania. But it’s the Western states — the races in Arizona, Nevada and Montana — that could determine who controls the Senate. If Democrats hold on to all three, they
NO ONE IS certain where that impressive title came from — the credit usually goes to President James Buchanan — but it is perhaps the best descriptor of what the chamber has become. The Constitution’s framers seemed to craft it to that end, prioritizing debate and deliberation. Weeks of discussion went into how representation in Congress would be awarded. Would it be proportional, based on states’ populations, or would it be equal, as the Articles of Confederation called for? Eventually, the framers settled on a compromise: The House of Representatives would be a larger body, and
a state’s delegation would fluctuate in size, proportional to its population. The Senate, however, would be a smaller body, where each state would receive an equal number of representatives — two.
At its best, the Senate provides a forum for the priorities of each state to be recognized and heard. “The fact that the Senate has kept its original rules of debate and procedure substantially unchanged, is very significant,” Woodrow Wilson said in 1907. “It is a place of individual voices.”
Those individual voices often change the trajectory of the country — from creating Social Security to enacting civil rights to reforming criminal justice. In recent years, the Senate secured a conservative Supreme Court majority; shepherded historic legislation on infrastructure and clean energy; approved large funding packages for businesses and individuals during the Covid-19 pandemic; and oversaw aid to foreign allies in war. Oftentimes, the House of Representatives or the White House gets credit, or blame, for these milestones. But the true power to legislate, nominate judges and negotiate the federal budget lies with the Senate.
The party with majority control of the Senate decides what the group’s legislative priorities will be. As the West deals with drought and conservation issues, this year’s elections determine whether Republican or Democratic voices are louder. As population growth reshapes the West, a Republican majority could lead to a surge of deregulation and tax restructuring; a Democratic majority could continue its emphasis on domestic manufacturing and clean energy.
The West has been here before. Just two years ago, in the 2022 midterm elections, Democrats secured a one-seat Senate majority by clinching a win in Nevada. Less than a month later, Arizona’s Sinema announced she’d be leaving the Democratic Party and becoming an independent, putting the majority’s influence in flux.
The 1952 election carries shades of the present. Going into that fall, Democrats maintained a narrow two-seat majority in
the Senate, but the country’s involvement in unrest around the world — particularly the Korean War — and the nascent Cold War led to widespread discontent with President Harry S. Truman’s Democratic White House. Truman decided not to run for reelection, leading to Republican victories across the board. The victory in the Senate was cemented by flipping two key seats in Western states: Arizona and Wyoming.
Both were surprise victories. In Wyoming, Republican Gov. Frank Barrett entered the race late and knocked off a three-term incumbent. And in Arizona, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Ernest McFarland faced a challenge from Barry
VOTERS SEEM OBLIVIOUS — NOT TO THE KEY ROLE THEY COULD PLAY IN WHO WINS THE WHITE HOUSE, BUT THAT THEY WILL ALSO CHOOSE WHICH PARTY CONTROLS WHAT HAS LONG BEEN CALLED THE WORLD’S GREATEST DELIBERATIVE BODY.
Goldwater, a fiery member of the Phoenix City Council with little political cachet. When a friend asked Goldwater why he thought he could pull off the upset, Goldwater demurred. “I think a guy running for office who says exactly what he really thinks would astound a hell of a lot of people around the country.” Eisenhower went on to carry Arizona by double digits, and Goldwater deemed himself “the greatest coattail rider in history.” Never since have both chambers of Congress changed hands in a presidential year.
But 2024, in many ways, is different. It’s possible that each state’s voters split their respective tickets, by supporting a Senate
candidate of one party and a presidential candidate of another. And thanks to three distinct races in three very unique states, each could go either way — and take control of the Senate with them.
IN MONTANA, WITH its huge land mass but small population — there are more cows than people across the state — Tester’s reelection to a fourth term has a small-town feel. A farmer and butcher, Tester is missing three fingers on his left hand because of an accident in a meat grinder. And while Montana is a red state, Tester, an old-school Democrat, is fairly popular due to his pragmatism. It helps that in a small state, he spends a lot of time with his constituents. “Voters will say they know Jon Tester, they like Jon Tester, they trust Jon Tester,” says Schiller. “Tester manages to withstand the winds of polarization and nationalization of these elections because of his individual reputation, and the relationships he’s forged with residents of Montana.”
Where Tester derives strength from his genuineness, his challenger, Sheehy, can’t seem to get out of his own way. He claimed a gunshot wound in his arm came from his time in Afghanistan, but he later backtracked, saying it came from falling on a hike at Glacier National Park. (He later changed the story again, telling a park ranger he inadvertently shot himself in the arm.) And in an effort to play up Montana’s hominess, he claimed that there are more bears than people in the state — a fact that experts dispute. Still, early polls show Tester and Sheehy neck and neck: A March poll from J.L. Partners shows Sheehy up by three points, and another from Emerson College has Tester up by two percentage points. Both results are within the margin of error.
It’s a veteran-versus-incumbent showdown in Nevada, too. Republican Brown, who received the Purple Heart for his service in Afghanistan, is challenging first-term Democrat Rosen, a former computer programmer with no political experience before her election to the House in 2016.
Before entering politics, Rosen served as president of Congregation Ner Tamid, Nevada’s largest reform synagogue, making her the first former synagogue president ever elected to the Senate. She has been one of the staunchest allies to Israel in the Senate since the October 7 Hamas attack, and her Republican opponent largely walks in lockstep. But the similarities mostly end there: In addition to preparing for a showdown with Rosen, Brown spent much of the primary mitigating infighting among MAGA Republicans, seeking support from Trump and his allies.
Whether Rosen or Brown prevails will be because they ride the coattails of their state’s party organizations, bolstered in an election year. The state’s powerful tourism-related labor unions, especially the Culinary Workers Union, are critical to delivering the vote for Democrats in Nevada; in both 2016 and 2020, Trump and the Republican National Committee built extensive ground operations in the state. “Nevada, to me, represents probably the best bellwether of the organizational capacity of the two parties,” says Schiller.
It will be a bellwether of the strength of Trump and Biden’s candidacies, too. Nevada is a key swing state, as it has been in every presidential race since 2008.
Nevada isn’t the only swing state in the West. Arizona will help determine the presidency, too. But the Senate race there is also crucial, where a Lake-Gallego showdown has the same external makeup as the elections in Nevada and Montana: a firebrand Republican taking on an establishment Democrat.
Gallego has represented Arizona in the U.S. House since 2015. He “neatly personifies some of the state’s emerging demographic trends,” writes Tom Zoellner, an Arizona-born journalist. He’s young, progressive, Hispanic and an out-of-towner — he moved here from the Midwest in 2006. “Since territorial days, a big part of Arizona’s pitch to the rest of the country is how friendly it is to newcomers, despite the heat and cactus thorns,” writes Zoellner. “You
can move here cold and get plugged in fast.” Gallego, 44, has quickly become one of the most prominent Democrats in the state. Lake seeks redemption after her 2022 loss in the gubernatorial race that she won’t accept. She’s managed to burn bridges within and without the GOP, helping to force the resignation of the former state party chair and install an election denier in his stead. She’s continued her claims of election fraud in her 2022 gubernatorial race, leading to a defamation lawsuit filed by a top election official in Maricopa County. But the far-right schtick may be coming home to roost: After a controversial abortion ruling shook Arizona in the spring, Lake began to moderate her message on abortion, hoping to win over a wider swath of moderate voters. “The thing that gives her a chance is that Ruben Gallego is perceived to be quite
BUT THE TRUE POWER TO LEGISLATE, NOMINATE JUDGES AND OVERSEE THE FEDERAL BUDGET LIES WITH THE SENATE.
far-left, and Arizona is not a far-left state,” says Tyler Montague, a Phoenix-area political strategist.
“This is a well-known thing in Nevada, at this point — that Nevada is a consistent toss-up state. It’s a consistent battleground,” says Kenneth Miller, assistant professor of political science at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. But are Nevadans used to being key voters in determining the fate of the Senate? “I’m not so sure,” Miller says.
LAKE HAVASU IS known for its oddities. The town gets its name from a body of water created by Parker’s Dam, 20 miles to the south, backing up the Colorado River to form a particularly wide, lake-like inlet just below the town. The city’s main attraction is the old London Bridge — the
same bridge that once crossed the Thames but was purchased and shipped here brick-by-brick by local tycoon Robert McCulloch in the early 1970s.
Another oddity in Lake Havasu — and perhaps in other parts of Arizona and Nevada and Montana — is that voters don’t seem to understand or care about the impact they have in deciding the fate of the U.S. Senate, and in turn, deciding the federal government’s priorities. Candidates, like Lake, are trying their best. The stakes are high, she told the rally’s attendees, and voters can’t afford to stay home: The road to the Senate runs through Arizona.
“We are ground zero,” Lake says. “Everything that’s going on, Arizona is right there in the middle of it.”
Many seemed well aware of Arizona’s crucial status in selecting the next occupant of the White House. Even at this rally for the Senate race, Biden got far more boos than Gallego. That may be the strategy Senate campaigns are forced to use, says Montague: Hitch your wagon to your party’s presidential nominee, and hope that residual momentum from the presidential race carries over. “Senate races rank below presidential races in the minds of voters,” he notes, “but they are still ‘top of the ballot’ and voters are paying attention.”
It is easy to sell voters on why the other party is bad, and why the other party’s presidential candidate — or Senate candidate — will destroy America. It is more difficult to explain why the Senate, as an institution, is important, and why their vote will make a difference. When I asked attendees what they thought of Arizona’s role in determining control of the Senate, I got mostly blank stares.
“This election’s going to determine the way the state goes,” Tony M., a 54-year-old man hovering near the bar at the back of the lot, tells me. (He declined to share his last name.) But what about control of the Senate, where landmark debates over water, jobs and growth will shape the country’s coming years? He shook his head. “No one’s talking about that.”
ETERNAL FLAME
CAN THE OLYMPIC SPIRIT SURVIVE?
BY DAVID GOLDBLATT
In the run-up to Paris 2024, the Olympic spirit has been in demand. It is, according to the International Olympic Committee, making the journey from Olympia to Paris in the form of the torch relay. The Louvre, which will be hosting yoga and workout sessions, will be getting a visit. French illustrator Ugo Gattoni has, according to the organizers, captured the spirit in the official posters he has created for Paris 2024, while many think that the decision of World Athletics, the governing body of track and field, to use some of its Olympic money to reward gold medalists with a $50,000 bonus is against it. Is the Olympic spirit something about excellence and striving, as the Olympic motto “faster, higher, stronger” would suggest?
Or perhaps the Olympic spirit refers to the idea of international peace that the Olympic truce embodies. Or maybe it encapsulates the moral superiority of participation over winning? We are all going to hear a lot more about these ideals over the next month, but I wonder if any of us will be much the wiser.
Does the Olympic spirit even matter
anymore? After all, most of us will be consuming the spectacle and enjoying the show, without worrying too much about the Olympics’ founding ideals, myths or theology. On the other hand, if the claims of the IOC, that the Olympics is about more than
IN DE COUBERTIN’S READING OF THE ANCIENT OLYMPICS, PARTICIPANTS WERE ALL AMATEURS, POLITICS WAS EXCLUDED, AND THE OLYMPIC TRUCE BROUGHT PEACE TO THE HELLENIC WORLD. NONE OF THIS IS ENTIRELY TRUE.
sport, and is a force for good in the world, then it matters a lot. The IOC’s current definition of the Olympic spirit is sport, carried out with “mutual understanding … a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play.” Not exactly rousing prose, but who could
disagree with this? Well, Charles Pierre de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin, the founder of the Olympic movement, for one. Praising the spirit of the 1912 Stockholm Games, he wrote, in his most concise account of what the Games should be, that “we must continue to try to achieve the following definition: the solemn and periodic exaltation of male athleticism, with internationalism as a base, loyalty as a means, art for its setting, and female applause as its reward.” Clearly, the meaning of the Olympic spirit and the purposes of the Games have changed a lot over the last century. If we are to make sense of what purposes actually animate the Olympics today, we need to take a step back and understand how the Games were first invented by de Coubertin in the late 19th century, and how, again and again, they have been transformed.
FOR DE COUBERTIN, the model sportsman was an amateur athlete. On a trip to England in the 1880s, he had visited the leading public schools and universities and undergone a kind of spiritual awakening. In these institutions, sport had become a central element
IN AN INCREASINGLY FRAGMENTED WORLD, THERE IS STILL A DEEP NEED FOR COSMOPOLITAN FESTIVALS OF A COLLECTIVE HUMANITY. THE OLYMPICS, WHATEVER THEIR FAULTS, ARE UNQUESTIONABLY THIS.
of the curriculum, designed to produce the kind of physically and morally upstanding muscular Christian gentlemen who would go on to rule the British Empire. It was a version of sport that excluded commercial and political forces, and venerated the amateur (which conveniently ensured that the lower classes, without time or money to train, would be excluded from these upper-class social spaces). At an international level, this would create the opportunity for athletes to socialize and form friendships, and, in so doing, contribute to more peaceful and tolerant relations between states. Quixotic as this might appear now, de Coubertin was drawing on an established tradition of aristocratic diplomacy, where the crowned heads of Europe held summits separately from their governments, and coalitions of notables met to discuss public matters. But what would be the form in which this version of sport could be realized and shown to the world?
In de Coubertin’s reading of the ancient Olympics, participants were all amateurs, politics was excluded from the Games, and the Olympic truce brought peace to the Hellenic world for the duration of the Games. None of this is entirely true. While athletes did not receive monetary prizes at Olympia, there was a well-established circuit of Games in ancient Greece, at which many of the participants did receive prizes, and not a few could sustain what was, in effect, a professional career. Participation in those races didn’t disqualify athletes from the ancient Games. In any case, Olympic fame was often rewarded by city-states who gave victorious athletes cash bonuses and pensions. Politics, too, it seems, was never absent from Olympia. Herodotus wrote that the Athenian Kylon, emboldened by his victory in a sprint race in 640 B.C.E., went on to launch a coup d’etat at home. Later, Kimon, an Athenian aristocrat, exiled by the city’s ruler, Peisistratos, happened to take the Olympic prize in the four-horse chariot. At the next Olympic Games he won with the same horses, but permitted Peisistratos to be proclaimed victor, and by resigning the
victory to him he came back from exile. As to the Olympic truce, it was in fact just the guarantee of free passage to Olympia. Wars continued regardless.
Historically accurate or not, de Coubertin took what he needed from antiquity and, at the five Olympics over which he presided between 1896 and 1924, broadly achieved his objectives. Initially bound to the World’s Fairs — which de Coubertin thought vulgar and commercial — the Olympics became a free-standing event in Stockholm in 1912. Its athletes were overwhelmingly male, white and from the upper classes of Europe, Britain and its Empire, the United States and Canada. Professional athletes were excluded, or, as in the case of Jim Thorpe, who won the decathlon at the Stockholm Games, subsequently stripped of their medals. Formats and rituals — from the parade of nations to the Olympic hymn — created the symbolic trappings of a spiritual, quasi-religious occasion. The presence of commercial and political actors was nugatory. Audiences for the Games, male or female, were generally rather small, but they were, on the whole, polite. But almost as soon as this combination had been achieved, the character and the meaning of the Games began to change.
By 1932, the Olympics were all business. The Los Angeles Games were run by an alliance of real estate developers, movie studios and the oil industry. Coca-Cola was a visible presence, while Standard Oil was giving away promotional posters of Discobolus.
Berlin 1936 showed just what could happen when you fell in with bellicose ultranationalists ready to spend serious money to disguise their aggressive intentions. The small and relatively austere Olympics of the immediate postwar era, like London 1948 and Helsinki 1952, eschewed bombastic grandeur and dialed down the overt politics, but even these Games provided a stage for the first stirrings of Cold War sports conflicts. The next decade or so — Rome 1960, Tokyo 1964 and Munich 1972 — were the soft power coming out parties
for the defeated Axis powers, now returned to international respectability, while Mexico City 1968 was used by the government to celebrate the country’s breakneck economic development. Moscow 1980 and Los Angeles 1984 were transparently stages for late Cold War rivalries as first the Americans and their allies boycotted Moscow after the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, and then the Soviets and their allies reciprocated.
If, by the late 1980s, the IOC had come to an accommodation with both soft power and politics, and the commercial worlds of sponsorship and television, it still held fast to the virtues of amateurism, until 1992. That’s when IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch simply deleted amateurism from the Olympic charter and opened the door for the U.S. Dream Team to play in Barcelona.
