Last week, the Trump administration announced a landmark civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia. The deal would allow the kingdom to develop nuclear power using American technology and could eventually pave the way for uranium enrichment on Saudi soil. But the agreement must first undergo congressional review — and survive President Donald Trump’s social media feed.

When the Trump administration announced its agreement, it made no mention of the possibility of normalizing diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. But that omission and the possibility that Saudi Arabia could eventually enrich uranium alarmed Israelis — and Trump quickly threw in both conditions in a Truth Social post.

The chaos around the agreement comes as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heads to Washington, DC, this week to meet with Trump. The Saudi deal — as well as growing friction over differences on the goals and trajectory of the renewed US war with Iran and frustration in Washington over Israeli military operations in southern Lebanon — will undoubtedly be topics.

Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswame spoke with Michael Koplow, chief policy officer at the Israel Policy Forum, about the relationship between the two countries and its leaders ahead of Netanyahu’s visit. 

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What are we expecting from the meeting between Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump?

I suspect this will be among the most tense meetings that they have had because there are a number of issues on the table where President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu are on different pages. The issue that they used to be on the same page about was Iran, and I don’t think that is the case anymore. 

As we’ve seen the Iran war unfold, the Israeli view is still the view that they had at the outset of the war, which is that this is necessary to deal with Iran’s nuclear program, with its ballistic missiles, with its proxies. And ultimately what the Israelis wanted to see, and what they still want to see, is a different regime in Iran. President Trump may still share those goals, but it’s pretty clear that, as the war has not gone the way he anticipated, he’s looking for an exit strategy and his main focus is the Strait of Hormuz, which is not something that the Israelis care about at all. 

I think at this point, when Prime Minister Netanyahu arrives at the White House, he’s probably going to try to convince the president that the original goal should be on the table, that the US and Israel should keep going, and President Trump seems to have a different view of things.

And now we have this new deal with Saudi Arabia. Was Israel taken by surprise by the deal? 

It absolutely took Israel by surprise. When the deal was announced on Wednesday, it was a deal to provide Saudi Arabia with nuclear power and nuclear infrastructure. There was no mention of Israel. There was no mention of normalization. There was no mention of anything outside of the bounds of a nuclear agreement. 

President Trump on Thursday put out his Truth Social where he said that the deal is absolutely contingent on Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords. And what’s curious about that is that when the deal was announced, there was no mention of it, and the deal was actually signed. So either the president is intending to change the terms of the deal after it’s been signed, or he’s willing to back out of it if this new condition is not met. 

Or, and I suspect that this is the actual answer, he will secure some sort of commitment from the Saudis to examine joining the Abraham Accords at some point down the road when Israel has met a number of conditions and there’s been progress toward a Palestinian state. And if that is how it unfolds, it will leave the Israelis behind. And I think this comes as a pretty big shock to [Israel] given that President Trump’s previous policy was that a deal between the US and Saudi Arabia would involve normalization.

Was Netanyahu himself surprised by this deal? 

I think he must have been surprised by this deal. It is true that Trump and Netanyahu have seemed to have had a very cushy relationship, not only during this term, but during President Trump’s first term as well. But it’s not a relationship of equals.

We’ve seen President Trump — particularly over the past few months, I think in response to criticism here in the United States over the role that Israel and the role that the prime minister may have had in convincing President Trump to go to war — repeatedly talk about the fact that he is in charge, that Prime Minister Netanyahu is going to do what he says, that he is the decider and Prime Minister Netanyahu is not. 

I do think they have a good relationship, but President Trump, at least publicly, seems to be signaling that he is in charge and he wants everybody to know that. I think that Prime Minister Netanyahu undoubtedly is feeling some stress in this relationship. And when he shows up here tomorrow, he’s going to do whatever he can to try and repair any rifts that there are.

Israel wanted this war, but hates this deal that the president may very likely complete with Saudi Arabia. Did they miscalculate somewhere in here? 

I think the Israelis have miscalculated in a number of ways. And the biggest is that consistently since 2017 or 2018, you hear Israeli officials, political officials, security officials, even ordinary Israelis, talk routinely about President Trump being the best friend that Israel has ever had and exhibiting a faith in President Trump that he will never do anything that will hang Israel out to dry. 

And a lot of what they’ve done has proceeded on that assumption. And even though everybody is aware of President Trump’s transactional nature, even though everybody is aware that he is relatively volatile, that he slips on policy issues all the time, the Israelis had this faith that they would always be an exception to that rule. And I think what we’re seeing is that they’re not necessarily an exception to that rule. 

