My Brooklyn apartment is designed for sterility. The windows have screens to keep out bugs; I chose my indoor plants specifically because they don’t attract pests. While commuting to other, similarly aseptic indoor spaces—co-working offices, movie theaters, friends’ apartments—I’ll skirt around pigeons, avert my eyes from a gnarly rat, shudder at the odd scuttling cockroach. But once I’m back inside, the only living beings present (I hope, and at least as far as I know) are the ones I’ve chosen to interact with: namely, my partner and the low-maintenance snake plant on the windowsill.
My aversion to pigeons, rats, and cockroaches is somewhat justifiable, given their cultural associations with dirtiness and disease. But such disgust is part of a larger estrangement between humanity and the natural world. As nature grows unfamiliar, separate, and strange to us, we are more easily repelled by it. These feelings can lead people to avoid nature further, in what some experts have called “the vicious cycle of biophobia.”
The feedback loop bears telling resemblance to another vicious cycle of modern life. Psychologists know that lonely individuals tend to think more negatively of others and see them as less trustworthy, which encourages even more isolation. Although our relationship to nature and our relationships with one another may feel like disparate phenomena, they are both parallel and related. A life without nature, it seems, is a lonely life—and vice versa.
The Western world has been trending toward both biophobia and loneliness for decades. David Orr, an environmental-studies researcher and advocate for climate action, wrote in a 1993 essay that “more than ever we dwell in and among our own creations and are increasingly uncomfortable with the nature that lies beyond our direct control.” This discomfort might manifest as a dislike of camping, or annoyance at the scratchy touch of grass at the park. It might also show up as disgust in the presence of insects, which a 2021 paper from Japanese scholars found is partially driven by urbanization. Ousting nature from our proximity—with concrete, walls, window screens, and lifestyles that allow us to remain at home—also increases the likelihood that the experiences we do have with other lifeforms will be negative, Orr writes. You’re much less likely to love birds if the only ones around are the pigeons you perceive as dirty.
The rise of loneliness is even better documented. Americans are spending more time inside at home and alone than they did a few decades ago. In his book Bowling Alone, the political scientist Robert Putnam cites data showing that, from the 1970s to the late 1990s, Americans went from entertaining friends at home about 15 times a year to just eight. No wonder, then, that nearly a fifth of U.S. adults reported feeling lonely much of the previous day in an April Gallup poll. Loneliness has become a public-health buzzword; Surgeon General Vivek Murthy calls it an “epidemic” that affects both mental and physical health. At least in the United States, COVID-19 has made things worse by expanding our preferred radius of personal space, and when that space is infringed upon, more of the reactions are now violent.
That loneliness and biophobia are rising in tandem may be more than a coincidence. Orr wrote in his 1993 essay that appreciation of nature will flourish mostly in “places in which the bonds between people, and those between people and the natural world create a pattern of connectedness, responsibility, and mutual need.” The literature suggests that he’s right. Our sense of community certainly affects how comfortable or desirable we perceive time in nature to be, Viniece Jennings, a senior fellow in the JPB Environmental Health Fellowship Program at Harvard who studies these relationships, told me. In one 2017 study across four European cities, having a greater sense of community trust was linked to more time spent in communal green spaces. A 2022 study showed that, during COVID-related shutdowns, Asians in Australia were more likely to walk outside if they lived in close-knit neighborhoods with high interpersonal trust.
Relationships between racial and ethnic groups can have an especially strong influence on time spent in nature. In the 2022 study from Australia, Asians were less likely to go walking than white people, which the study authors attributed to anti-Asian racism. Surveys consistently show that minority groups in the U.S., especially Black and Hispanic Americans, are less likely to participate in outdoor recreation, commonly citing racism, fear of racist encounters, or lack of easy access as key factors. Inclusive messaging in places like urban parks, by contrast, may motivate diverse populations to spend time outdoors.
On the flip side, being in nature or even just remembering times you spent there can increase feelings of belonging, says Katherine White, a behavioral scientist at the University of British Columbia who co-wrote a 2021 paper on the subject. The authors of one 2022 paper found that “people who strongly identify with nature, who enjoy being in nature, and who had more frequent garden visits were more likely to have a stronger sense of social cohesion.” In a 2018 study from Hong Kong, preschool children who were more engaged with nature had better relationships with their peers and demonstrated more kindness and helpfulness. A 2014 experiment in France showed that people who had just spent time walking in a park were more likely to pick up and return a glove dropped by a stranger than people who were just about to enter the park. The results are consistent, White told me: “Being in nature makes you more likely to help other people,” even at personal cost.
Time spent in natural spaces might contribute to a greater sense of belonging in part because it usually requires you to be in public space. Unlike homes and offices, natural spaces provide a setting for unpredictable social interactions—such as running into a new neighbor at the dog park or starting a spontaneous conversation with a stranger on your walking path—which “can be a great space for forming connections and building social networks,” Jennings said. In a study in Montreal, Canada, researchers found that time in public parks and natural spaces allowed immigrant families to converse with neighbors, make new friends, and feel better integrated in their new communities, all for free. Similarly, there’s some reason to suspect that strong human relationships can help extinguish any disgust we feel toward the natural world. We learn fear through one another, Daniel Blumstein, an evolutionary biologist at UCLA, told me. The more safe and enjoyable experiences we accumulate in groups, the better our tolerance for new and unfamiliar things.
It would be a stretch to say that just getting people to touch more grass will solve all societal ills, or that better social cohesion will guarantee that humankind unites to save the planet. Our relationships with the Earth and one another fluctuate throughout our lives, and are influenced by a number of variables difficult to capture in any one study. But this two-way phenomenon is a sign that, if you’ve been meaning to go outside more or connect with your neighbors, you might as well work on both. “Natural ecosystems rely on different people” and vice versa, Jennings said. “You don’t have to go on long hikes every day to understand that.”
For more than half a century, I have been studying the shifting relations between white and Black Americans. My first journal article, published in 1972, when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, was about Black political power in the industrial Midwest after the riots of the late 1960s. My own experience of race relations in America is even longer. I was born in the Mississippi Delta during World War II, in a cabin on what used to be a plantation, and then moved as a young boy to northern Indiana, where as a Black person in the early 1950s, I was constantly reminded of “my place,” and of the penalties for overstepping it. Seeing the image of Emmett Till’s dead body in Jet magazine in 1955 brought home vividly for my generation of Black kids that the consequences of failing to navigate carefully among white people could even be lethal.
