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Who Would You Be If the World Ended?

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 03 › last-of-us-world-ended › 673436

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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

The critics and the gamers have written much about The Last of Us, the video game that became a majestic HBO series. The main story is about love and family, but there’s a dark and nagging question in the scenario: If the world had no more rules, what kind of person would you be?

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The four quadrants of American politics What have humans just unleashed? You can’t define woke.

Who Are You?

This story contains spoilers for the entire first season of The Last of Us.

Did you read that disclaimer? No, I mean it—I am going to spoil everything in the first season. You’ve been warned.

In interviews, the writers of The Last of Us have said that they intended the series to be about love. And they have indeed created a gorgeous—and disturbing—tale of how we find and cherish family. But I want to raise another question that lurks in the adventures of Joel and Ellie, a dark rumble of a thought that most of us would rather not confront: If the world ended, and all of the rules of society vanished, what kind of person would you be?

This question, I think, resonates more with us today than it did during the Cold War. Back then, and particularly in the 1970s and ’80s, postapocalyptic fiction included an entire pulpy genre that the scholar Paul Brians called “Radioactive Rambos,” in which men—almost always men, with a few notable exceptions—would wander the wasteland, killing mutants and stray Communists. (They also had a lot of sex.) Sometimes, these heroes were part of paramilitary groups, but most typically, they were the classic lone wolf: super-skilled death machines whose goal was to get from Point A to Point B while shooting everything in between and saving a girl, or a town, or even the world.

But we live in more ambiguous times. We’re not fighting the Soviet Union. We don’t trust institutions, or one another, as much as we did 40 or 50 years ago. Perhaps we don’t even trust ourselves. We live in a time when lawlessness, whether in the streets or the White House, seems mostly to go unpunished. For decades, we have retreated from our fellow citizens and our social organizations into our own homes, and since COVID began, we’ve learned to virtualize our lives, holding meetings on glowing screens and having our food and other goods dropped at our doors by people we never have to meet.

We also face any number of demagogues who seem almost eager for our institutions to fail so that they can repopulate them in their own image and likeness.

Living in a world of trees and water and buildings and cars, we can posture all day long about how we would take our personal virtues with us through the gates of Armageddon. But considering that we can barely muster enough civic energy to get off our duffs and go vote every few years, how certain are we about our own bravery and rectitude?

Although Joel and Ellie are rendered with wonderful complexity by the show’s writers and by the actors Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, some of the greatest moments in The Last of Us are with people the protagonists encounter during their travels: Bill, the survivalist (played by Nick Offerman in what should be a slam-dunk Emmy nomination); Kathleen, the militia leader (Melanie Lynskey); and David, the religious preacher and secret cannibal, played with terrifying subtlety by Scott Shepherd. (I warned you there were spoilers.)

Each of these characters is a challenge, and a reproof, to any of us who think we’d be swell folks, and maybe even heroes, after the collapse of civilization.

Bill is a paranoid survivalist who falls in love with a wanderer named Frank. They live together for years and choose suicide when Frank becomes mortally ill. It’s a marvelous and heartbreaking story, but Bill admits in his suicide note that he always hated humanity and was initially glad to see everyone die. He no longer feels that way, he says, implying that Frank’s love saved him, but right to the end, he remains hostile to almost everyone else in the world—just as he was before Outbreak Day.

Kathleen leads a rebellion in Kansas City against FEDRA, the repressive military government that takes over America after the pandemic. Her “resistance,” however, is a brutal, ragtag militia, and Kathleen is a vicious dictator who is no better (and perhaps worse) than the regime she helped overthrow. She promises clemency to a group of FEDRA collaborators, for example, and then orders them all to be shot anyway. “When you’re done, burn the bodies,” she says casually. “It’s faster.” She even imprisons her own doctor, who pleads with her, “Kathleen, I delivered you.” She executes him herself.

What’s important about Kathleen, however, is that she later admits that she really hasn’t changed. Her brother was the original head of the resistance: kind, forgiving, a true leader. She admits that she never had that kind of goodness in her, not even as a child—which raises the troubling thought that we all live near a Kathleen who is tenuously bound only by the restrictions of law and custom.

And then there’s David.

History is replete with times when desperate human beings have resorted to cannibalism, and although we recoil in disgust, we know it can happen. David hates what he felt he had to do, and he admits his shame. But it turns out that what makes David evil is not that he eats people but that he’s a fraud: He cares nothing about religion; he cares about being in charge, and he admits that he has struggled all his life with violent impulses. He is another character whom the apocalypse reveals more than it changes. When he gleefully tries to rape Ellie, she kills the former math teacher in self-defense.