And it’s important to stress that when it comes to this Saudi nuclear deal, the problem for the Israelis is not just that it was signed without any hint of normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia being part of the deal itself. It may open the door for countries that have signed more restrictive agreements in the region, like the UAE, to do the same. And ultimately, all of this is a bet that the trajectory of Saudi Arabia is going to continue, that it’s going to continue modernizing, continue becoming more moderate and pragmatic, and continue improving relations with Israel. 

If that’s not the case, once you’ve handed the Saudis a nuclear program, that’s irreversible. People shouldn’t forget that Iran’s nuclear program started off as a civilian nuclear program that the United States provided for it under the days of the Shah. So for Israelis, the normalization part of this is absolutely worrisome, but the deal itself is problematic too. And I think that’s where the Israelis are feeling panicked.

Today, Vox is launching The Midterms, Actually, a new weekly newsletter from Astead W. Herndon examining the big ideas and key people behind the political shifts shaping the 2026 elections — and what they reveal about where American politics is headed next.

Each week, Astead will break down one big idea he’s identified and one revealing thing he is hearing from voters, candidates, organizers, and other figures on the ground. The goal is to understand what the midterm elections are telling us about how the parties are changing, which new coalitions are emerging, whose voices are being overlooked, and what it all could mean beyond November.

The launch marks Vox’s first expansion onto Substack. Readers can sign up for The Midterms, Actually directly on Vox or follow on Substack. Astead will also regularly host Substack Lives, creating additional opportunities for conversations with readers and guests throughout the election cycle.

Astead is the host and editorial director of Vox’s America, Actually, a podcast focused on understanding how political change is unfolding across the country. He joined Vox in 2025, after working as a national political reporter at the New York Times and hosting The Run-Up, the Times’s flagship politics podcast. His reporting has focused on covering American politics from a voter perspective, tracking the changes in the country and the political parties from the bottom up.

Beginning today, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter, Today, Explained, written by Caitlin Dewey, will also be available on Substack in addition to its existing home on Vox.com. Every weekday afternoon, Today, Explained helps readers understand the big ideas behind the most important news stories.

Welcome to the first edition of The Midterms, Actually. Every week I’ll be writing about two things: one thing I’m thinking about — a big idea or trend I see forming across the 2026 primaries — and one thing I’m hearing, from a voice on the ground. You can sign up here to get it in your inbox every week. Let’s get into it.

One big idea

There are two ways of looking at the current divides within the Democratic Party. The first — and more dominant — narrative is that the party’s left wing is on an upward march, one that began with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s election in 2025 and has continued through this year’s Democratic primary season.

The second, and I believe more accurate, explanation is that the party is rudderless — an ideological fight to be settled in the next presidential election — and that the left’s success in New York City, Colorado, and even Maine (before Graham Platner’s campaign collapsed) grows out of a void left by a bigger, less-talked-about story: an establishment in free fall, on the wrong side of fundamental shifts across its own rank-and-file base.

The difference between those interpretations is fine, but important. I don’t think the Democratic base agrees with every position articulated by successful left-wing candidates — like “all deportations are wrong” (as NYC’s Darializa Avila Chevalier told me) — or have suddenly become committed democratic socialists. But I do think the left is on the right side of the gateway issues the base is currently prioritizing: a working-class-led affordability agenda, a skepticism of artificial intelligence, and a moral opposition to President Donald Trump’s war against Iran and to Israel’s campaigns of violence in Lebanon and Gaza. Those issues, more than any others, have defined the Democratic Party’s internal battles since 2024.

Progressives have also benefited from a moderate wing that, in many cases, has yet to lay out an affirmative vision. After the signature policies of the Biden administration flopped as political motivators, the center has seemed frozen in time, unable to offer its own blueprint for the electorate’s concerns (“abundance” aside). When I sat down with Third Way president Jon Cowan, he had no trouble assailing Hasan Piker, Abdul El-Sayed, or any number of the party’s most prominent progressive figures. But when I asked whether Third Way was actually responding to the clear shifts among the electorate — on Medicare-for-all, on abolishing ICE, on foreign aid to Israel — his answer was far less sure.

Cowan on America, Actually:

We’ve never said that there’s a problem with Hasan Piker because he advocates for Medicare-for-all. … I think Medicare-for-all is still very problematic as a political issue, and if someone were nominated for president on the Democratic ticket and they were for Medicare-for-all, I think it would be a major barrier to getting elected. But that’s not our beef with Hasan Piker at all.

It was the same evasion whenever the conversation turned from the messengers to the message. In a recent interview with US Rep. Jim Clyburn — the powerful South Carolina Democrat who has endorsed US Rep. Haley Stevens’s Senate run in Michigan — he bluntly defended insider politics, insisting party leadership was not at fault for the 2024 result. The blame, he told me, belonged to the Black voters who hadn’t turned out for Kamala Harris.