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For the past 16 years, I have been on the faculty of the sociology department at Yale, and in 2018 I was granted a Sterling Professorship, the highest academic rank the university bestows. I say this not to boast, but to illustrate that I have made my way from the bottom of American society to the top, from a sharecropper’s cabin to the pinnacle of the ivory tower. One might think that, as a decorated professor at an Ivy League university, I would have escaped the various indignities that being Black in traditionally white spaces exposes you to. And to be sure, I enjoy many of the privileges my white professional-class peers do. But the Black ghetto—a destitute and fearsome place in the popular imagination, though in reality it is home to legions of decent, hardworking families—remains so powerful that it attaches to all Black Americans, no matter where and how they live. Regardless of their wealth or professional status or years of law-abiding bourgeois decency, Black people simply cannot escape what I call the “iconic ghetto.”
I know I haven’t. Some years ago, I spent two weeks in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, a pleasant Cape Cod town full of upper-middle-class white vacationers and working-class white year-rounders. On my daily jog one morning, a white man in a pickup truck stopped in the middle of the road, yelling and gesticulating. “Go home!” he shouted.
Who was this man? Did he assume, because of my Black skin, that I was from the ghetto? Is that where he wanted me to “go home” to?
This was not an isolated incident. When I jog through upscale white neighborhoods near my home in Connecticut, white people tense up—unless I wear my Yale or University of Pennsylvania sweatshirts. When my jogging outfit associates me with an Ivy League university, it identifies me as a certain kind of Black person: a less scary one who has passed inspection under the “white gaze.” Strangers with dark skin are suspect until they can prove their trustworthiness, which is hard to do in fleeting public interactions. For this reason, Black students attending universities near inner cities know to wear college apparel, in hopes of avoiding racial profiling by the police or others.
I once accidentally ran a small social experiment about this. When I joined the Yale faculty in 2007, I bought about 20 university baseball caps to give to the young people at my family reunion that year. Later, my nieces and nephews reported to me that wearing the Yale insignia had transformed their casual interactions with white strangers: White people would now approach them to engage in friendly small talk.
But sometimes these signifiers of professional status and educated-class propriety are not enough. This can be true even in the most rarefied spaces. When I was hired at Yale, the chair of the sociology department invited me for dinner at the Yale Club of New York City. Clad in a blue blazer, I got to the club early and decided to go up to the fourth-floor library to read The New York Times. When the elevator arrived, a crush of people was waiting to get on it, so I entered and moved to the back to make room for others. Everyone except me was white.
As the car filled up, I politely asked a man of about 35, standing by the controls, to push the button for the library floor. He looked at me and—emboldened, I have to imagine, by drinks in the bar downstairs—said, “You can read?” The car fell silent. After a few tense moments, another man, seeking to defuse the tension, blurted, “I’ve never met a Yalie who couldn’t read.” All eyes turned to me. The car reached the fourth floor. I stepped off, held the door open, and turned back to the people in the elevator. “I’m not a Yalie,” I said. “I’m a new Yale professor.” And I went into the library to read the paper.
I tell these stories—and I’ve told them before—not to fault any particular institution (I’ve treasured my time at Yale), but to illustrate my personal experience of a recurring cultural phenomenon: Throughout American history, every moment of significant Black advancement has been met by a white backlash. After the Civil War, under the aegis of Reconstruction, Black people for a time became professionals and congressmen. But when federal troops left the former Confederate states in 1877, white politicians in the South tried to reconstitute slavery with the long rule of Jim Crow. Even the Black people who migrated north to escape this new servitude found themselves relegated to shantytowns on the edges of cities, precursors to the modern Black ghetto.
All of this reinforced what slavery had originally established: the Black body’s place at the bottom of the social order. This racist positioning became institutionalized in innumerable ways, and it persists today.
I want to emphasize that across the decades, many white Americans have encouraged racial equality, albeit sometimes under duress. In response to the riots of the 1960s, the federal government—led by the former segregationist Lyndon B. Johnson—passed far-reaching legislation that finally extended the full rights of citizenship to Black people, while targeting segregation. These legislative reforms—and, especially, affirmative action, which was implemented via LBJ’s executive order in 1965—combined with years of economic expansion to produce a long period of what I call “racial incorporation,” which substantially elevated the income of many Black people and brought them into previously white spaces. Yes, a lot of affirmative-action efforts stopped at mere tokenism. Even so, many of these “tokens” managed to succeed, and the result is the largest Black middle class in American history.
Over the past 50 years, according to a study by the Pew Research Center, the proportion of Black people who are low-income (less than $52,000 a year for a household of three) has fallen seven points, from 48 to 41 percent. The proportion who are middle-income ($52,000 to $156,000 a year) has risen by one point, to 47 percent. The proportion who are high-income (more than $156,000 a year) has risen the most dramatically, from 5 to 12 percent. Overall, Black poverty remains egregiously disproportionate to that of white and Asian Americans. But fewer Black Americans are poor than 50 years ago, and more than twice as many are rich. Substantial numbers now attend the best schools, pursue professions of their choosing, and occupy positions of power and prestige. Affirmative action worked.
But that very success has inflamed the inevitable white backlash. Notably, the only racial group more likely to be low-income now than 50 years ago is whites—and the only group less likely to be low-income is Blacks.
For some white people displaced from their jobs by globalization and deindustrialization, the successful Black person with a good job is the embodiment of what’s wrong with America. The spectacle of Black doctors, CEOs, and college professors “out of their place” creates an uncomfortable dissonance, which white people deal with by mentally relegating successful Black people to the ghetto. That Black man who drives a new Lexus and sends his children to private school—he must be a drug kingpin, right?
In predominantly white professional spaces, this racial anxiety appears in subtler ways. Black people are all too familiar with a particular kind of interaction, in the guise of a casual watercooler conversation, the gist of which is a sort of interrogation: “Where did you come from?”; “How did you get here?”; and “Are you qualified to be here?” (The presumptive answer to the last question is clearly no; Black skin, evoking for white people the iconic ghetto, confers an automatic deficit of credibility.)