Again, this raises the creepy question of how many Davids walk among us, smiling and toting algebra books, restrained from their hellish impulses only by the daily balm of street lights and neighbors and manicured lawns. We should be grateful for every day that we don’t have to know the answer.

Today’s News

Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan endorsed Finland’s NATO bid; he has not yet approved Sweden’s. The Justice Department is reportedly investigating the surveillance of Americans by the Chinese company that owns TikTok. President Joe Biden urged Congress to expand the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s authority to impose more stringent penalties on senior executives who mismanage lending banks.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Nicole Acheampong writes about the gift of rereading. Up for Debate: Readers weigh in on the freedom and frustration of cars.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic

GPT-4 Has the Memory of a Goldfish

By this point, the many defects of AI-based language models have been analyzed to death—their incorrigible dishonesty, their capacity for bias and bigotry, their lack of common sense. GPT-4, the newest and most advanced such model yet, is already being subjected to the same scrutiny, and it still seems to misfire in pretty much all the ways earlier models did. But large language models have another shortcoming that has so far gotten relatively little attention: their shoddy recall. These multibillion-dollar programs, which require several city blocks’ worth of energy to run, may now be able to code websites, plan vacations, and draft company-wide emails in the style of William Faulkner. But they have the memory of a goldfish.

Read the full article.

The Freedom and Frustration of Cars

found Mar '23 The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 03 › the-freedom-and-frustration-of-cars › 673427

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This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week I asked for readers’ reflections on the automobile. I wanted to know: How have cars shaped your life? What do you think about their future? I received so many responses that we are going off-schedule and posting half of them today and will share the rest on Monday.

Mauricio believes that electric vehicles are the future and has no patience for nostalgic holdouts:

I’m a car enthusiast from the Boomer generation, and I’m tired of laments for the internal combustion engine. It’s over! And people need to get over it. It’s been nearly 150 years now of the internal combustion engine, and fans say, “Oh, but they sound so glorious.” You know what sounds more glorious? A thoroughbred at full stride: the nostrils sucking in, the hooves tearing up the dirt, the gigantic heart pounding, and the jockey keeping it all under control. That’s romantic. But guess what? It died because the car was more efficient, easier to drive, and left less horse shit on the road—and at first, cars were slower than a decent horse. People bought them anyway, because cars were clearly the future … and let go of the romance of 4,000 years.

Lee is a physician and a cyclist who often has bikes on his roof rack that are worth more than his car:

My car increases my range. That makes my life richer. Even though I consider 50 miles in a day a modest distance to bicycle, a car puts many more things in my easily accessible daily range than I would otherwise have. Stores, parks, other people, all kinds of resources. Think of it the way any other animal would: How good a life you can make depends on what good stuff your range, or territory, comprises. A small range makes an impoverished life—materially, socially, intellectually. The bicycle was a social revolution, for just that reason. Remember, the bicycle was the impetus for widespread paved roads, and the Wrights were bicycle mechanics. The car followed shortly after, and took that principle up an order of magnitude. That ability, to access the good things in a large range at will, is why the car dominates our society and our lives, and will keep doing so for the foreseeable future. (Yes, mass transit can fill that role too, in select settings of sufficient density to support frequent and convenient operation, but for most of America and large swaths of the world, cars and motorcycles are really it.)

For Alisoun’s oldest son, life is a highway:

He turned 2 when the movie Cars came out, and our family got him car-related items as presents. We thought the car theme might be a phase, like, “Today it’s cars; tomorrow it’s diggers.” It is now 17 years later, and the car phase has never changed. We have a car kid.

We are not car people. We drive them. We have them. But we are raising a kid who loves cars with a depth not often seen in teenagers today (in the neurotypical community). At 16 he bought his first car, a Mustang. He gave us a presentation about why we should let him buy it. He loved it and worked on it in our garage throughout the early-pandemic lockdown. He sold that one and bought another Mustang. He spends breaks from college tracking down car parts. His room has boxes of car parts. He watches car videos.

We shake our heads. The world is going electric, quieter with their cars. He loves to make his Mustangs loud. He meets very nice people who share this passion. This year there was a recall on a car part. He drove in front of me to the dealer in his latest Mustang. I watched him stop for a family crossing the street. One of the group raised his finger and circled it above his head. My son revved the engine for him. The man threw his head back with joy. A fellow car guy. I didn’t know these communities existed. I do now.

