Our Year in Hell

Seeing the scale first is useful because it ’ s so unparalleled : not one city , or even one country , but everywhere at once .
Paris shut down and the first silent nights in its history enforced , with Parisians carrying permission slips like schoolchildren just to go to a pharmacy .
London under lockdown , Times Square in quarantine , dressed in ghost-town array .
“ A quiet capital is a contradiction in terms , ” the great Max Beerbohm wrote during the London bombing .
“ It is a thing uncanny , spectral.
” And yet @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the imagery of an actual pandemic is , truth be told , considerably less melodramatic than the cinematic version .
Often , when we call something “ unimaginable , ” what we really mean is more like “ too oft imagined.
” We actually have been here before , in every pandemic movie , in that Will Smith one with the zombies , for instance—and , in the zombie movie , the people are slavering in the streets .
In the real one , the streets are merely empty .
The sensory specifics @ @ @ @ @ @ @ linger , in history .
Read Daniel Defoe on the mid-seventeenth-century plague in London , and it is the inventory of specific people and places—how the bear-baiting pits got shut down—that is most memorable .
Let ’ s mark down some new sensory experiences , which our descendants might find hard to credit .
The feel of a mask against a face , for instance , a sensation regularly known among Americans , previously , only to a population of doctors and nurses , became a universal—though , tragically , not universal enough—sensation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s own nose , the two anchoring strings pressed behind the ears , vanishing from consciousness as a sensory pressure over the day , returning only when , in an absent-minded moment , we might forget to put it on—when , walking outside , the wearer feels utterly naked , exposed , without it .
And along with that comes the elaborate pantomime of masking : the shocking and newly learned truth that—for the most part , for most people—masks in fact don ’ t disguise and that all those Hollywood bandits @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , were concealing .
.
.
nothing .
We rarely fail to recognize a friend behind a mask ; the “ Così Fan Tutte ” -style misunderstandings that masking is supposed to produce almost never happen .
Instead , our astounding innate gift for facial recognition , long studied by the psychologist Susan Carey and her colleagues , has been vindicated : even broken data give us enough information to make a set of eyebrows and the turn of a head instantly recognizable as a unique person .
There is the accompanying pitiful @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sometimes sad .
In the outdoor pavement café , that perverse gift of the pandemic , the masks stay on through the act of ordering and then come off gaily the moment the food arrives , as though the virus halts in midair politely , like the reversible bullets in a cartoon .
And then there is the comedy of indoors and outdoors , as “ outdoor ” dining became acceptable in what were , as the fall wore into winter , huts and sheds that looked suspiciously like indoor dining .
If @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is shut off from the street , surely that counts as indoors—or at least reminds us that all we call “ indoors ” is actually outdoors , with walls drawn around it for a time .
To take a midway view , halfway between the overhead and closeup points , people who live in New York City , Philadelphia , Oakland , and elsewhere can pause a moment and recall , before their memory is eradicated by the next strange thing , the Weeks of the Mysterious Fireworks .
The history book that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about 2020 might well begin there , in late June and early July , with the sinister summer-long explosion of inexplicable fireworks long past midnight , seeding sleepless nights and countless conspiracy theories .
The fireworks were intertwined with the most passionate weeks of the Black Lives Matter protests that filled streets and pointed truths then , and it was not impossible to understand why the belief became current that the fireworks had been deliberately passed out by the authorities in order to do something invidious : perhaps to habituate people to noise @ @ @ @ @ @ @ perhaps merely to attenuate nerves on behalf of a paranoid police force .
Horror follows horror , and unease comes after unease .
The experience of the pandemic was made ghastlier by being placed against the declension of Trumpism from evil to absurdity—who will ever forget Four Seasons Total Landscaping ?
—and then back into even darker evil again .
Philip K. Dick is the only author who could match the monstrous improbability of the protagonist , this oafish orange showman , who incarnates every hypocrisy known to man , for this combination @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in a farce-nightmare of authoritarianism as a reality show .
Throughout the year , nothing was normal , and everything seemed normalized .
Kids spending their days staring at screens—and their parents now encouraging them to do it , for their own good !
Stark inequality not just already in place but driven ever more forward , pushing women out of work , depressing many businesses and devastating some , in retail and the restaurant business particularly , perhaps beyond repair .
Above all , more than a million people dead , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ virus as violent as it was mysterious .
Yet “ normalized ” is an ugly word , and inadequate to the experience of 2020 .
We haven ’ t normalized things we never expected to face ; rather , we ’ ve accepted them , and the idea of acceptance , as both an enduring spiritual virtue and as a dubious , fatalistic practice , wraps itself this year around both the pain we shared and our efforts to transcend it .
Add one more element to the ominous mix : all summer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ down on us , presiding over the strangeness .
Jupiter and Saturn , unusually bright and vivid , were approaching what astronomers call their “ great conjunction ” ; as this year ended , they were seen closer together than they have appeared in eight hundred years , so near as to form one peculiar , double Christmas star .
You can read Defoe to know what an earlier age would have made of such an enormous astrological portent .
It would have explained everything in one nightly array .
And yet , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reason shone .
A majority of American voters rejected Trumpism , including a small but crucial margin of former Trump voters .
Millions and millions more Americans voted against Trump than for him .
Reason—and the science it inspires—really does look sturdier at year ’ s tragic end than it did before .
The fireworks , we have since learned , went off not because of any covert conspiracy but because the ‘ opportunity costs ’ of fireworks , as one economist put it , suddenly became much lower ; opportunity costs “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a person could do with their time , ” and in the height of the pandemic in summer there just wasn ’ t enough else to do .
The fireworks happened for homespun economic reasons .
Whenever the kinds of conspiracy theories that Trump thrives on met tests of truth and evidence , in the courts or in the lab , they failed , miserably and abjectly .
The vaccine that may at least ease the crisis was the result of processes of biological science that have been ripening now for decades and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been slowly nurtured , in labs and classrooms , for so long .
A refusal to accept things as they are and a furious attachment to ongoing life proved stronger than either detachment or resignation—minimally stronger , perhaps , but minimal is often the best we can hope for .
Conjunctions , great and small , in sentences as in the skies , connect the dots of common speech , or of stars .
Conjunctions can glue us together or push us apart .
We write the world as much as we get @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of view with which to see even a year as strange as this one is neither from above nor from below but face to face , eye to eye , that human point of view which persists , even when , for a time , it must go masked .
• The funniest New Yorker cartoons , as chosen by our Instagram followers .
• Helen Rosner on the best cookbooks .
• Ian Crouch recounts the best jokes of the year .
• Sheldon Pearce on the albums that helped him navigate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Yorker writers on the best books they read this year .

