Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

Donald Trump is guilty of deplorable actions, under indictment for multiple crimes, and yet remains the most popular candidate with voters in the Republican Party’s presidential primary.

Why do you think he is still their first choice?

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com.

Conversations of Note

The prevailing public conversation about crime has been upended in one of the most progressive enclaves in America, where a storied civil-rights organization has had enough. In Oakland, California, the local branch of the NAACP released a scathing open letter on crime last week that purports to capture the frustrations of a community where many now live in fear.

Cynthia Adams, president of the Oakland NAACP, and Bishop Bob Jackson, a local pastor, are listed as the letter’s authors. It begins:

Oakland residents are sick and tired of our intolerable public safety crisis that overwhelmingly impacts minority communities. Murders, shootings, violent armed robberies, home invasions, car break-ins, sideshows, and highway shootouts have become a pervasive fixture of life in Oakland. We call on all elected leaders to unite and declare a state of emergency and bring together massive resources to address our public safety crisis.

African Americans are disproportionately hit the hardest by crime in East Oakland and other parts of the city. But residents from all parts of the city report that they do not feel safe. Women are targeted by young mobs and viciously beaten and robbed in downtown and uptown neighborhoods. Asians are assaulted in Chinatown. Street vendors are robbed in Fruitvale. News crews have their cameras stolen while they report on crime. PG&E workers are robbed and now require private security when they are out working.

Everyone is in danger.

The letter proceeds to lay blame for the crisis on local leadership and their progressive policies, stating:

Failed leadership, including the movement to defund the police, our District Attorney’s unwillingness to charge and prosecute people who murder and commit life threatening serious crimes, and the proliferation of anti-police rhetoric have created a heyday for Oakland criminals. If there are no consequences for committing crime in Oakland, crime will continue to soar.

People are moving out of Oakland in droves. They are afraid to venture out of their homes to go to work, shop, or dine in Oakland and this is destroying economic activity. Businesses, small and large, struggle and close, tax revenues vanish, and we are creating the notorious doom-loop where life in our city continues to spiral downward. As economic pain increases, the conditions that help create crime and criminals are exacerbated by desperate people with no employment opportunities.

We are in crisis and elected leaders must declare a state of emergency and bring resources together from the city, the county, and the state to end the crisis. We are 500 police officers short of the number that experts say Oakland needs. Our 911 system does not work. Residents now know that help will not come when danger confronts them. Worse, criminals know that too.

The authors call for a multiracial anti-crime coalition, and imply that would-be members of such a coalition have been too intimidated to form one:

We urge African Americans to speak out and demand improved public safety. We also encourage Oakland’s White, Asian, and Latino communities to speak out against crime and stop allowing themselves to be shamed into silence. There is nothing compassionate or progressive about allowing criminal behavior to fester and rob Oakland residents of their basic rights to public safety. It is not racist or unkind to want to be safe from crime.

And it advocates for social programs and economic development to address root causes of crime:

Our youth must be given alternatives to the crippling desperation that leads to crime, drugs, and prison. They need quality education, mentorship, and, most importantly, real economic opportunities. Oakland should focus on creating skilled industrial and logistics jobs that pay family sustaining wages, and vocational training so Oakland residents can perform those jobs. With this focus we can produce hundreds, if not thousands, of the types of jobs desperately needed to stem economic despair. Unfortunately, progressive policies and failed leadership have chased away or delayed significant blue collar job development in the city, the Port of Oakland, and the former Army Base. That must change! We also must continue with mentoring programs like the Oakland branch of the national OK Program that steers youth away from criminal activity. We believe that young people currently in the criminal life will choose another path if they are shown a way.

In response to the letter, the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office released the following statement to local media outlets: “We are disappointed that a great African-American pastor and a great African-American organization would take a false narrative on such an important matter. We would expect more from Bishop Bob Jackson and the Oakland Chapter of the NAACP.”