Black newcomers must signal quickly and clearly that they belong. Sometimes this requires something as simple as showing a company ID that white people are not asked for. Other times, a more elaborate dance is required, a performance in which the worker must demonstrate their propriety, their distance from the ghetto. This can involve dressing more formally than the job requires, speaking in a self-consciously educated way, and evincing a placid demeanor, especially in moments of disagreement.
As part of my ethnographic research, I once embedded in a major financial-services corporation in Philadelphia, where I spent six months observing and interviewing workers. One Black employee I spoke with, a senior vice president, said that people of color who wanted to climb the management ladder must wear the right “uniform” and work hard to perform respectability. “They’re never going to envision you as being a white male,” he told me, “but if you can dress the same and look a certain way and drive a conservative car and whatever else, they’ll say, ‘This guy has a similar attitude, similar values [to we white people]. He’s a team player.’ If you don’t dress with the uniform, obviously you’re on the wrong team.”
This need to constantly perform respectability for white people is a psychological drain, leaving Black people spent and demoralized. They typically keep this demoralization hidden from their white co-workers because they feel that they need to show they are not whiners. Having to pay a “Black tax” as they move through white areas deepens this demoralization. This tax is levied on people of color in nice restaurants and other public places, or simply while driving, when the fear of a lethal encounter with the police must always be in mind. The existential danger this kind of encounter poses is what necessitates “The Talk” that Black parents—fearful every time their kids go out the door that they might not come back alive—give to their children. The psychological effects of all of this accumulate gradually, sapping the spirit and engendering cynicism.
Even the most exalted members of the Black elite must live in two worlds. They understand the white elite’s mores and values, and embody them to a substantial extent—but they typically remain keenly conscious of their Blackness. They socialize with both white and Black people of their own professional standing, but also members of the Black middle and working classes with whom they feel more kinship, meeting them at the barbershop, in church, or at gatherings of long-standing friendship groups. The two worlds seldom overlap. This calls to mind W. E. B. Du Bois’ “double consciousness”—a term he used for the first time in this publication, in 1897—referring to the dual cultural mindsets that successful African Americans must simultaneously inhabit.
For middle-class Black people, a certain fluidity—abetted by family connections—enables them to feel a connection with those at the lower reaches of society. But that connection comes with a risk of contagion; they fear that, meritocratic status notwithstanding, they may be dragged down by their association with the hood.
When I worked at the University of Pennsylvania, some friends of mine and I mentored at-risk youth in West Philadelphia.
One of these kids, Kevin Robinson, who goes by KAYR (pronounced “K.R.”), grew up with six siblings in a single-parent household on public assistance. Two of his sisters got pregnant as teenagers, and for a while the whole family was homeless. But he did well in high school and was accepted to Bowdoin College, where he was one of five African Americans in a class of 440. He was then accepted to Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, where he was one of 10 or so African Americans in an M.B.A. class of roughly 180. He got into the analyst-training program at Goldman Sachs, where his cohort of 300 had five African Americans. And from there he ended up at a hedge fund, where he was the lone Black employee.
What’s striking about Robinson’s accomplishments is not just the steepness of his rise or the scantness of Black peers as he climbed, but the extent of cultural assimilation he felt he needed to achieve in order to fit in. He trimmed his Afro. He did a pre-college program before starting Bowdoin, where he had sushi for the first time and learned how to play tennis and golf. “Let me look at how these people live; let me see how they operate,” he recalls saying to himself. He decided to start reading The New Yorker and Time magazine, as they did, and to watch 60 Minutes. “I wanted people to see me more as their peer versus … someone from the hood. I wanted them to see me as, like, ‘Hey, look, he’s just another middle-class Black kid.’ ” When he was about to start at Goldman Sachs, a Latina woman who was mentoring him there told him not to wear a silver watch or prominent jewelry: “ ‘KAYR, go get a Timex with a black leather band. Keep it very simple … Fit in.’ ” My friends and I had given him similar advice earlier on.
All of this worked; he thrived professionally. Yet even as he occupied elite precincts of wealth and achievement, he was continually getting pulled back to support family in the ghetto, where he felt the need to code-switch, speaking and eating the ways his family did so as not to insult them.
The year he entered Bowdoin, one of his younger brothers was sent to prison for attempted murder, and a sister who had four children was shot in the face and died. Over the years he would pay for school supplies for his nieces and nephews, and for multiple family funerals—all while keeping his family background a secret from his professional colleagues. Even so, he would get subjected to the standard indignities—being asked to show ID when his white peers were not; enduring the (sometimes obliviously) racist comments from colleagues (“You don’t act like a regular Black”). He would report egregious offenses to HR but would usually just let things go, for fear that developing a reputation as a “race guy” would restrict his professional advancement.
Robinson’s is a remarkable success story. He is 40 now; he owns a property-management company and is a multimillionaire. But his experience makes clear that no matter what professional or financial heights you ascend to, if you are Black, you can never escape the iconic ghetto, and sometimes not even the actual one.
The most egregious intrusion of a Black person into white space was the election (and reelection) of Barack Obama as president. A Black man in the White House! For some white people, this was intolerable. Birthers, led by Donald Trump, said he was ineligible for the presidency, claiming falsely that he had been born in Kenya. The white backlash intensified; Republicans opposed Obama with more than the standard amount of partisan vigor. In 2013, at the beginning of Obama’s second term, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, which had protected the franchise for 50 years. Encouraged by this opening, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Texas moved forward with voter-suppression laws, setting a course that other states are now following. And this year, the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action in college admissions. I want to tell a story that illustrates the social gains this puts at risk.
Many years ago, when I was a professor at Penn, my father came to visit me. Walking around campus, we bumped into various colleagues and students of mine, most of them white, who greeted us warmly. He watched me interact with my secretary and other department administrators. Afterward, Dad and I went back to my house to drink beer and listen to Muddy Waters.
“So you’re teaching at that white school?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“You work with white people. And you teach white students.”
“Yeah, but they actually come in all colors,” I responded. I got his point, though.
“Well, let me ask you one thing,” he said, furrowing his brow.
“What’s that, Dad?”
“Do they respect you?”
After thinking about his question a bit, I said, “Well, some do. And some don’t. But you know, Dad, it is hard to tell which is which sometimes.”
