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Just one in five Biden supporters said that a win by Trump would be because he received more votes than Biden; nearly two in three said it would be due to “voter suppression and foreign interference.”

Whether Biden or Trump emerges as the winner, millions of Americans will likely believe that their candidate was robbed.

Given this reality, how can Americans know if the outcome is free and fair? And how can they distinguish between an election tarnished by imperfections and one that has been so compromised, its outcome is illegitimate?

Only one in three Americans who plan to vote for Trump said that if Joe Biden is declared the victor, that would be “because he receives more votes than Donald Trump.” More than two in five said it would be “because voting systems are rigged and voter fraud is committed.”

They also advised voters to distinguish between ordinary forms of electoral malfunction and an extraordinary attack.

Daniel Ziblatt, a government professor at Harvard and a co-author of How Democracies Die, stressed that voters should rely on data and impartial umpires, not anecdotes and partisan activists:

Jess Marsden, a counsel at Protect Democracy who specializes in election law, agreed. “The average election official has worked seven previous elections. These people aren’t partisan hacks; they’re serious professionals working at the state and local level. If they say the results are legitimate, that means a lot.”

The final piece of advice is perhaps the most important: Look at the totality of the evidence rather than focusing on a few specific issues. “It really comes down to common sense,”

Shimer emphasized that any concerted attempt to rig the election would likely produce a clear trail of evidence.

No matter who wins the election, millions of Americans are likely to doubt that its outcome is fair. Less than two months from now, American democracy could face one of the biggest tests of its legitimacy in living memory.

My buddy Kevin Williamson had a line yesterday kind of poo-pooing the idea of legitimacy, saying “legitimacy” is magic.

The law almost always follows reality and public opinion. Laws that don't have the support of the governed get contested, ignored, or changed. This isn't a value judgment. It's just the truth. Deserve's got nothin' to do with it.

"Smoke from the volcano, divine right of kings, democratic elections all come down to the same thing," Lockwood had said to Julian one night, out on the campaign trail. "One man gets anointed and everybody else says, 'Right! He's got the Magic.'" .

He made decisions and let Julian make sure that the cabinet and the rest of the hierarchy took care of the details. What was important in the presidency were the very things Julian dismissed as superfluous: ceremony, symbolism, tone, ritual appearance--in short, the Magic.

I think this is right. And the Magic is, like any other norm or tradition, so obvious that we can be fooled into thinking it doesn't matter. Right up until the moment it's broken, at which point we realize how important it was.

China is conspicuously absent from Democrats’ top seven, notwithstanding Beijing’s increasing predations in the economic

Independents, not surprisingly, occupy the center, placing Covid-19 first and China fourth.

independents identify domestic political polarization as a top threat, second only to the pandemic.

Political polarization is a “force multiplier” that worsens other threats and cripples our ability to combat them.

our polarization prevents us from effectively confronting vital challenges, from the pandemic and its economic consequences to climate change; from the rise of white supremacist groups, which account for the bulk of domestic terrorism, to reforming our immigration system.

Whether reprising discredited eugenics theories of white racial superiority, stoking fears of “low income” people invading white suburbs, demanding “patriotic education” in public schools that whitewashes slavery and institutionalized racism, falsely declaring mail-in voting corrupt or expressing contempt for “blue state” America, Mr. Trump seeks to perpetuate himself in power at great cost to our national cohesion.

Mr. Trump and his party are happy to ignite the ire of many Americans, a majority of whom oppose this brazenly hypocritical and illegitimate move.

national security threats are best understood as anything that can kill or severely harm large numbers of Americans, devastate our economy or upend our way of life.

Americans rank the top seven critical threats to U.S. vital interests as: 1) the Covid-19 pandemic; 2) domestic violent extremism; 3) China; 4) global economic downturn; 5) political polarization; 6) international terrorism; 7) foreign interference in U.S. elections. Each is properly conceived as a national security threat, and at this extraordinary time, we are contending with almost all of them simultaneously.

threat perceptions vary significantly, depending on political party affiliation.

Without policies like Medicare For All and a Green New Deal, working class people will continue to die. Compromise will not save them.

Biden’s platform instead includes a want to not “demonize” the wealthy and have “no one’s standard of living change,” as he told rich donors at a fundraiser last June.

he notably neglects those who suffered the most as a result of the administration’s mass deportations, record civilian drone strikes and infamous Wall Street bailout.

He also authored the 1994 crime bill, which led to mass incarceration of disproportionately black and brown Americans. Just a few months ago, Biden gave a speech in Iowa claiming “poor kids are just as bright as white kids.”

Any Democrat who dismisses these allegations as uncredible or illegitimate is a hypocrite.

And as much as Democrats want me to, I do not believe in voting for the “lesser” of two rapists.

We must not forget that Biden voted for the Iraq war, voted for NAFTA, has consistently supported corporate bailouts and opposes Medicare for All amid a pandemic (one that he has been largely absent from)

Biden was nowhere to be found. The only coronavirus response policy he has been vocal about, other than criticizing President Donald Trump, is advocating to hold in-person elections and putting thousands at risk.

After all, Biden voted to confirm both conservative judges Sandra Day O’Connor and Antonin Scalia. More importantly, Biden was the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman during the Anita Hill hearings where Clarence Thomas, now the most conservative justice on the Court, was accused of sexual misconduct.

But those key Bernie-Trump voters were never Democrats in the first place – they were self-identifying independents and traditional non-voters who distrust establishment politicians.

But neither have I, and neither have the sexual assault survivors or former incarcerated people whose lives were affected by Biden’s decisions.

Trump is a dangerous figure, but he exists only by virtue of the prevailing establishment and status quo. He is a symptom of the late capitalist neoliberalism that the Democratic establishment embodies

By continuously voting for the lesser of two evils, I have effectively taken away the power of my own vote and allowed our country to move further to the right.

development of her legal philosophy of originalism, the view that judges must adhere closely to the written text of the Constitution and the plain meaning of language used in statutes at the time they were enacted.

Barrett, an acolyte of Justice Antonin Scalia, often expressed disdain for injecting policy preferences into judicial rulings. 

“wit, wisdom and a dose of terror.”

“Not having a philosophy is a philosophy. If your approach is grab-bag, that’s your theory,”

 “can’t answer about specific cases, but questions about judicial philosophy should be on the table. ... You have a right to know what yardstick you’re using to make those decisions.” 

“My job is to call balls and strikes and not pitch or bat. ... I have no agenda.” 

Barrett has used that metaphor for those who might surrender to temptation to disregard the Constitution.

“Is the Constitution a straitjacket? No, the Constitution itself leaves plenty of room for change – political, legal, social and otherwise.

The Constitution is less than 6,000 words and makes no attempt to regulate every aspect of American life.” 

“The fact that we weren’t alive or didn’t have the ability to participate doesn’t render the law illegitimate,” Barrett said. “We accept the law as we find it, until we lawfully change it.”

“I would not be surprised if opponents misrepresent or caricature originalism on incendiary topics,”

“A primary way that the Supreme Court contributes to stability is not to grant cert (accept a case for review) when the question presented is ‘Do you want to overturn a precedent?’"

“We shouldn’t be putting people on the court who share our policy preferences,” she said. “We should be putting people on the court who want to apply the Constitution.” 

many of the questions on which liberals and conservatives share common assumptions have an intimate edge. That is, they touch on core values — how people perceive themselves and their place in the world — more than they do programmatic details of policy. Historically, values debates have the most staying power in American politics

What is the morality of cancel culture?

Justice Louis Brandeis gave his famous answer about the right response to false or wrongheaded political speech: “The remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

Traditional liberals and conservatives are in agreement on the enduring wisdom of that philosophy

Activists to their left and right, by contrast, disagree in detail but agree that in newsrooms, on campuses, on social media, or even during the national anthem at sports stadiums, there is a widening sphere of speech and politically infused gestures that are so offensive they should be suppressed, shamed and punished.

The left agrees with The New York Times’ celebrated 1619 Project, which stated, “Our democracy’s ideas were false when they were written.”

Both sides are eager to see institutions sharply challenged, with root-and-branch overhauls — admissions policies transformed, executives taxed or even jailed, monopolies demolished, and so on.

Liberals and conservatives, on the other hand, tend to fret over institutions. They have lots of ideas for how to make them more responsive to their times or improve their reputation. But these are typically incremental in nature and flow from the assumption that a healthy society is animated by respect for institutions, and one animated by contempt is in deep trouble.

The most influential liberals and most influential conservatives in establishment politics typically have reaped those rewards. These winners may wish to expand the number and diversity of people joining in success. But these people typically don’t regard their own success as unmerited, or deserving of confiscatory taxation, or the result of illegitimate structural advantages that should be demolished

Many on the left, in contrast to traditional liberals, do believe that large fortunes are by definition wrong as a matter of public policy.

The argument that expanding the circle of success to include outstanding African Americans — exemplified by Barack Obama’s presidency — had done little to dilute systemic racism as experienced in everyday life for millions of people was gaining power before Trump’s presidency. In 2020 that argument is at the center of national conversation in ways that almost certainly will remain there after Trump leaves office.