Commenting on the NAACP’s letter, the civil libertarian criminal-defense attorney Scott H. Greenfield argued at his blog, Simple Justice, “There is nothing inconsistent about wanting better cops, who treat citizens respectfully, don’t violate their constitutional rights and don’t resort to needless violence, and wanting police to do the job of protecting citizens.” He continued:

Nobody wants to be wrongfully beaten by a cop. Nobody wants to be beaten by a vicious criminal either. Nobody wants people who are inclined to commit crimes, whether because economic circumstances aren’t as wonderful as Bidenomics tells them or just because committing crimes is a quicker path to getting what they want than working for it, to believe they can do so with impunity … When people on the street live in fear of crime, their lives are miserable and their participation in society limited. They don’t want to live that way, and the Oakland NAACP has stood up to speak for its constituency. This doesn’t make them cop lovers or reform haters, but human beings trying to survive together. Cops are part of that survival, and to accept this does not mean that cops can’t, and shouldn’t, do a whole lot better than they have in the past.

The Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby writes:

Each year, tens of thousands of Oakland residents are victimized in criminal attacks. Preventing shoplifting, car jackings, armed robberies, and homicides is not a conservative or a liberal goal. It is why governments exist in the first place.

The Road Not Taken

At Notes From the Middleground, Damon Linker is considering the newest indictment of Donald Trump with trepidation for the future and frustration about a key moment in the recent past:

Short of an intervening (possibly stress-induced) medical event, Trump is going to be the Republican nominee for president. He will be running for the nation’s highest office while on trial for multiple crimes in multiple jurisdictions. His campaign will take direct aim at the rule of law, declaring it a sham fit only for saps, suckers, and chumps, and most Republican voters will fall in line with this sordid civic lesson, just as most Republican voters have come to believe the 2020 election was stolen by the Democrats simply because Trump has said it was.

Trump could well be convicted in one or more of these trials before Election Day 2024. And he could well win the election, sending him to the White House instead of federal prison. Far from vindicating the rule of law, such an outcome would make a mockery of it.

And what if he loses, claiming once again to have been robbed of a victory by a vast conspiracy involving the Democratic Party, prosecutors and the courts, ostensibly neutral government functionaries, and the “fake news” media that will stop at nothing to deny power to the nearly half of the country that dares to resist left-wing totalitarian control? I won’t try to answer that question. Your imaginations can do the work all on their own.

I’ll leave you with something else instead—my growing conviction is that the last opportunity we had to contain and partially neutralize the civically pestilential influence of Donald Trump on our polity was February 13, 2021. That’s the day Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell voted to acquit Donald Trump for his actions on and leading up to the events of January 6. While describing Trump’s words and deeds in the run-up to the insurrectionary violence on Capitol Hill as “disgraceful,” McConnell nonetheless preferred to let the judicial branch of government solve his Trump problem for him, declaring, “We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”

In the annals of shirked political responsibility, that has to deserve a special prize. It would have taken ten more votes in the Senate to convict Trump in his second impeachment. Had McConnell taken a public stand against the former president and whipped others in his party to do the same, Trump might have been barred from ever holding public office again. That would have been a political solution to what was and remains a fundamentally political problem. Instead, we’re left with the legal solution McConnell preferred—and the considerable risk that politics may well overwhelm and devour it.  

In Hot Water

In The Atlantic, Marina Koren argues that rising sea temperatures are especially troubling:

Earth is an ocean planet, a water world. We have not observed anything like it yet in the universe, not even with our best telescopes, and so we cannot know exactly how rare—and thus, how difficult—it may be for the forces of cosmic nature to produce such a thing. And yet, here we are, simmering its oceans at our peril and changing the fundamental makeup of the ecosystem that defines Earth. Our oceans have absorbed most of the excess heat produced by greenhouse-gas emissions in recent decades, serving as a buffer that protects us from the worst effects of climate change. Humans may be sweltering on land this summer, but our planet’s future—and therefore ours—is intimately tied with the sea.

Provocation of the Week

Writing at Law & Liberty, Yuval Levin explores the relationship between America’s constitutional design and our efforts to live together across differences.