Having a car kid means I have learned to pay attention to cars. I have driven all over with him in the pursuit of good deals on parts. When looking at colleges, we counted the Mustangs we saw on our travels. We hit a hot stretch in North Carolina where we saw 17 Mustangs in 15 minutes! I am so glad our son found his passion young and we have gotten to watch him revel in cars. We still have the Cars bedspread from his Little Tikes bed and the Cars shirt he wore every other day of preschool. And now I get to ride shotgun in the latest Mustang with the push-button start and the special gear-shift cover and the very loud exhaust, and watch as fellow car folks wave as we go by.

Adam is not a car guy:

I’ve never driven a car and don’t expect to. It makes no sense on any level that I would be trusted, after fairly minimal instruction, to send a couple tons of metal hurtling around the world at extremely high speeds. Some mornings it takes me three tries to tie my shoes right; it seems crazy to suggest I should go from there to placing the right shoe on the accelerator and pushing down hard. To me it’s one of the wonders of the world that thousands of people drive thousands of cars past my window all day, every day, and only occasionally wind up wrapped around a telegraph pole, traffic signal, or each other.

One of humankind’s great achievements is the accommodation of mediocrity: There is something glorious about how we’ve managed to build societies in which millions of people can spend their time being just barely okay at things, and it mostly works. It’s one thing to invent a car and build a road network that a few geniuses or highly trained experts can navigate sort-of safely; it’s quite another thing to build a system that millions of everyday people, often not functioning at their best, somehow manage to traverse daily, mostly without dying. It’s incredible. But I still can’t make the leap to participating directly.

Vancouver’s one of those cities that does car-free days: pick a street and shut it off to traffic for the afternoon. I always go to those. It’s fascinating to see how many thousands of people can fit into a pretty normal city street when it doesn’t have any cars on it, and how completely different it feels. Just standing in the middle of a six-lane road and looking along, it is pretty strange.

I get that, to some people, they seem like a necessity, but cars are pretty weird if you never drive one and rarely get in them. We’ve played this funny trick on ourselves by accepting so completely the notion that roads are for cars, and that we must have enough roads for everyone who wants to to drive everywhere all the time.

Tara is conflicted about cars:

I spent the majority of my life in the exurbs. A couple of years ago, following a divorce, I moved into the type of walkable, urban neighborhood that city planners lust over. And the truth is, a lot of days, I still miss the exurbs.

My commute was brutal. I had to be up by 5:30 every morning to make it to work by 8. For the majority of the year, I never got to experience sunlight in my own house: I was on the road before dawn, and I’d arrive home after dusk.

Time and time again, my journey home was delayed by traffic accidents. I would sit in traffic for an extra two hours, knowing that the reason three lanes were blocked off was because another exhausted commuter drove under a semi that day. It was also never far from my mind that these accidents happened not because somebody was drinking or trying to see how fast a Porsche could go, but because the driver was an exhausted commuter just like myself, trying to make it home before it was time to put the kids to bed.

But also, I had a nice, big yard, with mature rose bushes climbing the back gate. We had a fire pit. We had a home theater, and could watch any film we desired on a massive screen, complete with a top-of-the-line sound system. The neighborhood was quiet. And, crucially, we were able to enjoy these benefits as average, middle-class people. The mortgage on that house was one-third of what my current rent is, and the public schools were perfectly acceptable.

Now? I’m in healthier shape than I’ve been in since adolescence, because my neighborhood in the city is so walkable. I no longer put 20,000-plus miles on my car every year. I walk several miles a day, forever discovering new gems in the neighborhood I never knew about.

But I also no longer have my yard. I no longer have my home theater. I’m crammed into one-third of the space, but paying three times more. I walk by throngs of homeless people every day, and I have to step over puddles of urine on the sidewalks. Property crime is rampant; I’ve had to call 911 three times in two years to report dangerous situations, and every time, I have had to spend 10 minutes on hold because the operators are too busy.

I don’t have children, but if I did, private school would be a necessity rather than a luxury, since the public schools in the city are abysmal. And all of this is in the nice part of the city. The part of the city that is far, far more expensive and more affluent than my old exurb.

I hated spending my life behind the wheel of a car. I hated the commutes that robbed me of the opportunity to enjoy the sunlight, or the ability to spend waking hours with my family. I hated the car dependency, the way that I couldn’t so much as grab a soda without getting behind the wheel again. But I also appreciate the cars and infrastructure that made that all possible, that made it possible for average people to live in spacious houses with big yards in safe neighborhoods for a reasonable price. No matter how much cities invest in infrastructure and affordable housing, no matter how well a city is designed, no amount of urban planning will ever replace the freedom an automobile gives.