Traditional liberals and conservatives often believe that a color-blind society may never be perfectly attained, but it remains the ideal—and one that the country for all its problems is moving ever closer to achieving

The pro-Trump right and the anti-Trump left are filled with activists who believe institutions have earned their contempt by being fundamentally not on the level — filled with self-dealing elitists

How linked are merit and success?

How broken are American institutions?

What’s the core problem? Damon Linker is on to a piece of it: “It amounts to a refusal on the part of lots of Americans to think in terms of the social whole — of what’s best for the community, of the common or public good. Each of us thinks we know what’s best for ourselves.”

this individualism, atomism and selfishness is downstream from a deeper crisis of legitimacy. In 1970, in a moment like our own, Irving Kristol wrote, “In the same way as men cannot for long tolerate a sense of spiritual meaninglessness in their individual lives, so they cannot for long accept a society in which power, privilege, and property are not distributed according to some morally meaningful criteria.”

A lot of people look around at the conditions of this country — how Black Americans are treated, how communities are collapsing, how Washington doesn’t work — and none of it makes sense. None of it inspires faith, confidence

if you don’t have a fierce sense of belonging to each other, you’re not going to sacrifice for the common good.

We’re confronted with a succession of wicked problems and it turns out we’re not even capable of putting on a friggin’ mask.

I had hopes that the crisis would bring us together, but it’s made everything harder and worse. And now I worry less about populism or radical wokeness than about a pervasive loss of national faith.

Reading or rereading a collection of such books today is like watching an old movie that feels more anguishing and frustrating than you remember. The anguish comes from knowing how the tale will unfold; the frustration from realizing that this was hardly the only possible outcome.

This conclusion is laid bare in the sprawling literature to emerge from 9/11 over the past two decades

Whatever individual stories the 9/11 books tell, too many describe the repudiation of U.S. values, not by extremist outsiders but by our own hand.

In these works, indifference to the growing terrorist threat gives way to bloodlust and vengeance after the attacks. Official dissembling justifies wars, then prolongs them. In the name of counterterrorism, security is politicized, savagery legalized and patriotism weaponized.

that state of exception became our new American exceptionalism.

The latest works on the legacy of 9/11 show how war-on-terror tactics were turned on religious groups, immigrants and protesters in the United States. The war on terror came home, and it walked in like it owned the place.

It happened fast. By 2004, when the 9/11 Commission urged America to “engage the struggle of ideas,” it was already too late; the Justice Department’s initial torture memos were already signed, the Abu Ghraib images had already eviscerated U.S. claims to moral authority.

“It is for now far easier for a researcher to explain how and why September 11 happened than it is to explain the aftermath,” Steve Coll writes in “Ghost Wars,” his 2004 account of the CIA’s pre-9/11 involvement in Afghanistan. Throughout that aftermath, Washington fantasized about remaking the world in its image, only to reveal an ugly image of itself to the world.

“We anticipate a black future for America,” bin Laden told ABC News more than three years before the 9/11 attacks. “Instead of remaining United States, it shall end up separated states and shall have to carry the bodies of its sons back to America.”

bin Laden also came to grasp, perhaps self-servingly, the benefits of luring Washington into imperial overreach, of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy,” as he put it in 2004, through endless military expansionism, thus beating back its global sway and undermining its internal unity.

To an unnerving degree, the United States moved toward the enemy’s fantasies of what it might become — a nation divided in its sense of itself, exposed in its moral and political compromises, conflicted over wars it did not want but would not end.

“The most frightening aspect of this new threat . . . was the fact that almost no one took it seriously. It was too bizarre, too primitive and exotic.” That is how Lawrence Wright depicts the early impressions of bin Laden and his terrorist network among U.S. officials

The books traveling that road to 9/11 have an inexorable, almost suffocating feel to them, as though every turn invariably leads to the first crush of steel and glass.

With the system “blinking red,” as CIA Director George Tenet later told the 9/11 Commission, why were all these warnings not enough? Wright lingers on bureaucratic failings

Clarke’s conclusion is simple, and it highlights America’s we-know-better swagger, a national trait that often masquerades as courage or wisdom. “America, alas, seems only to respond well to disasters, to be undistracted by warnings,” he writes. “Our country seems unable to do all that must be done until there has been some awful calamity.”

The problem with responding only to calamity is that underestimation is usually replaced by overreaction. And we tell ourselves it is the right thing, maybe the only thing, to do.

A last-minute flight change. A new job at the Pentagon. A retirement from the fire station. The final tilt of a plane’s wings before impact. If the books about the lead-up to 9/11 are packed with unbearable inevitability, the volumes on the day itself highlight how randomness separated survival from death.

Had the World Trade Center, built in the late 1960s and early 1970s, been erected according to the city building code in effect since 1938, Dwyer and Flynn explain, “it is likely that a very different world trade center would have been built.

Instead, it was constructed according to a new code that the real estate industry had avidly promoted, a code that made it cheaper and more lucrative to build and own skyscrapers. “It increased the floor space available for rent . . . by cutting back on the areas that had been devoted, under the earlier law, to evacuation and exit,” the authors write. The result: Getting everybody out on 9/11 was virtually impossible.

The towers embodied the power of American capitalism, but their design embodied the folly of American greed. On that day, both conditions proved fatal.

Garrett Graff quotes Defense Department officials marveling at how American Airlines Flight 77 struck a part of the Pentagon that, because of new anti-terrorism standards, had recently been reinforced and renovated

“In any other wedge of the Pentagon, there would have been 5,000 people, and the plane would have flown right through the middle of the building.” Instead, fewer than 200 people were killed in the attack on the Pentagon, including the passengers on the hijacked jet. Chance and preparedness came together.

The bravery of police and firefighters is the subject of countless 9/11 retrospectives, but these books also emphasize the selflessness of civilians who morphed into first responders

The passengers had made phone calls when the hijacking began and had learned the fate of other aircraft that day. “According to one call, they voted on whether to rush the terrorists in an attempt to retake the plane,” the commission report states. “They decided, and acted.”

The civilians aboard United Airlines Flight 93, whose resistance forced the plane to crash into a Pennsylvania field rather than the U.S. Capitol, were later lionized as emblems of swashbuckling Americana

Such episodes, led by ordinary civilians, embodied values that the 9/11 Commission called on the nation to display. Except those values would soon be dismantled, in the name of security, by those entrusted to uphold them.

Lawyering to death.The phrase appears in multiple 9/11 volumes, usually uttered by top officials adamant that they were going to get things done, laws and rules be damned

“I had to show the American people the resolve of a commander in chief that was going to do whatever it took to win,” Bush explains. “No yielding. No equivocation. No, you know, lawyering this thing to death.” In “Against All Enemies,” Clarke recalls the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, when Bush snapped at an official who suggested that international law looked askance at military force as a tool of revenge. “I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass,” the president retorted.

The message was unmistakable: The law is an obstacle to effective counterterrorism

Except, they did lawyer this thing to death. Instead of disregarding the law, the Bush administration enlisted it. “Beginning almost immediately after September 11, 2001, [Vice President Dick] Cheney saw to it that some of the sharpest and best-trained lawyers in the country, working in secret in the White House and the United States Department of Justice, came up with legal justifications for a vast expansion of the government’s power in waging war on terror,

Through public declarations and secret memos, the administration sought to remove limits on the president’s conduct of warfare and to deny terrorism suspects the protections of the Geneva Conventions by redefining them as unlawful enemy combatants. Nothing, Mayer argues of the latter effort, “more directly cleared the way for torture than this.”

Tactics such as cramped confinement, sleep deprivation and waterboarding were rebranded as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” legally and linguistically contorted to avoid the label of torture. Though the techniques could be cruel and inhuman, the OLC acknowledged in an August 2002 memo, they would constitute torture only if they produced pain equivalent to organ failure or death, and if the individual inflicting such pain really really meant to do so: “Even if the defendant knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent.” It’s quite the sleight of hand, with torture moving from the body of the interrogated to the mind of the interrogator.

the memo concludes that none of it actually matters. Even if a particular interrogation method would cross some legal line, the relevant statute would be considered unconstitutional because it “impermissibly encroached” on the commander in chief’s authority to conduct warfare

You have informed us. Experts you have consulted. Based on your research. You do not anticipate. Such hand-washing words appear throughout the memos. The Justice Department relies on information provided by the CIA to reach its conclusions; the CIA then has the cover of the Justice Department to proceed with its interrogations. It’s a perfect circle of trust.

In these documents, lawyers enable lawlessness. Another May 2005 memo concludes that, because the Convention Against Torture applies only to actions occurring under U.S. jurisdiction, the CIA’s creation of detention sites in other countries renders the convention “inapplicable.”

avid Cole describes the documents as “bad-faith lawyering,” which might be generous. It is another kind of lawyering to death, one in which the rule of law that the 9/11 Commission urged us to abide by becomes the victim.

Similarly, because the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment is meant to protect people convicted of crimes, it should not apply to terrorism detainees — because they have not been officially convicted of anything. The lack of due process conveniently eliminates constitutional protections

Years later, the Senate Intelligence Committee would investigate the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation program. Its massive report — the executive summary of which appeared as a 549-page book in 2014 — found that torture did not produce useful intelligence, that the interrogations were more brutal than the CIA let on, that the Justice Department did not independently verify the CIA’s information, and that the spy agency impeded oversight by Congress and the CIA inspector general.