What tone can one possibly strike for an overview of 2020? The Queen’s old label of annus horribilis for her own most troubled time hardly seems adequate. Even the right point of view is hard to decide on. Does it make more sense to see the year from high above, taking a picture of an entire panicked planet, or to start from the ant’s- or worm’s-eye view, with the transformation of our manners and minds by the strangeness of 2020 (and by its sadness, too)? Begin with the scale of the misery and dislocation? Narrow down to the specific sensory strangeness of the year?
Seeing the scale first is useful because it’s so unparalleled: not one city, or even one country, but everywhere at once. Paris shut down and the first silent nights in its history enforced, with Parisians carrying permission slips like schoolchildren just to go to a pharmacy. London under lockdown, Times Square in quarantine, dressed in ghost-town array. “A quiet capital is a contradiction in terms,” the great Max Beerbohm wrote during the London bombing. “It is a thing uncanny, spectral.” And yet, uncanny though it might be, the imagery of an actual pandemic is, truth be told, considerably less melodramatic than the cinematic version. Often, when we call something “unimaginable,” what we really mean is more like “too oft imagined.” We actually have been here before, in every pandemic movie, in that Will Smith one with the zombies, for instance—and, in the zombie movie, the people are slavering in the streets. In the real one, the streets are merely empty.
2020 in Review New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.
The sensory specifics are all that usually matter, or linger, in history. Read Daniel Defoe on the mid-seventeenth-century plague in London, and it is the inventory of specific people and places—how the bear-baiting pits got shut down—that is most memorable. Let’s mark down some new sensory experiences, which our descendants might find hard to credit. The feel of a mask against a face, for instance, a sensation regularly known among Americans, previously, only to a population of doctors and nurses, became a universal—though, tragically, not universal enough—sensation. The formerly unfamiliar smell of one’s own nose, the two anchoring strings pressed behind the ears, vanishing from consciousness as a sensory pressure over the day, returning only when, in an absent-minded moment, we might forget to put it on—when, walking outside, the wearer feels utterly naked, exposed, without it.
And along with that comes the elaborate pantomime of masking: the shocking and newly learned truth that—for the most part, for most people—masks in fact don’t disguise and that all those Hollywood bandits, robbing banks in old cowboy movies, were concealing . . . nothing. We rarely fail to recognize a friend behind a mask; the “Così Fan Tutte”-style misunderstandings that masking is supposed to produce almost never happen. Instead, our astounding innate gift for facial recognition, long studied by the psychologist Susan Carey and her colleagues, has been vindicated: even broken data give us enough information to make a set of eyebrows and the turn of a head instantly recognizable as a unique person.
There is the accompanying pitiful pantomime of immunity, sometimes comic and sometimes sad. In the outdoor pavement café, that perverse gift of the pandemic, the masks stay on through the act of ordering and then come off gaily the moment the food arrives, as though the virus halts in midair politely, like the reversible bullets in a cartoon. And then there is the comedy of indoors and outdoors, as “outdoor” dining became acceptable in what were, as the fall wore into winter, huts and sheds that looked suspiciously like indoor dining. If it has walls and a roof and is shut off from the street, surely that counts as indoors—or at least reminds us that all we call “indoors” is actually outdoors, with walls drawn around it for a time.
To take a midway view, halfway between the overhead and closeup points, people who live in New York City, Philadelphia, Oakland, and elsewhere can pause a moment and recall, before their memory is eradicated by the next strange thing, the Weeks of the Mysterious Fireworks. The history book that someone will write a century from now about 2020 might well begin there, in late June and early July, with the sinister summer-long explosion of inexplicable fireworks long past midnight, seeding sleepless nights and countless conspiracy theories. The fireworks were intertwined with the most passionate weeks of the Black Lives Matter protests that filled streets and pointed truths then, and it was not impossible to understand why the belief became current that the fireworks had been deliberately passed out by the authorities in order to do something invidious: perhaps to habituate people to noise in preparation for military operations, or perhaps merely to attenuate nerves on behalf of a paranoid police force.
Horror follows horror, and unease comes after unease. The experience of the pandemic was made ghastlier by being placed against the declension of Trumpism from evil to absurdity—who will ever forget Four Seasons Total Landscaping?—and then back into even darker evil again. Philip K. Dick is the only author who could match the monstrous improbability of the protagonist, this oafish orange showman, who incarnates every hypocrisy known to man, for this combination of grotesque carnival and incipient fascism, in a farce-nightmare of authoritarianism as a reality show.
Throughout the year, nothing was normal, and everything seemed normalized. Kids spending their days staring at screens—and their parents now encouraging them to do it, for their own good! Stark inequality not just already in place but driven ever more forward, pushing women out of work, depressing many businesses and devastating some, in retail and the restaurant business particularly, perhaps beyond repair. Above all, more than a million people dead, and millions sickened, by a suddenly arrived virus as violent as it was mysterious. Yet “normalized” is an ugly word, and inadequate to the experience of 2020. We haven’t normalized things we never expected to face; rather, we’ve accepted them, and the idea of acceptance, as both an enduring spiritual virtue and as a dubious, fatalistic practice, wraps itself this year around both the pain we shared and our efforts to transcend it.
Add one more element to the ominous mix: all summer long, two strangely glowing planets glowered down on us, presiding over the strangeness. Jupiter and Saturn, unusually bright and vivid, were approaching what astronomers call their “great conjunction”; as this year ended, they were seen closer together than they have appeared in eight hundred years, so near as to form one peculiar, double Christmas star. You can read Defoe to know what an earlier age would have made of such an enormous astrological portent. It would have explained everything in one nightly array.
And yet, in the end, smaller lights of reason shone. A majority of American voters rejected Trumpism, including a small but crucial margin of former Trump voters. Millions and millions more Americans voted against Trump than for him. Reason—and the science it inspires—really does look sturdier at year’s tragic end than it did before. The fireworks, we have since learned, went off not because of any covert conspiracy but because the ‘opportunity costs’ of fireworks, as one economist put it, suddenly became much lower; opportunity costs “put a dollar value on what else a person could do with their time,” and in the height of the pandemic in summer there just wasn’t enough else to do. The fireworks happened for homespun economic reasons. Whenever the kinds of conspiracy theories that Trump thrives on met tests of truth and evidence, in the courts or in the lab, they failed, miserably and abjectly. The vaccine that may at least ease the crisis was the result of processes of biological science that have been ripening now for decades and came to the rescue because they had been slowly nurtured, in labs and classrooms, for so long. A refusal to accept things as they are and a furious attachment to ongoing life proved stronger than either detachment or resignation—minimally stronger, perhaps, but minimal is often the best we can hope for.
