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Photographs by Anna Rose LaydenOn August 7, 2022, Shantise Summers arrived home from a night out with friends around 2:40 a.m. As she walked from her car toward her apartment in Oxon Hill, a Maryland neighborhood just southeast of Washington, D.C., she heard footsteps behind her. She turned and saw two men in ski masks. One put a gun to her face; she could feel the metal pressing against her chin. He demanded her phone, wallet, keys, and Apple Watch. She quickly handed them over, and they drove off in her 2019 Honda Accord.She called the police, and later that morning, a patrol officer spotted her Accord with several teenage boys in it. When the officer approached, the teens fled. As they sped down Alabama Avenue, in Southeast D.C., they collided with a city bus, then crashed into a pole. One was seriously injured. Two of the teens had been arrested for armed carjacking eight months earlier; one was still on probation. This was in keeping with what police had been regularly seeing: the same perpetrators arrested for carjackings again and again, even after getting caught.Summers took three days off from work. She kept thinking about the feel of the gun on her skin, the way those seconds had stretched on interminably, the terror of believing that she would leave her children motherless. She was too scared to sleep at night, and afraid to leave her apartment. In need of groceries, she finally forced herself to walk to Safeway. “Every teenage African American male I saw, I’d freeze up,” Summers, who is Black, told me. “I was standing in the middle of the store crying and shaking.”Now her fear was overlaid with guilt. Here she was, a Black woman who considered herself progressive, stereotyping young Black men as threats.Summers is a single mother of four who works for the U.S. Postal Service. To pay for a new car, she had to take a second job that had her working until 11 o’clock every night, after her eight-hour shift at the post office. All the while, she was consumed with fear that the suspects, who knew where she lived, would come back and hurt her in retaliation for calling the police. She moved out of the apartment she’d lived in for eight years. Shantise Summers was carjacked at gunpoint. None of her teenage assailants got jail time. “They’re violent thieves, scary thieves. What will they become next? Because the system just told them armed carjacking is okay.” (Anna Rose Layden for The Atlantic) Two of the carjackers took a plea deal; the assistant state attorney declined to prosecute the one who had been seriously injured in the crash. This past January, at a hearing for the fourth suspect, who’d been 16 at the time of the offense, the judge ordered his family to pay $2,000 in restitution (which Summers says she has not received, and doesn’t ever expect to), then let him go. He walked out of court ahead of her.Summers found herself puzzled by the language of juvenile court. Kids are called “respondents” rather than “defendants.” They get found “involved” rather than “guilty.” “We’re treating them like children,” Summers told me. “But there was nothing childlike about what they did to me.” Summers believes that all four should have faced jail time. “They’re violent thieves, scary thieves,” she told me. “What will they become next? Because the system just told them armed carjacking is okay.”On a June evening about six months later, Detective Darren Dalton peered into the fading light, trying to determine the make and model of the vehicle approaching him. For the past two hours, ever since the call had gone out that a Cadillac Escalade had been stolen at gunpoint, Dalton and four other police investigators had been hunting for it.As the SUV neared, Dalton glanced down at its license plate: FH 7152. He pressed the mic on his radio.“I’ve got it,” he said.Dalton, a 15-year police veteran, is one of a dozen detectives on the new Prince George’s County Carjacking Interdiction Unit. In the District of Columbia and the surrounding area, which includes Prince George’s County pressed up against most of the city’s eastern border, this crime has become an offense committed not just by seasoned criminals but by adolescents looking to rob people, go for a joyride, and beef up their street-tough bona fides. Since early 2023, a third of the unit’s detectives have been shot at or have fired their own gun while pursuing carjackers.In 2020, the killing of George Floyd transformed the politics of policing in America. That summer, consensus solidified not just on the left but in the political center that tough-on-crime policies had had a net negative effect—and a disproportionate impact on poor Black neighborhoods. Politicians moved quickly to meet the moment. Many communities, including D.C., diverted money away from police departments and talked about directing it instead toward addressing crime’s chronic causes: the insufficient number of jobs paying a living wage, failing schools, run-down public housing.But during the pandemic, violent crime exploded around the country. This was especially true in the Washington area. By 2023, homicides in D.C. had climbed to a level not seen in a quarter century. Carjackings rose even more. They were happening everywhere, to everyone: a mother buckling in her children outside an elementary school; a food-delivery driver making his final stop of the day; a 90-year-old who watched the carjackers drive off with her late spouse’s ashes.Some of the victims were high-profile. In October of last year, three masked men carjacked Henry Cuellar, a Democratic congressman from Texas, as he arrived at his apartment, making off with his Toyota, phone, iPad, and sushi dinner. In January, Mike Gill, a 56-year-old father of three who’d served as the chief of staff for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, was driving his new Jeep to pick up his wife from her law office in downtown D.C. when a man climbed into his car and shot him. Gill’s wife found him in a pool of blood on the sidewalk outside her office, one foot still inside the Jeep; he would die in the hospital several days later. (Within hours of shooting Gill, his assailant successfully carried out three additional carjackings, and killed one other person.) Even law-enforcement officers have been victimized: In the past year, carjackers have attacked a police officer driving an unmarked car, stolen an FBI agent’s car—pushing her to the ground near the Capitol before making off with her Chevy Malibu—and tried to steal the car of the two deputy U.S. Marshals on protective detail near Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s home. (This attempt was thwarted when a Marshal shot one of the carjackers in the mouth.)[David A. Graham: Does being a victim of crime shift a politician’s views?]Even when the pandemic abated, carjackings kept increasing. In 2019, Prince George’s County police officers investigated fewer than 100 carjackings; by the end of 2023, that number had risen to more than 500. Angela D. Alsobrooks, the Prince George’s County executive, said the community was “under siege.” “I don’t feel safe stopping at a gas station,” she said at a press conference. In Washington, the number of carjackings more than doubled from 2019 to 2020, from 152 to 360, and then kept climbing—to 484 in 2022, and 958 in 2023. This startling increase stemmed from a complex and still somewhat mysterious set of factors, but prominent among them, at least according to cops in the Carjacking Interdiction Unit, were protracted school closings, which fueled truancy and juvenile crime; police reforms that restricted the ability to fight crime effectively; and a new hesitancy among some officers about risking their career or their life in a political atmosphere (“Defund the police!”) that they felt villainized them more than the criminals.On that night this past June, the stolen Escalade and Dalton’s unmarked Mazda CX-9 passed each other driving in opposite directions along D.C.’s border with Maryland. Dalton didn’t want to spook the carjackers, so he waited until the Escalade’s brake lights disappeared over a hill in his rearview mirror, then made a quick U-turn. He accelerated to catch up, sliding into position about eight cars behind the stolen SUV, then slowly moved in closer, weaving through traffic until he was three cars back. Other detectives from his unit, also in unmarked cars, were heading toward him from across the county. They would take turns following the Escalade. The view from Sergeant Josh Scall’s passenger-side mirror as he drives his unmarked car through Prince George’s County, looking for carjacked vehicles (Anna Rose Layden for The Atlantic) If the SUV turned left, staying in Maryland, the detectives could chase it. But if it slipped across the D.C. line, the officers would have a harder time getting permission to chase it. This, too, was an outgrowth of the changing politics of policing over the past decade: Communities all over the country had placed new restraints on police departments’ ability to aggressively pursue criminals. There were good reasons for these reforms—tragic examples of police overreach and outright abuse, especially in predominantly Black neighborhoods, were common. But police say this sudden overhaul had serious unintended consequences: more murders, more carjackings, and more violent crimes of other sorts, most of them in the very communities that the police reforms had ostensibly been aimed at protecting.Among the new limits placed on police in D.C. was an effective ban on high-speed car chases, which too often end up killing innocent bystanders, or the police officers themselves. But the spike in carjackings had been so extreme that by now, in 2024, the city had been compelled to loosen its restrictions a bit. Still, Dalton and his fellow detectives weren’t sure they would be able to get permission, so they were hoping the Escalade stayed on the Maryland side of the border.Dalton followed for two more miles, to the intersection of Southern and Branch Avenues. A crucial moment.