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.”

Of the roughly 1,000 people who have been charged for their participation in the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, nearly a quarter were indicted alongside a relative or romantic partner. All sorts of other close personal relationships run through the indictments: the two roommates from Ohio who have known each other since they were kids, the three high-school buddies from North Carolina, the three Marines from Camp Lejeune, a Florida man and his pastor, an electrician’s apprentice and his boss. The conventional wisdom about radicalization is that ideas attract people to extremist movements and to the violence those movements commit. Most adherents, though, never move beyond reading manifestos, watching videos, or plunging down internet rabbit holes. Very often, what differentiates those who commit overt violence is their personal ties to others in the movement. Because although extremist movements are ideological, extremist violence turns out to be strikingly social.

As a historian of American social movements, I’ve found that the perpetrators of violence tend to be pulled along not by ideas alone, as compelling as these people may find them, but also by the power of personal connections. These individual loyalties can create obligations so intense that they permit those who feel them to justify committing horrors.

[From the April 2023 issue: The new anarchy]

The phenomenon reaches far back into the 20th century. Think of the lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp. These two young Black men were accused of killing a white man, but their lynching was not determined by that. Instead, their murder, in August 1930 in Marion, Indiana, followed a grim pattern that became one of the most common forms of political violence in 20th-century America: an accusation of rape leveled by a white woman who had reason to lie, a quick arrest, the accused Black men’s imprisonment in a jail that police weren’t willing to defend when a mob descended. Once the jail’s doors had been battered down, Smith and Shipp were dragged from their cells and hanged from a maple tree on the courthouse lawn, two blocks away. The aftermath of the killings was captured in a commemorative photo sold as a postcard for 50 cents that showed members of the mob smiling for the camera, the young Black men’s brutalized bodies dangling above them.

A few days after the lynching, the executive secretary of the NAACP arrived in town to conduct a quiet investigation. His report on the murders, which was widely distributed through the organization’s press service, resulted in a storm of publicity that forced the county’s district attorney to respond. Together with the attorney general of Indiana, the D.A. launched an inquiry that stripped away the anonymity that normally protected lynch mobs’ leading participants.

The official investigation found that the assault on the jail began when the sheriff refused to hand Smith and Shipp over to the father and the uncle of the alleged rape victim, 18-year-old Mary Ball. Although the mob swelled to more than 1,000 people at its peak, witnesses attributed the worst of the violence to a core group of 21 men, 17 of whom, by my tally, lived close enough to one of the Ball brothers to be called their neighbors. White supremacy underpinned the killings of Smith and Shipp, but the rage of those who committed the atrocity was mobilized by the intimate ties of family and community.

Sixty-five years later, on April 19, 1995, a former soldier named Timothy McVeigh pulled a rented Ryder truck into the delivery zone of Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. He primed the fuses on the nearly 5,000-pound fertilizer bomb that he and his friend Terry Nichols had assembled in the truck’s cargo bed. Then he got out, locked the truck’s door, and walked toward the car he’d left in a parking lot several blocks away. He was still on his way there when the bomb detonated, demolishing the front of the building and killing 168 people, including 19 children, many of whom had been in a day-care center right above the delivery zone.

[Read: Alt history]

McVeigh saw his political purpose as guided by the anti-government extremism he’d embraced in the white-power militia movement. On the morning of the bombing, he carried with him pages from The Turner Diaries, the apocalyptic 1978 novel whose white-nationalist hero counters Washington’s mounting oppression by blowing up the FBI’s headquarters. In that respect, there would seem to be a straight line from his ideological conversion to the violence he committed that day. But he had been immersed in the movement for seven years before his attack on the Murrah building. For most of that time, he had engaged in only the pettiest of political acts—until he became bound by the personal ties that ran through the militia movement as strongly as they did in the mob that murdered Shipp and Smith.

