‘The Bear’: Jeremy Allen White Explains Why Carmy Daydreams of Sydney (2024)

An Antidote to the Cult of Self-Discipline

Procrastination, or the art of doing the wrong things at one specifically wrong time, has become a bugbear of our productivity-obsessed era. Wasting resources? Everybody’s doing it! But wasting time? God forbid. Schemes to keep ourselves in efficiency mode—the rebranding of rest into self-care, and of hobbies into side hustles—have made procrastinating a tic that people are desperate to dispel; “life hacks” now govern life. As the anti-productivity champion Oliver Burkeman once put it, “Today’s cacophony of anti-procrastination advice seems rather sinister: a subtle way of inducing conformity, to get you to do what you ‘should’ be doing.” By that measure, the procrastinator is doing something revolutionary: using their time without aim. Take to the barricades, soldiers, and when you get there, do absolutely nothing!The novel has been sniffily maligned throughout its history as a particularly potent vehicle for wasting time—unless, of course, it improves the reader in some way. (See: the 19th-century trend of silly female characters contracting brain rot from reading, which Jane Austen hilariously skewered with Northanger Abbey’s Catherine Morland.) Which makes Rosalind Brown’s tight, sly debut, Practice, a welcome gift for those who dither about their dithering. It presents procrastination as a vital, life-affirming antidote to the cult of self-discipline, while also giving the reader a delicious text with which to while away her leisure time.In Practice, Annabel, a second-year Oxford student, wakes long before sunrise on a misty Sunday morning “at the worn-out end of January.” The day holds only one task—to write a paper on Shakespeare’s sonnets—but Annabel is a routinized being and must act accordingly: “The things she does, she does properly.” So first she makes herself tea (coffee will rattle her stomach) and leaves the radiator turned off to keep the room “cold and dim and full of quiet.” She settles in with a plan: a morning spent reading and note-taking, a lunch of raw veggies, a solo yoga session in the afternoon, writing, a perfectly timed post-dinner bowel movement. A day, in short, that is brimming with possibilities for producing an optimized self. Except that self keeps getting in its own way: Her mind and body, those dueling forces that alternately grab at our attention, repeatedly turn her away from Shakespeare. Very little writing actually takes place in Practice; Annabel’s vaunted self-discipline encounters barrier after barrier. She wants to “thicken her own concentration,” but instead she takes walks, pees, fidgets, ambles down the unkept byways of her mind. She procrastinates like a champ.[Read: How to spend your time ‘poorly’]Brown’s novel elevates procrastination into an essential act, arguing that those pockets of time between stretches of productivity are where living and creating actually happen. Which makes procrastination one of the last bastions of the creative mind, a way to silently fight a hundred tiny rebellions a day. Screwing around, on the job and otherwise, isn’t just revenge against capitalism; it’s part of the work of living. And what better format for examining this anarchy than the novel, a form that is created by underpaid wandering minds?Practice is technically a campus novel, but it makes far more sense as a complement to the recent spate of workplace fiction that wonders what exactly we’re all doing with our precious waking weekly hours. Some Millennial novelists, born in an era of prosperity and then launched into adulthood just as the usual signposts of success slid out of reach, have fixated on the workplace as a source of our discontent. Many of us were told in childhood that we can do anything we want, that “if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.” Work was supposed to be a promised land of fulfillment, a place where your aptitudes would flourish and—bonus—you’d get paid. But no job could live up to such a high standard. It doesn’t help that a torrent of systemic issues—inadequate health care, drastic rent hikes, underfunding of the arts—have left members of this generation feeling like they’re dedicating 40-plus hours a week to treading water.Recent literature has been flush with examples. In Helen Phillips’s The Beautiful Bureaucrat, a 20-something spends her workdays entering inexplicable series of numbers into “The Database” at a labyrinthine office. The job itself turns out to be vital to humanity, but compensation, explication, and basic human dignity aren’t on offer. Halle Butler’s The New Me features a 30-year-old working as a temp at a design firm, the kind of place populated by ash-blondes in “incomprehensible furry vests.” Her try-hard personality keeps her from climbing the office social ladder, which in turn leaves her pathetically shuffling papers and slipping further into loneliness, both at work and in her personal life. The young narrator of Hilary Leichter’s barely surreal Temporary takes gigs as a mannequin, a human barnacle, a ghost, and a murderer—but all she really wants is what she and the other temps call “the steadiness,” an existence in which work and life feel benignly predictable. According to these novels, the contemporary workplace turns us into machines, chops our intellect into disparate bits, and hands our precious attention over to the C-suite.What’s missing in each of these characters’ lives is the space for rumination, the necessary lapses our brains need to live creatively, no matter our careers. Brown exquisitely spells out how procrastination is intrinsic to the imaginative process. Despite her professed allegiance to a schedule, Annabel interrupts her own routine early and often. Just after waking, she opens a window and then immediately wishes she could experience the feeling of opening it again: “She wants to know exactly how the cold blue light feels when it begins to appear, she doesn’t want to miss a single detail of the slow dawn, the reluctant winter morning.” While settled at her desk under a cape-like blue blanket, she spends as much time considering how to spend her time as she does actually spending it. She imagines her old tutor advising her to “look away from the text and out the window if you have to, try and pause your mind on the one thing.” Sure, she jots down occasional adjectives to describe Shakespeare and the mystery lover he courts in the sonnets, but most of Annabel’s focus is in the moment, in the rabbit hole of lightly connected memories and notions her brain accesses when it’s drifting off piste. Rather than turn her ideas into a work product, she listens to a robin sing, thinks through an unconsummated relationship from the past year, and fondly recollects her time studying Virginia Woolf—a writer who herself dwelled in the interstices of passing time.[Read: Procrastinating ourselves to death]Like Woolf, Brown understands that life is lived in the in-between moments, and that buckling down to produce a piece of art does not necessarily have the intended effect. (Anyone who has sat at a desk, desperate for the words to come, can affirm.) It’s no surprise, then, that Annabel admires Woolf, whose churning novels of the mind revolve around ordinary activities that are often waylaid by characters’ fancies and distractions. Mrs. Dalloway’s party planning ends up on the back burner as she considers alternate versions of her life; the Ramsay family fails to reach the tower at Godrevy in To the Lighthouse because their musings intervene; the children of The Waves spend as much time dallying as they do putting on their play. Similarly, Practice places Annabel’s decision making—what to write about the sonnets, whether her much-older boyfriend should visit her at college—on the same footing as her daydreams.What Annabel senses, and Brown beautifully drives home, is that it’s the strange mental collisions between the thinking mind and the wandering mind that yield the most interesting results. These are the moments when artistry sneaks in unbidden; Annabel understands that if art is created out of life, the latter has to have space to happen. She copies out a line from the poetry critic Helen Vendler: “A critical ‘reading’ is the end product of an internalisation so complete that the word reading is not the right word for what happens when a text is on your mind. The text is part of what has made you who you are.” The creative life isn’t about doling a self out into different portions—it’s about sitting in the stew that a whole life makes and offering your perspective on it.Annabel’s day turns extraordinary, albeit in small ways. She breaks a treasured brown mug, the one thing she’d rescue in a fire; this slash through her routine almost makes her cry. She finally decides whether to invite her boyfriend for a weekend, and maybe invite him deeper into her life. A tragedy in the bedroom next door jerks her toward the understanding that all lives are as complicated as her own. She also ends the day with no more than some notes and a few words on Shakespeare’s poems: “slick — bitter — nimble.” Who is to say if she’s been productive or not?The art of procrastination requires confrontation—with our inefficiencies, with the allure of easy pleasure, with the fact that time will someday end for us. But we can melt into it. We can let ourselves float in the in-between. Perhaps with a meaningful, self-aware novel.

