Kyrsten Sinema knows what everybody says about her. She pretends not to read the press coverage—“I don’t really care”—but she knows. She knows what her colleagues call her behind her back (“egomaniac,” “traitor”). She knows how many articles The New York Times has published about her wardrobe (five). She feels misunderstood, and she would like to explain herself.

We’re sitting across from each other in her “hideaway,” a small, windowless room in the basement of the U.S. Capitol Building. Every senator gets one of these subterranean, chamber-adjacent bunkers, and most are outfitted with dark, utilitarian furniture. But Sinema’s walls are pale pink, the couches burnt orange, and desert-themed tchotchkes evoking her native Arizona are interspersed among bottles of wine and liquor.

Sinema tells me that there are several popular narratives about her in the media, all of them “inaccurate.” One is that she’s “mysterious,” “mercurial,” “an enigma”—that she makes her decisions on unknowable whims. She regards this portrayal as “fairly absurd”: “I think I’m a highly predictable person.”

“Then,” she goes on, “there’s the she’s just doing what’s best for her and not for her state or for her country” narrative. “And I think that’s a strange narrative, particularly when you contrast it with”—here she pauses, and then smirks—“ya know, the facts.”

You can see, in moments like these, why she bothers people. She speaks in a matter-of-fact staccato, her tone set frequently to smug. She says things like “I am a long-term thinker in a short-term town” and “I prefer to be successful.” The overall effect, if you’re not charmed by it (and a lot of her Republican colleagues are), is condescension bordering on arrogance. Sinema, who graduated from high school at 16 and college at 18, carries herself like she is unquestionably the smartest person in the room.

No one would mistake her for being dumb, though. In the past two years, Sinema has been at the center of virtually every major piece of bipartisan legislation passed by the Senate, negotiating deals on infrastructure, guns, and a bill that codifies the right to same-sex marriage. She has also become a villain to the left, proudly standing in the way of Democrats’ more ambitious agenda by refusing to eliminate the filibuster. The tension culminated with her announcement in December that she was leaving the Democratic Party and registering as an independent.

[Lee Drutman: Kyrsten Sinema and the myth of political independence]

Sinema hasn’t given many in-depth interviews since then, but she says she agreed to meet with me because she wants to show that what she’s doing “works.” She thinks that, unfashionable though it may be, her approach to legislating—compromise, centrism, bipartisan consensus-building—is the only way to get anything done in Washington. I was interested in a separate, but related, question: What exactly is she trying to get done? Much of the discussion around Sinema has focused on the puzzle of what she really believes. What does Kyrsten Sinema want? What Does Kyrsten Sinema stand for? The subtext in these headlines is that if you dig deep enough, a secret belief system will be revealed. Is she a progressive opportunistically cosplaying as a centrist? A conservative finally showing her true colors? The truth, according to Sinema herself, is that there is no ideological core to discover.

I learn this when I describe for Sinema the story I hear most often about her: that she started out as an idealistic progressive activist—organizing protests against the Iraq War, marching for undocumented immigrants in 100-degree heat, leading the effort to defeat a gay-marriage ban in Arizona—but that gradually she sold out her youthful idealism and morphed into a Washington moderate who pals around with Republicans and protects tax breaks for hedge-fund managers.

To my surprise, Sinema doesn’t really push back on this one. For one thing, she tells me, she’s proud that she outgrew the activism of her youth. It was, in her own assessment, “a spectacular failure.”

I ask her to elaborate.

“Well,” she says, with a derisive shrug. “You can make a poster and stand out on the street, but at the end of the day all you have is a sunburn. You didn’t move the needle. You didn’t make a difference … I set about real quick saying, ‘This doesn’t work.’”

Listening to her talk this way about activism, it’s hard not to think about the protesters who have hounded her in recent years. They chase her through airports, yell at her at weddings. In one controversial episode, a group of student protesters at Arizona State University followed her into the bathroom, continuing to film as they hectored her. (The ASU police recommended misdemeanor charges against four students involved.)

I ask Sinema if, as a former activist herself, she could understand where those students were coming from. Would she have done the same thing when she was young?

“Break the law?” she scoffs. “No.”

She doesn’t like civil disobedience, thinks it drives more people away than it attracts. More to the point, Sinema contends, the activists who spend their time noisily berating her in person and online aren’t doing much for the causes they purport to care about. “I am much happier showing a two-year record of incredible achievements that are literally making a difference in people’s lives than sharing my thoughts on Twitter.” She punctuates these last words with the sort of contempt that only someone who’s tweeted more than 17,000 times can feel.

It’s not just the activism she’s discarded; it’s also the left-wing politics. Sinema, who described herself in 2006 as “the most liberal legislator in the state of Arizona,” freely admits that she’s much less progressive than she used to be. While her critics contend that she adjusted her politics to win statewide office in Arizona, she chalks up the evolution to “age and maturity.” She bristles at the idea that politicians shouldn’t be allowed to change their mind. “Imagine a world in which everybody who represented you refused to grow or change or learn if presented with new information,” she tells me. “That’s very dangerous for our democracy. So perhaps what I’m most proud of is that I’m a lifelong learner.”

Still, Sinema insists that people overstate how much she’s changed. Leaving the Democratic Party was, in her telling, a kind of homecoming. “I’m not a joiner,” she says. “It’s not my thing.” She points out that she wasn’t a Democrat when she started in politics. I point out that at the time she was aligned with the Green Party. She demurs.

Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona attended hearings on Capitol Hill on Wednesday afternoon. (Photograph by Natalie Keyssar for The Atlantic)

“I never think about where [my position] is on the political spectrum, because I don’t care,” she tells me. “People will say, ‘Oh, we don’t know what her position is.’ Well, I may not have one yet. And I know that’s weird in this town, but I actually want to do all of the research, get as much knowledge as possible, spend all of the time doing the work before I make a decision.”

