It is difficult to fathom why the United States nearly went to war with Iran last week, beyond that hard-liners in both countries see political advantage in it. For decades, Iran has been expanding its regional influence by funding, training, and arming proxy forces in unstable countries, and then helping them develop into political movements that are opposed to U.S. interests. For just as long, U.S. officials have called this strategy “sponsoring terrorism.” But, in the past year, the Trump Administration and the mullahs in Tehran have goaded each other into a series of pointless escalations, treating war as a game of chicken that is now hurtling out of control.

Thirteen months ago, the United States pulled out of its own nuclear deal with Iran, not because the Iranians had violated it—there is no evidence to suggest that they had—but seemingly because it had been negotiated by President Trump’s predecessor. In April, the U.S. designated Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, a powerful military and intelligence faction that has roughly a hundred and twenty-five thousand troops, a “terrorist organization”; in response, Iran passed a law that designates every American soldier in the Middle East as a “terrorist.” On June 7th, Trump’s special envoy to Iran mocked the Iranian Air Force, saying that it has “Photoshopped antiquated aircraft and tried to pass them off as new stealth fighter jets.” Days later, the Revolutionary Guard shot down a hundred-and-thirty-million-dollar U.S. surveillance drone, “in large part to prove they could do it,” the Times reported. Both governments practically celebrated the incident as a reason to ratchet up tensions.

On June 20th, Trump ordered a military strike, only to withdraw the order with ten minutes to spare, partly owing to a crisis of conscience—apparently the bombardment would have killed around a hundred and fifty people—and partly, according to the Times, because the Fox News host Tucker Carlson had told Trump that another casualty of the strike would be his hope of being reëlected.

Now the Iranians have abandoned the nuclear deal, following a year of compliance with the remaining five partners; the Revolutionary Guard is gaining power and recklessly lashing out, giving the United States more reasons to respond with a deadly strike. On June 25th, in response to Iran’s President, Hassan Rouhani, saying that the White House was “afflicted by mental retardation,” Trump threatened the “obliteration” of Iran. After which, who knows?

Beneath the bluster, senior officials in the Trump Administration have been pushing forward a legal pretext to go to war with Iran: that the government is harboring members of Al Qaeda. This argument relies on a one-sentence law, the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed three days after 9/11, which empowers the President “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided” in the commission of 9/11. It was passed by Congress with near-total unanimity, and yet, since then, it has come to reflect the legislative branch’s abdication of its role in the separation of war powers.

In public, Trump Administration officials have deflected questions about whether the President intends to invoke this authorization for Iran. Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, has said that he’d “prefer to just leave that to lawyers.” But the law has already been used as cover for at least thirty-seven military operations in fourteen countries. “There is no doubt there is a connection” between Al Qaeda and Iran, Pompeo continued. “Period. Full stop.”

The day after 9/11, the White House sent a draft proposal of the law to the leaders of the Senate and the House, requesting that they authorize the President “to deter and pre-empt any future acts of terrorism or aggression against the United States.” Congress rejected that language, limiting the authorization specifically to those who were responsible for the attack. Lamar Smith, a conservative Texas representative, insisted on registering an objection before voting in favor of the bill. “It does not go far enough,” Smith complained. He lamented that the A.U.M.F. “ties the President’s hands and allows only the pursuit of one individual and his followers and supporters.” Smith needn’t have worried. In the years that followed, the war on terror took on an absurd, escalatory logic: as terrorist groups proliferated, Presidential lawyers simply decided, with no meaningful oversight, that the A.U.M.F. permitted the executive branch to send troops to places that had no relevance to Osama bin Laden and other 9/11 plotters. (The lone dissenting vote against the A.U.M.F. was cast by Representative Barbara Lee, a Democrat from California, who warned her colleagues in Congress “not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target.” In response, she was called a “traitor,” a “coward,” and a “communist,” and received thousands of angry calls and e-mails, including death threats.)

Eighteen years later, it’s hard to conceive of a metric by which the United States’ response to 9/11 has been a success. The military has become much better at killing insurgents, but only because the war on terror, with all of its excesses and mistakes, has created so many of them. The Taliban currently controls more of Afghanistan than it has since the earliest months of the invasion. Al Qaeda has expanded from a group that had a few hundred adherents, mostly based in southern Afghanistan, into a global terror franchise, with branches in West Africa, East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Central Asia, the Sinai Peninsula, South Asia, and the Levant. The A.U.M.F. is also the basis for the U.S.’s prolonged campaign against the Islamic State, a group that didn’t exist when bin Laden attacked the United States, and which has been battling Al Qaeda for more than five years. Now American soldiers whose parents deployed after 9/11 are being sent to countries thousands of miles from Afghanistan, to kill jihadis unaffiliated with Al Qaeda and who were born after the attacks. “The biggest casualty in the struggle against the Islamic State so far has been the American Constitution,” Bruce Ackerman, a professor at Yale Law School, wrote, in 2015.