Kathy is also an aficionado of the freedom cars can afford:

Canadian here eh.

When I was a kid, my mother used to joke that it was a miracle that neither I nor my younger brother were born on a back road. Dad’s typical car comment was “Let’s see where this goes.” And I’ve inherited that driving gene from my dad.

I was born in Whitehorse, Yukon, and then we moved countless times, all over Northern Ontario, and then the family settled in Ottawa. Driving was a rite of passage for my generation, back in the ’60s and ’70s. The group I was part of for about five years was completely car-centered—rallies, demolition derbies—and gas was so cheap then, so a recreation item was to drive half an hour out somewhere, and then back, to accommodate parental deadlines. Of course, it was only the boys who were driving; the girls’ appropriate role was to sit in the stands, or the passenger seat, look sexy, and admire.

I moved on. My first husband had been a car buff for years, with a car sitting in the backyard waiting for his 16th birthday. Several months before, he developed glaucoma in one eye and went down to 10 percent vision. His charming grandfather convinced him that he would never again be able to drive any kind of motorized vehicle. We got a car, and I drove us everywhere, until it died of old age.

I love driving—my husband used to call me Stirling Moss, and told everyone that if you wanted to know the longest distance between two points, just travel with me. Freeways were efficient, but I always preferred the scenic route. My dream would not have been to be a ballet dancer, or anything like that—my dream was to be a stock-car racer. And, until I got older and some smarter, I had a very heavy foot. Whee! Traffic circles? Bring ’em on, and let’s see how fast we can do them.

We parted, and my next partner was an anxious driver, and an even more anxious passenger. We took a number of travel vacations around Canada—out to the west coast to British Columbia, and then out through the Atlantic provinces on the east coast, and eventually on a road tour of Newfoundland. We were good driving companions. And of course, each of us drove to and from our separate jobs every day. He had a truck, and I had (still have) a small car—and that’s pretty standard here.

I will never understand what changed for him, but his anxiety escalated, to the point that all he could do was drive into town once a week to pick up groceries and various supplies. I’m 74. And now he’s gone, and I want to take road trips again—there are little parts of Ontario, and Canada, that I’ve been longing to see or revisit. I don’t know anyone, among all my friends, who would be the kind of traveler I am, though, and it’s not as much fun to travel alone, with no one to share all of the “Oh, look at that”s.

Cars are freedom. If you’ve never heard Dory Previn sing about screaming in her car in a “Twenty-Mile Zone,” well, that’s another aspect of it. That little self-contained universe, all your own. Turn the volume up to 12. Sing along—the car doesn’t care if you can’t sing worth beans. Belt it out. Cry if you need to. Laugh at the things on the side of the road. Bliss. Always has been. An encapsulated adventure, or therapy, or joy, or whatever you need. Cars are a glory.

Roza couldn’t be more different:

I hate cars so much that I moved to another country and shaped my career around addressing car dependency. I think the most significant shift was my study-abroad semester in Copenhagen, where I fell in love with cycling. Not cycling in a Lycra suit trying to outrace the cars, but cycling in my everyday clothes at a mellow pace, maintaining a conversation with a friend and feeling completely safe. This led me to write my senior thesis about cycling policy in the U.S. and gave me the gift of seeing cycling as a valid form of transport wherever I am. I cycle daily in London, where I live now, and where I work in the city-planning sector.

Although London isn’t anywhere near a cycle utopia like Copenhagen, there’s been so much progress in the past few years with the introduction and expansion of the low-emissions zone in the center. I am able to cycle around central London with its substandard cycling infrastructure due to the fact that many of the streets in the center are quiet and peaceful, even during rush hour. The air quality has improved, and noise pollution has decreased. Although the policies were really contentious at first, I don’t think anybody would want them lifted at this point and to go back to being stifled by pollution and traffic.

My dislike of cars is probably propelled by the fact that I’ve been plagued by motion sickness all my life and can’t read or stare out the window of a moving car without feeling nauseous, making long car trips dreadfully boring for me. Since we have built our cities around the personal vehicle, we are left with a gray landscape that looks the same wherever you are in the country: highways, parking lots, flyovers, leaving no place for creativity or community. Most suburban places in the U.S. have no viable public space—places where people can just be for free, where they can meet people and form community, something that I think is further driving the division and loneliness that we face.

Why Congress Doesn't Work

found Mar '23 The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2023 › 03 › house-of-representatives-equity-research-institute-usc-analysis › 673422

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Control of the House of Representatives could teeter precariously for years as each party consolidates its dominance over mirror-image demographic strongholds.