I ask her if there’s any ideological through line at all that explains the various votes she’s taken in the Senate. She thinks about it before answering, “No.”

She says she’s guided by an unchanging set of “values”—she mentions freedom, opportunity, and security—that virtually all Americans share. When it comes to legislating, Sinema sees herself as “practical”—a dealmaker, a problem solver. And if taking every policy question on a case-by-case basis bewilders some in Washington, Sinema says it’s just her nature. Even in her private life, she tells me, she’s prone to slow, painstaking deliberation. I ask for an example.

“It took me eight years to decide what to get for my first tattoo,” she offers.

So what did you decide on? I ask.

“I don’t actually want to share that.”

To illustrate the effectiveness of her legislative approach, she likes to point to the gun-control bill she helped pass last year. It began the day after a man opened fire at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, killing 19 kids. Sinema made a rare comment to the press, telling reporters that she was going to approach her colleagues about potential legislative solutions. From there, she recalls, she went straight to the Senate floor and asked Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, “Who should I work with?” He pointed her to Republican Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, both of whom she immediately texted. A few minutes after that, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat, texted her asking if she meant what she’d said to the press. “I was like, ‘I’m Kyrsten. I always mean what I say.’”

[Conor Friedersdorf: The Senate needs more Kyrsten Sinemas]

“The next morning, four of us senators sat right here and had our first meeting,” she tells me. “Twenty-eight days later, we had a bill.”

It was the first gun-control bill to pass Congress in nearly 30 years, and getting the deal done wasn’t easy. But Sinema says she followed a few lessons she’d learned from past negotiations. The first was to ignore the reporters who were camped out in the hallways. “We would come out of the meeting, and they would be like little vultures outside the door asking what just happened,” she recalls. “Why on earth would I tell anyone what just happened in the meeting when I’m trying to nail down some of the most difficult elements of an agreement?”

Her allergy to the Capitol Hill press corps—which she tells me is generally obsessed with covering “the petty and the hysterical”—was not shared by all of her colleagues. “There are some folks who really enjoy talking to the press so they can tell them what they think or whatever. I’m not that interested in telling people what I think.”

Another principle she followed was to prioritize dealing directly with her colleagues in person. She’d found that many bipartisan negotiations get bogged down early on with a process termed “trading paper,” wherein senators’ staffs exchange proposals and counterproposals until they agree on legislative language—or, more often, reach an impasse. “When I first got here, I was like, What are you doing?” She says disagreements can be resolved much more quickly by getting her colleagues in a room and refusing to leave until they’ve figured it out.

This is why when progressives criticize her as flaky, dilettantish, or out of her depth, it strikes her as fundamentally gendered. More than any other line of attack, this seems to really bother her. She points to Democratic Representative Ro Khanna, who said in 2021 that Sinema lacked “the basic competence” to be in Congress.

“I mean, when there are … elected officials who say ‘She’s in over her head,’ or ‘She’s not substantive,’ or ‘She doesn’t know what she’s talking about—that is, um, absurd,” she tells me, her tone sharpening. “Because I know every detail of every piece of legislation. And it’s okay if others don’t. They weren’t in the room when we were writing it.” She added that Khanna “doesn’t know me, and I don’t know him. The term colleague is to be loosely applied there.” (Asked for comment, Khanna told me that he’d criticized Sinema during the debate over the Build Back Better bill “because she was unwilling to explain her position and engage with the press, her colleagues, and the public.”)

The result of all the laborious gun-control negotiations was the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which was signed into law last June. The law expanded background checks for gun buyers under 21, enhanced mental-health services in schools, and provided funding for states to implement “red-flag laws,” which allow authorities to temporarily confiscate guns from individuals deemed dangerous. Critics on the left dismissed the law as a half measure. But to Sinema, the fact that she and her colleagues made any progress on such an intractable issue was validation for her method of operating.

Patient, painful bipartisan dealmaking, she tells me, is “the only approach that works. Because the other approaches make a lot of noise but don’t get anything done.”

I ask her what other approaches she’s thinking of.

“I don’t know,” Sinema says with a shrug. “Yelling?”

Members of her former party would argue that there was another option for enacting their policy vision—eliminating the filibuster, which requires 60 votes for most legislation in the Senate, to start passing bills with simple majorities—but Sinema ensured that was impossible. She makes no apologies for voting to preserve the filibuster last year. In fact, she tells me, she would reinstate it for judicial nominees. She believes that the Democrats who want to be able to pass sweeping legislation with narrow majorities have forgotten that one day Republicans will be in control again. “When people are in power, they think they’ll never lose power.”  

[Read: A troubling sign for 2024]

Before departing her hideaway, I return to Sinema’s central argument—that her approach “works.” It’s hard to evaluate objectively. What to make of a senator who leaves her party, professes to have no ideological agenda, and yet manages to wield outsize influence in writing the laws of the nation? Some might look at her record and see a hollow careerism that prizes bipartisanship for its own sake. Others might argue that in highly polarized times, politicians like her are necessary to grease the gears of a dysfunctional government.

One thing is clear, though: If Sinema wants to persuade other political leaders to take the same path she has taken, she’ll need to demonstrate that it’s electorally viable. So far, the polls in Arizona suggest she would struggle to get reelected as an independent in 2024; she already has challengers on the right and the left. A survey earlier this year found that she was among the most unpopular senators in the country.