“Left turn onto Branch,” Dalton said into the radio. The car was staying in Maryland.At a stoplight, Dalton pulled up next to the Escalade and finally got a look inside. The driver wore a blue surgical mask and a hoodie cinched tight around his face. The front-seat passenger was wearing a black ski mask, with only his eyes showing.In the distance, a police helicopter thumped across the sky, positioning itself overhead. As Dalton steadied his breathing, a fleet of patrol cars converged, preparing to give chase.Stealing cars is as old as making them; as soon as Henry Ford’s factories began churning out Model T’s in the early 1900s, people began swiping them. But over time, car alarms and anti-theft systems made them harder to steal. You could no longer take most vehicles just by pushing a screwdriver into the ignition or manipulating wires. Which is partly why, in the 1980s and ’90s, another type of car theft exploded: stealing occupied cars at gunpoint. In 1991, Scott Bowles, a police reporter for The Detroit News, wrote a story about Ruth Wahl, a 22-year-old drugstore cashier who’d been shot and killed after refusing to give up her Suzuki Sidekick. Bowles described this crime as a “carjacking.”The word would soon be inscribed in the American consciousness because of stories like this one: On a September morning in 1992, Pam Basu, a 34-year-old chemist, left her Maryland townhouse to take her 22-month-old daughter to her first day of preschool. When she pulled up at a stop sign, two men forced Basu out of her BMW. As she tried to grab her daughter from her car seat, screaming “My baby!,” the suspects took off. Basu, caught in a seat belt, ran alongside the car, then tripped and bounced on the pavement. The suspects dragged her for about two miles, leaving behind a trail of flesh, clothing, and blood. Basu, who died from her injuries, “looked like a rag doll,” a witness later told jurors. “It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen.” A neighbor found the car seat in the road, the toddler uninjured. Stories like Basu’s helped fuel the ’90s panic about vicious “superpredators” and led to the passage of the federal Anti Car Theft Act of 1992, which made carjacking a federal crime, punishable by a possible life sentence.Criminologists found carjackers to be different from traditional car thieves, most notably in their willingness to commit violence. As Bruce Jacobs, a former criminology professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, has put it, a carjacking is “a Hobbesian standoff where fear reigns and brute force is the medium of communication.” Not every criminal has the temperament for it.Carjacking violence can be wanton, even gratuitous. In March 2022, after an Uber driver named Juan Carlos Amaya drove two men to Southeast D.C., they put guns to his head and demanded his keys. Amaya quickly obeyed and got out of his car. One of the men shot him in the leg anyway. “They already had the car and the key,” Amaya told a local TV station. “They just had to leave.”Major Sunny Mrotek noticed the uptick in carjackings in Prince George’s County the month that COVID lockdowns began, in March 2020. By the end of that year, the county police department had logged a 183 percent increase over the previous year. Most of the carjackers in the area were going unpunished—roughly 70 percent of cases go unsolved. The majority of those caught are younger than 25, and about two-thirds of those arrested for carjacking in D.C. from 2020 to 2024 were juveniles, many of them from predominantly Black neighborhoods hollowed out by economic neglect.Mrotek believed that the pandemic had created an environment ripe for crime. With schools, malls, and recreation centers closed, and in-person access to various social services diminished, more young people were unsupervised. The first pandemic year was bad. “But then came 2021, and we just got crushed,” he told me. By year’s end, carjackings in Prince George’s County had jumped another 49 percent. And for the first time, the number of juvenile carjacking arrests surpassed adult arrests. Mrotek, who had been a cop for three decades, had never seen anything like this.In response, the county’s new police chief, Malik Aziz, created the agency’s Carjacking Interdiction Unit, centralizing investigations in hopes of improving arrest rates and successfully resolving more cases. Starting in the fall of 2021, a lieutenant, two sergeants, and 12 detectives would handle all carjackings, under Mrotek’s supervision.Mrotek handpicked his investigators. He needed officers who had a detective’s mind—part thinking cop, part street cop, with the skills to piece together complex cases; to surveil suspects; and, when necessary, to engage in risky chases by car or on foot. They would wear plain clothes—not suits and ties, like homicide detectives—and drive unmarked cars.The carjacking crisis came at a time when police departments were already struggling to hire officers. The Prince George’s County Police Department, budgeted for 1,786 sworn officers, has about 350 open positions, leaving the force the smallest it’s been in a dozen years. (In 2012, according to Aziz, nearly 8,000 people applied to be police officers in the county; in 2022, only about 800 did, most of them unqualified.) D.C. has lost nearly 500 sworn officers since 2020, leaving the force at a half-century low of 3,285. Many officers who remained were hesitant to do proactive police work, preferring simply to respond to 911 calls. “The general feeling was If you’re not going to fund me, acknowledge me, or appreciate me, I’m going into self-preservation mode,” Mrotek told me. To Mrotek and his colleagues, the relationship between the retreat from aggressive policing and the explosion of violent crime seemed obvious.Around this time, Mrotek and other detectives noticed that they were arresting the same kids again and again; more than a few wore GPS monitors on their ankle from previous arrests. “Why are we locking up the same people every time?” Mrotek wondered.His unit was judged by its numbers: how many cases it closed, how many cars it recovered. So he wanted to see data on what was happening to offenders after they were arrested. Were they getting locked up or released? What was the recidivism rate?Mrotek, who retired this year, found himself frustrated by what he viewed as the “coddling mindset” of the juvenile justice system. To better understand what was happening to kids as they went through the system, he began tracking the aftermath of every arrest his team made. He was stunned by what he found: dozens of cases in which teens were arrested for armed carjacking, pleaded to this or to lesser charges, and were released on probation. Kids found to be involved in carjackings rarely seemed to get any significant time in juvenile detention. He compiled a list of what he called the “top offenders”—teens on probation for carjacking who went on to be charged with additional carjackings. Suddenly, explaining the county’s carjacking problem seemed simple: If there were no meaningful consequences for committing a crime, kids would just keep committing it. “This isn’t brain surgery,” Mrotek told me. Kids would say to detectives, “ ‘I’m a juvenile—I’ll be home later today.’ ” Christina Henderson, a member of the D.C. city council, told me she would hear about offenders committing multiple carjackings. “That tells me that when he didn’t get caught after the first one, there was a feeling of invincibility—Nothing is going to happen to me; let me keep going.”Mrotek is a father of two. He doesn’t think that a single impulsive decision should derail a kid’s future. But some crimes, he believes, are bad enough to require serious consequences, even for minors. “If you’ve just finished working 10 hours, stop at a gas station, and two juveniles pistol-whip you and drive off in your car, should they get only probation?” he said. “If we’re not punishing people for having a gun and violently assaulting people, what’s left? Murder?”I talked with an assistant principal of a 1,200-kid middle school in the metropolitan D.C. area who shares this concern. “I don’t care who you are,” Ateya Ball-Lacy told me. “If you are in the community carjacking and putting a gun to somebody’s head, you need to be in a restricted environment. Period. Is it jail? Is it juvie? I don’t know, but clearly you need to be somewhere you can get help.”Ball-Lacy grew up in Southwest D.C. during the crack epidemic. Several of her cousins died. “I never agreed with ‘defunding the police,’ ” she said. “When that conversation happened in my school district, we were very clear: That’s insane. If we don’t have police, who is going to break up the fights? I have a permanently torn rotator cuff as a result of breaking up fights. We cannot pretend that we are not in this place.”Mrotek proposes a fix that he believes could solve the carjacking problem: If a juvenile pulls a gun during a carjacking, they serve a mandatory three years—one-tenth of the maximum sentence for adults.“I guarantee you the numbers will drop real fast,” he told me.Some people say that society can’t arrest its way out of a crime problem. “Yes, we can,” Mrotek said. “It’s actually very simple.”As the sun set, Detective Sara Cavanagh joined Detective Dalton in tailing the Escalade, following it into an apartment complex. The SUV stopped in front of an apartment; two suspects got out of the car and disappeared inside.Cavanagh sat behind the wheel of her unmarked Chevy Equinox and waited. Four other detectives parked nearby, each in a separate unmarked car. Patrol vehicles began lining up along a side street. If the suspects tried to flee in the Escalade, officers would deploy a spike strip—Teflon-coated metal spikes arrayed along a cord that cops can throw onto the road—to flatten its tires. The police department’s helicopter circled above. If Cavanagh and her colleagues had to give chase, the helicopter would serve as “the eye,” with a spotter calling out directions. Left: Detective Darren Dalton, of the Prince George’s County Police Department carjacking unit, spotted a carjacked Cadillac Escalade this past June, leading to a chase and an arrest. Right: Detective Sara Cavanagh is the only female member of the Prince George’s County carjacking unit. Her experience has led her to conclude that carjacking is among the most heinous of crimes, behind only rape and murder. (Anna Rose Layden for The Atlantic) Cavanagh is the only woman in the Carjacking Interdiction Unit, which tends to attract rough-and-tumble, testosterone-driven types. Her squad’s resident gym rat, Rusty Ueno, can bench-press 450 pounds. Many of the detectives have elaborate tattoos, samurai and lions swirling across their biceps, and they fish, hunt, and drink beer together on the weekends. Cavanagh, who is 29, has taken on the role of little sister. She bounces into the office every day, ponytail swinging, chattering nonstop. “She makes us say hello to her,” her sergeant, Matt Milburn, grouses. But she has the unit’s respect. She is the only woman in the entire department certified to carry a rifle, and many times she is the first to arrive at a crime scene. A former Division I soccer player, Cavanagh can beat anyone in her squad in a foot chase.For Cavanagh, carjacking ranks behind only murder and rape in the hierarchy of awful crimes. She has seen the terror in victims’ eyes. The ones that affect her the most are the elderly women. Like the old lady who had been unloading groceries in her driveway when four suspects approached and demanded her car. The woman put up a fight and screamed for help; as she tried to run, one of the men tackled her, breaking her foot. Or the woman in her mid‑80s who was assaulted while parked at an ATM. Three adolescent boys grabbed her cash and pushed her while taking her car keys; she tripped backwards over a concrete parking barrier and hit her head on the ground. When Cavanagh’s unit later arrested one of the boys, in a grocery store, they discovered that he was only 12.During the arrest, the kid said something to Detective Dalton about a bullet.“You have a gun on you?” Dalton asked.“No, a bullet in me,” the kid said.“What are you talking about?”