That’s the clearest conclusion of a new analysis of the demographic and economic characteristics of all 435 congressional districts, conducted by the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California in conjunction with The Atlantic.

Based on census data, the analysis finds that Democrats now hold a commanding edge over the GOP in seats where the share of residents who are nonwhite, the share of white adults with a college degree, or both, are higher than the level in the nation overall. But Republicans hold a lopsided lead in the districts where the share of racial minorities and whites with at least a four-year college degree are both lower than the national level—and that is the largest single bloc of districts in the House.

This demographic divide has produced a near-partisan stalemate, with Republicans in the new Congress holding the same narrow 222-seat majority that Democrats had in the last one. Both sides will struggle to build a much bigger majority without demonstrating more capacity to win seats whose demographic and economic profile has mostly favored the other. “The coalitions are quite stretched to their limits, so there is just not a lot of space for expansion,” says Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the political-reform program at New America.

The widening chasm between the characteristics of the districts held by each party has left the House not only closely divided, but also deeply divided.

Through the late 20th and early 21st centuries, substantial overlap remained between the kinds of districts each party held. In those years, large numbers of Democrats still represented mostly white, low-income rural and small-town districts with few college graduates, and a cohort of Republicans held well-educated, affluent suburban districts. That overlap didn’t prevent the House from growing more partisan and confrontational, but it did temper that trend, because the small-town “blue dog” Democrats and suburban “gypsy moth” Republicans were often the members open to working across party lines.

Now the parties represent districts more consistently divided along lines of demography, economic status, and geography, which makes finding common ground difficult. The parties’ intensifying separation “is a recipe for polarization,” Manuel Pastor, a sociology professor at USC and the director of the Equity Research Institute, told me.

To understand the social and economic characteristics of the House seats held by each party, Jeffer Giang and Justin Scoggins of the Equity Research Institute analyzed five-year summary results through 2020 from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

The analysis revealed that along every key economic and demographic dimension, the two parties are now sorted to the extreme in the House districts they represent. “These people are coming to Washington not from different districts, but frankly different planets,” says former Representative Steve Israel, who chaired the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Among the key distinctions:

*More than three-fifths of House Democrats hold districts where the share of the nonwhite population exceeds the national level of 40 percent. Four-fifths of House Republicans hold districts in which the minority share of the population is below the national level.

*Nearly three-fourths of House Democrats represent districts where the share of white adults with a college degree exceeds the national level of 36 percent. More than three-fourths of Republicans hold districts where the share of white college graduates trails the national level.

*Just over three-fifths of House Democrats hold districts where the share of immigrants exceeds the national level of 14 percent; well over four-fifths of House Republicans hold districts with fewer immigrants than average.

*Perhaps most strikingly, three-fifths of Democrats now hold districts where the median income exceeds the national level of nearly $65,000; more than two-thirds of Republicans hold districts where the median income falls beneath the national level.

Sorting congressional districts by racial diversity and education produces the “four quadrants of Congress”: districts with high levels of racial diversity and white education (“hi-hi” districts), districts with high levels of racial diversity and low levels of white education (“hi-lo districts”), districts with low levels of diversity and high levels of white education (“lo-hi districts”), and districts with low levels of diversity and white education (“lo-lo districts”). (The analysis focuses on the education level among whites, and not the entire population, because education is a more significant difference in the political behavior of white voters than of minority groups.)

[Read: The GOP’s control of congress is only getting stronger]

Looking at the House through that lens shows that the GOP has become enormously dependent on one type of seat: the “lo-lo” districts revolving around white voters without a college degree. Republicans hold 142 districts in that category (making up nearly two-thirds of the party’s House seats), compared with just 21 for Democrats.

The intense Republican reliance on this single type of mostly white, blue-collar district helps explain why the energy in the party over recent years has shifted from the small-government arguments that drove the GOP in the Reagan era toward the unremitting culture-war focus pursued by Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Many of the most militantly conservative House Republicans represent these “lo-lo” districts—a list that includes Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania.

“The right accuses the left of identity politics, when the analysis of this data suggests that identity politics has become the core of the Republican Party,” Pastor told me.

House Democrats are not nearly as reliant on seats from any one of the four quadrants. Apart from the lo-lo districts, they lead the GOP in the other three groupings. Democrats hold a narrow 37–30 lead over Republicans in the seats with high levels of diversity and few white college graduates (the “hi-lo” districts). These seats include many prominent Democrats representing predominantly minority areas, including Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, Terri Sewell of Alabama, and Ruben Gallego of Arizona. At the same time, these districts have been a source of growth for Republicans: The current Democratic lead of seven seats is way down from the party’s 28-seat advantage in 2009.