Clyburn on America, Actually:

When the white vote turned out 71 percent two years ago, and the Black vote turned out 59 percent, you tell me whose fault that is. … If that 59 percent had been 69 percent, she would’ve won.

When I asked him directly whether the argument was that Black voters had let Harris down, he didn’t hesitate: “In many instances, absolutely.” It is a remarkable thing to hear from a member of leadership — the base failed us, not the other way around — and it is exactly the instinct that has the establishment on its back foot.

This is why I think it matters to read the Democratic Party’s post-2024 convulsion as a story of establishment collapse rather than left-wing ascension. Stevens, Clyburn, and the party’s leadership would prefer to make this a referendum on the left — on the acceptability of its candidates and its media figures. But the base is communicating something else: a lack of confidence in the center, and in a version of establishment politics that prizes seniority and loyalty over voters’ values. Establishment collapse also explains the Democratic results that don’t fit neatly on the moderate vs. progressive binary: like Attorney General Phil Weiser’s victory in Colorado or whatever is happening in the Wisconsin governor’s race.

The center’s other problem is that its core general-election pitch — we may not thrill you, but we’re not Trump — is losing relevance the weaker that Trump looks politically. I spent a night at Trump’s UFC event on the White House lawn in June, an evening engineered to speak to the young men who broke his way in 2024, and found plenty of them cooling. “He was promising lower prices on everything,” one told me. “We didn’t know wars were gonna start.” Even the MAGA operative Jack Posobiec conceded that “the numbers are softer today, there’s no question about that.”

When the opposition’s own coalition is cracking, branding yourself as an inoffensive vessel who can gather up the most anti-Trump voters looks less compelling. The establishment needs an affirmative reason to be chosen — and it hasn’t found one.

So here’s my amendment to the narrative of the moment: The story isn’t a left-wing party discovering its confidence. It’s an establishment losing its own — and a base voting, in New York, in Colorado, and soon in Michigan and Wisconsin, on how much faith it still has that the center will name what it actually wants and fight for it. 

What I’m hearing: A Michigan reporter’s take on the Democratic Senate race

I reached out to Samuel Robinson, a reporter for the state’s oldest Black newspaper, the Michigan Chronicle; he also has a Substack, Detroit One Million. Robinson is based on Detroit’s east side, and he’s someone I’ve known for a while, as we’re both members of the National Association of Black Journalists. 

Both the Democrats’ moderate and progressive wings have invested so much in the state — it’s become the proxy war in the party’s fight over its future. What is it about Michigan that you think has made the stakes so high? 

Stakes are high because of the control of Congress. But also, Michigan is like a microcosm of America. It swings back and forth every four, eight years. But our US Senate seats have been held by Democrats since 1992. Republicans say they’re going to spend a ton of money to flip the seat being opened by Gary Peters retiring. Women moderates (Dana Nessel, Gretchen Whitmer, Jocelyn Benson) won big in 2018, and eight years later, all three to some degree have disappointed their own voters. Dems had a legislative trifecta from 2022 to 2024, and many people feel like Dems let down Black residents who got them elected in the first place. 

That’s one thing that unites the Black progressives and the Black establishment: Members in both camps feel the Democratic Party hasn’t done enough. 

How would you describe the difference between a Haley Stevens supporter and an Abdul El-Sayed supporter? 

Haley supporter — usually older; the young people I’ve met who support her typically come from wealthier backgrounds. Haley supporters are usually not involved in politics or people who keep up with national discourse. Haley supporters are worried about the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. They are worried about Trump nationalizing elections or not leaving the White House after ’28.

Abdul supporter — usually younger; the older people I’ve met who support him often acknowledge they are in the minority of their peers. The younger people who support him are all over the place in terms of their backgrounds — rich, poor, highly educated, no college. He has the support of most young people under 35. They are mostly worried about sending American taxpayer dollars to Israel, and the influence of AIPAC. I hear more about that than I do Medicare-for-all. 

Stevens has sought to capitalize on El-Sayed’s perceived weakness with the Black vote. How real do you think that vulnerability is? 

Abdul struggles with certain Black voters mostly because they don’t know who he is. I’ve heard from countless people who have said something to the degree of, “I don’t know enough about him.” He received media attention as the Detroit and Wayne County health director, but not enough for people to feel it. Most people know that he ran for governor in 2018 with no experience. People see Haley Stevens ads and mailers. Most Black voters aren’t on Twitter.