Acting together when we don’t think alike requires creating some space for competing approaches to governance; compelling opposing factions to bargain, negotiate, and seek accommodations that not only avert conflict but bring us closer together; administering the government in steady, predictable ways in accordance with those accommodations; and enforcing clear boundaries on the power of majorities and public officials. This is the work of federalism, Congress, the president, and the courts, respectively. But it all requires a citizenry well formed in core republican virtues by the very experience of working together even when we don’t think alike.

This is a fact we often miss about our Constitution. It works by setting competing interests and powers against each other, which critics sometimes caricature as substituting an almost mechanical proceduralism for morally substantive civic formation. But that is precisely wrong. This approach actually begins from the insight that, in order to be properly formative, our politics must always be in motion—that moral formation is a matter of establishing habits, and that civic habits are built up by civic action more than by a proper arrangement of rules. The different interests, priorities, and power centers set against each other in our system do not rest against each other, like interlocking beams holding up a roof. Rather, they push, pull, and tug at each other and unceasingly compete for position. They are living political actors, not inanimate structural supports. And none can achieve anything without dealing with the others, who are always in their way. The result is a peculiar style of politics, which feels frustrating and acrimonious at almost any given instant, but can be remarkably dynamic in the long run.

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All my life, I thought there was just one way to get to my hometown’s ShopRite: right on Fair Street, right on Gleneida Avenue, right into the parking lot. That was until I plugged ShopRite into Google Maps. Now I had two options. I could turn right into the parking lot in front of the grocery store or, if I felt compelled, enter closer to Gold’s Gym and cut across the asphalt sea. Either route would take four minutes, the app said, but the latter earned the Google Maps eco-mode seal of approval: a little green leaf. A blurb informed me that I would save 6 percent gas by turning into the lot before, rather than after, the spot where my mom takes Bodypump classes. I could do my part to save the world.

It’s been two years since Google announced its Maps eco-routing feature. For all trips by car in the U.S., Canada, and much of Europe, the app defaults to recommending the most environmentally friendly route, as long as it’s not that much slower than the alternative. If the time difference between routes is negligible, the app defaults to the one that saves gas. The feature’s launch was met with significant internal buzz. Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, said that it could save “over one million tons of carbon emissions per year—the equivalent of removing over 200,000 cars from the road.”

That sounds great. But those numbers are less impressive when you consider that the EPA estimated on-road-vehicle emissions of about 1.5 billion tons of CO2 last year, and that nearly 103 million cars were registered in the United States in 2021. The tiny green leaf may help the planet a little, but it might also make things worse by giving drivers like me a false sense of accomplishment as we continue destroying the planet with gas-guzzling personal vehicles. Eco-mode is a little nudge in a time when little nudges just don’t feel like enough—a sign of how much inconvenience any of us is actually willing to suffer in order to mitigate climate change.

The question of how much eco-mode is actually changing drivers’ behavior is difficult to answer. For one thing, the “green” routes that Google recommends are, in many cases, exactly the same routes it would’ve offered anyway. “The fastest route and the most fuel-efficient one are the same the vast majority of the time,” Rosa Wu, a product manager at Google Maps, told me, though the company was unable to provide any precise numbers. In cases where there are multiple options, Wu said, eco-mode does make it easier for drivers to choose a more sustainable route when planning a trip.

[Read: EVs are sending toxic tire particles into the water, soil, and air]

When I talked with David Reichmuth, a senior engineer in the Clean Transportation program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, he asked the app for directions from his Oakland, California, home to his parent’s house in Petaluma, about 45 miles northwest. The result was fantastic: “It says right now that I will save 62 percent gas,” he told me about the 40-minute trip. But the alternative was a roundabout two-hour journey that took him south to San Jose, north through San Francisco, and over the Golden Gate Bridge (and avoided a $7 toll). “So I guess, yes,” he said, “you do save 60 percent over driving the wrong way.”