Democrats hold a more comfortable 57–35 edge in the “lo-hi” districts with fewer minorities and a higher share of white adults with college degrees than average. These are the mostly white-collar districts represented by leading suburban Democrats, many of them moderates, such as Angie Craig of Minnesota, Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, Sharice Davids of Kansas, and Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey. A large share of the House Republicans considered more moderate also represent districts in this bloc.

The core of Democratic strength in the House is the “hi-hi” districts that combine elevated levels of both racial minorities and college-educated whites. Democrats hold 98 of the 113 House seats in this category. Many of the party’s most visible members represent seats fitting this description, including former Speaker Nancy Pelosi; the current House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries; former House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff; and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. These are also the strongholds for Democrats representing what Pastor calls the places where “diversity is increasing the most”: inner suburbs in major metropolitan areas. Among the members representing those sorts of constituencies are Lucy McBath of Georgia, Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, and Ro Khanna and Zoe Lofgren of California.

Though Democrats are not as dependent on any single quadrant as Republicans are on the low-diversity, low-education districts, each party over the past decade has been forced to retreat into its demographic citadel. As Drutman notes, that’s the result of a succession of wave elections that has culled many of the members from each side who had earlier survived in districts demographically and economically trending toward the other.

The first victims were the so-called blue-dog Democrats, who had held on to “lo-lo” districts long after they flipped to mostly backing Republican presidential candidates. Those Democrats from rural and small-town areas, many of them in the South, had started declining in the ’90s. Still, as late as 2009, during the first Congress of Barack Obama’s presidency, Republicans held only 20 more seats than Democrats did in the “lo-lo” quadrant. Democrats from those districts composed almost as large a share of the total party caucus in that Congress as did members from the “hi-hi” districts.

But the 2010 Tea Party landslide virtually exterminated the blue dogs. After that election, the GOP edge in the lo-lo districts exploded to 90 seats; it reached 125 seats after redistricting and further GOP gains in the 2014 election. Today the districts low in diversity and white-education levels account for just one in 10 of all House Democratic seats, and the “hi-hi” seats make up nearly half. The seats low in diversity and high in white education (about one-fourth) and those high in diversity and low in white education (about one-sixth), provide the remainder.

For House Republicans, losses in the 2018 midterms represented the demographic bookend to their blue-collar, small-town gains in 2010. In 2018, Democrats, powered by white-collar antipathy toward Trump, swept away a long list of House Republicans who had held on to well-educated suburban districts that had been trending away from the GOP at the presidential level since Bill Clinton’s era.

Today, districts with a higher share of white college graduates than the nation overall account for less than one-fourth of all GOP seats, down from one-third in 2009. The heavily blue-collar “lo-lo” districts have grown from just over half of the GOP conference in 2009 to their current level of nearly two-thirds. (The share of Republicans in seats with more minorities and fewer white college graduates than average has remained constant since 2009, at about one in seven.)

Each party is pushing an economic agenda that collides with the immediate economic interests of a large portion of its voters. “The party leadership has not caught up with the coalitions,” says former Representative Tom Davis, who served as chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

For years, some progressives have feared that Democrats would back away from a populist economic agenda if the party grew more reliant on affluent voters. That shift has certainly occurred, with Democrats now holding 128 of the 198 House districts where the median income exceeds the national level. But the party has continued to advocate for a redistributionist economic agenda that seeks higher taxes on upper-income adults to fund expanded social programs for working-class families, as proposed in President Joe Biden’s latest budget. The one concession to the new coalition reality is that Democrats now seek to exempt from higher taxes families earning up to $400,000—a level that earlier generations of Democrats probably would have considered much too high.

Republicans face more dissonance between their reconfigured coalition and their agenda. Though the GOP holds 152 of the 237 districts where the median income trails the national level, the party continues to champion big cuts in domestic social programs that benefit low-income families while pushing tax cuts that mostly flow toward the wealthy and corporations. As former Democratic Representative David Price, now a visiting fellow at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, says, there “is a pretty profound disconnect” between the GOP’s economic agenda and “the economic deprivation and what you would think would be a pretty clear set of needs” of the districts the party represents.

Each of these seeming contradictions underscores how cultural affinity has displaced economic interest as the most powerful glue binding each side’s coalition. Republicans like Davis lament that their party can no longer win culturally liberal suburban voters by warning that Democrats will raise their taxes; Democrats like Price express frustration that their party can’t win culturally conservative rural voters by portraying Republicans as threats to Social Security and Medicare.