“Oh, I see,” he said.
He didn’t disbelieve me; it was just that what he’d witnessed on campus was at odds with his experience of the typical Black-white interaction, where the subordinate status of the Black person was automatically assumed by the white one. Growing up in the South, my dad understood that white people simply did not respect Black people. Observing the respectful treatment I received from my students and colleagues, my father had a hard time believing his own eyes. Could race relations have changed so much, so fast?
They had—in large part because of what affirmative action, and the general processes of racial incorporation and Black economic improvement, had wrought. In the 1960s, the only Black people at the financial-services firm I studied would have been janitors, night watchmen, elevator operators, or secretaries; 30 years later, affirmative action had helped populate the firm with Black executives. Each beneficiary of affirmative action, each member of the growing Black middle class, helped normalize the presence of Black people in professional and other historically white spaces. All of this diminished, in some incremental way, the power of the symbolic ghetto to hold back people of color.
Too many people forget, if ever they knew it, what a profound cultural shift affirmative action effected. And they overlook affirmative action’s crucial role in forestalling social unrest.
Some years ago, I was invited to the College of the Atlantic, a small school in Maine, to give the commencement address. As I stood at the sink in the men’s room before the event, checking the mirror to make sure all my academic regalia was properly arrayed, an older white man came up to me and said, with no preamble, “What do you think of affirmative action?”
“I think it’s a form of reparations,” I said.
“Well, I think they need to be educated first,” he said, and then walked out.
I was so provoked by this that I scrambled back to my hotel room and rewrote my speech. I’d already been planning to talk about the benefits of affirmative action, but I sharpened and expanded my case, explaining that it not only had lifted many Black people out of the ghetto, but had been a weapon in the Cold War, when unaligned countries and former colonies were trying to decide which superpower to follow. Back then, Democrats and some Republicans were united in believing that affirmative action, by demonstrating the country’s commitment to racial justice and equality, helped project American greatness to the world.
Beyond that, I said to this almost entirely white audience, affirmative action had helped keep the racial unrest of the ’60s from flaring up again. When the kin—the mothers, fathers, cousins, nephews, sons, daughters, baby mamas, uncles, aunts—of ghetto residents secure middle-class livelihoods, those ghetto relatives hear about it. This gives the young people who live there a modicum of hope that they might do the same. Hope takes the edge off distress and desperation; it lessens the incentives for people to loot and burn. What opponents of affirmative action fail to understand is that without a ladder of upward mobility for Black Americans, and a general sense that justice will prevail, a powerful nurturer of social concord gets lost.
Yes, continuing to expand the Black professional and middle classes will lead to more instances of “the dance,” and the loaded interrogations, and the other awkward moments and indignities that people of color experience in white spaces. But the greater the number of affluent, successful Black people in such places, the faster this awkwardness will diminish, and the less power the recurrent waves of white reaction will have to set people of color back. I would like to believe that future generations of Black Americans will someday find themselves as pleasantly surprised as my dad once was by the new levels of racial respect and equality they discover.
This article appears in the November 2023 print edition with the headline “Black Success, White Backlash.”
The commercial success of the country star Jason Aldean’s ode to small-town vigilantism helps explain the persistence of Donald Trump’s grip on red America.
Aldean’s combative new song, “Try That in a Small Town,” offers a musical riff on the same core message that Trump has articulated since his entry into politics: that America as conservatives understand it is under such extraordinary assault from the multicultural, urbanized modern left that any means necessary is justified to repel the threat.
In Aldean’s lyrics and the video he made of his song, those extraordinary means revolve around threats of vigilante force to hold the line against what he portrays as crime and chaos overrunning big cities. In Trump’s political message, those means are his systematic shattering of national norms and potentially laws in order to “make America great again.”
Like Trump, Aldean draws on the pervasive anxiety among Republican base voters that their values are being marginalized in a changing America of multiplying cultural and racial diversity. Each man sends the message that extreme measures, even extending to violence, are required to prevent that displacement.
“Even for down-home mainstream conservative voters … this idea that we have to have a cultural counterrevolution has taken hold,” Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, told me. “The fact that country music is a channel for that isn’t at all surprising.”
Aldean’s belligerent ballad, whose downloads increased more than tenfold after critics denounced it, follows a tradition of country songs pushing back against challenges to America’s status quo. That resistance was expressed in such earlier landmarks as Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.,” a staple at Republican rallies since its 1984 release. Aldean even more directly channels Merle Haggard’s 1970 country smash, which warned that those opposing the Vietnam War and “runnin’ down my country” would see, as the title proclaimed, “the fightin’ side of me.” (Earlier, Haggard expressed similar ideas in his 1969 hit, Okie From Muskogee, which celebrated small-town America, where “we don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street.”)
Haggard’s songs (to his later ambivalence) became anthems for conservatives during Richard Nixon’s presidency, as did Greenwood’s during Ronald Reagan’s. That timing was no coincidence: In both periods, those leaders defined the GOP largely in opposition to social changes roiling the country. This is another such moment: Trump is centering his appeal on portraying himself as the last line of defense between his supporters and an array of shadowy forces—including “globalist elites,” the “deep state,” and violent urban minorities and undocumented immigrants—that allegedly threaten them.
Aldean, though a staunch Trump supporter, is a performer, not a politician; his song expresses an attitude, not a program. Yet both Aldean and Trump are tapping the widespread belief among conservative white Christians, especially those in the small towns Aldean mythologizes, that they are the real victims of bias in a society inexorably growing more diverse, secular, and urban.
In various national polls since Trump’s first election, in 2016, nine in 10 Republicans have said that Christianity in the U.S. is under assault; as many as three-fourths have agreed that bias against white people is now as big a problem as discrimination against minorities; and about seven in 10 have agreed that society punishes men just for acting like men and that white men are now the group most discriminated against in American society.
The belief that Trump shares those concerns, and is committed to addressing them, has always keyed his connection to the Republican electorate. It has led GOP voters to rally around him each time he has done or said something seemingly indefensible—a process that now appears to be repeating even with the January 6 insurrection.
In a national survey released yesterday by Bright Line Watch—a collaborative of political scientists studying threats to American democracy—60 percent of Republicans (compared with only one-third of independents and one-sixth of Democrats) described the January 6 riot as legitimate political protest. Only a little more than one in 10 Republicans said that Trump committed a crime in his actions on January 6 or during his broader campaign to overturn the 2020 presidential election result.