“The CIA’s effectiveness representations were almost entirely inaccurate,” the Senate report concluded. It is one of the few lies of the war on terror unmasked by an official government investigation and public report, but just one of the many documented in the 9/11 literature.

Officials in the war on terror didn’t deceive or dissemble just with lawmakers or the public. In the recurring tragedy of war, they lied just as often to themselves.

“The decision to invade Iraq was one made, finally and exclusively, by the president of the United States, George W. Bush,” he writes.

n Woodward’s “Bush at War,” the president admitted that before 9/11, “I didn’t feel that sense of urgency [about al-Qaeda], and my blood was not nearly as boiling.”

A president initially concerned about defending and preserving the nation’s moral goodness against terrorism found himself driven by darker impulses. “I’m having difficulty controlling my bloodlust,” Bush confessed to religious leaders in the Oval Office on Sept. 20, 2001,

Bloodlust, moral certainty and sudden vulnerability make a dangerous combination. The belief that you are defending good against evil can lead to the belief that whatever you do to that end is good, too.

Draper distills Bush’s worldview: “The terrorists’ primary objective was to destroy America’s freedom. Saddam hated America. Therefore, he hated freedom. Therefore, Saddam was himself a terrorist, bent on destroying America and its freedom.”

The president assumed the worst about what Hussein had done or might do, yet embraced best-case scenarios of how an American invasion would proceed.

“Iraqis would rejoice at the sight of their Western liberators,” Draper recaps. “Their newly shared sense of national purpose would overcome any sectarian allegiances. Their native cleverness would make up for their inexperience with self-government. They would welcome the stewardship of Iraqi expatriates who had not set foot in Baghdad in decades. And their oil would pay for everything.”

It did not seem to occur to Bush and his advisers that Iraqis could simultaneously hate Hussein and resent the Americans — feelings that could have been discovered by speaking to Iraqis and hearing their concerns.

few books on the war that gets deep inside Iraqis’ aversion to the Americans in their midst. “What gives them the right to change something that’s not theirs in the first place?” a woman in a middle-class Baghdad neighborhood asks him. “I don’t like your house, so I’m going to bomb it and you can rebuild it again the way I want it, with your money?

The occupation did not dissuade such impressions when it turned the former dictator’s seat of government into its own luxurious Green Zone, or when it retrofitted the Abu Ghraib prison (“the worst of Saddam’s hellholes,” Shadid calls it) into its own chamber of horrors.

Shadid hears early talk of the Americans as “kuffar” (heathens), a 51-year-old former teacher complains that “we’ve exchanged a tyrant for an occupier.”

Shadid understood that governmental legitimacy — who gets to rule, and by what right — was a matter of overriding importance for Iraqis. “The Americans never understood the question,” he writes; “Iraqis never agreed on the answer.

When the United States so quickly shifted from liberation to occupation, it lost whatever legitimacy it enjoyed. “Bush handed that enemy precisely what it wanted and needed, proof that America was at war with Islam, that we were the new Crusaders come to occupy Muslim land,” Clarke writes. “It was as if Usama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range mind control of George Bush, chanting ‘invade Iraq, you must invade Iraq.’ ”

The foolishness and arrogance of the American occupation didn’t help. In “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone,” Rajiv Chandrasekaran explains how, even as daily security was Iraqis’ overwhelming concern, viceroy L. Paul Bremer, Bush’s man in Baghdad, was determined to turn the country into a model free-market economy, complete with new investment laws, bankruptcy courts and a state-of-the-art stock exchange.

a U.S. Army general, when asked by local journalists why American helicopters must fly so low at night, thus scaring Iraqi children, replied that the kids were simply hearing “the sound of freedom.”Message: Freedom sounds terrifying.

For some Americans, inflicting that terror became part of the job, one more tool in the arsenal. In “The Forever War” by Dexter Filkins, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel in Iraq assures the author that “with a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them.”

Chandrasekaran recalls the response of a top communications official under Bremer, when reporters asked about waves of violence hitting Baghdad in the spring of 2004. “Off the record: Paris is burning,” the official told the journalists. “On the record: Security and stability are returning to Iraq.”

the Iraq War, conjured in part on the false connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda, ended up helping the terrorist network: It pulled resources from the war in Afghanistan, gave space for bin Laden’s men to regroup and spurred a new generation of terrorists in the Middle East. “A bigger gift to bin Laden was hard to imagine,” Bergen writes.

“U.S. officials had no need to lie or spin to justify the war,” Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock writes in “The Afghanistan Papers,” a damning contrast of the war’s reality vs. its rhetoric. “Yet leaders at the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department soon began to make false assurances and to paper over setbacks on the battlefield.” As the years passed, the deceit became entrenched, what Whitlock calls “an unspoken conspiracy” to hide the truth.

Afghanistan was where al-Qaeda, supported by the Taliban, had made its base — it was supposed to be the good war, the right war, the war of necessity and not choice, the war endorsed at home and abroad.

If Iraq was the war born of lies, Afghanistan was the one nurtured by them

Whitlock finds commanding generals privately admitting that they long fought the war “without a functional strategy.” That, two years into the conflict, Rumsfeld complained that he had “no visibility into who the bad guys are.”

That Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, a former coordinator of Iraq and Afghanistan policy, acknowledged that “we didn’t have the foggiest idea of what we were undertaking.”

That U.S. officials long wanted to withdraw American forces but feared — correctly so, it turns out — that the Afghan government might collapse. “Bin Laden had hoped for this exact scenario,” Whitlock observes. “To lure the U.S. superpower into an unwinnable guerrilla conflict that would deplete its national treasury and diminish its global influence.”

All along, top officials publicly contradicted these internal views, issuing favorable accounts of steady progress

Bad news was twisted into good: Rising suicide attacks in Kabul meant the Taliban was too weak for direct combat, for instance, while increased U.S. casualties meant America was taking the fight to the enemy.

deceptions transpired across U.S. presidents, but the Obama administration, eager to show that its first-term troop surge was working, “took it to a new level, hyping figures that were misleading, spurious or downright false,” Whitlock writes. And then under President Donald Trump, he adds, the generals felt pressure to “speak more forcefully and boast that his war strategy was destined to succeed.”

in public, almost no senior government officials had the courage to admit that the United States was slowly losing,” Whitlock writes. “With their complicit silence, military and political leaders avoided accountability and dodged reappraisals that could have changed the outcome or shortened the conflict.”

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage traveled to Moscow shortly after 9/11 to give officials a heads up about the coming hostilities in Afghanistan. The Russians, recent visitors to the graveyard of empires, cautioned that Afghanistan was an “ambush heaven” and that, in the words of one of them, “you’re really going to get the hell kicked out of you.”

a war should not be measured only by the timing and the competence of its end. We still face an equally consequential appraisal: How good was this good war if it could be sustained only by lies?

In the two decades since the 9/11 attacks, the United States has often attempted to reconsider its response

They are written as though intending to solve problems. But they can be read as proof that the problems have no realistic solution, or that the only solution is to never have created them.

the report sets the bar for staying so high that an exit strategy appears to be its primary purpose.

he counterinsurgency manual is an extraordinary document. Implicitly repudiating notions such as “shock and awe” and “overwhelming force,” it argues that the key to battling an insurgency in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan is to provide security for the local population and to win its support through effective governance

It also attempts to grasp the nature of America’s foes. “Most enemies either do not try to defeat the United States with conventional operations or do not limit themselves to purely military means,” the manual states. “They know that they cannot compete with U.S. forces on those terms. Instead, they try to exhaust U.S. national will.” Exhausting America’s will is an objective that al-Qaeda understood well.

“Counterinsurgents should prepare for a long-term commitment,” the manual states. Yet, just a few pages later, it admits that “eventually all foreign armies are seen as interlopers or occupiers.” How to accomplish the former without descending into the latter? No wonder so many of the historical examples of counterinsurgency that the manual highlights, including accounts from the Vietnam War, are stories of failure.

“Soldiers and Marines are expected to be nation builders as well as warriors,” the manual proclaims, but the arduous tasks involved — reestablishing government institutions, rebuilding infrastructure, strengthening local security forces, enforcing the rule of law — reveal the tension at the heart of the new doctrine

In his foreword, Army Lt. Col. John Nagl writes that the document’s most lasting impact may be as a catalyst not for remaking Iraq or Afghanistan, but for transforming the Army and Marine Corps into “more effective learning organizations,” better able to adapt to changing warfare. And in her introduction, Sarah Sewall, then director of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, concludes that its “ultimate value” may be in warning civilian officials to think hard before engaging in a counterinsurgency campaign.

“The thing that got to everyone,” Finkel explains in the latter book, “was not having a defined front line. It was a war in 360 degrees, no front to advance toward, no enemy in uniform, no predictable patterns, no relief.” It’s a powerful summation of battling an insurgency.