The advantage for Republicans in this new alignment is that there are still many more seats where whites exceed their share of the national population than seats with more minorities than average. Likewise, the number of seats with fewer white college graduates than the nation overall exceeds the number with more.

That probably gives Republicans a slight advantage in the struggle for House control over the next few years. Of the 22 House seats that the nonpartisan Cook Political Report currently rates as toss-ups or leaning toward the other party in 2024, for instance, 14 have fewer minorities than average and 12 have fewer white college graduates. “On the wedge issues, a lot of the swing districts look a little bit more like Republican districts than Democratic districts,” says Drutman, whose own recent analysis of House districts used an academic polling project to assess attitudes in all 435 seats.

But as Pastor points out, Republicans are growing more dependent on those heavily white and non-college-educated districts as society overall is growing more diverse and better educated, especially in younger generations. “It’s hard to see how the Republicans can grow their coalition,” Pastor told me, with the militant culture-war messages they are using “to cement their current coalition.”

Davis, the former NRCC chair, also worries that the GOP is relying too much on squeezing bigger margins from shrinking groups. The way out of that trap, he argues, is for Republicans to continue advancing from the beachheads they have established in recent years among more culturally conservative voters of color, especially Latino men.

[Read: Are latinos really realigning toward Republicans?]

But Republicans may struggle to make sufficient gains with those voters to significantly shift the balance of power in the House: Though the party last year improved among Latinos in Florida, the results in Arizona, Nevada, and even Texas showed the GOP still facing substantial barriers. The Trump-era GOP also continues to face towering resistance in well-educated areas, which limits any potential recovery there: In 2020, Biden, stunningly, carried more than four-fifths of the House districts where the share of college-educated white adults exceeds the national level. Conversely, despite Biden’s emphasis on delivering tangible economic benefits to working families, Democrats still faced enormous deficits with blue-collar white voters in the midterms. With many of its most vulnerable members defending such working-class terrain, Democrats could lose even more of those seats in 2024.

Constrained by these offsetting dynamics, neither party appears well positioned to break into a clear lead in the House. The two sides look more likely to remain trapped in a grinding form of electoral trench warfare in which they control competing bands of districts that are almost equal in number, but utterly antithetical in their demographic, economic, and ideological profile.

DeSantis Will Betray Ukraine for MAGA Votes

found Mar '23 The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 03 › desantis-ukraine-maga-trump › 673424

This story seems to be about:

Both Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis have signaled their willingness to sell out Ukraine to the Kremlin, and the Russians have gleefully taken notice. How could this be happening in the party of Ronald Reagan?

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Breaking: the strongest evidence yet that an animal started the pandemic You should be outraged about Silicon Valley Bank. Make a to-don’t list.

Taking the Bait

State governors are not usually experts on foreign policy, but those who intend to run for president are advised to at least brush up on the subject. Alas, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis did not get that memo. Last week, DeSantis declared Russia’s massive invasion—the largest operation in Europe since the defeat of the Nazis—to be a mere “territorial dispute,” and said that the war is thus not “a vital American national strategic interest.” This was too much for many elected Republicans and even for the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, who described the comments as “Ron DeSantis’s First Big Mistake.”

This shining opportunity to stumble came courtesy of the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who a few weeks ago sent out questionnaires about Ukraine policy to a group of possible GOP presidential candidates. Carlson’s questions presented Republican contenders with a dilemma. On the one hand, many faithful MAGA voters, who make up the core of the GOP base, are regular viewers of Carlson’s show, and his questionnaire was a kind of early beauty pageant, an opportunity for Republican candidates to take a quick walk down the runway in front of MAGA World. On the other hand, Carlson is an irresponsible demagogue who has been exposed in the Dominion-lawsuit filings as a relentless opportunist who will bamboozle his own audience for ratings.

Since the war in Ukraine began more than a year ago, Carlson has gone on numerous unhinged rants against “the D.C. war machine,” meaning anyone who supports aiding Kyiv. (He even went off the deep end about me a few weeks ago.) Carlson claims to just be asking questions, but on Ukraine, as on many other issues, he is located right in the heart of the fever swamps.

