The Most Satisfying Moment of the Harris-Trump Debate

 

It was about as close to perfect as Kamala Harris has come in a debate, and it was as close to self-parody as Donald Trump—who doesn’t comprehend parody—can manage. Harris repeatedly laid out the bait, and Trump couldn’t resist taking it, spiraling through rabbit warrens of gibberish about his crowd sizes and the Central Park Five and pet-eating migrants, all of which served to distract from whatever canned answers he had prepared. That mostly came later; first, before almost anything and after a slightly nervous start from Harris, whatever momentum Trump may have achieved was lost immediately when he attempted to answer an inevitable question about women and abortion. It ended there.

For over two years—since Roe v. Wade was reversed by a Supreme Court more interested in their feelings than your health care—women have waited for one crisp, cogent answer to the simple question: Who decides what happens to your body when you are pregnant? On Tuesday, Harris offered it flawlessly. It was a long time coming.

Indeed, one reason it felt like such a specific relief is because in the infamous June debate, President Joe Biden coughed up an excruciating rhetorical hairball when questioned about the fall of Roe: “I supported Roe v. Wade, which had three trimesters,” he temporized. “The first time is between a woman and a doctor. Second time is between the doctor and an extreme situation. And a third time is between the doctor—I mean, it’d be between the woman and the state.” On this he sort of did get something right—abortion, as constructed in Roe, is a physicians’ rights issue. But it was not a satisfying answer by any means for the women who have been living out the consequences of Dobbs in states around the country.

In Tuesday’s debate, by the third question of the evening, Trump was offered a chance to explain his prior incoherent evasions around which abortions will be deemed lawful and what kinds of abortion bans he would endorse. The moderator, ABC News anchor Linsey Davis, ended the inquiry with the simple question: “Why should women trust you?”

Trump responded as he now unerringly responds to this question: with a pair of lies. The first is the now-familiar lie that Democrats support aborting babies “in the ninth month” and also are in favor of “executing babies” after they are born. Even before allowing Harris to respond, Davis stopped that set of lies cold: “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it is born,” she said, before offering Harris a chance to respond more fully.

Harris was also tasked with responding to Trump’s second lie, which was subtler but stupider. Abortion has nothing to do with women, as he frames it, but with the “legal scholars” who get to decide what women need. Trump intoned his familiar pitch that “for 52 years they’ve been trying to get Roe v. Wade into the states,” and that “every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative, they all wanted this issue to be brought back to the states where the people could vote.” The word “woman” appeared nowhere in his answer, by the way, because in his imaginary construction of the problem, the imaginary “scholars” get to decide for the rest of us. (Well, the scholars and “the genius and heart and strength of six supreme court justices.”) In other words, Trump’s answer to why women should trust him was quite literally that “scholars” and the Supreme Court got to decide—and they sent it to the states to decide. So trust Trump!

Harris’ response highlighted who loses because their bodily autonomy was vaulted over “into the states” after Dobbs:

“In over 20 states there are Trump abortion bans which make it criminal for a doctor or nurse to provide health care. In one state it provides prison for life. Trump abortion bans that make no exception even for rape and incest. Which—understand what that means. A survivor of a crime, a violation to their body, does not have the right to make a decision about what happens to their body next. That is immoral. And one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree: The government, and Donald Trump certainly, should not be telling a woman what to do with her body.”

Then she explained what Trump’s make-believe legal scholars and handpicked Supreme Court zealots never cared to understand:

“You want to talk about, this is what people wanted? Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term, suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the health care providers are afraid they might go to jail, and she’s bleeding out in a car in the parking lot? She didn’t want that. Her husband didn’t want that. A 12 or 13-year-old survivor of incest being forced to carry a pregnancy to term? They don’t want that. Understand in his Project 2025, there would be a national abortion—a monitor that would be monitoring your pregnancies, your miscarriages.”

Asked whether he would veto a national abortion ban, Trump would not answer. Asked why his running mate, J.D. Vance, said he would do so, Trump replied that he and Vance hadn’t discussed it. The vibe was that the matter is not even worthy of discussion between running mates; best left to the “scholars” and the “courageous” Supreme Court.

Harris’ rejoinder was to provide a still life in American women, post-Dobbs—a snapshot of the people whose lives have been disrupted and decimated by the former president and his handpicked Supreme Court justices who genuinely never cared about their dignity or autonomy:

“Nowhere in America is a woman carrying a pregnancy to term and asking for an abortion. That isn’t happening. It’s insulting to the women of America. And understand what has been happening under Donald Trump’s abortion bans. Couples who pray and dream of having a family are being denied IVF treatments. What is happening in our country, working people, working women who are working one or two jobs, who can barely afford childcare as it is, have to travel to another state, to get on a plane sitting next to strangers, to go and get the health care she needs. Barely can afford to do it. And what you are putting her through is unconscionable.”

And for millions of us, it was finally, oh my God, finally, the right answer, delivered cogently and passionately, without apology or triangulation. As Harris put it: “The majority of Americans believe in a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body. And that is why in every state where this issue has been on the ballot, in red and blue states both, the people of America have voted for freedom.”

