Any Iowan will remind you that September is early in the bid for the Democratic Presidential nomination. At this time in the 2008 race, Barack Obama was trailing Hillary Clinton and running just a few points ahead of John Edwards. Pete Buttigieg, the thirty-seven-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is currently polling at around fifth place in the national race and in the first caucus state. On Labor Day, he made his eleventh trip to Iowa as a Presidential candidate, a quick swing that included attending a panel on climate change and the opening of two new campaign offices. Some of Buttigieg’s staffers have dubbed this month the next phase of the campaign, following the first, in which they taught the electorate how to pronounce his inscrutable last name, and the second, in which they raised enough money to insure that he’d last through the fall. Until this week, his team had set up just one office in Iowa. By the end of September—the third phase of the Buttigieg campaign—it plans to have opened twenty more.

If success in the first caucus state depended on the size of a candidate’s crowds, Buttigieg might have been able to overlook the fact that his poll numbers have slipped, perceptibly, since his breakout, last spring. In March, Buttigieg’s performance at a CNN town hall propelled him to sudden relevance in the national headlines. In June, a poll from the Des Moines Register showed him jockeying for second place with Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. In the most recent quarter, Buttigieg brought in more money than any of his Democratic rivals, relying on a network that includes both grassroots donors and high-dollar patrons from the coasts. But a meaningful distance still separates him from the race’s front-runners, most of whom established their operations in early-voting states months ago. The optimists in Buttigieg’s camp contend that his ample finances will allow him to survive a brief period of stagnancy. The pessimists suggest that time is running out, not simply for the country—as Buttigieg is fond of repeating in his stump speech and on the debate stage—but for his prospects in an overcrowded field.

On Labor Day, as Buttigieg toured a river in Cedar Rapids where flooding a decade ago had caused billions of dollars in property damage, he found himself fielding questions about more than a few national disasters. During the weekend, an armed man in Texas had murdered seven people. Hurricane Dorian, which had slammed the northern Bahamas, killing at least five, now crept toward south Florida. The news, as usual, was dispiriting, but gun control and climate change are issues that, perhaps more than any others, allow Buttigieg to cast his youth as an asset. (“We are never going to be able to fix what’s broken in Washington by recycling the same arguments and politicians,” he says, in a Spotify advertisement that was released last month. “We’ve got to do something completely different.”) Buttigieg was a junior in high school during the Columbine massacre; he likes to remind voters that he was part of the “first school-shooting generation”—and that adults had promised that there would never be a second—before cueing up perhaps his most reliable applause line: “Shame on us if we allow there to be a third.”

Buttigieg makes a similar appeal when discussing the perils of the climate crisis. At a roundtable discussion in Cedar Rapids, he assured two high-school seniors from the Sunrise Movement of his commitment to “generational justice.” “I’m concerned for you, for your generation,” he told one of the students. “I would like to say our generation, but I’m beginning to admit that I can’t claim to be from the same generation as somebody in high school.” Buttigieg grinned. The audience, mostly white and middle-aged, broke out in applause. He told the teen-ager, “I would love for us to be figuring out stuff we can’t even imagine by the time you’re ready to run for President.”

When Buttigieg hopped on a soapbox outside his new office, a converted single-story house on the southwest side of the city, he looked tanned and well-rested, in a white button-down shirt and a snug pair of jeans. “We are going to change the expectations for the American Presidency so that it’s an office that kids can look up to,” he told a few hundred locals. Kids, in fact, abound at Buttigieg’s campaign stops. Babies can often be heard wailing as the candidate takes the stage. One of his Labor Day speeches included a stirring litany of some of the children who have attended his events: a fifth grader in Cedar Rapids who asked him how the country would protect its schools from shooters; a twelve-year-old who brought up a detailed question about health-care policy, her precocity rivalled only by her urgent need for insulin; a black fourteen-year-old whose concerns about “racial tensions” in his school distract him from cultivating his passion for computer programming. “This is exactly the kind of kid we want concentrating on what he happens to be very good at,” Buttigieg said. “But he explains to me that in the halls of his high school he’s getting called racial slurs. And I’m thinking, That’s not racial tension. That’s abuse. It is on the rise in our country, and we’ve got to turn it around.”