Hitting the wrong house is what counterinsurgency doctrine is supposed to avoid. Even successfully capturing or killing a high-value target can be counterproductive if in the process you terrorize a community and create more enemies. In Iraq, the whole country was the wrong house. America’s leaders knew it was the wrong house. They hit it anyway.

Another returning soldier, Nic DeNinno, struggles to tell his wife about the time he and his fellow soldiers burst into an Iraqi home in search of a high-value target. He threw a man down the stairs and held another by the throat. After they left, the lieutenant told him it was the wrong house. “The wrong f---ing house,” Nic says to his wife. “One of the things I want to remember is how many times we hit the wrong house.”

“As time passes, more documents become available, and the bare facts of what happened become still clearer,” the report states. “Yet the picture of how those things happened becomes harder to reimagine, as that past world, with its preoccupations and uncertainty, recedes.” Before making definitive judgments, then, they ask themselves “whether the insights that seem apparent now would really have been meaningful at the time.”

Two of the latest additions to the canon, “Reign of Terror” by Spencer Ackerman and “Subtle Tools” by Karen Greenberg, draw straight, stark lines between the earliest days of the war on terror and its mutations in our current time, between conflicts abroad and divisions at home. These works show how 9/11 remains with us, and how we are still living in the ruins.

When Trump declared that “we don’t have victories anymore” in his 2015 speech announcing his presidential candidacy, he was both belittling the legacy of 9/11 and harnessing it to his ends. “His great insight was that the jingoistic politics of the War on Terror did not have to be tied to the War on Terror itself,” Ackerman writes. “That enabled him to tell a tale of lost greatness.” And if greatness is lost, someone must have taken it.

“Trump had learned the foremost lesson of 9/11,” Ackerman writes, “that the terrorists were whomever you said they were.”

The backlash against Muslims, against immigrants crossing the southern border and against protesters rallying for racial justice was strengthened by the open-ended nature of the global war on terror.

the war is not just far away in Iraq or Afghanistan, in Yemen or Syria, but it’s happening here, with mass surveillance, militarized law enforcement and the rebranding of immigration as a threat to the nation’s security rather than a cornerstone of its identity

the Authorization for Use of Military Force, drafted by administration lawyers and approved by Congress just days after the attacks, as the moment when America’s response began to go awry. The brief joint resolution allowed the president to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against any nation, organization or person who committed the attacks, and to prevent any future ones.

It was the “Ur document in the war on terror and its legacy,” Greenberg writes. “Riddled with imprecision, its terminology was geared to codify expansive powers.” Where the battlefield, the enemy and the definition of victory all remain vague, war becomes endlessly expansive, “with neither temporal nor geographical boundaries.”

This was the moment the war on terror was “conceptually doomed,” Ackerman concludes. This is how you get a forever war.

There were moments when an off-ramp was visible. The killing of bin Laden in 2011 was one such instance, Ackerman argues, but “Obama squandered the best chance anyone could ever have to end the 9/11 era.”

The author assails Obama for making the war on terror more “sustainable” through a veneer of legality — banning torture yet failing to close the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay and relying on drone strikes that “perversely incentivized the military and the CIA to kill instead of capture.”

There would always be more targets, more battlefields, regardless of president or party. Failures became the reason to double down, never wind down.

The longer the war went on, the more that what Ackerman calls its “grotesque subtext” of nativism and racism would move to the foreground of American politics

Absent the war on terror, it is harder to imagine a presidential candidate decrying a sitting commander in chief as foreign, Muslim, illegitimate — and using that lie as a successful political platform.

Absent the war on terror, it is harder to imagine a travel ban against people from Muslim-majority countries. Absent the war on terror, it is harder to imagine American protesters labeled terrorists, or a secretary of defense describing the nation’s urban streets as a “battle space” to be dominated

In his latest book on bin Laden, Bergen argues that 9/11 was a major tactical success but a long-term strategic failure for the terrorist leader. Yes, he struck a vicious blow against “the head of the snake,” as he called the United States, but “rather than ending American influence in the Muslim world, the 9/11 attacks greatly amplified it,” with two lengthy, large-scale invasions and new bases established throughout the region.

“A vastly different America has taken root” in the two decades since 9/11, Greenberg writes. “In the name of retaliation, ‘justice,’ and prevention, fundamental values have been cast aside.”

the legacy of the 9/11 era is found not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but also in an America that drew out and heightened some of its ugliest impulses — a nation that is deeply divided (like those “separated states” bin Laden imagined); that bypasses inconvenient facts and embraces conspiracy theories; that demonizes outsiders; and that, after failing to spread freedom and democracy around the world, seems less inclined to uphold them here

Seventeen years after the 9/11 Commission called on the United States to offer moral leadership to the world and to be generous and caring to our neighbors, our moral leadership is in question, and we can barely be generous and caring to ourselves.

Still reeling from an attack that dropped out of a blue sky, America is suffering from a sort of post-traumatic stress democracy. It remains in recovery, still a good country, even if a broken good country.

9/11 was a test. Thebooks of the lasttwo decades showhow America failed.

Deep within the catalogue of regrets that is the 9/11 Commission report

the one of which the commission is most skeptical is adding seats to the Court. The risks of expansion are “considerable,” the document says, and could “undermine the very goal of some of its proponents of restoring the court’s legitimacy.”

Term limits are presented not as a tired manifestation of cynical partisan maneuvering, but as an opportunity to advance “our Constitution’s commitments to checks and balances and popular sovereignty.”

But for voters of color in Arizona who just watched six Republican-appointed justices hollow out the Voting Rights Act at the Republican Party’s request, for example, expansion would not “politicize” the Court, because the Court’s relentless assault on the right to participate in democracy has been going on for decades. As usual, the people wringing their hands over the Court’s political nature are those who are less likely to be meaningfully affected by the Court’s political choices.

because capping the length of judicial service at some point in the future does nothing to address the crisis that this 6-3 conservative supermajority faces right now.

The commission took care to note its skepticism that Congress can institute term limits by statute, as opposed to the herculean task of enacting them via constitutional amendment

this public trepidation paves the way for savvy Republicans to frame term limits proposals—again, the option that supposedly enjoys “widespread and bipartisan support”—as just another illegitimate Democratic power grab.

which increased significantly in the aftermath of Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s warp-speed pre-election confirmation. Delegating that task to an ad hoc collection of law review enthusiasts who met over Zoom every few weeks was perhaps the least efficacious method of accomplishing that result, short of doing literally nothing.

tasked with writing down lots of big words about this country’s broken legal system while simultaneously saying nothing of consequence.

the Englishness of Brexit only matters if people see themselves as something other than British.

Brexit revealed the scale of the problem that was already there.

he passage reminded me of a conversation I’d had with a figure who had been close to Boris Johnson and worried that the U.K. was in danger of becoming an anachronism like the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies or the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Britain, this person said, was failing because it had grown lazy and complacent, unable to act with speed and purpose. The state had stopped paying attention to the basics of government, whether that was the development of its economy, the protection of its borders, or the defense of the realm. Instead, it had become guilty of a failed elite groupthink that had allowed separatism to flourish, wealth to concentrate in London and its surrounding areas, and the political elite to ignore the public mood.

Austria-Hungary did not, as is often portrayed, disintegrate because it was illegitimate or a relic of a bygone era. It fell apart because in its desperation to survive World War I, it undermined the foundation of its legitimacy as an empire of nations, becoming instead an Austrian autocracy. In its scramble to survive, it forgot who it was.

States that have forgotten who they are tend not to last long.The Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Austria-Hungary, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies: In each case, the breakup came about because of the demands of the dominant state in the union (or from outside the union, in the case of Sicily) as much as the demand for independence or autonomy from the peripheries.

One of the problems in Britain is that the loss of faith in the country is now so pervasive that it is hard to know whether it can be rebuilt

if Britain is to survive, it has to believe that there is such a thing as Britain and act as though that is the case. Joseph Roth wrote that the old Austro-Hungarian monarchy died “not through the empty verbiage of its revolutionaries, but through the ironical disbelief of those who should have believed in, and supported, it.” In time, we might well say the same of Britain.

Outside the European Union, Britain’s collective experience becomes more national by definition. Its economy diverges from the EU, with separate trading relationships, tariffs, standards, and products. It will have its own British immigration system, border checks, and citizenship. For good or bad, Brexit means that Britain will become more distinct from the other nations of Europe.

Brexit is unlikely to be the decisive factor either way. Unless people in Scotland believe that they are also British and that the British government and state is their government and state, nothing else matters.

At the end of The Leopard, as the prince lies dying in his old age, he realizes that his youthful calm about the fate of his class and country had been misplaced—he had been wrong to think nothing would change. “The significance of a noble family lies entirely in its traditions, that is in its vital memories,” he says to himself. But the revolution has swept away his family’s old aristocratic privileges and way of life. The meaning of his name, of being noble, had become, more and more, little more than “empty pomp.”

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland remains an unusual country, but its vital memories are dying. To survive, it must be more than empty pomp.

