Project Stream: Google Takes on GeForce Now

How much mercury should coal plants be allowed to emit? There’s been a years-long fight in Washington, D.C., over that very question—and who wins it may ultimately depend on whether Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed to the Supreme Court.

Mercury is a potent neurotoxin, and particularly dangerous to the brains of developing fetuses and young children. Thus, say Democrats, environmentalists, and public health professionals, its release into the atmosphere should be severely restricted. Back in 2011, the Obama administration attempted to do just that, proposing the first-ever federal limits on toxic heavy metal pollution from coal plants.

But Republicans, the coal industry, and President Donald Trump, citing the costs of regulatory compliance, argue for looser regulations. To that end, the Environmental Protection Agency soon will unveil a proposal to “dramatically weaken” and potentially repeal Obama’s Mercury and Air Toxics Standard (MATS), according to The New York Times.

A few things inevitably will happen when the Trump administration officially unveils its proposal to weaken MATS. Environmental groups will file a lawsuit arguing that the move violates the Clean Air Act. The lawsuit will be heard by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals—where Kavanaugh currently serves. Finally, that court’s decision will be appealed to the Supreme Court. If Kavanaugh is sitting on the Supreme Court come that time, it’s almost certain Trump’s proposal would be upheld because the justification for it echoes a dissenting opinion Kavanaugh wrote four years ago.

Trump’s new proposal, according to the Times, will do one very important thing: “repeal a 2011 finding made by the EPA that when the federal government regulates toxic pollution such as mercury from coal-fired power plants, it must also, when considering the cost to industry of that rule, take into account the additional health benefits of reducing other pollutants as a side effect of implementing the regulation.” Put another way, the EPA will no longer be required to count so-called “co-benefits” of reducing pollutants like soot and nitrogen oxide when it’s regulating mercury. It will only be required to count the benefits of reducing mercury.

The change is significant, because Obama’s mercury rule only brings in $6 million in health benefits from reducing mercury annually, but it brings in up to $90 billion per year in health benefits from reducing co-pollutants. Without that $80 billion, the EPA can’t legally justify the strong mercury rule—because it costs the coal industry a whopping $9.6 billion per year.

Kavanaugh expressed skepticism about the EPA’s practice of counting “co-benefits” in 2014, when the D.C. Circuit heard a case case seeking to invalidate MATS. A divided three-judge panel upheld the Obama-era rule, with Kavanaugh dissenting. He noted the “disputed” nature of the EPA’s estimated $90 billion in annual benefits from mercury regulation. The coal industry’s estimates, he wrote, “focus on the reduction in hazardous air pollutant emissions attributable to the regulations, which amount to only $4 to $6 million dollars each year. If those figures are right, the rule costs nearly $1,500 for every $1 of health and environmental benefit produced.”

That ruling was appealed to the Supreme Court, which in 2015 blocked the mercury rule and ordered the EPA to do a new cost analysis. The vote was 5-4, as Justice Anthony Kennedy sided with the court’s conservatives. During oral arguments of a later case over the MATS rule, Kavanaugh “cited comments by Chief Justice John Roberts that counting such benefits is ‘an end-run and bootstrapping and disproportionate,’” according to E&E News. (After conducting a new cost analysis, the Obama administration reinstated the mercury rule, and was sued yet again, but the case was delayed because of the Trump administration’s plan to rewrite the rule.)

Kavanaugh is generally skeptical of strong environmental regulation at the federal level. “He maintains a level of discomfort of anything he regards as a reach, authority-wise, from the EPA,” Brendan Collins, an environmental litigator who has argued before Kavanaugh, told me earlier this year. That makes him similar to the other four conservative justices currently sitting on the court. And Kavanaugh, if confirmed, would be filling the seat vacated by Anthony Kennedy, who consistently voted to uphold strong environmental regulations.

There’s a lot the public still doesn’t know about Kavanaugh. It’s unclear, for example, whether he’s guilty of the sexual assaults he’s been accused of, or whether he would vote to overturn the landmark abortion case Roe v. Wade. But it’s clear that his confirmation wouldn’t just shift the balance of the nation’s highest court; it would alter the contents of the atmosphere.

Last Wednesday, Tesla CEO and chairman Elon Musk rejected a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission over claims he lied on Twitter about having “secured” funding to take the automaker private at $420 a share. Under the settlement, Musk and Tesla would’ve paid fines of tens of millions of dollars, Tesla would’ve added a couple of independent board members, Musk wouldn’t have had to admit guilt, and he would’ve lost his chairmanship for two years.

Three days later, Musk agreed to a settlement on mostly the same terms, only he’ll have to step down as chair for three years.

In between those 72 hours, the SEC filed a thoroughly detailed lawsuit against Musk showing that funding for a takeover offer was in no way secured. Musk “had never discussed a going-private transaction at $420 per share with any potential funding source, had done nothing to investigate whether it would be possible for all current investors to remain with Tesla as a private company via a ‘special purpose fund,’ and had not confirmed support of Tesla’s investors for a potential going-private transaction,” according to the suit.

The SEC determined that Musk made materially false statements, leading to significant run-ups in the stock price, which subsequently crashed when Musk backtracked. This is securities fraud, and the lawsuit sought a heavy penalty, prohibiting Musk from acting as a director or officer of any public company, permanently. But days later, the SEC reverted to nearly the same settlement Musk had turned down, with a slap-on-the-wrist fine, a little adult supervision from the board, and prescribed monitoring of his tweets (seriously).

If you have a CEO this dead to rights on securities fraud, why let him continue as CEO? According to the SEC, Musk was indispensable. In a statement, SEC Chair Jay Clayton said “holding individuals accountable is important and an effective means of deterrence,” but that he must take the interests of investors into account, and “the skills and support of certain individuals may be important to the future success of a company.”

This is mistaken and counter-productive—even dangerous. No one man or woman is or should be so vital to a company’s existence that they cannot be punished for wrongdoing. This is essentially the principle of too big to fail, brought into every corporate boardroom. If you have a reckless CEO who can’t be fired because it would hurt the company, then you don’t really have a company; you have a cult.

You could say that removing Musk’s chairmanship and giving him a boss represents some deterrent. But the SEC’s own actions are a hint to whoever becomes Tesla’s chair that Musk cannot be held fully accountable because he is too important to the company and its shareholders. The agency has tied the hands of the chairman—which, with enough support from the board of directors, could oust him—before the position is even filled.

How did we get to this cult of the CEO? It has grown in tandem with the shareholder value theory, the idea that companies operate solely to maximize stock returns. Shareholders are not the only ones with a stake in a company’s success: workers, communities, and the government all play a role. But if investors are the only stakeholders recognized, any disruption to a company, even if it might improve long-term performance, cannot be abided if it would drop the stock price. That means punishing a CEO for fraud is disallowed; or at least, the punishment must be balanced by an interest in keeping the stock stable, as in the SEC’s conception.

Then you have the media’s treatment of CEOs as masters of the universe who are singularly responsible for making companies grow. Steve Jobs was treated as such, but engineers built the iPod and iPhone, designers created its look, and marketers made it attractive to consumers. Thousands of people contributed to those products, not one guy in a turtleneck. Apple hasn’t shrunk into irrelevance after Jobs’s death because a successful company relies on more than a charismatic CEO and ineffable qualities like “leadership.”

The valorization of CEOs creates several distortions. First and perhaps most important, it fuels their obscene pay packages, which are 361 times the pay of the average worker at companies in the S&P 500. Second, it ascribes brilliance to their decision-making even when it’s lacking, and increases the potential for con artistry; the cult of the CEO is how we ended up with Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes.

In the case of Musk, he’s now been given license to continue his recklessness. “Naughty by Nature,” he tweeted early Monday, after reaching the deal with the SEC on Saturday. Tesla’s stock jumped 17 percent on Monday.

Effectively immunizing risk-taking CEOs can hurt investors far more than it helps them. Under Musk, Tesla violated labor law by threatening worker stock options if they unionized. It has a mountain of debt as it burns through cash to reach production goals. To achieve this, Tesla built thousands of cars under a tent in the parking lot of its factory, with questionable quality control. Tesla’s drive to produce enough cars has led to unendurable parts and service delays; it can take weeks to get one of its cars fixed.

All these actions, potentially fatal to Tesla over the long term, are by-products of a single-minded, irresponsible CEO who views the law and product quality as a trifling interference on the road to profitability. It’s not good for investors to have someone with this mentality in charge. But Musk has inspired such a celebrity following that he’s inextricably linked with Tesla in the public consciousness, such that dislodging him for fraud was never seriously considered, it seems.

Extrapolate that out, and there are time-bomb CEOs scattered throughout the economy. This builds hubris into the corporate class and further severs the justice system in two, with one arrangement for the powerful and another for everyone else. It doesn’t create better products and stronger companies, just more entitled CEOs willing to set money on fire, harm workers and consumers, and laugh in the aftermath. Plus, it can make corporations fragile and introduce unnecessary risk. Losing a CEO should not create a panic, but when the CEO is a cult leader, it surely does. And that makes the stock market an incredibly hazardous place to invest money.

Regulators should hold corporate officers to the same set of rules as everyone else. This wouldn’t harm stock investments but strengthen them, forcing companies to focus on institutional capacity and selling good products and services at a fair price. The way to end the cult of the CEO is to treat workers and managers as equal contributors in corporations’ economic success.