This was, perhaps, the final break with the original de Coubertin version of Olympism. While this certainly ensured great TV ratings, and underwrote the increasing value of the Olympics’ sponsorship deals and media rights, it left a gaping ideological and moral hole in an organization that continued to see itself as a force for good in the world. Having made its peace with commercialism, television, state power and elite sport, what made the Olympics any different from the other global sporting spectacles? Samaranch’s response was to reinvent Olympism by aligning it with some of the emergent concerns of post-Cold War international politics, such as gender equality, universal human rights and environmentalism. To this, his successors, Jacque Rogge and Thomas Bach, have added the Olympics’ role in promoting healthier, active lifestyles and raising levels of participation in sport, fighting their own war on drugs against the increasingly prevalent use of performance enhancing substances, and the claim that hosting the Games can leave a positive legacy of urban transformation. These are all worthy notions, and together they might plausibly add up to a new Olympic philosophy, but the reality of the Games is so far
from the promise that it is hard to see it as a useful model at all.
SO, WHAT IS left of modern Olympism? What kind of Olympic spirit do the Games now evoke? Can a commercial and highly politicized sporting spectacle possibly live up to the practical and moral claims made on its behalf? In an increasingly fragmented world, there is still a deep need for cosmopolitan festivals of a collective humanity. The Olympics, whatever their faults, are unquestionably this. More than that, it touches on the widespread sense that play and sport are a fundamental part of what it is to be human, and encoded in their rules and rituals is a better version of ourselves
regeneration program than many previous Olympic efforts. It has done so on the lowest budget for a Summer Games since Sydney 2000, and though some public money has been required for some of the infrastructure, the staging of the Games has been covered by sponsors, ticket sales and the IOC. Given that Tokyo 2020 cost more than $30 billion, keeping the tab down to around $9 billion is an achievement.
PLAY AND SPORT ARE A FUNDAMENTAL PART OF WHAT IT IS TO BE HUMAN, AND ENCODED IN THEIR RULES AND RITUALS IS A BETTER VERSION OF OURSELVES AND OUR WORLD.
and our world. The Olympics might not always live up to these ideals, but the global sporting public still cherishes the notions it appears to represent. Most believe that international sport is a space in which an alternative vision of global politics and conflict can be imagined. The Olympic truce may not, practically, be up to much, but that such an idea, backed by the U.N., can exist at all is a precious thing.
Paris 2024 offers all this, alongside some important shifts in the way the Games are staged. It has built just two new major facilities and an Olympic village, located them in literally the poorest region in France, and made significant efforts to turn this into a balanced and more socially just
Above all, the global public is still thrilled and awed by Olympians. After three decades of open professionalism, the application of enormous amounts of public money to elite sports programs, not to mention significant technological advances in equipment, medicine and training, modern athletes have made themselves into extraordinary human beings, who are capable of extraordinary things. Records in athletics and swimming continue to tumble. Gymnasts and skaters are capable of moves more complex and challenging than previous generations. New, more viewer-friendly formats and modern camera technologies have made accessible the cool brilliance of archery and shooting. Across all of these sports, the Olympics are more diverse than they have ever been. They are, finally, in terms of competitions and events, gender-balanced and they have and continue to give a showcase to women’s sport and women athletes that they still rarely receive. In this regard, the Games, alongside the Paralympics, are one of the very few, perhaps the only occasion when a realistic portrait of humanity stares back at us from our screens. Is this enough to compensate for the shortcomings of the Olympics? Is it the material out of which a new version of the Olympic spirit can be fashioned? That is the challenge that faces the IOC , its hosts and stakeholders, and we, the global viewing public, who in the end decide whether or not to connect with and animate that spirit.
AMY THE INVENTION — AND REINVENTION — OF CONEY
BARRETT
SHE MAY BE THE SUPREME COURT’S MOST ENIGMATIC JUSTICE. AND THE MOST LIKELY TO BECOME AN ICON
BY MARIYA
MANZHOS ILLUSTRATION BY ELIZABETH WAKAU
MASS ADJOURNED WITH A ROUSING PROCESSIONAL HYMN
and a reminder about the bake sale outside, but Amy Coney Barrett wasn’t ready to leave. Her husband, Jesse, dressed in a beige long-sleeved shirt and cream-colored pants, hustled toward the exit, ahead of the other parishioners. Barrett, however, remained in the maroon cushioned pew at St. James Catholic Church, unrushed. She sat next to her 12-year-old son Benjamin, her youngest, who has Down syndrome, the “unanimous favorite of the family,” as she described him in her Supreme Court nomination hearings. She placed her hand on his back and fixed her gaze on his face, ignoring the cheerful
post-Mass hum of hovering congregants. Among them was her colleague and fellow parishioner Justice Clarence Thomas, who sat across the aisle from the Barretts with his wife, Virginia, who goes by “Ginni,” a member of the security detail in the row right behind them. (It was Justice Thomas who had administered Barrett’s oath to join the Supreme Court.)
St. James, a quaint neo-Gothic stone church nestled in a leafy Falls Church, Virginia neighborhood, is led by another close person in Barrett’s life, the Very Rev. Paul Scalia, the son of the late Antonin Scalia, the
conservative Supreme Court justice for whom Barrett had clerked in the late 1990s. Father Scalia gave a homily disentangling the perceived tension between freedom, obedience and obligations. “Once we think that freedom means doing whatever we want, then we are slaves — just to our passions and our desires, which is what we’re witnessing now,” he said from the pulpit. “Freedom apart from God turns into slavery.”
Ahead of Barrett on this Sunday morning in late April was an important week at the Supreme Court — on the docket were oral arguments for a homelessness case in
Oregon, Idaho’s laws on emergency care and abortion treatment, and, perhaps the most consequential leading up to the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump’s immunity trial related to his role in the events of January 6.
But lit by suspended lanterns from the church’s ceiling flanked with wooden arches, Barrett seemed far removed from interpreting the Constitution, from the partisan bickering online, and from work on the book she’s writing about keeping personal feelings out of judicial decisions. She looked different from her public image, too, more down-to-earth: black flats, poncho-style sweater, glasses. Amid the bustle of the parish and the demands outside of it, Barrett, a devoted mother, focused her attention on her son. At last, as the church emptied, Barrett rose from the pew, took her son by the hand, and made her way toward the altar in the wood-paneled sanctuary of the church.
DURING HER CONFIRMATION hearings in October 2020, Barrett projected composure and restraint, dodging controversial questions and periodically reaffirming her impartiality: She vowed to tackle each case with “an open mind,” unswayed by politics, applying the Constitution as the founders had intended. Following Trump’s appointments of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, Barrett’s confirmation tilted the court significantly to the right, securing a 6-3 conservative majority.
Unlike her anodyne answers, her style during the hearings displayed more flair: the fuschia dress, golden drop earrings, frilly blouse collar. There were even glimpses of a sense of humor — the one her friends have assured me she has — when she lifted the blank stationary to showcase that she had no notes prepared and proceeded to read the letterhead. (“She’s also funny,” one friend told me. “It’s probably not something that comes across about her.”) Barrett, then a U.S. Court of Appeals
judge and former Notre Dame University law professor, was hailed by Republicans as a sharp legal scholar with an unwavering commitment to originalism and an impeccable — albeit not very long — legal record of decisions that appeared to align with the Republican Party’s vision for the country, particularly on abortion and the Second Amendment. Barrett was quick on her feet, polished and young enough to have a lengthy tenure on the court. She was so
THE CONEY DINNER table rarely included politics. A yard sign endorsing a political candidate never adorned the family’s lawn.
impressive that even her lack of Ivy League degrees, present on resumes of all other current Supreme Court justices, began to seem like a favorable advantage.
Barrett would replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a feminist icon and champion of the left, who was buried just two weeks before the confirmation hearings — and five before the 2020 presidential election — and whose dying wish, as NPR reported, was for Congress to wait until the new president was elected to replace her. But Republicans had pounced on the opportunity to fill the seat while they still controlled the presidency.
Even more unusual was the fact that Barrett is a mother of seven — a path-breaking model for conservative women and the only woman on the court ever with school-age children. “All the young conservative women out there — this hearing is about a place for you,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said in the hearings. To Senate Democrats, however, Barrett’s confirmation hearings were illegitimate and rushed — just eight days before the presidential election and after 60 million people across the United States had already voted. The hearing was a distraction from approving relief for Covid,
they reiterated, a mere political move to repeal the Affordable Care Act, a case slated to be heard by the court the following month. Both Democrats and Republicans expected Barrett to fall in lockstep with conservative legal priorities. But looking at Barrett’s four terms on the bench, it’s hard to describe them in a singular way. She did fulfill the hopes of conservatives by casting the crucial fifth vote to overturn Roe v. Wade and voted to limit affirmative action and sustain rights to hold firearms. But she’s been surprising in other cases, exhibiting caution and restraint when, for instance, in the Catholic
BOTH DEMOCRATS AND Republicans
expected Barrett to fall in lockstep with conservative legal priorities. But looking at Barrett’s four terms on the bench, it’s hard to describe them in a singular way.
foster agency case, she refused to overrule the precedent before knowing what would replace it. During hearings, she’s been an incisive interrogator (her questions make headlines) and in court opinions, a thorough and precise writer, shaped by years in academia. Ideologically, she’s fallen alongside Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts in the relatively moderate middle, which makes Barrett an influential vote in cases split between the conservative and liberal wings on the court. “On many issues we have a 3-3-3 court rather than a 6-3 court,” said David Lat, lawyer and founder of the legal commentary site Above the Law. Recently, however, Barrett’s presence on the bench began to shift. In oral arguments that took place at the end of April, she’s been bolder, more terse and almost impatient with opponents’ opaque reasoning and lack of logic. In her recent questioning of Idaho’s solicitor general on abortion treatment,
she grew uncharacteristically short and to-the-point. “I’m kind of shocked, actually,” she said, evidently frustrated with the lawyer’s convoluted argument. The following day, during a hearing on presidential immunity, Barrett grilled Trump’s lawyer on the distinction between Trump’s private and official acts, an exchange that experts said reframed the argument of the case. A month prior, in Trump’s Colorado ballot case, she penned a biting concurrence admonishing her liberal colleagues for their divisive rhetoric in the opinion. After Barrett’s searing exchanges that week in oral argument, experts called her a “key player,” who is “increasingly comfortable in her skin.”
I’ve talked to more than a dozen people, including friends and past colleagues, who know Barrett and her work, and what’s clear is that both sides got her all wrong. Her fourth term on the bench has proven that much. At 52, Barrett, who declined to be interviewed for this story, no longer needs to appease anyone’s expectations, including those who championed her along the way to the court. But now that there is no higher mountain to climb, the question of what’s driving Amy Coney Barrett — what she wants — is not as straightforward as it once appeared.
BARRETT GREW UP keenly aware of the needs around her and the part she had in responding to them. In the 1980s, in Metairie, Louisiana, a suburb of New Orleans, Barrett’s mother, Linda Coney, a former high school French teacher, dispatched Barrett, the eldest, and her six siblings to deliver meals to the elderly and the sick in their neighborhood. When Barrett’s father, Michael Coney, a lawyer for Shell Oil, was offered a promotion and a raise that required a move to Houston, he tried commuting for three months. It was tough on the family, so he quit the job. “Our discernment had told us that money and success were not as important as what was
best for our family,” he wrote in an essay on the website of his parish.
While praying, Michael Coney felt called to shepherd his church community as a deacon of St. Catherine of Siena Parish, which Barrett and her family attended growing up. Eventually the family joined an ecumenical community called the People of Praise, a point in Barrett’s biography that, three decades later, would elicit great suspicion and even obsession from critics because of the group’s strict adherence to traditional gender roles and practices like speaking in tongues.
The Coney dinner table rarely included politics — a yard sign endorsing a political candidate never adorned their lawn — but when their precinct lost a polling place, her parents offered up their garage as a voting location. “This wasn’t a convenient thing for my parents … but they saw a need and so they volunteered their home to fill it,” Barrett said at an event at George Washington University in March, where she appeared with fellow Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Whether it was a sense of duty that fueled Barrett’s ambition or the other way around, the two were deeply intertwined. In high school at St. Mary’s Dominican,
she worked with envy-inducing efficiency. For one English assignment, Barrett wrote a paper over a course of a lunch period and got an A, her high school friend Angelle Adams told me. “She’s a very goal-oriented person, and kind of relentless, I would say, in pursuit of her goals,” said Adams, who bonded with Barrett over books like “Anne of Green Gables” and “A Wrinkle in Time.”
In college, to cope with a disappointment over an A- in French, Barrett decided to “conquer” the language and declare it as a minor. “She wants to win at Trivial Pursuit. If she’s going to play, she’s going to win,” Adams told me.
But Barrett wasn’t a Lisa Simpson all the time. She could have fun, too. There was the time in high school when, as a vice president of the student council, she orchestrated an installation of a haunted house on the stage of the gym for a fundraiser with girls “jumping off ladders” and bowls of spaghetti to resemble brains. “She was very social — it’s not like she was an intellectual hermit who huddled behind a book in her glasses,” Adams recalls.
If Barrett had big ambitions back then, she never declared them to anyone. At
Rhodes College in Memphis, where she studied English, she went to church every week, held her own at parties, and never bragged about acceptance into Phi Beta Kappa. She liked C.S. Lewis and somber British movies, like “Shadowlands,” which told the story of Lewis’ life. The only class her college friend Chip Campbell remembered Barrett complaining about was computer programming. She preferred meatier conversations about free speech and whether priests and nuns should marry. “She was like: I’m figuring out who I am as a person and I’m going to work hard to then get there,” Campbell told me.
But perhaps even without fully realizing it, Barrett continued to gravitate toward weightier responsibilities. As vice president of the Honor Council at Rhodes College, a 17-person panel that determined the fate of students accused of violating the school’s honor code, Barrett collected evidence on “a multitude of sins — from cheating on a test to lying in an official matter,” according to an article in the 1994 Rhodes student and alumni magazine. During one trial that went on for 23 hours, Barrett and other council members took a break at 3 a.m. to
SHOWN WITH HER HUSBAND JESSE
WAS ON PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’S SHORT LIST OF CONSERVATIVE JUSTICES IN 2018 TO SUCCEED RETIRING JUSTICE ANTHONY KENNEDY, BUT DIDN’T GET NOMINATED UNTIL 2020 AFTER JUSTICE RUTH BADER GINSBERG DIED.
AMY CONEY BARRETT,
BARRETT,
get a few hours of sleep only to reconvene and continue to deliberate. “You want to be absolutely sure you’re doing the right thing by that person,” Barrett, then 22, told the magazine. “Everybody (on the council) is supposed to be on the same side and have equal concern for the accused, the Honor Code itself and the community.” It sounded like something she might say about the Supreme Court 30 years later.
In a photo in her college yearbook, wearing a white cable-knit sweater and jeans, sitting on the ground, legs crossed — with what resembles a backdrop of the Seine riverbank in Paris — Barrett cradles a bottle of wine and a baguette. The wind is ruffling her wavy bangs and Barrett is beaming, as if she can’t contain the thrill of what’s ahead.
BACK AT ST. JAMES, as Barrett and her son stood by the altar rail, she struck up a conversation with a priest, Father Scalia’s colleague, and several young women, while two security officers waited in the back of the chapel, keeping an eye on Barrett and son.
Security now followed her to grocery stores, to buy her children’s uniforms and to church. “I’ve found it difficult to get used to that aspect of the job,” Barrett said in a speech. Careful, guarded, constantly accompanied by detail — it wasn’t always like this for Barrett.
In South Bend, where Barrett met her husband when they were both law students at Notre Dame University, the couple surrounded themselves with the proverbial village, which eventually included seven kids, two adopted from Haiti. The law school faculty at Notre Dame was a tight-knit group that shared carpools and hosted barbecues, Easter egg hunts and post-Halloween trick-or-treating pizza parties. Sick kids came to work and sometimes to class.
Barrett was immersed in the life of the law school — often in its less glamorous
aspects, like advocating for more convenient staff parking to make carpooling with children easier and helping a blind student, Laura Wolk, with technology. During confirmation testimony, Wolk recounted Barrett’s warmth and attention when Wolk reluctantly came to Barrett for help, recalling that Barrett had said, “Laura, this is no longer your problem — it’s my problem.” Rick Garnett, her friend and professor at Notre Dame Law, told me Barrett “wasn’t an absentee professor as you can imagine some professors being who have a lot of outside things going on.”