theatlantic.com

I Play Chess 40 Times a Day. Because I Must.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, please know that you are not alone. If you are in danger of acting on suicidal thoughts, call 911. For support and resources, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or text 741741 for the Crisis Text Line.FOR THE PAST HALF-DECADE, I have found myself playing nearly 40 games of chess every day. I still work a full-time job, write fiction, raise a child, but these responsibilities are not prohibitive. My daughter goes down and I play late into the night, I sleep a bit, then I wake very early to play more. I play during off-hours at work, on lunch breaks, during writing time when I can’t work out a scene, and on Saturday mornings, after feeding my cats and brewing the coffee and giving Alma her egg. Addiction in my life has this quality: Something I was previously not doing at all—drinking, smoking cigarettes, collecting coffee cans, pulling hairs out of my face one at a time with tweezers—becomes all-consuming.Chess as a game seems ripe for addiction. It has specific rules that, once understood, open out onto a wild horizon of possibility. You can play fast or slow; you can play aggressively, reservedly, violently, or creatively. For a few clicks on any number of chess sites, you can flood your brain with dopamine as often as you like, and if you tire of it, you can delete your account, swear off the game, and, in the morning, start over.As in life, one can play 95 percent of a chess game perfectly, only to have a pivotal oversight undo hours of meticulous work. Missed opportunities rarely resurface and are far more often punished. Positional advantages still require near-perfect play to be converted to wins. Losses feel like moral judgments and haunt like vengeful regret. In many ways it is a silly game; in others, it is as wide, varied, primitive, and complex as the universe itself. Within the bounds of strict rules, genuine freedom is possible over a chessboard. And when the game ends—and this is the crucial difference from life—one can begin again.IN HIS NOVEL The Luzhin Defense, Vladimir Nabokov describes the world-silencing effects of chess addiction. His main character, based on the German chessmaster Curt von Bardeleben, riffles indifferently through editions of an old illustrated magazine: “Not a single picture could arrest [his] hand as it leafed through the volumes—neither the celebrated Niagara Falls nor starving Indian children (potbellied little skeletons) nor an attempted assassination of the King of Spain. The life of the world passed by with a hasty rustle, and suddenly stopped.” What finally catches the young chess master’s eye? A single image—a woodcut of a chessboard—and his mind turns instantly to “the treasured diagram, problems, openings, entire games.” This article has been adapted from Cory Leadbeater’s book, The Uptown Local: Joy, Death, and Joan Didion. We are in an era of bad habits, of nihilism and the certainty that dread, as a guiding principle, is warranted. In just the past week or so, catastrophic flooding deluged the Midwest, the military attempted a coup in Bolivia, an Arkansas man shot and killed four people in a grocery store, and wildfires went on ravaging the Arctic Circle. As I play chess, these sorts of events begin to blur and fade; they pass by with a hasty rustle; suddenly, they stop. In better times, perhaps I would not have needed chess the way that I do—but alas, we have not had better times. As I play chess, these sorts of events begin to blur and fade; they pass by with a hasty rustle; suddenly, they stop. In better times, perhaps I would not have needed chess the way that I do—but alas, we have not had better times.I wake one morning realizing I haven’t heard a word of what anyone’s said for nearly three days. I have ignored the news, have ignored myself, have been thinking only of chess. I resolve to end my addiction, and so I delete my account. My abstention lasts 16 hours. I make a new account. In six days, I play 578 games. The nadir comes when I win eight in a row and then lose 12 of my next 14 and go to bed thinking of self-murder. My chess play has devolved into a kind of daily predictive weatherglass: On days I play well, I am cheery, excitable, pleased to be alive; on days I play poorly, I am nasty to those I love best, I place blame for my poor play on others, I feel certain of my brain’s rapid decay, and I know, truly know, that my life will never come to any good.Still, there have been moments when chess was not on my mind: a night in early January 2021 when I stayed up till 4 a.m. to see the election results certified; an afternoon one spring when I first glimpsed my daughter’s nose, blown up and electrified on an ultrasound screen; and when, just after a miscarriage that we were both grieving, I divulged to my partner, Liz, for the first time in the six years we’d been together, that for my entire life, as far back as I can remember, I’ve dealt on a daily basis with suicide.Suicide can be about many things, but what it can most often be about is pain: ineffable pain that has nothing to do, really, with happiness or unhappiness, or even with reality. William Styron, in one of the seminal accounts of suicidal ideation, writes, “The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne.” I like to think of it a different way: “There was so much that was real that was not real at all,” goes the Wallace Stevens line, and this has always struck me as being, in some ways, the predicament of suicide. Folks who find reality inadequate are apt to go looking for better or different things elsewhere. In my lifetime, I’ve sought relief in booze, in books, in self-destructive sexual behavior, in writing fiction. Like fiction, chess has, as the Latvian International Master Alvis Vitolins wrote, no limits. When I play, reality is held at bay for a while. I am even free of having to deal with myself.The subject of suicide is ugly to talk about, burdensome at best, morbid and harrowing at worst. Although in polite company it is best left undiscussed, the bare facts suggest that in the United States, a suicide has occurred in the time it has taken you to brew your coffee, sit down, and read the first several paragraphs of this article. “Maybe you’ve spent some time trying every day not to die, out on your own somewhere. Maybe that effort has become your work in life,” Donald Antrim wrote in The New Yorker. It seems to me now that more and more Americans are undertaking this work every day. They do so in the shadows. They may not admit to others what dark calculus goes on in their brain. They are trying not to die. They are playing chess, or caring for their children, or riding the bus home from work and thinking of next month’s bills. Whatever the case, they are everywhere among us; it seems likely that, at the very least, you know someone like this.MY FIRST FORAY into chess was with my older brother at a cigar shop near where we grew up. In our early 20s, we would go and sit with the regulars—all men in their 60s—and we’d smoke four or five cigars and share a bottle of bourbon and play chess into the early morning hours. I was not particularly good then, probably an 800 player (I’m 1900 now; grand masters are 2500 and up), but we were so happy. Much of our relationship is built on a shared language, shared history, shared frequency, and chess is good for this. Together we stepped into the game’s vast universe of possibility, and we did what so much of good existence comes down to: We risked mistakes, we tried for beauty, we played. And we woke in the morning with disgusting-smelling clothes and the feeling that we’d had fun.Suicides among competitive chess players are not uncommon, though it would be impossible to say if they are any more frequent than in the general population. There was Karen Grigorian, who leaped from the tallest bridge in Yerevan, Armenia; Norman van Lennep, who jumped from a ship into the North Sea; Lembit Oll, who jumped from a window; Georgy Ilivitsky, who jumped from a window; Curt von Bardeleben, who either jumped or fell from a window; Pertti Poutiainen, whose method of suicide I could not find; Shankar Roy, who hanged himself; and the limitless Vitolins, who jumped from a railway bridge into Latvia’s Gauja River.Antrim, describing his time on a psych ward, wrote that he would say “good luck” to his fellow patients when it was time to be discharged, “good luck, good luck out in the world.” When you are playing chess, you do not have to be out in the world. You are in chess. So I play and play and play, until I am in a full fit and am breathing heavily and am unreachable. Selfhood is a thing of the past, ego is dead, even relations with loved ones are gone. This is it. I am free.[Read: A lesson about living from a survivor of suicide]And then my play strays. I make stupid mistakes. I miss easy chances. Chess as an idea is infinite, but my chess, in practice, is already beginning to decay. It is not about freedom. It is about joy-death.IN CHESS there is a move called a zwischenzug, when the action must pause for an immediate situation to be addressed; perhaps a king is in check, or a queen is imperiled, or an unforeseen move has been made that greatly threatens one’s position. You can use zwischenzug to slip in between the crevices of the normal flow of moves and dramatically alter the course of a game. What once felt inevitable may now never come to pass. The coronavirus pandemic in many ways felt like the world’s longest zwischenzug. Things that in February of 2020 felt inevitable—my partner and I having a wedding, for instance, but for many others, employment, housing—were suddenly frozen in peril. In place of taking the subway to work on the Upper East Side of New York every day, I was now driving up the FDR, one of only three or four cars on the road.