In addition to his own bizarre perorations, Carlson also occasionally relies on input from his guest Douglas Macgregor, a retired Army colonel who for a hot second was an adviser to Trump’s last (acting) defense secretary, Christopher Miller, and whose nomination to be an ambassador foundered in part because of a history of weird and offensive statements. To give you some idea of the minefield awaiting GOP candidates, Macgregor went on last night about how the Ukrainians are getting “crushed,” and how the left has weakened the U.S. military to the point where it is almost useless. (The Pentagon’s assessment is a bit less gloomy, to say the least.) Carlson responded by asking, “[If America] became embroiled in a hot war with Russia, how long before you are arrested would it be, do you think, for saying what you just did?”

Even Macgregor didn’t bother answering that one, but it shows why, for the credible would-be candidates filling out Carlson’s questionnaire, there is no real advantage in saying anything of substance. And so, most of them didn’t, offering unexceptional responses composed mostly of political dryer lint: Kristi Noem blamed Joe Biden for being too weak to deter the Russians. Mike Pence said that regime change in Russia was up to the Russian people. Vivek Ramaswamy was more than happy to provide more detailed answers, but that is a luxury one can take while on the path to becoming a kind of GOP Andrew Yang. And Nikki Haley, in a classic cautious Nikki Haley move, waited until Carlson’s deadline for response had passed and the show on the subject had aired before answering the questions.

DeSantis, however, bit down on this giant hunk of bait, and his answers were displayed on Carlson’s show like a prize marlin.

Of course, this may have been DeSantis’s intent. He may well be trying to sound like an ill-informed isolationist, because he is trying to capture the MAGA voters who now support Trump. The former president is the undisputed world heavyweight champion of ignorant views, and if you’re going to take him on, you’d better have some stunningly ignorant views of your own to bring to the table. That’s what the Republican base wants.

DeSantis seems to know this all too well, which is likely why he’s been shoveling so much red meat out the front door of the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee to the MAGA cultural warriors. While covering his Trump-exposed flank on foreign policy, however, DeSantis has accidentally illustrated the problem of running for office in what used to be the party of Reagan: If you want to win the primary voters, you’ve got to reject everything you once believed.

Indeed, back in 2017, DeSantis the congressman—but not yet the candidate—wanted to be Reagan. When he opposed Barack Obama’s efforts to initiate a “reset” with Russia, he noted that Democrats “viewed guys like me who are more of the Reagan school that’s tough on Russia as kind of throwbacks to the Cold War.” And two years earlier, DeSantis was all about teaching the Russians a lesson for seizing Ukraine. He excoriated then-President Obama for being weak-kneed:

We in the Congress have been urging the president … to provide arms to Ukraine. They want to fight their good fight. They’re not asking us to fight it for them. And the president has steadfastly refused. And I think that that’s a mistake.

Well said, congressman. Perhaps you might have a talk with the current governor of Florida.

This pandering to the MAGA base is going to get worse, because Trump continues to dominate the GOP primary field. In some areas, this featherweight posturing will be repairable: Down the road, no one is likely to be fighting over whether first graders should be assigned college texts on “critical race theory.” In other cases, such as the destruction of Florida’s public universities, the damage will be more long-lasting.

But in foreign policy, amateurish pandering to Tucker Carlson’s audience is dangerous. The Russian media are already crowing that the next American president will throw Ukraine to the wolves, a belief that could lead the Kremlin to take even greater risks than bumping into drones. Many elected Republicans and GOP presidential contenders—despite their constant fear of offending Trump—seem to recognize this, to their credit. If only Ron DeSantis were one of them.

Today’s News

Polish President Andrzej Duda pledged to give Ukraine about 12 MiG-29 fighter jets, making Poland the first NATO member nation to follow through on Kyiv’s requests for warplanes. Eleven major U.S. banks said they would deposit $30 billion into First Republic Bank amid a crisis of confidence from the bank’s customers and investors. The U.S. military released video of what it says is the collision between a Russian fighter jet and an American surveillance drone over the Black Sea.

Dispatches

I Have Notes: Nicole Chung reflects on the responsibilities of writing about the dead.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic

Climate Activists Are Turning Their Attention to Hollywood

By Katharine Gammon

On a warm, windy fall night in Los Angeles, I stood in a conference room at the Warner Bros. Discovery television-production offices, straightened my spine, and stared down my showrunner, preparing to defend my idea for a minor character in our near-future science-fiction series.

“This character needs a backstory, and switching jobs because she wants to work in renewable energy and not for an oil company fits perfectly,” I told the unsmiling head honcho.

His face twisted, as if his assistant had delivered the wrong lunch. “Too complicated. That just feels like a lot of information to cram into a backstory. What if her story is that she wants this job because it’s near where her brother was killed in a terrorist attack? We’d just need to invent a terrorist attack.”

Read the full article.