I saw this post on X where you were talking to a Stevens supporter who expressed some pretty bigoted claims about El-Sayed’s candidacy. How widespread is that sentiment? When I was reporting on Mamdani’s election in New York City, it was clear that there was anxiety among the Black political class that the rise of Asian, Latino, Muslim communities could displace them. Is that fear at play here? 

The race is definitely a tension point between Wayne County’s Black and Muslim population. Many who have shared with me similar sentiments will point to the anti-Black racism and exploitation of our community at the hands of Arab gas station and liquor store owners. That resentment builds up and then bubbles over in a race like this. We certainly live amongst each other, like off Seven Mile on the east side, where Bengali families and Black families live side by side as next-door neighbors. But there’s a resentment that goes both ways.

The Midterms, Actually is a new weekly newsletter from Astead Herndon. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Tuesday.

This story was originally published in The Highlight. To get access to member-exclusive stories like this every month, become a Vox Member today.

Some countries built their identities on their land. Some countries built their identities on a shared ethnic heritage. America, however, began with an idea on a piece of paper. 

“America was an enlightenment experiment, and so that means we have to make our own identity,” said Mark Graybill, a professor of English at Widener University who specializes in American literature. To do so, we need books: novels that articulate what it’s like to live in this strange new land. 

Lawrence Buell, the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus at Harvard, wrote a definitive study on this problem called The Dream of the Great American Novel. Buell said that the calls to produce and recognize a national literature began in 1776, but they intensified throughout the 19th century. That was especially the case after the War of 1812, when America reaffirmed its independence from England. The widespread belief, said Buell, was that “now we are a mighty political entity, we should be a cultural force as well.” 

In 1868, the novelist John William DeForest coined the phrase “great American novel” in an essay that feared the genuine article had not yet been written. 

Over time, readers, critics, scholars, and the people who build school curricula have developed a loose consensus on some of the books that might aspire to the title — books that are certainly great, certainly interested in America, and certainly novels, but which may or may not be the great American novel. Buell has identified a collection of “recipes” that they all tend to follow. Among the key ingredients for one of the recipes, he said, are a “democratic collective that’s in distress in one way or another. A collectivity of people that are operating under great pressure, great anguish often. And in that collective crucible, you see national themes of one sort or another played out.” 

I talked to literary scholars and critics about five major contenders for the great American novel, all of which follow Buell’s recipe. I wanted to understand what it was about these books that spoke to so many people, who decided that they were so important, and what their vision of the United States is. 

Taken together, the national portrait these novels offer is darker than you might expect or than the people who helped canonize these books might have wanted. If they’re united on one thing, it’s the idea that America is not an innocent country. 

The Scarlet Letter (1850): An American origin story

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter has long been a mainstay on school syllabi and is a perennial pick for the great American novel. “It first became acclaimed, almost overnight, as the first serious topnotch piece of long fiction yet written by an American,” said Buell. 

The Scarlet Letter tells the tale of virtuous adulteress Hester Prynne, forced by her 17th-century Puritan neighbors to wear a red “A” forever to mark her for her crime, even as she insists on her own dignity and integrity. It is endlessly useful as a metaphor for talking about American tendencies toward mob-mindedness and our prudishness around sex, a censorious impulse that keeps recurring — and, on the other hand, for talking about Hester’s very American independence and self-determination. With its early colonial setting in the first days of Puritan Boston, it speaks to an America that had not yet become modern, and it functions as a kind of origin story. 

What the novel seems to insist upon most strongly, though, is the gloomy, dour Puritanism that began the American experiment. “The founders of a new colony,” Hawthorne wrote in the opening paragraphs, “whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.” In The Scarlet Letter, that is the United States: a utopian idea, a prison, and a graveyard.

To say that The Scarlet Letter is the great American novel, then, is to fear that our Puritan roots are inescapable, that we can never transcend the tomb and the penitentiary — and to hope that we can still, like Hester Prynne, redeem ourselves from our sins.

Moby-Dick (1851): A democracy at sea 

Herman Melville was close friends with Hawthorne, whom he considered a mentor and to whom he dedicated his 1851 opus, Moby-Dick, the story of a sea captain obsessed with the titular white whale. Yet, Melville, unlike Hawthorne, was not revered in his own lifetime. 

Moby-Dick wouldn’t have its revival until the 1920s and ’30s, when critics at Columbia University took it up. “Melville emerges as this voice speaking to the middle of the 20th century like a prophet,” said Jennifer Greiman, a professor of English at Wake Forest University and editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies. With its swirling, perplexing structure of digressions and asides — some chapters rendered as theatrical scripts and others as encyclopedia entries full of whale facts — Moby-Dick hadn’t made much sense as a 19th-century realistic novel. But it made a lot of sense to ambitious, boundary-pushing modernists. 