Conjunctions, great and small, in sentences as in the skies, connect the dots of common speech, or of stars. Conjunctions can glue us together or push us apart. We write the world as much as we get written by it. The best point of view with which to see even a year as strange as this one is neither from above nor from below but face to face, eye to eye, that human point of view which persists, even when, for a time, it must go masked.
2020 in Review


newyorker--2020-12-31--Three Mathematicians We Lost in 2020

Three Mathematicians We Lost in 2020

The “ moral ” that excited everyone when this computer game was invented , in 1970 , was that simplicity could beget complexity .
It provided users with a computational version of the molecular primordial soup , with its ramifications intact but time collapsed .
These days , of course , it ’ s hard not to see our real lives in the game ’ s simple , abstract terms .
Variations on Life are used to model epidemics like the one we ’ re experiencing .
The coronavirus is among the simplest life forms , living only to reproduce @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the next , through some form of basic contact transmission .
We are the squares , some of us occupied and some vacant , all of us doing what we can to avoid being a nearest , or even second-nearest , neighbor .
The inventor of Game of Life , John Conway , is among those we ’ ve lost to the coronavirus this year .
( He died , in April , of COVID-19 . )
I sometimes wonder if , given his ironic and dark sense of humor , he would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was an extraordinarily creative mathematician , one who needed to see a problem as a puzzle or a game in order for it to seize his interest .
Early on , Conway made his name by solving a complicated puzzle about symmetries in twenty-four dimensions .
For most of us , it ’ s easier to start with two .
Imagine that you have a pile of identical Frisbees .
You want to lay as many of them down on the floor as possible—no stacking allowed !
Try it , and you ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ them out in rows that are shifted just a bit , so that the boundary of one Frisbee dips into the cleavage between the two below , is the best that you can do .
Nestle a few rows together in this way , and you ’ ll find that any given Frisbee is surrounded by six others .
At this point , a mathematician might place an imaginary peg in the center of a group of six Frisbees , then connect the pegs with imaginary lines .
Do this , and you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that ’ s symmetrical in a number of ways : you can flip it across various axes or rotate it around its center in steps of sixty degrees , and , except for which corners are where , it remains unchanged .
In mathematical lingo , we ’ ve taken a few interesting steps .
We started with a “ packing problem ” ; by solving it , we uncovered a symmetrical shape ; that shape , in turn , contains its own “ group ” of symmetries .
We could take the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that you replace the Frisbees with perfectly spherical , identical oranges .
( A mathematician ’ s oranges are always perfect spheres . )
Now we ’ re contemplating the so-called greengrocer ’ s problem—the question of the best way to stack fruit in a market .
In the usual greengrocer ’ s arrangement , layers of oranges are stacked such that each orange touches twelve others .
The three-dimensional polyhedron created when we connect the centers of the neighboring oranges also has its own , much larger , group of symmetries .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ group theory , ” and its modern origins are generally traced back to the nineteenth-century mathematician Evariste Galois , who—in one of the most romantic of mathematical legends—is said to have feverishly organized his definitive manuscripts the night before a duel in which he died .
Galois wasn ’ t interested in symmetries in space , but in symmetries among and within solutions to equations .
A given solution to an equation might have a mirror solution , differing only in its sign : √2 and -√2 , for instance .
Galois realized @ @ @ @ @ @ @ equation was intimately related to the complexity of the “ group ” of its solutions ’ symmetries .
His discovery initiated over a century ’ s worth of work aimed at ferreting out groups of symmetries hidden in ever-more-complicated mathematical and geometric structures .
By the late nineteen-sixties , mathematicians were racing to fill out a complete catalog .
Conway , who had been hunting around for a good problem , had followed the work of the British mathematician John Leech , who had explored the packing of spheres in twenty-four-dimensional space .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ fantastical grocery store , each sphere simultaneously touches 196,560 others .
But the complete symmetries of the gemlike object obtained by connecting the centers of those neighbors were still unknown , and Conway decided to take a crack at finding them .
He set out a deliberate schedule of work , anticipating that it would go on for weeks , but then blazed to a solution in a single , Galois-worthy night of intellectual frenzy : he found that his twenty-four-dimensional crystal was symmetrical in 8,315,553,613,086,720,000 distinct ways .
This work would ultimately @ @ @ @ @ @ @ useful for communication between satellites and Earth .
The so-called Conway Group , meanwhile , paved the way for the uncovering of an even larger group , which mathematicians call the Monster—a group of symmetries as large as the number of kilograms of matter in the observable universe , which lives in a space of over a hundred and ninety thousand dimensions .
The Monster has helped mathematicians to understand prime numbers , and given physicists new insights into quantum gravity .
Conway was also a showman and a showoff and an intellectual @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his was to tell you the day of the week on any date , something he could do faster than anyone else .
At Princeton , he could usually be found not in his office—which resembled a mathematical apothecary shop hit by a tornado—but in the large and somewhat soulless common room of Fine Hall , the massive looming tower , on the edge of the Princeton campus , that is the home of the mathematics department .
When I was an undergraduate math major at Princeton , in the early nineteen-eighties , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ only in the mid to late afternoon , just as things were revving up for the daily “ tea , ” a small box-cookie reception roughly marking the time when most classes had ended and a few seminars were about to start .
Conway would often hold court there , hard to miss , a cross between Rasputin and a Middle Ages minstrel , loudly talking philosophy and mathematics , playing the board game Go , or engaging in some other kind of mathematical competition , surrounded by adoring and admiring students , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a shy and unhappy undergraduate , not a game player , and I would watch the small whirlwind of activity from a distance , eat my cookies , drink the terrible coffee , and then disappear back to the bowels of the mathematics library to work on my problem sets .
After graduating from college , I don ’ t think I saw Conway again until five years later , in 1989 .
I was in the audience at a conference at M.I.T.
, where Conway gave a lecture , titled “ Computers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ house .
I remember little about the content—something about the way in which a spirit of curiosity and fun , mixed with a little computing , could be a pathway to some deep mathematics .
What I do remember quite clearly was that Conway gave the talk using an overhead projector with a single transparency ; each time he filled the transparency , he picked it up and then , to the horrified delight of the audience , licked it clean , then resumed writing .
To Conway , mathematics was a game—so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ career , he discovered , or invented , a new class of numbers that can be infinitely large and infinitely small : the “ surreal numbers , ” which include the real ones .
Conway had both a disciplined and an undisciplined mind .
He was childlike in many ways , and he took advantage of the kind of leeway that we grant to geniuses .
His method was to make mathematics out of whatever caught his fancy , but to do so with laser focus .