Professor Barrett’s teaching style was not flashy, yet it was engaging, former students told me. She was tough and firm in her grading, but well liked by students, and earned three “best teacher” awards. “She had a way of teaching that was very effective in not injecting her own personal views,” a former student said. “While some other professors would have relished the opportunity to be in the spotlight, argue with senators at a hearing, be at a press conference in the Rose Garden with the president — I would have never picked her out as one of them,” the student said.
SUPPORT FOR JUSTICE AMY CONEY BARRETT’S CONFIRMATION TO THE SUPREME COURT LARGELY HINGED ON HER ANTI-ABORTION VIEWS. SINCE HELPING OVERTURN ROE V. WADE, SHE HAS MOVED TO A MORE MODERATE POSITION AMONG THE NINE JUSTICES.
After their last Easter egg hunt in South Bend, before the family moved to the D.C. area, Barrett shared tears with Nicole Garnett, a Notre Dame University law professor who lived around the corner from Barrett for about 20 years. “They had no desire to ever leave this place,” Garnett told me. “Until getting a call from the White House for the 7th Circuit, I never heard her raise a possibility of being a judge at all,” she said. “I think it was a serious question whether or not she was going to allow herself to be considered.”
“ARE YOU PREPARED for the attacks?” Trump had asked Barrett in September 2020, during a secret meeting in the Oval Office before the nomination, a scene Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, detailed in his memoir. “They’re going to come at you with everything they’ve got. And you need to be ready. Are you?”
The project of getting Barrett to the Supreme Court began long before her nomination. A member of the Federalist Society, which has been instrumental in advancing judicial candidates to Republican presidents, Barrett was placed on Trump’s short list in 2018. Although Trump went with Kavanaugh, a “more establishment-friendly nominee,” Meadows wrote, the decision “had come back to bite us.” Trump couldn’t repeat the same mistake. Barrett, reportedly, didn’t hesitate answering his question: “Yes, I am.”
In their Oval Office meeting, Trump also asked Barrett whether she’d uphold the Constitution, ensuring she wouldn’t “do all this legislating from the bench that the liberals do.” When asked in the hearings what it felt like to be nominated to the Supreme Court, Barrett’s seemingly unrehearsed answer painted a portrait of a fearless and dutiful servant with no self-aggrandizing ambitions: “I’m not the only person who could do this job, but I was asked, and it would be difficult for anyone,” said Barrett
in the hearings. “So why should I say someone else should do the difficulty? If the difficulty is the only reason to say no, I should serve my country.”
But she didn’t know then how bad it was going to get.
In June 2022, after a leak of the draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, protesters appeared in Barrett’s quiet cul-de-sac of stately colonials in Falls Church. A day after, a California man showed up at Kavanaugh’s home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, with a plan to assassinate him, and a group marched in front of Barrett’s house, holding up signs like “We didn’t elect people of praise.” Some groups resembled performance art with blood-soaked dolls and the red and white costumes from the television adaptation of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Protesters yelled profanities while Barrett tried putting her kids to sleep. One podcast called her a “right-wing freak.” A milder take was that she’s “bad for women.” Barrett’s $2 million book deal with Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin Random House, spurred an uproar from the literary community, writing in a public letter that the publisher “privately funded the destruction
BARRETT HAS SAID that she stays away from reading press about herself, good or bad, as a way of walling herself off from playing to the influences and expectations of others.
of human rights with obscene profits.”
More Americans (46 percent) had opposed Barrett’s nomination than supported it (42 percent). To some progressive women, Barrett represents betrayal of shared, hard-won rights. “She’s a woman voting against women — she’s literally the ‘pick me’ of the Supreme Court,” said Cassidy Thompson, who was protesting outside of
the Supreme Court on a morning in April, while the justices deliberated on homelessness in Oregon. Linda Finkel-Talvadkar, another woman there, worried that the Supreme Court is becoming a political entity not representative of most Americans or in touch with modern-day reality. “To have us be ruled by antiquated laws based on antiquated statements in the Constitution is absurd,” said Finkel-Talvadkar, a D.C. resident and “child of the ‘60s,” as she described herself, who often participates in the protests.
Last year, Barrett was interrupted midsentence while speaking about former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s views on federalism at the University of Minnesota, when abortion-rights protesters erupted, chanting, “Not the court, not the state, people must decide their fate.” Barrett froze, her lips pursed, looking out at the hecklers the way a disappointed mother would look at her misbehaving child. “She is perfectly willing to take all the arrows, but she thinks family should be left out of it,” Amul Thapar, Barrett’s friend and a federal appellate court judge, told me.
She’s grown more private, too, and has tempered her public comments about her faith, which has been the target of the harshest attacks against her. In March, Barrett spoke to a group of Harvard Catholic alumni at the Saint John Paul II National Shrine in Washington, D.C., and she asked that it be off the record. “I do think that there are times when, especially now, she may hold herself a bit apart, but I don’t know if it’s necessarily her nature or her personality,” Adams, the high school friend, told me. “It’s more a function of (being) a Supreme Court justice. Would you get up and dance crazy at your cousin’s wedding? Those are some normal things that most people would do that she can’t do. Because somebody’s going to put that on the internet.”
“How does she do it?” was my question to every friend of Barrett I spoke with. The children, including one with a disability, the pressures and expectations of the job,
the critics. Part of the answer is surely practical: Her husband, also a lawyer, pulls the heavier load at home; family helps with child care. Several people mentioned a nanny. Barrett has said that she stays away from reading press about herself, good or bad, as a way of walling herself off from playing to the influences and expectations of others. “I mean, like why should you be reading a steady diet — or in my case, it wouldn’t really be a steady diet — why should you be consuming flattering articles about yourself?” she said in a 2022 Notre Dame symposium, inviting laughter from the crowd.
“I think she’s been able to do all that she’s been able to do because she approaches these decisions as a question,” Nicole Garnett, the former neighbor, told me. “‘What I’m meant to be doing,’ and not, ‘Is this the next more prestigious thing or is this going to be an inconvenience?’”
Maybe, as Father Scalia taught in his sermon, it’s Barrett’s orientation toward the thing she’s been called to do that empowers her. “We all have obligations. How are we going to fulfill those obligations?” Father Scalia preached. “We can fulfill them slavishly, stomping our feet and slamming doors and grumbling about things.” He continued: “But our Lord shows us that true freedom consists in undertaking our obligations joyfully and generously.”
THE DAY THE Supreme Court heard the Idaho state abortion treatment case, abortion-rights activists and local health care workers protested outside the courthouse, staging a “die-in” protest and holding up signs that said “No limits on emergency care.” Inside, the temperature was heating up, too. In a different kind of split, the four women on the bench grilled the Idaho lawyer on the question of the state’s near-complete abortion ban violating a federal law that requires emergency care for patients, which includes abortions.
The men on the bench mostly remained on the sidelines during the argument, while the women, on both sides, invoked real-life scenarios like sepsis, preeclampsia and uncontrolled bleeding.
Barrett, whose track record is largely defined by her anti-abortion stance, joined the liberal Justice Sotomayor in grilling Idaho Solicitor General Joshua Turner on whether doctors could be prosecuted for administering an abortion.
“Why are you here?” Barrett asked Turner, fishing for a precise ruling that the court was up against. Later, she chimed in with unusual tension in her voice: “Counsel, I’m kind of shocked, actually, because I thought your own expert had said below that these kinds of cases were covered,” she said to Turner, referring to emergency cases that would merit abortion. “And you’re now saying they’re not?” Barrett had no patience for the lawyer’s imprecision: “Well, you’re hedging.” She then dovetailed with Sotomayor to advance her point: “I mean, Justice Sotomayor is asking you, ‘Would this be covered or not?’”
The next day, during Trump’s immunity hearing, in another terse exchange, this time with the former president’s attorney, John Sauer, Barrett rattled off Trump’s violations, asking Sauer to identify whether they were private or official, and ultimately getting him to concede that Trump’s private actions do not qualify for immunity.
Experts say that we’re witnessing Barrett figuring out her jurisprudence and forming as a justice before our eyes. Being on the court, she once said, “it’s like learning to ride a bike with everyone watching you.” Barrett arrived on the court with a set of neutral principles that she’s been figuring out how to apply to law, William Baude, law professor at the University of Chicago, told me. “She’s not just working out her gut instincts on the fly, but is really trying to put a well-developed philosophy into practice,” he said.
This Justice Barrett, more than ever before, seems more blunt and less concerned with how she may appear — perhaps more
open to pushing ideological boundaries that may have been ascribed to her. Ruth Marcus, a Washington Post columnist, wrote following that week that Barrett has been “no submissive pushover.”
The recent surprises, or perhaps deviations from a reductive caricature she was made into, mark an emergence of her voice that’s more nuanced and bold and which may steer the court’s most important cases in unexpected directions. Could it be that
BARRETT’S LASTING MARK on the court may be the way she could redefine what it means to be a conservative justice.
Barrett, whose unflashy and dogged commitment to interpreting law that the progressives thought to be a mere façade, is ready to stake out her own distinct position on the court?
NOAH FELDMAN, a professor at Harvard Law School who clerked for Justice David Souter at the same time Barrett clerked for Scalia, had “never met someone so charismatic, so brilliant, and so conservative all at the same time,” he said in his audiobook “Takeover” about the history of the Federalist Society. He doesn’t agree with Barrett on the methods and the outcomes of “many, many, many” cases, he told me, but she exhibits an “incredible command of legal doctrine and logic.” Among the conservatives on the court, she had the “special something,” he noted.
Regardless of how Barrett might vote in the crucial cases heard in April, her
influence and mark on the court are bound to only amplify, experts and Barrett’s allies believe. Her fame nationally is likely to exceed Ginsburg, Feldman predicted in his book: “She will very soon be the most recognizable and identifiable of the Supreme Court justices.”
Barrett is unlikely to drift to the left the way some believe Anthony Kennedy or John Roberts have, Lat thinks. “She came in very conservative and she’s going to leave very conservative,” he told me. But part of Barrett’s lasting mark on the court may be the way she could redefine what it means to be a conservative justice.
“She’s a great example of how in order to achieve the highest levels of success, you don’t necessarily have to be cutting, snarky or cutthroat to get there,” said Samantha Dravis, a conservative lobbyist and one of Barrett’s former students.
Thomas Griffith, a retired D.C. Circuit judge and Barrett’s friend, told me that he thinks Barrett’s cultural impact may be just as important as her legal influence. “In many ways, cultural impact is more important than legal impact, right?” He continued: “I mean, ‘law is downstream of culture.’”
At the sanctuary of St. James, Barrett and her son, along with three other parishioners, knelt at a step by the marble altar rail. A purple stained-glass window glowed above the wooden crucifix. A priest held up a communion wafer in one hand and a chalice in another, and proceeded to administer a blessing.
Other congregants began trickling into the church, announcing the next Mass. Barrett and her son appeared ready to conclude their worship, and two detail officers ushered them toward the exit.
It was time to return to her bustling household and the following day, to the courthouse, from which Barrett’s voice would be transmitted across the entire country. Outside, a gray SUV waited in the church’s alleyway. Security by her side, Barrett propped open the church’s hefty wooden door and stepped into the sunlight.
THE UNDERCOVER AGENT WHO WASN’T
RAY EPPS BELIEVED THE CONSPIRACY THEORY THAT THE 2020 ELECTION WAS STOLEN. THEN HE BECAME THE CONSPIRACY THEORISTS’ BIGGEST TARGET
BY MEGAN FELDMAN BETTENCOURT • ILLUSTRATION
BY NATE SWEITZER
ROCKING R FARMS WAS A QUIET PLACE WHERE PEOPLE STARTED LIFE ANEW.
IN THE PHOENIX suburb of Queen Creek, the property seemed far from the city’s sprawl and roaring traffic. Its windmill, cow pastures and rustic brick farmhouse evoked earlier times — the front doors were even made of wood from the Revolutionary era.
James Ray Epps and his wife, Robyn, had made the affectionately named Knotty Barn the center of their wedding venue business. Set on five pastoral acres, with a courtyard featuring a red brick walkway, wooden arch and three-tiered Italian fountain, Knotty Barn was an ideal place to get married.
Ray and Robyn, in their late 50s and retired from careers in roofing and sales, were living on the bucolic property and helping young people begin new chapters together when, in 2021, their peace was shattered. Threatening voicemails and text messages began flooding their business phone and email accounts. People drove past the ranch brandishing weapons. One day, Ray found bullet casings littered across the property.
“We’re coming Ray!!!!!!” read one email. “Hopefully you are filled with holes soon.”
A churchgoing Republican who served four years in the United States Marine Corps and twice voted for Donald Trump, Epps was an unlikely target of death threats. Yet Epps had become something of a paradox: He believed in one conspiracy theory, only to find himself in the red-hot center of another — a
theory that would place him in the crosshairs of a former president, turn him into a punching bag on Fox News, and lead to the complete collapse of the life he and his wife had built, sending them into hiding.
Conspiracy theories have never played a more prominent role in a presidential campaign, embraced by certain candidates on the left and right. The case of Ray Epps, now the subject of a lawsuit against Fox News, stands as a cautionary tale. And it began, like all conspiracy theories do, with one tiny grain of doubt.
BY 2020, RAY and Robyn Epps had been living at Rocking R Farms in Queen Creek for 10 years. As they managed the property and hosted weddings, they observed the nation’s tumultuous year of pandemic, presidential campaigning and social unrest. They frequently watched Fox News during Covid-19 lockdowns, and as racial justice demonstrations erupted after George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer. After President Joe Biden’s win at the polls, they heard Tucker Carlson and other Fox News pundits discussing Trump’s claims of election fraud.
The fear that it was apparently not 100 percent clear who won the election worried Ray. There should be no doubt, he thought, as to who clinched an election in a nation seen as a beacon of freedom around the
world. The allegations stood out to Ray and Robyn because of something that had happened earlier that fall: They had received not just their own two vote-by-mail ballots, but also an additional three addressed to people they didn’t know. In the years they had owned the property, they had never heard the names on those envelopes. Ray believed that the U.S. Constitution was God-inspired and voting sacred. And so the mystery ballots weighed on Ray’s mind as Trump and his supporters doubled down on their claims. What did the extra ballots mean? Were they evidence of the stolen election Trump kept talking about?
On December 19, even after election audits and dozens of judges rejected Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud, the former president tweeted about the Stop the Steal rally planned for January 6, the day Congress would certify Biden’s victory. “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” Trump wrote. “Be there, will be wild!”
Ray’s son Jim, who lived in Utah, planned to attend the rally and asked Ray to come. Ray hesitated because winter was a busy wedding season, but Robyn suggested he go. She voiced concern the rally might face violence from antifa, a collection of leftist anarchist groups known for confronting attendees of far-right demonstrations.
After talking with his wife and son, Ray began to think of the rally as a father-son
lieved to be the goal of the next day’s rally: showing support for President Trump and marching peacefully to the Capitol to protest problems with the election.
What Epps didn’t know was the man with the megaphone was a social media influencer named Anthime Gionet. Known online as “Baked Alaska” (he was born in Anchorage), Gionet, who livestreamed their conversation, responded to Epps’ attempts to calm the crowd and turned on him, chanting, “Fed! Fed!” The crowd followed
But today, as the megaphone-toting protesters walked faster along Pennsylvania Avenue, Epps saw them grab sticks and metal bars, according to court records. In 2009, he remembered demonstrators picking up trash — not makeshift weapons. “Put that down,” Epps pleaded, “you’re go-
He followed the crowd as it pushed aside mesh fencing and bicycle rack barriers marking the restricted area of the Capitol grounds. His eyes fell on a set of metal barricades guarded by U.S. Capitol Police officers up ahead. Clearly, the building wasn’t open to the public this time. The crowd’s fervor only grew. People screamed at the police, calling them “oath breakers” and
On Epps’ 2009 visit to Washington, he met military veterans and law enforcement officers who belonged to a newly founded group called the Oath Keepers. Led by Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers whom Epps met struck him as stand-up guys, and he joined the organization. He served as Arizona state chapter president but within two
CONSPIRACY SUBCULTURES HAVE ALWAYS CARRIED HIGH RISKS FOR PARTICIPANTS BECAUSE THEY’RE HEAVY ON PARANOIA AND LIGHT ON AGREED-UPONOBJECTIVE, FACTS.
widening web of conspiracy theories: The government intended to seize Americans’ weapons, force resistors into concentration camps, and institute a one-world socialist government known as the “New World Order”; Jews were replacing white people with immigrants; the world was controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who could only be defeated by Trump.