Those connections started to form in the mid-1980s, when James Nichols brought Terry, his younger brother, into the militia that was taking root around their home in rural Michigan. Terry joined the Army in 1988. During his basic training at Fort Benning, in Georgia, he befriended McVeigh, whose own interest in white-power survivalism had been inspired, in large part, by The Turner Diaries. How much influence Terry then had on McVeigh is not completely clear, though McVeigh officially joined the movement during the first year they spent together, following a spell as a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

The two men had seemed to drift apart after Terry washed out of the Army in 1989, but they reconnected when McVeigh was discharged two years later. Terry was then living with James on their family farm. In early 1993, McVeigh also moved in. There, James revived his big-brother role as mentor, feeding his brother and his friend with movement propaganda, ferrying them to militia meetings, and stoking their anger in long conversations he tended to dominate. The two younger men took almost every step leading to the bombing together, except for the single act of driving the Ryder truck, which McVeigh did alone. When he was arrested, little more than an hour later, he listed the Nichols farm as his home and James as his next of kin.

In his lawyer’s telling, 24-year-old Hunter Seefried had no interest in Donald Trump’s January 6 rally at the Ellipse. He had voted for Trump. And he was sure that his father, Kevin, was right when he said that the Democrats had stolen the election. It just didn’t bother him enough to devote a day to protesting it. But his dad wanted the family to go with him, and saying no was likely to cause more trouble than it was worth. So, that morning, Hunter and his girlfriend made the two-hour drive with his parents from their small town in Delaware to Washington, D.C.

[Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Extremism has spread into the mainstream]

When the rally was over, Kevin insisted that they join the march on Congress, though they had planned on having lunch and heading home. Once they got to Capitol Hill, Hunter’s mother and his girlfriend faded into the crowd, while Hunter and his father worked their way to the front. They reached the west portico just as the first few rioters were climbing through a window that a Proud Boy had smashed open. Hunter carefully removed the last shards from the frame. Then he and his dad climbed in too.

They moved through the building together, up the stairs with the mob trying to chase down the Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman, into an ugly confrontation with the backup officers Goodman had called. The two of them joined the mob’s front line, Kevin screaming at the officers to step aside or shoot him. When it became clear that the police wouldn’t back down, Hunter and Kevin left the building, 25 minutes after they’d entered.

Three months later, father and son were indicted together on seven misdemeanors and a felony charge of obstructing an official proceeding.

We don’t yet know enough about all of the extremist organizations that were involved in the January 6 attack to be able to trace their webs of affinity with the same precision. But what we already know is revealing: The Seefrieds are hardly alone.

The federal indictments identify the 14 Oath Keepers who, at the height of the riot, marched through the mob in military-style stack formation. Six of them had come to the Capitol with a relative who was also an Oath Keeper. Two others, both military veterans, had a tight friendship. One of the pair had also found a mentor in another Oath Keeper, 15 years his senior. “Love the hell outta you,” the younger man texted him on January 8. “You too, my dear friend!” the mentor texted back. “We stormed the gates of corruption together (although on opposite sides of the building) so between that and our first meeting and getting to know you since I can say we will always be brothers!”

Hunter Seefried was no Oath Keeper. He was a barely political young man following his father, whose own radicalization had not gone beyond following right-wing news sites and pro-Trump social media. Yet they were among the first rioters to breach the Capitol building, half an hour before the Oath Keepers started their march.

At Hunter’s sentencing hearing this past October, his lawyer argued that he didn’t deserve prison time; Hunter had put himself in the mob’s vanguard only because he was a dutiful son, and not as an insurrectionist. But America’s history of violent extremism makes that distinction meaningless. The Seefrieds turned to violence as so many people had before them, through the tangling together of dangerous ideas and intimate obligations. The more extremism spreads into the mainstream, the more likely that combination is to take hold again. As the personal pulls the ideological closer and closer to the center of American democracy, there is no limit to the damage this potent combination might do.