Sinema tells me she hasn’t decided yet whether she’ll seek reelection, but she talks like someone who’s not planning on it. She’s only 46 years old; she has other interests. “I’m not only a senator,” she tells me. “I’m also lots of other things.” I ask if she worries about what lessons will be drawn in Washington if her independent turn leads to the end of her political career.

She pauses and answers with a smirk: “I don’t worry about hypotheticals.”

Kyrsten Sinema knows what everybody says about her. She pretends not to read the press coverage—“I don’t really care”—but she knows. She knows what her colleagues call her behind her back (“egomaniac,” “traitor”). She knows how many articles The New York Times has published about her wardrobe (five). She feels misunderstood, and she would like to explain herself.

We’re sitting across from each other in her “hideaway,” a small, windowless room in the basement of the U.S. Capitol Building. Every senator gets one of these subterranean, chamber-adjacent bunkers, and most are outfitted with dark, utilitarian furniture. But Sinema’s walls are pale pink, the couches burnt orange, and desert-themed tchotchkes evoking her native Arizona are interspersed among bottles of wine and liquor.

Sinema tells me that there are several popular narratives about her in the media, all of them “inaccurate.” One is that she’s “mysterious,” “mercurial,” “an enigma”—that she makes her decisions on unknowable whims. She regards this portrayal as “fairly absurd”: “I think I’m a highly predictable person.”

“Then,” she goes on, “there’s the she’s just doing what’s best for her and not for her state or for her country” narrative. “And I think that’s a strange narrative, particularly when you contrast it with”—here she pauses, and then smirks—“ya know, the facts.”

You can see, in moments like these, why she bothers people. She speaks in a matter-of-fact staccato, her tone set frequently to smug. She says things like “I am a long-term thinker in a short-term town” and “I prefer to be successful.” The overall effect, if you’re not charmed by it (and a lot of her Republican colleagues are), is condescension bordering on arrogance. Sinema, who graduated from high school at 16 and college at 18, carries herself like she is unquestionably the smartest person in the room.

No one would mistake her for being dumb, though. In the past two years, Sinema has been at the center of virtually every major piece of bipartisan legislation passed by the Senate, negotiating deals on infrastructure, guns, and a bill that codifies the right to same-sex marriage. She has also become a villain to the left, proudly standing in the way of Democrats’ more ambitious agenda by refusing to eliminate the filibuster. The tension culminated with her announcement in December that she was leaving the Democratic Party and registering as an independent.

[Lee Drutman: Kyrsten Sinema and the myth of political independence]

Sinema hasn’t given many in-depth interviews since then, but she says she agreed to meet with me because she wants to show that what she’s doing “works.” She thinks that, unfashionable though it may be, her approach to legislating—compromise, centrism, bipartisan consensus-building—is the only way to get anything done in Washington. I was interested in a separate, but related, question: What exactly is she trying to get done? Much of the discussion around Sinema has focused on the puzzle of what she really believes. What does Kyrsten Sinema want? What Does Kyrsten Sinema stand for? The subtext in these headlines is that if you dig deep enough, a secret belief system will be revealed. Is she a progressive opportunistically cosplaying as a centrist? A conservative finally showing her true colors? The truth, according to Sinema herself, is that there is no ideological core to discover.

I learn this when I describe for Sinema the story I hear most often about her: that she started out as an idealistic progressive activist—organizing protests against the Iraq War, marching for undocumented immigrants in 100-degree heat, leading the effort to defeat a gay-marriage ban in Arizona—but that gradually she sold out her youthful idealism and morphed into a Washington moderate who pals around with Republicans and protects tax breaks for hedge-fund managers.

To my surprise, Sinema doesn’t really push back on this one. For one thing, she tells me, she’s proud that she outgrew the activism of her youth. It was, in her own assessment, “a spectacular failure.”

I ask her to elaborate.

“Well,” she says, with a derisive shrug. “You can make a poster and stand out on the street, but at the end of the day all you have is a sunburn. You didn’t move the needle. You didn’t make a difference … I set about real quick saying, ‘This doesn’t work.’”

Listening to her talk this way about activism, it’s hard not to think about the protesters who have hounded her in recent years. They chase her through airports, yell at her at weddings. In one controversial episode, a group of student protesters at Arizona State University followed her into the bathroom, continuing to film as they hectored her. (The ASU police recommended misdemeanor charges against four students involved.)

I ask Sinema if, as a former activist herself, she could understand where those students were coming from. Would she have done the same thing when she was young?

“Break the law?” she scoffs. “No.”

She doesn’t like civil disobedience, thinks it drives more people away than it attracts. More to the point, Sinema contends, the activists who spend their time noisily berating her in person and online aren’t doing much for the causes they purport to care about. “I am much happier showing a two-year record of incredible achievements that are literally making a difference in people’s lives than sharing my thoughts on Twitter.” She punctuates these last words with the sort of contempt that only someone who’s tweeted more than 17,000 times can feel.

It’s not just the activism she’s discarded; it’s also the left-wing politics. Sinema, who described herself in 2006 as “the most liberal legislator in the state of Arizona,” freely admits that she’s much less progressive than she used to be. While her critics contend that she adjusted her politics to win statewide office in Arizona, she chalks up the evolution to “age and maturity.” She bristles at the idea that politicians shouldn’t be allowed to change their mind. “Imagine a world in which everybody who represented you refused to grow or change or learn if presented with new information,” she tells me. “That’s very dangerous for our democracy. So perhaps what I’m most proud of is that I’m a lifelong learner.”

Still, Sinema insists that people overstate how much she’s changed. Leaving the Democratic Party was, in her telling, a kind of homecoming. “I’m not a joiner,” she says. “It’s not my thing.” She points out that she wasn’t a Democrat when she started in politics. I point out that at the time she was aligned with the Green Party. She demurs.

Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona attended hearings on Capitol Hill on Wednesday afternoon. (Photograph by Natalie Keyssar for The Atlantic)

“I never think about where [my position] is on the political spectrum, because I don’t care,” she tells me. “People will say, ‘Oh, we don’t know what her position is.’ Well, I may not have one yet. And I know that’s weird in this town, but I actually want to do all of the research, get as much knowledge as possible, spend all of the time doing the work before I make a decision.”

I ask her if there’s any ideological through line at all that explains the various votes she’s taken in the Senate. She thinks about it before answering, “No.”

She says she’s guided by an unchanging set of “values”—she mentions freedom, opportunity, and security—that virtually all Americans share. When it comes to legislating, Sinema sees herself as “practical”—a dealmaker, a problem solver. And if taking every policy question on a case-by-case basis bewilders some in Washington, Sinema says it’s just her nature. Even in her private life, she tells me, she’s prone to slow, painstaking deliberation. I ask for an example.

“It took me eight years to decide what to get for my first tattoo,” she offers.

So what did you decide on? I ask.

“I don’t actually want to share that.”

To illustrate the effectiveness of her legislative approach, she likes to point to the gun-control bill she helped pass last year. It began the day after a man opened fire at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, killing 19 kids. Sinema made a rare comment to the press, telling reporters that she was going to approach her colleagues about potential legislative solutions. From there, she recalls, she went straight to the Senate floor and asked Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, “Who should I work with?” He pointed her to Republican Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, both of whom she immediately texted. A few minutes after that, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat, texted her asking if she meant what she’d said to the press. “I was like, ‘I’m Kyrsten. I always mean what I say.’”

[Conor Friedersdorf: The Senate needs more Kyrsten Sinemas]

“The next morning, four of us senators sat right here and had our first meeting,” she tells me. “Twenty-eight days later, we had a bill.”

It was the first gun-control bill to pass Congress in nearly 30 years, and getting the deal done wasn’t easy. But Sinema says she followed a few lessons she’d learned from past negotiations. The first was to ignore the reporters who were camped out in the hallways. “We would come out of the meeting, and they would be like little vultures outside the door asking what just happened,” she recalls. “Why on earth would I tell anyone what just happened in the meeting when I’m trying to nail down some of the most difficult elements of an agreement?”

Her allergy to the Capitol Hill press corps—which she tells me is generally obsessed with covering “the petty and the hysterical”—was not shared by all of her colleagues. “There are some folks who really enjoy talking to the press so they can tell them what they think or whatever. I’m not that interested in telling people what I think.”

Another principle she followed was to prioritize dealing directly with her colleagues in person. She’d found that many bipartisan negotiations get bogged down early on with a process termed “trading paper,” wherein senators’ staffs exchange proposals and counterproposals until they agree on legislative language—or, more often, reach an impasse. “When I first got here, I was like, What are you doing?” She says disagreements can be resolved much more quickly by getting her colleagues in a room and refusing to leave until they’ve figured it out.

This is why when progressives criticize her as flaky, dilettantish, or out of her depth, it strikes her as fundamentally gendered. More than any other line of attack, this seems to really bother her. She points to Democratic Representative Ro Khanna, who said in 2021 that Sinema lacked “the basic competence” to be in Congress.

“I mean, when there are … elected officials who say ‘She’s in over her head,’ or ‘She’s not substantive,’ or ‘She doesn’t know what she’s talking about—that is, um, absurd,” she tells me, her tone sharpening. “Because I know every detail of every piece of legislation. And it’s okay if others don’t. They weren’t in the room when we were writing it.” She added that Khanna “doesn’t know me, and I don’t know him. The term colleague is to be loosely applied there.” (Asked for comment, Khanna told me that he’d criticized Sinema during the debate over the Build Back Better bill “because she was unwilling to explain her position and engage with the press, her colleagues, and the public.”)

The result of all the laborious gun-control negotiations was the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which was signed into law last June. The law expanded background checks for gun buyers under 21, enhanced mental-health services in schools, and provided funding for states to implement “red-flag laws,” which allow authorities to temporarily confiscate guns from individuals deemed dangerous. Critics on the left dismissed the law as a half measure. But to Sinema, the fact that she and her colleagues made any progress on such an intractable issue was validation for her method of operating.

Patient, painful bipartisan dealmaking, she tells me, is “the only approach that works. Because the other approaches make a lot of noise but don’t get anything done.”

I ask her what other approaches she’s thinking of.

“I don’t know,” Sinema says with a shrug. “Yelling?”

Members of her former party would argue that there was another option for enacting their policy vision—eliminating the filibuster, which requires 60 votes for most legislation in the Senate, to start passing bills with simple majorities—but Sinema ensured that was impossible. She makes no apologies for voting to preserve the filibuster last year. In fact, she tells me, she would reinstate it for judicial nominees. She believes that the Democrats who want to be able toto pass sweeping legislation with narrow majorities have forgotten that one dayRepublicans will be in control again. “When people are in power, they think they’ll never lose power.”  

[Read: A troubling sign for 2024]

Before departing her hideaway, I return to Sinema’s central argument—that her approach “works.” It’s hard to evaluate objectively. What to make of a senator who leaves her party, professes to have no ideological agenda, and yet manages to wield outsize influence in writing the laws of the nation? Some might look at her record and see a hollow careerism that prizes bipartisanship for its own sake. Others might argue that in highly polarized times, politicians like her are necessary to grease the gears of a dysfunctional government.

One thing is clear, though: If Sinema wants to persuade other political leaders to take the same path she has taken, she’ll need to demonstrate that it’s electorally viable. So far, the polls in Arizona suggest she would struggle to get reelected as an independent in 2024; she already has challengers on the right and the left. A survey earlier this year found that she was among the most unpopular senators in the country.