On September 12, 2017, an American citizen walked out of ISIS territory and into the hands of the Syrian Democratic Forces, America’s proxy force in northeastern Syria. The S.D.F. turned him over to the Americans, who brought him to a detention facility in Iraq and began questioning him, without giving him access to a lawyer. After his detention leaked to the press, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a writ of habeas corpus on his behalf, and later argued that the government could not indefinitely detain him as an enemy combatant, because the war against ISIS had not been authorized by Congress. The American was eventually deported to Bahrain, but not before government lawyers were forced to enter into evidence their argument that the A.U.M.F. applies to ISIS.

They wrote, correctly, that ISIS “began as a terrorist group founded and led by Abu Mu’sab al-Zarqawi,” a Jordanian street thug. Then came the misleading part: “Al-Zarqawi was an associate of Osama bin Laden, the leader of the al-Qaida terrorist group, dating back to al-Zarqawi’s time in Afghanistan and Pakistan before al-Qaida attacked the United States on September 11, 2001.” This characterization echoed a speech that Colin Powell, then the Secretary of State, gave on February 5, 2003, to the United Nations Security Council, in the run-up to the Iraq War. “Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Mu’sab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants,” Powell said. Behind him, a PowerPoint slide depicted Zarqawi as the head of an international terror cell, spanning Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. A few days later, George W. Bush described Zarqawi as “a senior Al Qaeda terrorist planner.” Then Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national-security adviser, went on television and announced that “a poisons master named Zarqawi” was “the strongest link of Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda.” Ten days later, the U.S. began bombing Baghdad.

In fact, when Zarqawi travelled to Afghanistan, in 1999, bin Laden snubbed him. The Al Qaeda leader considered himself an intellectual; he and his deputies had no interest in recruiting Zarqawi, a high-school dropout with a history of alcoholism and of raping both women and men. Al Qaeda operatives also worried that Zarqawi’s network might have been infiltrated by Jordanian intelligence. Zarqawi, for his part, had no interest in pledging allegiance to bin Laden, which was a formal condition of Al Qaeda membership.

For two weeks, Zarqawi stayed in a safe house in Kandahar, before he was finally visited by Saif al-Adel, a former Egyptian Army officer who coördinated Al Qaeda’s military operations. “I had reservations” about him, Adel later wrote, in a letter to a Jordanian journalist. “Abu Mu’sab was a hardliner,” who was “not really very good at words.” But Adel figured that Zarqawi might be a useful asset in recruiting other Jordanians, and so he gave him five thousand dollars and sent him to an empty training camp near Herat, more than three hundred and fifty miles away. There, Zarqawi established his own jihadi group, with around a dozen followers. Even from a distance, the Al Qaeda leadership found his behavior disturbing; in Herat, Zarqawi married a thirteen-year-old girl.

“We knew he wasn’t part of al Qaida and didn’t seem to coordinate operations with them,” Nada Bakos, a former C.I.A. analyst who was Zarqawi’s lead targeter, wrote in her memoir, “The Targeter: My Life in the CIA, Hunting Terrorists and Challenging the White House,” which was published earlier this month. “The CIA had determined that Zarqawi’s organization didn’t know about the 9/11 attacks, much less participate in them.” Yet, Bakos writes, “everyone within the Iraq unit sweated under the demands from George W. Bush and his administration for more answers about a possible Iraq–al Qaida collaboration than we could plausibly provide.” She and her colleagues watched Powell’s speech to the U.N. in disbelief. As they pushed back, the Administration reframed its requests for evidence of a connection, asking them to prove a negative: that Zarqawi wasn’t part of Al Qaeda, and that he wasn’t working with Saddam. In searching for a pretext to invade Iraq, the United States had given Zarqawi what bin Laden had refused him: relevance.

Yet, after the fall of Iraq and the rise of the insurgency, Al Qaeda found a way to capitalize on the sudden credibility of Zarqawi’s group. In July, 2004, the United States increased the bounty on Zarqawi to twenty-five million dollars—the same as that on bin Laden. Six months later, bin Laden bestowed upon Zarqawi the title of Al Qaeda in Iraq. In “Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS,” Joby Warrick writes, “By co-opting Zarqawi, al-Qaeda could share the credit for his successes and draw in new energy from his suddenly white-hot celebrity.”

“Branding is not the same thing as operational control,” Bakos told me, earlier this week. “That was the distinction we made with Zarqawi. He was never part of Al Qaeda prior to the Iraq invasion. He made up his own agenda.”

Meanwhile, as part of its argument that the A.U.M.F. applied to ISIS, the U.S. government has weighed in on an ongoing spat between ISIS and Al Qaeda. Last February, Trump Administration lawyers entered into evidence a claim by ISIS “that it is the true executor of bin Laden’s legacy, rather than al-Qa’ida’s current leadership.”

The story of the American Presidency after 9/11 is that of a power grab, facilitated by Congress’s abdication of responsibility and the judiciary’s reticence to challenge the executive branch on matters of national security. Inside the White House, lawyers from the Office of Legal Counsel draft secret authorizations that, left unchallenged, become precedent for other secret authorizations, so that, at a certain point, to undo one authorization might bring down an entire house of cards. “When OLC writes its legal opinions supporting broad presidential authority in these contexts—as OLCs of both parties have consistently done—they cite executive branch precedents (including Attorney General and OLC opinions) as often as court opinions,” Jack Goldsmith, who served for nine months as the Assistant Attorney General in Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel, wrote in his memoir, “The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration.” He continued, “These executive branch precedents are ‘law’ for the executive branch even though they are never scrutinized or approved by courts.”