Part of Buttigieg’s strategic charm is his ability to communicate even progressive stances with rhetoric that emphasizes seemingly nonpartisan American values. Matthew McGrane, who recently moved, with his husband, from Chicago to Cedar Rapids, told me that he appreciated Buttigieg’s “expansion of the term ‘freedom,’ ” which, during speeches, the candidate defines, in “its richest sense,” not simply as a “freedom from” societal ills—unjust working conditions, corrupt polling practices—but a freedom “to live a life of your choosing.” A caucusgoer who attended the same event drew a comparison between the candidate’s liberty to choose a life partner—Buttigieg, who came out in 2015, is married to a man—and her own liberty to select a health-care plan. “There’s nothing more essential to freedom than having those rights,” she said.

Ryan Brainard, a father of three, from Marion, who hosts a beloved country-radio show, attended Buttigieg’s event in Cedar Rapids, where he met the candidate for the first time. He compared supporting Buttigieg to “discovering a band, or a new music act.” “You get in on the ground floor,” he said, “and then you see other people come in.” Brainard grew up in a conservative family and voted for Clinton in 2016; he said that he admired Buttigieg’s reinvigoration of faith in politics. “The Republican Party has long incorrectly held that particular issue as hostage—as though, if you’re a Christian, you can’t vote for a Democrat,” Brainard told me. “I really appreciate the fact that he speaks to that.” Jeff Zoltowski, who brought his wife and three of his children to the same event, voted for Donald Trump in the last election. “I thought that he would shake up the establishment, which would create a new generation of political candidates,” Zoltowski said, adding that, four years later, “Pete’s the candidate for that. He’s got some conservative values that a lot of the other Democrats don’t.” On the other hand, he pointed out, “I think the fact that he’s young and gay will bring out the youth vote. I think he can energize the youth in a way that no other candidate can.”

Later that day, Buttigieg stopped by his new office in Iowa City, a few blocks from the University of Iowa. A team of volunteers, led by Chris Weckman, a local contractor and a Buttigieg diehard, had spent the previous week refurbishing the building. It used to be a “nasty little tanning salon,” Weckman told me. Now it was a veritable shrine—all blue and gold paint, with countdown calendars, American flags, and an entire wall reserved for a stencilled rendering of the candidate’s face. “Looks like I’ll always be looking on you,” Buttigieg told the crowd. The key now, he said, was “to go out there” and spread his message “across the way.” “This is how we’re gonna win Iowa. And Iowa is how we’re gonna win the nomination. And that’s how we’re going to win the Presidency—so I think we’ll be looking back very fondly on this day.”

As the volunteers made their way to College Green Park, where eight hundred people convened for Buttigieg’s final stop, I chatted with Izzi Teduits and Sean Murphy, two students who helm a campus organization at the University of Iowa called Hawkeyes for Pete. Like many of Buttigieg’s volunteers, the students plan to rely on what the campaign refers to as “relational organizing,” a strategy that prioritizes leveraging familial and social networks over cold-calling strangers. Earlier that day, in Cedar Rapids, a crowd member who works at the university described a “buzz” for the candidate on campus. “You’ll see the T-shirts,” he told me. “You’ll see the signs. I have not seen that with any other candidate.” On campus, students had just finished their first week of classes, but Murphy, a sophomore, described an already palpable sense of enthusiasm. “The university president hosts a block party at the start of school, and people were just ecstatic about Pete,” he said. “He’s young. He’s fresh. He has great ideas.”