Sinema tells me she hasn’t decided yet whether she’ll seek reelection, but she talks like someone who’s not planning on it. She’s only 46 years old; she has other interests. “I’m not only a senator,” she tells me. “I’m also lots of other things.” I ask if she worries about what lessons will be drawn in Washington if her independent turn leads to the end of her political career.

She pauses and answers with a smirk: “I don’t worry about hypotheticals.”

In 1868, Senator Waitman Willey, of the newly formed antislavery state of West Virginia, stood on the floor of Congress to argue for the proposed Fourteenth Amendment’s provision disqualifying former Confederate officers from holding office in the recently reunified country. He asserted that the proposal was “a measure of self-defense.” He evidently felt this argument to be so crucial that it required repeated emphasis and explanation. He expanded, “Being a permanent provision of the Constitution, [the provision] is intended to operate as a preventive of treason hereafter by holding out to the people of the United States that such will be the penalty of the offense if they dare to commit it.” He repeated, “It is therefore not a measure of punishment, but a measure of self-defense.”

The proposal passed by a wide margin and eventually became part of the Constitution.

Despite this history, a narrative has developed that defensive democracy—a tradition of passing and enforcing laws to defend democratic institutions from authoritarian threats—does not and cannot exist in America. Defensive democracy’s critics argue that it unavoidably violates our Bill of Rights, because the freedoms of speech and assembly should always include the right to attack any government, whether or not it’s a democracy; your authoritarian is my freedom fighter. In one of the few book-length American treatises on defensive democracy, the Duke University political theorist Alexander Kirshner writes about the “paradox” of defensive democracy: “In avoiding the Scylla of Weimar, it is best not to steer into the Charybdis of McCarthyism.”

But likening defensive democracy to McCarthyism is a dangerous mistake. Although there is much to fear in the abuse of state power against political opponents, the fact is that a viable, valuable American tradition of defensive democracy exists, and we need to revive it today rather than reject wholesale a set of tools the country desperately needs at this crucial moment of democratic fragility.

[Adam Serwer: The Capitol riot was an attack on multiracial democracy]

The idea of defensive democracy goes back to ancient Athens—which passed into law measures, including exiling any demagogue for 10 years, to protect its democracy—and to the fight against fascism across Europe in the 20th century. In 1935, after Weimar Germany crumpled to Nazism, Karl Loewenstein, a Jewish German political scientist teaching in America, wrote two famous articles for the American Political Science Review, in which he proposed a theory of defensive democracy, or wehrhafte demokratie. In Loewenstein’s hands, defensive democracy (also translated as “militant democracy”) comprised laws by which the democratic state defended itself from antidemocratic forces, as in (at the time of the article’s writing) Finland, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland. Finland, for instance, prohibited the formation of private armies within political parties. Belgium passed statutes to prevent the abuse of parliamentary procedures by political extremists—for instance, through frivolous side elections. Switzerland passed a law imposing certain limits on political assemblies to avoid physical clashes between political opponents. Above all, Loewenstein argued that such measures needed to be insulated from partisanship, even suggesting that officials enforcing defensive democracy should not belong to any political party at all.

In the decades since, those ideas have spread around the world. Many democracies, including Germany, Israel, and India, have laws banning violent political speech, parties, or candidates undermining democracy. Germany today maintains an Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which detects and surveils antidemocratic actors and organizations. The leader of the office describes his charge: “We are the early warning system of democracy.”

America’s own defensive-democracy tradition is admittedly narrower than those in some Western European countries that lack our strong free-speech and assembly rights. Yet it is still undeniably robust, including at least three significant safeguards—prohibiting seditionists from serving in office, preventing unpermitted paramilitary activity, and prosecuting insurrection.

Although the Fourteenth Amendment’s provision against insurrectionists holding office has not been often put to use—there have not been many insurrections, mercifully—it is part of the Constitution, available when the need arises. In September 2022, it was employed by a judge in New Mexico, who removed Couy Griffin, a county commissioner in Otero County, from office for his participation in the January 6 insurrection. In his decision, the judge observed the “irony of Mr. Griffin’s” that he should be allowed to “defend his participation in an insurrection by a mob whose goal, by his own admission, was to set aside the results of a free, fair and lawful election.”

As for paramilitary activity, 49 states have laws on the books stating that paramilitary organizations can legally operate only with the permission of the civilian authority. These laws sit on the bedrock of solid federal and state law. In 1886, the Supreme Court held that “military operations and military drill are subjects especially under the control of the government of every country. They cannot be claimed as a right independent of law.” A New York appellate court noted in 1944, “The inherent potential danger of any organized private militia is obvious. Its existence would be sufficient, without more, to prevent a democratic form of government, such as ours, from functioning freely, without coercion.”

These laws were employed by Georgetown’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, and by the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, while I was the city’s mayor. Together, we successfully sued more than 10 paramilitary groups that had invaded Charlottesville during the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally to prevent them from reentering the city. Notably, the militias we blocked were on both the left and the right, ranging from the white-supremacist Atomwaffen group to the far-left antifa group Redneck Revolt.

American laws against seditious conspiracy and against advocating for overthrowing the government are quintessential defensive democracy. The law that makes up this pillar of America’s defensive-democracy tradition was passed by Congress after the Civil War to punish those who “conspire to overthrow, [to] put down, or to destroy by force” the federal government, and anyone who “knowingly or willfully advocates, abets, advises, or teaches the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying” federal or state governments by force, violence, or assassination. These laws are now leading to conviction after conviction (or guilty pleas, in many cases) for those who participated in January 6, including multiple leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.