There is a robust minority of American voters so infatuated with Donald Trump that his solipsism affords them great comfort: If Donald Trump says Haitian immigrants in Ohio feast on domestic pets, it must be true; if Donald Trump says there would not be a war in Ukraine today if he were president, it must be true; if Donald Trump says that every single American expert, Republican or Democrat, believes that your most intimate health care decisions should be voted in the state legislatures, it must be true. For them, Trump’s abortion answers must feel like soothing reminders that Big Daddy knows all the things and that Viktor Orbán has his back, if there’s any remaining doubt.

But for an awful lot of Americans, and the majority of American women, to be fobbed off with debunked falsehoods about executing live babies, then razzle-dazzled with claims that you shouldn’t make your own miscarriage care or fertility choices, because the “scholars” and the “courageous” justices wanted your state legislators to decide in your stead, is not something that soothes. It’s a tactic so thin as to signal contempt. It ends up feeling like Trump is saying: I had eight years to prepare for this debate question and all I could manage is that you are invisible to me.

-Dahlia Lithwick, Slate

 

Takeaways from the Presidential Debate

 

PHILADELPHIA, Sept 11 (Reuters) - Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump met on Tuesday for their first and perhaps only debate, a square-off that could have a significant impact on the Nov. 5 election as polls show a tight race.

Here are takeaways from the debate:

RILING HER RIVAL

Harris made a point to get under Trump's skin, as her campaign had forecast - and it worked.

She urged viewers to attend a Trump rally, where she said Trump would say bizarre things such as windmills cause cancer (something he has, in fact, said) and where, she taunted, attendees would leave out of exhaustion and boredom (something they have, in fact, done.)

Trump, who prides himself on the crowds he draws, was clearly riled.

"My rallies, we have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics," he said. He accused Harris of busing in attendees to her rallies.

Trump then falsely claimed that immigrants in the country illegally were killing and eating people's pets in the city of Springfield, Ohio, an unsubstantiated assertion that has circulated on social media and been amplified by Trump's vice presidential running mate JD Vance.

"In Springfield, they're eating the dogs! The people that came in, they're eating the cats!" Trump said. "They're eating the pets of the people that live there."

City officials in Springfield have said those reports are untrue, which the ABC moderators pointed out after Trump’s comments.

"Talk about extreme," Harris responded, laughing.

PLAYING DEFENSE

Another of Harris’ goals, as a former California prosecutor, was to call Trump out for his past actions, particularly his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

An hour into the debate, her strategy appeared to be paying off. Trump was continually on the defensive.

Asked about the Jan. 6, 2021, siege of the U.S. Capitol, he insisted he “had nothing to do with that, other than they asked me to make a speech." He also maintained, falsely, that he had won the 2020 election.

Harris used Trump's actions as an argument for the country to turn the page, which she would do throughout the evening.

"Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people, so let's be clear about that, and clearly he is having a very difficult time processing that, but we cannot afford to have a president of the United States who attempts as he did in the past to upend the will of the voters in a free and fair election,” Harris said.

The vice president dug at Trump a little more, saying world leaders were “laughing” at him and calling him a disgrace – language that Trump has employed himself at rallies in reference to how he says other countries view President Joe Biden.

A few minutes later, Trump erupted, claiming Harris had received “no votes” in claiming the Democratic nomination and suggesting she replaced Biden as part of some sort of coup.

“He hates her,” Trump said of Biden. “He can’t stand her.”

The exchanges may have aided Harris' argument that Trump, as she put it, lacks the “temperament” to be president.

'WEAPONIZED' JUSTICE

Trump and Harris accused each other of conspiring to "weaponize" the Justice Department in a bid to go after their enemies.

Trump said the indictments he faces for conspiring to overturn his 2020 election loss and for his mishandling of classified documents - as well as his conviction for forging documents related to hush money payments to a porn star - are all the result of a conspiracy cooked up by Harris and Biden. There is no evidence for that assertion.

Harris shot back by pointing out that Trump has promised to prosecute his enemies if he wins a second term.

"Understand this is someone who has openly said he would terminate, I'm quoting, terminate the Constitution," Harris said.

The heated exchange underlined how Harris and Trump see the stakes of this election as existential. Both claimed their opponent to be a threat to democracy itself.

RACIAL DIVIDE

Deep into the debate, the long-simmering topic of race came up. Trump was asked why he had publicly questioned Harris’ dual heritage as a Black and South Asian woman.

“I don’t care what she is,” he responded. “I read that she was Black. Then I read that she was not Black.”

Asked to respond, Harris accused Trump of using race to divide Americans throughout his career. She cited how he and his father turned away Black renters in the 1970s and how Trump led the public outcry against five young Black and Latino men who were wrongly convicted of assaulting a jogger in New York City's Central Park in 1989.

He also has openly questioned whether President Barack Obama, who was born in the United States, was an American citizen, Harris noted.

"I think it's a tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president who has, consistently, over the course of his career, attempted to use race to divide the American people," she said.

"I think the American people want better than that," Harris added. "We don't want a leader who is constantly trying to have Americans point their fingers at each other."