Around the time Epps positioned himself before the barricades on Capitol grounds and tried to calm the crowd, someone hung a noose from the crossbeam of the wooden gallows erected in front of the building. “Hang Mike Pence!” people chanted, while images of the gallows were projected around the country.
Some in the crowd, brandishing an 8-by-10-foot Trump sign on wheels with heavy metal casters, began advancing, threatening to use the sign as a battering ram. Epps watched as on either side of him, people pushed the barricades. The police pushed back. Then the rioters pulled the barricades toward themselves and officers fell onto the toppled metal. As the police went down, the rioters climbed over the pile and ran toward the building.
When asked later why he followed, Epps said he thought maybe he could still do some good, or at least prevent more damage. Yet the crowd toppled a third set of barriers, including a waist-high metal fence. They gathered on the West Plaza, where police struggled to keep rioters from advancing while being assaulted by fists, pepper spray and flagpoles.
Epps stood in the few feet of space between the police line and the advancing
CARLSON ACCUSED EPPS OF LEADING THE CHARGE AND MOCKED HIM WITH NAMES LIKE “FEDEPPS.”
crowd. “Take a step back,” he told them. “We’re not trying to get people hurt. They don’t want to get hurt; you don’t want to get hurt. Just back up. … We’ve made our point.”
Then, the police sprayed tear gas to disperse the attackers. It hung in the air as rioters ended their fight with the officers and began to disperse. When Epps heard calls for a medic, he ran toward the voice to find a protester sprawled on the ground, seemingly unconscious. An EMT appeared and Epps helped him carry the man away from the building. “Emergency! Clear the way!” they shouted as they pushed through the crowd streaming in the opposite direction toward the Capitol. They reached a patch of grass and set the man down.
Epps looked back toward the Capitol. People were crawling all over the building, climbing the scaffolding on the walls. He felt sick to his stomach. He turned and made his way toward his hotel. As he did, he didn’t know rioters were running through the Capitol building looting the historic rooms and breaking into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office while secret service agents rushed Vice President Pence to an undisclosed location. He
didn’t know lawmakers donned gas masks while more than a hundred police officers were assaulted.
And he didn’t know that this trip to Washington would forever change his life in Queen Creek. He never imagined footage of him trying to de-escalate attacks on police officers had gone viral thanks to “Baked Alaska” — or that a conspiracy theory was emerging that blamed him for being the undercover agent who infiltrated the rally and instigated the violent breach of the U.S. Capitol.
“MEET RAY EPPS, the Fed-protected provocateur who appears to have led the very first 1/6 attack on the Capitol,” read an October 25, 2021, headline on Revolver News. Darren Beattie, the website’s editor and a former Trump staffer, was eventually invited onto Fox’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” Before millions of viewers, Beattie blamed undercover FBI agents for the January 6 insurrection and called Epps “the smoking gun of the entire Fedsurrection.”
It was a classic “false flag” conspiracy theory: the idea that it was secretly the FBI, not enraged Trump supporters or white supremacist militias, that led thousands
RAY EPPS, IN THE RED TRUMP HAT, TRIED TO PREVENT VIOLENCE IN THE JANUARY 6 ATTACK ON THE CAPITOL, BUT HE ENDED UP CHARGED WITH DISORDERLY CONDUCT. A CONSPIRACY THEORY FUELED BY TUCKER CARLSON, GOP POLITICIANS AND DONALD TRUMP HIMSELF THAT EPPS WAS A GOVERNMENT PLANT IN THE CROWD RUINED HIS BUSINESS AND FORCED HIM AND HIS WIFE INTO HIDING.
of people to illegally enter the Capitol, destroy property, assault police and threaten the lives of public officials. Carlson accused Epps of leading the charge and mocked him with names like “FedEpps.”
Ironically, Epps’ cooperation with FBI investigators provided more fodder. Two days after January 6, a relative had told Epps his photo was posted on the FBI’s “most wanted” list. By that time, Epps had seen images of destruction from inside the Capitol and said he felt sad and sickened about what happened. He immediately called the FBI and participated in a phone interview. His photo had since been removed from the FBI website. Yet Carlson cited its removal as more evidence proving Epps was a covert agent. He would broadcast more than 20
segments about Epps, using the fact that Epps hadn’t been charged for crimes as evidence that he was protected by the bureau.
When the congressional committee investigating the Capitol attack interviewed Epps and released a statement saying that he “informed us that he was not employed by” any federal agency, Carlson suggested they too were protecting Epps. FBI Director Christopher Wray’s statement that Epps had never worked for the bureau also failed to quell the rumors.
T-shirts appeared on eBay printed with, “Arrest Ray Epps for Leading the Jan. 6 Fedsurrection.” Republican politicians spread the conspiracy theory, too. Trump mentioned Epps at an Arizona rally. “How about the one guy, ‘Go in, go in, get in there
obviously a fed plant and not trustworthy!”
A text message read, “You better sleep with one eye open.”
When the congressional committee interviewed Epps in early 2022 and asked how all this had changed his life, he told them about the threats and dwindling business. But the point when he became most emotional was when he said his grandchildren were getting bullied at school because they shared his last name.
“The leaders that try to ride this thing for gain, I just believe they could do better,” Epps
When I reached out to Epps, he declined to be interviewed for this story. I was disappointed, but it wasn’t hard to imagine why he didn’t want to talk. Fox News wasn’t the only media outlet that had criticized him. “You’ve given them a lot of ammunition to paint you News correspondent Bill Whitaker told Epps after he and Robyn
As I watched video of Epps from January 6 and pored over transcripts of his sworn testimony from court documents and the congressional committee interview, I wondered: Why had a seemingly rational person fallen victim to conspiracy culture?
Politically polarized cable news that relies on punditry, not factual reporting, was obviously part of it, along with social media “influencers” who build massive audiences by posting paranoid yarns. It’s never been easier for people to cherry-pick facts that match their beliefs — or fabricate them altogether. But why did so many of these fabrications hinge on scapegoating? Scholars say the answer can be found in the belief
“HEY, FBI AGENT,” ONE VOICEMAIL SAID. “TURN YOURSELF IN, BUD. NOTHING CAN STOP WHAT’S COMING.”
IT’S NEVER BEEN EASIER FOR PEOPLE TO CHERRY-PICK FACTS THAT MATCH THEIR BELIEFS — OR FABRICATE THEM ALTOGETHER.
that white people have become increasingly marginalized, or “white grievance.”
“There is such tremendous income inequality that it produces an inevitable sense of grievance,” Michael Barkun, a Syracuse University emeritus professor who studies conspiracy theories and political extremism, told me. As declines in manufacturing and other blue-collar pursuits left many working-class white people struggling economically, many blamed bicoastal elites, rising immigration and anyone who had been a “minority” but seemed to be advancing into the “majority.” The sense of marginalization among Americans who traditionally viewed themselves as superior has perhaps led them to feel threatened. And people who feel threatened are more likely to believe conspiracy theories. Those who believe that white people experience racial discrimination, studies show, are more likely to believe the electoral process is corrupted.
In her book “Republic of Lies,” Anna Merlan cites the election of Obama as a milestone
in the mainstreaming of weaponized conspiracy theories. That’s when Trump gained an audience as a vocal proponent of “birtherism,” the conspiracy theory that Obama had not been born in the U.S. At the Tea Party protest Epps attended in 2009, people carried a sign scrawled with “Liar Liar, Pants on Fire!” and surveys at the time showed 25 percent of Americans still believed the conspiracy theory even after Obama released copies of his birth certificate.
After the 2016 election conspiracy theories became even more mainstream. On twitter, liberals spun theories about Trump’s ties to Russia, while Trump’s influence on the Republican Party promoted a political ecosystem in which conspiracy played an increasingly prominent role.
In 2017, white supremacists protesting the removal of a Gen. Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville chanted, “You will not replace us!” and, “Jews will not replace us!” (slogans from “The Great Replacement” conspiracy theory accusing Jews of orchestrating mass immigration to dilute
the white race). It was later that summer when, after a separate white supremacist rally ended with a neo-Nazi driving a car into the crowd and killing a young woman, Trump famously said there were “fine people on both sides.” To people within pockets of the right, that comment sanctioned weaponized conspiracy from the highest levels of government, Jacob Ware, a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who specializes in domestic terrorism, told me.
Many acts of weaponized conspiracy theory involve extremists attacking political enemies, like when an election denier broke into Pelosi’s home and bludgeoned her husband with a hammer. Yet Epps fell victim to something else: weaponized conspiracy theory wielded by, and against, people on the right, as when the rioters who entered the Capitol threatened to hang the vice president. “This is about compelling behavior that the extremists would like,” Ware told me. “The terroristic threat of violence against people on the right who are deemed to be insufficiently pure is working to influence the behavior of people on the right (as a whole).”
Ware pointed out that Trump himself excels at weaponizing conspiracy theories. After using stolen election claims to cling to power, he is campaigning on them once again as he seeks to retake the White House. “You can boil down Trump’s real genius to four words: fake news and deep state,” Ware says. “If anyone inside the government criticizes him, they’re dismissed, and if anyone in the GOP says anything, they’re dismissed as a RINO (Republican in name only). He has created a space where only he can be trusted.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. meanwhile, has built a presidential campaign on a dizzying collection of conspiracy theories. The former Democrat turned independent has suggested without evidence that the CIA assassinated his uncle, John F. Kennedy; COVID-19 was intentionally created in a lab; AIDS is not caused by HIV; antidepressants cause school shootings; Wi-Fi causes
cancer and “leaky brain” and 5G networks are being used for mass surveillance, just to name a few. Kennedy’s response to being fact-checked or criticized for spreading beliefs that lack scientific merit is to claim he is being censored by a plot on the part of government and media.
False flag conspiracy theories have also flourished about the Israel-Gaza war since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on Israeli civilians. Despite ample evidence of the atrocities, some on the left insist that instead of Hamas, it was secretly Israel that perpetrated the murder and hostage-taking spree to justify committing genocide against Palestinian civilians. Some versions of Oct. 7 denialism even claim the U.S. was behind the secret plot. Last winter, as polls confirmed a third of Americans still believed the last U.S. election was stolen and a quarter believed the false flag theory that FBI operatives instigated the attack on the Capitol, accusations that Israel had created a “false flag” in relation to Oct. 7 surged on platforms including TikTok, Reddit and 4chan.
Conspiracy subcultures have always carried high risks for participants because they’re heavy on paranoia and light on objective, agreed-upon facts, says Brian Hughes, co-founder of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University. Yet the biggest factor that puts someone like Epps at risk of believing a lie that leads to either committing violence or being victimized by it, he says, are public figures repeating misinformation and condoning violence.
“The larger issue here has to do with leaders in politics and the media condoning violence or encouraging it,” says Hughes. “During the attacks on the Capitol, the people doing it thought they had sanction from the highest levels of government.”
As Epps said during his “60 Minutes” interview, “Fox News, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ted Cruz … they were all telling us before (January 6) that (the election) was stolen — who has more impact on people, them or me?”
Because holding public officials accountable for misinformation is so challenging, legal efforts have turned to media figures. Before Epps filed his lawsuit, Dominion Voting Systems won a $787 million settlement from Fox News in its own defamation case, alleging Fox acted with malice in airing baseless claims that Dominion’s voting equipment switched votes from Trump to Biden. Family members of children, educators and one law enforcement officer killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre won a $965 million judgment from Alex Jones of Infowars after he promoted the conspiracy theory that the grieving families were actors who faked the school shooting to strip Americans of their guns.
Michael Teter, Epps’ attorney, says his client’s lawsuit allows Epps to speak the truth while holding Fox News accountable for the destruction it causes “as it places falsehoods above facts and profits over people.” That accountability, Teter told me, is critical. “This case is one of several that seek to do two things: demonstrate the real-world consequences of spreading lies and misinformation and to hold accountable those who seek to capitalize — either for profit or political gain — on distortions and falsehoods.”
Teter is also managing director of The 65 Project, a bipartisan nonprofit founded to establish consequences for attorneys who filed the 65 now-dismissed lawsuits alleging the 2020 election was stolen. The organization has filed more than 75 ethics complaints against attorneys, taking the effort beyond just the most high-profile lawyers like Rudy Giuliani, who had his law license suspended and faces criminal charges for alleged efforts to overturn the election.
“It’s not just about holding to account the lawyers that have engaged in this in the past,” says Teter, a former Utah assistant attorney general who has taught constitutional law at the University of Utah law school. “It’s about using the discipline they receive so that future lawyers see this is not something they can abuse without consequences.”
As Trump faces his own prosecution on charges of trying to overturn his election loss, he frames the indictment as a conspiracy by the “deep state” and vows revenge on the campaign trail. “I am your warrior. I am your justice. … I am your retribution,” Trump told followers at last year’s Conservative Political Action Conference. “With you at my side, we will demolish the ‘deep state.’”
NEARLY TWO YEARS
after Trump mentioned Epps and the “Fedsurrection” conspiracy theory at an Arizona rally, the two men’s legal fates intertwined at a Washington, D.C., courthouse.
On January 9, 2024, Trump watched a U.S. Court of Appeals panel hear his claims that he should be immune from prosecution on federal charges that he plotted to overturn the election. “I think it’s very unfair when a political opponent is prosecuted,” he told reporters, claiming, without evidence, that Biden was behind the charges.
The same day, Epps appeared via Zoom in a different courtroom in the same building. He was sentenced to a year of probation for his role in the January 6 insurrection. “Trust in elected officials and Fox News led to my gullibility in believing the election was stolen,” he told the judge after pleading guilty. “What I witnessed (on January 6) was rage and vulgarity on a level I’ve never seen before, and it was generated by people like me, not the FBI or antifa.”
When Epps appeared before the Jan. 6 congressional committee, he said he felt used. “I’m being used to further their agenda,” he said. “To sell their news … or, to further them in a political career.”
As primary season approached, I wondered: Who else would wind up feeling used, getting hurt or worse? Ware, from the Council on Foreign Relations, said he worried about the same thing. “Those conspiracy theories,” he told me, “can whip up such a passionate frenzy that anybody can get sucked into it.”
AS TIME RUNS OUT ON JIMMER FREDETTE’S BASKETBALL
CAREER, THIS SUMMER’S OLYMPIC GAMES PRESENT
A CHANCE — POSSIBLY HIS LAST — TO GO OUT A WINNER
BY ETHAN BAUER
S THAT A streak of gray in Jimmer Fredette’s hair? It couldn’t be. For the nation of fans he inspired to yell “Jimmer range!” when pulling up for an audacious half-court shot, who saw him earn praise from President Barack Obama and land on the cover of Sports Illustrated, he’s remembered with a brown-haired, curly mop.
The gray disappears when he adjusts himself, the result of a webcam illusion that nevertheless echoes reality: While today’s Jimmer still looks plenty like his younger self, still flashes a toothpaste-commercial smile above an anvil of a chin, that curly mop is buzzed at the sides. It’s thinner than it used to be. His skin creases around his eyes and nose and forehead. Jimmer looks great for 35, no question. But he also looks a long way from 22 and the version of himself that first tasted fame.
Seated in his home office, trophies bracket him on either side — among them, his 2011 Naismith Player of the Year award. A royal blue BYU basketball logo shines on the wall directly behind him. They tell the familiar story of the Jimmer who captivated the nation 13 years ago. Now, he’s ready to tell a new story. The story of who he is, rather than who he was.
“I’m excited to be here with everyone today,” he says in his first remarks since he was named to the U.S. men’s 3-on-3 Olympic basketball team. The turnout over Zoom is relatively small. Three-on-three basketball doesn’t court as much attention as the 5-on-5 squad headlined by Steph Curry, Kevin Durant and LeBron James. Most American fans don’t even know the team exists, since 2024 will mark its first appearance in the Olympics. But Jimmer — as usual — seems sincere. He is excited to be here, even though he never expected to be. “It’s definitely been a transition to get into this 3-on-3 game, but let me tell you: It’s been a welcome transition,” he says. “It’s been something that has really given me new life.”
The 3-on-3 version of the game is fast-paced, physical and thrilling — the kind of inventive, competitive, first-to-21 basketball people play in parks and gyms around the world. It’s a style that suits Jimmer’s abilities, and with the experience and maturity gained from a successful career overseas, watching him now feels like something familiar and new at once. Like the player who instigated the free-flowing, high-scoring fun of Jimmermania mixed with a seasoned, master craftsman.