I’ve described it as a romantic narrative, one that’s about unities in the process of becoming, a calling together of Americans to transcend racial division and come together in a unifying way, a more perfect union, as a transcendence of essential American goodness over transitory American evils.

when we tell the story that way, unfortunately, not only is it mythic, but it trains us to treat King as the kind of person who’s not doing any original political thinking. What he’s doing is calling us to be true to who we always already were

And when you treat him like that, the thing that becomes most interesting about him is not his thought. It’s not the way he challenged us to think about violence. It’s not the way he challenges us to think about segregation, both de facto and de jure. It’s not how he challenges us to think about economic justice.

The thing that’s interesting about him starts to be his rhetoric or his tactics, the way in which he pushes people or frames arguments to call us to be true to who we always already were. That’s a real problem because it evades the most incisive, challenging and generative contributions that his public philosophy makes for our era.

it gets conscripted into a story that’s ultimately affirming about the adequacy of our constitutional order, the trajectory of our institutions, the essential goodness of our national character. You often hear politicians use this rhetoric of, this is not who we are.

it’s partly related to how we tell the story of the civil rights movement and particularly, how we tell King’s role in the civil rights movement.

There’s a way in which the philosophy of nonviolence gets painted, even in King’s time, as a kind of extreme, purist pacifism. And part of that is the connection with Gandhi, although I think it’s a radical misunderstanding of Gandhi, as well.

it’s a way of imagining the commitment to nonviolence as related to passivity, as related to the performance of suffering for pity. These are things that King never endures. For him, the idea of passive resistance was a misnomer. He helped coin the phrase “direct action” — he and other members of the civil-rights generation — that nonviolence is aggressive.

It’s an aggressive attack on injustice, an aggressive form of noncooperation with domination. It’s about trying to wedge yourself into the machinery of domination, to prevent its adequate functioning, to try to force or coerce your fellow citizens to stop and take stock of what kind of injustices are being unfurled in their name.

And it does so on the presumption that politics involves coercion, especially for King, who had a pretty tragic sense of human nature, that politics is going to involve confrontation with great evil, that it’s not a Pollyannaish view about what we’re all capable of if we just turn our eye toward God in the right way.

We’re owe it to them to live with evil. And we always are going to be called to confront it. We just need to do it in ways that won’t unleash a further chain of social evil and bitterness and revenge and retaliation. And King thought nonviolence was the only weapon that could cut and heal at the same time.

So when you hear King talk about love, when you hear King talk about nonviolence, these things actually require not just an enormous discipline around the acceptance of suffering, as if it’s some kind of passive practice, but they require really creative, dedicated thinking around how exactly to push and prod your neighbors into addressing the forms of injustice that structure the polity and how to do it in a way that doesn’t leave a perpetual midnight of bitterness when the conflict is done.

He says that the really interesting question, however, is how to organize a sustained, successful challenge to structural injustice. And for King, that requires something that blends militant resistance and a higher-order ethical practice that can point the way toward peaceful reconciliation over the long term.

Gandhi has this line where he says, if you can’t practice nonviolence, it quote, “retaliation or resistance unto death is the second best, though a long way off from the first. Cowardice is impotence, worse than violence.” So this idea that if you can’t be nonviolent, it’s better to be violent than to be a coward, doing nothing — I think gets at something important. Can you help unpack that?

to raise the question of strategy, as if we can evaluate means without some kind of ethical reflection or without some kind of underlying ethical commitments, for King, is already a confusion. He thinks that the ends are prefigured in any means.

Gandhi, in “Hind Swaraj,” has this great passage where he talks about how could come to acquire a piece of property. You could buy it. You could steal it. You could kill somebody in pursuit of it. You could ask for it as a gift.At the end of the day, you still have the same property. But the thing, itself, has changed. In one scenario, it’s a piece of stolen property. It’s a theft. In another, it’s a gift, which is different than something you’ve purchased.

So in the course of acquiring the thing, even though the thing is the same, the means have transformed it in a really, really important way. And King wants to say something similar — that in all political practice, the ends are prefigured in the means

nonviolence has to be — if it’s going to be true nonviolence for King — informed by a philosophy of love that really wants and desires and wills goodwill for the enemy at present and is committed, at the fundamental level, to going on together in peace, going on together, sharing the polity in perpetuity.

I think for King, imperative to nonviolent resistance turns, in large part, on the question of your own dignity and self-respect. So it is a justice question. He’s concerned with structural justice as a matter of the kinds of arrangements that prevail in the larger American society. That’s obviously true.

So there’s the person or group you’re in conversation or conflict with. I’m a liberal, and I’m arguing with a conservative. And I think that’s the most common target to think about: How do I beat or convince this person or group on the other side?

Then there’s the broader community polity — the voters, of the country, people who are bystanders, maybe interested, maybe not, but a broader community that is in some way watching or can be brought in to watch. And then there’s you, the person taking the action, and how it affects you and your group to take a particular action.

something that seems present in King’s thought is much, much, much, much more concern and focus than I think most political thinkers have today on how political action affects you, the person taking it, and affects the broader community that might be watching it

— that ends up with you being turned away from the good and toward things like hatred, resentment, violence, which he thinks, ultimately, will corrode your soul and take you further away from flourishing.

But he’s also concerned with how you relate to your own sense of equality, equal standing, worth, as he would say, somebodiness, we might say dignity — he also says that a lot — and that for King, to acquiesce in the face of oppression and domination, without protest, is to abdicate your own self-respect and dignity.

for him, dignity also required a certain kind of excellence of character, a certain kind of comportment and practice toward others.

So it is about trying to defend your dignity, defend yourself respect against insult and humiliation, oppression. But it’s also about doing so in a way that doesn’t degrade your character in the long term, that doesn’t cause you to end up being turned away from the good, which, again, for him, is going to be a religiously-inflected category

When you think about somebody’s political philosophy or their theory of political action, you can maybe think of there being a couple agents they’re thinking about.

It has fallen out of favor to say that there are certain ways of acting, politically, that are better and worse, from a virtue perspective, because it often is seen not as really a question of you and your relationship to some baseline or ideal but is some kind of concession you’re making to people who don’t deserve

I am a person who believes those questions are still legitimate, that they can’t all be reduced to strategy or will to power or psychic drives. I think that there’s something like an ethical life that requires us to argue about it and requires us to think really hard about how we discipline ourselves to achieve it.

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, wrote a phenomenal book, many years ago, called “Righteous Discontent.” And that’s what introduces the phrase, “the politics of respectability.” It’s a study of turn of the century Black Baptist women and their organizing efforts through the church.

It’s this idea that, in confronting a system of social stigma, the response that you need to have to it is to try to adjust your behavior, comportment, your self fashioning, in line with the dominant norms so that you can, over time, undermine the stigma and become a full participant in society.

there are all sorts of questions, legitimate questions, that are raised against that. Are we losing something valuable about alternative forms of life, about alternative cultural practices, when we take the existing, dominant norms as unassailable or something to aspire to?

what’s really fascinating is that he talks a lot about how he sympathizes with all those criticisms. He agrees with them

here’s the other part of Evelyn Higginbotham’s formulation — there’s a deeper question, one with thousands of years of moral reflection built up into it, which is about virtue ethics — that there are some things that people are appealing to you about that aren’t about their effect in the polity that aren’t about trying to manipulate white, racial attitudes. They’re about your own flourishing and character. They’re deep questions about how to live a good life, how to achieve excellence and the crafting of your soul.

as King would say, our reason sometimes can become subordinate to our passions. It can just be a legitimizing power or rationalizing power to the point where we lose track of what we really want to achieve, the kind of character we really want to have.

And for King, many of the appeals he made in that vocabulary are really about that. They’re really about virtue. They’re really about what hatred does to your life, what anger does to your life, what violence does to your life

there is a question for him, at the core of his life, which is, what makes this worth doing? That’s a virtue question. It’s not just a strategic or tactical one, in the narrow sense.

he describes nonviolence, I think really importantly, as also being about a nonviolence of spirit.

the example that he often gives is about humiliation — that there’s a way in which the desire to humiliate others, to diminish their status in front of other people for your own pleasure, the desire to subject them to standards of evaluation that they probably themselves don’t hold or don’t understand, in order to enable mockery. There’s a way in which, if we’re reflexive about where that desire comes from, we will find that it comes from a place that’s irrational, indefensible and, likely, cruel, and that if we were to imagine a way of life built around those feelings, those desires, those practices, it would be one that would make it really hard for us to have healthy social ties, stable institutions, flourishing social relationships.

So part of what he’s up to is asking us, at all times, to be self-reflexive about the desires and needs and fantasies that drive us in politics

the concession.

So what nonviolence does is, it builds in a check on those kinds of rationalizations, those kinds of emotional drives, by teaching us to avoid forms of humiliation and forms of physical violence that make it hard to come back from. So that’s the first point.

The second point — and it goes more to your sense of revenge and retaliation — is again, forcing us to acknowledge the legitimacy of anger.

He uses the phrase, “legitimate anger” in the late ’60s — but to be reflective about it and understand that, even in a case where someone kills a loved one of yours, revenge, violence, retaliation, that doesn’t bring back the loved one that you’ve lost.