[Read: The pandemic’s surprising effect on suicide rates]At the worst parts of the pandemic, I was drinking two or more liters of gin per week. I took up smoking again. I would buy myself a nice bottle of scotch as a reward for making it through the week, and it would last less than a night. I was just coping; I was just doing whatever I needed to do to get through. When I cut back on gin, I drank instead a bottle and a half of wine each night. My evening walks to the liquor store were my way of ending the day. These routines comforted even while they pointed toward dependency. But I am dependent. I am dependent on everything I bring into my life. Among the many displeasures of dealing with suicide, one that glares is the transformation it imposes on life’s joys: Everything becomes, in one way or another, a new defensive tool deployed against choosing death.I’ve written four unpublished novels about the same part of southern Oklahoma, all of them featuring similar characters. They are down-and-out; they are lonely; they love and have beautiful memories of moments when they were happy. They, to me, are realer than real life. Only after several months of playing chess at a heightened clip did I realize that the two impulses—to write, to play—were linked, in the way they are separate from reality. As the Dutch grand master Genna Sosonko wrote of Vitolins: “For him chess was never amusing; his life in chess, outside of everyday concerns, was his real life. He lived in chess, in solitude, as in a voluntary ghetto.” Fiction has been my voluntary ghetto for a decade because it allows me to look at life without actually participating in it. Chess, now, too.ANY SEASONED DEPRESSIVE knows well the fear that settles in when a bad storm is raging and the old protectors are, for whatever reason, failing. Cherished songs or poems, a long day at the bar, listening to a dear friend tell a story—when these balms prove powerless, a different kind of terror takes hold. The hard-learned lesson of the lifelong depressive is that bad spells are not to be “fixed”; there is no “making it better”; rather, these spans of time—sometimes a week, sometimes a year or longer—are to be weathered. The depressive gathers in the course of his daily life particular items, elements that will be useful to him when, inevitably, the next period of joy-death occurs. But when that store cupboard proves useless, a new thought dawns: This may be the one that finally kills me, and I will have no defense against it. So maybe, today, chess.It is difficult to explain suicide to people who do not think of it constantly. Difficult in the first because it is so unpleasant to discuss. Relations are burdened by it. Co-workers of course are not meant to hear of it. Pets help. What I think of most when I think of a bad depressive spell, a spell that brings on near-hourly thoughts of suicide, is endurance. How much have I already endured, and how much is there left to be endured. Anyone who has suffered a bad low streak—and here I mean the kind of lowness that makes bridges unwalkable—can tell you (or try to) how bad it can really get. Once you’ve gone through it, there is no escaping not just the terror of having been afflicted, but also the exhaustion of knowing all that’s left to endure when a new storm arrives. How one survived the previous depression seems miraculous; knowing what one will have to endure to survive the next one can be mentally crippling in its own right, the way a person with a chronic illness quivers when the first sign of returned symptoms makes itself known. It’s here; now I will suffer.The nastiest trick of a suicidal spell is that it demolishes all time; there is no remembering the time before it; there is no belief that there will be a time after. In this sense it is intoxicatingly freeing. One has never been so free, at least as regards the imprisonment of time. Free to do what, though? Not live. Another thing suicide takes is the sense that life is to be filled with activities, joys, hobbies, gratitude for loves and blessings. Instead, during a suicidal spell, life is to be survived. Trains are dangerous; belts are dangerous; long solo rides on the highway are dangerous; too much to drink, dangerous; Hart Crane’s Complete Poems, dangerous. But for me, for these past five years, chess has been not-dangerous. I’ve played it too much now to “enjoy” it, but at the very least, it does not make me think of death. Nabokov writes that chess is an unstable thing. Well, it is, but one does not have to die to try it again.IT WAS in November of 2020 that Liz had the miscarriage. It was a horrific time for many reasons, not least of which was the cone of silence that descends over people experiencing such a loss. It was around Thanksgiving, and Liz had not told anyone, and so she was forced to still sit through a holiday dinner, my older brother and his wife’s two perfect children seated right next to her. She grew impatient and angry and sad very quickly. She behaved badly, I felt, and when we fought about it, we both sensed that something had frayed. The miscarriage might signal our end, too. She discussed going back to Seattle to stay with her father for a while. We haggled over our three cats.That night, after Liz went to bed, I sat on our couch downstairs with my younger brother, talking about this and many other things late into the night. Though Liz had asked me to keep the miscarriage between us, I broke that confidence and shared with my brother what had happened.In the morning, Liz confronted me. She had overheard us when I’d shared the miscarriage news, and she was justly angry. We fought. I grew more and more furious (not with her, with myself), though I could not explain that I was furious because now I did not know if suicide—my suicide; the way I’ve had to, each day, watch the train go by and talk myself out of kissing the 6—was something she’d also overheard us discussing. I had, for more than five years, kept it out of the relationship, but now if I did not address it, it might hang there as something that she’d overheard, but lay hidden. I told her, as best I could, that, as long as I could remember, I’d struggled with suicide. In a major way, I said, trying to emphasize this point. Every day, I said, and then I began to cry. She said that it was all right, and I apologized for the unfairness of this revelation coming while she was grieving, too. She said that she understood, and that it didn’t matter.HOW IT OFTEN GOES: All morning I play poorly. I wake early, I feed the cats, I make coffee, I arrange my daughter’s breakfast, and soon I’ve lost six games in a row. Top players say you should play only a handful of games a day, but this does not deter me. I play more. I play until I can no longer imagine playing. I walk away from the computer, read some, write some, and then I have to play another, and another. Whatever happens today, I will play my 40 games. I play for reasons beyond my control; I play for respite from the rest of myself.[Read: The father-son talk I never expected to have]On the day my daughter was born, a new clock started. It is the countdown to when she’ll discover this inextinguishable urge I carry, but also the countdown to when I might decide to leave her, when the pain of being alive might possibly become too much: freedom, and control. Chess is about freedom, and control. Addiction is about freedom, and control. Depression and suicide and living through an age of catastrophes—these things are about freedom, and control. Admitting to dealing with suicide often necessitates an immediate promise that one will never succumb to the urge, but such promises are empty by nature. They fail to see the point. The point is that no such promise can be made.All folks have this clock, but if you deal with suicide, yours is slightly different: You feel at all moments that you could be barreling toward the exact second when you will decide enough is enough. Having a child adds yet another layer to this; this clock now affects the person I swear to myself again and again that I will never hurt on purpose.I continue to play chess, though I hate it now. One of the brutal parts about having an addictive personality is the inevitability of this joy-death. A new thing enters my life, I love it deeply and passionately, and already I know that it’s only so long until this thing I love becomes another thing that tortures. I no longer play for creative beauty or intellectual surprise. I play because I cannot stop.Knowing this does not give me power over myself any more than knowing about gravity gives me the ability to float. I know that I am simply to wait; soon the addiction will jump, and I will find myself doing something else for that dopamine hit. It might be playing with my new daughter; it might be scanning lines of poems to see how commas work. For now, moving pieces over a board keeps me from entertaining too seriously some of the more terrifying thoughts rolling around in the dark rooms of the warehouse of my brain. I keep the power cut off from those unsafe rooms as often as I can. Instead, I take out my phone, and I begin another game: e4, e5, Nf3, Nc6, Bc4—the Italian opening is on the board, and I have, again, survived. Simple as it may seem, by running the power elsewhere, I make sure—for now—that those deadly rooms stay quiet.