When eco-mode’s recommendations do differ from the fastest route available, estimating how much gas is saved is not trivial. To calculate its eco routes, Google Maps relies on a vehicle-energy-consumption model co-created by Jacob Holden, a research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Predicting how much gas a certain vehicle will consume at a certain speed on a certain path is a fairly simple engineering problem, Holden told me, but it’s harder to transfer this information when road conditions, and people’s individual driving styles, are unpredictable. “You and I and 1,000 of our friends could drive the same stretch of road, and we’ll all drive it a little bit differently,” he told me. Still, he thinks eco-mode’s predictions are roughly accurate; one paper he co-authored in 2018 found that the NREL’s current methodology “should accurately select the route that consumes the least fuel 90% of the time.”

We also have no way of knowing the net climate impact of eco-mode other than to take Google’s word for it. Konstantinos Katsikopoulos, a behavioral-science professor at the University of Southampton, wanted to see more data on the 200,000-car figure especially. Though a 200-word endnote in Google’s 2023 environmental report outlines how the company reached that figure, it doesn’t include the raw data. “Maybe they’re assuming that nobody’s interested to know more or they couldn’t understand it,” he told me. But to him, it mostly seemed opaque.

[Read: Google Maps’ failed attempt to get people to lose weight]

Eco-mode’s impact may be small, at least so far, but wide-scale eco-nudges could cumulatively play a role in reducing overall emissions. A 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, according to a summary by one of its co-chairs, concluded that “having the right policies, infrastructure and technology in place to enable changes to our lifestyles and behaviour can result in a 40–70% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.” Google Maps isn’t helping people buy electric vehicles, retrofit their houses with energy-efficient technologies, or install heat pumps—changes that would undoubtedly carry a much larger benefit—but it’s still a behavior change. If small reminders incorporated into tools people already use in their daily lives could make a real dent in emissions, the world might indeed warm more slowly. And in that sense, eco-mode’s successes are as instructive as its shortcomings.

But that doesn’t mean people will use it when the more sustainable choice is actually slower. Holden told me that, on his own trips, he’ll more often than not take the eco-route, but it’s not always great. “There are certainly times where I’ll be given a route that’s recommended as efficient and we'll just kind of chuckle at the impracticality,” he told me. If the app instructs him to  avoid the highway in favor of a slightly longer drive through a series of stoplights, he’ll believe the recommendation—it’s based on his own model, after all—but still drive the highway route. “And I think that’s really interesting,” he said. “Me of all people, I’m reaching that conclusion.”

To impress the benefits of the eco-routes upon drivers like Holden, Google is considering retooling how its eco-routes are presented, Wu told me. Maps doesn’t display emissions estimates—such as carbon-dioxide equivalent—because they’re confusing for regular drivers, she said. “When we were doing research, we found that users had no conception of emissions.” But the percentages might not be persuasive enough to change people’s behavior. Instead of “saves 2% gas,” the company is thinking of presenting potential financial savings at some point—take this route, spend four more minutes driving, and save $1.45.

Kate Brandt, Google’s chief sustainability officer, told me repeatedly that the goal of programs like eco-mode and Google Flights’ carbon-footprint calculation (which estimates how many kilograms of CO2 I’ll contribute to the atmosphere depending on which flight I pick) is to provide “helpful information that people are seeking.” But as I scrolled through Maps over the past few weeks, I wondered who was seeking some of the information Google offered: the route to upstate New York that would take 40 more minutes and, depending on the time of day, possibly save me 2 percent on emissions; the ShopRite parking-lot maneuver that would save a couple of teaspoons of gas.

[Read: America is missing out on the biggest EV boom of all]

If Google Maps is so intent on showing me the greenest way to get to the grocery store, its eco-friendly nod would perhaps more helpfully be directed toward a non-driving option. Though Google Maps provides helpful walking, biking, public-transit, and mixed-mode directions, no amount of industrious trekking will earn you a green leaf. Reichmuth thinks this is a mistake. When he pulled up routes from his home to San Francisco’s Oracle Park, he wondered why Google bestowed the eco seal of approval on any driving route when he could take public transit, get there in about the same amount of time, and not waste minutes and fuel parking.

Holden, despite his gas-use models, felt similarly. “The actual solution here is to get on your bike and go to Trader Joe’s,” he said. “That will be the most efficient path.”