As France is wracked by furious protests over President Emmanuel Macron’s plan for pension cuts, a bipartisan group of legislators on Capitol Hill is discussing how to make Social Security available to a smaller group of workers. People are living longer, the argument goes, and benefit programs are running out of money. Shifting the retirement age higher is a reasonable, desirable, and necessary fix.

[Pamela Duckerman: Why the French want to stop working]

Except it is not reasonable. It is not desirable. And it is not necessary. Indeed, the opposite is true: Politicians should let Americans retire with security and dignity by making retirement benefits more generous and by promising to lower the retirement age.

Lifting the age at which retirees can receive their full Social Security benefits is one of those policies that sound sober and prudent on the face of it. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the Social Security trust fund will run out of money 10 years from now in part because current beneficiaries got such a large cost-of-living adjustment this year. The ostensibly obvious solution is to have Americans work a little longer before they can access their full benefits—something that will help the country avoid turning into Japan, whose productivity and GDP have sagged as the elderly make up an ever larger share of the population.  

In reality, raising the retirement age is the fetishistic obsession of a tiny sliver of Beltway wonks, people wholly out of step with what average Americans want and need. There is more than one way to keep the United States from turning into Japan. One is to admit millions of additional immigrants—something proven to increase the number of start-ups and help the rate of economic growth. The U.S. could also establish a child allowance and a rational paid-leave policy to help families that want more kids.

Similarly, there is more than one way to fix Social Security’s eventual financing challenges. Right now the payroll tax that raises money for the program applies to only the first $160,200 of a person’s wage income; if you make $300,000 a year, $139,800 of that money remains untouched by the relevant tax. This is unfair: There’s no good reason that millionaires should pay a lower tax rate than their assistants do to help finance the country’s retirement benefits. (And there’s no reason to make the tax liability max out even if benefits do; we want progressive taxes and progressive spending.) It is also silly, given the importance of Social Security in ending elderly poverty and letting people retire with confidence. Lifting the payroll-tax cap would secure the program’s financing for decades, depending on wage and longevity trends.

[Read: Raising the retirement age is a sneaky way to reduce Social Security benefits]

Those longevity trends do not really show all Americans enjoying a long and healthy life. In 1980, 50-year-olds in the top income quintile could expect to live four or five years longer than 50-year-olds in the bottom income quintile. In 2010, the rich were living 13 or 14 years longer than the poor. And now average life expectancy is dropping because of the coronavirus pandemic, the opioid epidemic, and the prevalence of gun violence.

The number of healthy years that lower-income Americans can expect to enjoy by the time they hit middle age is also lower than you might think. What some researchers call health span—meaning the length of time a person spends living without major illness or disability—is heavily predicated on a person’s socioeconomic status. The rich get to retire and have fun; the poor have to work until their body starts to give out.

[Read: The social security trap]

The people arguing that Americans should work until they are 70 are typically people with cushy, remunerative white-collar jobs—the types of jobs that are fun and intellectually engaging for octogenarians. Most people do not have those jobs, especially not older workers without a college degree. That’s why the average lower-income American quits working and applies for Social Security as soon as they are eligible, trading a lower monthly benefit for the ability to stop changing car tires or working a cash register for $11 an hour at age 62.

That is perhaps the strongest argument for lowering the retirement age rather than raising it: Earlier retirement is what the American people obviously want, given how they behave. Poll after poll after poll shows that both Democrats and Republicans strongly support leaving benefits alone. And survey after survey shows that older Americans seek retirement as soon as is practical, with one-third of people taking benefits at 62 and more than half accepting reduced benefits for the chance to quit working before the current “full” retirement age of 66.

There is no good reason for the government to force such people to continue toiling away at their job toward the end of their life. We live in the wealthiest society the world has ever known. We have dozens of policy options available to increase employment among prime-age workers, help all Americans live a healthier life, and lift productivity and GDP. It would be straightforward to fully finance Social Security with some simple tax changes, ones that would have the benefit of making the tax code fairer and more progressive. And it would be straightforward to give workers what they want by letting them accept full retirement benefits at age 62 or 65 rather than at 67.