You and I might notice that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ; only Conway could turn that into a deep exploration of symmetry .
( After I heard him speak on this subject , walks through Central Park were never the same . )
Some say that his contributions to mathematics peaked with his discovery of the Monster .
That ’ s a little like saying that , after “ Anna Karenina , ” it was all downhill for Tolstoy ; still , Conway himself often fretted about losing his mathematical powers .
In the early two-thousands , Conway was among the mathematicians my @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , “ The Math Life.
” We had a broad and fascinating conversation , ranging from deep mathematics to word origins ( “ numb ” and “ number ” are very likely connected ! )
and wordplay .
He reflected on a life of intellectual privilege , the joys of teaching , and the wild highs and dark lows of perpetual thinking .
Our talk of his achievements was tinged with melancholy as he reminisced about the “ white hot ” creative moments now in his rearview mirror .
While Conway ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ achievement , it was also just a life , and a complicated one , one as messy as his office : several marriages , bouts of depression , and even a suicide attempt .
Mathematics was both a passion and an escape .
“ You know the saying ‘ Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare ’ ?
” he asked me .
( It ’ s a line from Edna St. Vincent Millay . )
“ Well , what does that mean ?
I think it means that , you know , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s stripped—stripped of cats and twigs and palaver—there ’ s just something pure , and clean , and simple , and exact , and precise.
” Social events can sometimes feel like settings populated by random people ( or random points , to a mathematician ) .
Here ’ s a question : how many people do you need to invite to a party to guarantee that three of them will be either mutual friends or mutual strangers ?
You might visualize a gathering as a network , with lines connecting friends or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ constellations will form triangles .
The “ Ramsey number ” associated with this scenario tells us the minimum gathering size we need in order for those triangles to emerge .
In this case , five people is too few , but six will do the trick—so the Ramsey number for this odd social-engineering task is six .
For more complex scenarios , Ramsey numbers are notoriously difficult to calculate .
They seem to require the listing out , for each guest , of the other guests they do and don ’ t know—an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Instead of making lists , mathematicians have tended to reframe the question in terms of an upper bound : we might conclude that the Ramsey number , whatever it is , is no higher than a certain other number .
Finding these bounds can quickly take us into the numerical stratosphere .
It was through such a quest that Ron Graham , who also died this year , arrived at Graham ’ s number , once called “ the largest number ever to have a use.
” Graham ’ s early life @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a love of mathematics was a steady and portable source of comfort .
A few years of school here and a few there led to entry into the University of Chicago at fifteen , through a program for precocious teen-agers ; he studied philosophy and literature in the school ’ s “ great books ” program—Carl Sagan was a classmate—then left , a few credits shy of a degree , to study mathematics at Berkeley .
He left Berkeley early , too , to enlist in the Air Force— “ The brochures looked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ when I interviewed him for “ The Math Life ” —and , while stationed in Fairbanks , Alaska , earned a degree in physics as a part-time student .
Later , he would return to Berkeley to finish his doctorate in math , becoming one of the great “ combinatorialists ” of our time .
Many parlor-room questions are combinatorial : “ How many ways can we seat these people at this table so that no one is sitting next to someone she knows ?
” But there are less familiar questions , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ inform probability theory and computer science .
Graham ’ s number mixes party planning with geometry .
Imagine a party held on a jungle gym with eight guests ; each guest sits on a corner of a cube .
By slicing the cube through any two parallel edges , it ’ s possible to isolate a four-person “ table ” —a plane on which four guests sit .
Six of these “ four-tops ” are made by the sides of the cube ; six more are made by diagonal slices through it .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ such a party , you ’ re guaranteed to find that the guests at any of these four-tops will either all know one another or all be strangers .
The answer is no : with eight guests at a cubical party , such a social arrangement isn ’ t guaranteed .

Life in the real world is complicated. It’s much simpler on the computer. As the Game of Life begins, the screen is filled with a vast latticework of squares, only a few of them filled in. The magic is in the algorithms, which determine, on the basis of the current pattern, what will happen next. As time ticks on, whether any given square will be vacant or occupied, dead or alive, depends on its present state, as well as the states of its nearest neighbors, and possibly of their neighbors, and of their neighbors twice or three times removed. Change the first pattern, rewrite, delete, or add an algorithmic rule, and the pattern may grow unbounded and crenellated or recede to a tiny, moving archipelago, or evolve only to cycle back to its initial configuration, so that it can start over again. The wheel spins on.
The “moral” that excited everyone when this computer game was invented, in 1970, was that simplicity could beget complexity. It provided users with a computational version of the molecular primordial soup, with its ramifications intact but time collapsed. These days, of course, it’s hard not to see our real lives in the game’s simple, abstract terms. Variations on Life are used to model epidemics like the one we’re experiencing. The coronavirus is among the simplest life forms, living only to reproduce, occupying each host only to find the next, through some form of basic contact transmission. We are the squares, some of us occupied and some vacant, all of us doing what we can to avoid being a nearest, or even second-nearest, neighbor.
2020 in Review New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.
The inventor of Game of Life, John Conway, is among those we’ve lost to the coronavirus this year. (He died, in April, of COVID-19.) I sometimes wonder if, given his ironic and dark sense of humor, he would’ve appreciated the symmetry. He was an extraordinarily creative mathematician, one who needed to see a problem as a puzzle or a game in order for it to seize his interest.
Early on, Conway made his name by solving a complicated puzzle about symmetries in twenty-four dimensions. For most of us, it’s easier to start with two. Imagine that you have a pile of identical Frisbees. You want to lay as many of them down on the floor as possible—no stacking allowed! Try it, and you’ll probably find quite quickly that setting them out in rows that are shifted just a bit, so that the boundary of one Frisbee dips into the cleavage between the two below, is the best that you can do. Nestle a few rows together in this way, and you’ll find that any given Frisbee is surrounded by six others. At this point, a mathematician might place an imaginary peg in the center of a group of six Frisbees, then connect the pegs with imaginary lines. Do this, and you get a perfect hexagon, a shape that’s symmetrical in a number of ways: you can flip it across various axes or rotate it around its center in steps of sixty degrees, and, except for which corners are where, it remains unchanged.
In mathematical lingo, we’ve taken a few interesting steps. We started with a “packing problem”; by solving it, we uncovered a symmetrical shape; that shape, in turn, contains its own “group” of symmetries. We could take the same steps in three dimensions. Suppose that you replace the Frisbees with perfectly spherical, identical oranges. (A mathematician’s oranges are always perfect spheres.) Now we’re contemplating the so-called greengrocer’s problem—the question of the best way to stack fruit in a market. In the usual greengrocer’s arrangement, layers of oranges are stacked such that each orange touches twelve others. The three-dimensional polyhedron created when we connect the centers of the neighboring oranges also has its own, much larger, group of symmetries.