The only thing that can do that is a kind of forward-looking, constructive practice of politics and social ethics.

so what he’s trying to do is raise the question of, can we channel our legitimate rage, our legitimate anger, into a practice that allows us to maintain our self respect?

here’s this man who is both making this public argument and trying to get people to follow him in it and put themselves at risk over it, and is also living it himself, and talks about this unbelievably difficult thing, which is not feel righteous anger, but to not feel hatred, to internally reflect the world you want externally.

he does falter. He does fail. And I think when we read biographies of King, when you read the last parts of David Garrow’s biography, when you read Cornel West’s essay, from “To Shape a New World,” which talks a lot about the despair at the end of King’s life, if you watch HBO’S great documentary, “King in the Wilderness,” you see a person faltering and failing under the pressure.

He’s not able, for example, to bring himself to a kind of reconciliation with Malcolm X

How imaginable is King’s philosophy, is this practice, without his deep Christianity, without a belief in redemption, in salvation, in the possibility of a next life?

I think King, himself, thinks that the practice of nonviolent politics does the kind of work that you’re describing. And I think he would be worried about the fact that, in our time, so much of these questions about the management of emotion, the building of character, has become a privatized practice.

So I think he does think that that’s one way that this really does happen. And we have lots of evidence from the Civil Rights Movement, personal testimony, and personal reflection, where this seems to be the case.

the last thing I’ll say is that in order to do that work, in order to do some of the work you’re describing, he also is building an alternative community

So one way that I read that famous final speech, “I’ve seen the promised land” — there’s obviously a prophetic reading of it, but there’s also one where he’s describing the prefiguration of the promised land in the kind of politics and social life he’s participated in over his career, that the promised land is seen in the union politics in Memphis, it’s seen in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, gathering to do Mississippi Freedom Summer. It’s seen in the people walking for 350-plus days in Montgomery, Alabama, and banding together to help each other out, that is the promised land.

And when you are in a community that’s constantly talking with each other and lifting each other up and engaging in practices like song, prayer, other communal rituals, to try to affirm this alternative set of ethical and political commitments against the whole rest of the culture, that’s the only way it can be done, is that you have to have an alternative form of social life that can sustain you in that work. The private practice isn’t going to do it.

When you look at the principles of nonviolence on Stanford’s King Institute, I think a bunch of them would be familiar to people. You can resist evil without resorting to violence. You seek to win the friendship and understanding of the opponent, not to humiliate.

He thinks that we learn a lot about how to love other people by confronting them in public, by forcing ourselves into uncomfortable situations where we have to endure the look of the other, back and forth, where we train ourselves to extend these interactions of contentious politics until they can alter or change the people that we’ve put our bodies in close contact with on the field of politics.

I go back to the sermon he gave — and it’s collected in “Strength to Love,” and it’s called shattered dreams — where he confronts a problem that is all over the Black tradition, which is that the struggle we’re engaged in has gone on, in some form or another, for hundreds of years. At the moments of its greatest promise, you can look over the course of history and see, just years later, we find ourselves in situations that are unimaginably awful.

King is not naive. He’s a student of history. He’s somebody who asks himself hard questions like this. And he gives two different kinds of answers. And one is the answer that you’ve mentioned here, which is a theological answer. It’s conventional theodicy story, that look, at the end of the day, God is at work in the world. And God is on the side of justice.

There’s another way that he goes at it, however. And for me, I read it as rooted in a different kind of project, one that combines what used to be called philosophical anthropology, which is just a way of saying philosophical reflections on what kind of beings we are. It’s rooted in that, and it’s rooted in politics. And I think those things can find lots of overlapping consensus from people outside of the Christian tradition.

What you have to be committed to, in the last instance, is that evil is not the totality of who we are as persons, that people have the capacity, emotionally and rationally, to reflect on their life plans, their practices, their commitments, and change them, maybe not all of them, maybe not all at once, but that those things can be changed, and that politics is really a field where contingency is the key word, that although there are structural constraints and everything can’t be done at every moment, that the unprecedented, the new, the unexpected, happens in this realm.

And the only way that we can confirm that nothing new will happen, that oppression will last forever, that the future bears no hope, is if we don’t act. That’s the only way we can confirm that it’s true for all time, is by failing to act in pursuit of justice.

that’s King’s view, I think. And to me, that’s the persuasive one, that in our action, we might be able to see some measure of justice from a complicated, complex swirl of contingencies, and to move the ball forward — we will inevitably fail — but to look back on that failure with maturity and try to do better the next time.

How do you think about the question of the weaponization of nonviolence and then the applicability of its principles to the powerful and to what they might, we might, the state might learn from it.

there were many people — Harold Cruse famously wrote this, but others even closer to King — who said, you’re not the leader of Vietnam. You’re the leader of the African American civil rights movement. You should not speak out on this war because you’ll lose your relationship with Johnson.

King says that the people who are advising him in this way, they just don’t know him, his commitment or his calling. They don’t understand that if he’s going to raise his voice against violence in Watts or Detroit, that he’s got to raise it against what he called, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” his own government.

for him, the question was really one about militarism and the way that gets imagined as this hardheaded, realistic, hyper-rational response to international disputes and social problems abroad, when in actuality, if we take stock of what he called the casualties of war, the spiritual ones and the material ones, we would realize that most of the violence we engage in at the foreign-policy level is counterproductive. It’s created more problems and more harms than it ever has seemed to solve.

This is one of the powerful interventions that you see in Lionel McPherson’s essay, in “To Shape a New World.” It’s just this idea that this is about hardheaded realism is mythic. King says it’s about an immature image that we are nurturing for ourselves, that we’re trying to shore up this idea of ourselves as some kind of crusading hero or all-powerful world power, while not taking stock of all of the things about our freedoms, about our way of life, about our connectedness as a society, about our social divisions, that war has exacerbated, not to mention the violence that’s prosecuted abroad.

And he says similar things about domestic policy, the ways in which our politics toward poor families, single-parent households, is punitive for reasons that aren’t justified, that our response to what he calls “the derivative crimes of the ghetto” are wildly out of proportion and unjust compared to how we treat the systematic crimes of exploitation, segregation, disenfranchisement, that structure much of ghetto life.

So I’m in total agreement with Coates on that question

it just seems — I don’t want to call it axiomatic, but a repeated d that the more willing you become to use violence as a state, the more it corrupts you, and the more violent you become as a state, and to some degree, the more violent the people you are policing, the people you are occupying, become.

I’m not a pacifist. I don’t believe you can fully eradicate violence. But we don’t weigh how violent we make others, in our actions, very well, and then how violent we become in response, how much we enter into that escalatory dynamic.

But then the other thing is this question of this broader community, of changing hearts, of changing minds, of acting upon people, not through punishment, but through our belief that they can alter. And I’d be curious to hear you reflect on that question of community a little bit, because I think one of the central debates of our time is who’s actually in the community.

What would it mean to have a bit more of King’s view, of trying to create community at the center of what the state is attempting to do, as it fashions and helps govern the country?

BRANDON TERRY: So one underappreciated feature from King’s famous Riverside Church speech against Vietnam, is he goes on this whole riff about America lacking maturity. And it’s a weird thing to have in a foreign-policy speech. You’re used to — you’re a policy person. You don’t usually hear the word “maturity” bandied about in these kinds of debates.

But what he’s getting at is that something really tightly linked to violence, that violence always exceeds the original justification you have for it. It’s not precise. It’s not able to be easily targeted, as we think. It spirals out. It produces retaliation. And then we retaliate again.

And all the while, it’s expanding its justifications to the point of absurdity. And King describes that as adding cynicism to the process of death. And he says that maturity is one of the only ways out here, that the maturity to be able to stand up and say, we were wrong, we want to make amends, we want to repair evils committed in our name, those are questions that are essentially nonstarters in American politics right now, certainly about foreign policy, but even in some places in domestic policy.

that feature of King’s thinking is something that I always want to draw attention to because I think it’s something we ignore. So that’s the first point I want to make.

The second thing — and this is also really deeply-seeded in that Vietnam speech — one of the reasons that people hated it so much — he was attacked in The New York Times, basically every editorial page in the country — one of the reasons people hated that speech so much is that he spent so much time expressing solidarity and sympathy with Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese forces.

How could you express sympathy or some kind of solidarity with the enemy? And it’s very instructive, how King went about it. He wasn’t one of these people — you’ve seen these images of people waving the North Vietnamese flag at counterculture protests. It wasn’t like that.

It was him really spending a lot of time meditating on the reasons why we had ended up in this conflict, narrating the whole history of our failure to support Ho Chi Minh and the struggle against French colonialism, against Chinese colonialism, and how that had led to the situation we were in by 1967. King is narrating this history. He’s also trying to get people to think about what it must feel like to be on the ground in Vietnam and witness these bombings, witnessed this imposition of terror.

And he’s doing that because at bottom, he’s inspired by a vision really rooted in a parable the Good Samaritan, from the Bible, that everyone is our neighbor, that there are no sectional loyalties that should eviscerate our moral obligations to others, our obligation to show them respect, to go on in community with them, and that most of what goes on in foreign policy and particularly war making, is a bad-faith evasion of the fact that we’re all interconnected.

he understood that there’s a fundamental interconnectedness amongst humanity at the ethical level and at the material, structural level, and that war making is an evasion of that fact. We’re going to have to live together. So the chief question that should organize it is, how can we do so in peace?