Our hominid ancestors first appeared around six million years ago. They started to use symbols around 150,000 years ago, and the first of the major religions began 5,000 years ago. What are we to make of this? Did humans have souls before then? If not, how did we acquire them? If so, why didn’t God reveal Himself throughout 99.9 percent of humanity’s life span? What was He thinking? And God’s puzzling silence didn’t end with the advent of religion. The God of the Old Testament was fairly communicative, and the gods of the Hindu pantheon made frequent appearances, at least for a while. But since Jesus ascended to heaven (or, if you prefer, since the angel Gabriel finished dictating to Muhammad), transmissions have all but ceased.

This would seem to call for some explanation. As the infidel Tom Paine scoffed: “A revelation which is to be received as true ought to be written on the sun.” The devout Cardinal Newman agreed but thought it had been: “The Visible Church was, at least to her children,” he wrote in 1870, “the light of the world, as conspicuous as the sun in the heavens, and the Creed was written on her forehead.” Unfortunately, the Church’s radiance has dimmed somewhat since then, and many unbelievers have wondered why God can’t write “YES, I EXIST” across the night sky in mile-high flaming letters visible (to each viewer in her own language, of course) everywhere on earth, each night for a week, once a year. Is that too much to ask of an omnipotent, infinitely loving Being?

God’s inexplicable reticence has always made life difficult for theists. John Gray thinks that such problems with theism shouldn’t make most atheists any more confident about their own outlook. Gray is professor emeritus of European thought at the London School of Economics, a prolific author (Seven Types of Atheism is his 22nd book), and a columnist for the New Statesman. He was briefly a Thatcherite, then became a critic of free-market fundamentalism, then (briefly, again) a New Labourite, though he strongly opposed (and was acutely prescient about) the Iraq war. Since around 2003 he has turned from political theory and current affairs to a more philosophical, even prophetic, vein, producing numerous short books that take a very long—and glum—view of Western intellectual history.

A similar argument runs through all these later books, including Seven Types of Atheism. The secular, progressive, rationalist ideologies of the West are so much “spilt theology.” The expectation that science, or more generally knowledge, will transform the human condition is a form of Gnosticism, the esoteric doctrine that the world is ruled by an evil demiurge, whom only those in possession of secret, saving knowledge can defeat. The belief that humankind will eventually achieve lasting peace and happiness merely recapitulates Christianity’s salvation history, in which the People of God will be redeemed at the end of days. Very few, mostly marginal figures, in either East or West, have achieved the detachment and disenchantment that would signal a genuine break with religious thinking. Most atheists have instead “searched for a surrogate Deity to fill the hole left by the God that has departed.”

The archetype of this quest was the Enlightenment, with its confident efforts to fashion a science of man. Unfortunately, these efforts issued in the racist pseudo-science of Voltaire and Hume (or so Gray claims), while all attempts to inaugurate the rule of reason have resulted in bloody fanaticisms, from Jacobinism to Bolshevism, that equaled the worst atrocities attributable to believers. Perhaps this should have come as no surprise. As Carl Becker argued 85 years ago in The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (still “the best book on the Enlightenment,” in Gray’s opinion), the philosophes “demolished the Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials.” Gray’s verdict is even harsher: “Racism and anti-Semitism are not incidental defects in Enlightenment thinking. They flow from some of the Enlightenment’s central beliefs.”

Seven Types of Atheism does not offer a rigorous or exhaustive taxonomy of nonbelief. The seven sections mainly provide a convenient way of organizing Gray’s likes and (more often) dislikes. He starts with a chapter on the New Atheists, who have poured scorn on the more obvious logical difficulties and historical implausibilities of dogmatic religion. Even the New Atheists’ admirers must admit that they sometimes display more zeal than finesse, and that they give a general impression of punching down. Gray’s contempt for these contemporary would-be philosophes is such that he can barely bring himself to refer to them by name. The likes of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are, he judges, “mostly a media phenomenon and best appreciated as a type of entertainment.”

Instead he sets out some intellectual scaffolding. “There is no such thing as ‘the atheist worldview,’” he argues, because “atheism simply excludes the idea that the world is the work of a creator-god.” Some people identify atheism with scientific rationalism, but science cannot dispel religion—not least because religion is not a set of hypotheses to be disproven. Rather, it is anything—myths, rituals, even illusions—that makes sense of our passage through life. Others equate atheism with disbelief in the omnipotent God of Christianity and Islam; Gray counters that this notion falls short, since “religion is universal, whereas monotheism is a local cult.” Still others imagine that religion was simply a stage in human evolution, now left behind, to which Gray responds: “The human mind is programmed for survival, not for truth.” (Gray is much given to such lapidary pronouncements, perhaps because he is an ardent admirer of the brilliantly witty philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and George Santayana.)

Gray’s next category, secular humanists, includes Mill, Marx, and Bertrand Russell, who for all their differences are alike in their “vast hopes for social transformation.” Atheists of this sort think they have left religion behind, but they are wrong. The history of Christianity is shot through with millenarian movements promising the end of history. After the Reformation, humanists dropped this apocalypticism in favor of gradual progress and swapped the aim of reaching the Heavenly City for the goal of building a utopia in this world through human effort. What Christianity and secular humanism share is more important than their differences: No other religious tradition—Jewish, Greek, Indian, Chinese—envisions history as linear rather than cyclical or conceives of humanity as a unitary collective subject. The very idea of utopia—a place where everyone is happy—could not have occurred to people who took for granted that individuals have irreconcilable desires and ideals, and that conflict is therefore impossible to eliminate. Western universalism, Gray scoffs, is very provincial indeed.

The same pattern appears again and again, Gray finds, as a mode of thought overthrows religion, only to imitate some of its characteristic intellectual moves. Evolution had no sooner vanquished Christian theology than outcroppings of “evolutionary theology” began appearing. Gray rebukes Darwin, who wrote: “As natural selection works solely for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress to perfection.” Natural selection does not work solely for the good of each being, as Darwin himself acknowledged often enough elsewhere. But the impulse to identify evolution with progress has proved hard to resist, as has the temptation to lend evolution a hand with eugenics. “Evolutionary humanism” birthed some dehumanizing attitudes in the writings of Herbert Spencer, Ernst Haeckel, Julian Huxley, and H.G. Wells, who tended to view ordinary people as merely grist for the production of “men like gods,” in Wells’s famous (or infamous) phrase.

A subset of science-based atheists are the “transhumanists,” who believe that we are destined to become gods. Such prophecies were numerous in the twentieth century: The illustrious scientist J.D. Bernal imagined humans becoming creatures of pure light, Arthur C. Clarke foresaw a similar end for humanity in his 1953 novel Childhood’s End, and even Trotsky predicted that, after the Revolution, “the average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.” Ray Kurzweil is the most confident exponent of transhumanism today, certain that by genetically enhancing ourselves and melding our minds with machines, we will produce a qualitatively new version of Homo sapiens, perhaps in the twenty-first century. Yuval Noah Harari is more ambivalent, pointing out that this new version of humanity, which he calls Homo Deus, may not see much point in keeping old and unimproved specimens of its predecessor species around. Gray, as usual, finds these supposedly daring speculations to be merely variations on an ancient tune: the age-old dream of transcending physical limitations and historical contingency and uniting with the Absolute.

Not all modern atheists are unwitting Christians. Some are unwitting Gnostics. In that ancient mystery religion, remember, the earth was created by a malevolent demiurge, while a transcendent God dwells, inaccessible, in a realm of light, unknowable except by those who receive a special, secret revelation. The baneful lure of esoteric knowledge—ideology—is, Gray argues, responsible for the modern political religions. Jacobins, Positivists, Bolsheviks, Nazis, and Maoists all featured an elite stratum of intellectuals whose mastery of some body of liberating ideas—Rousseauist republicanism, Comtean “social science,” Marxism-Leninism, Aryan race science, Mao Zedong Thought—entitled them to rule the uninitiated. That each of these movements was irrational, intolerant, authoritarian, and apocalyptic—hence religious, on one view of religion—no one can dispute. Yet whether it is useful, given the absence from all of them of a malevolent demiurge and a transcendent God, to call them “Gnostic” is less certain.

Most of Gray’s subjects are rationalists, who thought their way (or so they believed) out of religion. But he also contends with passionate or existential atheists, rebels who cannot forgive God for the horrors of the world or the miseries of their own natures. The dark prince of these “misotheists” (God-haters) is the Marquis de Sade. Finding himself beset by impulses to cruelty and sexual domination, he ascribed them to Nature, which, after the eighteenth-century French fashion, he equated with God. Sade’s distinction, however, is to have disenchanted Nature, which until then had been almost universally reverenced but which he saw as a cesspool of violent and lustful drives. Of course, as Gray points out, “Sade was mistaken when he imagined he had left monotheism behind. Instead he changed one unforgivable deity for another.”

More appealing misotheists include Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, who “hands back his ticket” to heaven because an Almighty God allows innocent children to suffer, and William Empson, whose classic Seven Types of Ambiguity suggested the title of Gray’s book. Empson, a literary critic, derived an intense revulsion against Christianity from studying Paradise Lost, in which God is an all-powerful tyrant who created Hell and consigned to it a large part of human- (and angel-) kind. “The Christian God the Father, the God of Tertullian, Augustine, and Aquinas,” he wrote, “is the wickedest thing yet invented by the black heart of man.” Nevertheless, Gray finds Empson, too, insufficiently emancipated. “By invoking an idea of metaphysical evil, Empson showed he remained wedded to a Christian worldview.” A world in which God is the Devil is a Christian world, albeit with all the signs reversed.