It is true that there is, as Pompeo put it, “a connection” between Iran and Al Qaeda. It has been true since at least 2002, when a group of bin Laden’s deputies, who were fleeing Afghanistan, guessed that Iran would see a greater strategic value in keeping them and their families under house arrest than in turning them over to the United States. Earlier this year, I met Al Qaeda’s lead negotiator in this arrangement, a Mauritanian ideologue named Abu Hafs al-Mauritani. (He had previously served as Osama bin Laden’s adviser on Sharia law, and, though he opposed 9/11, he knew about it before it took place.) Partly as prisoners, partly as guests, Abu Hafs explained, the Al Qaeda families underwent routine interrogations, but they were allowed to have phones and Internet access, and were chaperoned by Iranian intelligence officers on visits to luxurious malls and gyms. It was under these circumstances that Abu Hafs raised one of bin Laden’s sons, Hamza, who is now thirty years old and ascending in the Al Qaeda ranks. For the Iranians, it was about leverage: while bin Laden’s family and lieutenants lived at the mercy of its Revolutionary Guard, there would be no Al Qaeda operations in Iran.

Abu Hafs left Iran in 2012, but, according to a recent report by the United Nations, two high-level Al Qaeda operatives continue to live there. The Bush and Obama Administrations both knew of Al Qaeda’s arrangement with the Iranians; neither saw fit to attack, even as both took advantage of the broad language of the 2001 A.U.M.F. in other areas of the world. Similarly, the Trump Administration doesn’t claim that the Al Qaeda presence in Iran is a threat to the United States. The war, if there is one, will be for other reasons; Al Qaeda is merely the key to unlocking the A.U.M.F.—to have soldiers kill, and be killed, without congressional approval.

During Goldsmith’s nine months in Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel, he drafted three resignation letters. After he revoked several secret O.L.C. opinions, including one that authorized the C.I.A. to torture detainees, he submitted one. “The danger, of course, is that OLC lives inside the very political executive branch, is subject to few real rules to guide its actions, and has little or no oversight or public accountability,” he wrote. In other words, he continued, Presidents define their policies and then lawyers find some way to make them legal. And the integrity of the office lies in its “cultural norms.”

The cultural norms of the Presidency are currently determined by a man who, on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, was asked on live television whether a building he owned on Wall Street had suffered any damage during the attack. “Well, it was an amazing phone call,” he said, as footage of the falling towers played onscreen. “Forty Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan.” (It wasn’t.) “And now it’s the tallest.” He went on to suggest that a Boeing 767 couldn't “possibly go through the steel” beams without secondary explosions—a line of questioning at the core of the 9/11-truther movement. Then he became the President of the United States.

The nation is divided. Loved ones tweeting at loved ones. What the American people need now more than ever is a party that can unite the entire country in disappointment. That’s where we step in: the Centrist Party. In 2020, we want you to skip the red and the blue and vote for the grayish taupe that represents our ideologically meek coalition. We couldn’t decide on a campaign slogan—every time we voted on one, everyone abstained—so we’ll let you read the list and, if any resonate, awesome; if not, no big deal!

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“For the exhausted.”

“Some ideas. Some beliefs. Some feelings.”

“Thinking exactly what you think since [day you were born].”

“Putting the awkward silences back in Thanksgiving.”

“We can be bought.”

“Like our symbol, the petrified deer, we’re proudly frozen in the middle of the road.”

“Make news boring again.”

“Proudly standing against proudly standing against anything.”

“The sanest, most reasonable waste of a vote.”

“This is the third time we’re introducing ourselves and you’re still going to act like we just met the next time we see each other.”

“Wearing ideological camouflage since we won an uncontested race in a county you’ve never heard of.”

“We’ve done some stuff we’re not proud of, but none of it’s too bad, we guess.”

“The shortest distance between hope and giving up.”

“Like an a-cappella group singing the same note for four years.”

“The flat, room-temperature diet soda of political parties.”

“Goldilocks was right.”

“When you’re only voting to post a photo of yourself wearing that little ‘I Voted’ sticker on Instagram.”

“Our guy doesn’t have Twitter—and, yeah, it’s a guy.”

“Shrug!”

When I first saw “Paris Is Burning,” the 1990 documentary about drag-ball culture in New York City, I noted that each ball was well organized and carefully managed, a veritable drag bureaucracy, but that the work of organizing the events was not shown onscreen. I didn’t know at the time that another documentary already existed that went behind the scenes of a major New York drag competition and detailed the administrative elements and behind-the-scenes politics that are inseparable from the contestants’ public performance. That extraordinary movie, “The Queen,” directed by Frank Simon, centered on the Miss All-America Camp Beauty Pageant, held at New York’s Town Hall, in early 1967. The film was released in 1968 but has been shown only rarely in theatres since then, and it’s being rereleased this Friday at the IFC Center in a new restoration (which, I hope, heralds a forthcoming home-video and streaming release).