He has a line where he says, quote, “the dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain and when he knows that he has a means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts between husband, wife and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth, on a scale of dollars, is eliminated.” Tell me a bit about the spiritual and psychological dimensions of King’s economic philosophy and organizing.

BRANDON TERRY: Well, for King, the question of poverty and the question of economic inequality are both questions of dignity and democracy, and the questions of dignity because when you live without the adequate means to really enjoy the fair value of your basic rights, when you live in a society — and this is a really important point for King — when you live in a society of profound affluence, like the United States, and you live in severe poverty, it expresses a kind of contempt from your fellow citizens about your standing as an equal member of the polity.

So separate from the plain, material fact of hunger or health care, there’s this additional spiritual concern with the way in which living with nothing, living on a lonely island amidst an ocean of prosperity, as he would put it, diminishes your dignity.

then another piece — this is bridging of the dignity and democracy question — is that when people don’t have a say in the core, vital interest of their life, when they have no decision-making power over the processes which determine how their life is going to go, that too is a diminishment of their dignity. And King, who was operating in a long tradition of social democracy, wants to expand democratic practices to the broader economic realm.

Without expanding democracy into that economic realm, for King, we’re both making a mockery of democracy and we’re diminishing the dignity of citizens who live in search of a real standing as free and equal.

as somebody who spends a lot of my time in debates about economic policy, I think it is fair to say that the ends of economics are taken as the economy, typically. People hopefully shouldn’t starve. But a lot of debates about what we should do, even for the poor, become these recursive, well, how can they better participate in the economy and how are they going to be able to invest in themselves and how they’ll be economic opportunity for their children.

And the idea that the economy is subservient to the community, that the point of the economy is the community, that it should be measured— our policy should be measured by what they do for democratic participation, for the dignity of individuals, is pretty lost. If anything, I see it more now, on the post-liberal right, as people call it, than I even do among mainline Democrats.

it has fallen out of favor as a way to frame and think about these conversations.

BRANDON TERRY: Yeah, I think it’s rooted in some really complicated things. I think there’s a kind of liberal anxiety about speaking forthrightly about the fact that living in areas of severe, concentrated disadvantage and racial segregation that we call ghettos, diminishes the dignity of the people who live there.

That feels uncomfortable for people to say forthrightly, in the way that King would.

so we try to get around it by speaking about opportunity and the wealth gap and unemployment statistics. But really what people are feeling is an existential assault on dignity.

one way to read that book is to say that she’s telling a tragic story about the loss of a particular ideal that guided great society politics. And that’s the principle of maximum feasible participation.

That was a really social-democratic idea, this idea that, well, we need to empower all sorts of people to participate in policy making and democratic deliberation, and that part of where people will find self-respect and dignity is through engagement in politics and their community

I think it gets to something that is very present, towards the end of King’s life, which is his sense that there is something important for the civil rights movement in the labor movement. And unions, on some level, they are mechanisms of democracy. One of the most important functions they have is workplace democracy

King is, in this tradition, in many ways inspired by a mentor of his. And one of the most important figures in American history but one of the most severely neglected was A. Philip Randolph, the great labor leader, former organizer of the Pullman Porters, the architect of both the March on Washington that gets canceled, which was going to target the Roosevelt administration during World War II, and the 1963 famous March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

they’ve got a certain set of commitments. So one is the idea that because most African Americans are working class or poor, anything that advances the interests of working-class people and their ability to exercise democratic control over the economy is going to advance the interests of African Americans.

for King labor unions are also, as you described, important laboratories of democracy. So they’re one of the few places where people from all walks of life can get together, deliberate about strategy, deliberate about social ends, social goods, put money behind things that they value, that aren’t only their own material interest.

today, of course, there’s this ongoing — always is this ongoing argument — of should you have race-based politics or is that unusable, doesn’t work, creates too much backlash? Or you should have class-based politics that are looking for commonalities, and because you’ve had so much economic disadvantage for Black Americans, that’ll work through the mechanism of class just fine.

BRANDON TERRY: So King often invokes the philosopher Hegel, because he’s constantly describing his mode of thinking as a dialectical one, where he’s trying to reconcile seeming opposites and produce a new synthesis, which helps you transcend certain intractable problems.

Now as a reading of Hegel, that has much to be desired. But as a description of Martin Luther King’s thought, I think that’s always a good way to understand what he’s up to. And so I think what he’s always trying to do is transcend that opposition.

there’s a way in which we sometimes will say class-based politics works to lift African Americans because they’re disproportionately poor. And what’s tricky about that is that it doesn’t really theorize what to do about the African American middle class and the African American elite.

So a thing that King was thinking a lot about when he wrote “Stride Toward Freedom” and the Montgomery bus boycott, is there are areas where racial solidarity is going to be really effective and probably indispensable.

where questions of anti-Black racism emerge, where questions of racial humiliation, stigma that really affects the larger group, things that all Black people feel vulnerable to, those are going to be areas — like the segregation laws on the buses — those are going to be areas where you actually can generate a lot of racial solidarity and do a lot of important work with it, especially as a defensive posture.

When you start to get into questions of political economy, however, you have to be careful because the appeal of racial solidarity can actually obscure the fact that Black people don’t all share the same material interest in lots of ways.

King’s primary principle always is, is that he’s dedicated to the group that William Julius Wilson called the truly disadvantaged, the least of these, that at the end of the day, he’s going to give everything to the people who are in the most desperate situation, the poor. And that’s going to guide his politics.

where that is enabled by a race-based solidarity, so in questions of policing, perhaps, or questions of social stigma and media discourse, that’s where he’ll turn. But in other cases, I think he’d really be trying to experiment with a form of politics that empowers the poor to take leadership on their ow

How does being more aware of the distinctions he drew and the decisions he made help you look at some of the paths we should be walking down today and are not, in these conversations, or are walking down and shouldn’t be?

n order for us to understand why so many African Americans are located in the realm of the most disadvantaged, in the strata of the most disadvantaged, you have to understand the history of racial domination in this country. You have to understand the persistence of racial discrimination, especially in labor markets. And you have to understand the ways that racial ideology allows us to obscure the nature of our economy.

So the most classic example is that structural unemployment gets reframed, in part by racism, as questions of laziness or pathology or criminality instead of as a feature of the economy as such. So King always talks about the critique of racism as part of the diagnosis of the disease in order to cure it.

So even in the privileging the least well off and being concerned with poor people of all races, he wants to say that the critique of racism helps us see through the kinds of blindnesses that obscure the nature of our economy and the commonalities across race and the things that we need to address the questions of economic justice precisely

The second thing is that, in his critique of Black power, one of the things he says is that he worries that Black power gives priority to the question of race in a way that confuses our analysis of social reality. So what does he mean by that?

if you think that all Black disadvantage is primarily about anti-Black racism, you can start to miss the fact that there are broader economic dislocations that need to be addressed, that there are structural features of the American constitutional order, the ways in which municipal boundaries are structured, ways that funding decisions are made, that aren’t primarily driven by racial animus, that need to be addressed.

You can lose sight of those things and start to think that the real battle is in something like a totality of anti-Black racial ideology that can be battled in Hollywood movies and comic books and school curricula and legislation and political rhetoric

it’s not to say that those things don’t exist. It’s just to say that there’s a confusion about what’s going to make the biggest impact in improving the life circumstances of the least well off.

King really calls us to constantly be very precise about what the causal mechanisms are for Black disadvantage and to not be confused by the fact that there’s discrimination and injustice and cruelty in these other realms but which might not have as much causal impact as some of these other things.

King was very adamant that Black pride, that a concern with representation, that thinking in expansive ways about how do you affirm the somebodiness of Black youth, that those things are really, really important and that they’re not to be dismissed.

So it is a question of justice if people in Hollywood just constantly demean or diminish the talent of nonwhite actors. That is a question of justice. It’s just that we have to be honest about what the import of those struggles will be for the broader group. And the only way we can do that is by being attentive to the class differences within the group.

there’s a way in which — and King diagnoses this very incisively — there’s a way in which some genres of Black nationalism are so pessimistic about the possibility for multiracial democracy in the United States, for any kind of Black flourishing in the United States that they essentially foreclose real interest in political organizing and social movements

But the energy they still managed to generate — the outrage, the sentiment, the sociality — they find their outlet, instead, in a practice of humiliation, counter humiliation. So that there may not be hope that we can actually change the country, but at the very least, we can enjoy a feeling of retaliation, a kind of self-respecting sense of resistance, by engaging in a practice of trying to humiliate our opponents in the public spher

there’s a titillation to that. There’s a catharsis in watching someone — at that point, it would have been called stick it to whitey. Now it would be stick it to the libs or own the libs.

this is a significant amount of people that could cause real damage in the places where they don’t face many countervailing forms of power. And they can exercise a much more toxic impact on the broader state of American politics in a time where the media environment is way more fragmented

I see those elements. And I think that we need more people operating, in the kind of mode that King did, in his critique of Black power, to try to turn people away from their understandable feelings of hostility and resentment, toward more productive forms of political engagement.

the word, “emotion,” which is a neglected part of politics, maybe of King’s thought in particular is that he understood — I think he understood part of the goal of politics and political action as creating a particular structure of political emotion.