“I got shot two weeks ago,” the kid said.He’d been a victim in a triple shooting. A bullet was still lodged in his back.Cavanagh later went to search the house where the kid lived. She found cockroaches everywhere, an empty refrigerator, 10 people crammed in two rooms, old takeout rotting beneath a bed. “I really didn’t want to like this kid—he’d just carjacked an old lady,” Cavanagh told me. “But I felt sorry for him.”After every arrest, Sergeant Milburn looks up the suspect’s prior contact with the criminal-justice system. He estimates that in at least half of the unit’s juvenile cases, the suspect has had previous interactions with the police as a victim—of physical or sexual abuse, for example, or of neglect by a parent or family member. Milburn searched the 12-year-old’s history, and sure enough: He’d allegedly been physically abused at 6 years old. “Most of these kids don’t stand a chance,” Milburn told me. “I can’t tell you how many times we notify parents and they say, ‘I don’t care,’ or ‘Just send his ass to Cheltenham’ ”—the county’s juvenile detention center. “That happens more times than not.”Cavanagh kept her eyes on the Escalade in the gathering dusk. The two suspects emerged from the apartment. “Carjacking 14,” she radioed, announcing herself by her call sign. “I’ve got two people on foot.”The suspects climbed into the Escalade and headed toward the complex’s exit. Just past the gate, officers were hiding between two cars, where they’d laid the spike strip. Once the vehicle had passed over it, the officers would quickly yank the strip out of the road, to spare the tires of pursuing police cars.From the sky, the helicopter spotter called out the Escalade’s movements: The suspects were coming around the corner, approaching the gatehouse. As the Escalade bumped over the spikes, air hissed out of its tires. It wobbled but kept going.The line of patrol cars emerged from the side street, sirens wailing. Cavanagh joined the chase, crossing into a residential neighborhood, bouncing over speed bumps at 40 miles per hour.As the carjackers sped down a hill on their busted tires, they lost control of the Escalade, which veered off the road and smashed into the front of a house. The suspects leaped out and ran. For a long moment, the police radio was quiet as officers chased them on foot.“Talk to me,” a dispatcher finally said.“Got one in custody,” a breathless patrol officer replied.The second suspect had disappeared into the trees, the vegetation too dense for the helicopter to pick up his heat signature. A supervisor called for a canine unit; perhaps a dog could pick up his scent.Cavanagh raced toward the woodline, listening for the sound of sticks breaking or leaves rustling, then slipping into the trees to search.Brian L. Schwalb, the District’s attorney general, told me he was surprised at how quickly the prevailing sentiment had returned to “Lock ’em up” when carjackings and other crimes exploded. After all the marches and protests demanding criminal-justice reform in 2020, he said, “here we are four years later, and it’s as if that conversation never happened.” Frightened residents suddenly became less interested in hearing about root causes and long-term solutions, saying in community forums across the region that they felt unsafe and wanted something done now. Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for D.C., found himself suddenly being attacked as “soft on crime,” sometimes by the very same people who just months earlier were deriding him and other federal prosecutors as “mass incarcerators.” As soon as people start feeling unsafe, Graves told me, calls for reform are replaced by a desire to “lock up as many people as possible for as long as possible.” Evidence of this dizzying shift can be seen in the 2024 presidential election: Kamala Harris now embraces the prosecutor’s background she attempted to distance herself from during the 2020 primary campaign.In 2014, the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, led to a wave of police reforms across the country. The killing of George Floyd intensified that wave. But as violent crime rose sharply across D.C. over the past few years, many of those reforms suddenly seemed ill-conceived. A new narrative took hold, even among frightened liberals: The city’s progressivism had prompted a descent into lawlessness. Juvenile criminals were facing no consequences. Young people were out of control. Politicians backpedaled, prosecutors promised to get tough again, and police officers said smugly to one another, What did they think was going to happen?The D.C. city council’s decision to trim the Metropolitan Police Department’s budget in 2020 led to a hiring freeze that Peter Newsham, D.C.’s police chief from 2016 until early 2021, believes contributed to the spike in crime. “If you look at our data during that time period, crime almost immediately went in the wrong direction, particularly violent crime,” Newsham told me. “To reduce the size of the police department was, in my opinion, irresponsible.”Newsham doesn’t dispute that policing needs to reform and evolve. But Washington’s police department has been evolving for decades, he said, under the supervision of the U.S. Department of Justice. “We’re not the Derek Chauvins of the world,” he told me, referring to the police officer who killed George Floyd.Newsham is now the police chief for nearby Prince William County, Virginia, which has been averaging only a dozen or so carjackings a year. He says that if you were to place a red dot on a map everywhere across the region where a serious crime has occurred, most of those dots would be concentrated in D.C. and some of its adjoining Maryland neighborhoods. “As soon as you go into Virginia, there are very few red dots,” he says. “How do you explain that?”He answered his own question: “It’s the lack of consequences in D.C. If you want to stop violent crime, you have to separate violent criminals from society. They’re just not doing that. We’re so concerned about the freedom of the violent offender that we’re putting everyone else in jeopardy.” (The poverty rate is also lower in Prince William County than in Washington.) Newsham says criminals in D.C. have told him they know not to commit a crime in Northern Virginia because they know punishment there “is going to be swift and certain.”The carjacking fever seems to finally be breaking; this is the first year since 2019 in which carjackings are down—by more than 50 percent in D.C. and roughly 26 percent in Prince George’s County through August. Police leaders attribute the decline in part to their specialized carjacking task forces, which have gotten better at solving cases—and also to a public sentiment that has shifted back in favor of more aggressive policing and prosecution. Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney, ascribes the decline in carjackings partly to his office’s successful prosecution of multiple cases that resulted in lengthy prison sentences. Christina Henderson, the city-council member, concurs. “I think the growing number of prosecutions has helped curb some of this behavior,” she said. Sergeant Scall surveils a stolen Toyota Corolla. (Anna Rose Layden for The Atlantic) But Eduardo Ferrer, the policy director of the Juvenile Justice Initiative at the Georgetown University Law Center, says the panicked return to a draconian tough-on-crime approach is misguided. “We’re revisiting failed policies from the 1990s,” such as youth curfews and longer pretrial detention, he told me. “We’re bringing back policies that we know did not work and that actually created a lot of harm.”“When crime rises, the reaction has always been to get tough on crime,” Emily Gunston, who worked as first assistant attorney general for D.C. under Schwalb, told me. But “all of the studies show that putting kids deeper in the juvenile justice system increases criminality rather than reducing it.”Ferrer noted that it’s a relatively small group of kids getting into trouble: Of the roughly 48,000 adolescents who live in D.C., fewer than 3 percent, or about 1,200, have been involved in the juvenile court system—and of those, about 1 percent, or fewer than 500, are charged with the most violent crimes: homicide, armed robbery, and carjacking. Gunston thinks the focus should be on this subset of offenders. “If we threw enough money and resources at these children,” she told me, “it would be much cheaper and more effective than what we’re doing.” Graves agrees that the most effective approach is to concentrate on the small number of people who are committing violent acts—but that the initial emphasis should be on removing them from the community.Juvenile crime rates rise and fall, but the primary root causes of the crimes don’t change, Ferrer said: Based on data from 2022, he estimates that 12 percent of the kids involved in D.C.’s juvenile justice system are homeless, 75 percent are on Medicaid, at least 45 percent have a diagnosed behavioral-health issue, and at least 50 percent have reported abuse or neglect. Many of these kids have experienced significant and complex trauma, and so have their parents. Problems that have compounded over generations will not be solved quickly.“It’s really important to hold two ideas in your brain at the same time,” Gunston said. “Carjacking is a terrible crime that has terrible effects on victims—and these are children who don’t have the same decision-making abilities as adults. A child who commits a crime like this has already been failed in so many ways.”The concerns of a community worried about safety in the face of runaway violent crime are legitimate. So are concerns about the rights and life prospects of the sometimes quite young kids committing these crimes—kids born into poverty and structural racism, many of whom were themselves victims before they became criminals. Can these concerns be balanced effectively? Ferrer said the solution is to address the root causes of crime and poverty. “Real public safety is a by-product of thriving communities,” he told me, and that’s clearly true as far as it goes. But until we achieve that, would-be criminals, even young ones, have to know that they will face serious consequences for violent behavior. On this, police, prosecutors, criminologists, and most citizens in the afflicted communities agree. It should be possible to concentrate more intensive and proactive police work, and prosecutorial follow-through, on the small core of regular violent offenders, while at the same time investing public resources more broadly in impoverished neighborhoods. Brian Schwalb, the attorney general, calls this a “both and” approach: Violent offenders must face aggressive prosecution—and communities must address root causes of crime. Rather than careening wildly from one extreme (defund the police) to the other (lock ’em up), Schwalb says the whole criminal-justice apparatus—police and prosecutors and policy makers—must constantly be calibrating minor adjustments in the balance between rehabilitation and punitiveness.Milele Drummond, who has taught in D.C. public schools for 14 years, has been struck recently by how casually some of her students talk about carjacking. “To them, it’s not a big deal,” she told me. “It’s more fun to carjack” than to be in school.Drummond, who lives in Southeast D.C., near the border with Maryland, worries about getting carjacked when she goes to get gas, especially when she has her two young children with her. But she also worries about her students. She had thought that teaching Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye would lead to productive discussions about racism. But she’s found that an easier way to convey some of these lessons has been to talk about crime and justice in their own city. When crime is a thing that happens to other people elsewhere, she tells her classes, it’s easy for people far from the scene to express empathy toward the perpetrator, and an understanding of why a person might have committed such a crime. But when people who are used to feeling safe suddenly don’t, that empathy and understanding tend to evaporate quickly.