theatlantic.com

Paul George agrees to 4-year deal with 76ers: report

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foxnews.com

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washingtonpost.com

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abcnews.go.com

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foxnews.com

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foxnews.com

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newsweek.com

Simone Biles Qualifies for Her Third Straight Olympics in Spectacular Style

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thedailybeast.com

Hurricane Beryl approaches Caribbean’s Windward Islands as Category 3 storm

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abcnews.go.com

Caitlin Clark's future is 'so bright,' WNBA legend Diana Taurasi says

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washingtonpost.com

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foxnews.com

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washingtonpost.com

Simone Biles Secures Spot At Third Consecutive Olympic Games After Impressive Trials Win

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‘Janet Planet’ came from another world: Western Massachusetts

Director Annie Baker and star Julianne Nicholson grew up in the region. Their new film, “Janet Planet,” embraces its funky, overgrown normal.

washingtonpost.com

DNC host city's major newspaper calls second Biden term ‘a ridiculous idea’; urges him to drop out of race

As the aftermath of the 2024 presidential debate settles into the minds of voters, “The Chicago Tribune" pleads for President Biden to drop out of the race.

foxnews.com

It’s do-or-die for USMNT vs. Uruguay — and maybe for Gregg Berhalter, too

Coach Gregg Berhalter and his U.S. men are in a precarious position even before taking on powerful Uruguay in their Copa América group-play finale Monday.

washingtonpost.com

As China backslides on women’s rights, the U.S. can step up

Xi Jinping has turned back the clock on women’s roles in society and the workplace.

washingtonpost.com

Browns News: Amari Cooper Didn't Hold Back About His Absence at Minicamp

Browns wide receiver Amari Cooper didn't hold back about why he missed minicamp.