At 35 years old, Jimmer might just be playing his best basketball, graying or not. And if he can keep it up through the end of the Paris Games, he could finally reach a milestone that, thus far, has eluded him.
JIMMER DOESN’T SAY much about what went wrong in the NBA. He’s not avoidant — he’s just straightforward, and he doesn’t know the answers. Nor does he have much interest in remembering how it felt. So usually, his family has spoken for him. “It was humiliating for him,” his father told ESPN in 2017. “We thought his momentum at BYU would just continue. And then year one didn’t pan out, year two didn’t pan out. Things slowly got worse,” his wife, Whitney, told Deseret about a year later. “At first it was really hard because he had set such high expectations for his career and he literally didn’t meet any of them.”
Eventually, though, Jimmer set new goals. He adjusted. He adapted and thrived overseas. He earned a shoe deal with Chinese apparel company 361 and tech endorsements. He scored 73 points in one game. He earned the nickname “The Lonely Master” because his skills were so far ahead of everyone else, he was like a god. “He had to reevaluate his dream,” his sister Lindsay said back then. “And he had to come to peace with the fact that there are some things you can’t control. If you don’t do that, you might miss some opportunities that are placed in front of you.”
Which is exactly how he ended up where he is now, with a chance to have his career culminate in one last Jimmermania-esque
run — this time with a major title at the end of it. The Washington Post, NBC and The Associated Press have all covered the team’s Olympic pursuits, always with him as the centerpiece. “With the Olympics taking place this year in Paris,” The Washington Post’s Des Bieler wrote in March, “basketball fans will have to set their clocks to … Jimmer Time?”
That story mentions all the key moments in Jimmer’s basketball journey: his stardom at BYU. His NBA struggles. And his three seasons with the Chinese Basketball Association’s Shanghai Sharks. He also briefly played for a Greek club in the EuroLeague, and he technically won the Greek League championship in 2020 by default. The pandemic canceled the season, and the team was declared champions because they were in first place when the season ended. Effectively laid off because the club could no longer afford his contract, Jimmer signed with the Sharks again and went back to China, but this time, strict pandemic lockdown protocols limited him to the arena or his apartment/hotel room, with no visitors and no chance to leave. He didn’t see Whitney and their kids for about seven months. “It was brutal,” he says. “It was absolutely brutal.”
Back at their home in Colorado, Whitney spent those seven months trying to main-
summer of 2022, he was pondering whether he wanted to return to competitive hoops when he got a call from Fran Fraschilla, a former college coach and ESPN analyst who was helping USA Basketball develop its 3-on-3 program. He asked if Jimmer might be interested in helping the Americans qualify for the Paris Games.
MANY CURRENT OR former NBA players had been floated as options for the U.S. 3-on-3 squad before, says Canyon Barry, who will play alongside Jimmer this summer. Rumors circulate constantly. But they usually vanish, possibly by design. “It’s a really hard sport to play,” Barry explains, “if you’re still trying to pursue that NBA dream.” The schedule makes it almost impossible. Barry abandoned his own G-League pursuits for 3-on-3. So he was skeptical when he heard Jimmer might be joining up, but Jimmer himself was at a juncture where he wanted something more meaningful. The lone word “Olympics” was enough to convince him. As soon as Fraschilla said that was the goal, he was all in. Soon, he was headed to Miami to play in the 2022 AmeriCup.
After four straight victories, the finals of his very first 3-on-3 tournament pitted Jimmer and his teammates against Puerto Rico. To watch that final game is to watch
“HE COULD DIE HAPPY. IT WOULD MEAN EVERYTHING. IT WOULD BE ICONIC. LEGENDARY. IT’S EVERYTHING HE’S EVER WANTED.”
tain her sanity. It was hard enough when he was overseas in the past, but without having him home at all, and without getting to see him in China, it was unbearable. When he returned, both agreed he needed a break from basketball to figure things out and spend time with her and the kids. In the
something very familiar, in a few ways. First, it’s basketball; if you’ve ever watched an NBA or college game on TV, you’ll recognize it right away. But it also operates more like a game you might watch between friends at the park than BYU vs. Utah at the Huntsman Center.
CANYON BARRY, DYLAN TRAVIS, JIMMER FREDETTE AND KAREEM MADDOX TOOK THE GOLD MEDAL AT THE 2023 PAN AMERICAN GAMES ON THE PATH TO QUALIFYING FOR THIS YEAR’S SUMMER GAMES IN PARIS. A CHANCE TO PLAY IN THE OLYMPICS WAS WHAT COMPELLED FREDETTE TO PLAY BASKETBALL AGAIN.
The contests are usually — though not exclusively — played outside. They’re only 10 minutes long, and can end even sooner if one team reaches 21. The shot clock only runs for 12 seconds, so it looks frantic. Every moment is spent trying to find an open look. It follows a half-court, make-it lose-it format, where shots inside the arc are worth 1, and shots outside it are worth 2. And because games are concentrated in a smaller space with fewer players, 3-on-3 requires sweeping competence. You can’t have specialists like in the NBA. The ball is constantly moving between every player on the floor, and if you have a weakness, it’ll get exposed — quickly. “There’s times in 5-on-5 when you can run up and down the court for a three- or four-minute stretch and not touch the ball,” Barry says. “That doesn’t happen in 3-on-3.”
Among Jimmer’s teammates, Barry is probably the most recognizable. His father is NBA Hall-of-Famer Rick Barry, and he was the Southeastern Conference Sixth Man of the Year at Florida in 2017. Dylan Travis played at Florida Southern in the mid-2010s; he helped his team to a Division II national title before playing professionally overseas. And Kareem Maddox was the Ivy League Defensive Player of the Year at Princeton in 2011. He also played overseas for a few years. But unlike Jimmer, none of his teammates are full-time professional athletes.
as a systems engineer at one of the largest defense contractors in the country. Travis teaches special education at a Nebraska high school. And Maddox spent years working in radio and podcasting, even hosting local editions of NPR’s flagship afternoon news program, “All Things Considered.” Since 2022, he’s worked in the personnel department for the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves. “They’re not NBA guys, with the exception of Jimmer,” Team USA coach Joe Lewandowski observed during the team’s introductory press conference. “These are guys that have a passion for something, and they’re going after it and they’re competing.” In that sense, 3-on-3 basketball is more true to the original, amateur spirit of the Olympics than its more well-known cousin. And Jimmer, though an outlier, likes that. There are certainly times when he wonders how he got here. “Here” being Olympics qualification and preparation games all over the world, from Chile to Kosovo to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, in 100-degree heat, with a handful of hardly interested observers watching. It’s a long way from 19,000 fans in the Marriott Center, and sometimes, he misses that. But from the beginning, he decided that if he was going to do this, he was going to commit himself all the way. The end goal, he told himself, would be worth it. He grew up watching the Olym-
“HE HAD TO REEVALUATE HIS DREAM. AND HE HAD TO COME TO PEACE WITH THE FACT THAT THERE ARE SOME THINGS YOU CAN’T CONTROL.”
Barry picked up a master’s degree in nuclear engineering at the University of Florida, and since he left the G League to pursue his 3-on-3 dreams, he’s worked in construction sales and, for the last year and a half,
pics. “I was one of those crazy people that watched literally every event,” he says. To get there by playing the game he loves — how could that possibly lead him astray? “I was prepared for it,” he says. “I was ready
for it and I was excited about it,” whatever the quirks.
One big, unexpected quirk was the travel. When Fraschilla pitched it, Jimmer and Whitney remember he specifically emphasized that travel wouldn’t be excruciating — a tournament for two or three days, then back home. But when a tournament is in Mongolia, that means two full days for travel alone, plus a few days to adjust to the time zone and to practice (the team’s players are scattered across the country, from Florida to Nebraska to Colorado to Minnesota, so practice before tournaments is vital). And then there’s another tournament in Switzerland, and wouldn’t it just make more sense for him to go straight there? Suddenly he’s been gone 27 days. “It kind of ended up being more than we expected,” Whitney admits. “We just have to make it to Paris.”
To get there, though, Jimmer needed to improve quite a bit. The tournament in Miami was a good start — he sank a game-winning 2-pointer to win gold — but it was just the beginning. Most of all, he couldn’t avoid playing defense anymore. “Jimmer Fredette,” Barry says, “was never put on any team for his defensive abilities.” And in 3-on-3, you have to defend. Jimmer had to evolve. “He’s done an unbelievable job,” Barry says, “and has become a solid defender.” He also needed to learn about spacing and ball movement and being a little more cooperative on the floor. And to his credit, Lewandowski says, he responded to those shortcomings with humility. “You’re right,” he likes to say, “I can get better at this.” Not only can he; he wants to get better. “It’s only three guys out there. There’s nowhere to hide,” Jimmer says. “I like that aspect of it.”
It’s forced him to become the type of player he never could be in the NBA: someone well-rounded — and absolutely deadly as a scorer. “For every single defense, on every single team, their No. 1 objective is to stop Jimmer,” Lewandowski says. And, like at BYU, that doesn’t happen much. In addition to the 2022 AmeriCup, Jimmer
TOP: BECAUSE 3-ON-3 PLAYS ON A SMALLER COURT WITH FEWER PLAYERS, WEAKNESSES ARE EXPOSED. UNLIKE THE NBA, WHICH HAS SPECIALISTS, THE PLAYERS ON A 3-ON-3 TEAM HAVE TO BE GOOD AT EVERYTHING.
BOTTOM: JIMMER HAS ALREADY WON GOLD AT SEVERAL 3-ON-3 TOURNAMENTS, BUT OLYMPIC GOLD WOULD BE THE CAPSTONE OF HIS BASKETBALL CAREER.
led Team USA to victory at the 2023 PanAm Games; was named Team USA’s 3-on-3 Male Athlete of the Year for 2023; and almost clinched a World Cup in 2023 against Serbia. With 19 points and the ball in his hands, he shot a 2-pointer that “went as far in the basket as a ball can possibly go without going in,” Barry says. Serbia got possession and scored to win it, sending the Americans home with silver. The squads have played several times since then (with back-and-forth results, including an April matchup in Utsunomiya, Japan, where Jimmer led all scorers with 8 and sunk a game-winning 2-pointer to secure a 21-20 victory), but never with the same significance. The Olympics could finally bring the high-stakes rematch they’ve been waiting for. Barry is mum about who he’s most enthusiastic to play, but when asked about the team’s biggest rival, Whitney isn’t. “It’s 100 percent Serbia,” she says.
JIMMER’S PHONE AND computer backgrounds are Olympic rings. Professionally, he’s thought about little else in the past two years. “When this presented itself, it gave him a new goal, a new aspiration, and just the ultimate opportunity and the ultimate situation,” Whitney says. “He could die happy,” she adds of winning Olympic gold. “It would mean everything. It would be iconic. Legendary. It’s everything he’s ever wanted.”
He admits it takes him 15, maybe even 20 minutes longer to get warmed up nowadays than it did in his 20s, but once he’s ready, he’s in top condition physically. Mentally, he’s never been sharper. And most importantly: “I’m as comfortable in my own skin as I’ve ever been,” he says. “I feel like I’m playing really, really good basketball right now. As good as I’ve ever been.”
FIBA maintains individual rankings of all the world’s 3-on-3 players, and Jimmer currently ranks fourth behind two Serbians and a Dutchman. His coach believes the list doesn’t reflect how good he is. “When you go into a situation where you have the best player in the world playing with you,” he
says of Jimmer, “it gives you that ability to go to a different level.”
In April, Jimmer finally played at the Final Four — during halftime of the UConn-Alabama game, in a 3-on-3 exhibition against Puerto Rico. “It is maybe the biggest arena that I’ve ever been in,” Lewandowski says. The crowd was listed at over 74,000. “I don’t think any of the other guys had ever played on a stage like that.” Jimmer hadn’t either, but he’d come the closest, and he was ready. The U.S. trounced Puerto Rico, 16-8, behind a barrage of vintage Jimmer shots from deep. “He embraces those moments,” Lewandowski says. “And I think that when you have your best player embrace those moments, and want to be in those situations, everyone follows.”
WHITNEY WILL BE watching the Games in person, along with their kids. She’ll be there for 10 days, win or lose, before heading home to Denver — hopefully, alongside her gold-winning husband. And then? “We’ll see,” Jimmer says. “I wish I could say one way or the other. But I think all options are on the table.”
The options include diving into the several companies he owns, or his work with a venture capital firm. His 3-on-3 team will still have a season to play, though he isn’t sure he’ll continue. “I think it’s just kind of dependent on how the Olympics go,” Whitney says. Maybe he’ll get into coaching basketball; he’s wanted to do that for a long time. Or maybe he’ll just prioritize spending time with Whitney and their kids. Whatever he does, it sounds like the 2024 Olympics could be Jimmer’s last basketball run.
Paris could be his last chance to finally deliver on the promise he flashed at BYU — and the last chance for fans to watch him do it. To witness that familiar magic he brought to the basketball world all those years ago. And, amid that familiarity, to witness something new: a player who refuses to be defined by his past, and instead embraces the possibilities of his present — hopefully by hoisting a gold medal at last.
THE AMERICAN DREAM
THE FOUNDERS' SECRET TO FINDING HAPPINESS
BY JEFFREY ROSEN
In his early 20s, Benjamin Franklin recalled, “I conceiv’d the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.” He had been reading some of the classical Greek and Roman philosophers — Pythagoras, Xenophon, Plutarch and Cicero — as well as scanning the popular magazines of the day for self-help advice.
Based on his reading, he had become convinced that the key to self-improvement was daily self-examination. Accordingly, he devised a spiritual accounting system, drafting a list of 12 virtues: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility and chastity. Franklin later expanded his list to 13 by adding another virtue a Quaker friend told him he needed to work on: humility. He resolved each day to run through a checklist of whether or not he had lived up to each virtue, placing a black mark next to the virtue where he had fallen short. Franklin worried that if word got out about his plan for moral perfection, it might be viewed as “a kind of foppery in morals” that “would make me ridiculous.”
(Perhaps he imagined the reaction to a book called “Humility, by Benjamin Franklin.”)
Daunted by all the black marks, he eventually abandoned the project. But “on the whole,” he concluded, “tho’ I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the endeavor, a better and a happier man
THE KEY TO A HEALTHY REPUBLIC BEGINS WITH HOW WE ADDRESS OUR OWN FLAWS AND COMMIT TO BECOMING BETTER CITIZENS OVER TIME.
than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it.”
Franklin’s conclusion was that “without Virtue Man can have no Happiness in this World.” As the motto for his project, he chose these lines from one of the most
widely read books of Stoic self-help philosophy, Cicero’s “Tusculan Disputations”:
O philosophy, guide of life! O searcher out of virtue and exterminator of vice! One day spent well and in accordance with thy precepts is worth an immortality of sin.
Thomas Jefferson, like Franklin, was inspired by “Tusculan Disputations” to draft his own list of 12 virtues — he called them “a dozen canons of conduct in life” — that he believed were key to the pursuit of happiness. And Jefferson, like Franklin, accompanied his list of virtues with practical maxims about how to follow each one, beginning with industry, which Jefferson reduced to the following: “Never put off to tomorrow what you can do to-day.” (Franklin’s version was “Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.”)
Today we think of happiness as the pursuit of pleasure. But classical and Enlightenment thinkers defined happiness as the
JAMES MADISON WOULD HAVE URGED US TO THINK MORE AND TWEET LESS.
pursuit of virtue — as being good, rather than feeling good. For this reason, the Founders believed that the quest for happiness is a daily practice, requiring mental and spiritual self-discipline, as well as mindfulness and rigorous time management. At its core, the Founders viewed the pursuit of happiness as a lifelong quest for character improvement, where we use our powers of reason to moderate our unproductive emotions so that we can be our best selves and serve others. For the Founders, happiness required the daily cultivation of virtue, which the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith defined as “the temper of mind which constitutes the excellent and praiseworthy character.”
If you had to sum it up in one sentence, the classical definition of the pursuit of happiness meant being a lifelong learner, with a commitment to practicing the daily habits that lead to character improvement, self-mastery, flourishing and growth. Understood in these terms, happiness is always something to be pursued rather than obtained — a quest rather than a destination.
THROUGHOUT AMERICAN HISTORY, the meaning of the pursuit of happiness has evolved in unexpected ways. The ancient wisdom that defined happiness as self-mastery, emotional self-regulation, tranquility of mind and the quest for self-improvement was distilled in the works of Cicero, summed up by Franklin in his 13 virtues, and used by John Adams in his “Thoughts on Government.”