[Read: Why California is swinging right on crime]“When people of means and power and privilege start to feel afraid, everything changes,” Drummond tells her students—the response shifts very quickly from “Oh, they have a sad story” to “Lock them up.”In other words, when the threat of becoming a victim increases in their own neighborhoods, even progressive reformers are apt to suddenly become tough on crime. Which is what many of the law-abiding residents of higher-crime communities have been all along.It was now close to midnight. After chasing down the Escalade, the detectives had returned to the maze of gray cubicles on the second floor of their building. One wall was papered with flyers showing carjacked vehicles that had not been recovered. A discarded bumper with D.C. tags lay on the floor, retrieved from a carjacking scene.Josh Scall, another sergeant on the unit, walked in wearing a backwards baseball cap that read Girl Dad. He has two daughters, 6 and 8. During the car chase, his wife had been texting him, telling him that the girls, worn out from a swim meet, had gone to sleep easily.Scall looked over at a computer monitor on Dalton’s desk, which was showing live feeds from each of the four interrogation rooms down the hall. Two young suspects, arrested in a different case, were yelling to each other through an air-conditioning vent.“They’re trying to charge me with armed robbery,” one shouted.In a third room, the suspect whom the carjacking unit had apprehended that night sat in a chair, his head on a desk, his left wrist cuffed to a wall. Ueno, the gym rat, had gone in earlier to get the kid’s name, and described him as respectful. “He seemed defeated,” he told the others. (They never found the second suspect.)After George Floyd’s death, Scall, a 14-year police veteran, had questioned his choice of career. Scrolling Facebook, he’d see that everyone, including friends, had seemed to turn against his profession. But since joining the carjacking unit in 2021, he told me, he’d felt renewed purpose. His squad was doing unambiguous police work, with clear victims and villains. Every time he showed up at a scene, he’d been called there to help. He liked that. His wife thinks the job is too dangerous. But Scall feels that the unit is making a difference.Scall watched the detectives work. Cavanagh was typing up a probable-cause affidavit. Another detective retrieved a copy of the pursuit video from the helicopter hangar. A third followed the Escalade to the evidence bay for processing. Ueno hung up the phone and rolled his chair around to face the others. “All right, the juvenile’s grandmother has been notified,” he said. She had not sounded surprised to hear that her grandson had been arrested.Just after midnight, Cavanagh walked over to the microwave to warm up a container of Irish stew. As the microwave beeped, her telephone rang. It was the owner of the Escalade. “They ran from us and ended up losing control and hit a house,” Cavanagh told him. “So your car has some serious front-end damage.”After Cavanagh hung up, she went back to the affidavit. She was charging the juvenile with 13 criminal counts, mostly felonies. In a little while, she’d drop him off at a youth detention center. With no prior arrests, he’d likely be released later that morning.This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “Catching the Carjackers.”

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Alaska’s glaciers are melting at a record rate due to global warming. | Sergi Reboredo/VW Pics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Hi, I’m Paige Vega, Vox’s climate editor. Over the past few months, I’ve been working with Joseph Lee, a New York City-based journalist and member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribe, on a series exploring Indigenous solutions that address extreme weather and climate change. And today, on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we’ve published the project’s latest feature, a story that takes us to Idaho, where the Coeur d’Alene Tribe is undergoing a sweeping, multi-decade effort to restore an important wetland on the reservation. Their restoration, guided by the return of ancestral food sources, could serve as a model for the rest of the country. You can read it here.   Stories like the Coeur d’Alene’s highlight the value of Indigenous solutions as we face increasingly extreme weather and natural disasters and navigate the brutal effects of the climate crisis.   Around the world, Indigenous people have the smallest carbon footprint, according to the United Nations, but are more vulnerable to the impact of climate change because they disproportionately live in geographically high-risk areas.  At the same time, these communities are also key sources of knowledge and understanding on climate change impacts, responses, and adaptation. Their traditional knowledge — focused on sustainability and resilience, from forecasting weather patterns to improving agricultural practices and management of natural resources — has increasingly gained recognition at the international level as a vital way to tackle climate change. I talked with Lee about the process of exploring several tribes’ climate dilemmas, and why the alternative posture they’re taking can offer us uniquely humble, approachable, and nature-first holistic approaches — something we could all take to heart.  Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. Paige Vega: Let’s talk about the project Changing With Our Climate and how it came to be. What were some of the goals you had — things you really wanted to hit home through these stories? Joseph Lee: We wanted to look at different ways Indigenous people are adapting to climate change and extreme weather. For years, I’ve been hearing a lot about how Indigenous people are on the front lines of climate change and that Indigenous knowledge and land stewardship are good for the environment, so we wanted to explore in depth what that actually looks like in different Indigenous communities. In each story, we really wanted to focus on a specific community, to show the diversity of Indian Country, the challenges tribes are facing, but also the range of creative solutions they’re working on.  How do you draw on your own perspective and life experiences as well as your professional experiences reporting on Indigenous communities?   Writing this series gave me a lot of opportunities to think about my own tribe, the Aquinnah Wampanoag. For example, in writing about the Coeur d’Alene Tribe’s water potato harvest, in our story that published on Vox today, I was reminded of my tribe’s annual cranberry harvest, which I just attended. Or when I visited the Shinnecock Nation in August, I couldn’t help but see the similarities between their tension with their wealthy Hamptons neighbors and my tribe’s experience on Martha’s Vineyard. I think my personal experience can help me think about what questions to ask, but my background doesn’t give me any sort of secret code to understanding other tribes. Every tribe is different, and my goal for this series was to show the specific situations facing each featured community.  What is the value of traditional ecological knowledge and Indigenous solutions? What can all communities learn from the distinct way that tribes grapple with extreme weather and climate change? Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge is based on generations of experience with land and environment. The Coeur d’Alene Tribe, for example, relied on a beloved elder’s memory when they began reconnecting old stream channels in their wetlands restoration project. And in our first piece [about how an Alaskan tribe dependent on sea ice is adapting to rapid warming], Roberta Tuurraq Glenn-Borade, an Iñupiaq researcher, told me how she is gathering local observations about the climate in the Alaskan Arctic to help leave a detailed record for the future. That’s what Indigenous knowledge is, she said — an understanding developed over years and years. All of these stories show how it’s about constant evolution and looking forward. Indigenous knowledge has never been set in stone, and in the face of climate change, Indigenous people are adapting more than ever.  What were some of the highlights or unexpected insights that blew you away? One of the things that struck me is that Indigenous people have been saying and doing these things for years, so the question becomes what’s been stopping them [now]. Sometimes colonialism can seem abstract, but there are so many clear examples, whether that’s systemic racism in the Hamptons against the Shinnecock Nation or the legacy of allotment policies on the Coeur d’Alene reservation. Government policies have made it that much harder for tribes to adapt to climate change. Threats to tribal sovereignty can also be seen as threats to climate adaptation.  On the other hand, despite the legacy of colonialism, some of these solutions are really straightforward ideas, like bringing good fire [also known as controlled burns] back to the land after decades of fire suppression policies. There’s a lesson here that we don’t have to overcomplicate these ideas, we just have to not just listen to people who have been doing the work for generations, but support them or get out of their way.  What’s one lesson or takeaway that you’d like to leave readers with? There are two things that I kept hearing while reporting these stories. The first is that we can’t control nature, that trying to impose our will on the environment has never worked. For the Shinnecock Nation on Long Island, for example, they understand that no matter what they do, they can’t stop the water from rising. So they are working with that knowledge to find a solution that will work for their community.  The second is that we need to be thinking more long-term. The real change is going to take generations. A number of the Indigenous people I spoke to for this series talked about how they don’t expect to see the results of their work in their lifetimes, but they believe in it anyway. People in the Coeur d’Alene Tribe talked about how the previous generation of tribal leaders fought for legal justice but never saw the fruits of their labor, and now this generation understands they may not be around to see the salmon fully return, or their wetland restoration completed.  I think that kind of commitment to an effort that you may never see completed is something we could all learn from. 