[David A. Graham: It was sedition]

In addition to these three methods of American defensive democracy, we should consider an approach similar to federal hate-crime laws: adding a proven attack on democracy—assaulting an elected official, preventing the peaceful transfer of power—as an aggravating factor in the prosecution and sentencing of an existing statutory crime.

American democracy, at its best, innovates within our laws and principles to address the threats of the time. We can respond, just as the nations who resisted fascism in the 1930s did, by embracing defensive democracy. Our history, our ambitions, and our troubling times demand nothing less.

Shortly after his 18th season with the Green Bay Packers ended with an uncharacteristic thud, Aaron Rodgers, the Super Bowl winner and future Hall of Fame quarterback, announced that he would be spending four days and four nights isolating himself at an Oregon “darkness retreat”—a cave, basically—during which he would contemplate his future. The Packers wanted to move on, start over, and Rodgers, now 39, needed to decide if he did too, or if it was time to retire. After nearly 100 hours with zero natural light, Rodgers emerged back into society with an answer: He would play for at least one more season, and he would do it for the New York Jets.

What the hell happened to him down there?

As a long-suffering Jets fan, trust me when I say that rooting for the Jets is like rooting for the Mets, but even sadder and less rewarding. The Jets haven’t won a Super Bowl—haven’t been to the Super Bowl—since 1969, and haven’t even reached the playoffs since 2010. Since then, the franchise’s highest-profile moments have been the time ex-Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez fumbled the ball after slipping and colliding into his own lineman’s rear end (the fabled “Butt Fumble”) and the time another ex-Jets quarterback, Geno Smith, got sucker-punched in the locker room by a teammate, who broke his jaw. Not since Joe Namath in the late 1960s have the Jets had a player whom anyone would describe as “electrifying.” The joke around football is that our team name is really an acronym, that “JETS” stands for “Just End The Season,” and that the only real mystery in a Jets season is how early we start deploying that motto. We’re not just lousy. We’re dull.

We even tried this strategy before—embracing a legendary Packers QB after the Packers no longer wanted him—in 2008, with Brett Favre, who wound up throwing as many interceptions (22) as touchdowns and humiliated the team by sending lewd photos and text messages to a female NFL reporter, prompting a league investigation that, of course, this being the NFL, resulted in no suspension and a $50,000 fine. He tore his bicep 11 games into his only season in New York, and that was the end of the Jets’ Brett Favre era. In hindsight, we were a perfect match.

Surely Aaron Rodgers has heard about us. Surely he understands what he’s attaching his name to. The Jets front office surrendered significant draft capital to get him—the Jets’ first- and second-round picks in this past week’s draft, and their second-round pick in 2024, which becomes their first-round pick if Rodgers plays 65 percent of the Jets’ offensive snaps this season, or roughly 12 out of 17 games. That’s a lot for a guy who might play only one more season. And yet, in spite of the fact that he will turn 40 in December, and had the worst season of his career last year, and may have lost his passion for the game, and might only be playing because he’s owed $50 million this season and almost $60 million the next as long as he plays for someone, he will nevertheless be the most gifted football player ever to put on a Jets uniform, and far and away our best quarterback, even now, even at his advanced age. Which is why you won’t find a single halfway reasonable Jets fan who is anything less than ecstatic about Rodgers’s arrival, even though we know, with decades of evidence to back us up, that this is bound to end very badly.

I don’t care! Rodgers is bringing a measure of credibility to a franchise known for butt-fumbling it away. At a press conference announcing the decision, Rodgers said all the right things. He wore No. 12 with Green Bay, but he’ll wear No. 8 with the Jets—his number in college at Cal—because 12 is the one number you can’t wear on the Jets. “Twelve,” Rodgers acknowledged, “is Broadway Joe.” In another nod to Namath, he said the Jets’ sole Lombardi trophy, from Super Bowl III, “looks a little lonely.”

Rodgers is funny, smart, and charismatic on camera—three things the Jets haven’t had since Rex Ryan was head coach and his foot fetish got bigger tabloid headlines than his football team. Rodgers guest-hosted Jeopardy for a stretch in 2021 and very much wanted the full-time job. He dates movie stars and goes on ayahuasca journeys. Forget about wins and losses. Rodgers makes the Jets infinitely more interesting just by walking in the door.

He’s also—let’s be blunt—a super weird fit. Jets fans are not exactly a Jeopardy crowd. We do not appreciate being told to rephrase things as a question. We’ve always been the down-market team in New York relative to the Giants, the Mets to their Yankees, the Islanders to their Rangers, with a salty blue-collar fan base that takes pride in being uncouth and that Timothée Chalamet, of all people, somehow managed to nail on Saturday Night Live. The exit rotundas at the old Meadowlands Stadium were a drunken hellscape. Some of our more imaginative ogres used to drop quarters from the top of the spiral footpath down onto the grassy center, then wait for a kid to come grab it and dump beer on him from above. J! E! T! S! Jets! Jets! Jets! Don’t even get me started on Fireman Ed.

At the press conference, reporters took turns gently probing Rodgers on whether he understood what he was getting himself into, and many of his answers could be paraphrased as yes, I’m aware. He insisted that his fling with the Jets wasn’t “a one-and-done in my mind. This is a commitment.” We’ll see about that.