No less than a documentary by Frederick Wiseman (who hadn’t yet premièred his first movie when Simon was filming), “The Queen” reveals character through process, presenting personal revelations by observing quasi-public activities such as organizational meetings, rehearsals, a visit to a costume supplier, and the backstage management of the pageant. But there is also something intensely private and dangerously intimate to Simon’s filming. At the time, both drag and homosexual relations were illegal in New York State. In “Queens at Heart,” a remarkable, anonymously made short film from 1967 that was rediscovered by the filmmaker and historian Jenni Olson, and that will screen with “The Queen,” an interviewer declares that four trans women whom he introduces as “contestants in a recent beauty contest” are using pseudonyms on camera because “right now each one of them is breaking the law.” In making his documentary, Simon is filming the participants committing and confessing what at that time were criminal acts; they display their confidence in him, and also their defiant sense of shared purpose, in their poignant confessions and indelible testimonies about the lives of gay men in the time before Stonewall.

“The Queen” is centered on the work of the pageant’s impresario and m.c., who calls herself Sabrina. (She’s the film’s narrator, and is credited by her given name, Jack Doroshow; she died in 2017.) Sabrina is a businessperson who runs drag pageants throughout the country, and the commercial side of this pageant is evident: compared to the freewheeling artistry on view in “Paris Is Burning,” it is as formal and sedate as a network-television beauty pageant. (A poster shows that the pageant is even a benefit for the Muscular Dystrophy Association of America.) Sabrina, who describes her stage persona as a “bar-mitzvah-mother thing,” is the manager, choreographer, and director, working in private with the participants on the details of their routines and then rehearsing them onstage. She meets the artists and the staff in her apartment, on Seventy-third Street, and then struggles to find a hotel to house them all; she describes the shows as “conventions” for drag queens, occasions where the social and the professional overlap.

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It’s in hotel rooms, before the makeup and costuming for the pageant, that a group of contestants discuss some of the crucial matters that they confront in their lives outside the pageants. The subjects include relations with family members and neighbors, relations with lovers, the possibility of gender-reassignment surgery, and the threat of the draft. (The Vietnam War had begun.) Speaking of their appearances before draft boards, the queens cite a series of absurd interactions with officials that inevitably led to their being ruled ineligible for the military—yet one participant subsequently wrote to the President to request the chance to serve and, she says, received a response. “They couldn’t help me in the Army as of yet, but maybe one day they’ll see things right and I could get in,” she says.

One of the contestants, a young friend of Sabrina’s from her home town of Philadelphia whom contestants call Richard and who performs as Harlow, is a relative newcomer—and an overnight success, having won the first pageant that she entered. In the hotel, Harlow, something of a self-aware diva, is quietly but firmly in the midst of a meltdown because a platinum-blond wig has gone missing. (Ever organized, Sabrina’s staff attends to the matter.) Now Harlow is competing in the New York pageant, and her presence sparks resentment on the part of veteran competitors—in particular, that of the pageant’s prime celebrity, Crystal LaBeija, who would go on to found the drag family House of LaBeija, in 1972. During the course of the pageant, this rivalry between the newcomer and the veteran bursts out into the open.

“The Queen” doesn’t explicitly address the racial politics of queerness, the distinction between the black-run ball scene in Harlem that’s seen in “Paris Is Burning” and the staid pageantry of the ball in midtown. But these issues are evident in the contrast between the glorious theatrical grandeur of Crystal and the alluring near-neutrality of Harlow. Their opposing styles are suggestive of another division—the one between theatre and cinema. Harlow has the manner and power and the name of a movie star, holding the camera with an elusive presence; stagecraft is secondary. Crystal—who says that she has been dubious about the quasi-corporate pageant from the start—ultimately leaves the stage before the show is over, and then accuses Sabrina of fixing the results with the judges (a group that includes Andy Warhol). Sabrina denies doing so, but Crystal nonetheless asserts that another queen refused to participate in the pageant and advised her against doing so because of the belief that they wouldn’t win—the implication being that, as black performers in a pageant run by white organizers, they didn’t have a chance.

“The Queen” shows how—despite legal sanctions against homosexuals—the practice of the pageant was deeply integrated into the city’s administrative, legal, and economic order. From the police officer who calmly maintains order backstage to the hotels and other businesses that profit from the pageant’s presence to Town Hall itself, which is rented out to the production, the pageant suggests an official tolerance of queer life that was in fact unofficial, tenuous, and ultimately illusory. In a remarkable 2015 Vice article about Sabrina, Hugh Gray discusses outtakes from “The Queen” showing that the pageant’s after-party was on the verge of being raided by the police (who were fended off by Edie Sedgwick, another of the jurors.) In “The Queen,” the institutional politics of the pageant evoke a vision of gradual change; but it was the exceptional, spontaneous, and confrontational actions at Stonewall, two years later, that sparked a revolution.