After Jefferson inscribed the idea in the Declaration of Independence, it showed up in the Federalist Papers, the essays James Madison and Alexander Hamilton wrote in support of the Constitution, focusing on the promotion of public happiness. It was evoked by Presidents John Quincy Adams and Abraham Lincoln, as well as by the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, to defend the ideal of self-reliance and to advocate for the destruction of slavery. It became the basis of Alexis de Tocqueville’s idea of “self-interest properly understood” and of Justice Louis Brandeis’ idea of freedom of conscience.
The ancient wisdom fell out of fashion in the 1960s and in the “Me Decade” that followed, when our understanding about the pursuit of happiness was transformed from being good to feeling good. But the classical ideal of happiness was resurrected and confirmed in the 1990s by insights from social psychology and cognitive behavioral therapy, which found that we can best achieve emotional intelligence by developing habits of emotional self-regulation — training ourselves to turn negative thoughts and emotions into positive ones — through the power of the imagination.
The Founders talked incessantly about their struggles for self-improvement and their efforts to regulate their anxieties, emotions and perturbations of the mind. They tried to calm their anxieties through the daily practice of the habits of mindfulness and time management. Aristotle said that good character comes from the cultivation of habits, and it’s remarkable how much time and energy many of the leading members of the founding generation devoted to their own lifelong quests to practice the habits that would improve their character. They took seriously the Pythagorean injunction to use every hour of the day to cultivate their minds and bodies. They created disciplined schedules for reading, writing and exercise, and they kept daily accounts of their successes and failures in living up to the ideals they found in the books of ancient wisdom, trying to use each moment productively by living in the present with calm but intense purpose and focus. The Founders may not have meditated, but they practiced the habits of mindfulness.
Following the classical and Enlightenment philosophers, the Founders believed that personal self-government was necessary for political self-government. In their view, the key to a healthy republic begins with how we address our own flaws and commit to becoming better citizens over time. In the Federalist Papers, Madison and Hamilton made clear that the Constitution was designed to foster deliberation so that citizens could avoid retreating into
the angry mobs and partisan factions that can be inflamed by demagogues. Ancient Athens had fallen because the demagogue Cleon had seduced the Athenian assembly into continuing the war with the Peloponnesian League; Rome had fallen because the people were corrupted by Caesar, who offered them luxury in exchange for liberty. Only by governing their selfish emotions as individuals could citizens avoid degenerating into selfish factions that threatened the common good. The way for citizens to create a more perfect union, the Founders insisted, was to govern themselves in private as well as in public, cultivating the same personal deliberation, moderation and harmony in our own minds that we strive to maintain in the constitution of the state. Madison would have urged us to think more and tweet less.
In this sense, the Founders believed that the pursuit of happiness regards freedom not as boundless liberty to do whatever feels good in the moment but as bounded liberty to make wise choices that will help us best develop our capacities and talents over the course of our lives.
They believed that the pursuit of happiness includes responsibilities as well as rights — the responsibility to limit ourselves, restrain ourselves and master ourselves, so that we achieve the wisdom and harmony that are necessary for true freedom.
“Obviously freedom must carry with it the meaning of freedom to limit oneself,” the composer Leonard Bernstein said of Beethoven’s choice of a single note in his “Eroica Symphony.” “Freedom is not infinite, not boundless liberty, as some hippies like to think — do anything you want, anytime, anywhere you want to. No, freedom isn’t that. It means being free to make decisions, to determine one’s own course.” Bernstein went on to connect Beethoven’s struggle to balance freedom and harmony in the symphony with the same freedom of citizens to govern themselves in a democracy. “In Beethoven, as in democracy, freedom is a discipline, combining the right to choose freely, with the gift of choosing wisely.”
Citing Cicero’s famous analogy between “harmony in song” and “concord in the State,” John Adams, too, compared the harmony of a well-tempered state constitution to the harmony of a well-tempered orchestra. “As the treble, the tenor, and the bass exist in nature, they will be heard in the concert,” Adams wrote in his “Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America.” “(I)f they are arranged by Handel, in a skilful composition, they produce rapture the most exquisite that harmony can excite; but if they are confused together, without order, they will ‘Rend with tremendous sound your ears asunder.’” This was the classical understanding of the pursuit of happiness: the freedom to make daily choices about how to balance emotion and reason that lead to truth, order, harmony and wisdom, aligned with the divine will or the natural harmonies of the universe. The Founders understood the importance of our spiritual nature, and for many of them, the pursuit of happiness was a spiritual quest.
By attempting to travel into the minds of the Founders, we can begin to understand their quest for the good life on their own terms. By reading the books they read and following their own daily attempts at self-accounting, we can better understand the largely forgotten core of their moral and political philosophy: that moderating emotions is the secret of tranquility of mind; that tranquility of mind is the secret of happiness; that daily habits are the secret of self-improvement; and that personal self-government is the secret of political self-government.
It’s not a surprise that the Founders often fell short of their own ideals of moral perfection. But what is a surprise is the seriousness with which they took the quest, on a daily basis, to become more perfect.
EXCERPTED FROM “THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS: HOW CLASSICAL WRITERS ON VIRTUE INSPIRED THE LIVES OF THE FOUNDERS AND DEFINED AMERICA” BY JEFFREY ROSEN. COPYRIGHT 2024 © BY JEFFREY ROSEN. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF SIMON & SCHUSTER, AN IMPRINT OF SIMON & SCHUSTER, LLC.
ONLY BY GOVERNING THEIR SELFISH EMOTIONS AS INDIVIDUALS COULD CITIZENS AVOID DEGENERATING INTO SELFISH FACTIONS THAT THREATENED THE COMMON GOOD.
DISSATISFIED DEMOCRACY
DO WE REALLY WANT A GOVERNMENT BY THE PEOPLE?
BY HARVEY C. MANSFIELD
Student activists have been out in force this year to protest at American universities. They are called activists because they are dissatisfied with the normal activity of our country’s intellectual centers of research and education. Just as judicial activism means going beyond normal judging, so student activism means greater than normal interest in politics.
“Normal” in our country is exercising one’s individual rights within the law. It includes those few students who ready their talents for politics as well as the many who will be, we hope, informed voters. Activists want your attention and are sometimes willing to coerce, even perhaps violently, to get it. They break rules, norms and laws. Though they claim the right to speak freely, activists rarely argue; they make demands. Not for them, the normal ways democracy affords to persuade others.
Setting aside indignation for the means activists employ, or the unworthy causes they at times espouse, there may be something to be learned from activism about the nature of modern democracy. We voters may not be entirely different, in the end, though it may not seem obvious quite why.
Activists oppose established elites and the elitism they stand for, but as students, they are also prepping themselves for the effort of becoming a new elite replacing the old one. Having learned how to get attention, the new elite will want to rule.
But modern democracy is hostile to rule and depends on consent. We know from
MERIT REMAINS A CHALLENGE TO DEMOCRACY PRECISELY BECAUSE IT IS NECESSARY. THOSE LIVING IN A DEMOCRACY WILL OFTEN BE TEMPTED TO DENOUNCE ITS ELITES AND THEIR SHOWY, ARROGANT ELITISM.
the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and endowed with rights; to secure these rights, they consent to government. Government, in this view, comes from a contract; it is not imposed by a ruler. Government is said to represent us, meaning that it acts for us and does not
impose on us like a ruler. This contractual view of government was discovered in the 17th century by philosophers who wished to replace the old notion of rule, dating from Aristotle, with a new idea that government should protect rights rather than establish the rule of a certain principle.
Aristotle had said that human beings are political by nature and use their reason to claim to rule according to the principles they think best. Democracy is the rule of the people for the sake of a democratic way of life. The modern thinkers, led by John Locke, held that individuals have rights before they have government, so that government is necessarily limited. In order to represent the people, it must secure or protect rights, but not demand, as a ruler would, that they be exercised in a certain way. The exercise of rights is up to the individuals who hold those rights.
This distinction between representation and ruling is fundamental to our democracy and to liberal democracies around the world. Coming back to the activists, representation creates what we regard as normal and denies their desire to boss others around. But what about the elites that
the activists complain of and oppose? Don’t they rule, even in a modern democracy? Is there not such a thing as meritocracy that endangers democracy?
The answer is yes. If government is necessary and all persons are equal, the most truly democratic way to select it is by lottery. Lottery makes the inequality of governing into a mere chance and does not imply that success is deserved. If success comes from an election, however, it is deserved. The winner won for reasons that in some way made him better than the loser. Nowadays, elections are considered to be democratic, even the essence of democracy, but Aristotle was correct to say that they are aristocratic. They imply that some persons are superior to others, even if they are elected by everyone, and if the reasons for their success are feeble and biased.
So we democrats need to admit that perfect equality is impossible. Some jobs are necessary and will require capable people to do them. We need plumbers, for example. All of us breathe a sigh of relief when the plumber arrives. The plumber, however necessary, needs to be paid but doesn’t boss us around. This kind of meritocracy doesn’t disturb democracy very much. Merit, and reward for merit, are justifiable in democracy if they serve the needs of democracy and do not openly challenge its principle of equality. But suppose the inequality is not so modest or little threatening as the plumber. People who want to get ahead, ambitious types, have something of a ruler in their minds. They want you to make way for them, which means get out of their way. Ambitious people like to compete, to come in ahead of others and to show their success rather than be quiet about it. The rest of us may distrust such folk, but we depend on them to seek promotion in a company, to start a new enterprise, and, in politics, to run for office. In our private lives, we value those who accept responsibility for dealing with difficult or messy situations. There are people, generally, whom we look up to; their merit is useful and acceptable. They are not equal themselves but, while violating equality, they make it work.
Between these two types of merit, the latter does threaten equality because it contains a measure of ruling. It is made less threatening, however, under a constitution like ours in America with provision for federalism and separation of powers, two very important principles that force individuals with the merit to win elections to compete with one another. They are what James Madison called “auxiliary precautions” besides elections that keep unequal merit in check. Together with the public constitution, the private sphere in America keeps competition alive where powerful individuals with monopolies might otherwise tell others how to live.
Still, merit remains a challenge to democracy precisely because it is necessary. Those living in a democracy will often be tempted to denounce its elites and their showy, arrogant elitism. That accusation comes from the left and the right and the center, and it comes from one elite to another, as well as from ordinary people against the elite. Professors like to accuse the moneyed elite for being rich while forgetting that they themselves with their big mouths and fluent pens also have unequal advantage. But ordinary citizens, too, entertain suspicions that occasionally break out as angry denunciation against those who seem or want to be better than ordinary. At the same time, there are celebrities who enjoy popular favor as long as they behave well by thanking their fans and do not appear condescending. Actors, musicians and athletes excel in ways all can appreciate, and they do it without claiming to rule because of their celebrity. Sometimes actors take a political stand, but usually without much effect. One of them, Ronald Reagan, became president, yet did it through partisan political channels using his talents for attracting votes rather than his, admittedly, somewhat mediocre fame as an actor.
Democracies democratize whatever inequalities in society are obvious or implicit. The authority of parents over children might seem to be a natural necessity, though hard to justify democratically. Everyone knows
that children are “dependents” on adults. Yet the tenor of American education from start to finish is anti-authoritarian, to put it mildly. It is very hard for us to admit to ourselves and to others that anyone must be ruled often against their inclinations. Teachers are an elite but understand themselves rather as professionals serving democracy rather than diminishing it. Professional elites are to be found everywhere in modern democracy but elitism is always deplored. Except for the Marines — “the Few, the Proud, the Marines.” But they come from all ranks of society and they defend a democracy.
ORDINARY PEOPLE VOTE, which as seen above, is an aristocratic action of choosing the best. It is also an action of rule. One often hears a deprecating remark intended to sound modest that goes: “It’s my view, I’m not imposing it on you.” But when voting, imposing on others is what you are doing. Whether you are pro-life or pro-choice, you want a society that agrees with you, and when you vote on that issue, or any other, you are doing what you can to impose your view on the whole. This is partisanship, a problem for representative government if it wants to avoid ruling. The government resulting from an election that represents voters is supposed to secure their rights, not exercise them; this is the limitation that characterizes modern democracy. Limited government has to be nonpartisan, impartial among the opinions that divide society. But democratic citizens won’t feel that their rights are safe if governments impose partisan opinions on the exercise of rights. They are likely to become activists to defend themselves against the opinions they reject.
It seems, then, that protest activism for the sake of ruling others is hard to distinguish from normal, partisan activism. They seem to set forth the same desire to rule, and the “normal” is merely less ruling than the transgressive, protest activism of students and professional agitators. Our parties seem to cross from representation into ruling. In fact, modern democracy began with an attitude hostile to parties, as it was
the terrible wars of religious parties in the 17th century that induced the political elite in Britain to adopt the representative government set forth in the writings of John Locke. Yes, it was the elite that made modern democracy and did so to prevent civil war by parties desiring to impose their will on society. Only in time did parties become respectable as limited in their ambition and willing to tolerate alternation with their opponents. In the United States, the founder of the Democratic-Republican party, Thomas Jefferson, declared his triumphant election in 1800 showed that his party was the true party. It was not until Martin Van Buren’s presidency (1837-1841) that a president began to speak of the opposition party as if it deserved to exist.
Do parties rule or do they represent? It seems that they do some of both, representing in a way that falls short of tyrannical domination but still contains something of rule. To the extent that partisans are activists, they want to rule. But the normal parties argue strenuously with each other and neither want or expect the other to disappear or be annihilated. Aristotle is right that man is by nature a political, meaning partisan, animal. But modern democracy has found a way to tamp down partisanship by emphasizing the rights of individuals rather than parties. Insofar as we emphasize individuals, we hold to a nonpartisan standard. But then it turns out that we argue about the allegedly nonpartisan standard, as for example on abortion. Who is the individual with rights, the woman or the unborn? Parties are needed to define the individual and espouse its rights. In sum, modern democracy seems to be the creation of Locke with more than a dash of Aristotle, Locke’s opponent.
A DIFFICULTY ARISES in the fundamentals of Locke’s thinking about individual rights. In order to put individual rights first, one must find a situation beyond societies in which individuals are given their place and their rights by society rather than by individual choice. In these normal societies,
individuals appear to be ruled. Locke found a way to get beyond this domination of society by conceiving a “state of nature,” where there is no common judge, no government, to decide disputes. In this state of nature, individuals are supreme and yet equal in their inalienable rights to life, liberty and property. An inalienable right is one that cannot be taken away from you. But if everyone has such rights, how can government bring peace to the inevitable conflict that will arise? The answer is government by consent of the governed, the self-government in which modern democracy takes pride. This government is made by contract among individuals, who trade their absolute right that is insecure in the state of nature for limited rights that are secured by government limited to that purpose. This is Locke’s reasoning, and more or less consciously, it is ours too.
The trouble is that when you trade your inalienable right, you will want to keep track of what the government does with it. Will it actually do the limited job it has been given? So our regime answers this need for accountability with a constitution and with elections. But suppose the constitution is interpreted against you or your party loses the election? You will be tempted, and with some reason, to withdraw your consent and look for some other constitution or society you might prefer. The difficulty with an inalienable right is that it does you no good to keep it and you cannot give it away. You can’t keep it because it’s insecure, and you can’t give it away because it’s inalienable. A fundamental inalienable right of the individual is, if you look hard at it, nothing but Aristotle’s desire to rule concealed by Locke’s invention of a state of nature one never sees.
There is a human desire to rule others that occasionally rears up when it is riled. With a good constitution and a minimum of virtue in society, it can be controlled most of the time, but not easily and not always. It takes a statesman, or perhaps in a democracy an elite of statesmen, to keep society whole and guide it to an end it can regard with pride.
All this has been to argue that the student
activism we have been seeing is, in its way, normal. It is the main feature of modern democracy, part of its fundamental constitution, to be dissatisfied with itself. It wants to represent the people but often succeeds only in ruling them. This means that student protest should not be a surprise, but it does not mean it should be welcomed or excused as youthful exuberance. Student protest makes its points by breaking rules rather than by making arguments. But breaking rules has the same desire to rule. The protesters would say that they are more honest and straightforward than the elite they confront because they are not afraid of rules that are rigged to keep them silent.
Yet what do the protesters have to say but to issue demands? The First Amendment contains rights to free speech and free assembly. Free speech, unfortunately, has been transformed into “free expression.” Protests against government gained respectability as expression, and nowadays are held to be the best form of speech, for it is more emphatic and passionate than mere words. But words are required for argument, and argument puts reason to work. Speech at its best is giving reasons that persuade people freely. That was the original purpose of the First Amendment: to support free government with free speech. Free speech includes the right to assemble to “petition” the government.