For the last few months, Buttigieg has drawn crowds in Iowa that conjure the early energy of the Obama campaign. Last month, after five hundred people showed up to a rally in Fairfield, more than a few told me that, although Obama’s audience in the same town twelve years ago was slightly larger, no other candidate’s numbers have come as close. The campaign has not resisted leaning into these comparisons, in no small part, it seems, because Buttigieg will need to rely on a similar tactic to succeed. In 2008, Obama managed to activate political interest in under-engaged communities in Iowa, where an unprecedented turnout of first-time caucusgoers delivered him a surprising eight-point victory. The precedent for such a strategy might be rarefied, but it exists. The question is whether Buttigieg’s campaign has the power, and the patience, to repeat it.

Before Donald Trump became President, some purportedly knowledgeable students of the Constitution had never even heard of the emoluments clause. (Me, for example.) This heretofore obscure provision of Article I had its origin in the distant mists of American history, when representatives of the young republic were seen as vulnerable to temptations offered by the wealthy grandees of Europe. As a result, the Framers decided to ban American officials from receiving any gifts or money—that is, emoluments—from foreign governments. It was a simple rule, easy to comply with, and the clause generated few controversies and even fewer court cases for more than two centuries.

But Trump brought the emoluments clause to life. After he refused to divest his real-estate holdings upon becoming President, his hotels became a magnet for foreign visitors seeking to curry favor with his Administration. A former Trump Organization official recently estimated that foreign governments spent more than a million dollars at Trump’s businesses in 2018, mostly at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. (Since Trump was inaugurated, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have been good customers there.) But the money flowing from foreign governments to the President’s businesses could soar if he makes good on his apparent plan, which he announced last month, to host next year’s G-7 meeting at his Doral golf resort, in Florida. If the deal comes to fruition, the conference would mark a new level of grifting by the President, and it appears consistent with a new brazenness in his efforts to profit from his office. (Zach Everson’s newsletter follows issues relating to Trump’s use of the Presidency for financial gain.)

Some of Trump’s efforts may have run afoul of an even more obscure provision of the Constitution: the so-called domestic emoluments clause. This section of Article II states that the President “shall not receive” any emolument, other than his fixed salary, from “the United States, or any of them.” Again, the idea behind this provision is similar to the one underlying the foreign clause: the Framers didn’t want any part of the government, or any state, trying to influence the President by funnelling money to him. This is precisely the problem with Vice-President Mike Pence’s recent trip to Ireland, where he wasted many hours and untold thousands of dollars of government money, to stay at a Trump golf resort that was nearly two hundred miles away from his meetings with Irish leaders, including the Prime Minister, Leo Varadkar, in Dublin. (The Administration’s explanations for how Pence came to stay at the hotel have been unconvincing, to say the least.) Can anyone seriously doubt that the reason Pence stayed at Trump’s hotel was to please the boss, at the taxpayers’ expense? And that’s precisely the ill that the constitutional provision was designed to prevent.

Since practically the day that Trump took office, his political opponents have taken to the courts to protest what they characterize as his violations of the emoluments clauses. The cases have generally gone poorly for the President’s adversaries, although none has been definitively resolved. A panel of the Fourth Circuit threw out an emoluments case brought by the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia, on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked the legal standing to sue. A similar case in a New York federal court met the same fate. A federal judge in Washington, D.C., held that a group of members of Congress, led by Senator Richard Blumenthal, of Connecticut, did have standing to bring an emoluments case, but the Trump Administration has appealed, and that case is stalled, too. Another possibility for resolution of the emoluments issues, of course, is for Congress to use it as a basis for impeachment. As with other potential grounds for impeachment, such as obstruction of justice, it awaits a determination by the Democratic leadership in Congress about whether to pursue it.

In all, the emoluments issue represents a good illustration of Kinsley’s law, named for the journalist Michael Kinsley, who observed that the scandal isn’t what’s illegal, but what’s legal. What society chooses not to punish tells you the most about the prevailing moral standards of any age. According to an estimate by the Center for Responsive Politics, various domestic political groups and committees have spent nearly twenty million dollars on events at Trump’s properties.