At this point the reader, especially if she has encountered similar arguments in Gray’s previous books, may find a question arising in her mind: So what? Why does it matter that Bolshevism and Nazism both have certain structural and psychological resemblances to Christianity? Christianity has, after all, had benign as well as malign consequences; and the murderousness of Nazism and Bolshevism surely had far more to do with both societies’ history of absolutism than with those ideologies’ prophetic and millenarian character. Christianity has pervaded Western culture for over 1,000 years; its traces are bound to be everywhere—even in atheisms.

In another example of guilt by somewhat far-fetched association, Gray writes that Kant and Mill “believed that a universal moral law could be grounded in reason,” giving rise to an “evangelical liberalism” that has led modern Western governments, “possessed by chimerical visions of universal human rights,” to disastrous interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya “in order to promote a liberal way of life in societies that have never known it.” Leaving aside the fact that these interventions had nothing whatever to do with promoting a liberal way of life and that the Western governments in question (especially our own) cared not a fig for universal human rights, does all this really call into question Kant’s and Mill’s theories or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Can Kant and Mill really be held responsible for Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton?

In fact, some of the resemblances Gray claims to see between Christianity and various types of atheism are less than compelling. In a devastating critique of Becker’s Heavenly City, Peter Gay coined the phrase “the fallacy of spurious persistence” to name a tendency to claim false or exaggerated continuities. When Auguste Comte issued a “Catechism of Positive Religion,” the continuity with Roman Catholicism was clear. That Mill’s liberalism “aimed to replace monotheism even as it continued monotheistic thinking in another guise,” as Gray claims, is much less plausible—Mill’s thinking is “monotheistic” only in a very strained sense. “If you want to understand modern politics,” Gray writes, “you must set aside the idea that secular and religious movements are opposites.” Secular and religious people may beg to differ, but Gray knows better.

A close student of Isaiah Berlin, and the author of a notable book about him, Gray has clearly absorbed Berlin’s sensitivity to the dangers to liberty posed by ideologies, both rationalist and irrationalist, as well as by styles of thought, irrespective of content. Hence his concern with the extreme, unworldly, uncompromising character of the thinking of many who believe they have emancipated themselves from Christianity. It is a useful interpretive approach, from the viewpoint of mental hygiene—even if he sometimes takes aim at largely blameless thinkers like Hume, Kant, Mill, Marx, Darwin, and Russell.

At last, just as many readers will have begun to wonder if any Western thinkers ever succeeded in freeing themselves from monotheism, millenarianism, and Gnosticism, Gray introduces us to his favorite atheists: the anti-progressives and the mystics. George Santayana was a philosopher of amiable imperturbability. He wrote fluently but entirely unsystematically and without the slightest concession to the interests of academic philosophers, so he is largely forgotten. Instead of staging his exit from religion as a kind of cosmic melodrama, he simply “stepped out of monotheism altogether.” In a charming irony, he passed the last decade of his life in Rome, at the Convent of the Blue Nuns, producing countless exquisite sentences like this: “A mind enlightened by skepticism and cured of noisy dogma, a mind discounting all reports, and freed from all tormenting anxiety about its own fortunes and existence, finds in the wilderness of essence a very sweet and marvelous solitude.” Gray calls him “an atheist who loved religion.”

Joseph Conrad was as fatalistic and disillusioned as Santayana, but without Santayana’s lightheartedness and sense of mischief. If Santayana was an Epicurean, Conrad was a Stoic, certain that Fate would eventually come for each individual and that all that mattered was how she met it. Gray quotes Conrad’s famous letter to Bertrand Russell, who had asked his opinion of “international socialism” and its prospects: “I have never been able to find in any man’s book or any man’s talk anything to stand up for a moment against my deep-seated sense of fatality governing this man-inhabited world.” Conrad thought reason grossly overrated; competence and courage were enough to see one through. Santayana played with ideas; Conrad mistrusted them, sure that some fool would get hold of them and wreak havoc.

With his poodles, his concert-going, and his “carefully managed hedonism,” Schopenhauer was sublimely selfish and wholly bourgeois.

Schopenhauer, whom Gray exalts above Hegel and Nietzsche, was a “mystical” atheist. His philosophy of the will furnished Freud with many mordant apothegms. He studied Indian philosophy, which supported his belief that selfhood was an illusion, and that destroying this illusion was the only possible salvation. Curiously, Schopenhauer lived a far more sensual and worldly life than his ideal of salvation might suggest. With his poodles, his concert-going, and his “carefully managed hedonism,” he was sublimely selfish and wholly bourgeois. And yet, Gray writes, “for anyone weary of self-admiring world-improvers, there is something refreshing in Schopenhauer’s nastiness.”

Spinoza, on the other hand, was notably unworldly, and the least self-assertive of philosophers. He was a hero of the philosophes, partly because he was one of the last thinkers to be actively persecuted for his atheism, but also because he wrote an influential treatise on politics denying the legitimacy of censorship and advocating democratic republicanism. Gray admires him and Lev Shestov, a twentieth-century Russian existentialist, both “negative theologians” who predicated a God about which nothing could be said. Spinoza was a pantheist, but not in the same sense as most of his predecessors of that description. He did not conceive of countless individual gods dwelling in every separate object, but rather of a single God diffused through and in fact identical with the universe. He was also an early specimen of that recurring paradox (which is not really a paradox): the philosophical determinist who is also a passionate champion of freedom.

Gray is at his best in these sketches of writers he admires, as well as in the many similar sketches scattered through his previous books: Varlam Shalamov, Stanislaw Lem, J.G. Ballard (Straw Dogs); Sigmund Freud, Joseph Roth, Norman Lewis, T.E. Hulme, Llewelyn Powys (The Silence of Animals); Giacomo Leopardi, T. F. Powys, Philip K. Dick (The Soul of the Marionette); among others. They earn Gray’s highest praise: “Not looking for cosmic meaning, they were content with the world as they found it.” Such all-too-rare detachment is the beginning of wisdom. Addressing readers directly (at the end of Straw Dogs), Gray asks us to do likewise: “Other animals do not need a purpose in life.… Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?”

With considerable respect for Gray (and for Conrad, Santayana, et al.), I would answer no. As long as so much of what we see is unnecessary suffering, we cannot be content with the world as we find it. Of course we should keep Gray’s cautions well in mind. The catastrophic revolutionary ideologies of the past were ersatz religions. Scientific utopias and promises to transform the human condition deserve the deepest suspicion. Moral and political progress are always subject to reversal. Humans are animals; human nature is riven with conflicts; reason is a frail reed. But even if we can’t set the cosmos right, we can’t leave our corner of it the way it is. Whatever else may be an illusion, other people’s suffering is not.

In the salle des assises, the Paris courtroom reserved for the examination of murders, rapes, and other serious crimes, a box of thick glass has been erected atop the old wood enclosure in which the accused is made to sit. The glass is a recent addition, and incongruous; the remainder of the room—the lustrous carved oak of the wainscoting, the six brass chandeliers strung from the high plafond—has been preserved as it was at least a century and a half ago. Above the glass box, a grand mural depicts a conclave of red-robed judges and the child king Louis XIII. The mural is in fact a somewhat recent flourish, having been commissioned by the wartime fascists of Vichy, but that infelicitous detail is easily obscured by the vision of splendid continuity the painting sets forth. French judges still wear those red robes. Amid this pomp, the effect of the glass box is that of nothing so much as a museum specimen case, one intended for curiosities of human scale.

Last year, for the month of October, it held a 35-year-old Franco-Algerian man named Abdelkader Merah. More than five and a half years had passed since the crimes of which he was accused—long waits in prison are common in French terrorism cases—but in that time, by a tragic paradox, the expectation that his trial might generate insights of immediate use to the country had only grown. Merah was a jihadist of the sort to which France and Europe have lately grown accustomed, a “homegrown” criminal-turned-radical, an “Islamo-delinquent” whose local resentments and fantasies of violence found justification and structure in a vicious Islam. He was charged as an accomplice in the killings that first brought such men to the attention of France, and arguably, the world. A conviction could send him to prison for life.

On the afternoon of March 11, 2012, in the corner of an empty parking lot in Toulouse, gendarmes had discovered the lifeless body of an off-duty airborne commando. The victim, a Franco-Moroccan, had been shot in the face. Witnesses reported seeing the presumptive killer flee the scene aboard a large motor scooter. Four days later, in Montauban, 30 miles north, a shooter ambushed three soldiers outside their barracks. Two of the men died; the third was left paralyzed. All three victims had been dressed in green military fatigues; two were of Algerian descent, and the other black. Witnesses again described an assailant fleeing on a motor scooter, and ballistics confirmed that the same .45 caliber pistol had been used in both shootings. In Paris, intelligence officials surmised that the killer was a racist ultranationalist, perhaps a former soldier with a grudge against the military that converged with his hatred of nonwhites.

The murders four days later clarified matters. That day, shortly before eight o’clock in the morning, the killer arrived outside a Jewish school on a narrow residential street in Toulouse and opened fire on a group of small children arriving for the day, alongside a young rabbi. He sprayed them with fire from an Uzi submachine gun; when it jammed, he pulled a Colt .45 from his pocket and stood over his victims to execute them from close range. The four dead were an 8-year-old girl; the rabbi, 30; and his two sons, ages 5 and 3. Once again the shooter escaped on a motor scooter.

The killings, the country soon discovered, were the work of Abdelkader Merah’s 23-year-old younger brother, Mohammed. Before dying in a shootout with police three days after the last of the murders, Mohammed declared himself a member of Al Qaeda. He’d targeted the soldiers, he said, because their units had been deployed to Afghanistan, where they fought the Taliban; the Jewish children were revenge for the daily “massacre” of Palestinians.