, what structure of emotion, of political emotion, we’re actually living in.

BRANDON TERRY: My mentor and friend, Karuna Mantena, at Columbia, political theorist, a brilliant political theorist working on a book on Gandhi — I learned this from her, thinking a lot about how nonviolence is a kind of realism, in part because it doesn’t engage in of fiction that politics is operating on, in the model of rational discussion. It takes very, very, very seriously the problem of emotion.

for King, thinking about the history of racial oppression in America, they’re key emotions that you have to think about. One of the most important ones is fear

If that fear is a longstanding, deeply-structuring feature of American culture and political life, if it’s something that animates our comedy movies, our stand-up routines, our political discourse, you can’t operate as if it’s not there. You have to do things that will somehow disarm, disrupt, dispel those fears, in order to make progress on the political questions you want to pursue. That was one of King’s deepest, deepest commitments.

He’s thinking a lot about anger, which we’ve talked at great length about. And one of the disappointments I’ve had with radical politics in the present, as sympathetic as I am to most of the aims, is that I just don’t think the emotion question has been adequately considered

people often defend their politics as like, King was unpopular. And the things we’re saying are unpopular. So we’re operating in that tradition.

it’s not enough to just say, I’ve started a conversation, I’ve provoked something toxic in the culture. He’s not trying to do that, necessarily. He’s trying to elicit reactions that bring forward certain emotions but not let those emotions unravel the society itself. He’s trying to channel them into other forms of political affect that are much more congenial to reconciliation and justice.

what we’ve unfortunately ended up with is that the sophistication of mobilization strategists, the depth of the polarization, has made anger the principal affect of American politics at this moment.

a King-inspired political philosophy, both at the state level and the activist level, has to do, is think about how do we transform the recalcitrant nature of today’s political anger and channel it into forms of constructive politics that might point toward a more just future and that might dissolve the forms of anger that are illegitimate and ill founded, in part, by doing the kind of work sometimes described as a moral jujitsu, turning those affects against themselves, in part, to try to transform them into something different.

maybe it’ll be easier to use myself as an example, here.

When I started out in blogging and political writing and journalism, particularly blogging, I think I thought a lot about politics in terms of winning and losing, and in my corner of it, winning and losing intellectually, that I was involved in political arguments, and arguments could be won or lost in front of some kind of audience.

One is having been in a lot of arguments. And I think I’m a reasonably good arguer. And so I’ve done, by my own likes, well, and then noticed it didn’t have it all the effect I wanted it to have, which is, if anything, it usually — if you really beat somebody in an argument and they feel humiliated, they go further into views they already held

And two things have begun to corrode, for me, that sense

so you lose by winning.

then the second is, particularly in the Trump era, the sense that if you met something awful with an equal and opposite energetic force, that in some weird way, you just added energy to what was now an awful system and conversation.

What do you do to not create a sense that this is a right conversation to be having? And I don’t the answers to it. And I’m not saying like I’ve ascended to some higher plane and don’t argue or any of that. I have all the same intuitions and senses I’ve always had.

that’s why I find King so interesting and challenging in this way, because it’s just really, really, really different to ask the question, how do I reshape the emotional politics and the emotional structure of myself, of the people I’m in conflict with and then of the people who are bystanders or watchers of that conflict, for the better

It’s just a really different goal to be targeting, and just unimaginably harder than, can I come up with an argument that I think is a winning argument.

I think you see it — when he’s assassinated, the leading figures of the Black-Power generation, they’re heartbroken. They mourn his loss. They grieve for him, in part because — and you can read any of these memoirs, particularly Stokely Carmichael’s — they felt like he never — that even when he disagreed with them, he loved them, and not just because they were friendly, but because he loved in the sense that he always invoked, of agape love, that he wanted goodwill for them, and that his arguments weren’t from a place of trying to humiliate them or embarrass them or expose them as ridiculous.

He wanted to affirm their right to make the arguments they were making, to affirm their intelligence and judgment and to enter into their mind, to try to reconstruct a position with sympathy, but then show why it falls short for the sake of goals that he was forthright about, about justice, about reconciliation, about love

we are in a moment of extraordinary cynicism. And cynicism can take advantage of your intellectual honesty, your practice of agape love. But I think that’s in the short term.

In my better moments, I’m of the view that the only way to start to turn the tide against the cynicism that has so corroded and corrupted our political culture is to try to have these demonstrations of humility and authenticity that cause us to put ourselves at some risk, the way that King did

So always our final question: What are three books you would recommend to the audience? And if I can put one spin on that, you mentioned the many books King wrote. If people want to start with one thing he actually wrote to read, one book, which one should they start with?

I think you get the best sense of his mature thought from his 1967 book, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community,” which is still our question. So I would definitely recommend that. I also really love “A Trumpet of Conscience,” his Canadian Broadcasting Corporation lectures that were published posthumously.

I really strongly recommend Peniel Joseph’s, “The Sword and the Shield.” It’s a dual biography of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. I reviewed it for The New York Review of Books and think really highly of it. It’s a great meditation on the ways they influenced each other. And it gives you a good sense of the broader intellectual milieu of the period.

I also really like Jeanne Theoharis’s “A More Beautiful and Terrible History.” I think for people coming to the study of the civil rights movement for the first time are kind of curious about why some of the things that I’ve said don’t sound familiar to them. She writes, in a really accessible and intelligent way, about some of the myths, that structure, how that history is taught and popularly conveyed. We have a lot of agreements there.

And then a where do we go from here question, I want to recommend my colleague, Tommie Shelby’s book, “Dark Ghettos,” which is a King-inspired philosophical reflection on the deep structure of ghetto poverty and what it requires of us, as a society, to do to redress it. It’s a book that’s very demanding on how far we’ve fallen short and questions of justice that pertain to the kind of neighborhoods that we grew up in and around.

It works like this: Hardcore base voters want to watch media that confirms all their priors and then some. —> So fringe media outlets get traction with Republican audiences. —> GOP politicians need to go on these media outlets in order to reach base voters. —> The more politicians go on these fringe shows, the more mainstream these outlets become. —> Which creates competition for right-wing news outlets that are one standard deviation more sane, forcing those media outlets to get crazier just to stay on par.

Over time, the whole mutually reinforcing, mutually radicalizing process creates the conditions necessary for 70 percent of the Republican party to sincerely believe that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president due to a rigged election

It’s hard to blame voters for believing a lie when every politician they see and media personality they trust is repeating it.

— giving the next generation of Republican officeholders, senior advisers, judges and appointees explicit permission and encouragement to believe that the country is on the verge of collapse.

The list of people making these arguments includes former officials in the Trump administration, some of whom are likely to be considered for top jobs in the event of a Trump restoration in 2024.

The ideas about the threat of an all-powerful totalitarian left and the dismal state of the country — even the most outlandish of them — are taken seriously by conservative politicians as well as prominent influencers on the right.

If Mr. Trump manages to win the presidency again in 2024, many of these intellectual catastrophists could be ready and willing to justify deeds that could well bring American liberal democracy to its knees.

Mr. Anton’s “Flight 93” essay originally appeared on a website with modest traffic, but two days later Rush Limbaugh was reading it aloud in its entirety on his radio show. The essay set the tone of life-or-death struggle (and related imagery) that is common among catastrophists.

Mr. Anton updated and amplified the argument in a 2021 book, “The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return.”

The prospect of Mr. Biden’s becoming president constituted an “existential threat,” Mr. Eastman said, to the survivability of the country. Would we “completely repudiate every one of our founding principles” and allow ourselves to be “eradicated”? Those were the stakes, as he viewed them.

Once a thinker begins to conceive of politics as a pitched battle between the righteous and those who seek the country’s outright annihilation, extraordinary possibilities open up.

in May 2021, Mr. Anton came to conduct a two-hour podcast with a far-right Silicon Valley tech guru and self-described “monarchist,” Curtis Yarvin, in which the two agreed that the American “regime” is today most accurately described as a “theocratic oligarchy.” In that arrangement, an elite class of progressive “priests” ensconced in executive branch agencies, the universities, elite media and other leading institutions of civil society promulgate and enforce a distorted and self-serving version of reality that illegitimately justifies their rule.

It culminated in Mr. Yarvin sketching a scenario in which a would-be dictator he alternatively describes as “Caesar” and “Trump” defies the laws and norms of democratic transition and uses a “Trump app” to direct throngs of his supporters on the streets of the nation’s capital to do his bidding, insulating the would-be dictator from harm and the consequences of his democracy-defying acts.

Mr. Anton described Caesarism as one-man rule that emerges “after the decay of a republican order, when it can no longer function.”

he would prefer the country to embrace the principles of “1787 forever.” But if that is no longer possible, he said, the rule of a Caesar can be a necessary method to restore order.)

Those on the right primarily concerned about the fate of traditionalist Christian morals and worship in the United States insist that we already live in a regime that oppresses and brutalizes religious believers and conservatives. And they make those charges in a theologically inflected idiom that’s meant to address and amplify the right’s intense worries about persecution by progressives.