For John Conway, mathematics was a passion and an escape. Photograph by Denise Applewhite / Princeton University
The mathematics of symmetry is called “group theory,” and its modern origins are generally traced back to the nineteenth-century mathematician Evariste Galois, who—in one of the most romantic of mathematical legends—is said to have feverishly organized his definitive manuscripts the night before a duel in which he died. Galois wasn’t interested in symmetries in space, but in symmetries among and within solutions to equations. A given solution to an equation might have a mirror solution, differing only in its sign: √2 and -√2, for instance. Galois realized that the complexity involved in solving an equation was intimately related to the complexity of the “group” of its solutions’ symmetries. His discovery initiated over a century’s worth of work aimed at ferreting out groups of symmetries hidden in ever-more-complicated mathematical and geometric structures. By the late nineteen-sixties, mathematicians were racing to fill out a complete catalog.
Conway, who had been hunting around for a good problem, had followed the work of the British mathematician John Leech, who had explored the packing of spheres in twenty-four-dimensional space. Leech had found that, in this fantastical grocery store, each sphere simultaneously touches 196,560 others. But the complete symmetries of the gemlike object obtained by connecting the centers of those neighbors were still unknown, and Conway decided to take a crack at finding them. He set out a deliberate schedule of work, anticipating that it would go on for weeks, but then blazed to a solution in a single, Galois-worthy night of intellectual frenzy: he found that his twenty-four-dimensional crystal was symmetrical in 8,315,553,613,086,720,000 distinct ways. This work would ultimately find applications in the creation of codes useful for communication between satellites and Earth. The so-called Conway Group, meanwhile, paved the way for the uncovering of an even larger group, which mathematicians call the Monster—a group of symmetries as large as the number of kilograms of matter in the observable universe, which lives in a space of over a hundred and ninety thousand dimensions. The Monster has helped mathematicians to understand prime numbers, and given physicists new insights into quantum gravity.
Conway was also a showman and a showoff and an intellectual competitor. A favorite parlor trick of his was to tell you the day of the week on any date, something he could do faster than anyone else. At Princeton, he could usually be found not in his office—which resembled a mathematical apothecary shop hit by a tornado—but in the large and somewhat soulless common room of Fine Hall, the massive looming tower, on the edge of the Princeton campus, that is the home of the mathematics department. The common room would come to life only in the mid to late afternoon, just as things were revving up for the daily “tea,” a small box-cookie reception roughly marking the time when most classes had ended and a few seminars were about to start. Conway would often hold court there, hard to miss, a cross between Rasputin and a Middle Ages minstrel, loudly talking philosophy and mathematics, playing the board game Go, or engaging in some other kind of mathematical competition, surrounded by adoring and admiring students, faculty, and visitors.
In 1989, I was in the audience at a conference at M.I.T., where Conway gave a lecture, titled “Computers and Frivolity,” to a packed house. I remember little about the content—something about the way in which a spirit of curiosity and fun, mixed with a little computing, could be a pathway to some deep mathematics. What I do remember quite clearly was that Conway gave the talk using an overhead projector with a single transparency; each time he filled the transparency, he picked it up and then, to the horrified delight of the audience, licked it clean, then resumed writing. To Conway, mathematics was a game—so much so that he discovered, or invented, a new class of numbers that can be infinitely large and infinitely small: the “surreal numbers,” which include the real ones.
Conway had both a disciplined and an undisciplined mind. He was childlike in many ways, and he took advantage of the kind of leeway that we grant to geniuses. His method was to make mathematics out of whatever caught his fancy, but to do so with laser focus. You and I might notice that brickwork often has a pattern to it; only Conway could turn that into a deep exploration of symmetry. (After I heard him speak on this subject, walks through Central Park were never the same.) Some say that his contributions to mathematics peaked with his discovery of the Monster. That’s a little like saying that, after “Anna Karenina,” it was all downhill for Tolstoy; still, Conway himself often fretted about losing his mathematical powers. In the early two-thousands, Conway was among the mathematicians my co-producers and I interviewed for a documentary, “The Math Life.” We had a broad and fascinating conversation, ranging from deep mathematics to word origins (“numb” and “number” are very likely connected!) and wordplay. He reflected on a life of intellectual privilege, the joys of teaching, and the wild highs and dark lows of perpetual thinking. Our talk of his achievements was tinged with melancholy as he reminisced about the “white hot” creative moments now in his rearview mirror. While Conway’s life was full of honors and mathematical achievement, it was also just a life, and a complicated one, one as messy as his office: several marriages, bouts of depression, and even a suicide attempt. Mathematics was both a passion and an escape. “You know the saying ‘Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare’?” he asked me. (It’s a line from Edna St. Vincent Millay.) “Well, what does that mean? I think it means that, you know, in Euclidean geometry, because it’s stripped—stripped of cats and twigs and palaver—there’s just something pure, and clean, and simple, and exact, and precise.”
In Conway’s Game of Life, chaos emerges from order. In reality, it’s generally the other way around: life is lived forward and understood backward, which is to say that the search for order in randomness is a very human endeavor. In that sense, we’re all mathematicians—pattern seekers and pattern creators at heart, from the search for meaning in our terrestrial wanderings to the imposition of constellational structures as we scan the night sky. In the vast heavens over a pitch-black town in ancient Greece, how could your eye not connect a line of stars into Orion’s Belt, or a group of them into the Big and Little Dippers? There are mathematical manifestations of this impulse. The game of connect-the-dots that our forebears played with the stars is a precursor to a zone of inquiry that mathematicians call Ramsey Theory—named for the British mathematician Frank Ramsey—which explores the inevitability of finding preordained structures in collections of random dots. Essentially, it investigates the conditions under which structure is unavoidable.
Social events can sometimes feel like settings populated by random people (or random points, to a mathematician). Here’s a question: how many people do you need to invite to a party to guarantee that three of them will be either mutual friends or mutual strangers? You might visualize a gathering as a network, with lines connecting friends or strangers; in either case, their constellations will form triangles. The “Ramsey number” associated with this scenario tells us the minimum gathering size we need in order for those triangles to emerge. In this case, five people is too few, but six will do the trick—so the Ramsey number for this odd social-engineering task is six.


newyorker--2020-12-31--The Real Republican Radicals

The Real Republican Radicals

The second development is the more surprising one : the conservative grass roots , long understood to be the source of Trump ’ s political strength , have been less forceful in their defense of the idea that the election was stolen than the Party ’ s elected leaders .