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This story is the fourth feature in a Vox special project, Changing With Our Climate, a limited-run series exploring Indigenous solutions to extreme weather rooted in history — and the future. Last October, Aiyana James attended her first water potato harvest on the reservation of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe in northwestern Idaho. The weather was unusually cold, but she was determined to harvest her first water potatoes, a small wetland tuber that’s one of the tribe’s key traditional foods.  The smell of smoke and drying elk meat filled the air along the shore of Lake Coeur d’Alene, where the tribe set up food booths and educational stations. She waded into the frigid water barefoot to dig for the small tubers, while back on land, tribal members cooked them in a traditional pit bake, where elk, camas (a flowering plant with edible bulbs), and other locally harvested foods are layered. James, who grew up in Portland, Oregon, and spent summers and school breaks on the reservation, was excited to take part in the harvest for the first time after moving to the reservation after college. But something was wrong: Early-season snow dampened the harvest, and although it was only a light dusting, tribal leaders spoke during the opening prayers about how unusual the conditions were. It had been a dry summer, and the water potato harvest was bad, something that has been happening more and more in recent years.  “I know that this isn’t supposed to be how it is,” James said. “Deep down within me, I’m like, ‘This just doesn’t feel right.’” After their land in northwest Idaho was carved up by 1909 federal allotment policies, Western agriculture, and logging thatback persists on some level today, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe lost a massive amount of acreage and, with it, their ability to manage the land and maintain balance between environmental protection and economic development. Salmon and trout disappeared from the streams. Fires became more frequent and powerful. Water potatoes and other key plants like camas, once staple foods for tribal members, started to disappear.  Now, extreme drought is making the situation even worse.  All of this is part of a reinforcing cycle of land degradation and climate change that the Coeur d’Alene Tribe has been fighting for decades. It’s a fight that James has now joined as one of the tribe’s first climate resilience coordinators.  To protect their land and community, the Coeur d’Alene are in the middle of an ongoing, multi-decade effort that relies, in part, on elder knowledge to restore an important wetland.  The tribe is bringing back beavers and salmon, restoring native grasses, and repairing stream channels. Collectively, those efforts are designed to restore balance to the landscape, make it more resilient to future climate change by fostering interconnected ecosystems, and, tribal members hope, one day allow them to rely again on important ancestral foods like the water potato. “We’ve been living off of the foods that are on our land for thousands upon thousands of years,” James said. “Reconnecting with that food reconnects us with our land.” Bring back the water potato, help the climate Across the country, ecological restoration is increasingly seen as a key part of the fight against climate change, and wetlands provide an especially important service in an era of global warming: They absorb carbon from the atmosphere.  For the Coeur d’Alene tribe, a healthy wetland signifies a way to curb rising temperatures that will provide the basis for the return of a rich food source and a traditional way of life. That a wetland serves as the lynchpin means that the tribe is taking on the restoration of an ecosystem that is especially threatened as the world’s climate trends hotter and more arid. Because wetlands are areas where water is at or near the surface for large parts of the year, severe bouts of drought made more common by climate change threaten their existence.According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, more than half of the wetlands in the lower 48 states are gone, and the rate of loss is only accelerating. Between 2009 and 2019, an area of vegetated wetlands in the US the combined size of Rhode Island disappeared.  There’s an overarching effort underway to help these imperiled landscapes. The 2022 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included $1.4 billion for ecosystem restoration and resilience, while President Joe Biden also signed an executive order setting a national goal to conserve at least 30 percent of the country’s lands and waters by 2030.  The Coeur d’Alene aren’t alone in their focus on restoration, but they’re especially good at it. And their uniquely patient, humble approach could serve as a model for other communities working to restore the environment and prepare for climate change.  Tribal knowledge and expertise is especially important for restoration because Indigenous people are the ones who know what the land was like before it was degraded and what techniques will help restore it. The thread that ties it all together is traditional food, like the water potato. These cultural foods build connections between people and land and act as an especially tangible measuring stick of the impact that those connections can have on the environment.  James says that camas, for example, grows better when it is regularly harvested. But because so much Coeur d’Alene land is now owned by non-Indigenous people, tribal members often don’t have access to camas fields, and some that have been unattended for years are now suffering.  “We need these foods, but they also need us to flourish and to grow and get better,” she said. “If we do these things right and we focus on restoring our relationship and restoring our connection with our culture, sovereignty, and traditions, then that’s going to have lasting effects.” An environmental restoration — and a cultural one, too On the Coeur d’Alene reservation, soil health and biodiversity have declined, the water temperature is rising, and extreme weather like heat waves and drought are increasingly frequent. But the tribe’s restoration work is beginning to pay off.   In the summer of 2022, an adult salmon swam in Hangman Creek for the first time in around 100 years. Two years after the tribe released juvenile salmon into the creek, and after an arduous journey out to the Pacific Ocean and back, the tribe welcomed salmon back to the creek for the first time in generations.  For Ralph Allan Jr., the tribe’s fish and wildlife program manager, it was the culmination of 20 years of work that began with long days of fieldwork like planting trees. Now, he’s leading the department as it prepares to bring salmon back to the reservation.  Allan is also working to plant the seeds for a new generation of restoration advocates. He has led an internship program to get college students out in the field and three tribal members are currently enrolled in fish and wildlife degree programs. At the water potato harvest, Allan makes sure that department staff are working with the youth, showing them how to harvest the potatoes and pulling the kids out of the mud when they get stuck.  This cultural and community work is part of the tribe’s restoration effort. Allan worries that the tribe’s younger generation is not as connected to the land as he was growing up. “We’re not just reintroducing the species of salmon back to our people,” he said. “We’ve lost that cultural connection to the salmon as well, so we’re reintroducing a whole culture of salmon.” While salmon are a priority, they are just one piece of a complicated, interconnected ecosystem the tribe is working to restore. Take beaver dams. Dams raise the water table, extend the area along the banks of a river or lake that more animals and plants can inhabit, and keep more water on the landscape. All of this makes the area more welcoming to salmon and other wildlife, but also makes the landscape more resilient to drought and extreme heat because wetlands absorb and retain water that is released during drier periods, explains Tyler Opp, the tribe’s wetlands coordinator.  The beaver dams also support clean, cold-water habitats for salmon, but to do that, they need trees. Since 2019, the tribe’s environmental programs department has planted over 18,000 trees from about a dozen different species, and plans to plant another 4,000 by 2025.  The tribe has used beaver dam analogs — man-made approximations — to encourage beavers to return and posts to reinforce existing beaver dams. Gerald Green, a wildlife biologist for the tribe, says they are currently supporting about seven beaver dams in the creek.  Trees, beavers, salmon, water — they’re all part of a cyclical, interdependent system the tribe is trying to restore and support. Cajetan Matheson, natural resource director and a tribal council member, says that addressing climate impacts or restoration goals one by one will not work. “Everything is really related to each other,” Matheson said. “You can’t just clear-cut a mountain and say, ‘Oh, now we’ve defeated the fire problem.’ There’s way more to it than that.” These projects take time. Tyler Opp says that even though the scale of the work that needs to be done can be overwhelming, the tribe’s approach helps keep things in perspective.  By keeping longer-term goals in mind, like bringing salmon back, which could take decades, the tribe avoids Band-Aid solutions. The whole tribal government buys into this approach, year after year and generation to generation, and although the tribe is limited by funding and capacity, like many public agencies, this commitment allows them to focus on projects that will contribute to achieving that long-term vision. Despite the constraints, the tribe can unify behind a shared vision of the future, based on their collective history, knowledge, and appreciation for the land.  “The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies,” he said. “The tribe doesn’t have to think in terms of the next budget cycle for getting work done. All of [the things we are doing] are done for future generations.” Almost everyone I talked to in the Natural Resources Department credits that perspective to Felix Aripa, a tribal elder who died in 2016. He is seen as instrumental in setting the tone for the tribe’s restoration work.  Even Aiyana James, who never had the chance to meet him, says she’s listened to old tapes of Aripa. He was an early proponent of using beavers as a restoration partner and helped with things as straightforward as pointing out where a stream used to flow so that the technicians could use that as a guideline to restore the course rather than starting from scratch or guesswork. “The ultimate goal for anybody that works here in the Fish and Wildlife Program is to leave a legacy the way that Felix Aripa left his legacy and his mark on the program,” Allan said. Before he passed away, Aripa helped Matheson and others put the tribe’s traditional seasonal calendar on paper. The calendar, which is based on seasonal indicators like tree sap rather than months and days, includes detailed information about foods, ecosystems, plants, animals, and human activities. “As we’re thinking broadly about how we approach restoration, it’s the framework that we can use,” Laura Laumatia, the tribe’s environmental programs manager, said. “It represents millennia of knowledge.”  So while the tribe is proud of their progress, they are still working for the future. “I think it’s nice to work for 20 years in the same place because you do see some changes happening,” Laumatia said. “But we know that the fruits of our labor are really going to be 70 years from now.”