Instead of trying to defend his record, Trump pivoted back to the economy and sought to pin Biden’s economic policies on Harris. “She’s trying to get away from Biden,” he said.

HANDSHAKE

Heading into the debate, there was a question as to how Harris and Trump, who have never met, would greet each other.

Harris settled the issue, definitively. She walked over to Trump at his podium, extended her hand and introduced herself as “Kamala Harris.”

It was an assertive way to approach a man who has spent weeks insulting her with racist and sexist attacks. Trump had no choice but to accept the gesture.

SPARRING ON THE ECONOMY

In the debate’s opening minutes, Trump and Harris went to battle on one of the issues that is top of mind for voters: the economy.

Harris detailed the economic policies she has rolled out in recent weeks, which include a substantial tax credit for small start-ups. Trump focused his comments on tariffs, saying he would protect the American economy from unfair foreign competition.

While both sides got their jabs in, Harris got to speak first on a topic where she trails Trump in terms of voter trust. She appeared to force the former president onto his back foot, and Trump essentially played defense on one of his strongest issues.

"She doesn't have a plan," Trump said, after Harris' opening comments. "It's like Run, Spot, Run."

A SCHISM ON ABORTION

The two candidates also engaged in a fractious debate about abortion, an issue where polls show Harris has the upper hand.

Trump defended the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling that ended constitutional protection for abortion and sent the issue back to individual states, arguing, incorrectly, that it was an outcome desired by both Republicans and Democrats. Democrats have long supported a constitutional right to abortion.

“I did a great service in doing it. It took courage to do it,” Trump said.

Trump contended that some states allow babies to be aborted after birth, a point corrected by ABC News moderator, Linsey Davis.

Harris flashed some outrage at Trump’s assertion that abortion becoming a states-rights issue was a popular result, referring to states that have passed restrictive bans.

“This is what people wanted?” Harris asked. “People being denied care in an emergency room because healthcare providers are being afraid of being hauled off to jail?"

Trump was asked whether he would veto a federal abortion ban if one were passed by Congress. He insisted a federal ban would never happen.

WORLDS APART

One of the most heated policy discussions came when Trump and Harris clashed over how they would handle Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

The candidates' responses revealed the degree to which their views on America's role in the world fundamentally differ.

Trump refused to say he wanted Ukraine to win the war, even as ABC moderator David Muir pushed him on the point, saying only that he wanted to wrap up the conflict as soon as possible.

Harris shot back, arguing that what Trump really wanted was Ukraine's quick and unconditional capitulation.

"If Donald Trump were president, (Russian President Vladimir) Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now," Harris said.

She also pushed back at Trump's claim she had been sent by Biden to talk to Putin to resolve the conflict. Harris has never met with Putin, but has met several times with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

"I said at the beginning of this debate, you're going to hear a bunch of lies coming from this fellow, and that is another one," Harris said.

 

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Reporting by James Oliphant in Washington and Gram Slattery in Philadelphia; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Daniel Wallis

 

The Atlantic Cover

 

When are we going to rebel against his control over the Republican Party, his constitutional ignorance, his obstruction of justice and concealment, his lawless demagoguery, his pathological narcissism, his grandiose delusions, his anti-social personality disorder, his malignant arrogance, his moral relativism, his white nationalism, his perfidious nationalism, his hateful racism, his infectious nihilism, his outrageous iconoclasm, his ruthless competition, his puerile dereliction, his disgusting buffoonery, his embarrassing idiocy, his provocative transgressions, his mocking disrespect, his impetuous vulgarity, his sexual predation, his belligerent intimidation, his incessant lying, his conspiratorial gaslighting, his obsessive vindictiveness, his hypocritical cowardice, his compulsive xenophobia, his callous misogyny, his insufferable bigotry, his histrionic rallying, his dangerous idiocy, his sociopathic bullying and seditious behavior…?  

-Glen Brown

Vote

 

..Something I hear in Trump’s rhetoric is an effort to convince people there will be no place for them in Kamala Harris’ America. It is the same strategy he has always used: Divide people. Stoke hate. Stoke fear. 

And all too often, it seems to work, especially in an era where changing demographics mean that instead of a majority-white country, we are rapidly becoming a majority-minority country. Along with that, we have the emergence of strength in the LGBTQ+ community, with women, people with disabilities, religious minorities, immigrants, and others. 

All of that seems to be a concern for people who fear change, especially when those fears are enflamed by Donald Trump, who doesn’t hesitate to use lies to his own benefit.

In this moment, people need to be assured that with the changes, there will still be a place for them in America, that they are welcome. I’m always a little taken aback by people who support Trump even though it’s not in their own best interests to do so. But they are the people who need this reassurance the most. 

It’s easier to understand the political types—they want power. Or, they want relevance. In his new book, On Heroism: McCain, Milley, Mattis, and the Cowardice of Donald Trump, the editor of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, tells a story about Lindsey Graham that’s illustrative. 