The revisionist whitewashing of January 6 among conservatives helps explain why Aldean, without any apparent sense of contradiction or irony, can center his song on violent fantasies of “good ol’ boys, raised up right” delivering punishment to people who “cuss out a cop” or “stomp on the flag.” Trump supporters, many of whom would likely fit Aldean’s description of “good ol’ boys,” did precisely those things when they stormed the Capitol in 2021. (A January 6 rioter from Arkansas, for instance, was sentenced this week to 52 months in prison for assaulting a cop with a flag.) Yet Aldean pairs those lyrics with images not of the insurrection but of shadowy protesters rampaging through city streets.
By ignoring the January 6 attack while stressing the left-wing violence that sometimes erupted alongside the massive racial-justice protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd, Aldean, like Trump, is making a clear statement about whom he believes the law is meant to protect and whom it is designed to suppress. The video visually underscores that message because it was filmed outside a Tennessee courthouse where a young Black man was lynched in 1927. Aldean has said he was unaware of the connection, and he’s denied any racist intent in the song. But as the Vanderbilt University historian Nicole Hemmer wrote for CNN.com last week, “Whether he admits it or not, both Aldean’s song and the courthouse where a teen boy was murdered serve as a reminder that historically, appeals to so-called law and order often rely just as much on White vigilantism as they do on formal legal procedures.”
Aldean’s song, above all, captures the sense of siege solidifying on the right. It reflects in popular culture the same militancy in the GOP base that has encouraged Republican leaders across the country to adopt more aggressive tactics against Democrats and liberal interests on virtually every front since Trump’s defeat in 2020.
A Republican legislative majority in Tennessee, for instance, expelled two young Black Democratic state representatives, and a GOP majority in Montana censured a transgender Democratic state representative and barred her from the floor. Republican-controlled states are advancing incendiary policies that might have been considered unimaginable even a few years ago, like the program by the Texas state government to deter migrants by installing razor wire along the border and floating buoys in the Rio Grande. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy raised the possibility of impeaching Joe Biden. The boycott of Bud Light for simply partnering on a promotional project with a transgender influencer represents another front in this broad counterrevolution on the right. In his campaign, Trump is promising a further escalation: He says if reelected, he will mobilize federal power in unprecedented ways to deliver what he has called “retribution” for conservatives against blue targets, for instance, by sending the National Guard into Democratic-run cities to fight crime, pursuing a massive deportation program of undocumented immigrants, and openly deploying the Justice Department against his political opponents.
Brown, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, pointed out that even as Republicans at both the state and national levels push this bristling agenda, they view themselves not as launching a culture war but as responding to one waged against them by liberals in the media, academia, big corporations, and advocacy groups. The dominant view among Republicans, he said, is that “we’re trying to run a defensive action here. We are not aggressing; we are being aggressed upon.”
That fear of being displaced in an evolving America has become the most powerful force energizing the GOP electorate—what I’ve called “the coalition of restoration.” From the start of his political career, Trump has targeted that feeling with his promise to “make America great again.” Aldean likewise looks back to find his vision of America’s future, defending his song at one concert as an expression of his desire to see America “restored to what it once was, before all this bullshit started happening to us.”
As Brown noted, the 2024 GOP presidential race has become a competition over who is most committed to fighting the left to excavate that lost America. Aldean’s song and video help explain why. He has written a battle march for the deepening cold war between the nation’s diverging red and blue blocs. In his telling, like Trump’s, traditionally conservative white Americans are being menaced by social forces that would erase their way of life. For blue America, the process Aldean is describing represents a long-overdue renegotiation as previously marginalized groups such as racial minorities and the LGBTQ community demand more influence and inclusion. In red America, he’s describing an existential threat that demands unconditional resistance.
Most Republicans, polls show, are responding to that threat by uniting again behind Trump in the 2024 nomination race, despite the credible criminal charges accumulating against him. But the real message of “Try That in a Small Town” is that whatever happens to Trump personally, most voters in the Republican coalition are virtually certain to continue demanding leaders who are, like Aldean’s “good ol’ boys raised up right,” itching for a fight against all that they believe endangers their world.
Most likely, the person’s skin color will change. An ashy tone might creep in, or they could turn a shade of blue. If too much fluid pools in their mouth or lungs and mixes with air, foam will appear at their lips. There might be a sound, too—that of light snoring. These are some of the main symptoms of an overdose. Although the drug causing the reaction might be different, the symptoms look the same. “An overdose is an overdose,” Soma Snakeoil, a co-founder of the Sidewalk Project, a harm-reduction organization, told me.
But although overdose symptoms have not shifted, the ability to treat it has, most notably because of the availability of naloxone, the medication that can quickly reverse an overdose and that was approved in late March to be sold over the counter, as Narcan. This move happened at least in part because in the past few decades, the entire context of an overdose in the United States has changed. The U.S. has entered its fourth wave of the opioid crisis, and the death toll is different now: Overdoses have been steadily increasing for many years, but this wave, also known as the “era of overdoses,” has seen the highest number of fatal overdoses yet. “I think what makes this current crisis so unique is the volume” of overdoses, John Pamplin II, an epidemiologist at Columbia’s school of public health, told me. And that is happening because the drugs have changed too. “It’s not necessarily that more people are using drugs,” Emilie Bruzelius, an epidemiology researcher at Columbia’s school of public health, told me. “The opioids that people are using now are incredibly strong, and they’re more likely to cause an overdose.”
The result is that any person using drugs has a higher chance of overdosing than ever before. “There’s no population segment that is insulated,” Bruzelius said. “It’s really affecting everybody now.”
The origins of the opioid crisis can be traced back to 1999. As doctors prescribed opioids more and more—OxyContin prescriptions for non-cancer-related pain alone increased from about 670,000 in 1997 to 6.2 million in 2002—related deaths rose swiftly. In that same period, the number of deaths increased almost 30 percent, to nearly 9,000. This first wave largely affected white people: By 2010, the opioid mortality rate was more than two times higher for white people than Black people.