Unlike government expenditures, there’s no question that these payments are legal. But in a country that purports to demand that its politicians work for the public interest, not for their private gain, Trump’s behavior is an outrage. At this point, it seems unlikely that the courts, or even the Congress, will do anything about it. The only hope for a check on Trump, and for his removal, is the voters.

The current crisis of gun violence in America registers mostly in two distinct forms. (At least two; the crisis of suicide by gunshot is its own subject.) Inevitably, most of those who try to act on the crisis concentrate on the more visible form, which expresses itself in what is by now an American regularity as much as it is an American singularity: the gun massacre.

That isn’t a false emphasis. Gun massacres, in addition to the death and horror that they bring, are reshaping our culture in ways so destructive— producing perverse exercises in school architecture and the constant, usually needless, but real panic in parents’ hearts—that to register their damage even in terms of the lives lost is insufficient. (That damage is as incomprehensible as it is real—as one chronicle shows, there have been more mass shootings this year than there have been days in the calendar.)

Yet we can see some small signs that the inevitable process of democratic reform—in which legislation is a lagging, not a leading, indicator, and public outrage eventually directs political conduct more than political conduct can defeat public outrage—is under way. This week’s announcement that Walmart, the second-largest retailer in the world, will end the sale of some kinds of ammunition—and end the sale of handguns in Alaska, the only state where it still sells them—might seem pitifully minimal to visitors from other countries, not least because it was paired with a “request” that customers in the states that allow open carry refrain from openly bringing guns into Walmart stores. But the announcement is nevertheless significant, even astounding.

Walmart, historically a conservative company, has taken other steps in recent years, including banning the sale of assault-style rifles. It was moved to act now, in part, by the fact that this summer two of its stores were the scene of shootings, including the one in El Paso in which twenty-two people were killed. More meaningfully, the move was also propelled, as social action most often is, from below—from the pleadings and the polemics of Walmart employees, who, deciding that they no longer wanted to be “complicit” in profiting from the sale of firearms, put their livelihoods on the line in order to push their bosses to take a further stand on the gun issue.

Though it can’t change everything, Walmart’s act is likely to change something. The employees’ response shares the logic of a previous people’s fight, against drunk driving. It’s the primary rule both of social agitation and of social reform: the more micro-changes you make in more places, the more effective the macro-change becomes. Banning the sale of some of the most dangerous kinds of guns and ammunition is just one step. But many steps make long marches.

The other chief, though often less visible, form that the gun crisis currently takes in this country is that of gun violence in the cities. A fine new book, “Bleeding Out,” by Thomas Abt, sheds light on the issue of urban violence and offers some practical, street-tested solutions to it. Though the situation is very different, the solutions seem effectively cast in a similar vein—as focussed and specific programs designed to solve seemingly overwhelming problems. Abt, a senior research fellow at Harvard’s Center for International Development, who previously worked in the Obama Justice Department and for Governor Andrew Cuomo, of New York, is aware that gun massacres are, so to speak, the megafauna of the gun-crime environment. They grab our attention, while, Abt writes, “we largely overlook the thousands of black and brown young men who die violently each year, caught up in cycles they do not fully understand and cannot easily escape.”

Though completely committed to social justice, and passionately aware of the role that bigotry plays in creating disparate forms of social violence, Abt believes that the only way to attack violence is to attack violence. This means that we have to attack urban violence and its immediate causes as a specific social problem and behavior, not as an über-symptom of some other underlying problem. Essentially, get rid of guns and you begin to get rid of gun violence.