As is tradition, this year’s Democratic gathering in South Carolina was unofficially kicked off last Friday by Jim Clyburn’s World Famous Fish Fry. The event, where the House Majority Whip serves up big steaming trays of fried white fish on white bread for free (with your choice of sauces: hot, tartar, or mustard), had humble beginnings as an alternative for Democratic volunteers and delegates who, in the early nineties, couldn’t afford the state Party’s pricey annual dinner. For years, the stakes were low, the speeches largely beside the point. Candidates came to pay homage to Clyburn, crack some bad jokes (Cory Booker: “Let’s not flounder; let’s get out there and kick some bass!”), and mingle with local politicos, rank-and-file Democrats, and journalists. This year, a few thousand people turned out in ninety-degree heat, and the conga line of contenders—twenty-one in total, including the mayor of Miramar, Florida, Wayne Messam—meant that each one, introduced in turn by Clyburn, had just a minute for his or her spiel.

Clyburn helped save the night by being in vintage form, jovially introducing the candidates with his characteristically eccentric pronunciations (Beto O’Rook, Jule-e-un Castro) and unreliable biographical details (“John Hickenlooper from California,” he called out, before the candidate came onstage to make his pitch about how he’d do for America what he’d done for Colorado). Only Kamala Harris, whom Clyburn called “a good friend, whose name I know how to pronounce,” managed to command the full attention of the milling, chatting throng when she said, “I’m-a take us down for a minute,” and praised the legacy of the Emanuel Nine, who were murdered by a white supremacist four years ago this month, at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston.

It was just the kind of moment she needed. The stakes for the weekend, with the state Democratic Convention and a Planned Parenthood forum on Saturday, were perhaps the highest of Harris’s Presidential bid thus far. She, more than any other contender, will have her campaign lifted or perhaps permanently deflated by what happens in South Carolina, in the fourth primary contest—and first in the South—on February 29th. Just three days later will come Super Tuesday, where all of Harris’s other hopes are invested: California will vote on March 3rd, along with five Southern states, where she’ll hope to ride her success with black voters in South Carolina to strong showings, if not victories. With Harris finding herself mostly stagnant in national polls, hovering in the high single digits since her initial bump from a big and impressive campaign launch, in Oakland, there’s no other path to the nomination.

So far, the polling in South Carolina has lined up almost perfectly with the Party’s national averages: Joe Biden is way ahead, with Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren in a second-place cluster, and Harris and Booker somewhere in the mid-to-high single digits. But only a small handful of the dozens of delegates and civilian Democrats I spoke with over the weekend had their minds made up. If “they’re all good” and “Oh, Lord, I have no idea” were offered as choices in the next South Carolina poll, they would probably win a majority of the respondents.

South Carolina has long been the first state where black voters have not only a voice but a deciding one—a fact first made clear in 1988, when Jesse Jackson proved that he was a legitimate contender for the Democratic nomination with a sweeping victory in the state on Super Tuesday. Four years ago, when Hillary Clinton crushed Bernie Sanders in South Carolina and exposed his weakness among African-American voters, sixty-one per cent of those who turned out were black, up from fifty-five per cent when Barack Obama beat Clinton, in 2008. Harris has made a serious investment in South Carolina, already hiring organizers in every part of the state. She’s held more than thirty events, the most of any candidate, except Booker—by comparison, Biden has held only eight events—but there’s little sign of it providing a boost for either candidate. One state operative called it “the greatest mystery to me” that Harris and Booker’s efforts haven’t yet borne fruit in the polling.

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But there’s little reason for Harris to rethink her intensive focus on South Carolina. Like Democrats in Florida and Georgia, the Party has launched major voter registration and turnout efforts in recent elections—in the 2018 midterms, Democrats won almost 270,000 more votes than four years earlier. And with more than two hundred and fifty thousand eligible black voters remaining unregistered, according to the state Democratic Party, there’s still room for growth. When Obama won here in 2008, the Party was still mostly run by whites, and Democrats were clinging to the notion that they could only win with socially conservative messages. At this year’s convention, a long list of mostly black state legislators, many of them young, delivered uncompromisingly progressive speeches between the Presidential spiels. The more bluntly liberal the rhetoric—about abortion rights, L.G.B.T. freedoms, gun control, or racially unjust law-enforcement practices—the better it was received. The most highly touted Democratic candidate for 2020 is Jaime Harrison, formerly the first African-American state Party chair, who is running for Senate with the hopes of challenging the incumbent, Republican Lindsey Graham, in the general election. Harrison’s campaign placards and volunteers were ubiquitous. The last time the Party tried to field a candidate to run against Graham, in 2014, it had trouble finding anyone willing to be a sacrificial lamb, and ended up with a little-known white state senator. This time, Harrison—a dynamic campaigner who got the fish-fry crowd laughing when he called Graham “the most well-off golf caddy in America”—has primary competition from another African-American activist, the economist Gloria Bromell Tinubu.