That year, a second wave began, in which overdose deaths involving heroin grew most dramatically. By 2015, heroin overdose deaths surpassed the number of deaths attributable to opioid pills. This time, the total opioid mortality rate grew for both Black and white populations; death rates increased by an average of at least 30 percent a year beginning in 2010, and accelerated even faster after 2013. In this same period, illicitly manufactured fentanyl—a synthetic opioid approved for pain relief—was being slipped into heroin, counterfeit pills, cocaine, and other drugs. Many of the people taking these drugs did not realize that they were taking fentanyl at all, leading to a third wave of overdoses. Mortality skyrocketed. In 2017, synthetic opioids were responsible for more than 28,000 deaths, while opioid-pill and heroin overdose deaths had leveled off at about 15,000. The demographics of the crisis continued to shift too, and in 2020, the fastest increases in death rates was experienced by Black and Indigenous Americans, surpassing the death rate of white Americans, Pamplin told me.
The new, fourth wave is characterized by more mixing of different drugs. “People are overdosing from cocaine and fentanyl or methamphetamines and fentanyl or methamphetamines and fentanyl and heroin,” Bruzelius told me. Recently, xylazine—a non-opiate sedative also known as “tranq”—has infiltrated the fentanyl supply, resulting in what the DEA has deemed the deadliest threat yet.
This is the context in which the FDA approved Narcan to be sold over the counter. Narcan packages naloxone as a nasal spray, and the FDA argued that its approval could “help improve access to naloxone, increase the number of locations where it’s available, and help reduce overdose deaths throughout the country.” By binding to opioid receptors, naloxone blocks the effects of opiates in the system. This reverses the impact of an overdose, restoring normal breathing.
But drug policies in America tend to swing, pendulum-like, from one extreme to the other, David Courtwright, a historian at the University of North Florida, told me: A response focused on care for drug users might give way to a more punitive policy. Already, some critics of Narcan’s availability have pushed to restrict its use on the grounds that an effective overdose treatment could encourage drug use—even though there’s “just no kind of scientific or empirical backing” for those arguments, Bruzelius said. Here, the simplest logic holds: If overdoses are affecting every community in America, better to have an accessible treatment everywhere.
Senator Raphael Warnock’s win in yesterday’s Georgia Senate runoff capped a commanding show of strength by Democrats in the states that decided the 2020 race for the White House—and will likely pick the winner again in 2024.
With Warnock’s victory over Republican Herschel Walker, Democrats have defeated every GOP Senate and gubernatorial candidate endorsed by Donald Trump this year in the five states that flipped from supporting him in 2016 to backing Joe Biden in 2020: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona.
Coming even amid widespread discontent over the economy, this year’s Democratic sweep against the Trump-backed candidates underscores the continuing resistance to the former president’s influence. In particular, Warnock’s decisive margins in Atlanta and its suburbs yesterday extended the Democratic dominance of white-collar (and usually racially diverse) metropolitan areas, as varied as the suburbs of Detroit and Philadelphia and the booming hot spots of Phoenix and Madison.
“The huge question after the election of 2020 was whether the suburbs would snap back to the GOP column after Trump was no longer on the ballot,” Ben Wikler, the Democratic Party chair in Wisconsin, told me. “What we saw in 2022 was suburbs continuing to trend toward Democrats.”
Apart from perhaps Michigan, none of these states appears entirely out of reach for the GOP in 2024. Whit Ayres, a longtime GOP pollster, told me that although suburban voters recoiled against “delusional candidates” who “parroted” Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, Republicans “could very well come back and win the suburbs” with “non-delusional candidates.”
Of the five pivotal states from the last presidential election, Republicans this year actually performed best in Georgia, where the party swept the other statewide offices. Even Walker remained stubbornly close to Warnock in the final results, despite an avalanche of damaging personal revelations and gaffes. Across these states, Republican dominance in rural areas that the GOP consolidated under Trump continued through this year’s midterm and allowed several of his endorsed candidates, like Walker, to remain competitive despite big deficits in the largest population centers.
But in the end, the Democratic strength in the largest metropolitan areas proved insurmountable for the seven Trump-backed candidates in governor or Senate races across these five states. The only Republicans who won such contests in these states were Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who sharpened an image of independence by standing up to Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss in the state, and Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, who echoes many of Trump’s themes but has an established political identity apart from him. (Johnson barely held off his Democratic challenger, Mandela Barnes.)
“You have a large percentage of Americans who are wary of MAGA and have now voted against MAGA three times,” Simon Rosenberg, the president of NDN, a Democratic research and advocacy group, told me. Rosenberg was the most forceful public skeptic of the “red wave” theory. “They are now going to have to take all those people and turn them into Republican voters in 2024. It’s certainly not impossible, but I’d much rather be us than them going into the 2024 election”
In many ways, yesterday’s Georgia result underscored the partisan chasm that has left the country closely divided for at least the past decade. Walker was, by any objective measure, among the weakest general-election candidates for a major office either party has produced in modern memory. Tarred by an endless procession of scandals, prone to nonsensical statements on the campaign trail (as when he mused on the relative merits of vampires and werewolves), and unwilling or unable to articulate positions on many major issues, he nonetheless drew unflagging support from national Republican leaders and held the large majority of the state’s Republican votes.
That Walker came as close as he did to winning underscores the growing parliamentary nature of House and Senate elections, in which fewer voters are casting their ballots based on personal assessments of the two candidates and more are deciding based on which party they want to control the national agenda.
Yet all of that still left Walker, like the other Trump-backed candidates, short in the face of solid margins for Democrats in and around these states’ major population centers. Exit polls showed Democrats posting big advantages among all the demographic groups that tend to congregate in large metropolitan areas: young people, people of color, college-educated voters, secular voters, and LGBTQ adults.
Thriving Cobb and Gwinnett Counties outside Atlanta, with a combined population of 1.7 million people, encapsulate the suburban evolution that has tilted the balance of power. For years, these counties were Republican redoubts: George W. Bush won them by roughly a combined 150,000 votes in the 2004 presidential race, and even as late as the hard-fought 2014 Georgia Senate race, the winning GOP nominee, David Perdue, carried each of them by double-digit margins.