After John McCain died and Lindsey Graham attached himself to Trump, Goldberg had the opportunity to ask Graham why he was doing it, especially after Trump had initially refused to lower the flags at the White House to half-mast in the Senator’s honor following his death. Goldberg writes that Graham said to him, “Jeff, if you know about me, you know that I need to be relevant … You know who I was just on the phone with … Donald Trump is the president of the United States. That’s the truth. You think I’m going to go into exile?”

The people who can’t live without power and relevance are one thing, but what about the cashier at your local grocery store or the group of people traveling for a church ministry I chatted with in the airport today who were all Trump voters? What about family members, friends? Do they want their daughters to die from tubal pregnancies because they can’t get a lifesaving abortion procedure? Do they want to miss out on the joy of having grandchildren because IVF is unavailable? 

There are no easy answers. Maybe some of them don’t believe Trump will really do what he says he’ll do because it sounds so crazy—that’s what they will tell you. These are the folks who are in denial about Project 2025. It won’t be that bad, they say. 

That’s hard to comprehend since we all lived through the Muslim ban, family separation policy, and bleach and lights for Covid. At bottom, it’s hard to believe that anyone with a modicum of common sense supports Trump because of his policies, like this week’s “childcare is childcare” hold promise for the future.

Trump is a racist. He used anger and white grievance about change to attract his base, and he continues to use it to persuade people that there won’t be any room for them in America if Democrats win. That means it’s important for Kamala Harris to reassure people that there is room for everyone, that a rising tide lifts all boats, and that her America is one with space for everyone to enjoy life and to succeed. Trump's policies don’t make sense, so I’m forced to conclude it’s fear and hate that he successfully peddles. 

But our strength as a country has always been in our diversity and our ability to embrace diversity, and especially new immigrants, and to emerge better, stronger, more successful, and more interesting. We can do that again.

That’s the message I’m hoping to hear from Harris in the debate Tuesday night when the folks who are committed to neither Trump nor Harris will be listening. We need a joyful warrior who can help people understand that they don’t need to be afraid of change and that it can work for them. 

What we should fear is going back or treading water, particularly in a world that requires us to evolve if we are going to compete successfully in a new global economy. 

This is a moment for a leader who offers compassion and inspiration, the kind of courage that John F. Kennedy evoked in Americans, so that the country can finally reject the malignant cancer Trump injected into the body politic. 

Harris really means it when she says, “for the people,” and her record proves it. The debate is a chance for her to explain that to people who need to hear it. So, despite the polls, don’t get discouraged. Get to work. Don’t despair. Vote.

-Joyce Vance

 

How the quiet war against press freedom could come to America

 

A.G. Sulzberger is the publisher of the New York Times.

After several years out of power, the former leader is returned to office on a populist platform. He blames the news media’s coverage of his previous government for costing him reelection. As he sees it, tolerating the independent press, with its focus on truth-telling and accountability, weakened his ability to steer public opinion. This time, he resolves not to make the same mistake.

His country is a democracy, so he can’t simply close newspapers or imprison journalists. Instead, he sets about undermining independent news organizations in subtler ways — using bureaucratic tools such as tax law, broadcast licensing and government contracting. Meanwhile, he rewards news outlets that toe the party line — shoring them up with state advertising revenue, tax exemptions and other government subsidies — and helps friendly businesspeople buy up other weakened news outlets at cut rates to turn them into government mouthpieces.

Within a few years, only pockets of independence remain in the country’s news media, freeing the leader from perhaps the most challenging obstacle to his increasingly authoritarian rule. Instead, the nightly news and broadsheet headlines unskeptically parrot his claims, often unmoored from the truth, flattering his accomplishments while demonizing and discrediting his critics. “Whoever controls a country’s media,” the leader’s political director openly asserts, “controls that country’s mindset and through that the country itself.”

This is the short version of how Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, effectively dismantled the news media in his country. This effort was a central pillar of Orban’s broader project to remake his country as an “illiberal democracy.” A weakened press made it easier for him to keep secrets, to rewrite reality, to undermine political rivals, to act with impunity — and, ultimately, to consolidate unchecked power in ways that left the nation and its people worse off. It is a story that is being repeated in eroding democracies all around the world.

Over the past year, I’ve been asked with increasing frequency whether The New York Times, where I serve as publisher, is prepared for the possibility that a similar campaign against the free press could be embraced here in the United States, despite our country’s proud tradition of recognizing the essential role journalism plays in supporting a strong democracy and a free people.

It’s not a crazy question. As they seek a return to the White House, former president Donald Trump and his allies have declared their intention to increase their attacks on a press he has long derided as “the enemy of the people.” Trump pledged last year: “The LameStream Media will be thoroughly scrutinized for their knowingly dishonest and corrupt coverage of people, things, and events.” 

A senior Trump aide, Kash Patel, made the threat even more explicit: “We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly.” There is already evidence that Trump and his team mean what they say. By the end of his first term, Trump’s anti-press rhetoric — which contributed to a surge in anti-press sentiment in this country and around the world — had quietly shifted into anti-press action.

If Trump follows through on promises to continue that campaign in a second term, his efforts would likely be informed by his open admiration for the ruthlessly effective playbook of authoritarians such as Orban, whom Trump recently met with at Mar-a-Lago and praised as “a smart, strong, and compassionate leader.” 

Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, recently voiced similar praise of Orban: “He’s made some smart decisions there that we could learn from in the United States.” One of the intellectual architects of the Republican agenda, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, asserted that Orban’s Hungary was “not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model.” To loud applause from attendees of a Republican political conference held in Budapest in 2022, Orban himself left little doubt over what his model calls for. “Dear friends: We must have our own media.”

To ensure we are prepared for whatever is to come, my colleagues and I have spent months studying how press freedom has been attacked in Hungary — as well as in other democracies such as India and Brazil. The political and media environments in each country are different, and the campaigns have seen varying tactics and levels of success, but the pattern of anti-press action reveals common threads.

These new would-be strongmen have developed a style more subtle than their counterparts in totalitarian states such as Russia, China and Saudi Arabia, who systematically censor, jail or kill journalists. For those trying to undercut independent journalism in democracies, the attacks typically exploit banal — and often nominally legal — weaknesses in a nation’s systems of governance. This playbook generally has five parts.

• Create a climate hospitable to crackdowns on the media by sowing public distrust in independent journalism and normalizing the harassment of the people who produce it.
• Manipulate legal and regulatory authority — such as taxation, immigration enforcement and privacy protections — to punish offending journalists and news organizations.
• Exploit the courts, most often through civil litigation, to effectively impose additional logistical and financial penalties on disfavored journalism, even in cases without legal merit.
• Increase the scale of attacks on journalists and their employers by encouraging powerful supporters in other parts of the public and private sector to adopt versions of these tactics.
• Use the levers of power not just to punish independent journalists but also to reward those who demonstrate fealty to their leadership. This includes helping supporters of the ruling party gain control of news organizations financially weakened by all the aforementioned efforts.

As that list makes clear, these leaders have realized that crackdowns on the press are most effective when they’re at their least dramatic — not the stuff of thrillers but a movie so plodding and complicated that no one wants to watch it.

As someone who strongly believes in the foundational importance of journalistic independence, I have no interest in wading into politics. I disagree with those who have suggested that the risk Trump poses to the free press is so high that news organizations such as mine should cast aside neutrality and directly oppose his reelection. 

It is beyond shortsighted to give up journalistic independence out of fear that it might later be taken away. At The Times, we are committed to following the facts and presenting a full, fair and accurate picture of November’s election and the candidates and issues shaping it. Our democratic model asks different institutions to play different roles; this is ours.

At the same time, as the steward of one of the country’s leading news organizations, I feel compelled to speak out about threats to the free press, as my predecessors and I have done to leaders of both parties. I am doing so here, in the pages of an esteemed competitor, because I believe the risk is shared by our entire profession, as well as all who depend on it. In highlighting this campaign, I am not advising people how to vote. 

There are countless issues on the ballot that are closer to voters’ hearts than protections for my broadly unpopular profession. But the weakening of a free and independent press matters, whatever your party or politics. The flow of trustworthy news and information is critical to a free, secure and prosperous nation. 

This is why defense of the free press has been a point of rare bipartisan consensus throughout the nation’s history. As President Ronald Reagan put it: “There is no more essential ingredient than a free, strong, and independent press to our continued success in what the Founding Fathers called our ‘noble experiment’ in self-government.”

That consensus has broken. A new model is being crafted that aims to undermine the ability of journalists to freely gather and report the news. It’s worth getting to know what this model looks like in action…

-A.G. Sulzberger

Opinion | A.G. Sulzberger: A strongman’s guide to disabling the free press - The Washington Post

 

The Junkification of American Life by David Brooks

 

Back in February, the music historian Ted Gioia wrote an essay on the state of American culture. He argued that many creative people want to create art (work that puts demands on people), but all the commercial pressures push them to create entertainment (which gives audiences what they want). As a result, for the past many years, entertainment (superhero movies) has been swallowing up art (literary novels and serious dramas).

But now, Gioia observed, even the entertainment business is in crisis. Hollywood studios are laying off employees. The number of new scripted TV series is down. That’s because entertainment is being swallowed up by distraction (TikTok, Instagram). People stay on their phones because it’s easier. Each object of distraction lasts only a few seconds and doesn’t require any cognitive work; the audience just keeps scrolling.

Our dopamine-driven brains drive us to choose cheap distraction over entertainment and art. A 15-second video causes a dopamine release in the brain, which creates a desire for more stimulus, which leads to the habit of more scrolling on your phone, which leads to an addiction to more stimulus. If distraction is swallowing entertainment in our culture, addiction is also swallowing distraction.

Gioia wrote: “The tech platforms aren’t like the Medici in Florence, or those other rich patrons of the arts. They don’t want to find the next Michelangelo or Mozart. They want to create a world of junkies — because they will be the dealers.”