And yet if we remove those Gang Green–tinted glasses, the ones that give everything a vague hue of vomit, it’s not hard to see why Rodgers believes, or at least says he believes, that the Jets can win a Super Bowl. The team went 7–10 last season, but it was a frisky 7–10, lots of close games, and the roster was young, well coached, and loaded with talent, especially at wide receiver. In a rare sweep, a pair of Jets—wide receiver Garrett Wilson and cornerback Sauce Gardner—wound up winning the NFL’s offensive and defensive rookie of the year awards. The team’s winning percentage hovered around .500 all season, despite the worst quarterbacking in the league, and it played semi-meaningful games into December. “Just End The Season” didn’t get deployed until the season ended. Jets fans actually enjoyed watching this team, not because they were good, per se, but because they were promising—and when you’re a Jets fan, promising is as good as it gets.

The Rodgers trade had been gestating for weeks, and I was beginning to wonder if this would wind up as another Jetsy chapter in our franchise history—that time we actually thought we were going to get Aaron Rodgers. Instead, shortly after news of the trade broke, the Jets’ Vegas odds of winning the Super Bowl shot up to sixth-highest in the league. Suddenly, four words that have never been associated with the Jets started getting thrown around on sports-talk shows: fashionable Super Bowl pick. The Jets! Do you know how long we’ve waited just to be a fashionable Super Bowl pick? This is already our best season in years, and it hasn’t begun yet.

In 2021, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, one of the few NFL franchises as bungling as ours, won the Super Bowl after Tom Brady ditched Bill Belichick and the Patriots to play for them, so there is some recent precedent here. Brady has also obliterated notions of how long a quarterback can perform at an elite level. He led the NFL in passing yardage at 43. He makes Rodgers look like a puppy. During a game last season against the Bills, on October 30—outdoors, in Buffalo—I watched with astonishment as Rodgers flicked a pass 70 yards downfield, right on target, like it was nothing, before one of his lousy receivers dropped it. His arm, at least, is as golden as ever.

Rodgers isn’t Brady, but he’s awfully close, and he’s always been the more physically gifted of the two. Few quarterbacks have ever played at a higher level. So if Brady can win a ring with the Bucs, why can’t A-Rodg do it with the Jets?

Even if Rodgers is washed up, relative to peak Rodgers, every Jets fan in creation would still choose him over what we rolled out last season: a three-man rotation consisting of a genuinely washed-up former Super Bowl winner (Joe Flacco), an undrafted career backup who pulled off a few plucky wins (Mike White), and the worst starting quarterback in the NFL last season by nearly every statistical metric, Zach Wilson. Going from Zach Wilson to Aaron Rodgers is like going from a potato to Aaron Rodgers. We just need a seasoned pilot. Merely good would be a quantum leap.

Rodgers is a student of history (Jeopardy), so he’s perhaps already calculated that even if things do go off the rails with the Jets, the world will forget that this peculiar union ever happened, just like people have probably already forgotten that Favre once played for the Jets, or that Michael Jordan played a few years for the Washington Wizards. And those who do remember will blame us, not him. We have no idea how this will go. We know exactly how this will go. Just start the season.

*Source Images: David Eulitt / Getty; Elsa / Getty; Grant Halverson / Getty; Stacy Revere / Getty  

My last personal slump was brought on by a succession of blows: a job change, bad luck and bad judgment in love, and a daunting milestone birthday. Less, Andrew Sean Greer’s hilarious and brilliant Pulitzer-winning novel, took the edge off; reading about a middling writer’s middle-life-panic-induced trip on the eve of his 50th birthday made me think my own midlife crises of confidence might be survivable. That occasion wasn’t the first time a book turned my life around. When I got stuck in the muck on my dissertation, other academics discussing their methods freed me—Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel’s The Popular Arts was a life raft. And after I had a health setback, John Bingham’s The Courage to Start put me on a path to the Miami Half Marathon.

Which genre works best for this kind of inspiration depends on the reader. Some will need a book that will break them down before lifting them back up. Others will find solace in a title that blends laughter and pathos. And not every issue can be jump-started by literature; sometimes there’s nothing else for it but professional help. But bibliotherapy, or healing through reading, has been shown to alleviate depression symptoms; even undertaken informally, it may lead to mood shifts.

If you’re in search of a boost or a push to change your life, the seven books below may help. Their stories of stress and triumph make the hard times feel less lonely, provide catharsis, and, in some cases, serve as a model for navigating the ebb and flow of our lives.

Viking

Oh My Mother! A Memoir in Nine Adventures, by Connie Wang

In some ways, this propelling memoir about a mother-daughter duo traveling around the world reads like a mash-up of Eat, Pray, Love and The Amazing Race, but the differences are delightful. In each essay, the journalist and memoirist Connie Wang explores her complicated connection with her charismatic mother, Qing Li, and what she terms the many “oh my mother” moments that arise during their adventures—roughly akin to oh my God, the phrase is a “polite expletive,” a way to mark a tiny moment of revelation. The author also dives into her family’s history: When Wang’s parents came to the United States in the late 1980s, they were something like, to paraphrase Wang, “accidental immigrants”—a move meant basically to be a “four-year vacation” became permanent when her academic father’s public solidarity with his peers in Tiananmen Square made China no longer a safe option. There’s also a deeper story here about the growth that comes from getting outside one’s comfort zone. Wang finds her relationship with her mom to be equal parts endearing and infuriating, as only familial ties can be. Their journey may motivate readers to see their own complicated-but-loving bonds in a new light.