But both counties have grown more diverse. White people now make up only about three-fifths of the population in Cobb and a little more than half in Gwinnett, and nearly half of Cobb adults hold at least a four-year college degree. This has alienated them from a GOP that Trump has reshaped to reflect the cultural priorities and grievances of culturally conservative white voters, particularly those without college degrees or who live outside urban areas. Hillary Clinton narrowly carried both counties in 2016, Biden won just under 60 percent of the vote in each in 2020, and Warnock in November roughly matched Biden’s performance. As of the latest count, Warnock yesterday again carried about three-fifths of the vote in both Cobb and Gwinnett. He also ran up big margins in the suburban counties just south of Atlanta.
The same patterns were evident in the large white-collar suburbs of the other states that Republicans must win back to recapture the White House in 2024. In Michigan, Governor Gretchen Whitmer, in crushing her Trump-backed opponent, Tudor Dixon, won a higher share of the vote in Oakland and Kent Counties than she managed in 2018 or than Biden did in 2020. In Pennsylvania, Senator-elect John Fetterman matched Biden in exceeding three-fifths of the vote in both Delaware and Montgomery Counties, outside Philadelphia. In Arizona, Senator Mark Kelly carried Maricopa County, centered on Phoenix, by almost 100,000 votes—more than doubling Biden’s margin in 2020, when he became the first Democratic presidential nominee to win the county since Harry Truman in 1948. In Wisconsin, Governor Tony Evers won booming Dane County, centered on Madison, by 25,000 more votes than he had in 2018, and an analysis of the statewide results showed him improving the most over his first election in the counties with the highest levels of educational attainment.
After this year’s defeats, many analysts in both parties are dubious that Trump can recapture enough (and maybe any) of these five states in 2024. The bigger question facing Republicans is whether another candidate, one who does not have Trump’s personal baggage but who shares most of his culture-war views, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, could perform much better.
Republicans are generally optimistic that DeSantis could regain ground Trump has lost among suburban voters who leaned Republican not too long ago. They point to Georgia Republican Governor Kemp performing better than Walker did in the Atlanta suburbs as evidence that a more mainstream Republican can slice the Democratic advantage in such places. DeSantis, Ayres said, “has got a lot of things he can sell to suburban Republican voters that Trump just can’t sell.”
Almost universally, Democrats believe that Republicans are underestimating how hard it will be to reel back in college-educated suburban voters who have now mobilized against Trump’s vision for America in three consecutive elections, especially in these battleground states. Although DeSantis is less belligerent than Trump, and not associated with the violence and subversion of the January 6 insurrection, so far he has emphasized a similar style of politics focused on conservative grievance against “woke” cultural liberalism. “Ron DeSantis is every bit as MAGA as Donald Trump,” Rosenberg said. “This idea that he is some more moderate version of Trump is just farcical.”
The fact that even a candidate as weak as Walker remained as competitive as he did underscores how difficult it may be for either side to establish a comfortable advantage in these states in 2024. (The exceptions could be Michigan, which even many Republicans agree looks daunting for them, and maybe Pennsylvania, which also tilted blue last month.)
These states provided Democrats with their own warning signs this year. Exit polls last month showed that most voters in these states disapproved of Biden’s job performance and that big majorities in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the states where the question was asked, did not want him to run again. Democrats also faced a worrying trend of lagging Black turnout in many urban centers this year, though Black voters came out in big numbers in Georgia’s early voting, and activists in the state are confident they will remain highly engaged through 2024. “Our goal was to build a culture of voting, and that’s what we have done in Georgia over the past five years,” Amari Fennoy, the state coordinator for the NAACP Georgia State Conference, told me.
Yet the consistency of the results this year, both demographically and geographically, signal that the re-sorting of the parties in the Trump era has left Democrats with a narrow, but potentially durable, advantage in these five crucial states. That doesn’t mean Democrats are guaranteed to win them in the 2024 presidential race, but it does suggest an important takeaway from the 2022 election that finally ended last night: As long as voters still perceive Republicans to be operating in Trump’s shadow (much less if they again nominate Trump himself), Democrats will begin with an advantage in the states most likely to pick the next president.
“I think that the coalition that turned out to stop Trump is going to be the starting point for the next presidential race,” Wikler said. “There are new threats and new opportunities, but this was not a one-off coalition that came together for a special occasion and went home.” Georgia, again, made that very clear last night.
The role of extremist white nationalists in the GOP may be approaching an inflection point.
The backlash against former President Donald Trump’s meeting with Nick Fuentes, an avowed racist, anti-Semite, and Christian nationalist, has compelled more Republican officeholders than at any point since the Charlottesville riot in 2017 to publicly condemn those extremist views.
Yet few GOP officials have criticized the former president personally—much less declared that Trump’s meeting with Fuentes and Ye, the rapper (formerly known as Kanye West) who has become a geyser of anti-Semitic bile, renders him unfit to serve as president again.
Even this distancing from Fuentes (if not Trump) comes as House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy, the putative next speaker, is poised to restore prominent committee assignments for Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, two House Republicans who have publicly associated with Fuentes. It also comes as Republican officials, including McCarthy and Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, are locking arms in support of Elon Musk’s push to allow extremist voices more access to Twitter.
Although it took days to develop, some believe the widespread Republican criticism of Trump’s meeting could signal a new determination to restore the barriers between mainstream conservatism and far-right Christian and white nationalism that eroded during the Trump era.
Elizabeth Neumann, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security under Trump who focused on domestic extremism, told me she believes the backlash—however belated—combined with the GOP’s disappointing performance in last month’s midterm elections, could mark a turning point. “I think we are going to be playing footsie with fascism and authoritarianism and extremism for a while,” because it helped Trump win the presidency in 2016 and sustain his support thereafter, she said. But, she added, after several years of feeling “very pessimistic” about the prospect of weakening those movements, “this is the first time I’ve felt there might be some light at the end of the tunnel.”
Yet others remain unconvinced that the GOP is ready to fundamentally break with Trump or ostracize the coalition’s overtly racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic white supremacists and Christian nationalists. “I think what we are looking at is the entrenchment of extremism, and that’s what is so worrisome,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, told me.
If anything, extremist groups could gain momentum in the coming months. Musk’s proposed mass amnesty for banned Twitter accounts would provide “a tremendous amount of oxygen to extremists on the radical right” and allow those groups to push back much harder against any Republican elected officials resisting their presence in the party, Michael Edison Hayden of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project told me. If Musk opens the door to extremist organizing on Twitter, Hayden said, the white-nationalist presence in the GOP coalition will become “potentially irreversible in the short term.”