For all the fears that preceded Election Day , there has been no widespread political violence , and rallies convened to protest the election results have drawn a far cry from the “ MILLION ” marchers that Trump ’ s press secretary claimed .
During the past two months , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ defined by the comic-pathetic scene of Rudy Giuliani denouncing the election results to a handful of supporters and press at Four Seasons Total Landscaping , in Philadelphia .
The Trump movement was long understood to represent a populist era of politics—a toppling of the élites .
But now we are at the end of the Trump Administration , with the President insisting that democracy itself is under siege , and the people at the barricades are politicians and their lawyers .
Flake lives in Mesa , Arizona , where he voted for Joe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ thirty-five years , Cheryl , keeps his schedule .
He still has his oaky , patient senatorial voice but none of the old senatorial pomp .
Flake spoke about the conservative base the way Western reporters speak about Kim Jong Un—as a force that is sublime in its power and childish in nearly every other dimension .
In Flake ’ s view , the Republican Party had resisted its weakest , most irrational element for years , and then finally acceded to it .
“ Take Arizona as a microcosm , ” Flake @ @ @ @ @ @ @ McCain , principally , and [ the former U.S. senator ] Jon Kyl , and myself spent a lot of money from our campaigns and whatnot trying to keep that infrastructure sane .
And , with McCain gone , and Kyl out , me gone , there is no effort at all in Arizona .
You try to convince your neighbor who is a rational Republican to attend a district meeting or become a precinct committeeman , and then they attend , and all it is is conspiracy theories , and birtherism for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ceded to that element.
” At least partly out of exhaustion .
The Party ’ s radicalization , especially on immigration , had meant that “ the business community has stopped giving to the state Republican Party , by and large , ” which made the state Party even more dependent upon the national Party , which meant that its ranks filled even more with loyalists willing to tweet out photos of an aging casino billionaire reflected as a lion .
Flake said , “ It ’ s just a vicious cycle we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Flake is stuck living in the past , ” a spokesperson for the Arizona G.O.P .
wrote in an e-mail to The New Yorker .
“ The days of crony capitalists and ‘ Republicans In Name Only ’ dominating the levers of power in the Republican Party is on the decline.
” ) Flake was describing a process that continued to unspool even after his story ended , and whose natural terminus is something like the situation of the past month , in which the conspiracies emanating from the President ’ s most @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from the conservative grass roots .
“ It ’ s time to move on , ” the televangelist Pat Robertson said last week , suggesting that the President should leave Washington and not run again in 2024 .
( He spoke highly of Nikki Haley , the former South Carolina governor ) .
In the most powerful seats in conservative Washington , the mood has been different .
Ron Johnson , the senator from Wisconsin , has called for a hearing to investigate “ election irregularities ” in the 2020 contest .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ retired three-star general , suggested that the President might invoke martial law as part of his challenge to the election results .
Sidney Powell , a former prosecutor and Texas appellate lawyer , unspooled such baroque conspiracies about voting machines that even Giuliani insisted she wasn ’ t speaking for the Presidential campaign , but the President himself invited her to the White House several times during the week before Christmas .
Some of this is natural—inner circles tighten when everyone knows an era is ending .
But the inner-circle conspiracies took in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ portion that had signed the Texas letter .
The paranoia was coming from the top of the Party ; conservatism had been flipped upside down .
Nothing the President had done since the election surprised Flake .
He said , “ What has surprised me is how many people in positions of power have pushed this nonsense.
” There was nothing especially raggedy or vague about the poll watchers ’ affidavits .
Their testimony was clear , their observations exact , their cursive legible to the point of elegance .
Even if they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and Michael Flynn ’ s project , they sounded very little like Sidney Powell or Michael Flynn .
They had been backed by a team of Republican lawyers , and some of them were lawyers themselves ( George L. Boller : “ I am a member in good standing of the state bar of Michigan ” ) or accompanied by lawyers ( Cynthia Brunell : “ I arrived a few minutes before 9 p.m. on Tuesday November 3 with my husband , David Brunell , an attorney volunteer with the Republican Party ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ middle-class suburbs of Detroit : Bloomfield Hills , Sterling Heights , Livonia .
They stayed for remarkably long shifts and kept a careful watch .
( Articia Bomer : “ I arrived at approximately 9:30 p.m. and left the next morning at approximately 6:30 a.m. ” ) Sometimes , when they could not remember exact details , they acknowledged it .
( Colleen Schneider : “ I asked the first set of women if they were getting counted twice and they said no .
I moved down the line and asked again and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ my own business .
I can not remember the exact words.
” ) To read the file was to see the basic virtues of twentieth-century corporate life ( exactitude , determination , careful record keeping ) repurposed in service of a mania .
Many of the Republican poll watchers detected hostility from the election workers , perhaps because the Republicans were assiduously noting which of them were wearing Black Lives Matter face masks .
( Colleen Schneider : “ She told her table to continue counting the votes .
Then she said that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to which I replied that she didn ’ t intimidate me either.
” ) Some suspicion concentrated on the poll workers , who were alleged to have counted some ballots that were incomplete .
The patchiness of municipal government machinery drew attention .
( Andrew John Miller : “ I saw roughly 24 computers on November 3 , 2020 and every computer I saw had a red error messages in the lower right-hand corner saying , ‘ update overdue.
’ ” ) But even when the poll watchers noticed something that seemed to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ matter-of-factly .
( Braden Gaicobazzi : “ At least 80 % of the military ballots I saw were straight ticket democrat or simply had Joe Biden ’ s name filled in on them .
I had always been told that military personnel tended to be more conservative , so this stuck out to me as the day went on.
” ) The popular story of the Republican base through the Trump years , and especially this year , has been that it comes from the social margins , subject to the conspiratorial paranoia @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at the crucial moment , the base that the President could rely upon was composed of careful partisans who followed the rules and sought remedy within them .
If Michael Flynn was plotting a revolution , they were preparing for a lawsuit .
Really , they did not seem so far from the precinct committeemen whom Jeff Flake had worked so hard to install , to keep the Party infrastructure “ sane.
” Some of the poll watchers lived in Michigan ’ s tenth congressional district , and in December their congressman , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had not run for reëlection , quit the Republican Party .
In a letter addressed to the R.N.C .
chair , Ronna Romney McDaniel , and Representative McCarthy , Mitchell made clear that he had supported the President ( voting with Trump ninety-five per cent of the time , helping to whip votes , raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to support his colleagues ) but that he had reached a breaking point after the election .
“ If Republican leaders collectively sit back and tolerate unfounded conspiracy theories and ‘ Stop the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ electoral process , which the Department of Homeland Security said was ‘ the most secure in American history , ’ our nation will be damaged , ” Mitchell wrote .