newsweek.com

The Liberal Alliance Confronts the Axis of Resistance

Like a lightning strike illuminating a dim landscape, the twin invasions of Israel and Ukraine have brought a sudden recognition: What appeared to be, until now, disparate and disorganized challenges to the United States and its allies is actually something broader, more integrated, more aggressive, and more dangerous. Over the past several years, the world has hardened into two competing blocs. One is an alliance of liberal-minded, Western-oriented countries that includes NATO as well as U.S. allies in Asia and Oceania, with the general if inconsistent cooperation of some non-liberal countries such as Saudi Arabia and Vietnam: a Liberal Alliance, for short. The other bloc is led by the authoritarian dyad of Russia and Iran, but it extends to anti-American states such as North Korea, militias such as Hezbollah, terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad, and paramilitaries such as the Wagner Group: an Axis of Resistance, as some of its members have accurately dubbed it.With the adoption of the Abraham Accords normalizing Israel’s relationship with several Arab countries, and with the accession of Sweden and Finland into NATO, the Liberal Alliance has forged tighter ties. In response, the Axis of Resistance has adopted a more offensive posture. “This is an entente that is really coming together in a way that should alarm us quite a lot,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick Kagan said recently in an interview with the journalist Bill Kristol. “These countries disagree about a lot of things; they don’t share a common ideology. But they do share a common enemy: us. And the thing that they agree on is that we are a major obstacle to their objectives and their plans, and therefore that it’s in each of their interest to help the others take us down.”The Axis of Resistance does not have a unifying ideology, but it does have the shared goal of diminishing U.S. influence, especially in the Middle East and Eurasia, and rolling back liberal democracy. Instead of a NATO-like formal structure, it relies on loose coordination and opportunistic cooperation among its member states and its network of militias, proxies, and syndicates. Militarily, it cannot match the U.S. and NATO in a direct confrontation, so it instead seeks to exhaust and demoralize the U.S. and its allies by harrying them relentlessly, much as hyenas harry and exhaust a lion.The Axis has thus developed into an acephalous networked actor, its member states operating semi-independently yet interdependently, taking cues from one another and sharing resources and dividing duties, jumping in and out of action as opportunities arise and circ*mstances dictate. One country will help another bust sanctions while receiving military equipment from a third. As The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum has reported, Russia, Iran, and China have also joined forces on the propaganda front, launching waves of disinformation toward the West. Although the Axis normally takes care to keep its hostilities beneath the threshold that would trigger state-to-state military conflict, it can and will resort to direct military confrontation if it sees need or advantage.In the two current conflicts, Ukraine and Israel act not only on their own behalf but also as surrogates for the broader alliance. Neither Ukraine nor Israel can sustain its position without outside support. That support, therefore, is a primary target of the Axis, which coordinates across both fronts. Russia has ditched its previously warm relationship with Israel to embrace Iran, which supplies the Kremlin with weaponry and equipment. North Korea likewise supplies the Russian war effort, and it recently entered into a security pact with Russia; Hamas praises North Korea as “part of [our] alliance.” China, while keeping some distance from the Ukraine conflict militarily, has declared “unlimited partnership” with Russia, helps Russia defeat economic sanctions, and provides industrial and technological support for Russia’s war effort. Meanwhile, Russia props up the pro-Iran regime in Syria, and militias aligned with Iran use missiles and drones to strike Israel from Gaza and Lebanon, U.S. forces from Iraq and Syria, and Saudi Arabia from Yemen. Even the weakest and poorest of the Axis forces, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, disrupt regional shipping virtually at will.[Arash Azizi: Iran’s proxies are out of control]The Axis’s principals make no secret of their designs. “We are fighting in Ukraine not against Ukrainians but against the unipolar world,” the Russian ideologue Alexander Dugin said at a conference in Moscow in February. “And our inevitable victory will be not only ours but a victory for all humanity … This is not a return to the old bipolar model but the beginning of a completely new world architecture.” According to the Middle East Media Research Institute, Hossein Salami, the commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said in a speech in November, “The enemies of the Islamic regime were, and are, the enemies of all humanity, and today the world is rising up against them.” America, he predicted, will “lose [in] the political arena” and “will also fail economically … Be certain that the morning of victory is nigh.”In the Barack Obama years, it seemed tenable to dismiss Russia as a weak and declining regional power that could slow but not block the advance of liberal democracy, and Iran as a vicious but brittle and unsustainable regime that could needle America but not challenge it. Both countries, after all, seemed beset with social, economic, and demographic problems that could hobble them in the long run. But the long run is taking its time arriving. For the moment, the Axis is playing offense and setting the tempo. Even if it cannot drive the United States completely out of Europe and the Middle East, it may well succeed in weakening NATO, dominating the Middle East, and, what is perhaps most significant, calling into question the sustainability of Western-style liberalism. As it aligns its goals and strategies across far-flung theaters, the Axis of Resistance is emerging, alongside the rise of China, as a generational challenge to the Liberal Alliance.Americans, accustomed to gauging power by counting aircraft carriers and nuclear warheads, have until now underestimated the ambition and sophistication of the forces arrayed against us. The Axis’s strategy of harrying and exhausting us might very well work, and head-on military responses can be at best only partially effective against it. The Alliance must build a network of its own, one that can coordinate across multiple fronts to contain, deflect, and deter the Axis’s provocations. And only one of the two people running for president is capable of doing that.In June 2021, at an annual summit in Brussels, NATO reaffirmed its commitment to the eventual membership of Ukraine, which was also in negotiations to join the European Union. Eight months later, Russian tanks were streaming toward Kyiv. NATO, the Americans and others said, could not extend its security guarantee to Ukraine during a hot war with Russia. The NATO-Ukraine deal was off, at least for the time being.On September 22, 2023, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, told the United Nations General Assembly that Israel and Saudi Arabia were “at the cusp” of a deal normalizing relations—a “dramatic breakthrough” and a “historic peace.” Two weeks later, Hamas, an Iran-backed terrorist organization, invaded Israel, killed 1,200 Israelis and foreigners, took at least 240 hostages, and set off a war. The Israeli-Saudi deal was off, at least for the time being.For Russia and, likewise, for Hamas and Iran, these attacks were epic gambles, the kind of risks leaders take once in a generation. Although the gambles were made in different theaters, their cause was the same: Both actors saw time running out to stop changes they feared.Vladimir Putin, although once more conciliatory, today describes the Liberal Alliance as Russia’s “enemy” or “adversary,” depending on the translation. He views its geopolitical goals as fundamentally incompatible with his regime’s continued authoritarian rule. In this, Putin is correct. His incorrigibly antidemocratic and corrupt government derives legitimacy from its claim of defending Russia from foreign meddling, Western humiliation, and “LGBT propaganda.” For a time, several U.S. administrations hoped to rub along with Putinism, or outlast it, or distract it with consumer goods and McDonald’s, betting that Putin and his mafia might be content to loot billions from the economy and stash the money in foreign bank accounts and mansions. But in February 2022, Putin dashed those hopes.Why just then? Putin was not primarily concerned about NATO enlargement. NATO posed no offensive threat to Putin, and a stable and constructive working relationship was his for the asking. But Putin came to perceive any such arrangement as capitulation, and he came to see Ukraine’s independence as a historical aberration and a kind of personal insult. After the Orange Revolution turned Ukraine toward Europe in 2014, he responded by invading and seizing Crimea. That, predictably, strengthened Ukraine’s fear of Russia and its resolve to cast its lot with the West.In 2014, when Russia’s “little green men” made fast work of Crimea, the Ukrainian state was riddled with corruption and barely democratic. But by 2022, under President Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine was tackling corruption, Westernizing, and consolidating democratic rule. Also, with the help of American military aid (the very aid that Donald Trump held up in an effort to extort political dirt from Zelensky), Ukraine was developing the capacity to defend itself. Putin could see that if he did not intervene soon, Ukraine would join the Liberal Alliance culturally through its Western ties, militarily through NATO, and economically through the European Union. Putin could foresee Russia’s sphere of influence crumbling, and with it, his own fearsome reputation. Russia feared losing a historically significant geographic buffer against invasion from the West. But much worse, Ukraine’s escape from Russia’s orbit might inspire other countries to follow. Liberal democracy, not just NATO tanks, would roll up to Russia’s border. From America’s standpoint, Putin was behaving imperialistically and militaristically. But from Putin’s standpoint, he was acting defensively against the relentless expansion of the Liberal Alliance. One way or another, Zelensky had to go.Putin’s Russia had sometimes positioned itself as a dealmaker and even a peacemaker, cultivating relations with Israel while keeping a deniable distance from Iran—but the Ukraine invasion, and the swift and vigorous Western reaction, disambiguated the situation, firmly planting Russia in the Axis. Despite Russia’s economic and demographic decline and its stunted and sclerotic politics, its size, strength, resources, and lack of scruples transformed the Axis from a regional menace into a global one. With its successful interventions in Syria, its extraterritorial assassinations, and its aggressive propaganda and cyber operations, Russia has reached far beyond its neighborhood. Putin understands his economic and military weakness relative to the Liberal Alliance, but he is betting that he can divide the Alliance and outlast it—that he can inflict and tolerate more pain. He can look to far-right parties and leaders in America and Europe to help him. His plan is hardly fanciful. If Trump returns to office, Putin might win his bet, with America’s abandonment of its commitments to NATO.Iran has its own plan, which also relies on harrying, dividing, exhausting, and ultimately rolling back the Alliance. Tehran has spent billions of dollars in aid, and years of military mentoring, to encircle Israel with antagonistic proxies: Hamas to the west, in Gaza; Hezbollah to the north, in Lebanon; Shiite militias to the east, in Syria and Iraq; and the Houthis to the southeast. Iran, writes Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, “is indirectly occupying four Arab capitals: Baghdad, Beirut, Damascus and Sana”—perhaps an exaggeration, but not much of one. Only along its Egyptian and Jordanian flanks does Israel enjoy any kind of security. Iran’s proxies and clients, while maintaining various degrees of nominal independence from Tehran, can harry Israel relentlessly—not just today or next year, but forever. The same proxy network can needle Saudi Arabia and America to keep them constantly jumping. “Iran has coordinated actions taken among its various proxies, including the recent attacks against U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria and the Yemen Houthis’ activities, seeking both to impose costs on the United States for supporting Israel and also to limit additional U.S. assistance,” Katherine Zimmerman of the American Enterprise Institute wrote in January. “To date, Iraq-based groups have attacked U.S. forces at least sixty-six times in Iraq and Syria since the start of this conflict, injuring over sixty troops.”Like Russia, Iran knows that it cannot win a direct confrontation with the United States; however, also like Russia, it believes that it won’t have to. The pressure of encirclement and relentless harrying will, in its view, erode Israel’s military, divide its democracy, drive away its entrepreneurs and investors, and demoralize its population. Lacking the conditions that make a modern liberal democracy viable, Israel will collapse within 25 years, Iran’s leaders believe. Meanwhile, tied down by Iran’s unpredictable and relentless proxies and reluctant to strike directly at Tehran, the United States will become exhausted and look to exit the region, which it longs to do anyway. As Israel weakens and America withdraws, the way will be clear for Tehran’s mullahs to dominate the region, and the impotence of modern liberal democracy will be exposed.America, Israel, and the Sunni Arab states are well aware of Iran’s strategy. Whatever the Sunni countries’ tensions with Israel and the U.S., they regard being dominated by revolutionary Iran as far worse. They have noticed that Saudi Arabia was helpless to defend itself from hundreds of drone and missile attacks by the Iranian-backed Houthis on Saudi oil facilities and cities, including a 2019 attack that knocked half the supply of the kingdom’s oil exports offline. They have noticed, too, that Saudi Arabia’s effort to flex its military muscles in neighboring Yemen was a fiasco. They accurately perceive Israel as the lesser threat, which is why Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, followed by Morocco and Sudan, took the dramatic step of normalizing their relations with Israel.For the Liberal Alliance, though, an even greater prize seemed within reach. Threatened by Iran, Saudi Arabia wants—and needs—a formal defense commitment from the United States, beyond the informal support it enjoys already. It wants access to Israeli technology. It wants nuclear power, to hedge against a post-oil future and a nuclear-armed Iran. By October 2023, negotiations were reportedly well advanced for a deal combining those elements with formal normalization of Saudi-Israeli relations and tangible steps toward Palestinian statehood.[Michael Schuman: China may be the Ukraine war’s big winner]From Iran’s point of view—and, by extension, from Hamas’s—that deal would have been catastrophic. It would effectively have ended the 75-year Arab-Israeli conflict, which Iran has exploited to inflame the region and prevent an anti-Iranian consolidation. Worse still, Israeli-Saudi normalization would turn the tables on Iran’s encirclement strategy; now Iran and its allies would be the ones facing encirclement, in the form of a wall of U.S.- and Israel-aligned Arab states from North Africa to the Persian Gulf. In an interview with Thomas Friedman in January, Secretary of State Antony Blinken put the case straightforwardly: “If you take a regional approach, and if you pursue integration with security, with a Palestinian state, all of a sudden you have a region that’s come together in ways that answer the most profound questions that Israel has tried to answer for years, and what has heretofore been its single biggest concern in terms of security, Iran, is suddenly isolated along with its proxies, and will have to make decisions about what it wants its future to be.” Moreover, from Hamas’s point of view, the deal would add insult to injury by bolstering the Palestinian Authority, Hamas’s bitter rival in Palestinian politics.And so, Iran and its client Hamas, like Putin, believed that they had to act before they found themselves walled in. They were willing to take incalculable risks, and suffer severe losses, by lighting their regions on fire.If the clock were stopped right now, the military contest would probably be declared a draw. The wars being waged by Israel and Ukraine both appear likely to end in some form of stalemate. Israel’s military effort to eradicate Hamas will be imperfect and impermanent, and it is incurring unsustainable costs to Israel’s international reputation and relationships. Ukraine, for all its skill and pluck, lacks the manpower and resources to evict Russia from every inch of its territory. Even if American support were not already wavering, Ukraine could not indefinitely throw men and materiel at entrenched Russian positions; even if international support for the campaign against Hamas were not already eroding, Israel could not indefinitely throw its labor force into firefights in Gaza.Militarily, in Ukraine, Putin can win by not losing. To be sure, he had hoped to topple Kyiv’s democratic government and establish a vassal state. But he can still intimidate Russia’s neighbors, divide the Liberal Alliance, and show that Western power cannot be counted on against determined Russian aggression. Even if he is temporarily stymied in Ukraine, he would be in a position to resume aggression there and elsewhere at a time of his choosing. Moreover, he can use the threat of aggression, plus relentless economic and political pressure, to strangle Ukraine’s economy and influence its politics.The same is true for Hamas and Iran. Even though they have no hope of defeating Israel militarily, their show of force in Israel and across the region can intimidate the Arab states, divide the Liberal Alliance, and demonstrate the unreliability of Western power. By threatening aggression, keeping Israel on a permanent war footing, and destabilizing the region, they can strangle Israel’s economy and prevent Iran’s rivals from consolidating. On both fronts, the Axis can win by depriving its target countries of the conditions needed to sustain prosperity, democracy, and domestic solidarity.Against this asymmetrical strategy, conventional military responses are of limited use. They will be necessary on occasion, but the U.S. would run itself ragged attempting to respond militarily to provocations across the Axis network, which is exactly as the Axis intends. The two current hot conflicts, in Ukraine and Israel, have already depleted American means and will.Fortunately, whether the Axis wins its two wild gambles depends only partially on battlefield outcomes. What matters as much—indeed, more, from a U.S. point of view—is whether the U.S. and its allies can deny Russia and Iran their principal strategic aim by handing them major diplomatic setbacks. That could deter them and other powers (notably China, which is looking on and taking notes) from trying similar gambits in the future. In other words, deterrence can be established strategically as well as militarily.In an article published in Foreign Affairs last year, just before Hamas attacked Israel, Jake Sullivan, the Biden administration’s national security adviser, touted a “self-reinforcing latticework of cooperation.” He pointed to the global coalition of countries supporting Ukraine against Russia; the expansion of NATO to include Finland and Sweden; deepened U.S.