Trump famously declared that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the neo-Nazi riot against the removal of confederate monuments in Charlottesville, Virginia, during his first year in office. Asked to denounce the extremist Proud Boys during one 2020 presidential debate, Trump instead told them to “stand back and stand by.” After the January 6 insurrection, in which white-supremacist groups played a central role, the overwhelming majority of House and Senate Republicans voted against impeaching or convicting Trump for spurring the violence. More recently, hardly any Republicans have raised objections to Trump repeatedly floating the possibility of providing mass pardons (and even government apologies) to the insurrectionists if he wins the presidency again in 2024.
Other officials inside the GOP coalition have pushed through the boundaries Trump has weakened. Gosar and Greene both appeared at Fuentes’s America First Political Action Conference. So did Republican Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers, who called the audience at one of the events “patriot,” and declared, “We need to build more gallows. If we try some of these high-level criminals, convict them, and use a newly built set of gallows, it’ll make an example of these traitors who have betrayed our country.”
The Republican-controlled Arizona State Senate censured Rogers this year for threatening her colleagues, but she was nevertheless fulsomely embraced by Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for Arizona governor this year. Other prominent GOP candidates, including Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, also associated with white and Christian nationalists or directly echoed themes from those movements this year.
In a similar vein, in the days before the election, McCarthy made clear that he would restore committee assignments to Greene and Gosar, whom the Democratic majority had stripped of such roles for their association with extremists and embrace of violent imagery. McCarthy also promised Greene and other hardline conservatives that he would authorize an investigation into the government’s prosecution and treatment of the January 6 insurrectionists, many of whom are extremists tied to white and Christian nationalism.
“After Trump’s rise, these barriers became softer and softer, and they really broke down in the aftermath of January 6 altogether,” Hayden said. “And now you have this kind of opening between the fringe world and the mainstream world in a way that is very difficult to separate.”
Musk has quickly become a major new factor in further razing those barriers between the far right and the conservative mainstream, restoring the Twitter accounts of figures banned for misinformation, promotion of violence, or intimidation—including Trump and Greene. Hayden said the Southern Poverty Law Center’s research shows that some previously banned white nationalists have already been restored to the site.
In a torrent of combative posts, Musk wrapped himself in the mantle of “free speech” to justify restoring accounts previously banned for violating the site’s standards. And he’s accused individuals and institutions that argue for drawing a line against extremist rhetoric of threatening the core American value of free expression. In Musk’s formulation, even the most noxious forms of hate speech can be justified as free speech, and any effort to combat divisive rhetoric is an un-American attempt at censorship or intimidation by the “woke” mob. “This is a battle for the future of civilization,” Musk insisted in one tweet. “If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead.” That’s quite a minuet: According to Musk’s logic, it’s a form of “tyranny” to oppose his amplification of authoritarian, racist, and neo-Nazi views antithetical to democracy.
The rush of GOP leaders such as McCarthy, DeSantis, and incoming House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan to support Musk as he works to restore more banned accounts shows how hard it will be for the GOP to completely divorce itself from white and Christian nationalism. So does McCarthy’s pledge to restore committee assignments to Greene and Gosar, as well as the reluctance of almost all GOP officials to directly criticize Trump.
But a much larger slice of Republican partisans express views that might be called white-nationalist adjacent. In various polls, preponderant majorities of GOP voters have said that discrimination against white people is now as big a problem as bias against minorities, that Christianity in the U.S. is under assault, and that the growing number of immigrants threatens American values and traditions. About half of Republicans have expressed agreement in other polls with tenets of white nationalism, including the racist “replacement theory” that elites are importing immigrants to undermine the political power of native-born white people, the core Christian-nationalist belief that “God intended America to be a new promised land,” and the assertion that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.”
Only a minuscule percentage of those Republican partisans might contemplate violence or join extremist organizations, Neumann and other experts point out. But the receptivity of so many Republican voters to arguments, even if less virulent, that overlap with those championed by white- and Christian-nationalist organizations may be a crucial reason for party leaders’ reluctance to confront Trump and others, like Greene, who have associated with such groups. Given the extent of such views inside the GOP coalition, Neumann said, Republicans feel no political incentive to reject the far right “other than out of the goodness of their heart and moral clarity. And apparently that wasn’t enough.”
Neumann, now the chief strategy officer of Moonshot, a company that combats online extremism, worries that organized far-right violence could still erupt if Trump ever faces a trial as a result of the various investigations targeting him. But she sees the possibility that the visibility and influence of the extreme right inside the GOP peaked with this fall’s converging events, especially the party’s disappointing election results. “I really do think this is, like, a 10-, 20-year process,” she told me, but “I have a slight hope that this sticks and that we move past it.”
Robert P. Jones, the president and founder of the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute and the author of White Too Long, a history of Christian nationalism, is less optimistic. He believes Christian-nationalist beliefs are spreading more widely among Trump’s followers because they believe “they are at a kind of ‘last stand’ moment” for their vision of a white-Christian-dominated America. “The unwillingness of party leaders, time and time again, to denounce Trump for giving these voices support and cover has allowed them to move into the center of the GOP today,” Jones wrote to me in an email. “I would be surprised if we didn’t see increasing numbers of GOP party leaders openly associating with these voices in the future, particularly leading up to the 2024 presidential election.”
Greenblatt is also less sanguine. The Anti-Defamation League tracked more than 2,700 anti-Semitic incidents in 2021—the highest annual total it has ever recorded and triple the number of incidents it documented as recently as 2015, the last year before Trump emerged as the GOP’s leading man. Furthermore, Greenblatt is unconvinced that the current Republican distancing from Trump will last any longer than it did in earlier episodes, such as Charlottesville. And he worries that Musk is on course to radically increase the volume of racist and anti-Semitic hate speech on Twitter, which was already a problem before Musk bought the company.
On all of these fronts, Greenblatt sees what he calls “the normalization of extremism” hardening in ways that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. “Society itself is at risk if we don’t finally move the extremists … out of the mainstream, back to the margins where they belong,” he told me. “I think we don’t realize the peril that we run, the risk that’s upon us, if we don’t get this right.”