The student protests want the contrary — to intimidate an audience. They seek to rule, and to rule like bullies, using bullhorns and shouting juvenile chants and slogans. They threaten violence they may not plan to use. In doing so, they spread their own discontent and abuse the democratic right to be dissatisfied. They also waste their precious time at universities, where they should be cultivating their minds in order to be worthy of helping rule in our constitutional democracy.
HARVEY
THE RISE OF OUR ‘JURISTOCRACY’
THE
DANGER OF RELYING ON THE SUPREME COURT TO SOLVE OUR PROBLEMS
BY JAMES C. PHILLIPS
Looking back, historians labeled the 17th and 18th centuries the Age of Reason. The period from approximately the 15th to the 17th centuries historians named the Age of Exploration (or Discovery). And if some future historians give a moniker to our day, perhaps it will be the “Age of Celebrity.” From social media influencers to athletes to politicians, we want to make celebrities of just about everyone.
And this tendency has not bypassed the U.S. Supreme Court. For instance, justices these days appear on television shows, like “Sesame Street”; write their memoirs, for which they earn millions of dollars; receive rock star treatment at various events and conferences; have their personal workouts go viral; and even acquire nicknames, like the “Notorious RBG.” Similarly, big cases get massive headlines, confirmation hearings draw millions of television viewers and the death of a justice while still on the court is a national event with wall-to-wall media coverage.
But this “celebritization” of Supreme Court justices was not always the case. Early in our history, it was hard to get good candidates to take or keep a spot on the court. John Jay, our first chief justice, resigned
that position to become the governor of New York. John Quincy Adams, a decade before he became president, turned down a position on the court. From 1810-1861 the court convened in the basement of the U.S. Capitol building. And just 100 years ago, George Sutherland was nominated and confirmed without even knowing it while on a trip to Europe. No wonder Alexander
WHILE COURTS HAVE AN IMPORTANT DUTY TO INTERPRET THE CONSTITUTION AND APPLY IT TO DISPUTES BEFORE THEM, OUR SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT IS NOT A “JURISTOCRACY.”
Hamilton argued at the founding that the Supreme Court would be the “least dangerous branch.”
However, making celebrities out of Supreme Court justices is merely a symptom of a broader problematic trend: running to the court to get what we want rather than the more painstaking process of legislating.
So perhaps historians will give another name for our day: the “Age of Courts.”
At some level, this is understandable — it is much easier to try and convince a few judges than hundreds of members in a legislature. Likewise, if one wins in court, one does not need to compromise with one’s opponents, since lawsuits are usually a zero-sum game. It is no wonder this type of activity is sometimes called “lawfare.”
Yet this tendency to turn to law rather than politics to get what we want is deeply damaging to our constitutional democratic republic. For instance, by outsourcing our contentious policy debates to attorneys and judges, our muscles of self-government atrophy.
Abraham Lincoln warned of this danger. In his First Inaugural Address, he noted the tendency of people seeking to have “the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people … irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court.” The result, Lincoln lamented, was that in so doing “the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.”
When we cease to be our own rulers, we give up on self-government.
We have also lost control of the Constitution. We seemed to have imbibed the quip from former Chief Justice Charles Hughes that “the Constitution is what the judges say it is.” But while courts have an important duty to interpret the Constitution and apply it to disputes before them, our system of government is not a “juristocracy.” Other branches have a constitutional duty to interpret the Constitution and comport their behavior to it rather than just doing or passing what they please and letting the court decide whether they’re playing within constitutional bounds.
This used to be more in the ethos of the other branches. Read early congressional debates and much of the discussion is over whether a bill is constitutional. For example, when a devastating fire destroyed much of Savannah, Georgia, in 1796, Congress ultimately decided not to provide federal relief to the city. Not because Congress didn’t care — there was certainly agony over the suffering the city residents had and were enduring — but because Congress didn’t read the Constitution as authorizing spending on relief for Savannah.
Or consider the debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act, where one senator encouraged other senators to pass the bill and leave to the Supreme Court a determination of its constitutionality. The suggestion brought swift rebuke from his colleagues, who argued that senators aren’t under obligation to vote for bills they consider unconstitutional.
Now Congress passes legislation and, when pressed whether the new law is constitutional, members of Congress frequently respond with remarks similar to a representative recently, “Let’s let the courts decide whether it’s constitutional. That’s not for Congress to decide, that’s why we have courts to make that decision.”
We see something similar with the president. For example, it used to be that presidents would not veto bills on policy grounds, but only if the president viewed the bill as unconstitutional. Now we have just the opposite, with presidents releasing
signing statements that they think the bill is unconstitutional but have signed it anyway.
We, as the nation’s sovereign, also have the duty to understand the Constitution and make sure it’s being followed. We exercise this oversight primarily through petitioning the government and voting.
This turning to the courts to solve our political disputes, not surprisingly, affects our politics. Litigation tends to be a zero-sum game — someone wins and someone loses. Courts are not institutionally designed to balance competing views and values and come up with a compromise where no one gets everything they want but also no one gets nothing they want.
But relying on litigation rather than leg-
MAKING CELEBRITIES OUT OF SUPREME COURT JUSTICES IS MERELY A SYMPTOM OF A BROADER PROBLEMATIC TREND: RUNNING TO THE COURT TO GET WHAT WE WANT RATHER THAN THE MORE PAINSTAKING PROCESS OF LEGISLATING.
islation for contested political issues makes our politics resemble litigation where our elected representatives are unwilling to work with the other side and unwilling to settle for anything less than total victory. But legislating should not resemble the legal process. Perhaps this explains some of Congress’s current dysfunction and why we are so polarized.
It has not always been so. Rather than file a lawsuit or pack the Supreme Court to overturn the infamous Dred Scott decision, Congress sought to amend the Constitution. Similarly, rather than relying on the court to deal with discrimination in employment, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
All of this is not to downplay the good courts have done and the important role they play in our constitutional system. Besides resolving individual disputes, courts serve the important function of upholding the compromises that the people’s representatives, through the Constitution or Congress, have adopted. Thus, we need courts to police the division of power between the branches of the federal government or between the federal government and the states. Likewise, we need the courts to uphold the rights that have been ensconced in law when lawmakers, attuned to the better angels of their nature, have decided to protect minorities of all stripes who have little defense against a political majority.
But we need to only rely on courts for their proper constitutional role. If we relied on our arms for standing and walking, not only would our legs atrophy, but we wouldn’t stand or walk as well as we could have with legs. So too with the judiciary. We should cease trying to turn them into a legislature.
Rather than spending so much time, effort and money on litigation, we should instead focus on coalition building, the political process and compromise. After all, our Constitution was a product of compromise and designed to facilitate it. We may not get everything we want, but our republic will be healthier. And having a healthy constitutional democratic republic is something we should want above any short-term gain. It is a blessing handed to us by our ancestors and one we should preserve for our posterity. To do so, let’s keep courts in their rightful place and reinvigorate the republican government muscles we have let sit far too often for too long. Our Constitution starts, after all, not with “We the Judges,” but with that important reminder of whose duty it is to preserve our republic: “We the People.”
PHILLIPS IS DIRECTOR AND ASSOCIATE
JAMES C.
PROFESSOR OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT INITIATIVE OF THE WHEATLEY INSTITUTE AT BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY.
THE WARNING
LINCOLN PREDICTED THIS MOMENT. HE DIDN'T LIKE WHAT HE SAW
BY JUSTIN COLLINGS
Alanky, tall and ungainly figure strode awkwardly to the rostrum. His limbs were long, and his hands were huge. His abundant black hair was unruly, and his clothes fit exceedingly ill. The audience must have found his looks unpromising, but as soon as he began to speak, it was clear that he commanded uncommon rhetorical power. He was all of 28 years old.
Abraham Lincoln’s “Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois,” delivered on January 27, 1838, is not his most famous speech, but it is his first famous speech. In it, he gave glimpses of the qualities that would one day make him the greatest orator, and perhaps the greatest leader, in American history. His stated topic, “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” has a haunting relevance for us today in a time of toxic polarization, rhetorical stridency and, increasingly, more-than-rhetorical calls for political violence. Ninescore and six years ago, the young Lincoln issued a warning that was wise beyond his years — one that beckons to us now.
Lincoln began by describing what he
called an “ill-omen amongst us.” That omen, he continued, was “the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgement of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive
WE FACE A REAL RISK TO A REPUBLIC IN THE INCREASING WILLINGNESS, FROM UBER-PARTISANS OF ALL POLITICAL STRIPES, TO DEFY ESTABLISHED LAWS AND TO ASSAIL ESTABLISHED INSTITUTIONS.
ministers of justice.” For Lincoln, law was the civic embodiment of reason. Passion, including political passion, was reason’s enemy and opposite.
Lincoln worried that an increasing tendency to defy established laws and to flout inherited institutions had unleashed a
“mobocratic spirit” that would undermine the people’s attachment to constitutional government. If popular commitment to constitutional structures weakened or waned, the country would grow correspondingly vulnerable to the influence of demagogues — to “men of … talent and ambition” who were willing to manipulate popular passions to serve their personal ends at the expense of the common good.
The problem, Lincoln predicted, would intensify as the republic matured. The founding generation, he explained, was committed to the constructive project of establishing a durable government on the principle of personal liberty and popular rule. In words that foreshadowed a more famous speech he would give a quarter-century later, Lincoln observed that “(t)heir ambition aspired to display before an admiring world, a practical demonstration of the truth of a proposition, which had hitherto been considered, at best no better, than problematical; namely, the capability of a people to govern themselves.”
The founders, on Lincoln’s telling,
succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. But the demagogues of future generations would not be content to operate within existing structures. “Towering genius,” Lincoln warned, “disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.” If a future demagogue arose whose ambition
outstripped his devotion to the Constitution and the laws, the results could be catastrophic. With “nothing left to be done in the way of building up,” Lincoln warned, “he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.” If that happened, “it will require the people to be united with each other,
attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.”
In response to the threats he described, Lincoln called for a full-bore reinforcement of the country’s civic culture and the citizenry’s devotion to the rule of law. “Let every American,” he roared, “every lover of liberty, every well wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others.” Lincoln called on all Americans to pledge “to the support of the Constitution and Laws” their lives, their property and their sacred honor. “Let reverence for the laws,” he continued, “be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles in her lap — let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; — let it be written in Primmers, spelling books, and in Almanacs; — let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation.”
Lincoln’s rhetoric might strike us as overwrought, and his talk of a “political religion” might make us squirm. But we face a real risk to our republic in the increasing willingness, from uber-partisans of all political stripes, to defy established laws and to assail established institutions. We desperately need precisely the return to civic virtue and the reinvigoration of constitutional culture for which young Lincoln pleaded.
In his own era, alas, Lincoln proved prophetic. In his eyes, the secession of slaveholding Southern states from the Union represented the triumph of mobocracy, the apotheosis of demagoguery and lawlessness. In an era of mounting impatience with legal limitations and constitutional restraints, we would do well to heed Lincoln’s warning before the forces of disunion gain any additional ground.
JUSTIN COLLINGS SERVES AS ACADEMIC VICE PRESIDENT, LAW PROFESSOR AND WHEATLEY INSTITUTE SCHOLAR AT BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY.
BIG BROTHER
SILICON VALLEY'S THREAT TO DEMOCRACY
BY FRANK H. MCCOURT JR.
We face a choice about our future.
Do we want to envision, write and be in charge of a future in which we are respected as individuals and in which we can enhance and enrich our society? Or do we want our future to be written by a few giant corporations, whose technology, algorithms and devices steadily chip away at our humanity? It’s a choice between human beings and machines. Everything — and I mean everything — hinges on this decision.
The future will be digital. There is no turning back the information technology revolution that has transformed our lives and blurred the lines between our digital and physical existences. The internet, the most profound expression of that digital transformation, will necessarily remain integral to our economic, social and political organizations. Still, the future I would choose is one in which the internet has a far more positive impact on our lives than it does today. It’s a digital future that has humans at its center.
The internet began as a utopian dream. The idea was first shaped, at least partly, by military considerations. But the internet of popular imagination, the one that some visionary academics, Silicon Valley’s
big-thinking coders, and a community of cyber-hippies latched on to in the 1980s and ’90s, the internet of mass disruption and freedom of information — that idea of an internet was one that was going to liberate us. Powerful elites would no longer control information systems or dominate the commercial networks that defined the economy. The “marketplace of ideas” would
THE INTERNET EXPLAINS WHY OUR NATIONAL ARGUMENTS SEEM INTRACTABLE. IT’S WHY EVERY ISSUE IS REDUCED, IN PUBLIC DEBATE, TO THE LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR.
organically bubble up the best of humanity and give scientists and innovators, wherever they might be, a real chance to improve life on this planet. It would be an internet of freedom, of unfettered access, of inclusion, of diversity, of collaborative and constructive connections between all people everywhere.
That’s not the internet we ended up with.
As it currently functions, the internet — despite all the conveniences and connectivity it has unleashed — is the primary cause of a pervasive unease in the United States and other democratic societies. The internet explains why our national arguments seem intractable. It’s why every issue is reduced, in public debate, to the lowest common denominator. It’s why youth suicide rates are rising, why politics is filled with toxicity and why many now dread Thanksgiving dinners. It’s why some people in California, much like their red state counterparts in Texas, are seriously contemplating secession. It’s why armed guards are deployed at school board meetings. It is why a massive law enforcement effort has failed to curtail the spread of a deadly fentanyl epidemic, with supply routes of the drug secretly coordinated over social media.
It’s why Americans’ confidence in a variety of civil institutions, as measured by the Edelman Trust Barometer, is at an all-time low. It’s why people are calling this a post-truth society.
On the face of it, these issues might seem unrelated. I’m here to tell you otherwise, that they all stem from flaws in our information
system. Information is the lifeblood of any society, and our three-decade-old digital system for distributing it is fatally corrupt at its heart. It has failed to function as a trusted, neutral exchange of facts and ideas and has therefore catastrophically hindered our ability to gather respectfully, to debate, to compromise and to hash out solutions to the many problems we face, big and small. Everything, ultimately, comes down to our ability to communicate openly and trustfully with one another. We have lost that ability — thanks to how the internet has evolved away from its open, decentralized ideals.
To be clear, when we refer to what the “internet” is doing to society, we are talking about the lived experience of the internet, the way we interact with that giant space of information and content that we tap into every day, not the physical infrastructure that connects the devices through which that information flows. That infrastructure remains more or less within the decentralized, no-one-in-charge structure that was built out in the 1970s by a group of well-intended computer scientists from a few U.S. universities. The internet’s problems exist higher “up the stack” at what computer scientists refer to as the “application layer” with what we now recognize as the “platforms” controlled by the Big Tech companies of Silicon Valley. Their dominance arose out of the changes that came in the 1990s with the arrival of the World Wide Web.
In this phase, the one we’re still living in, “the internet” became centralized, controlled by these corporations. It fueled the failure of our information system.
This failure has resulted in social regression. We feel a loss of control over our lives because we are now subject to what I call “digital feudalism”; it’s as if we were marching back toward the Middle Ages. Our sense of agency has been seized from us by a clutch of corporate behemoths. You know their names: Alphabet’s Google, Meta’s Facebook, the Chinese company ByteDance’s TikTok, et al. These companies have done great harm to us. By scraping and stealing our data, hiding the influence of their proprietary algorithms,
and persistently surveilling our online activity, they have stripped us of our agency, of our capacity to set the course of our lives. They have also completely undermined our collective ability to drive progress and, as bad as all this sounds, if we don’t move quickly to fix things, it will get much worse as the age of artificial intelligence rapidly takes shape.
The situation is urgent. We must change this system. Do it right, though, and we will finally, properly unlock the immense potential of the internet, the innate possibility that comes with interconnecting everyone on the planet. We can chart a path to a new, human-friendly internet and a better world.
BEFORE THE ENLIGHTENMENT spread across Europe, inspiring the likes of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson in colonial America, most people were subjects. Their claim on life was quite literally subject to the discretion of a king or queen, and their livelihoods were determined by an accident of birth that left them obligated to serve the lord or baron on whose land they toiled. Under American democracy, people became citizens, a concept that not only recognized their rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness but also ensured that their votes — not some specious notion of divine right — would determine who governed them. It was a direct manifestation of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notion of popular sovereignty, which proposed that governments have a legitimate claim on power only when they are derived from the “general will of the people,” a situation that creates what he called a “social contract” between the government and the people. In this way, the rights and responsibilities conferred on the new citizens of the United States of America would collectively empower them to determine a shared destiny for their nation. Citizens would have agency — a capacity to make choices and effect changes — whereas subjects did not.