Contra Donald Trump’s claims, Vice President Kamala Harris is not a Communist. For one, no evidence suggests that she seeks the collectivization of the means of production, or even that she is especially hostile to corporate America. When outlining her vision for an “opportunity economy,” Harris speaks of “a future where every person has the opportunity to build a business, to own a home, to build intergenerational wealth.” This is rhetoric that brings to mind George W. Bush’s “ownership society,” not the liquidation of the kulaks.Granted, we’re not obliged to take Harris’s campaign pronouncements at face value, and there is no question that she has supported a number of policies that place her firmly on the left of the Democratic Party. But since emerging as President Joe Biden’s chosen successor, Harris has jettisoned her past support for Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, the Zero-Emission Vehicles Act, a ban on fracking, and the decriminalization of illegal border crossings, conspicuously distancing herself from the ideological commitments of her short-lived 2020 presidential campaign.Moreover, Harris and her closest political allies, most notably her brother-in-law, the Uber executive Tony West, have made a concerted effort to cultivate influential CEOs and investors, many of whom have come away encouraged by her openness to their policy priorities. As if to demonstrate the seriousness of her pro-business pivot, Harris broke with Biden by proposing a more modest tax increase on capital gains and dividends. And while she continues to call for taxing the unrealized capital gains of households with more than $100 million in assets—a policy that is anathema to investors—the Dallas-based venture capitalist and entrepreneur Mark Cuban, perhaps her most visible champion in the business world, has flatly told CNBC “It’s not going to happen.”So no, Harris is not a radical. But when she claims to be a pragmatic capitalist who will take “good ideas from wherever they come,” the pitch doesn’t quite land. How, then, should we understand her ideological sensibilities?The most straightforward interpretation is that Harris is a Democratic Party loyalist who reliably moves in line with the evolving consensus among left-of-center interest groups, activists, intellectuals, donors, and campaign professionals. She stands in favor of whatever will keep the fractious Democratic coalition together. If the climate movement insists that fracking is an obstacle to the green-energy transition, she’ll take up their cause by backing a ban. If support for a fracking ban jeopardizes Democratic prospects in Pennsylvania, she’ll reverse her stance while underscoring that her values haven’t changed, careful not to rebuke the climate movement for its excesses. In this regard, Harris is strikingly similar to Biden, who has followed the Democratic consensus—to the right in the Bill Clinton era, to the left under Barack Obama and Trump—throughout his half century on the national political scene.If I’m right, the good news is that a Harris victory wouldn’t mean the end of American capitalism. The bad news is that her lowest-common-denominator progressivism wouldn’t fix what’s broken with American capitalism either.Before turning to the content of Harris’s economic agenda, it’s worth thinking through what we can learn from the arc of her political career.Harris rose to prominence against the backdrop of the Silicon Valley wealth boom and the collapse of two-party politics in the Golden State in the 2000s and 2010s. Unlike Clinton, who, as governor of Arkansas, navigated the Reagan-era realignment of the South and had to learn to appeal to swing voters, Harris’s chief political challenge has been winning over enough California Democratic voters to deliver a majority.With the notable exception of her 2010 race for attorney general, Harris managed to avoid facing off against a meaningful Republican challenger until she was named Biden’s running mate in 2020. She also seldom faced difficult fiscal trade-offs. As the district attorney of San Francisco and the attorney general of California, she was charged with making any number of important decisions but not with balancing budgets. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016, Harris’s tenure perfectly coincided with the Trump presidency, when the job of the junior senator from California was to be a voice of the anti-Trump resistance, not to strike bipartisan bargains.One lesson from Harris’s political climb is that “reading the room” has proved to be a much better way to make friends in blue-state Democratic politics than making hard choices. No one can accuse Harris of ever having cut a social program or denied a public-sector union an item from its wish list, which is a very good place for a Democratic presidential candidate to be.The downside, of course, is that we don’t have a good sense of whether Harris is capable of saying no to her political allies as Clinton, the architect of welfare reform, and Obama, who resisted calls for single-payer health care, did before her. Among Harris’s contemporaries, consider the contrasting political trajectory of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who has the distinct misfortune of having been a hard-nosed and highly effective governor of Rhode Island in the midst of a budget crisis, when she earned the lasting enmity of the Democratic left by saving her state from fiscal doom. That, I suspect, is why Raimondo is being discussed as a possible treasury secretary in a Harris administration and not the other way around.Harris is not alone in evading hard choices. Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign has been defined by a series of improvisational policy initiatives—including “No tax on tips,” “No tax on overtime,” “No tax on Social Security for our great seniors”—which, taken together, would blow an enormous hole in federal revenues. Recently, the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget released a careful analysis of the fiscal impact of the Trump and Harris campaign plans, and it found that although Harris’s plan would increase projected deficits by $3.5 trillion over the next decade, Trump’s plan would increase them by $7.5 trillion. Given the unseriousness of so many of Trump’s tax and spending proposals, many have concluded that Harris is the more credible presidential candidate. But the closer you look at Harris’s economic agenda, the more the gap in seriousness between the two campaigns starts to shrink.Shortly after the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget released its much-discussed analysis, Harris proposed an ambitious new Medicare benefit for home-based care on ABC’s daytime television program The View, a policy aimed at easing the burden of the “sandwich generation,” or working-age adults who find themselves caring for children and aging parents at the same time. This is a large and sympathetic group, and Harris deserves credit for speaking to its needs. From a fiscal perspective, however, the deficit-increasing impact of a new Medicare benefit along these lines could be in the trillions.Though a number of press reports have suggested that a home-based-care benefit could cost $40 billion a year, drawing on a Brookings Institution précis of a “very-conservatively designed universal program” with strict eligibility limits, my Manhattan Institute colleague Chris Pope projects that it could cost more than 10 times that amount. Harris has suggested paying for this new benefit by having Medicare drive a harder bargain with pharmaceutical companies, but Pope estimates that that would yield no more than $4 billion a year in savings. At the high end, this proposal alone could see the deficit-increasing impact of Harris’s campaign plan surpass that of Trump’s.Of course, much depends on the details of a new Medicare benefit, just as much depends on how Trump would operationalize his own scattershot campaign promises. Rather than offering a more sober approach, though, Harris is racing to outbid her Republican opponent. To swing voters who don’t have much faith in the federal government’s ability to spend money wisely or well—skepticism that I would argue is more than justified—Trump’s promise of further tax cuts might prove more resonant than Harris’s plans for an expanded welfare state.If instead of just adding to the deficit Harris were to pay for all of this new spending, she would have to do much more than raise the corporate income tax or tax unrealized capital gains, the same tax that her admirers in the business community insist will never see the light of day. She’d have to break her pledge to shield households earning $400,000 or less from tax increases, a move that would be difficult to reconcile with the Democratic Party’s increasing dependence on upper-middle-income, stock-owning voters.Harris does, however, have one way forward that could yield real political dividends. She just needs to say no.Drawing from a wide range of progressive thinkers, the Harris campaign has embraced ambitious goals that enjoy considerable public support, including a revitalized manufacturing sector, abundant green energy and housing, and increased public support for low- and middle-income families with children. Yet remaking the American political economy along these lines will necessitate saying no to interest groups that wield enormous power within the Democratic coalition—unions demanding concessions that threaten to undermine a manufacturing revival, environmental-justice activists who oppose permitting reform, and welfarists who want to create new entitlements for the young without rightsizing existing entitlements for the old.Judging by her past experience, Harris’s instinct will be to placate these constituencies, to take the path of least resistance when confronted by the Democratic left. That same ideological drift has plagued the Biden White House, and there is growing concern among Democrats that though voters might see Harris as younger and more vigorous than the incumbent president, they otherwise see her candidacy as representing more of the same. With early voting already under way in more than a dozen states, she’s running out of time to prove her doubters wrong.