“We are not that backward state anymore,” Tim Lewis, an ex-Marine and Charleston resident who ran for county council last year, told me. I ran into him late on Saturday, at a post-convention gathering for Booker, whom he said he “loves” but hasn’t yet committed to. Lewis had fairly recently moved back home, after twenty years away, to care for his brother, who was dying of cancer, and his ninety-three-year-old mother. He had a fresh view of how much South Carolina, and its Democrats, had evolved in those two decades.

“In South Carolina, the flag is down,” Lewis said, referring to the removal of the Confederate flag from the State House grounds, in 2015, in the wake of the Emanuel massacre. “I tell you, we’re not that state that was under that flag. And I think there is a progressive movement, or at least a breaking-out-of-the-box movement, here, as well. You see a lot of young people now.” He added, “They feel like there’s something to win now.”

Every leading Presidential candidate had a point to prove in Columbia. Warren, Buttigieg, and Sanders, who was badly damaged in 2016 by his anemic showing with black voters in South Carolina, needed to find ways to show that they had demonstrable black support, and to find new ways to ask for more. For Buttigieg, the shooting death of a black civilian at the hands of a white police officer in South Bend, and the protests against his handling of law enforcement and race more broadly as mayor, created a painfully awkward scenario in Columbia—in front of the mostly black delegates, with MSNBC and more than a hundred and fifty credentialled reporters amplifying everything. He skipped the fish fry on Friday to take flak from furious citizens in South Bend. Early on Saturday afternoon, Buttigieg showed up to deliver his convention speech, looking like a very tired thirty-seven-year-old. After some opening greetings and pleasantries, Buttigieg came to what was on everybody’s mind. “I’m with you after a challenging week back home,” he said, after “a tragic shooting of a resident of our community by a police officer.” I watched delegates look at each other. Some whispered. “It is as if one member of our family died at the hands of another,” Buttigieg said.

Joe Biden, unlike the others, had probably figured the weekend would amount to an early victory lap. Instead, he arrived with his third Presidential campaign confronting its first mini-crisis. Amid signs of a slow decline in his polling numbers, the former Vice-President had invited trouble by lauding the segregationist Senator James O. Eastland, of Mississippi, for not calling him “boy” when Biden was young and, by his own account, happily collaborating with the likes of him and Herman Talmadge, Eastland’s ideological doppelgänger from Georgia. Biden, as he and his loyalists would soon be protesting, was intending to offer a heartwarmingly specific example of the old-style, let’s-get-things-done collegiality in Washington that he witnessed as a young senator. But his examples had been poorly chosen, especially heading into South Carolina, where many Party elders still remember that Biden eulogized the Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond, the state’s seemingly eternal segregationist senator, in 2003. Biden had called Thurmond a “special man,” “a gift to us all” who was, sadly but inevitably, a “product of his time.”

In the view of the delegates and strategists I interviewed, Biden’s pole position is anything but secure, even if it helps him that Harris and Booker are fighting for some of the same African-American votes, as Sanders and Warren split the white progressives. “He’s liked in South Carolina, but he’s not well-liked, if that makes any sense,” the state operative told me. Dominique Sawyer, a local middle-school counsellor, told me at the fish fry that “Biden definitely has some explaining to do, but we’re all people, and sometimes in the moment we’re not always our best selves.” She added, “I do think it’s a perfect opportunity for Biden to show he’s seen his mistakes and is ready to move past them this weekend. We’ll see what he does with it.”

Biden was the second candidate that Clyburn called onstage, after most of the fish had been dished out. Biden hugged the Whip, smiled on cue, and praised Clyburn effusively, but what came of his mouth after that was a sign of things to come. “I’ll tell you what,” Biden said, “I do miss Fritz [Hollings] being here.” This wasn’t an entirely inappropriate or unexpected remark; Biden had eulogized South Carolina’s former Democratic governor and senator, who was his good friend, when he passed away in April. But many fish-fry attendees were too young to get the reference; Hollings had died as the oldest living ex-senator, and had retired from Washington way back in 2005. He wasn’t a segregationist, at least, by the time he got to the Senate, but nobody would have mistaken him for a twenty-first-century progressive. For a candidate who needed, more than anything, to turn the clock forward, the Hollings lament was a surprising way to kick off the weekend. As he left the stage, hugging Clyburn again, Biden raised his arms in mock-triumph and loudly quipped, “I did it in a minute!” But he left to polite applause after entering to cheers.

Saturday was worse. In his convention-closing speech, Biden had the bad luck of following a rousing address by Booker, whose young supporters led a loud demonstration, stomping along to “C-O-R-Y, Cory Booker is the guy” chants and waving smiling, oversized Cory-head cutouts in front of the stage. Booker didn’t mention the criticism he had made of Biden over his comments about the old Senate segregationists, but his speech started out borrowing from Martin Luther King, Jr., and ended the same way. “Beating Donald Trump gets us out of the valley,” Booker said, announcing his theme, “but it does not get us to the mountaintop.” In closing, Booker asked folks to “dream with me again” and ended by saying, “We will make it to the mountaintop, and we will get it to the promised land.” Most of the delegates rose to their feet, cheering and lifting up amens. Biden had no band, no cutout heads, no drums—just a couple of dozen cheering organizers and volunteers, holding up his signs on the far-right aisle of the convention floor and trying to start up a chant. “Give me a B . . .” fizzled quickly. And, although Biden had entered to a near-standing ovation, he shushed the enthusiasm after just a couple of beats. “My time’s running, I’m sorry,” Biden said, gesturing for folks to have a seat. “I never like to cut off cheers, but . . .”