Greiman argued that Moby-Dick’s late adoption speaks to what is so American about it: the way it seems to have been written for a time that hasn’t yet arrived. “It’s that sense of it as a book that is speaking to something that’s going to come in the future,” Greiman said. 

Also distinctively American is Moby-Dick’s crew, made up of white and Black Americans, Native Americans, Africans, Indians, and Pacific Islanders. They make their collective fatal mistake early on in the novel, when Captain Ahab informs the men that he has no plans to fulfill the ship’s mission to harvest oil from whales. Instead, Ahab said, he wants to enact vengeance against Moby-Dick, the great white whale that took his leg — and the crew willingly signs on to his monomaniacal quest.

“It’s often read as a democratic tragedy,” said Greiman. “Because you have this multi-racial crew, and one of the first things they do together is hand over all of their power to Ahab and doom themselves.” 

In the crucible of Moby-Dick, we see the weakness of democracy under the sway of a charismatic despot. We see the enormous and chaotic forward-seeking ambition of America, and the possibility that it may yet find that its great experiment is impossible, and its quest will end in tragedy.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884): Taking on America’s original sin

Like The Scarlet Letter, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was an immediate hit. Twain was a literary celebrity, and his books were widely popular. But Huck Finn, the tale of troublemaking 13-year-old Huck rafting down the Mississippi with a runaway enslaved man named Jim, wasn’t considered especially important. “It’s not singled out until after his death,” said Matt Seybold, scholar in residence at the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College.

It would be Ernest Hemingway who enshrined it in the canon, writing in 1935 that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” By the 1970s, said Seybold, it had become “probably the single most assigned work of literature in American classrooms.” 

Today, Huck Finn is assigned less often, especially at younger grade levels, Seybold said, in large part due to Twain’s frequent use of the n-word. Yet, it remains active and alive in the American imagination, enough so that Percival Everett won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer for his 2024 novel James, which re-imagined Huck Finn from Jim’s point of view.

Huck’s relationship with Jim is, for most readers, the heart of the novel. Huck believes it to be his duty to return Jim to the elderly woman who enslaved him, but he also loves Jim and wants him to be free. In the novel’s most celebrated passage, Huck decides to go against what the world has taught him is right and help Jim escape, announcing boldly, “All right then, I’ll go to hell.” 

Seybold said this scene is frequently read as “America overcoming the sins of its inception;” Huck’s redemptive love for Jim is enough to help him transcend the hypocritical moralism of the slave-owning south where he grew up. But, Seybold notes, Huck Finn doesn’t end with that glorious moment. It goes on for another 50 pages and features a lengthy episode in which Huck toys with Jim’s freedom as though playing a game, while Jim is re-enslaved and dehumanized. 

Seybold agreed with Toni Morrison’s read of the ending as a metaphor for Reconstruction — the promise of freedom abruptly reduced and turned into something contingent. Twain, Seybold said, was radicalized by a Frederick Douglass speech in which Douglass describes sharecropping as being nearly as bad as slavery. 

In this context, Huck Finn is a bold statement on one of America’s great failures. “Twain takes us back into the cruelty, the absurdity of antebellum America,” said Seybold. “That’s also America, right?”

The Great Gatsby (1925): A bleak look at the American dream

Like Hawthorne and Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald was a literary celebrity. When he published Great Gatsby in 1925, it was a critical success, but its sales were modest. “I always tell my students, if you want to be a writer, just think about the fact that Fitzgerald’s last royalty check was for $13.13,” said Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air, Georgetown professor of literary criticism, and author of So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures.

It took steady campaigning from Fitzgerald’s friends and publisher for Gatsby to be remembered. It started to become an institution during World War II, when the US army shipped copies of the book out to soldiers for morale and, then, was further bolstered by its widespread adoption as a high school text. Now, generations of American school children have grown up reading about Jay Gatsby, the poor boy who became a millionaire by mysterious means, all to win the love of the untouchable Daisy Buchanan.

This was around the same time that academics stopped talking about the idea of the great American novel singular, but it remained an effective marketing tool for publishers and an aspiration for authors, said Buell. Gatsby benefitted greatly from that marketing tool, in large part thanks to its status as a book that took seriously America’s class divides. 

In The Dream of the Great American Novel, Buell writes that the idea of the American bootstrapper stretches back to the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Gatsby makes that ideal sinister through Gatsby’s mysterious and ill-gotten gains and hollow as untouchable Daisy proves unable to live up to Gatsby’s image of her. Yet, Fitzgerald’s writing is at its most lyrical and lovely when he describes Gatsby’s longing. One of the indelible images of the novel is that of Gatsby standing alone at the end of his dock, stretching out his hands toward the green light of Daisy’s house. You know the things Gatsby is working for aren’t worth it, but Fitzgerald makes it beautiful to watch him try.