People often have mixed feelings about their birthdays, especially as they age. Countries can experience that too. For better or worse, America is due for a big birthday party: July 4, 2026, will mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—our national semiquincentennial, in the awkward Latinate construction, or “semiquin” for short. In an ideal world, it would be a moment of commemoration and celebration as well as a chance to reflect on national history. But so far, the semiquin is shaping up as an embarrassingly accurate reflection of America’s identity crisis.Until recently, America250, the federal commission charged with planning for 2026, was mired in organizational infighting and countless disputes, including over funding shortages and the distribution of patronage. Authorized while Barack Obama was president, the commission started work under Donald Trump, changed course under Joe Biden, and will spend most of 2025 answering to who knows which chief executive. But the challenges of 2026 extend well beyond logistics, appropriations, and leadership. How do you throw a grand national party when the country seems unable to agree on first principles or basic facts? Should 2026 be a rah-rah festival or a sober history lesson? What should the non-MAGA component of the American populace—that is, at least half of it— bring to such a patriotic occasion? Should it bring anything at all?[Tom Nichols: Reclaiming real American patriotism]Former U.S. Treasurer Rosie Rios, now the head of America250, still believes that the country can pull off something meaningful. The child of a Mexican-born single mother, she recalls the 1976 bicentennial as a moment when she began to feel “pride in what it means to be American.” She wants 2026 to offer the same sort of experience, tailored to a new generation.And perhaps it will. As Rios pointed out when we spoke, 1976 was itself hardly a moment of political harmony; the Vietnam War and Watergate had just crashed to a close, right on the heels of the turbulent 1960s. Nor, for that matter, was American society especially peaceable at the time of the sesquicentennial, in 1926, when the Ku Klux Klan was regularly parading through Washington, D.C.; or at the time of the centennial, in 1876, when the country was fighting over the future of Reconstruction; or at the time of the semicentennial, in 1826, when a controversial populist leader, Andrew Jackson, had just lost a close election and vowed to return for a second go-round.What seems different about the present moment is that the very idea of trying to tell some sort of national story—much less one with patriotic overtones—has itself been called into question. That’s especially true among the people who purport to care most deeply about an honest reckoning with the American past. For generations, liberals leaned into a story of gradual, if uneven, progress toward unfulfilled ideals. But even they no longer believe that the narrative of progress holds the power it once did.There is, of course, no national narrative that will magically unite America; true national consensus has never existed and won’t suddenly materialize now. But during past celebrations—50, 100, 150 years ago—the people excluded from America’s mythic narrative managed to leverage the nation’s symbols and rhetoric and put alternative stories before the public. They believed that the Declaration of Independence and the flag could be useful and inspirational.At stake in 2026 is whether a divided country can find common symbols worth embracing. But also at stake is whether those who take a critical view of America’s past will step up proudly and say not only what they stand against, but what they stand for in the American story.There was once a standard template for how to celebrate a centennial: Declare greatness and throw a big party, preferably in Philadelphia. Over the past two centuries, this model has yielded its fair share of jingoism, along with fireworks and flags and cannon blasts. But it has also provided an opportunity for reexamining American history and for raising questions about the country’s future.The first attempt at a national party in Philadelphia, during the “jubilee” year of 1826, did not quite come off. As one local newspaper noted, “The apathy of the citizens” seemed to be the defining feature of that particular July 4. The anniversary nonetheless occasioned at least a bit of national self-reflection. In early 1824, anticipating the semicentennial, President James Monroe invited the Marquis de Lafayette, the teenage French hero of the American Revolution, to return to the U.S. and take a look at what he had wrought. With much hoopla, Lafayette visited every state as well as the nation’s capital. But he also expressed horror at certain aspects of American life, especially the South’s ongoing embrace of slavery. During a visit to the Virginia plantation of former President James Madison, Lafayette pointedly reminded him of “the right that all men, without exception, have to liberty.”Fifty years later, on the other side of the devastating Civil War, Philadelphia tried again. This time, it succeeded. With an eye to the world’s fairs then popular in Europe, the city was determined to put on “the greatest international exposition that the world had ever witnessed,” as the historian Thomas H. Keels writes—albeit an exposition with a distinctly American stamp. The nation was engaged in a fierce debate over race, political partisanship, women’s rights, and the growing concentration of capital. All the more reason, organizers thought, to try to get everyone together to celebrate what there was to like about America.They started planning a festival for 1876 that was ultimately attended by some 20 percent of the American population. Upon arriving in Philadelphia, those millions of visitors found an entire mini-city constructed to house and display the marvels of the modern world. At the Main Building, ticket-holders encountered their first telephone, courtesy of the rising young inventor Alexander Graham Bell. Thomas Edison sent his latest inventions too. France contributed the upraised right arm and torch of a proposed Statue of Liberty; visitors could ascend stairs to the top for just a dime. The sheer number of gigantic expo buildings—249 in all—testified to the organizers’ outsize ambitions.This frenzy of activity and investment sent an unmistakable message: Despite the Civil War, America was full of energy and on the rise. But the scale of the spectacle masked important absences. Although 26 states built their own pavilions, most southern states opted out. Black citizens were banned from the expo altogether. When Frederick Douglass, an invited guest, tried to take his seat on the dais at the opening ceremony, guards blocked him until a U.S. senator intervened. The grim politics of 1876 would soon result in a violent and contested presidential election, and with it the end of Reconstruction in the South.If the expo did little to renew American commitments to equality, it did provide an occasion for certain excluded groups to restate their claims to full American citizenship, using the Declaration as inspiration. On July 4, Susan B. Anthony showed up uninvited at the Independence Hall ceremonies, flanked by fellow suffragists, to read the Declaration of the Rights of Women. In Washington, a group of Black men produced their own Negro Declaration of Independence.By 1926, the political terrain looked different. White women could finally vote; most Black men and women in the South could not. The U.S. had been through another war, this time in Europe, and had come out of it disillusioned. At home, during the war, the country had jailed thousands of dissenters. The Ku Klux Klan had built a powerful constituency, especially within the Democratic Party. And the country had slammed its doors shut to most immigrants.The organizers of the sesquicentennial celebration nonetheless doubled down on the model of a big party in Philadelphia. An estimated 6 million people showed up—not as many as the organizers had hoped for, but still a substantial number. The marvels on display were thoroughly of their moment: on the lowbrow end, Jell-O and Maxwell House coffee; on the high, Kandinsky and Matisse.The exposition was billed as a “Festival of Peace and Progress,” but like its predecessors, it could not help but reflect the political tensions of its time. When the KKK put in a bid for a special Klan day at the fair, the mayor of Philadelphia said yes before saying no. The fair itself was largely segregated, though Philadelphia’s Black community mobilized to ensure at least modest access and participation. Under pressure, the festival added the future civil-rights icon A. Philip Randolph as a last-minute speaker to represent the Black community and share the platform with government officials at the opening ceremony. Randolph delivered a searing account of how the nation had betrayed its promise of equality for Black citizens.Philadelphia tried to give it one more go 50 years later—for the bicentennial, in 1976. As the big birthday approached, though, many observers started to question whether the standard model really made sense anymore. “Is a World’s Fair-type Bicentennial festival appropriate for a country wracked with social, racial, and environmental agonies?” the writer Ada Louise Huxtable asked in The New York Times. By 1976, President Richard Nixon’s resignation and the mounting traumas of the 1970s had helped to yield a scaled-back, privatized, and decentralized celebration. There were some old-fashioned touches, such as the American Freedom Train, which conveyed the nation’s founding documents and historical treasures from city to city, and the cheery tall ships that sailed between ports. But corporate promotion rather than civic purpose carried the day. Branded products included a 1776-themed tampon disposal bag marketed with the slogan “200 Years of Freedom.”Critics pushed back against what they described as the “Buycentennial.” Some of the most theatrical resistance came from an ad hoc group called the People’s Bicentennial Commission, organized by the New Left activist (and future social theorist) Jeremy Rifkin. The group held rallies at sites such as Lexington and Concord, all the while claiming to be acting in the true spirit of ’76. Rifkin thought it crucial that the American left engage with rather than reject the narratives and symbols of the nation’s founding. Other groups, including the Afro-American Bicentennial Corporation, sought to ensure that at least some programming would reflect the Black experience. They advocated for a more diverse and inclusive account of the nation’s history—not one American story, but many.At least some of that vision began to be realized in the years during and after the bicentennial. What 1976 may have lacked in spectacle, it ultimately made up for with quiet investment in the infrastructure of public history, much of it attuned to bringing overdue attention to marginalized groups. According to a study by the American Association of State and Local History, some 40 percent of all historical institutions in existence by 1984—museums, living-history sites, local preservation societies, and the like—were created during the bicentennial era.In the summer of 2016, while most of the country was transfixed by the presidential