Mohammed became the hero of a generation of French jihadis, who still hail him in their propaganda as a “lion” who showed the way. French authorities, meanwhile, believed that Abdelkader had been his mentor. Together, in the words of the charging document in Abdelkader’s case, the Merah brothers were the “new face of terrorism.” French jihadists of previous eras traveled to the faraway lands of Islamic lore to fight; the new ones murdered their neighbors.

To say the Merah killings “shocked” France would be misleading, in addition to being obvious. Certainly they inaugurated a new and ongoing political moment, one in which the French came to view domestic jihadism as “the greatest challenge of our generation,” to quote one recent prime minister. But the killings were widely experienced less as a surprise than as a strange sort of vindication, a validation of cultural anxieties that had for years coursed just beneath the surface of French political debate: the alleged unwillingness of French Muslims to submit to the norms of French republicanism; the perceived ultraviolence of the young black and Arab postcolonial Frenchmen of the banlieues; and a feeling that those banlieues, under the sway of violence and Islam, were slipping out from the control of the République much as its overseas colonies once had.

The Merah killings were experienced less as a surprise than as a vindication, a validation of cultural anxieties that had long coursed beneath the surface of French political debate.

Mohammed committed his murders in the final weeks of France’s presidential campaign. Shortly after the killings, Nicolas Sarkozy, the right-wing incumbent, published a “Letter to the French” in which he rehashed the “clash of civilizations” hypothesis, positing Mohammed as an ideologue first and foremost, a killer at the vanguard of an intellectual movement “that is working for the destruction of the values of the West.” “We must combat the criminal manifestations of this ideology of hate,” he wrote. “But we must also fight it at its intellectual root, in the prisons, in the sermons of some extremist preachers, and also on internet sites.”

Sarkozy lost the election, but official France adopted his view of contemporary jihadism. The French have had several decades of experience with jihadism, but prior to the Merah killings they treated it almost exclusively as a matter of law enforcement, Peter Neumann, a political scientist at King’s College and prominent scholar of political violence, told me. “For a long time, they resisted talking about radicalization,” Neumann said. “They thought it was an Anglo-American conspiracy.” The French maintained that they were engaged in the prevention of violence, and it was the violence that mattered; whatever system of thought may have led to it was not, in a liberal democracy, a legitimate matter for state intervention. After the Merah killings, this stance came to be seen as dangerously naïve. Ideas were at the root of Mohammed’s violence, the new thinking went, and if violence such as his were to be stopped, the French would have to confront the ideas and their transmission more directly. Jihadism was no longer a mere matter of law enforcement, but a battle in an existential war of culture.

After Merah, new laws banned the French from visiting jihadi websites or making “apologias for terrorism.” Citizens identified as “radicalized” were banned from leaving the country; the government spent hundreds of millions of euros developing “de-radicalization” programs. (The programs were voluntary, and, unfortunately, of little interest to their target population.) In November 2015, after the attacks in Paris that left 130 dead, which had themselves followed the murders at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo earlier that year, the government declared a state of emergency. The security services were authorized to unilaterally place suspected radicals under indefinite house arrest, and to raid their homes without judicial warrants. Mainstream politicians spoke of creating internment camps for the 10,000 “radicalized” people flagged by the counter-terrorism authorities. By the logic that the Merah killings had ushered in, their alleged radicalization was effectively a crime in itself.

Abdelkader had been arrested in 2012 in a France that acknowledged, however uncomfortably, his right to whatever despicable beliefs he might harbor. The country in which he would be judged, altered as it was by his brother’s attacks and by the many that followed, did not. The trial was deemed by French officials and the press to be a moment of “national catharsis,” the redemptive coda to a cycle of national suffering. It was also the occasion to evaluate the new paradigm, the new theory of the evil afflicting France, by applying it to the very men who were at its origins. “Abdelkader Merah created Mohammed Merah,” the public prosecutor would claim. The two had functioned as a unit, “the one who played the role of sage, the other who played the role of combatant.” The prosecution held that Abdelkader had radicalized his brother, had provided him with the beliefs that were evidently the cause of his violence, and on its face this seemed a perfectly reasonable claim.

Mohammed Merah first went before a court at the age of 13. By the age of 20, he had been tried for and convicted of several thefts, a handful of assaults, and various other minor crimes. It was in prison, where he served less than two years, that he appears to have taken up Islam. He came to be known as a member of what French security officials called Toulouse’s “Salafist faction,” a loose group of about 100 Muslim fundamentalists who were monitored by the domestic intelligence service, known at the time as the DCRI. (After the Merah killings, the service was restructured and renamed.) Mohammed traveled widely in the Middle East, and made monthlong trips to both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Still, the DCRI viewed him to be, in the words of one declassified intelligence report, “an ambiguous character.” He seemed to be attempting to lead the pious and watchful life of a would-be jihadi operative, but then proving incapable of the requisite discipline. In Toulouse, he never used a cell phone registered in his name, and he stopped his car to pray at the roadside at the appointed hours. But he also drove donuts, sped wildly on the road, and had bloody fistfights in Les Izards, his childhood neighborhood. Once, he had taken a young local boy into his apartment, locked the door, and forced him to watch videos of decapitations and other jihadist violence; the boy’s mother filed a complaint with the police.

Abdelkader, six years older, was known to be less volatile. He too had been a petty criminal, but he seemed to have left that life behind more completely. He attended Koranic schools in Egypt, and the DCRI understood him to be an intellectual force within the small world of Toulousain jihadism.

Abdelkader had been arrested in a France that acknowledged his right to whatever despicable beliefs he might harbor. The country in which he would be judged did not.

Within hours of the killings at the Jewish school, both Merah brothers had been identified as suspects. In the early hours of March 21, 2012, police commandos moved to arrest them, at their separate homes. Mohammed opened fire on them and was subsequently shot and killed. Fifteen miles south, the men who smashed through the door of Abdelkader’s home found him in the living room, where, as if to aid in confirming his identity, he had left his passport on a countertop. “I was expecting a visit from the police,” he said later.

He denied any involvement in the killings. “I wasn’t my little brother’s accomplice in anything,” he told investigators. “If I shared the same religious convictions as him, I’d have participated in his actions, and if he’d told me about his plans, I’d have strongly dissuaded him.” But he applauded Mohammed’s actions just the same. “I’m proud of their aim,” he said. “Every Muslim would like to be killed by his enemy.” Mohammed had died “like a lion,” he said, “and not like a mouse.”

Abdelkader vacillated between what seemed a bizarre forth-rightness and a posture of coy and improbable ignorance. He volunteered, unprompted, that he had been present for the theft of the scooter that Mohammed used in the killings, and told investigators that, a few weeks prior, his brother had spoken to him of waging jihad in France. “He was telling me that our Muslim brothers were under attack from the crusaders everywhere in the world,” Abdelkader recalled. “I told him that this was true, but that Islam isn’t applied with passions and hate but according to the texts.” Abdelkader told investigators: “If it’s a crime to be named ‘Merah,’ I’m guilty; if it’s a crime to be Muslim, I’m guilty; if it’s a crime to be for jihad, with the rules that go with it, I’m guilty.”

He would be tried by a tribunal of professional magistrates. The six of them sat atop the elevated bench at the front of the salle des assises, each faintly illuminated by the glow of a brass banker’s lamp and dressed in black robes and a frilly white kerchief, with the exception of the chief magistrate, known as the president, who sat in the center in red. In addition to the prosecution and the defense, French trials accord a prominent role to the victims of a crime. In the Merah case, 232 people had registered as plaintiffs, mostly the families and extended families of the victims; their two dozen lawyers sat beneath the president, aligned in three rows like a panel of black-robed inquisitors. From across a narrow space at the center of the court they faced the glass cage.

Abdelkader entered the box each day through a rear door, with a lumbering nonchalance. The mug shot that had been provided to the press, evidently from his pre-Islamic years, portrayed a hard and contemptuous man, but he had grown chubby in prison and now radiated a smug detachment more than violence. His belly strained at the lower buttons of a white dress shirt. He wore a librarian’s reading glasses, held with a lanyard around his neck, and a long black beard ran from his temples to his chin, framing a pale, almost perfectly round, oddly cherubic mien. His mustache was freshly shaved, in the style favored by Salafis. He sat at the front of the glass box with his head cocked slightly back off his shoulders, quietly posturing, it seemed, like both the gangster he’d once been and the Muslim zealot he’d become.

As a child in Les Izards, he was reputed to be particularly violent. “Abdelkader feels no limits, acknowledges no laws,” a social worker wrote of him at 14. He beat his mother and was sent to prison for stabbing his elder brother, Abdelghani, seven times in the side. He visited Algeria during its civil war in the 1990s; according to Abdelghani, who survived the stabbing and testified against his brother at the trial last year, Abdelkader was entirely unfazed by the corpses piled in the streets. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, he came to be known in Les Izards as “Ben Ben,” after Osama bin Laden, whose ascetic religious doctrine was then of no interest to him—he went to prostitutes, drank alcohol, snorted cocaine, and smoked hashish, which he apparently also sold—but whose grand spectacle of murder evidently was. In his mid-20s, for reasons he could not or would not articulate to the court, except to speak of a “sadness of heart,” he put an end to his old ways. “From there on out, I changed,” he said. “I didn’t even steal a bonbon.” Abdelkader called himself an “orthodox Muslim,” and said that, though he was born into the faith, he had “converted” to the true Islam.