The phenomenon Gioia describes isn’t happening just to culture; it recurs across American life. We have access to wonderful things. But they require effort, so we settle for the junky things that provide the quick dopamine hits. We could all be eating a Mediterranean diet, but instead it’s potato chips and cherry Coke. We could enjoy the richness of full awareness, but booze, weed and other drugs provide that quick reward. Think of all the things in American life that seem to offer that burst of stimulation but threaten to be addictive — gambling, porn, video games, checking email, [Messenger, Instagram, X (Twitter), TikTok, Facebook, YouTube].

Even journalism has found ways to trigger dopamine for profit. We journalists go into this business to inform and provoke, but many outlets have found they can generate clicks by telling partisan viewers how right they are about everything. Minute after minute they’re rubbing their audience’s pleasure centers, which feels like a somewhat older profession.

The result is we’re now in a culture in which we want worse things — the cheap hit over the long flourishing. You reach for immediate gratification, but it fails to satisfy. It just puts you on a hamster wheel of looking for the next mild stimulus and pretty soon you’re in the land of addiction and junk food, you just keep scrolling, you just keep snacking. As the psychiatrist Anna Lembke writes in her book “Dopamine Nation,” “The paradox is that hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, leads to anhedonia, which is the inability to enjoy.”

Big companies don’t care. They have become sensational at arousing and manipulating our cravings. Their goal is to keep us consuming. By offering constant temptation, they appeal straight to our dopamine circuits and threaten to circumvent our capacity for self-control. In their book “The Molecule of More,” Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long write, “The sensation of wanting is not a choice you make. It is a reaction to the things you encounter.” The cookie, cat video or margarita is right there in front of you, whispering, “Consume me!” You can’t resist.

Modern life makes us vulnerable to these seducers. People live overwhelmed lives, exhausted, anxious. Willpower is drained. Big Gulps and trashy TV at least provide a break. But afterward, there come the recriminations: Why did I do that? So millions turn to therapists, dietitians, trainers, 12-step programs, lifestyle experts and authors of books on habit formation in order to regain control over their desires.

The great volume of advice that flows from these people seems to fall into three buckets. First, there is the self-binding bucket. Create rules so you don’t have easy access to the things that tempt you: No phones in school. No carbs in your diet. No alcohol in the house. A woman I once knew got dumped by her boyfriend; of course she came home with a big tub of ice cream. Halfway through the tub she grew disgusted with herself and threw it in the trash. Ten minutes later she was digging through the trash so she could eat some more. Finally, she poured dishwashing soap on the ice cream to help her resist temptation. Effective self-binding.

Then there is the here and now bucket. Don’t go searching for the next dopamine hit; enjoy the life that you already have around you. The neuroscientist Kent Berridge has shown that the wanting circuits in the brain are different from the liking circuits. So, try to stimulate the liking circuits by amping up your enjoyment of the life you already have.

For example, Lembke, the psychiatrist, had a patient who suffered from depression and anxiety and spent her life plugged into Instagram, YouTube and all the rest. Lembke suggested that the patient walk through her days without any devices and let her own thoughts surface.

The patient was dumbstruck at the suggestion. “Why would I do that?” she asked. Lembke said it’s a way of becoming familiar with yourself and not being consumed by distractions. “But it’s so boring,” the patient countered. Boredom can be good, an opportunity for reflection, Lembke argued. Finally, the patient agreed to put down her phone during walks. Later, she reported back to Lembke: “It was hard at first. But then I got used to it and even kind of liked it. I started noticing the trees.”

The third bucket is the higher desires bucket. That’s based on the premise that you usually can’t control a desire through sheer willpower. But you can replace a low desire with a higher desire. Pregnant women give up alcohol because the appeal of a drink is dwarfed by their love for their coming child.

Dopamine can sometimes sound like the bad guy in this conversation, but all in all, it’s an awesome neurotransmitter. It’s what drives us to create, to learn, to build, to improve. Dopamine pushes us to boldly go where no person has gone before. America was practically built on dopamine. As William Casey King argues in his book “Ambition, a History,” throughout most of European history, ambition was regarded as a terrible sin. But when the New World was discovered, people decided that ambition is mostly a virtue, driving us to explore.

The problem with our culture today is not too much desire but the miniaturization of desire, settling for these small, short-term hits. Our culture used to be full of institutions that sought to arouse people’s higher desires — the love of God, the love of country, the love of learning, the love of being excellent at a craft. Sermons, teachers, mentors and the whole apparatus of moral formation were there to elongate people’s time horizons and arouse the highest desires.

The culture of consumerism, of secularism, of hedonism has undermined those institutions and that important work. The culture has changed. As Philip Rieff noticed all the way back in his 1966 book, “The Triumph of the Therapeutic,” “Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased.”

We have schools to train our minds and gyms to train our bodies. We get less help training, elevating and regulating our desires. History suggests you can elevate people’s desires by giving them access to what is truly worth wanting. I imagine the cultural decline that Gioia described in his essay can be turned around if people can experience, at school or somewhere else, the emotional impact of a great film, a great novel, a great concert. It’s more desirable than a TikTok. Once you’ve tasted the fine wine, it’s harder to settle for Kool-Aid.