-EU cooperation; the thaw of relations between Japan and South Korea; AUKUS, a security partnership between the U.S., Australia, and Britain (an effort that Japan might informally join); the Quad cooperative framework between the U.S., Australia, India, and Japan; a new coalition with India, Israel, the U.S., and the United Arab Emirates, called I2U2; a 47-country effort to counter cybercrime and ransomware; and more.Although talking about countering a network with a lattice sounds gimmicky, the concept is substantive and sound. The Axis is well aware that the Liberal Alliance seeks to contain its power through security agreements, sanctions, and commercial ties. The Alliance would thus establish what the Australian journalist and podcaster Josh Szeps has called “an arc of anti-Iranian and potentially anti-Chinese and anti-Russian allies stretching from South Asia through the Arab Gulf states, through North Africa, and into the European Union.” Such a grouping is far better positioned than any individual state—even if that state is as powerful as America—to outlast and outmaneuver the Axis’s strategy of harrying and exhausting the Alliance. It could operate across the Northern Hemisphere to crimp the Axis’s financial and economic resources, to blunt the Axis’s weaponization of energy and commodities, and to deflect and cushion the effects of provocations.The most important steps that can be taken toward building out this vision are the two that Iran and Russia most fear and loathe: Saudi-Israeli normalization and Ukrainian NATO-ization. Both measures are desirable as security measures in their own right. More than that, however, they would constitute dramatic strategic defeats for the Axis. NATO membership—in tandem with European Union membership—would put Ukraine beyond Putin’s military and economic reach. Putin might wind up with a chunk of territory in eastern Ukraine, but he will have lost the subservient and illiberal satellite he sought to secure. In the Middle East, normal relations among Israel, the Saudis, and most of the region’s other Arab states, along with a U.S.-Saudi defense pact and progress toward a Palestinian state, would greatly reduce the reach, influence, and perceived success of Iran and its proxies.Have no illusions: This is hard. Russia and Iran will try to spoil any deals by prolonging the conflicts. NATO is reluctant to provide a standard Article 5 security guarantee to Ukraine while Ukraine is in a shooting war with Russia, the Saudis are unlikely to resume negotiations on normalization while Israel is killing Palestinians, and Israel is unlikely to proceed toward a Palestinian state under its current far-right government. In both theaters, there will need to be compromises and work-arounds, as well as some stabilization of the military situations.China also figures into the equation—albeit in a complicated way. Unlike the Axis of Resistance, China is a full-spectrum competitor of the United States, one that challenges America economically, militarily, and ideologically. But although it is adversarial, China is far more deeply integrated into, and dependent upon, the global economy than is Russia, Iran, or North Korea, and so its interests are conflicted. On the one hand, it benefits from the Axis’s strategy of keeping the Liberal Alliance off-balance and overextended, which is presumably why it sustains Russia’s war against Ukraine; on the other hand, it does not benefit from a chaotic world in which its export-dependent economy is disrupted. And so, although China’s backing increases the Axis’s resilience, China’s influence may also provide a source of restraint. For the Alliance, the trick is to separate China from the Axis and exploit their divergences.There are domestic hurdles for the Alliance too. The U.S. Senate might balk at a defense treaty with the Saudis. Turkey and Hungary might try to block Ukraine’s entry into NATO. Although the Axis does not have many overt friends in the West, it does benefit from the support of a collection of American and European populist, isolationist, and authoritarian constituencies—MAGA World chief among them. It also benefits from anti-colonialism, anti-Zionism, anti-capitalism, and other leftist ideologies in the West that see Hamas as a liberator and the liberal project as oppressive.Then there is the biggest potential challenge of all: Donald Trump.Russia and Iran might well have taken their gambles no matter who was president. If Joe Biden did anything to provoke their attacks, it was the progress he made toward building a sustainable liberal coalition. Some analysts, pointing to the bungled U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, blame the Biden administration for failing to deter adventurism by Moscow and Tehran. There may be something to that charge, even though the Afghanistan withdrawal was negotiated and sealed by Trump, not Biden. A better argument, though, is that Trump’s isolationism, transactionalism, and caprice were the larger factors emboldening the Axis. It was Trump who let attacks on Saudi Arabian oil facilities go unanswered in 2019, diminishing the Saudis’ confidence in American protection and increasing the Iranians’ sense of impunity. By scrapping an agreement to freeze Iran’s nuclear program, Trump eased the way for Iran to reach the weapons threshold. By truckling to Putin in public and delaying military aid to Ukraine in private, Trump may have contributed to Putin’s overconfidence. By sowing doubt about America’s commitment to NATO, and by implying that any U.S. commitment is purely transactional, Trump undermined confidence in the Alliance.In his 2024 campaign, Trump has gone much further than he did in the past toward repudiating America’s commitment to NATO. Although he might be able to push ahead with an Israeli-Saudi deal (his record negotiating the Abraham Accords was a bright spot), that deal will require deft handling of the Palestinian issue, in which Trump has shown no interest. Most important, however, is that Trump’s mercurial isolationism signals to the world that Americans’ will to build and maintain alliances is flagging, and it signals to the Axis that America is ready to be chased away.Still, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office, the U.S. and the Liberal Alliance hold some strong cards. Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, and the Western-oriented counties in their regions need a new security order—and they know it. Russia’s and Hamas’s invasions have demonstrated just how vulnerable the democracies and their allies are, and how ruthless and bloody-minded their antagonists are. If Putin and Hamas did nothing else, they shattered illusions that the status quo was adequate or sustainable. No wonder the Saudis have signaled their continued desire for American protection and normal relations with Israel, that EU membership for Ukraine is on a fast track, and that NATO’s members have agreed that Ukraine will join.[Michael Young: The axis of resistance has been gathering strength]The latticework of cooperation, as Jake Sullivan termed it, is not notional; the world got a vivid preview in April of what it looks like. Iran and its Yemeni proxies launched more than 300 missiles and drones at Israel. All but a handful were shot down, and the remainder caused only minor damage. As significant as the interceptions was the coalition that conducted them, which included U.S., British, and French forces in the region. “Perhaps more striking,” Lawrence Haas wrote, “leading Arab nations also came to Israel’s assistance. Saudi Arabia—which, we must remember, has not yet normalized relations with the Jewish state—and the United Arab Emirates were among several Gulf states that relayed intelligence about Iran’s planned attack, while Jordan’s military reportedly shot down dozens of Iranian drones in its airspace that were headed toward Israel.” In the end, what the strike demonstrated was not Iran’s ability to attack but the Liberal Alliance’s ability to defend.On balance, the crises in Europe and the Middle East, horrible though they have been, have improved the odds of an endgame in which Ukraine is a NATO democracy; in which the U.S., Israel, and the Arab world are linked together to contain Iran; and in which America and its allies together turn the tables on the Axis of Resistance. That strategic endgame, above and beyond any particular military outcome in Europe or the Middle East, is the victory that the U.S. should seek.