Various members of the Merah family were called to the stand to testify to his influence over Mohammed. “Through his example, through his words, through his hate,” Abdelghani said of him, “he made Mohammed into a terrorist.” As a young man, Abdelghani had been extremely violent himself, though he had never been drawn to Islam. “What I know is that Abdel’s violence brought on Kader’s violence,” their sister, Aïcha, testified. “And Kader’s violence brought on Mohammed’s violence.”

Abdelkader’s posture fluctuated, as it had during the investigation, between quiet defiance and obfuscation and self-satisfied provocation. “What do you think of the French soldiers who join up to go fight in Afghanistan?” a plaintiff’s attorney asked at one point. “I don’t do geopolitics,” he said, turning to the presiding judge. “I don’t know what’s happening in Afghanistan.”

Another attorney asked, “What is a martyr?”

“There are several types of martyr in Islam,” Abdelkader replied.

“And Mohammed Merah, did he die a martyr?”

“Ah, that, I don’t know,” he said, throwing up his hands. “No one can know.”

As it happened, Abdelkader had been recorded, in a jailhouse conversation with his mother, describing Mohammed’s glorious martyr’s life in paradise. The lawyer proceeded to read aloud from the transcript: “He’s got the houris now,” Abdelkader had said, referring to the young virgins reserved for Islamic martyrs. “Right now he’s not in his tomb, he’s in heaven.” “Ah, he has the houris with him?” his mother asked. Abdelkader replied, “He has the houris, he’s doing the shameful act with them, he’s doing everything!”

“Of course I hope my little brother is in heaven,” Abdelkader explained in court.

He and Mohammed had in fact not been reputed to get along, and it appeared the two had not spoken for nearly the entire year before the killings. Yet in the month immediately prior to the attacks, and during their nine-day span, the brothers saw one another repeatedly. Abdelkader claimed that he had sought Mohammed out to resolve their differences, as the Koran recommends. The prosecution contended that their estrangement had been a feint, a way to throw the authorities off the trail of their conspiracy, and that they had staged a reconciliation to put the final touches on their plot.

It was almost impossible to imagine that Abdelkader had not somehow participated in his brother’s murders. Stated in general terms, the facts of the case were that two brothers, members of a cultish, ultra-minority sect, were repeatedly seen together during the period when one of them was committing a series of murders in the name of precisely the rare beliefs they happened to share. The truly extraordinary thing would have been if Abdelkader were not involved.

The most readily identifiable shortcoming of the case against Abdelkader was the near-complete lack of material evidence to prove it. The prosecution advanced no proof that Abdelkader had helped his brother to procure the weapons he used or to choose his victims, or to plan the attacks, or to finance them, or to produce and distribute the video in which Mohammed claimed responsibility. The best they’d found, the element that served as the crux of the prosecution’s case, was Abdelkader’s avowed participation in the theft, five days before the killings began, of the Yamaha TMAX 530 motor scooter that Mohammed rode to and from the murders. On the afternoon of the tenth day of the trial, the president asked Abdelkader to describe the incident to the court.

Abdelkader, Mohammed, and a third man—Abdelkader had always refused to name him, to protect him from being “unjustly incarcerated” like himself—had been driving through an industrial park on the outskirts of Toulouse, when Mohammed started to yell from the back seat. “My brother says, ‘Stop!’” Abdelkader told the court. Mohammed got out, and Abdelkader parked nearby. “All of a sudden,” Abdelkader said, “I see my brother go by,” on the scooter. Later, Mohammed told him that he’d seen the TMAX parked with the keys in the ignition, and that “an opportunity like that doesn’t come around twice.” “My little brother was really excited,” Abdelkader recalled. “People from the bourgeoisie can’t understand it, but when you steal something, your adrenaline really gets going.” He said he’d been angry with Mohammed—to steal was haram—but not shocked. “Unfortunately, it’s not something unusual where we’re from,” Abdelkader said.

If he was indeed his brother’s accomplice in the motor scooter theft, one of his lawyers told the court, “Abdelkader Merah is the stupidest terrorist on the planet.”

Abdelkader’s lawyers noted that the police had found no witnesses to testify to their client’s presence at the theft. Had he not mentioned it to investigators, they likely never would have known he was involved. If he was indeed his brother’s accomplice, one of his lawyers told the court, “Abdelkader Merah is the stupidest terrorist on the planet.”

Even if Abdelkader’s active participation in the theft could be proved, this could not be deemed the act of an accomplice to murder unless it was shown that he knew what his brother planned to do with the stolen scooter. The prosecutor, Naïma Rudloff, dispensed with this issue by reminding the court that Abdelkader was a jihadist like his brother, and that, consequently, he necessarily understood his brother’s intentions. “Obviously,” she said, “none of what happened can be explained if we’re not in a jihadi context.”

Rudloff and the plaintiffs’ lawyers frequently took this inductive line of argument still further. If evidence of Abdelkader’s involvement was scant, they maintained, this was because he and Mohammed had sought to hide his involvement; the absence of evidence was proof, in itself, of guilt. The exotic term they invoked to mask the fallaciousness of this logic was taqiyya. Taqiyya is an Islamic precept that permits Muslims, when in danger or under duress, to conceal their true beliefs, breaking the usual injunction against lying. In the Muslim world, the term
typically refers to a practice among Shiites living in majority-Sunni areas, not one among Sunni jihadists, but non-Muslim Westerners sometimes present it as a sort of general doctrine of Islamic deception. (Taqiyya is, unsurprisingly, a favorite of the bigots and conspiracy theorists who speak of a global Muslim plot to subvert Western society from within.)

“The question that arises is whether or not we ought to believe you,” an attorney for the plaintiffs told Abdelkader. “If we’re to believe you, you’re in the car, your brother says to stop; he goes off to steal the TMAX, and you don’t see a thing?”

“Then don’t believe me about being present for the theft in the first place,” Abdelkader replied flatly from the glass box.

“You know that this scooter is going to be used for criminal acts that are perfectly aligned with radicalism!” the lawyer charged.

Abdelkader was suddenly agitated, and he retorted, “What’s ‘radical,’ what’s a ‘radical Muslim’?”

“You’re not a radical Muslim?” the lawyer asked in mock surprise.

“You say I’m a radical Muslim, so you must have some expertise in Islam?” Abdelkader was nearly yelling now. “What are the six pillars of Islam?”

Sunni Muslims typically recognize only five pillars of Islam; it is only jihadists who speak of six, adding “jihad” to the traditional list. If Abdelkader had been practicing taqiyya, he wasn’t very good at it.

Later, a lawyer for the plaintiffs asked Bernard Squarcini, the director of the DCRI at the time of the killings, why Mohammed claimed to have acted alone. “Does the fact that you don’t reveal who your accomplices are mean that you have no accomplices?” the attorney asked.

“No,” Squarcini explained. “It means you’re trying to protect them.”

In five weeks in the salle des assises, I encountered almost no one who seriously believed that Abdelkader might be acquitted, however limited the evidence against him. This was not because the taqiyya argument was widely accepted, though it did appear to be; and only a handful of the most cynical lawyers and journalists spoke of political interference or reason of state. Rather it was understood that Abdelkader’s conviction was assured because he was being tried not only as an accomplice in Mohammed’s crimes but also on a charge of association de malfaiteurs terroriste, or, loosely, “terrorist criminal association.”

In the summer and fall of 1995, Algerian Islamists killed eight people and wounded 200 more in a series of bombings in Paris. The following year, the French legislature passed a law to facilitate the charging of would-be terrorists before any such violence could be committed again. The association de malfaiteurs terroriste statute remains the primary tool of counterterror magistrates today. Its language is notoriously abstruse, but in essence the law goes beyond outlawing terrorist violence, per se, to punish the intent to commit it. In order to win an association conviction, prosecutors are not obliged to demonstrate the existence of any specific plot, only the broad contours of a hypothetical one. They must show that defendants intended to commit murders, for instance, but are under no obligation to show who the defendants intended to kill, or when, or how. In practice, prosecutors must show only that defendants hold violent ideologies, and that they associate with one another in suspicious ways. The premise of the law is that, under such conditions, the most reasonable explanation for their association is a terrorist plot. “We don’t have direct proof,” a prosecutor once explained to me. “We have proof through an intellectual construct.”

Civil libertarians have long argued that association de malfaiteurs terroriste criminalizes ideas. France has never taken such criticisms particularly seriously, much as it has refused to entertain challenges to its law against Holocaust denial. As with much of continental Europe, France’s politics is shaped by the memory of the twentieth-century catastrophes propelled by once-marginal ideologies, and the French, who have never had particularly strong speech protections, have few qualms about banning the most repugnant views.

Thousands of Islamists have been arrested and many hundreds convicted under the association law, and French security and intelligence officials long hailed the statute as the reason that since 1995 not a single Islamist attack had been carried off on French soil. Mohammed’s killings ended the 17-year run.

Though the association law was meant to be preventive, since those killings it has been repurposed to charge the alleged participants in successful terror plots, as well. In addition to attempting to prove that Abdelkader had been directly involved in his brother’s murders, then, the prosecution sought to establish that Abdelkader had joined with his brother in a terrorist association. He was a jihadist ideologue, they held; he spent time with Mohammed in the period before and during the killings; and he knew Mohammed to have been a jihadist ideologue as well. Abdelkader made little effort to deny the first two of these claims, and the prosecution therefore expended the greatest part of its energies in attempting to prove that Mohammed’s extremism was flagrant, and that Abdelkader was therefore necessarily aware of it.