“It’s that idea of aspiration, of yearning, of trying even in the face of knowing that sometimes the game is rigged,” said Corrigan. “This is a novel that deeply questions the idea of an American meritocracy.” 

To say Gatsby is the great American novel is to say that America is a place of capitalist striving and that the dream of striving is beautiful. It’s also to posit that there is no clean way to make money, and whatever redemptive power you think you’ll claim at the end of your hard work will disappoint you.

Beloved (1987): The haunting of America

Starting in the 1960s, rebellions from within the academy started to break the canon apart. Feminist scholars were pushing for recognition of books by women; scholars of African-American culture were pushing for recognition of works by Black people. “That theory of a canonicity being bogus really gets rolled out in the 1980s,” said Buell.

Into this atmosphere came Toni Morrison, a Black woman who made it impossible to interpret her writing as an apologia for America. 

In Morrison’s books, it is clear that America has never overcome its sins. Never is that more the case than in her 1987 novel Beloved, about a formerly enslaved woman who is haunted by the ghost of the baby she killed to save from slavery. 

Beloved was published to enormous acclaim, but it did not win that year’s National Book Award, despite being a finalist. The Black literary scene rallied around Morrison in response, with 48 critics, writers, and activists publishing an open letter in the New York Times in praise of Morrison’s accomplishment and registering their disappointment with the National Book Foundation. Later that year, Morrison would win the Pulitzer.

“For a lot of novels that become these cultural touchstones, there has to be a campaign behind them. There have to be people who are making cultural arguments for why it matters,” said Jeffrey Lawrence, an American literature scholar at Rutgers University. “And in Morrison’s case, this happened relatively quickly.” In 1993, five years after Beloved was published, Morrison won the Nobel Prize for literature. That, said Lawrence, is when Beloved “starts to be considered the classic work of the late 20th century.” 

In Beloved, Morrison was able to “unpack the difficulties of slavery…in so many different ways,” said Dana A. Williams, a professor of African American Literature at Howard University.  “It showed the history of the institution, yes, but it showed it from so many different perspectives.” Morrison depicted the way slavery left scars on both Sethe, her heroine; on Sethe’s entire family; and even on Sethe’s enslavers. Even the land seems haunted. There is not a part of America that isn’t damaged by the horrors of both slavery and by the effort to disavow, deny, and forget it ever happened.

“Ultimately, I think it also forced us to think very seriously about how we have articulated humanity in this country,” added Williams. “Like who’s alive, who’s dead.” Sethe is based on a real woman named Margaret Garner, whose case involved a debate over whether to charge her with murder or destruction of property for the killing of her baby. “It really did question: What is humanity and who has the right to it? Who has access to it?” said Williams. “Is it really an unalienable right?”

Part of Morrison’s project is to show that slavery has haunted America’s legacy from the beginning — that no matter what we say about ourselves, we are not an innocent country. In Beloved, that becomes painfully, inarguably clear. 

Closing the book

Let’s return to Buell’s idea that the great American novel is often about a democratic collective in peril. In the books we’ve talked about here, the threat is always a problem embedded in America’s national character: a mob-minded censoriousness; a weakness in the face of a charismatic leader; the sin, trauma, and whitewashing of slavery; the emptiness of capitalist striving. These are texts that tell us that America is a nation of ideas — beautiful ideas — and that it constantly struggles and fails to live up to those ideas. 

“The novel as a genre really exists to critique the society that it is writing about, in a way that allows us to ask questions and to answer questions that only fiction can allow us to do,” Williams said.

But what’s sort of lovely is that, as critical and merciless as they can be, and as imperfect as America still is, these books are still the ones we have enshrined and celebrated and cherished over the past 250 years. We teach them in schools and turn them into movies. We make sure that our people know about them, are warned at an early age that America’s innocence is a farce.

So, perhaps, the great American value that these novels enshrine is clear-eyed self-knowledge. Every country is prone to self-propagandizing and empty puffery, especially around an occasion like the 250th anniversary of one of its founding documents. But it’s comforting to know that the centuries-long American quest to define our national identity through texts has led to a canon of novels that tell us the ugly truth about who we are. 

The companies backed by the owner of the Dodgers may have failed to disclose loans properly.

Iran fired missiles into Jordan last week, killing three American service members. Jordan's growing role in the war is prompting uncomfortable conversations for the desert nation's leaders.

America’s right-wing elites have a theatrical new indictment of liberals that they warn will lead to catastrophe: They care too much.