[Read: The problem with mothers and daughters]

Akashic Books

Mr. Loverman, by Bernardine Evaristo

In this earlier triumph by the Booker-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other, a well-off 74-year-old man with a surfeit of charisma and swagger finds the courage to live his truth. “The whole point of a midlife crisis is to start living the life you want instead of tolerating the life you have,” Barry Walker thinks in 1990. And yet, between fear, social stigma, and familial obligations, it takes him another 20 years to make a move. By then, he’s raised two daughters and found financial success in England, but what he still lacks haunts him. He’s been in love with his best friend, Morris, since they were teens in Antigua, and for almost all of that time, he’s also been hiding behind his marriage to Carmel, a righteously religious woman who thinks her husband’s great sin is being a womanizer. The journey to the life he’s dreamed about is filled with wit, revelations, and an intriguing cast of secondary characters. Still, Barry’s grand plans for self-actualization don’t take Carmel’s feelings into account, and the chapters that center her distinctive, idiomatic voice balance the novel. The story, about facing and telling the truth, is brilliant for anyone who’s ever had a dream they were afraid to pursue—or who felt they needed to hide parts of themselves for survival or acceptance.

Counterpoint

The Chinese Groove, by Kathryn Ma

The struggles between belonging and liminality, and between delusion and hope, are the beating heart of Ma’s softly satirical new novel. In China’s Yunnan province, Zheng Xue Li, also known as Shelley, is nominally part of a family, but he’s descended from a widely loathed branch and is effectively an outcast. His mother is gone, his only loving relation is with his grief-stricken father, and his relatives hate him. So when his father sends him to San Francisco in January 2015 to study and live with his supposedly rich uncle Ted (in reality a second cousin once removed), Shelley is hoping that this is where he’ll finally belong. Shelley also pins his hopes on the “Chinese groove”—his term for a communal bond with his Chinese-born “countrymen”—from which he’s sure goodwill and support will flow. Reality is more messy and interesting. California presents fresh challenges: Shelley’s situation is precarious, and San Francisco is no progressive Eden. But through the hardships and hustle, Shelley gets to know his adopted city while discovering the inner resources he needs to fight for himself and others—and to finally find his people. His optimism and savvy are contagious.

[Read: The California dream is dying]

Dutton

Time’s Undoing, by Cheryl A. Head

A mystery that revolves around a brutal act of racial violence may sound like an unusual choice for someone seeking a boost, but one of the most uplifting things you can experience through fiction is the vicarious rush of seeing justice served. Head excels in this great pleasure of a crime novel. She infuses her challenging subject with a finely calibrated balance of vulnerability, care, and empowerment; the effect is galvanizing. Meghan McKenzie, a Detroit-based investigative journalist covering the Black Lives Matter movement, goes south to Alabama to confront the nearly century-old murder of her own great-grandfather. In addition to gaining resolution for that open wound, she finds a connection to her ancestral roots and new love, while uncovering secrets with present-day implications. Getting long-deferred truth and closure is no small matter, and Meghan’s advocacy gives hope that progress and growth are possible when we reckon forthrightly with the past. Few books feel more timely or needed than this one.

Grand Central Publishing

All the Lonely People, by Mike Gayle

This is a charming, sentimental book about loneliness that makes you feel less alone. Hubert Bird, a reclusive Jamaican widower and an accidental fabulist, has been lying to his beloved daughter, Rose, for five years. After a disturbing incident, he turned his back on the world, and has been hiding away in his South London apartment ever since. Apart from taking care of his cat, Hubert’s prime activity is making weekly calls to Rose, where he constructs a rich life out of whole cloth so that she won’t worry. (The lies get so elaborate that he needs a notebook to keep track.) All goes according to plan—until Rose announces that she’s finally coming back to England for a visit, and Hubert is forced to try to make some real friends to keep up the ruse. This leads to a surprising acquaintance with Ashleigh, a single mom who’s new in the neighborhood, and life opens up from there. In a fractured, pandemic-scarred age, many of us can easily relate to Hubert’s predicament; Gayle’s novel reminds readers about the perils of isolation and the possibilities of reconnection, and that sweetness and generosity are worth seeking. It’s like gentle aversion therapy for the lonely.

[Read: Life is worse for older people now]

Random House

Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted, by Suleika Jaouad

Watching someone fall ill just as they’re finding their way can feel confusing and unjust. But in Jaouad’s elegant mash-up of memoir and travel writing, the coming-of-age and survivor’s tales merge into something truly special. This deeply candid account documents the young journalist’s experience with a life-threatening cancer, her treatment, and the 15,000-mile journey of spiritual healing she took once the acute physical danger subsided. In the months before she got sick, the author graduated from Princeton, moved to Paris, fell grandly in love, and was on the cusp of securing her dream job. At the same time, there were persistent signs that something was gravely wrong. Her diagnosis was devastating, but it was also a turning point toward recovery. She chronicles all of it: falling ill in her prime, starting a blog, falling out of love, and visiting with virtual strangers across the United States, who had followed along with her posts and kept her company through years of treatment. This sensitive meditation on those years explores how illness splits a person’s life in two. (The book’s title comes from a related Susan Sontag quote about that bifurcation.) What makes it inspiring is the propulsive energy and beauty of the story, and the fact that readers know she’s moving toward a vibrant future.

Random House

How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water, by Angie Cruz

In 12 near-therapeutic sessions, Cara Romero, a Dominican immigrant in New York, tells her life story to a counselor at a government job-retraining program for older people. Estranged from much of her family and unemployed since the factory she’d worked at for more than 25 years shipped her job overseas, she’s baring her soul to the city employee to secure a fresh start. But the 56-year-old is also reflective and blunt as she reveals all that she’s navigated over the decades. To begin, Cara announces, “I came to this country because my husband wanted to kill me.” Departing her home with a baby and almost no money was hard; her son leaving their home (and her) for good at 18 years old was even harder. The care of a friend, letting loose and crying “until you don’t need to cry no more,” helped save her. Witnessing Cara’s story is like a secondhand catharsis. Though the novel delivers more pathos than laughs, the protagonist is unforgettable, learning and changing in her 50s, making the most of her tiny victories. For anyone facing their own dark days, it’s a profoundly encouraging experience.