race pitting Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump, Congress established the United States Semiquincentennial Commission, made up of private citizens, members of Congress, and federal officials. The commission was given the job of overseeing a national 2026 initiative.Its leaders took their time getting started, and Trump’s White House offered little guidance beyond the implicit admonishment to make American history great again. In Philadelphia, a group of local boosters took matters into their own hands. They called themselves USA250, a name barely distinguishable from that of the federal commission, and set out to make the case for a “blockbuster festival.”USA250 had no shortage of ambitious, expensive ideas. Beginning in 2025, according to one scheme, roving caravans would crisscross the country, showcasing the best of American history, art, food, and music. In 2026, the caravans would converge on Philadelphia. The budget that the organizers imagined was a symbolic $20.26 billion. However, there were no longer many takers for this kind of effort, even in Philadelphia. The arrival of COVID in early 2020—and the fear of super-spreader events it engendered—dealt another blow to the prospect of a big in-person bash.As for the federal commission, it swiftly descended into a morass of charges and countercharges over process, favoritism, hiring, gender discrimination, and budget decisions. In June 2022, Meta pulled out of a $10 million sponsorship deal, reportedly owing to the commission’s “leadership dysfunction.” Around the same time, several female executives quit the commission and filed suit. They described a Gilded Age level of “cronyism, self-dealing, mismanagement of funds, potentially unlawful contracting practices and wasteful spending”—not to mention sex discrimination and a toxic work environment. In the midst of the meltdown, the Biden White House stepped in to appoint Rosie Rios as the new commission chair. By then, the clock was down to less than four years.One of the federal commission’s signature initiatives, America’s Stories, is radically decentralized—less a top-down master plan than a national Instagram feed. Its website encourages Americans to send in personal reflections about the country’s past, present, and future in the form of songs, poems, personal essays, photographs, audio recordings, and videos. The stated goal is to create “the most inclusive commemoration in our history,” one in which “no story is too small” to matter. Rios views the emphasis on social media, as well as on diversity of experience, as a way to attract constituencies that might otherwise look elsewhere—notably young people, who often seem to think that the past has little to offer.R. Scott Stephenson, the CEO of Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution, describes the federal strategy as a “StoryCorps model” of historic commemoration. He worries that such a decentralized approach won’t rise to the moment. “If it’s just about everybody telling their story,” he asks, what’s to bring everybody together? His concerns are echoed by many in the public-history sphere. At the moment, though, almost nobody sees any prospect for a single big in-person celebration reminiscent of the extravaganzas of the past.Nobody, that is, except for Donald Trump. Alone among major political figures, Trump has seized the early momentum to offer a grand, centralized semiquincentennial vision. In May 2023, he released a campaign video introducing the idea of a Salute to America 250, the “most spectacular birthday party” the country has ever known. Though billed as a serious celebration of the world’s oldest democracy, the plan contains no shortage of reality-TV touches. One proposal is a Patriot Games, in which high-school athletes would be pitted against one another in interstate Olympics-style competition. Another is the National Garden of American Heroes, a long-standing pet project in which Trump hopes to select “the greatest Americans of all time” to be honored in a Washington statuary park. The centerpiece of the celebration would be the Great American State Fair, an 1876 expo-style gathering to be held in Iowa. “It’ll be something!” he promised.The video’s release produced plenty of critical commentary from MAGA skeptics. But, to paraphrase Trump, the Great American State Fair would at least be something: a focused, national, in-person commemoration with a clear message about where the country has been and where it is going. Whatever its other virtues may be, the individualized, localized, “invitation” approach evades any such nation-defining mission.The problem is, many Americans don’t know what they’d be celebrating. On the left, rejecting traditional patriotism has become de rigueur: by kneeling for the national anthem, dismissing the Founders as enslavers, and expressing unease at the prospect of flying an American flag. Seeing left or liberal activists deploying the images and ideas of the revolution for their own purposes is far less common than it used to be. One consequence may be that many people who care about a critical, nuanced view of the American past will simply opt out of 2026. If that happens, who will be left in charge of defining what founding-era ideals such as “independence,” “revolution,” “We the People,” and “the general Welfare” are supposed to mean in the 21st century?The task of identifying a usable past is of course much easier for Trump and his MAGA coalition than for those who seek a true reckoning with the country’s history of injustice. Trump has a clear view and a simple message: that only certain people count, that the past was better than the present, and that U.S. history was a tale of triumph until roughly the 1960s.Trump’s views are embodied in the work of a group called the 1776 Commission, appointed near the end of his presidency. Its creation (and name) was partly a reaction to The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, with its emphasis on slavery and the Black experience. It was also a bid to put the Trump stamp on the founding legacy. “As we approach the 250th anniversary of our independence, we must resolve to teach future generations of Americans an accurate history of our country so that we all learn and cherish our founding principles once again,” the commission’s report stated—at the same time promoting its own exclusionary and distorted vision of the past, one in which the Founders would obviously have opposed progressive social policy, affirmative action, and all forms of identity politics.Professional historians have scorned The 1776 Report as right-wing propaganda rather than anything resembling actual history. But scholars have often hesitated to offer an alternative national narrative in its place. By and large, they do not view themselves as being in the business of nationalism or patriotism; their mission is mostly to tell the truth as they see it. Within academia, the nation-state is itself often seen as a suspect form of social organization and power with a dubious track record.But in this moment of democratic crisis—and democratic possibility—there is something dissatisfying about sidestepping the challenge of 2026, with its implicit call to create a usable but thoughtful national narrative. During Trump’s term in office, the historian Jill Lepore chastised fellow academics for abandoning the project of a national story just when it was needed most. “Writing national history creates plenty of problems,” she argued. “But not writing national history creates more problems, and those problems are worse.”Coming up with an honest but coherent vision for 2026 is a genuine challenge. For the past 60 years, much of American historical scholarship has been about exposing a darker story behind self-congratulatory myths. As a believer in that effort, I have long shared the left’s ambivalence about patriotic symbols: the flag, the Founders, the national anthem, the Fourth of July. Today, though, I feel an urgency to reclaim and redefine all these things, lest they be ceded to those darker forces historians like to write about. [David Waldstreicher: The Fourth of July has always been political]The fact is, Americans have a pretty good origin story, as such things go: centrally, a revolution on behalf of human equality, despite all of its flaws and blind spots and limits. “On the subject of equality,” the political theorist Danielle Allen has argued, “no more important sentence has ever been written” than Jefferson’s assertion that “all men are created equal.” For its moment—and even for ours—it was a bold and revolutionary statement.Movements for equality, racial justice, and human rights have long taken advantage of that legacy. The abolitionists of the 1830s invented the Liberty Bell as a symbol of human freedom, seeing in its inscription to “proclaim liberty throughout all the land” a useful link to both the past and the future. The labor radicals of the late 19th century claimed Jefferson and Thomas Paine along with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Finding a stake in the American story has always been more difficult for those deliberately excluded from the Declaration’s vision: women and sexual minorities, Black communities, Indigenous nations. In 1852, Frederick Douglass delivered his famous address asking “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” His answer was that it marked a day of mourning, not celebration. Still, Douglass seized the moment to pressure white citizens to live up to their “saving principles,” noting that the Founding Fathers understood that “there is always a remedy for oppression,” even if they did not follow that insight to its logical conclusion.What we are witnessing now, with respect to America’s 250th, is thus a strange turn of events. To varying degrees, abolitionists, suffragists, labor leaders, and civil-rights activists were willing and able to harness America’s mythic rhetoric and stated principles to advance their causes. They embraced and invented cherished national symbols. And yet today, many who profess to believe in human equality and social justice seem to have little use for the American origin story and its most venerable words and figures.Why not reclaim them? The American revolution was, after all, a revolution—not in every respect the one you or I might have wanted, but an enormous stride toward equality. And revolution itself is an inherently malleable concept, made to be renewed and redefined with each generation. One need not wear a tricorne hat or fly the stars and stripes in order to celebrate the unlikely moment when a group of private citizens organized, dreamed big, and defeated the world’s most powerful empire.Though, now that I think of it, why not wear the hat and fly the flag? Despite today’s political optics, neither one actually belongs to the devotees of MAGA rallies. Perhaps those on the left can at least seize the moment to open up the conversation over what, if anything, really makes America great—and to teach some actual history. If they don’t, the meaning of 2026—and of American patriotism—will be decided for them.

The award went to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson for their “innovative research about what affects countries’ economic prosperity,” the Nobel committee said.

Test your wits on the Slate Quiz for Oct. 14, 2024.