 “Suicidal empathy,” the phrase coined by Canadian marketing professor and conservative influencer Gad Saad, is suddenly on the lips of everyone right-of-center — including billionaire Elon Musk, who has promoted Saad’s book by the same name. 

The catchy two-word indictment crystallizes a broader critique on the right — that progressive values aren’t just a misdirection of priorities, but an active threat to everything the West has achieved over thousands of years.  

The problem, in the view of Musk, Saad, and like-minded conservatives, is that the left is so obsessed with sticking up for those on the bottom — whether it’s aid recipients abroad, asylum-seekers at the border, or the homeless in cities — that they disregard everyone else, with deadly consequences for society.

“People have empathy for the criminals, but not empathy for the victims of the criminals,” Musk told Tucker Carlson in October 2024. 

It’s also a convenient new spin on an old idea. The billionaire tech right cohort Musk belongs to has long looked for a way to unshackle itself from the leviathan of basic social responsibility. With the concept of suicidal empathy, they have found an intellectual framework to argue that their policy preferences and bottom lines aren’t just about greed or self-interest, but a matter of cultural survival.

In their quest to make this argument, many on the right have pointed to a study that they see as a sort of intellectual checkmate. In 2019, a group of psychologists gathered participants across political ideologies and asked them to express their level of concern about different groups ranging from their close family to animals to all things in existence. In one section, you see a series of heatmaps that appear to show that liberals focus their moral concerns on groups further away from themselves, whereas conservatives value their close loved ones.

Conservatives seized on the heatmaps and turned them into a meme, arguing that liberals really do value the lives of distant foreigners and strangers over those of their own family and community. 

Venture capitalist and AI Super PAC megadonor Marc Andreessen, for instance, is a fan of the heatmap meme. Rob Henderson, a conservative author, claimed the heatmap proves that “conservatives devote the majority of their empathy and care to family and friends and liberals devote most of their concern to plants, trees, and inert entities such as rocks.” Even the Trump Department of Homeland Security has posted it to respond to a group of protesters opposing the deportation of Kilmar Ábrego García.

But things may not be so simple as this now-infamous set of heatmaps portrays. New research published in the journal Political Psychology last month decided to study liberals’ and conservatives’ moral concerns in a more exhaustive way. It came to a very different conclusion.

What the research says about empathy and politics 

Kyle Fiore Law, an assistant psychology professor at the University of Utah and one of the authors of the study, decided to embark on the research in part after seeing the heatmap memes. 

“The assertion going around was that liberals had come to care more about strangers and distant causes than about their own families and communities, and that claim is testable,” he told me. “It also sat awkwardly against decades of evidence that favoring close others is a widespread default in human social cognition, so we wanted to check it directly rather than assume either side of the debate was right.”

The problem, in Law’s view, was that the 2019 study was not robust enough to really tell us who liberals and conservatives prioritize. 

“The 2019 studies measured how far moral concern extends, and they did that well,” Law wrote to me in an email. “They were not designed to detect whether concern for distant others competes with concern for close others, because both tasks built an outward-expanding structure (e.g., from close humans to distant humans to non-human life to eventually the natural world and non-sentient targets) into the measure itself.”

Instead, Law and his colleagues surveyed liberals and conservatives with what’s called the Moral Expansiveness Scale. This scale lets people rank every group independently, which lets us see how much they value them relative to each other (you can do a simple version of examining how much you care about different groups with the test here). 

What Law and his colleagues found was that it isn’t so much that progressives value foreigners and other distant groups more than their close family; they simply extend their moral concern outward further than conservatives do. 

“Close others came first everywhere,” Law said. “Across all three datasets and essentially the whole ideological spectrum, people gave their inner circle the highest moral concern, and we found no evidence of an inversion among liberals at any level.”

 The only thing ideology seemed to predict in their study was how far out someone’s moral circle of concern goes.

 “[Liberals reached] further toward targets like animals, plants, and future generations,” Law said.

They did ask respondents about tradeoffs, and liberals were willing to allocate more theoretical points to outsiders than conservatives did. But the differences were small. 

When people were asked to divide a fixed pool of 100 points, people close to them received “by far the largest share in every group, roughly 56 to 62 points out of 100,” Law told me.

Law’s more robust study suggests that the heatmap meme is essentially fake. 

“In our data, extending concern outward did not come with reduced concern for close others,” he said.

How far should empathy extend?

But disproving the heatmap meme only tells us how liberals and conservatives tend to think; it doesn’t tell us how they should think.

Tradeoffs are a fact of life. Whether we should be willing to modestly increase the national debt or taxes to increase foreign aid, for instance, is a question of values rather than something that can be empirically derived.