This was an odd strategy, given that Mohammed had succeeded in passing himself off as a non-jihadist even to the French intelligence services. In November 2011, four months before the murders, two agents had come to Toulouse from Paris to meet with him and evaluate him as a potential informant. “He claims a moderate practice of Islam,” they reported in a subsequent intelligence note, and “does not share extremist and jihadist ideas.” They deemed Mohammed “quite clever and open” in addition to being “very polite.” His recruitment was marked down as “plausible.”

The prosecution called various witnesses from Les Izards—friends and acquaintances of the Merahs, men and women, young and old—to testify to Mohammed’s overt extremism. The charging document claimed that “most of the people from the neighborhood” had known Mohammed to be an Islamist radical. Yet their court testimonies did not bear that out.

“In my head, he wasn’t a Salafist, fundamentalist, jihadist, or anything like that, no,” one middle-aged woman, Touria Labiad, told the court. “For me he was just Mohammed.” Mohammed’s neighbors said they’d always found him to be “normal,” unremarkable, a delinquent like many others from Les Izards.

In the charging document, the brothers Bodief and Nasser Bougherara had been identified as “the most objective” of Mohammed’s acquaintances, and the court thus expected them to break with their neighbors’ claims of Mohammed’s normalcy. Bodief, a 41-year-old car-thief-turned-mechanic, arrived wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt with a large skull and crossbones on the front. He was a burly, grimacing man and did not seem to like being in court. Bodief had worked alongside Mohammed for several years at an auto shop owned by Nasser, and in 2012 he had given a lengthy statement to the police. The president asked him to summarize that statement for the court. “I don’t remember anymore,” he replied. The president asked what he meant. “I don’t remember anymore,” he said. “It means what it means.”

“You’re going to change your tone immediately,” the president snapped.

“I’ve told you three times now, I don’t remember!” Bodief said.

In fact, he did, and once his distaste for the court had registered with everyone in it, he said that Mohammed had been “impulsive” and “hotheaded,” but that this hardly distinguished him from his peers. “He was just a young guy, he just wanted to have fun more than anything else,” Bodief said. “The boy was never dangerous,” he added, and the plaintiffs’ lawyers were suddenly outraged. “The ‘boy!’’ one of them shouted. “He’s got holes in his memory except when it comes to singing the praises of Mohammed Merah!”

Later, I followed Bodief outside and found him smoking a cigarette on the courthouse steps. He was friendlier than he’d been on the stand. Abdelkader had a “nasty look” about him, he said, but Mohammed hadn’t been that way. “He was a good kid,” he told me with a shrug.

Nasser, Bodief’s 48-year-old brother, was a compact and more polished-looking man. He came to court in a cap, sport coat, and black brogues. But he was no less prickly on the stand. Mohammed, he said in a brief opening statement, had been “a kid from a bad neighborhood who wanted a shot, like others do.” Les Izards was a hard neighborhood—“a free-range zoo”—but if Mohammed had been radicalized, it was neither the neighborhood nor Abdelkader that had done it. Mohammed was “a kid who went completely off the rails,” Nasser said. “And in my opinion, he went off the rails all alone.”

This contention appeared to be to no one’s liking. Investigators had at one point suspected Nasser of a role in funding Mohammed’s attacks, and though this proved to be false, the president questioned him as if he were still a suspect. He asked about a withdrawal of 5,000 euros from his business’s bank account. “I work hard and pay my taxes!” Nasser said.

An important function of the trial was to indict the violent norms and low expectations of Les Izards, here conflated with jihadism, that led them to miss the threat Mohammed posed.

A lawyer for the plaintiffs presented a printout of a photograph that had been found taped to the door of a cabinet in Nasser’s garage. It showed the weathered face of an old man in a black turban with a bushy beard and a dagger between his teeth. The photograph wasn’t accompanied by any Islamic texts or political statements, and its style was more National Geographic than jihadist-propagandist, but the man appeared to be a Taliban fighter. Why, the lawyer asked Nasser, was this photograph hanging in his garage? Nasser was angry and silent, and when the lawyer pressed him again, he responded simply, “I believe in one thing: work.”

One important function of the trial was to indict the neighborhood and the way everyone in it lived, the violent norms and low expectations, here conflated with jihadism, that led them all to miss the threat Mohammed posed. Nasser seemed to have grasped that, and he left the stand in a silent rage.

I followed him out. “Can I bother you?” I asked. “No,” he said, not stopping. I asked if I might come to see him in the neighborhood. “Don’t come to Les Izards,” he said. “It won’t go well for you.”

Zoulikha Aziri, the Merahs’ mother, appeared late in the trial to testify. She tottered to the stand in the center of the court in a formless robe and a tasseled yellow hijab that accentuated the almost complete circularity of her face. She looked more defiant than solemn, her features turgid with angry confusion. The president explained to her that, because she was the mother of the accused, the law exempted her from swearing an oath of honesty. “Which does not prevent you from speaking with candor,” he added. “Yes, yes, yes,” she said.

She made a brief opening statement, in hesitant French. “I think my son Abdelkader is innocent, he has nothing to do with the whole story that happened,” she said. “Mohammed—what hedid, Mohammed, it’s very, very serious. I didn’t know what he was going to do. He did what he did; now he’s dead.” A translator had accompanied her to the stand, and Aziri turned to the young woman to assist her with a brief word for the plaintiffs. “I present my apologies to the victims,” Aziri said. The president then questioned her about her life.

She was born in 1957 in a village in what was then French Algeria, the eldest of six children. She raised her siblings and received no schooling, according to an account she once gave to social workers. At 18, she was married without her consent to a man she had never met, selected for her by her stepfather. Her new husband, Mohammed Merah, was 15 years her senior and already married to a second woman, with whom he had several children. He worked in a factory in France, and Aziri followed him there in 1981, with her two children, a daughter, Souad, and a son, Abdelghani. A first daughter had died in Algeria, as an infant. It had been a sickness, Aziri thought, or perhaps her mother-in-law had poisoned the baby. “I don’t know,” she told the court dully.

Aziri arrived in the housing projects of Toulouse speaking not a word of French. She rarely left her apartment. By 1982, two more children had been born, a daughter, Aïcha, and another son, Abdelkader. Aziri apparently wanted no more. According to one social worker’s report, another Algerian woman told her of the existence of contraceptive pills, and she began taking them, although apparently without understanding how they worked. Mohammed was born in 1988.

Aziri’s husband beat her, and sent his earnings back to his other wife in Algeria. In 1992, she fled with her children to a women’s shelter, and a divorce was completed several months later, at which point whatever stability the family may have known seems to have evaporated. Aziri’s brother, who lived in Toulouse, imposed himself as a malignant patriarch, hectoring and beating his sister and her children. Her eldest son, Abdelghani, began drinking heavily; he too beat his mother and his siblings, especially Abdelkader, who was flagged by social workers as a “child in danger” as early as 1995. Various testimonies suggest Abdelkader was raped by an uncle, as well. As he grew older, the middle brother exhibited a distinct sadism and was once alleged to have tied Mohammed to a bed by his wrists and ankles and beaten him for two hours with a broomstick. For most of his childhood, Mohammed would be in and out of group homes, where he could be protected from his brother. Abdelkader beat his older sisters if they smoked or stayed out late; he beat his mother, too, and she took to locking herself in a bedroom when he was home.

Mohammed attacked his mother as well. In 2002, when he was 13, his middle school principal wrote to a judge that Aziri had come to her with “several marks on her face and numerous bite marks on her arms.” Mohammed was apparently no longer sleeping, and spent his evenings terrorizing her. “He’s crazy,” his mother told the principal. Mohammed was placed in another group home.

That same year, after punching a social worker in the face—the woman had accompanied Mohammed and Aziri to a court date, and he grew angry after his mother reacted unfavorably to the prospect of having him back at home—he was evaluatedby a court-mandated psychologist. “Mohammed Merah’s discourse shows no sense of guilt,” the psychologist wrote. “He does not imagine the repercussions of his acts on the person he assaults because he places himself in a position of victimhood.” He had told her, “For adults it’s ‘violence,’ but for me it’s self-defense.” He was frequently sad, he reported—social workers indeed often found him crying, even as a teenager—and he sometimes thought of suicide. (In 2008, while in prison, he tried to hang himself.) The psychologist reported that his mother showed no understanding of her son’s behaviors, no notion of the forces that might be driving them. She was unwilling, probably unable, to interrogate the norms by which she and her family lived. Aziri showed “little capacity for mental elaboration,” the psychologist wrote, and “little self-awareness.” The events of her life were so unremittingly grave as to fail to register in her as serious at all.

In court, she lied about them. Her relationship with her ex-husband had been “a normal relationship,” she said, and she denied that he had ever beaten her. The president asked if Abdelkader had been violent when he was younger. “Abdelkader? Abdelkader normal,” she said.

“You’re sure?” the president asked.

“Sure,” she replied. The president read from a social worker’sreport, describing Abdelkader’s violence. “No, no, no,” Aziri said. She was asked if, in light of the violence, her family was perhaps not entirely normal. “Of course it’s normal,” she insisted. It was pointed out to her that her sons had committed a great number of violent acts, including murder. “There is no problem in the Merah family,” she said. “We’re not animals!” She denied having spoken to the police after Abdelkader tied Mohammed to the bed. The president read aloud from her statement from the time; she denied having given it.

The president turned to another line of questioning. Mohammed had lured his first victim to the site of his murder by claiming to want to buy his motorcycle, which the man, Imad Ibn-Ziaten, had put up for sale on the internet. (In his listing, Ibn-Ziaten had identified himself as a soldier.) Several days before the killing, shortly after eleven in the evening, someone had connected to the online classified from within Aziri’s apartment. Investigators suspected that it was Abdelkader who viewed the advertisement that night, and if this could be proved, his complicity in his brother’s killings was patent.