-New York Times

 

Labor Day, 2024

 

Almost one hundred and forty-two years ago, on September 5, 1882, workers in New York City celebrated the first Labor Day holiday with a parade. The parade almost didn’t happen: there was no band, and no one wanted to start marching without music. Once the Jewelers Union of Newark Two showed up with musicians, the rest of the marchers, eventually numbering between 10,000 and 20,000 men and women, fell in behind them to parade through lower Manhattan. At noon, when they reached the end of the route, the march broke up and the participants listened to speeches, drank beer, and had picnics. Other workers joined them.

Their goal was to emphasize the importance of workers in the industrializing economy and to warn politicians that they could not be ignored. 

Less than 20 years before, northern men had fought a war to defend a society based on free labor and had, they thought, put in place a government that would support the ability of all hardworking men to rise to prosperity. But for all that the war had seemed to be about defending men against the rise of an oligarchy that intended to reduce all men to a life of either enslavement or wage labor, the war and its aftermath had pushed workers’ rights backward.   

The drain of men to the battlefields and the western mines during the war resulted in a shortage of workers that kept unemployment low and wages high. Even when they weren’t, the intense nationalism of the war years tended to silence the voices of labor organizers. “It having been resolved to enlist with Uncle Sam for the war,” one organization declared when the war broke out, “this union stands adjourned until either the Union is safe, or we are whipped.” 

Another factor working against the establishment of labor unions during the war was the tendency of employers to claim that striking workers were deliberately undercutting the war effort. They turned to the government to protect production, and in industries like Pennsylvania's anthracite coal fields, government leaders sent soldiers to break budding unions and defend war production.

During the war, government contracting favored those companies that could produce big orders of the mule shoes, rifles, rain slickers, coffee, and all the other products that kept the troops supplied. The owners of the growing factories grew wealthy on government contracts, even as conditions in the busy factories deteriorated. While wages were high during the war, they were often paid in greenbacks, which were backed only by the government’s promise to pay. 

While farmers and some entrepreneurs thrived during the war, urban workers and miners had reason to believe that employers had taken advantage of the war to make money off them. After the war, they began to strike for better wages and safer conditions. In August 1866, 60,000 people met as the National Labor Union in Baltimore, Maryland, where they called for an eight-hour workday. Most of those workers calling for organization simply wanted a chance to rise to comfort, but the resolutions developed by the group’s leaders after the convention declared that workers must join unions to reform the abuses of the industrial system. 

To many of those who thought the war would create a country where hard work would mean success, the resolutions seemed to fly in the face of that harmony, echoing the southern enslavers by dividing the world into people of wealth and workers, and asking for government intervention, this time on the side of workers. Republicans began to redefine their older, broad concept of workers to mean urban unskilled or semi-skilled wage laborers specifically.

Then in 1867, a misstep by Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio made the party step back from workers. Wade had been a cattle drover and worked on the Erie Canal before studying law and entering politics, and he was a leader among those who saw class activism as the next step in the party’s commitment to free labor. His fiery oratory lifted him to prominence, and in March 1867 the Senate chose him its president pro tempore, in effect making him the nation’s acting vice president in those days before there was a process for replacing a vice president who had stepped into the presidency.

Wade joined a number of senators on a trip to the West, and in Lawrence, Kansas, newspapers reported—possibly incorrectly—that Wade predicted a fight in America between labor and capital. “Property is not equally divided,” the reporter claimed Wade said, “and a more equal distribution of capital must be worked out.” Congress, which Wade now led, had done much for ex-slaves and must now address “the terrible distinction between the man that labors and him that does not.”

Republican newspapers were apoplectic. The New York Times claimed that Wade was a demagogue. Every hard worker could succeed in America, it wrote. “Laborers here can make themselves sharers in the property of the country, —can become capitalists themselves, —just

as nine in ten of all the capitalists in the country have done so before them, —by industry, frugality, and intelligent enterprise.” Trying to get rich by force of law would undermine society.

Congress established an eight-hour day for federal employees in June 1868, but in that year’s election, voters turned Wade, and others like him, out of office. In 1869, Republican president Ulysses S. Grant issued a proclamation saying that the eight-hour workday of "laborers, workmen, and mechanics" would not mean cuts in wages.

Then, in spring 1871, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, workers took over the city of Paris and established the Paris Commune. The transatlantic cable had gone into operation in 1866, and American newspapers had featured stories of the European war. Now, hungry for dramatic stories, they plastered details of the Commune on their front pages, describing it as a propertied American’s worst nightmare. They highlighted the murder of priests, the burning of the Tuileries Palace, and the bombing of buildings by crazed women who lobbed burning bottles of newfangled petroleum through cellar windows. 

The Communards were a “wild, reckless, irresponsible, murderous mobocracy” who planned to confiscate all property and transfer all money, factories, and land to associations of workmen, American newspapers wrote. In their telling, the Paris Commune brought to life the chaotic world the elite enslavers foresaw when they said it was imperative to keep workers from politics. 

Scribner’s Monthly warned in italics: “the interference of ignorant labor with politics is dangerous to society.” Famous reformer Charles Loring Brace looked at the rising numbers of industrial workers and the conditions of city life, and warned Americans, “In the judgment of one who has been familiar with our ‘dangerous classes’ for twenty years, there are just the same explosive social elements beneath the surface of New York as of Paris.”