But the heatmap memes and pop psychology theories around “suicidal empathy” that have become so common on the right — from the world’s richest man to the folks who serve in the Trump administration — miss something deep and relevant about human beings. 

As a species, we succeeded not just because of our capacity to defend our in-groups — our family, friends, community, nations — but because of our ability to understand the interests and values of those far away. 

After World War II, for instance, multilateral organizations —  like the United Nations — were established to prevent another global conflict by having diplomatic channels that we can use to anticipate and ameliorate the concerns of other countries; even “Mutually Assured Destruction,” the doctrine that prevented a nuclear war, is based on the shared understanding that you cannot destroy someone else’s country without them deciding to do the same thing to you. 

It’s ironic that Saad’s suicidal empathy concept has taken off right as the Trump administration is actively disproving the idea that we can prosper by disregarding everyone else in the world. 

Trump’s trade wars and actual wars have been conducted under the concept that we can simply bully the rest of the planet and profit as a result. 

By trying to run roughshod over other countries’ economic interests, we’ve helped push them to find support in other major countries, like China. Repeated military attacks on Iran, powered by the idea that we should simply impose our terms on that country instead of coming to a mutually beneficial agreement as former President Barack Obama did, have cost us tens of billions of dollars in warfighting and threaten the global economy.

None of this has been popular with the people close to home that it’s purportedly meant to prioritize. Far from empathetic, the Trump doctrine seems to be suicidal cruelty — lashing out at foreigners even when cooperating with them is in our own best interest. 

The heatmap memes and quips about suicidal empathy may make for great social media fodder. But in the real world, seeing life as a constant zero-sum game where we win only if others lose is just as foolish as any progressive who suffers from an excess of empathy.

It looks to be the start of a bad era, not merely a bad year for measles. Confirmed measles cases just hit a 35-year high.

Lawyers for California and 22 other Democratic-led states sued, arguing that the states, not the federal government, have the constitutional authority to set the rules for voting and elections.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

America formally eradicated measles in the year 2000. But like many other remnants of the 1990s — flip phones, CDs, baggy pants — measles is now regrettably and undeniably back. 

More than 2,300 Americans have come down with measles so far this year — the highest number since 1992. New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that there’ve been more cases in the country in the last two years than in the 24 years prior. 

Many of the cases trace back to large outbreaks in South Carolina, Utah, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, some of which have ended. But the underlying problem is both much broader and much trickier to address: As more parents pass on routine childhood vaccinations for their kids, these once-eradicated viruses have more chances to spread.

For measles, which is incredibly — almost frightfully — contagious, 95 percent of people in any given community must be immune to stop its transmission. But today, only 28 percent of US counties vaccinate enough of their kindergarteners to meet that threshold. 

Another record-setting year for measles

Lower vaccination rates are, in large part, a result of political polarization, misinformation, and declining trust in health authorities and institutions. But there’s another, more ironic reason for measles’ resurgence: We did such a good job getting rid of it.

As late as the 1950s, virtually every American child contracted measles before age 16. Roughly 48,000 patients were hospitalized each year with measles, which is among the most contagious infections known to humanity. 

But the development of a highly effective vaccine in the 1960s, and a series of aggressive public immunization campaigns in the decades after that, all but eradicated a once-common childhood illness. The federal government poured millions of dollars into vaccination programs, especially for low-income kids. Everyone from Michael Jackson to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles championed measles immunization. 

All that campaigning worked. By the end of the 1990s, more than 90 percent of Americans had received the measles vaccine, and a similar percentage agreed that it was important to vaccinate children. As a result, most people born in the last 40 years have no firsthand experience of how dangerous measles is.

“We’ve done too good of a job,” one doctor joked to Vox last December. In other words, ironically, America’s success at vaccinating against measles … has made Americans complacent about measles vaccination. 

One link for later

➨ Go with your gut. The hashtag #GutTok has over 6 billion views on TikTok, and viral trends that promise to “hack your gut” through miracle products and cleanses are all the rage. But you don’t need an influencer-endorsed supplement for digestive wellness. Instead, actual experts recommend basic lifestyle steps like eating a high-fiber diet and reducing stress. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that there are more endangered species in California than in any other US state? But more surprising is the runner-up: After California, Alabama has the most endangered species. 
• Today’s trivia: Which Irish musician sings the song “Orinoco Flow”? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: On Friday we asked you for the four-letter university located in Athens. That would be Ohio. But there are more than two dozen Athenses in the US, and a rival Athens is also home to the University of Georgia. 

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services estimates that up to 444,000 of the more than 1.4 million asylum cases in its backlog could be affected by the rule.