Erik Tarloff

Illustrations by Guillem Casasús / Renderings by Borja Alegre

There is a cohort of close observers of our presidential elections, scholars and lawyers and political strategists, who find themselves in the uneasy position of intelligence analysts in the months before 9/11. As November 3 approaches, their screens are blinking red, alight with warnings that the political system does not know how to absorb. They see the obvious signs that we all see, but they also know subtle things that most of us do not. Something dangerous has hove into view, and the nation is lurching into its path.

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The danger is not merely that the 2020 election will bring discord. Those who fear something worse take turbulence and controversy for granted. The coronavirus pandemic, a reckless incumbent, a deluge of mail-in ballots, a vandalized Postal Service, a resurgent effort to suppress votes, and a trainload of lawsuits are bearing down on the nation’s creaky electoral machinery.

In New York, the decisive moment came in March. In Arizona and other Sun Belt states, it struck as the spring turned to summer. In every state that has so far seen a large spike of COVID-19 cases, there has been a moment when the early signs of an uptick are detectable—but a monstrous outbreak is not yet assured. Can a state realize what’s happening, and stop a surge in time? Wisconsin is about to find out.

In the past week, Wisconsin has crashed through its own coronavirus records, reporting more cases and more COVID-19 hospitalizations than it has at any time since the pandemic began, according to the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. It now ranks among the top states in new cases per capita, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and it is reporting more new cases, in absolute terms, than all states but California, Texas, and Florida.

Laura Kiesel was only 6 years old when she became a parent to her infant brother. At home, his crib was placed directly next to her bed, so that when he cried at night, she was the one to pick him up and sing him back to sleep. She says she was also in charge of changing his diapers and making sure he was fed every day. For the majority of her early childhood, she remembers, she tended to his needs while her own mother was in the depths of heroin addiction.

From as early as she can remember, Kiesel says she had to take care of herself—preparing her own meals, clothing herself, and keeping herself entertained. At school, she remembers becoming a morose and withdrawn child whose hair was often dirty and unkempt.

Portland, Oregon, has its share of gloomy days, so waking up to darkness wasn’t that strange. When I looked outside, however, the sky wasn’t overcast. It was filled with smoke the color of pumpkin spice, the result of nearby fires. A soupy miasma. The most noxious air in the world. I’d had enough. I told my husband, “We need to move.”

Having grown up in California’s Sonoma County, I’ve been spoiled by natural beauty and perfect weather. When I was 30, I briefly lived in New York, but after only six months, I started to miss horizon lines defined by mountains and sunsets, the sweet fragrance of dry vegetation in late summer, silvery oak trees and massive redwoods. I bought a one-way ticket back home. I remember the way the bay looked as my plane descended into San Francisco: glittery, golden, and serene—like a Maxfield Parrish painting I had on my wall in high school. I felt protected on this side of the country, grounded within the boundaries of water and range. I never thought I’d leave the West Coast again.

In February 1990, thanks to a 15-year-old boy named Bruno Kowalsczewski, footsteps echoed through the chambers of Bruniquel Cave for the first time in tens of thousands of years.

The cave sits in France’s scenic Aveyron Valley, but its entrance had long been sealed by an ancient rockslide. Kowalsczewski’s father had detected faint wisps of air emerging from the scree, and the boy spent three years clearing away the rubble. He eventually dug out a tight, thirty-meter-long passage that the thinnest members of the local caving club could squeeze through. They found themselves in a large, roomy corridor. There were animal bones and signs of bear activity, but nothing recent. The floor was pockmarked with pools of water. The walls were punctuated by stalactites (the ones that hang down) and stalagmites (the ones that stick up).

“I’m used to bullies.”

That’s a line Joe Biden has used several times during his run against Donald Trump, and he said it again recently in talking about the first presidential debate.

“I hope I don’t take the bait, because he’s going to say awful things about me, my family, et cetera,” Biden said at a virtual fundraiser. “I hope I don’t get baited into getting into a brawl with this guy, because that’s the only place he’s comfortable.” Biden expects to be able to keep his cool because, he said, “I’m used to dealing with bullies.”

The challenge for Biden isn’t simply that he’ll be facing a bully on the debate stage in Cleveland on Tuesday; it’s that he’ll be facing a man who is shameless and without conscience, a shatterer of norms and boundaries, a liar of epic proportions, a conspiracy-monger who inhabits an alternate reality. President Donald Trump operates outside any normal parameters.

During this uncertain and unstable year, I’ve learned not to take Hong Kong’s freedom for granted. Prodemocracy protests consumed the city for months starting in early 2019, but the political climate changed abruptly in the spring, when Beijing passed a wide-ranging security law that many see as a crackdown on dissent. At the end of June, a few hours before the law went into effect, I walked outside to catch the last glimpses of protest around my neighborhood in Hong Kong. A local barber was removing a gas mask and goggles from the mannequin in his window; I noticed that a coffee shop had already taken down all of its protest figurines and posters. The citywide self-censorship was swift.

The next day, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared that, in response to Beijing’s actions, the United Kingdom would alter its existing visa policies, essentially paving the way to naturalized British citizenship for 3 million Hong Kongers. Some of my friends and acquaintances felt a great sense of relief—the U.K. could be their haven, a place to restart. Rattled by arrests of demonstrators, journalists, and academics in Hong Kong, several people have already left for the U.K.; the prodemocracy activist Nathan Law announced in early July that he had fled Hong Kong and would continue his activism in London.

“How to Build a Life” is a biweekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.

You live in the future. So do I. We all do. It’s human nature. However, there are times—such as during a pandemic—when this nature makes us suffer.

We are “prospective” creatures, according to the psychologists and philosophers Martin Seligman, Peter Railton, Roy Baumeister, and Chandra Sripada in their 2016 book Homo Prospectus. Indeed, as Seligman told me, on average we spend 30 to 50 percent of our self-generated thought—what we think about when we aren’t trying to concentrate—contemplating the distant future. No other creatures do this, with the small exception of some primates who store tools for future use.

Last weekend, Philippe Reines walked over to Ron Klain’s house in Washington, D.C., to hand off his Donald Trump outfit: the suit, the shoes with the lifts, the shirt, the long red tie, the cufflinks. Just in case. When the former Hillary Clinton aide stored the outfit in a bag after playing Trump in debate prep four years ago, a part of him thought it might one day be in her presidential library.

Klain ran Clinton’s debate prep, and he’s doing it again this year for Joe Biden. Klain has a rule against discussing the process, but he did tell me that no one is going to be putting on the outfit this year. The former vice president doesn’t like mock debates—he prefers to read research briefings and have a collection of aides fire questions at him.

The first I heard of Amy Coney Barrett was when her name was floated as a possible nominee for the seat left vacant on the Supreme Court when Anthony Kennedy retired. I thought she was an interesting person, although not for any reasons of policy or politics: She is a mother of seven children, several of them very young; a Catholic; a deeply accomplished and distinguished member of the judiciary. I could not prevent myself from noticing, too, how beautiful she is, and wondering how the hell she balances raising seven children with her huge career. But there was little time to ponder these questions in my heart, as Mary did the annunciation, because Brett Kavanaugh was nominated instead of her, and things got so weird so fast that she slipped my mind.