Nine national media organizations, including CNN, are suing for access to Capitol Hill surveillance tapes of January 6, 2021, that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has provided to Fox News but so far to no other press outlets.

In the 1990s, The New Republic and other magazines published, under the byline of the pathological fabricator Stephen Glass, a series of lies about Republicans: that a group of them worshipped at a literal “First Church of George Herbert Walker Christ” and considered the one-term president a messiah; that young Republicans would, when the bowtie-wearing portion of their conventions concluded, cut loose and put on orgies. Some lies are obvious even at the time but somehow become less so in retrospect. These ones seem more plausible in light of recent events. Last week, the New York Young Republican Club posted a statement about former President Donald Trump’s indictment and hailed its own one-termer in terms normally reserved for deities and kings. “President Trump embodies the American people—our psyche from id to super-ego—as does no other figure,” wrote the club’s vice president, Nathan Berger, 32. “His soul is totally bonded with our core values and emotions, and he is our total and indisputable champion. This tremendous connection threatens the established order.”

Yesterday, minutes after Trump’s appearance before a Manhattan judge, I tailgated past security, behind a delivery man who had been buzzed in to deliver tubs of Chinese food to the New York Young Republicans at their clubhouse in NoMad. The clubhouse sits above a salon, a humble storefront, and an awning advertising the Gupta Watch company. Berger; the club’s president, Gavin Wax; and its executive secretary, Vish Burra, were expecting me, although they were briefly confused that I had arrived bearing chicken and noodles. Soon, though, I was in a nice leather chair, observed by a portrait of Governor Thomas Dewey (1902–71)—of “Dewey Defeats Truman” fame, and the club’s chairman from 1931 to 1932—and in heated, friendly conversation about the tangerine messiah to whom these young men are so touchingly devoted. Their love for him is real, but it is a strange, trolling love, invented by the young to the consternation of the old.

They had just come from rallying for Trump as he entered the courthouse a few hours earlier. Club members claimed that the pro-Trump crowd was organized and turned out by them. “We probably had five, six hundred people,” Wax told me. Now was time for an “after-action report,” Burra said. Wax, 29, is a journalist at The Babylon Bee, a right-wing satirical site; Burra came to the event with his friend Representative George Santos, now his boss on Capitol Hill. “It was packed, but it was peaceful,” Wax said. “And then you got the Naked Cowboy”—a muscular, seminude vaquero who poses for tourists in Times Square—“showing up. So it was a real New York scene. We enjoyed it.” He said media wanted to see violence and didn’t get their wish. “It was peaceful,” he said. “We got the press. So I say: Mission accomplished.”

John Hendrickson: Inside Manhattan criminal court with Donald Trump

I wanted to know about their statement, which suggested a love for Trump that my withered heart has never felt for any politician, ever.

“I don’t get up in the morning and worship at an altar to Donald Trump,” Berger told me. “That isn’t the point. But he really is a singular figure.” Berger said he considers the present “an era of everyone subverting boundaries.” And Trump ushered in this new era. He kept calling this Trump-catalyzed mass subversion “tremendously exciting,” but to me, it sounded exciting only in the sense that breaking the seventh seal from the Book of Revelation would be a wild ride. “There’s a stability that this country has relied on since the Spanish-American War,” Berger told me. He acknowledged that this subversion was risky, and he said although Trump had unleashed the instability, he also provided a way through it.

And there was, the group’s leaders conceded, an element of PR in the statement. “A lot of Republican organizations put out the same boilerplate stuff. Hey, liberty lovers! Fight socialism! Guess what: No one cares,” Wax said. “When we put out a statement, we want attention. We want to provoke.” Ego and superego? “We just threw a Sigmund Freud thing in there. Why not? We said it in a lofty way. But at the end of the day, I think a lot of people view him that way.”