At the same time, it was also clear that wealthy industrialists were gaining more and more control over both state and local governments. In 1872 the Credit Mobilier scandal broke. This was a complicated affair, and what had actually happened was almost certainly misrepresented, but it seemed to show congressmen taking bribes from railroad barons, and Americans were ready to believe that they were doing so. Then, in July 1877, after the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad cut wages 20 percent and strikers shut down most of the nation’s railroads, President Rutherford B. Hayes sent U.S. soldiers to the cities immobilized by the strikes. It seemed industrialists had the Army at their beck and call.

By 1882, factories and the fortunes they created had swung the government so far toward men of capital that it seemed there was more room for workingmen to demand their rights. By the 1880s, even the staunchly Republican Chicago Tribune complained about the links between business and government: “Behind every one of half of the portly and well-dressed members of the Senate can be seen the outlines of some corporation interested in getting or preventing legislation,” it wrote. The Senate, Harper’s Weekly noted, was “a club of rich men.” 

The workers marching in New York City in the first Labor Day celebration in 1882 carried banners saying: “Labor Built This Republic and Labor Shall Rule it,” “Labor Creates All Wealth,” “No Land Monopoly,” “No Money Monopoly,” “Labor Pays All Taxes,” “The Laborer Must Receive and Enjoy the Full Fruit of His Labor,” ‘Eight Hours for a Legal Day’s Work,” and “The True Remedy is Organization and the Ballot.” 

Two years later, workers helped to elect Democrat Grover Cleveland to the White House. A number of Republicans crossed over to support the reformer, afraid that, as he said, “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters.” 

In 1888, Cleveland won the popular vote by about 100,000 votes, but his Republican opponent, Benjamin Harrison, won in the Electoral College. Harrison promised that his would be “A BUSINESSMAN’S ADMINISTRATION” and said that “before the close of the present Administration businessmen will be thoroughly well content with it….” 

Businessmen mostly were, but the rest of the country wasn’t. In November 1892 a Democratic landslide put Cleveland back in office, along with the first Democratic Congress since before the Civil War. As soon as the results of the election became apparent, the Republicans declared that the economy would collapse. Harrison’s administration had been “beyond question the best business administration the country has ever seen,” one businessmen’s club insisted, so losing it could only be a calamity. “The Republicans will be passive spectators,” the Chicago Tribune noted. “It will not be their funeral.” People would be thrown out of work, but “[p]erhaps the working classes of the country need such a lesson….”

As investors rushed to take their money out of the U.S. stock market, the economy collapsed a few days before Cleveland took office in early March 1893. Trying to stabilize the economy by enacting the proposals capitalists wanted, Cleveland and the Democratic Congress had to abandon many of the pro-worker policies they had promised, and the Supreme Court struck down the rest (including the income tax).

They could, however, support Labor Day and its indication of workers’ political power. On June 28, 1894, Cleveland signed Congress’s bill making Labor Day a legal holiday. Each year, the first Monday in September would honor the country’s workers.  

In Chicago the chair of the House Labor Committee, Lawrence McGann (D-IL), told the crowd gathered for the first official observance: “Let us each Labor Day, hold a congress and formulate propositions for the amelioration of the people. Send them to your Representatives with your earnest, intelligent indorsement [sic], and the laws will be changed.” Happy Labor Day.

—Heather Cox Richardson

Notes:

https://www.dol.gov/general/laborday/history-daze

New York Times, July 1, 1867, p. 4. 

New York Times, July 9, 1867, p. 4.

New York Times, September 6, 1882, p. 8.

New York Times, September 6, 1882, p. 4.

New York Daily Tribune, September 7, 1882, p. 4.

https://blogs.loc.gov/law/files/2011/09/S-730.pdf

https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1851-1900/The-first-Labor-Day/

Grace Palladino, Another Civil War: Labor, Capital, and the State in the Anthracite Regions of Pennsylvania, 1840–1868 (Fordham University Press, 2006).

Mark Wilson, The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865 (Johns Hopkins, 2006). 

Brace quotation is from Robert M. Fogelson, America’s Armories: Architecture, Society and Public Order (Harvard University Press, 1989).

Frank Norton, “Our Labor System and the Chinese,” Scribner’s Monthly 2 (May 1871).

Chicago Tribune quoted in Harper’s Weekly, February 9, 1884, p, 86.

New York Times, November 10, 1892, p. 8. Statement from the Commercial Travelers’ Republican Club, quoted in Chicago Tribune, November 1, 1892, p. 2. Chicago Tribune, November 14, 1892, p. 2. Senator Teller, quoted in New York Times, November 15, 1892, p. 1. Washington Post, February 16, 1893, p. 7. Chicago Tribune, November 21, 1892, p. 4. Chicago Tribune, November 11, 1892, p. 4. Chicago Tribune, November 13, 1892, p. 4.

Grover Cleveland, Fourth Annual Message, December 3, 1888, at https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/fourth-annual-message-first-term