From the start and throughout the five years of the investigation, Aziri had maintained that Mohammed did not come to her apartment that night. She acknowledged that Abdelkader had been present earlier in the evening, but said he had left several hours before the connections were made. And yet Abdelkader’s cell phone pinged a cell tower near his mother’s apartment at the time of the connections, and the alibi he initially provided for his whereabouts that night—he claimed to have been at a party—proved false.

In court, Aziri denied that either of her sons had come to her apartment that night. “I was alone,” she said. “There was no one there!” Mohammed must have made the connections from outside her apartment, she said, by Wi-Fi. She was reminded that investigators had found that Ibn-Ziaten’s ad had not been accessed over Wi-Fi but via the hardline internet connection inside her apartment. “For me, what your technicians said isn’t true,” she declared.

To watch Aziri flail and fight and simply refuse to be honest was to resign oneself to the conclusion that she, and whatever knowledge she had of the crimes, was beyond reach.

It was incomprehensible, given the ease with untruth that she’d already demonstrated, and the lack of legal consequences, that she did not simply lie and say that she now remembered that Mohammed had come to her apartment that night, that it must have been him and not Abdelkader. This would have made clear that, if the court and plaintiffs and country were to be deprived of the information she possessed, it was out of a maddening but comprehensible desire to free her surviving son from prison. But reason seemed to have no purchase on her; her obstinacy was pointless. To watch her flail and fight and simply refuse was to resign oneself to theconclusion that she, and whatever knowledge she had of the crimes, was beyond reach.

A lawyer for the Ibn-Ziaten family stood to make his own attempt.

“Madame, this family wants to know the truth,” he said.

“That’s normal,” Aziri said, almost sympathetically.

The lawyer explained once again that whoever made the connections was necessarily inside her apartment.

“Mohammed took the codes and connected from outside,” Aziri said through the translator.

“That’s not possible!” the lawyer yelled. “There was someone at your apartment! The Ibn-Ziaten family has the right to know!”

“No one! There was no one at my apartment!” she shouted, switching now into rapid French. “Abdelkader isn’t there! Why are you speaking to me like this?! Me, too, I can speak to you like this!” Abdelkader reached a hand through an opening in the glass box and motioned to his mother to calm down.

“The families have the right to know the truth!” the lawyer yelled. “They’ve been waiting for it for five years—five years!”

Abdelkader’s lawyer, Éric Dupond-Moretti, stood and began to bellow across the aisle of the court. “What has she done?” he demanded. “What are you accusing this woman of?” The courtroom went nearly silent. “Of lying? And so what? She’s the mother of the accused, and she’s the mother of a dead man!”

The courtroom erupted. From the rear, a young man, IbnZiaten’s younger brother, screamed at Dupond-Moretti. “You’re not ashamed?! Shut up! Shut up!” he shouted through tears. “You’re a murderer! You’re mean! You’re shit!” He stumbled from the courtroom.

Dupond-Moretti had been wildly indecorous, and his words evidently set off the outpouring of the man’s anguish, but I do not think they were its source. The man’s deepest grievance, of course, was with his brother’s killer or killers, and the mother who was evidently shielding them. But I suspect it was also with the contention, which had been peddled to him since the days after the murders and throughout the five years that followed, that Mohammed’s radical evil had been fomented and then abetted by Abdelkader, and that a trial would prove it, and that it was thus possible to grant the victims the tidy moral resolution they deserved. What the events of the trial instead demonstrated was the cruel inadequacy of this contention, the naïveté of this logic. The most terrible discovery for anyone who watched the trial closely and was willing to plumb his own sense of disorientation was that the Merah family inhabited a corner of the world where logic of this sort simply did not hold.

Throughout the trial, I often shared a bench in the salle des assises with an anthropologist named Ariel Planeix. Planeix had been recruited by the French Ministry of Justice to produce an internal study on the lives of several dozen “radicalized” minors, some of whom had been before the courts, and others whose cases were handled by social workers. The upheaval and trauma of the Merahs’ lives were essentially average among the cases he’d seen, he said. He viewed Mohammed as a template for the generation of jihadists that has emerged since his killings. “He’s the new face of a sort of reactive violence,” he told me, violence that is politicized but that is hardly rooted in politics. The minors Planeix studied had all been abused, abandoned, or raped, and sometimes all three; if they remained in contact with their families, their families systematically denied the existence of any such problems. Their childhoods, like the Merahs’, were an almost absurd cumulation of horrors. A growing body of research suggests that, among this new generation of jihadis, this is indeed the norm. This is not to suggest that jihadism is merely a social problem, but rather that “radicalization” is much more than a matter of ideology and its transmission.

This ought to be a source of reassurance. Radicalization is not the vast crisis it has often been made out to be in the West, and certainly not an existential threat; it seems to operate upon a very particular population, and that population is small, damaged, and profoundly marginal. It is the great luck of the Salafi-jihadis that that their Islamic mythology should hold appeal for these men at the terrible margins; it is their great luck, too, that European societies should be so confounded by these men, torn between their loathing for them and a buried guilt for the outrages to which they, in their marginal lives, are exposed. Beneath the anger and horror at every jihadist attack in Europe is, like a shameful, postcolonial secret, an unsung note of self-reproach. Shame, like fear, is only very rarely a spur to sober evaluation of the problems at hand. But it is easier to overcome.

Abdelkader’s lawyers argued his right to think and believe as he saw fit. They were no more interested in an examination of how or why he’d chosen his particular path than was the prosecution. The trial served, then, as much as anything, to perpetuate Abdelkader’s own myth about himself, as a man defined by his extreme convictions, a sort of empty vessel filled, by divine providence, with jihadist Islam. This was a myth that was almost entirely palatable to his accusers, absolving them as it did of the uncomfortable responsibility of looking closer. The myth of pure evil flattered all. The court ostensibly scrutinized Abdelkader, his family, his neighborhood; but it seemed to see only what it wished, or what Abdelkader wished, in each of them.

“Do you have anything to add to your defense?” the president asked Abdelkader on the final morning of the trial, turning to the glass box.

“Yes, Monsieur le Président,” Abdelkader said blandly. He stood to speak. “I said it before and I’ll say it again: I have nothing to do with the killings committed by my brother.” He had finished his statement.

In the evening, the president read out the judges’ verdict, accompanied by an explication of the logic by which they had concluded that Abdelkader had not been shown to be his brother’s accomplice, but that he had participated in “a terrorist grouping or agreement” with him nonetheless. The Merahs’ association aimed to commit killings, the judges wrote, and this intent was revealed “precisely” by the killings Mohammed committed. Abdelkader was sentenced to 20 years.

There can be little doubt that Abdelkader Merah is a very dangerous man, and I suspect that everyone in the courtroom was relieved to see him convicted. But it was a glorious day for no one. Abdelkader sat unmoved in the glass box. In the end it was the prosecution itself that chose to appeal, finding the partial conviction insufficient.

In the second episode of American Vandal’s new season, a teenager named Kevin McClain (Travis Tope) gives a lyrical speech about the Mexican spiced milk drink, horchata. He is sitting in front of a black screen when he does this, the lead subject of a fictional documentary about a series of “poop crimes” committed at a private Catholic high school in the Pacific Northwest, and he is trying to exonerate himself.

You see, in the first episode of the series, Kevin McClain—an unabashed eccentric who wears a flatcap and formal vests with baggy khaki pants—confessed to the trio of crimes, which included spiking the cafeteria lemonade with maltitol powder so that over forty students spontaneously excavated their bowels, filling a pinata with excrement during a classroom party, and stuffing a set of t-shirt canons with dried cat dung. The anonymous prankster behind these fecal matters taunted the victims for weeks on social media, referring to him or herself on Instagram only as “The Turd Burglar.” No one at St. Bernardine’s knew who was terrorizing the school, or why, until one student stepped forward, telling authorities that he suspected his best friend, Kevin McClain of being the culprit. The reason? Horchata.

Apparently, Kevin McClain has a thing for beverages. He makes YouTube videos about rare teas from around the world. On the day of the lemonade attack, which students took to calling “The Brownout,” he knocked over an elderly priest’s lemonade in the cafeteria with his lunch tray, and replaced it not with a second lemonade, but with a horchata, which cost $1.25 more. In his interview, Kevin claims that he did this because “it is the superior beverage,” claiming with a put-on, pretentious affect that “it is shockingly smooth and sweet, and when mixed with organic whole milk as the Spaniards intended it, is divine.” Still, his friend argues, this makes him look suspicious, like he knew a gut bomb was coming, and he wanted to spare a frail old man from intestinal distress.

This all sounds very silly—Turd Burgling, poop crimes, an amateur investigation—but American Vandal is deadly serious about its silliness. The premise of the show is that two high school students, Peter Maldonado (Tyler Alvarez) and Sam Ecklund (Griffin Gluck), inspired by true crime documentaries like Serial and Making a Murderer, decide to shoot their own investigative films. In the first season, they cover a scandal at their own school: Someone has spray-painted 27 penises on the faculty’s cars, while the teachers were in a meeting. In the second season, they decide to look outside their own community, and instead of trying to identify a single mischief-maker, Sam and Peter are trying to unravel a massive institutional conspiracy.

The humor in the first season not only came from its crude subject matter (you learn more than you ever wanted to know about how to elegantly draw a phallus), but from the fact that Sam and Peter approach their vérité work like they are the Maysles brothers. As they attempt to exonerate the leading suspect Dylan Maxwell (Jimmy Tatro), they construct elaborate maps, they stage elaborate re-enactments, and they grill their interview subjects with a confrontational zeal that almost earns them a school expulsion. They are not solving a murder but they treat their material as if it is life or death, as if they are out to win a Pulitzer.