Abt’s approach is, in the classic American manner, an empirical one, wielding a quick pragmatic broom. Gangs, for instance, a favorite tabloid and cable-television indicator and cause of street violence, are strongly deprecated as a propellant in urban crime. Gangs, Abt explains, are far more fluid and complex social organizations than the tabloid picture presupposes. “We fetishize gangs, obsessing over the details of their rites, rituals and ceremonies. We exaggerate their numbers and their crimes,” he writes. “We have to start over and refocus our efforts not on gangs but on gang violence. If a gang or a gang member is violent, they deserve our anti-violence attention. With gangs, the issue is not the group’s identity; it is the group’s behavior.” Trump needs the MS-13 gang as a symbol with which to frighten his followers, but terrifying gangs should terrify few others.

Similarly, drugs and drug dealing turn out not to be causal for much urban violence. A lot of city drug dealing is nonviolent and, Abt argues, should be left as a problem to the public-health system. “Drugs are no longer central in the fight against urban violence. When rivalries among drug dealers spark shootings and killings, then those rivalries must be addressed, but generally speaking drugs should not be the focus of anti-violence efforts,” he writes. Indeed, alcohol turns out to be a far more insidious agent of street violence than illegal narcotics are: “One systematic review found strong evidence that preventing bars and restaurants from selling alcohol late at night can lead to substantial reductions in violence.” A criminologist has even suggested “that tripling alcohol taxes could reduce the murder rate by six percent.” And Abt insists that “community policing” alone is inadequate. “Racially discriminatory governmental policies were essential to producing concentrated poverty in many communities of color,” he writes. “Having played a role in creating violence-ridden urban communities, the state must now play a role in liberating them.”

What does work against urban violence, which is, mostly, gun violence? Abt recommends neither noxious stop-and-frisk policies nor amorphous community policing but, instead, what he calls “partnership-oriented crime prevention”—using all of a city’s resources, including but not limited to the police, to attack “hot spots” where violence occurs and is likely to occur again. Some years ago, in Kansas City, for instance, a program directed exclusively against illegal firearms, which involved seizing guns, checking cars, and stopping pedestrians in one violent neighborhood, saw gun crime fall by almost fifty per cent.

Abt recognizes the risk that this kind of policing can become stop-and-frisk-style harassment, and so he emphasizes the crucial role of community buy-in. “Extensive community outreach was done before police patrols began and when residents were surveyed later, they expressed support for the patrols” (emphasis mine). Urban crime is cruellest to the poor; if poor communities feel that they are being empowered, not preyed on, they act together with local government to end it.

Questions of tone, respect, and transparency are also crucial to ending urban violence: “When an officer approaches a group of young men and starts asking questions, the officer might be asked, ‘Why are you hassling us?’ That question should receive a respectful answer, such as, ‘We’ve had a lot of shootings nearby so we’re paying special attention to this area. We just want to be sure everybody is being safe.’ ” Things that might seem mere mood markers—an atmosphere of cynicism, a pervasive mistrust of the criminal justice system and the police—turn out to be key impediments to ending violence. Once an atmosphere of mutual effort begins, productive things happen. What might seem to be just “playing with the surface”—emphasizing a mutuality of interests, transparency of means, respectful address, and common effort—alters what happens below the surface. Big changes in urban violence can begin with small alterations in urban voices.

In both the fight against gun massacres and the fight against urban violence, what matters is not addressing an imagined underlying cause—mental illness or the broken family—but addressing the presence of too many guns. The essential step in limiting gun violence is to limit guns. What both fights have in common is that we can, finally, claim some small hard-won optimism about the possibility of direct action from direct actors. (Abt ends his book with a practical appendix detailing how networks of the engaged can be found and made to work together.) We don’t have to wait for a solution to all our problems—or for legislation from Washington, which, with Senator Mitch McConnell in charge, is not likely to happen soon—to have hope. The employees of Walmart acted as communities in cities are trying to, by doing the work that the law has ceased efficiently to do. As Abt wisely remarks, “If the law must be enforced, it has already lost.” By acting in communities—or in stores—before the killings start again, we act for our country in ways that our country, right now, seems unable to act for itself.