Burra suggested that my view, that politicians—even the good ones—exist to be mocked and harassed and not held up for adulation, was “a view mostly held by people who think of themselves as smart.” “But there are still plenty of normal people out there,” he said, in the nicest possible way. He acknowledged that politicians were merely human but urged me to recognize reality, which is that in politics, “everyone’s a personality today.” The way of politics is not dry disillusionment. “Everyone’s got their own cult following”—and that includes left and right alike. Some on the left live vicariously through Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram.

“When things were very mellow, politically, the politicians reflected that,” Wax said. “But the country is very divided. And Trump is a reflection of society.” He said Trump spoke not only for the people but also in the medium that the moment favored. He gestured at Dewey’s portrait and at others on the clubhouse walls. “Once, you had to have a voice for radio to be a good politician. Then television came, and you saw the Nixon-Kennedy debate. If you were not [good] on television, you weren’t gonna get elected. Now it’s social media.”

Others, he said, might appeal to the eggheads—Blake Masters, say, or Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio. “They serve their purpose. But they’re not going to be these electoral juggernauts. Trump is unique, and our statement calls that out: the id and the superego, the baseline emotions, the raw.” Moreover, Trump’s appeal to these animal instincts has not stopped him from reframing politics ideologically too. “Everything we talk about today, it’s because of how Trump has framed things.” Immigration, trade, culture wars, the deep state—all debates whose terms were dictated entirely by him. “He does have that ability to be sort of a thinker on a substantive side, but he puts it in a simplistic way that appeals to the voter. That’s a winning formula.

Tom Nichols: JD Vance and the collapse of dignity

Betting on that formula allowed Wax, Burra, and other Trump supporters to execute a hostile takeover of the New York Young Republicans. “It was on its deathbed,” Wax said—a moribund, blue-blooded institution of just 50 members unable to accept that even in New York, the center of energy was the working class. Wax is from Queens, Burra from Staten Island.

Burra described their takeover as “negotiated,” and their leverage as originating in their willingness to actually do things—such as put out crazy-sounding statements and turn out crowds. He and his colleagues saw earlier than others that the old way was dead, that “nothing is going to get changed if you keep having these softies and pussies who are not willing to do the absolute necessary to move the movement forward.” A martini toast to Jeb Bush was not going to be enough. “They were out of vision, out of gas,” Burra said. “We’re actually willing to push the big red button and be like, Fuck the optics, we’re going in. We’ll put out the statement. Everybody will pay attention to it.”

The older members “didn’t want to give it up to us,” Burra said. “We were like, ‘OK, well, who else are you going to give it to?’ They were lazy. And we were the only ones that were willing to take it. And so it was very Peter Stuyvesant, you know: They gave it up without us firing a shot.”

“Bridge and tunnel crowd,” Burra said, savoring the old slur against those who can’t afford to live in Manhattan. “Outer borough. How many times did we hear that? But you know what? Fuck you. Now we’re in your house.” The club has been around in various forms since the 19th century, and the current clubhouse was acquired in 2019—and located in Manhattan, of course. Their address, he said, “is the ultimate shitpost.”

Unable to resist playing my smartypants role in this conversation, I suggested that there was a paradox in the group: They pride themselves on their willingness to do anything to win power, using whatever cynical means necessary—yet their view of Trump is uncynical true love, a sitting-on-a-rainbow level of fondness.

“Have you ever been so jaded that you come out the other side?” Burra asked. “This is a dirty business. You need a dirty guy. You need operatives.” He was wearing a MAGA hat with four-inch letters, and a shirt from Project Veritas, which runs hidden-camera stings against journalists and unsuspecting leftists. “I have my ideals—America First, an America I’m fighting for—but how do you get that done? By any means necessary. A lot of people are coming around to that.”

From the September 1944 issue: A letter to the honorable Thomas E. Dewey

I looked back over at Thomas Dewey and wondered what he’d think about this statement. Then I remembered: He lost.