There is, of course, something puerile about this—the creators of American Vandal, Tony Yacenda and Dan Perrault, are essentially taking Christopher Guest’s mockumentary format and tossing in dirty jokes—but inside its shiny wrapper of inanity, the first season revealed a deeper truth. Even though Peter and Sam proved Dylan Maxwell innocent, their hard work was for naught. Dylan had already lost everything: his college acceptance, his girlfriend, the respect of his peers and of the country (in the meta-world of the show, Peter and Sam post their first installments on YouTube, sending Dylan’s story viral). So he decides to become the person that everyone assumes he is. He didn’t commit the first act of vandalism, but he picks up a can of red paint and angrily defaces a teacher’s driveway. Just as institutional biases can harm an individual, true crime series can distort and destroy the lives of their subjects.

When the second season of American Vandal begins, Sam and Peter have become national celebrities. In a truly next-level joke, they explain that Netflix picked up the first season of their show and has hired them to film a new installment. They follow up a tip from a student named Chloe Lyman, who believes that Kevin McClain is being framed for a crime he did not commit. She says she knows, in fact, who did it: the star of the basketball team, DeMarcus Tillman (Melvin Gregg), who is being protected by the administration because he is such a cash cow for the sports program.

What the show does better than almost any other comedy on television is specificity. Its minute observations about how Generation Z lives, down to the smallest emoji or Instagram comment, are uncannily accurate. There’s the way Kevin McClain says “horrrr-chah-ta,” overemphasizing the Spanish pronunciation to sound worldly. There’s DeMarcus Tillman, the star of the basketball team excusing his poor attempts at writing poetry by pronouncing that “I feel like Shakespeare’s first poem was probably trash too.” There’s the overeager, try-hard teacher Miss Montgomery, who gets into debates with students about whether or not the pope is cool and compares herself to “Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side.” There’s a disgruntled, expelled student Grayson Wentz, who makes angry vlogs about how his Internet-addicted classmates are all sheep who are desperate for double-taps.

For all its scatological humor—and there is a lot of that—the new season of American Vandal draws more profound conclusions than the first. Peter and Sam quickly find themselves in over their heads, in a dark cycle of blackmail, catfishing, revenge porn, and other webby terrors. This is a place where so many young people find themselves today; caught between appearances and reality, reputation and vulnerability. As more and more teenagers begin to lead their lives at least halfway online, they are opening themselves up for traumatic experiences. If the gimlet eye of American Vandal reveals one truth about the next generation, it is that the crap they will have to put up with is far worse than anything you could catch from lemonade.

When Fernando Haddad ran for a second term as mayor of São Paulo in 2016, he was mocked for wearing cheap baggy suits to televised debates, and even his supporters found him uncompelling. Although praised internationally for making the largest city in the Americas a more progressive megalopolis, Haddad was weighed down by his party’s dismal year, which included the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff over alleged budgetary manipulation. Haddad, a former education minister and university professor, lost to a millionaire who had once hosted the Brazilian version of The Apprentice. But now, Haddad is his party’s nominee for the October 6 presidential election, assigned a role that befits him about as much as those suits from two years ago: mass leader.

The stakes of Haddad’s undertaking could not be higher. Congressman Jair Bolsonaro, a retired army captain, is riding high in the polls as an unreconstructed apologist for the military regime that ruled Brazil between 1964 and 1985. While casting his vote in favor of Rousseff’s impeachment in 2016, Bolsonaro dedicated it to the memory of Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, a notorious torturer who died the year before without ever having to answer for crimes he committed as an agent of the dictatorship. In twenty-seven years in Congress, Bolsonaro has faulted the dictatorship for not killing enough people during its two decades in power, suggesting there should have been at least 30,000 casualties instead of several hundreds. He has argued that parents can and should beat homosexuality out of their children at an early age. He told a female member of Congress that he would never rape her because she did not deserve it. As a presidential candidate, he has called for widespread chemical castration of accused sexual offenders and argued that the discourse of human rights has done a “disservice” to Brazil. He has also declared that he will not accept the results of the election unless he wins, setting the stage for a potential constitutional crisis. Bolsonaro is Trump without the winking buffoonery, a Duterte who has yet to be handed the reigns of executive power. There is a very real chance that he could be Brazil’s next president.

It has long been clear to Brazilian progressives that Bolsonaro would mount a serious bid in 2018. Haddad’s candidacy, on the other hand, is largely an improvisation. After his 2016 defeat, Haddad met with former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the popular leftist who had previously been expected to seek a return to the presidency for a third term this year, but was jailed on corruption charges this past April. Haddad wanted to draft the policy platform for the presidential campaign. The position granted Haddad close access to Lula for months, even after the president was remanded to prison. When Lula was barred from candidacy last month, it seemed simple to pass the baton to Haddad on September 11. Haddad had already devised much of the policy agenda his Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT) was putting forward. Now he just needed to go out and campaign on it.

So far, he has been effective: A poll on September 24 showed Haddad in second place with 22 percent of the vote—a meteoric rise for the new nominee. Haddad lacks Lula’s preternatural ability to connect with poor and working-class voters who form the base of the PT’s electoral strength. But what he lacks in righteous populist fire, he makes up for with reasoned and reasonable argumentation: In opting for Haddad, the PT placed a bet on lucidity, far from a sure thing in this heated electoral climate. While Haddad seeks to establish a moderate progressive tone, Bolsonaro consistently emits extreme right-wing views, hardly denying the fact that his presidency would pose an existential threat to Brazilian democracy. The crucial question is whether Brazilians will embrace a soft-spoken professor of philosophy and political science from a tarnished political party at the most cacophonous moment in the country’s recent history.

Being Lula’s man will probably propel Haddad into the run-off, when the field of thirteen candidates will be whittled down to two. But he will need to broaden his support in the second round to overcome the very real animosity toward his party, which many Brazilians blame for the recession, high unemployment, deindustrialization, corruption—and just about every other malady, real and imagined—that has gripped the country in recent years. Whether Haddad can prevail will depend in large part on whether he can convey a generational changing of the guard.

The PT, founded in 1980 by union leader Lula, along with allies in the progressive Catholic Church, grassroots movements, and academia, has won four presidential elections in a row and is widely seen as Latin America’s most consequential leftist party, bringing Brazil widespread recognition and economic gains on the international stage in the early aughts. Lula’s hand-picked successor, Dilma Rousseff, became president in 2010 and was reelected in 2014. Soon thereafter, corruption scandals and an economic downturn fueled calls for impeachment. Rousseff’s vice-president Michel Temer, who was from a different party, turned against her and joined with reactionary forces in Congress for an ouster, citing underhanded budgetary practices. International reaction was mixed, and her supporters pointed out that virtually every one of the previous male presidents had engaged in practices similar to the ones Rousseff was accused of since the return of democracy in 1985.

Impeachment bore bitter fruit: Michel Temer has been the most unpopular president in Brazilian history by far, reducing parties that allied with him to electoral rubble. The Party of Brazilian Social Democracy—long the main opposition party of the center-right—has been one such casualty, reduced to a bit player in national affairs largely due to its support for the disastrous current administration. The congressional coup against Rousseff also did little to improve the country’s economic fortunes or restore trust in public institutions. Instead, it emboldened a darkly reactionary current of Brazilian society that openly questions whether democracy itself is worth preserving if the PT is to keep winning elections.

What is standing in Bolsonaro’s way? Women, for one. A Facebook group created by women against Bolsonaro briefly exploded onto the scene in mid-September, quickly garnering hundreds of thousands of female adherents before being hacked by bolsominions, as Bolsonaro’s supporters are called by their critics. The hashtag #elenão (“not him”), which started out as a curt female-driven rejection of Bolsonaro, recently became a trending topic on Twitter and inspired hundreds of thousands to take to the streets in Brazil and around the world in protest of Bolsonaro’s potential election.  At the ballot box, poor women voters of color in particular are likely to be the nation’s firewall against a Bolsonaro presidency, seemingly put off both by his rhetorical violence toward women and his exterminatory approach to law and order.

Haddad himself, an untested last line of defense, also stands in the way. Bolsonaro will seek to mobilize anti-PT sentiment against Haddad in the second round of voting, a potent force that will lead many Brazilians to conclude he is the lesser evil. He will also remind voters of corruption scandals under Lula and Dilma, declaring that he will tolerate no such thing. Bolsonaro would not be the first authoritarian or protofascist swept to power promising to violently stamp out crime and corruption, nor is this promise new for him personally. But against the backdrop of economic stagnation, his pledge of a well-ordered, if domineering, society may be intuitively appealing for many Brazilians. Bolsonaro was also stabbed at a public campaign event in early September, images of him recovering in a hospital bed inspiring a wave of sympathy nationwide. It’s not inconceivable that he could stay ahead in the race by keeping his mouth shut and playing up the circumstances of his recovery.

It is less clear what tack Haddad will take to convince voters that, however angry they might be at the PT, Bolsonaro is a step into the abyss. Will he double down on the PT’s strength in the impoverished northeast, emulating as best he can Lula’s personalist appeals? Or will he stay closer to home and bank on his ability to convey moderation to voters in the economic centers of the southeast? It is no exaggeration to say that the future of Brazilian democracy may well come down to the ability of a progressive soft-spoken professor to win over conservative voters who, reluctant to lose yet another close election, are considering a far-right adventure.