“ With the leadership of the Republican Party and our Republican Conference in the House actively participating in at least some of those efforts , I fear long-term harm to our democracy.
” Mitchell wrote that he had asked the House ’ s clerk to record his affiliation as ‘ independent ’ for his final votes .
“ While admittedly symbolic , we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ some ways the Republican and Democratic establishments have opposite problems .
The Democratic problem is that no one ever leaves—it is in the hands of a stubborn , cagey gerontocracy .
The Republican Party ’ s problem is that no one ever stays .
In the space of a few short years , its leadership has pinged from neoliberalism to radical libertarianism to minoritarian institutionalism to authoritarian nationalism , hauling the conservative citizens of Sterling Heights along in their wake .
Partisanship , rather than ideology , is keeping the Republicans glued together @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that nationalism would be a stopping point , the events since Election Day have undermined them .
Come January , conservatives will be in the minority , awaiting new instructions from new leaders to come .
In Mesa , Flake noted that his own political banner had been constitutional conservatism ; it was only about five years ago that this was the default slogan of any grassroots movement on the right .
“ Everybody had their worn pocket Constitutions that they ’ d rip out at events , ” he said .
Now @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Flake pointed out , behind the insistence that challenging the election results was “ the only way to save the Constitution , and even calls for martial law.
” Another rueful laugh .
Flake said , “ It ’ s just blown me away , frankly , how quickly that can happen.
” Read More About the Presidential Transition • Donald Trump has survived impeachment , twenty-six sexual-misconduct accusations , and thousands of lawsuits .
His luck may well end now that Joe Biden is the next President .
• With litigation unlikely @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Republicans are looking to strategies that might remain even after rebuffs both at the polls and in court .
• With the Trump Presidency ending , we need to talk about how to prevent the moral injuries of the past four years from happening again .
• If 2020 has demonstrated anything , it is the need to rebalance the economy to benefit the working class .
There are many ways a Biden Administration can start .
• Trump is being forced to give up his attempt to overturn the election .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ reality around himself will continue .
• Sign up for our daily newsletter for insight and analysis from our reporters and columnists .

There have been two major political developments in the final, post-election act of the Trump Presidency—each interesting on its own, but confusing when taken together. First, Trump’s hold over elected Republicans has seemed only to strengthen after his loss, amid his baseless claims of a rigged election. When the attorney general of Texas announced an almost fact-free lawsuit trying to reverse the election results in four swing states, a hundred and twenty-six Republican members of Congress signed a statement supporting it. The list included some known Trump dead-enders but also plenty of mainstream Republicans: House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, New York’s Representative Elise Stefanik, Missouri’s Representative Ann Wagner. This week, Senator Josh Hawley, of Missouri, a rising star in the Republican Party, announced that he will formally challenge the certification of the election. Trump’s hold over his party was supposed to rest on his ability to win, but he lost, and not much has changed. More than a month after the election, the Republican Party of Arizona tweeted an image of Donald Trump standing over a body of water, in which he was reflected as a lion. The caption read “Lionhearted.”
The second development is the more surprising one: the conservative grass roots, long understood to be the source of Trump’s political strength, have been less forceful in their defense of the idea that the election was stolen than the Party’s elected leaders. For all the fears that preceded Election Day, there has been no widespread political violence, and rallies convened to protest the election results have drawn a far cry from the “MILLION” marchers that Trump’s press secretary claimed. During the past two months, the defense of the President has been defined by the comic-pathetic scene of Rudy Giuliani denouncing the election results to a handful of supporters and press at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, in Philadelphia. The Trump movement was long understood to represent a populist era of politics—a toppling of the élites. But now we are at the end of the Trump Administration, with the President insisting that democracy itself is under siege, and the people at the barricades are politicians and their lawyers.
In an effort to make sense of all this, I put in a call to the former Arizona senator Jeff Flake, one of the Republican insiders Trump effectively ejected from power. Flake, a libertarian conservative, was a forceful critic of Trump’s during the 2016 campaign, and called for Trump to withdraw from the Presidential race after the disclosure of the “Access Hollywood” tape that October. The President made the senator from Arizona a political target, on and off Twitter, and Flake’s approval ratings among Republicans in his home state plummeted. (This, even as Flake voted with Trump’s positions eighty-one per cent of the time). In October, 2017, Flake announced that he would not run for reëlection, saying that winning the nomination “would require me to believe in positions I don’t hold on such issues as trade and immigration, and it would require me to condone behavior that I cannot condone.” Of the mood that had gripped the Republican Party, he said, “This spell will pass, but not by next year.”
Flake lives in Mesa, Arizona, where he voted for Joe Biden last month. His wife of thirty-five years, Cheryl, keeps his schedule. He still has his oaky, patient senatorial voice but none of the old senatorial pomp. Flake spoke about the conservative base the way Western reporters speak about Kim Jong Un—as a force that is sublime in its power and childish in nearly every other dimension. In Flake’s view, the Republican Party had resisted its weakest, most irrational element for years, and then finally acceded to it. “Take Arizona as a microcosm,” Flake said. “For years, John McCain, principally, and [the former U.S. senator] Jon Kyl, and myself spent a lot of money from our campaigns and whatnot trying to keep that infrastructure sane. And, with McCain gone, and Kyl out, me gone, there is no effort at all in Arizona. You try to convince your neighbor who is a rational Republican to attend a district meeting or become a precinct committeeman, and then they attend, and all it is is conspiracy theories, and birtherism for years. The Party has simply been ceded to that element.” At least partly out of exhaustion. The Party’s radicalization, especially on immigration, had meant that “the business community has stopped giving to the state Republican Party, by and large,” which made the state Party even more dependent upon the national Party, which meant that its ranks filled even more with loyalists willing to tweet out photos of an aging casino billionaire reflected as a lion. Flake said, “It’s just a vicious cycle we’re in.” (“Jeff Flake is stuck living in the past,” a spokesperson for the Arizona G.O.P. wrote in an e-mail to The New Yorker. “The days of crony capitalists and ‘Republicans In Name Only’ dominating the levers of power in the Republican Party is on the decline.”)