theatlantic.com

Rural Republicans Are Fighting to Save Their Public Schools

Drive an hour south of Nashville into the rolling countryside of Marshall County, Tennessee—past horse farms, mobile homes, and McMansions—and you will arrive in Chapel Hill, population 1,796. It’s the birthplace of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who helped found the Ku Klux Klan. And it’s the home of Todd Warner, one of the most unlikely and important defenders of America’s besieged public schools.Warner is the gregarious 53-year-old owner of PCS of TN, a 30-person company that does site grading for shopping centers and other construction projects. The second-term Republican state representative “absolutely” supports Donald Trump, who won Marshall County by 50 points in 2020. Warner likes to talk of the threats posed by culture-war bogeymen, such as critical race theory; diversity, equity, and inclusion; and Sharia law.And yet, one May afternoon in his office, under a TV playing Fox News and a mounted buck that he’d bagged in Alabama, he told me about his effort to halt Republican Governor Bill Lee’s push for private-school vouchers in Tennessee. Warner’s objections are rooted in the reality of his district: It contains not a single private school, so to Warner, taxpayer money for the new vouchers would clearly be flowing elsewhere, mostly to well-off families in metro Nashville, Memphis, and other cities whose kids are already enrolled in private schools. Why should his small-town constituents be subsidizing the private education of metropolitan rich kids? “I’m for less government, but it’s government’s role to provide a good public education,” he said. “If you want to send your kid to private school, then you should pay for it.”The coronavirus pandemic provided a major boost to supporters of school vouchers, who argued that extended public-school closures—and the on-screen glimpses they afforded parents of what was being taught to their kids—underscored the need to give parents greater choice in where to send their children. Eleven states, led by Florida and Arizona, now have universal or near-universal vouchers, meaning that even affluent families can receive thousands of dollars toward their kids’ private-school tuition.[Read: Salvaging education in rural America]The beneficiaries in these states are mostly families whose kids were already enrolled in private schools, not families using the vouchers to escape struggling public schools. In larger states, the annual taxpayer tab for the vouchers is close to $1 billion, leaving less money for public schools at a time when they already face the loss of federal pandemic aid.Voucher advocates, backed by a handful of billionaire funders, are on the march to bring more red and purple states into the fold for “school choice,” their preferred terminology for vouchers. And again and again, they are running up against rural Republicans like Warner, who are joining forces with Democratic lawmakers in a rare bipartisan alliance. That is, it’s the reddest regions of these red and purple states that are putting up some of the strongest resistance to the conservative assault on public schools.Conservative orthodoxy at the national level holds that parents must be given an out from a failing public-education system that force-feeds children progressive fads. But many rural Republican lawmakers have trouble reconciling this with the reality in their districts, where many public schools are not only the sole educational option, but also the largest employer and the hub of the community—where everyone goes for holiday concerts, Friday-night football, and basketball. Unlike schools in blue metro areas, rural schools mostly reopened for in-person instruction in the fall of 2020, and they are far less likely to be courting controversy on issues involving race and gender.Demonizing public education in the abstract is one thing. But it’s quite another when the target is the school where you went, where your kids went. For Todd Warner, that was Forrest High School, in Chapel Hill. “My three kids graduated from public schools, and they turned out just fine,” he said. “Ninety-five percent of our students, our future business owners, our future leaders, are going to the public schools. They’re not going to private. Why take it away from them?”The response from voucher proponents to the resistance from fellow Republicans has taken several forms, all of which implicitly grant the critics’ case that voucher programs currently offer little benefit to rural areas. In some states, funding for vouchers is being paired with more money for public schools, to offer support for rural districts. In Ohio, voucher advocates are proposing to fund the construction of new private schools in rural areas where none exist, giving families places to use vouchers.But the overriding Republican response to rural skeptics has been a political threat: Get with the program on vouchers, or else.That’s what played out this year in Ohio’s Eighty-Third District, in the state’s rural northwest. Last summer, Ohio adopted universal private-school vouchers, with middle- and working-class families eligible for up to $8,407 per high-school student and even the very wealthiest families eligible for almost $1,000 per child. Private-school leaders urged already enrolled families to seek the money, and more than 140,000 families applied for vouchers. The cost has exceeded estimates, approaching $1 billion, with most of it going to the parochial schools that dominate the state’s private-school landscape. Voucher advocates are now pushing to create educational savings accounts to cover tuition at unchartered private schools that are not eligible for the vouchers.[Read: Do private school vouchers promote segregation?]School leaders in Hardin County—with its cornfields, solar-panel installations, and what was once one of the largest dairy farms east of the Mississippi—are deeply worried that vouchers stand to hurt county residents. Only a single small private school is within reach, one county to the south, which means that virtually no local taxpayers would see any of that voucher money themselves—it would be going to private-school families in Columbus, Cincinnati, and other large population centers. (And under Ohio law, the very public schools that are losing students must pay to transport any students who attend private institutions within a half-hour drive of the public school.)Craig Hurley, the superintendent for Hardin’s Upper Scioto Valley District, is a solidly built 52-year-old who calls himself a staunch conservative. He attended the district’s schools and has worked in them for 30 years. He knows that they provide meals to 400 students, nearly two-thirds of whom qualify for free and reduced lunch. Even though the high school can muster only 20 players for football—basketball fares better—the fans come out to cheer. “Our district is our community,” he told me. “The more you separate that, the less of a community we’re going to be.”Hurley has calculated that local schools are receiving less state funding per student than what private schools now receive for the maximum possible voucher amount. Yet private schools face almost none of the accountability that public schools do regarding how the money is spent and what outcomes it achieves. “We have fiscal responsibility on all of it, on every dime, every penny we spend,” he said. “There’s no audit for them.” Not to mention, he added, “a private school doesn’t have to accept all students, right? They pick who they want.”Thirteen miles east, Chad Thrush, the school superintendent in Kenton, the county seat, noted that his school system is the second-largest employer in town, after Graphic Packaging, which makes plastic cups for vending machines. He worries that the rising cost of the voucher program will erode state funding for public schools, and he worries about what would happen to his district if a new private school opened in town. Thrush understands the appeal of vouchers for parents who want a leg up for their kid. But, he told me, “we need to be looking at how we’re preparing all students to be successful, not just my student.”As it happens, the two superintendents have a crucial ally in Columbus: their state representative, Jon Cross. Like Warner in Tennessee, Cross is an ardent pro-Trump conservative, and deeply opposed to private-school vouchers. At a legislative hearing last year, he cut loose at a lobbyist for Americans for Prosperity—the conservative advocacy group founded by the industrialist Koch brothers—who was testifying for vouchers, one of the organization’s long-standing causes. “Wouldn’t we be better off taking some money in our budget to fix the schools?” Cross said. “I tell you what, I really like my public schools. I’m really proud that Carson and Connor, my sons, go to Kenton City Schools and get an education from there just like I did.”Cross’s resistance to vouchers earned him the animus of the state Senate president, Matt Huffman, an avid voucher proponent. Huffman encouraged a primary challenge of Cross. So greatly did local school officials value Cross’s support that shortly before the March 19 primary, they held a public meeting to explain the threat vouchers posed, with Cross in attendance. “If the economy goes bad, are we going to pull $1 billion out for private schools?” Thrush said. Or, he continued, would the public schools be left with less money? Forrest High School in Chapel Hill, Tennessee United States (Whitten Sabbatini for The Atlantic and ProPublica) The schools in Hardin and Marshall Counties are majority white. But some rural Republican legislators in other states have been willing to buck their party leaders on vouchers even in more racially diverse districts. In Georgia, of the 15 Republican state representatives who blocked a voucher proposal last year, more than half came from rural areas with substantial Black populations. One of them was Gerald Greene, who spent more than three decades as a high-school social-studies teacher and has managed to survive as a Republican in his majority-Black district in the state’s southwestern corner after switching parties in 2010.Greene believes vouchers will harm his district. It has a couple of small private schools in it or just outside it—with student bodies that are starkly more white than the district’s public schools—but the majority of his constituents rely on the public schools, and he worries that vouchers will leave less money for them. “I just felt like we were abandoning our public schools,” he told me. “I’m not against private schools at all, but I just did not see how these vouchers would help southwestern Georgia.”After failing to pass a voucher program last year, the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and proponents in the legislature tried again this year, and this time they succeeded, albeit with vouchers more constrained than elsewhere: They can be used only by students in school districts that are ranked in the bottom quartile and whose families make less than 400 percent of the poverty level ($120,000 for a family of four), and their total cost can’t exceed 1 percent of the state’s total education budget, which caps them now at $140 million.Partisan pressures simply became too strong for some skeptical Republicans, including Greene’s counterpart in the Senate, Sam Watson. Seminole County Superintendent Mark Earnest told me about the conversation in which Watson let him know that he was going to have to support the limited vouchers. “They have turned this into a caucus priority. It’s getting very political,” Watson said. “Thanks for letting me know,” Earnest replied, “but all vouchers are bad for public education.” Watson’s response: “I know, but I couldn’t go with the Democrats. Sorry.” (Watson did not respond to a request for comment.)The highest-profile rural Republican resistance to vouchers has come in Texas, the land of Friday Night Lights and far-flung oil-country settlements where the public schools anchor communities. Late last year, the Texas House voted 84–63 to strip vouchers out of a broad education bill. In response, Governor Greg Abbott launched a purge of anti-voucher Republicans in this year’s primaries, backed by millions of dollars from the Pennsylvania mega-donor Jeff Yass, a finance billionaire.Among those targeted was Drew Darby, who represents a sprawling 10-county district in West Texas, and who frames the issue in starkly regional terms: The state’s metro areas depend on his constituents to provide “food, fiber, and hide,” to “tend the oil wells and wind turbines to provide electricity to people who want to be just a little cooler in the cities.” But without good public schools, these rural areas will wither. “Robert Lee, Winters, Sterling, Blackwell,” he said, listing some hamlets—“these communities exist because they have strong public schools. They would literally not exist without a good public-school system.”Darby, a fiscal conservative, is also opposed to a new entitlement for private-school families that is projected to soon cost $2 billion a year. “In rural Texas, there’s not a whole lot of private-school options, and we want our schools to get every dollar they can. This doesn’t add $1, and it’s not good for rural Texas.”Darby managed to stave off his primary challenge, but 11 of the 15 voucher resisters targeted by Abbott lost, several in races so close that they went to a runoff. Abbott is unapologetic: “Congratulations to all of tonight’s winners,” he said after the runoff. “Together, we will ensure the best future for our children.”Also succumbing to his primary challenger was Jon Cross, in western Ohio. His opponent, Ty Mathews, managed to make the campaign about more than just vouchers, taking sides in a bitter leadership split within the GOP caucus. And for all the concerns that local school leaders have about the effect of vouchers, the threat remained abstract to many voters. “I’m not worried about it, because we don’t have the revenue here anyways in this town for anything to be taken from us to be given to a bigger town,” one 60-year-old woman told me after casting her vote for Mathews. A younger woman asked simply: “What exactly are the vouchers?”But in Tennessee, Todd Warner and his allies staved off the threat again this year. To overcome rural resistance, voucher proponents in the Tennessee House felt the need to constrain them and pair them with hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding for public schools, but this was at odds with the state Senate’s more straightforward voucher legislation. The two chambers were unable to come to an agreement before the session’s end in April, by which point the House bill had not even made it to the floor for a vote.For Democratic voucher opponents in the state, the alliance with Warner and other rural Republicans was as helpful as it was unusual. “It was strange,” Representative Sam McKenzie, a Black Democrat from Knoxville, told me. McKenzie compared it to Twins, a movie in which Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito played unlikely fraternal twins: “Representative Warner and I were in lockstep opposition to this voucher scam.”[Watch: Why school choice fails]One voucher supporter, Representative Scott Cepicky, told me he was confident that his side would eventually prevail. “We’ll work on this again next year,” he said. “The governor is committed that we’re going to run on school choice again.” And Americans for Prosperity has made clear that it’s coming after voucher opponents. Its Tennessee state director, Tori Venable, told Warner during the legislative session that “I can’t protect you if you ain’t on the right side of this.” Another conservative group, the American Federation for Children, sent out a text message in March attacking Warner for his opposition to “parental rights,” without using the term vouchers. And a retired teacher in Marshall County, Gwen Warren, told me she and her husband recently got a visit from an Americans for Prosperity canvasser citing Warner’s opposition to vouchers. “She said, ‘We’re going around the neighborhood trying to talk to people about vouchers. We feel like Tennesseans really want the voucher system.’” To which, Warren said, her husband replied, “You’re very much mistaken, lady. We don’t want vouchers in this county, and you need to go away.”Warner remains unfazed by all this. He is pretty sure that his voucher opposition in fact helped him win his seat in 2020, after the incumbent Republican voted for a pilot voucher system limited to Nashville and Memphis. And he notes that no one has registered to challenge him in the state’s August 1 primary. “They tried to find a primary opponent but couldn’t,” he said with a chuckle. “I was born and raised here all my life. My family’s been here since the 18th century. I won’t say I can’t be beat, but bring your big-boy pants and come on, let’s go.”

theatlantic.com

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Will Smith Takes His Redemption Tour to the BET Awards Stage

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