In contrast to these core principles of liberty, our current reality is, in our mind, best described as digital feudalism. Like poor, powerless subjects of monarchs and
aristocrats, we are serfs, subjugated by a small group of companies that have exploited a feudal internet architecture. In this system, human beings are treated as afterthoughts — or not thought of at all — in service of building massive data extraction platforms. In the United States, the ruling clique comprises our era’s biggest software companies: Google’s owner, Alphabet; Facebook and Instagram’s owner, Meta; Amazon; Apple; and Microsoft. The latter, with its giant investment in the research organization OpenAI, has joined the tech arms race to control our data, and the power and profits that come with it. The founders, senior executives and large investors in the Big Tech companies command great sway over the operations of the internet. Thanks to them and their management teams, whose compensation models incentivize them to maintain or double down on the status quo, we live at the discretion of their proprietary algorithms. The software programs based on these algorithms — which, much like computers, servers and devices, should be understood as machines — treat us as quarries from which to mine our data, now the most valuable commodity of the digital economy. They then aggregate and organize this data and use it to create tools with which their corporate leaders can influence us.
Aided by sensors and data-capture points positioned at every turn in our daily life — in the words and emojis we put into texts and social media posts, in our purchases, in the movements of our computer mice, in the cameras pointed at us, in the GPS devices that track us, in the listening devices in our homes, and in the music to which we listen, the videos we watch and the photos we share — these machines store far more information about us and our social connections than our own brains could possibly store. As one MIT professor put it to me, “We are living in a minimum-security prison. We just don’t know it.”
According to a 2016 ProPublica report, Facebook at that time collected an average of 52,000 data points on each of its users. That number, now likely very much higher,
gives a sense of how we are viewed by the platforms. Their “black box” systems, built with code into which no outsiders have visibility, extract a valuable commodity (our data). They then use that commodity to assign us each a profile and to fabricate a powerful machine (a proprietary algorithm) with which they categorize, target and manipulate us. In doing so, they systematically dehumanize us — much as the feudal system dehumanized peasants.
In all of this, there is no social contract or even a moral obligation for these platforms not to treat us as their pawns.
Instead, they’ve buried us in legal contracts, most of them in fine print that no one reads, imposing terms and conditions surrounding our use of these applications that compel us to forgo any claims over our data and the content we create and post. We’ve literally signed away our rights and surrendered our personhood to these Silicon Valley giants.
This dynamic has been building for two decades, but only very recently have more and more people started to recognize the enormity of what we’ve given up. A seminal work in this field, Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff’s 2019 book, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” recounts how the data extraction model originated at Google in the early 2000s. Facebook, after discovering it could profit from a powerful self-reinforcing feedback loop, adopted and updated the model. Essentially, this is how it worked: Facebook’s surveillance of its users’ activity generated insights into how people responded to different textual, visual or aural stimuli. Facebook’s data scientists and engineers then tweaked the platform’s content curation algorithm in a bid to steer users into engaging with other users for longer periods of time. Internally, Facebook called this engagement meaningful social interactions, and these metrics served Facebook’s and its clients’ revenue goals. The cycle then repeated over and over, as new behaviors generated new data, allowing for iterative, perpetual “improvement” (i.e., more precise targeting) in the algorithm’s ability to modify user behavior.
One of the most notorious applications of this arose in the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, news of which broke in 2018. For years, the British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica collected Facebook users’ data without their consent and used it to feed them microtargeted disinformation. One of the goals was to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election; another was to sway the United Kingdom’s Brexit vote. But, in many ways, that high-profile scandal was an outlier: A far bigger, if more subtle, problem is the data extraction model’s impact on our day-to-day lives. In multitudinous ways, these platforms’ algorithms color our view of the world, shape how we react to issues that matter, and drive us into the hands of advertisers. Zuboff says this exploitative business model, which has migrated from
AS IT
CURRENTLY FUNCTIONS,
THE INTERNET IS THE PRIMARY CAUSE OF A PERVASIVE UNEASE IN THE UNITED STATES AND OTHER DEMOCRATIC SOCIETIES.
Facebook to become the modus operandi of virtually every internet platform or application, has stripped us of what makes us human: our free will, without which neither democracy nor markets can function.
Perhaps you’re sitting there thinking, “Nah, this isn’t me. I’m in control. I can’t be swayed by some computer code. I’m open to all ideas and suggestions, and I deliberate on them, carefully weighing the pros and cons of each before deciding what to do.”
I hear you. There are various areas of our day-to-day lives over which we retain control. But they are dwindling, because powerful interests profit from depriving us of that control. The owners of these tracking and advertising-maximization systems have not spent the past two decades figuring out what makes us tick for nothing. They’ve watched to see what content suggestions provoke the
dopamine releases that lead us to click, to “like,” to follow or to share. They’ve figured out our political leanings, our artistic tastes, our sleep habits, our moods, and, most important, the social groups and online tribes with whom we form connections and allegiances. Facebook, it is said, knows you are going to break up with your partner before you do. If you even briefly let go of the “I’m in charge; no one is telling me what to do” mindset, you can see how the platforms can and will use their gigantic data hauls to shape our individual thoughts as well as our collective behavior — because they are incentivized to do so.
Here’s another way to think about how you pay for all this data extraction: a two-decade divergence in prices for different goods and services in the U.S. economy. A chart from the online publisher Visual Capitalist shows how prices for goods and services that you need to live a healthy and productive life — such as medical care, college tuition, housing and food and beverages — all rose very sharply between 2000 and 2022. By contrast, prices for products that integrate with the internet and extract our data — such as software, cellphone services, TVs and other entertainment devices — all fell significantly during the same period. It’s worth asking why this is the case. Your quality of life in the nondigital world is deteriorating, but your digital existence keeps getting oddly less expensive. The reason is that the latter is subsidized by the ever-larger amounts of data you hand over to tech companies.
We need to think harder about the real price we are paying for data extraction devices and related software. Remember, your data is you. Here, the timeless words of the information security guru Bruce Schneier are helpful. Nearly a decade ago, he wrote: “If something is free, you’re not the customer; you’re the product.” EXCERPTED FROM “OUR BIGGEST FIGHT: RECLAIMING LIBERTY, HUMANITY AND DIGNITY IN THE
THUNDERSTRUCK
BY CLAY GRUBBS
As dusk fell across our suburban neighborhood in central New Jersey, I crept along a line of large pine trees toward my favorite hiding spot. Hide-and-seek was a team game, but the hiders were each on our own. I quietly climbed up the branches of a tree that almost formed a staircase for my 11-year-old body. As the seekers finished shouting their countdown, I had a great view to watch their failed efforts to find me, with my blind spot covered by a yard we had all deemed off-limits. This position had won me many games before, so I settled in, committed to wait until the other team gave up.
Few early memories feel as liberating as those evenings we spent running around my neighborhood as the sun set. Going out after dinner with the other kids on my block and playing night games, often variations on hide-and-seek, felt like a chance to be in charge. Six or seven of us would meet on Center Street in Hightstown every other night and improvise rules. We’d argue boundaries by block, which backyards were in or out, who was on which team and which team would hide first. The seekers would wait in a circle, eyes closed, until it was time to start the hunt.
I was never a fan of seeking; hiding was always my specialty, and I made a point to take it very seriously. “Perfect,” I thought,
as the sun dropped behind the rows of houses, leaving the moon hidden by large passing clouds. Less visibility meant less chances to be seen through the foliage. After some time, I heard somebody yell. I expected to hear our code word for surrender, but they were yelling for us to come out. A thunderstorm was moving in fast and their parents had told them to get inside. But since it wasn’t the code word, I assumed it was just a trick. These sorts of ploys had been used before.Unless I saw an actual parent outside, I couldn’t trust it. So I waited. And waited. Nobody came to find me.
Instead, what I saw next was lightning, followed by a downpour. I jumped from the tree and ran home. By the time I reached my front porch, I was absolutely drenched. I sat there in my wet clothes, upset that my parents hadn’t come out to warn me. But looking back now, that was the whole point of these nights. They trusted me to go out without them and make decisions on my own. And it was my choice to ignore my friends, stay in the tree and get myself stuck. Lightning struck again, and thunder followed not a second after. Getting the chance to make mistakes and to feel their consequences made these nights some of the first times I felt the responsibility of freedom.
AN ODE TO NIGHT GAMES
WALKING THE BEAR
BY STAR COULBROOKE
I walk on water, take the river from its high Uintas down Utah’s cascades, wander Wyoming’s meanders, Montpelier’s meadows, to Soda’s hair-pin curve where thirty-thousand years ago lava turned the Bear away from Blackfoot’s Snake and sent it down to Grace.
Doubling back from Gem Valley to Cache, I walk the river’s cobbled bed where tributaries surge, rowdy Cub, Little Bear, Beaver-headed Logan, six-tined fork of Blacksmith.
Down the length of floodplains I pass, through wetlands of cattails and bulrushes, to bottomlands leveled and drained, where the river silts in, slows down, its honeyed pace tamed for grain.
On the river’s gliding current I travel miles each step, a dreamlike passage through cedar and cottonwood, hawthorn and chokecherry, lifting like a heron over dams and sluggish lakes that halt the river’s breath.
I walk the Bear all summer as it builds strength again, widens into marshes, joins in lush bird-heavy congress with the great peculiar Salt, a lake that would surely die if not for this river, this path, this milk and honey.
STAR COULBROOKE IS THE AUTHOR OF THREE POETRY COLLECTIONS: “THIN SPINES OF MEMORY,” “BOTH SIDES FROM THE MIDDLE,” AND “CITY OF POETRY.”
REVOLUTIONARY MOTHERS
HOW WOMEN SHAPED EARLY AMERICA
BY LOIS M. COLLINS
We don’t hear much about the women who risked their lives and homes fighting for America’s independence. There is no iconic tale like Paul Revere’s ride that channels their heroism, no Broadway musical or definitive biography. Even though their actions were crucial to the nation’s birth and early development, they often took place offstage and were later forgotten. But we know more about them today thanks to scholars like Carol Berkin, who helped to pioneer the study of early U.S. history through the lens of the women who experienced it.
Born and raised in Mobile, Alabama, Berkin moved to New York City in 1960 to study at Barnard, a private women’s college. There, she was taught that women could do anything, if they had “the fortitude, the know-how and the skill” to make it happen. Later, she took that confidence across Broadway to Columbia University, earning a Ph.D. in American history. Women were
scant in the books she read there. Aside from Betsy Ross and Martha Washington, they seemed to be absent from the events that shaped our country. Berkin knew that couldn’t be true.
Over the next five decades, she wrote more than a dozen books. Her dissertation,
THAT IS ONE OF THE MOST RADICAL THINGS THAT HAPPENED IN THE REVOLUTION: WOMEN BECAME POLITICALLY CONSCIOUS.
published as “Jonathan Sewall: Odyssey of an American Loyalist,” was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Her texts on the Constitutional Convention and the Bill of Rights are definitive standards for understanding the tensions and compromises
behind the American project. But she has also explored the lives and circumstances of women in colonial America, in her book “Revolutionary Mothers,” during the struggle for independence, and the wives of key figures in the Civil War era, often through their own letters and memoirs.
Now 81, Berkin is Presidential Professor of History, Emerita, of Baruch College and the Graduate Center at City University of New York, where she has taught for 40 years. “I think that put me in the rare group of people who found their calling and got to do what they wanted to do,” she says. Deseret asked her about women in America’s early history and what difficulties the framers faced as they crafted the Constitution.
WHAT DO AMERICANS GET WRONG ABOUT THE FOUNDING?
There are many myths. You know: Everybody fought for the Revolution and all were willing to make sacrifices. It is not
CAROL BERKIN
true. And the real story is more interesting. Many think they won the war, then created the Constitution, and everybody was happy. But some didn’t want a central government. Maryland and Virginia had gunboats aimed at one another across the Potomac. Connecticut and New Jersey were plotting whether they could invade New York City in response to astronomical prices charged on imported goods. One of the most remarkable things about the revolution is that states cooperated to win.
THE FRAMERS HAD A LOT TO WORRY ABOUT. HOW DID THEY PULL IT OFF?
This was do or die. That’s one reason the men at the convention compromised. There was an economic depression. There was danger from foreign enemies like France, Spain and Britain, and the army consisted of 500 men. They owed a fortune to allies, their own soldiers and the American public. Oh, and there were also pirates. They tried sending wheat to the Mediterranean to build the economy, but had no navy to protect their ships. They were either gonna implode or be invaded. So every time a problem arose that might tear the convention asunder, they knew that there would be no United States if they didn’t have a real central government with real powers.
WE KNOW OUR FOUNDING FATHERS. WERE THERE FOUNDING MOTHERS?
The culture was highly patriarchal. When women got married, they disappeared legally. You couldn’t sue or be sued, you couldn’t own property unless your husband or your father granted it to you. The clothes on your back belonged to your husband. More significantly, your body belonged to your husband. When a slave ran away in the 18th century, they wrote “runaway” on the poster. When a woman ran away from her husband, they wrote, “She has abducted herself from me.” This was the culture women found themselves in, not only legally, but economically.
WAS INDEPENDENCE A CHANCE TO IMPROVE THEIR STATION?
The idea that there were women who ran around saying “equal rights” is not true. What is true is that the Revolution politicized women for the first time. Men needed their support, especially since the boycott of goods was the most powerful weapon Americans had in forcing Britain to repeal oppressive laws. Who drank tea and bought cloth? Women. Suddenly, they started talking politics and began to think that their activities had political significance. That is one of the most radical things that happened in the Revolution: Women became politically conscious.
DID THAT TRANSLATE INTO ACTION?
Yes. Women served as spies. They wrote propaganda for recruiting. Unmarried women in New York signed a manifesto that they would not get engaged to any man who didn’t join the army. They carried messages between American generals and militiamen, and rode off through enemy lines when no man was willing to do it. The stories cracked me up because they were mostly young girls, and it was always a dark and stormy night. No one ever rode off in good weather. Some were captured. Deborah Champion was taken in Massachusetts and absolutely played the young British soldiers. Like something from “Little Red Riding Hood,” she said “My uncle’s sick and I’m taking a basket of goodies to him.” In fact, she was carrying an important message between Washington and another general.
Women also kept arms and ammunition in their homes. And many burned down their homes to prevent the British from getting those stockpiles. One came out brandishing a ceremonial sword that her husband kept over the fireplace as loyalists and British came up toward her house. “If you come near me, I’ll kill you,” she said. They were so shocked that they turned around and left. Women did genuinely heroic things that they never knew they were capable of. They rose to
the occasion and in doing so discovered their own ingenuity, their own bravery and their own patriotism.
SO WHAT HAPPENED TO THAT SPIRIT AFTER THE WAR?
When their sons and husbands came back, all the women wanted to do was go back to what life was like before the war. You don’t see a lot of demands for rights among ordinary women. What they wanted was to restore what had been, and they had a lot of work to do. Some wealthy women who had the time wrote essays arguing that women were intellectually and spiritually equal to men and should be educated. That happened, briefly. All 13 original states opened academies for women. But it would take longer for these ideas to reach fruition.
HOW DID THE FRAMERS PREPARE FOR AN EVOLVING SOCIETY?
Ben Franklin said if the Constitution lasts 10 years, we will have done our duty. They weren’t writing about the future. They were writing a document designed to cure the problems the country was facing at that moment. Most of the men who wrote it took a look around them and said, “This country is in danger of disappearing; what can we do to shore it up?” They knew things would change. They did not have the kind of hubris that most of our politicians sadly have today. The amendment process tells you everything you need to know about their state of mind: If things change, make this document change with the times.
WAS THE CONSTITUTION BUILT TO LAST?
The Constitution embodies the principle that you can have power as long as it is distinct. That is, what we call today checks and balances, a mutual respect among the branches of government. To casually say, “Well, the Constitution is old news, we should throw it out,” denies the structure of the government the Constitution created. These days, I don’t know if it will, but it ought to last and be honored as long as we have a country.
AURORA BOREALIS, BONNEVILLE SALT FLATS | PHOTOGRAPHY BY AUSTIN PEDERSEN
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