Flake was describing a process that continued to unspool even after his story ended, and whose natural terminus is something like the situation of the past month, in which the conspiracies emanating from the President’s most senior allies have far exceeded anything coming from the conservative grass roots. “It’s time to move on,” the televangelist Pat Robertson said last week, suggesting that the President should leave Washington and not run again in 2024. (He spoke highly of Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor). In the most powerful seats in conservative Washington, the mood has been different. Ron Johnson, the senator from Wisconsin, has called for a hearing to investigate “election irregularities” in the 2020 contest. The former national-security adviser Michael Flynn, a retired three-star general, suggested that the President might invoke martial law as part of his challenge to the election results. Sidney Powell, a former prosecutor and Texas appellate lawyer, unspooled such baroque conspiracies about voting machines that even Giuliani insisted she wasn’t speaking for the Presidential campaign, but the President himself invited her to the White House several times during the week before Christmas. Some of this is natural—inner circles tighten when everyone knows an era is ending. But the inner-circle conspiracies took in something like half the Party in Washington—the portion that had signed the Texas letter. The paranoia was coming from the top of the Party; conservatism had been flipped upside down. Nothing the President had done since the election surprised Flake. He said, “What has surprised me is how many people in positions of power have pushed this nonsense.”
For several weeks, I’d had a daunting file open in my browser tab—several hundred pages of affidavits from Republican poll watchers in Michigan, documenting irregularities that they claimed to have seen while observing the main vote-counting site in Detroit. After I got off the phone with Flake, it occurred to me that this file was a probe into the new Republican Party that Flake had described—these were the Michiganders who had been willing to serve as the foot soldiers in Trump’s war against the election. Judges had read it, seen no meaningful evidence of a stolen election, rolled their eyes, and moved on, but from a cultural point of view it made for interesting reading.
There was nothing especially raggedy or vague about the poll watchers’ affidavits. Their testimony was clear, their observations exact, their cursive legible to the point of elegance. Even if they had enrolled in Sidney Powell’s and Michael Flynn’s project, they sounded very little like Sidney Powell or Michael Flynn. They had been backed by a team of Republican lawyers, and some of them were lawyers themselves (George L. Boller: “I am a member in good standing of the state bar of Michigan”) or accompanied by lawyers (Cynthia Brunell: “I arrived a few minutes before 9 p.m. on Tuesday November 3 with my husband, David Brunell, an attorney volunteer with the Republican Party”). They came from prosperous and middle-class suburbs of Detroit: Bloomfield Hills, Sterling Heights, Livonia. They stayed for remarkably long shifts and kept a careful watch. (Articia Bomer: “I arrived at approximately 9:30 p.m. and left the next morning at approximately 6:30 a.m.”) Sometimes, when they could not remember exact details, they acknowledged it. (Colleen Schneider: “I asked the first set of women if they were getting counted twice and they said no. I moved down the line and asked again and I was told to pretty much mind my own business. I cannot remember the exact words.”) To read the file was to see the basic virtues of twentieth-century corporate life (exactitude, determination, careful record keeping) repurposed in service of a mania.
Many of the Republican poll watchers detected hostility from the election workers, perhaps because the Republicans were assiduously noting which of them were wearing Black Lives Matter face masks. (Colleen Schneider: “She told her table to continue counting the votes. Then she said that I didn’t intimidate her, to which I replied that she didn’t intimidate me either.”) Some suspicion concentrated on the poll workers, who were alleged to have counted some ballots that were incomplete. The patchiness of municipal government machinery drew attention. (Andrew John Miller: “I saw roughly 24 computers on November 3, 2020 and every computer I saw had a red error messages in the lower right-hand corner saying, ‘update overdue.’ ”) But even when the poll watchers noticed something that seemed to them amiss, the observations were relayed matter-of-factly. (Braden Gaicobazzi: “At least 80% of the military ballots I saw were straight ticket democrat or simply had Joe Biden’s name filled in on them. I had always been told that military personnel tended to be more conservative, so this stuck out to me as the day went on.”) The popular story of the Republican base through the Trump years, and especially this year, has been that it comes from the social margins, subject to the conspiratorial paranoia of QAnon and OANN. But, at the crucial moment, the base that the President could rely upon was composed of careful partisans who followed the rules and sought remedy within them. If Michael Flynn was plotting a revolution, they were preparing for a lawsuit. Really, they did not seem so far from the precinct committeemen whom Jeff Flake had worked so hard to install, to keep the Party infrastructure “sane.”
Some of the poll watchers lived in Michigan’s tenth congressional district, and in December their congressman, a conservative named Paul Mitchell III who had not run for reëlection, quit the Republican Party. In a letter addressed to the R.N.C. chair, Ronna Romney McDaniel, and Representative McCarthy, Mitchell made clear that he had supported the President (voting with Trump ninety-five per cent of the time, helping to whip votes, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to support his colleagues) but that he had reached a breaking point after the election. “If Republican leaders collectively sit back and tolerate unfounded conspiracy theories and ‘Stop the Steal rallies’ without speaking for our electoral process, which the Department of Homeland Security said was ‘the most secure in American history,’ our nation will be damaged,” Mitchell wrote. “With the leadership of the Republican Party and our Republican Conference in the House actively participating in at least some of those efforts, I fear long-term harm to our democracy.” Mitchell wrote that he had asked the House’s clerk to record his affiliation as ‘independent’ for his final votes. “While admittedly symbolic, we all know that symbols matter.”
What has happened to the Republican Party during these past four years, and what will happen to it now? When Trump moved into the Oval Office, he hung a portrait of Andrew Jackson. But it is hard to credit the party as Jacksonian, or even broadly populist, when, this fall, it refused to send modest checks to suffering Americans, even though its own control of Washington was on the line. Trump was said to augur a rise of a more nationalistic cadre of young conservatives, but the emblem of this supposed turn, Turning Point USA, featured, at its annual conference in December, two models blasting cash through a “money cannon.” The conservatism to come might be anything at all.
In some ways the Republican and Democratic establishments have opposite problems. The Democratic problem is that no one ever leaves—it is in the hands of a stubborn, cagey gerontocracy. The Republican Party’s problem is that no one ever stays. In the space of a few short years, its leadership has pinged from neoliberalism to radical libertarianism to minoritarian institutionalism to authoritarian nationalism, hauling the conservative citizens of Sterling Heights along in their wake. Partisanship, rather than ideology, is keeping the Republicans glued together. If there were reasons to think that nationalism would be a stopping point, the events since Election Day have undermined them. Come January, conservatives will be in the minority, awaiting new instructions from new leaders to come.
In Mesa, Flake noted that his own political banner had been constitutional conservatism; it was only about five years ago that this was the default slogan of any grassroots movement on the right. “Everybody had their worn pocket Constitutions that they’d rip out at events,” he said. Now that same movement had arranged itself, Flake pointed out, behind the insistence that challenging the election results was “the only way to save the Constitution, and even calls for martial law.” Another rueful laugh. Flake said, “It’s just blown me away, frankly, how quickly that can happen.”
Read More About the Presidential Transition