Before his convention speech, Biden had come in for some pointed questioning at the Planned Parenthood forum, which was held across the street. When one of the two moderators, Kelley Robinson, the executive director of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, asked Biden to speak to voters who might be concerned about his “mixed record” on abortion, he objected to the question. “I’m not sure about the ‘mixed record’ part,” Biden shot back. “I’ve had a hundred per cent voting record—” At that point, his microphone cut out. When it came back on, Biden hastened to change the subject to health care more generally.

Now, in his final opportunity to tell black South Carolinians what they needed to hear, Biden began by meditating again on how much he missed Hollings. He then fast-forwarded through his policy agenda, point by point, until his time was up—speed-reading his way through a longer speech, it seemed, and never stopping for applause lines. He made no reference to the Eastland controversy. And, although his was only an eight-minute speech, halfway through, several delegates, folks who who’d sat all day listening politely to the likes of Tulsi Gabbard and Eric Swalwell, stood up and walked out.

On the morning of the convention, you could hear the percussive thumps a hundred yards away from the big white slab of downtown Columbia’s Metropolitan Convention Center. Inside, down the escalator to the convention floor, a drum line from Lower Richland High School was in full flight, every strike echoing through the corridors and overwhelming the chants of the fifty or so people with purple and yellow placards, shouting, “Ka-ma-la, Ka-ma-la!” California’s first-term senator and former prosecutor “for the people,” as the campaign motto on her multicolored placards says, is best known among national Democrats for grilling Trumpland characters in Senate hearings with stern efficiency. When Harris finally emerged from an official-looking S.U.V. outside the main entrance, she brushed off her gray-checked suit, swept back the right side of her hair, and then, hearing the beat, grinned and nodded and broke into some pretty convincing dance moves.

Harris drum-walked her way into a pre-convention rally, where Jesse Jackson stood off to the side of the stage, grinning like a proud uncle. After another burst of dancing and mock-orchestrating of the drummers, Harris told the volunteers about her first campaign, for San Francisco district attorney, in 2002. She was warned that she shouldn’t run against the Democratic incumbent, and had been assured that she couldn’t win, but, as she said, “I eat ‘no’ for breakfast.” She paused for the whoops and cheers before picking the story back up. “Often, I would campaign with my ironing board,” she said with a sly smile. “Now, you’re wondering, ‘Where’s she going with that?’ ” She chuckled, and then explained that it “made a great standing desk” for when she would set herself up outside of grocery stores and the like, and “make people talk to me when they came out.”

Harris’s weekend in Columbia checked all the boxes. Her organization looked sharp. Her supporters made noise. She appeared impeccably prepared for every setting and never made a misstep, which wasn’t surprising. But for those who hadn’t seen Harris during a campaign, who only knew her from Senate hearings and cable news, her persona—laughing a lot, mixing prosecutorial talk (“I know how to make the case against this President”) with “let’s get real now” colloquialisms—was a bit unexpected. So was the way that she was making her case, emphasizing policy less than broader themes with personal stories attached. At the Planned Parenthood forum on Saturday morning, Harris talked about her immigrant mother, “this five-foot-tall brown woman” who was actually an accomplished breast-cancer researcher, and how people had treated and regarded her. Then Harris presented her canny proposal to require voting-rights-style “preclearance” for changes to reproductive-rights laws in states like South Carolina. (Under the plan, basically, no new restrictions could go into effect until they’d been pre-approved, if they come from states with recent records of passing laws that violate protections under Roe.)

“We all know this is an inflection moment,” Harris said as she began her convention speech. She was talking about the country writ large, but she was clearly hoping that it was also true politically—that Biden’s bad week, and her good weekend, had begun to change the momentum in South Carolina. Although Harris, who’d sharply criticized Biden’s longing for the good old days of the Senate earlier in the week, didn’t directly reference the controversy over the weekend, she finished her speech by calling on the Democrats to “see what can be, unburdened by what has been.”

South Carolina is the place where Barack Obama, in 2007, first heard an elderly woman in a small town call out, at an early-morning rally, “Fired up! Ready to go!” Harris doesn’t have a story like that, yet, but her hopes to follow in his path and use South Carolina as a springboard for the nomination looked a lot less far-fetched after Democratic Weekend. Late on Saturday evening, Tim Lewis, the former Marine from Charleston, had got to the heart of what, aside from its strategic spot on the schedule, makes South Carolina such an important race in the 2020 primaries. “I’m a lot like my brothers and sisters in Alabama, a lot like my brothers and sisters in Georgia, a lot like my brothers and sisters in North Carolina, a lot like my brothers and sisters in Florida—except around Miami,” he said, laughing. “There are a lot of similar legacies. So being first in the South is a litmus test, you know? It’s taking the temperature, taking a reading. How are you doing with young people, with black people? Here you will find out.”

In the days after the 2016 election, with the shock of Donald Trump’s victory still fresh, Barack Obama spoke to The New Yorker’s David Remnick about his legacy and the country’s future. One topic of the conversation was the Democratic Party’s bench, or lack thereof. “Obama insisted that there were gifted Democratic politicians out there, but that many were new to the scene,” Remnick wrote. Obama mentioned Kamala Harris, the senator from California, who launched her Presidential candidacy this January with a rush of energy and attention. He mentioned Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, whose own Presidential campaign has surged lately, thanks in part to a well-deployed use of Norwegian. And he mentioned Michael Bennet, the senator from Colorado, who quietly entered the Presidential race last month, and who sits at between zero and one per cent in the polls going into the first Democratic debates this week.

On Tuesday, Bennet walked into a town house on Capitol Hill, removed his blue blazer, and sat down at a glass dining table to talk. He’d just come from a meeting of the Senate Intelligence Committee, of which he is a member. Before that, he’d been at debate prep. Bennet will be one of twenty Democrats participating in the first Party-sanctioned primary debates, in Miami. With so many candidates in the race, the Party split the event into two nights, with ten candidates onstage on Wednesday and ten on Thursday. Still, it will be a challenge for Bennet and other candidates to get noticed. “We’re going to be up there for two hours, and probably, if you’re lucky, you’re going to get six or seven minutes,” he said. “This is an exercise in thinking about what you want to say in suboptimal conditions.”

It’s tough to get excited for a ten-person debate. The general atmosphere going into them is one of trepidation alternating with bemusement. The National Institute for Civil Discourse put out a press release on Wednesday that called on the candidates to keep it clean. BuzzFeed published a quiz that challenges readers to name every Democrat in the race. Substantive hashing out of policy and political contrasts isn’t likely to be on offer. But valuable air time is, so the candidates have been practicing. Kirsten Gillibrand let a Times reporter into a mock debate that she held, in which aides played her various rivals. Joe Biden has been huddling with top aides. Cory Booker has been doing pushups. Over the past couple of weeks, Bennet held a few practice sessions, in Washington, in a local middle-school auditorium that his staff had commandeered.

In 2007, writing for The New Yorker about Bennet’s time as the superintendent of the Denver public-school system, Katherine Boo described him as having “a low, gravelly voice that carries without volume and gives a deadpan, cheerful air to his admonitions.” As we talked, he folded and unfolded a red tie, which he’d presumably worn during his Intelligence Committee meeting, on the table before him. There was a lot he wanted to say. Bennet is confident in his ability to hold the attention of living rooms and barbecues in Iowa and New Hampshire. But he is hardly snappy, and he has a tendency to grant himself a senator’s prerogative to make an additional point. “These guys”—he gestured to the aides who had accompanied him to the interview—“will tell you that it’s a weakness of mine,” he said. “I never answer anything in less than a minute, unless it’s a one-word answer, in which case I can get it done in a second.”

On Thursday, when it’s his turn onstage, Bennet will be trying both to introduce himself to voters and to compress his platform into a few words. Bennet’s two big campaign planks—separate, sweeping electoral- and climate-change plans—can be difficult to fit into one-minute answers and thirty-second rebuttals. “Rather than have a long discussion about the Green New Deal,” he told me, “I think what I’m going to be focussed on is, This is my plan. It’s a comprehensive climate plan.” But Bennet’s climate position is complicated. He’s not an outright enemy of the fossil-fuel industry, but his plan is ambitious and has an eye on building a coalition of support—bringing in conservationist and agricultural interests—to increase its chance at passage. I asked him what he’d do if, at the debate, the moderators simply asked people to raise their hands if they support the Green New Deal. “You’re going to have to either raise your hand or not raise your hand,” he said, admitting that it had come up in prep. “And, if you feel strongly enough about it, you’re going to have to find some other opportunity to explain why you did it.”

Bennet’s campaign is premised, in part, on reaching people with a more moderate or modulated message than what much of the rest of the field is offering in 2020. FiveThirtyEight recently pointed out that, like his fellow-candidate Amy Klobuchar, Bennet has a more conservative voting record in the Senate than most of his Democratic colleagues. Part of Bennet and Klobuchar’s trouble is that Joe Biden has so far attracted most of the middle-of-the-road attention. But much of the rest of the field has embraced the idea that the Party has changed, or needs to change, in ways unforeseen when Obama mentioned Bennet three years ago. Harris, the other senator that Obama noted, has adjusted her stance and embraced newly popular ideas like Medicare for All, which Bennet considers to be a “fatal” position for a Democrat in a general election. I asked Bennet who he imagined would be watching on Thursday night, when he’ll be on. “It’s a bigger audience than watch cable at night, traditionally,” he said. “And it’s a bigger audience than are engaging with their politicians on Twitter, probably. So it’s the opportunity to be able to have a first impression with people who don’t spend all their time thinking about politics.”