Mary Altaffer/AP

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks at a campaign rally Feb. 4, 2020, in Milford, New Hampshire.

Throughout the 2020 primary cycle, Democratic voters have professed themselves united around a common goal: beating President Donald Trump in November. But in the wake of Monday’s Iowa caucus debacle, it’s becoming clear that the intraparty fissures from 2016 have yet to heal – and indeed, may be growing deeper.

The division is in part ideological, between a progressive faction that wants radical change and a more pragmatic establishment. At a deeper level, though, is an emotional wound, with lingering mistrust and bitterness between supporters of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and those who backed Hillary Clinton – each of whom still holds the other at fault for 2016’s loss.

The latest results out of Iowa now show a virtual tie between Senator Sanders and Pete Buttigieg in state delegate equivalents, with Mr. Sanders leading in the popular vote. On Thursday, amid reports of new inconsistencies, the Democratic National Committee chair called for a recanvass (essentially an audit of the results). But Mr. Buttigieg already appears to have benefited from what at first looked like a victory for him, showing significant momentum in the latest New Hampshire tracking poll.

For supporters of Mr. Sanders – who believed they were unfairly stymied by the Democratic establishment four years ago – it feels infuriatingly familiar.

“I’m particularly concerned by establishment Democrats’ efforts to inhibit Bernie’s campaign,” says Parker Dooley, a “democracy tourist” from Virginia who has already cast a ballot for Mr. Sanders and is in New Hampshire with his wife to observe the state’s first-in-the-nation primary on Feb. 11. 

“I was going to say assassinate,” Mr. Dooley adds, as other Sanders supporters snap pictures of his T-shirt featuring Mr. Sanders in a “Back to the Future” motif. “But maybe that’s too strong.”

Christa Case Bryant/The Christian Science Monitor

Parker Dooley, a self-proclaimed "democracy tourist" from Virginia, stands outside a Bernie Sanders rally in Derry, New Hampshire, on Feb. 5, 2020. Inside, multiple people ask to take photos of his T-shirt – a limited edition, he says, due to a copyright violation complaint.

While it’s not uncommon for nomination battles to pit a left- or right-wing insurgency against a more moderate establishment, the Democratic Party’s overall leftward lurch in the wake of President Trump’s election has given its progressive wing new power. And at a time when distrust of institutions is already high, the sense of grievance among Sanders supporters about their candidate’s treatment could pose a significant problem for party unity if he fails to win the nomination again – particularly if no one wins convincingly, which now seems entirely possible.

“The political energy of the party shifted left some time ago. And while the party resisted it in 2016, they’re going to have a much harder time this year,” says Andrew Smith, director of the New Hampshire Survey Center in Durham. “Sanders voters or activists are saying, ‘Look, we tried it your way last time, and we got Donald Trump.’”

Ruptured trust

After 2016, many Sanders supporters came away feeling robbed, obstructed by a party machine that coalesced early around Mrs. Clinton and worked behind the scenes to preserve her advantage. Among their grievances was the Democratic National Committee’s decision to give Mrs. Clinton a greater degree of influence over its staffing and policy after she bailed out the indebted organization.

Another sore point was former DNC Chairwoman Donna Brazile’s sharing of CNN town hall topics with the Clinton campaign ahead of the televised events, giving the candidate extra time to prepare. This was revealed thanks to Russian hackers who procured thousands of DNC emails, which were published by WikiLeaks, revealing a pattern of bias against Mr. Sanders despite the organization’s proclaimed neutrality. One DNC communications official was quoted as suggesting that they promote a narrative about Mr. Sanders that “Bernie never ever had his act together, that his campaign was a mess.” The DNC later apologized, but the damage was done.

At the 2016 Democratic National Convention, angry Sanders supporters launched protests and wore tape over their mouths to symbolize having been “silenced.”

“I don’t trust the DNC,” says Nico Gillespie, a college student waiting outside the Derry Opera House in Derry, New Hampshire, to hear Mr. Sanders speak on Feb. 5. “They want to delay [the Iowa results] so Pete Buttigieg can have the momentum.”

Mr. Buttigieg, the 38-year-old former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, gave a victory speech Monday night before any official results were released. Those results have been delayed, due in part to technical problems with an app meant to help tally results according to new rules that were put in place after Sanders supporters complained about a lack of transparency in 2016. The Boston Globe/Suffolk University daily tracker poll shows Mr. Buttigieg has gotten an 8-point bounce since then, compared with only 1 point for Mr. Sanders.

More than 48 hours after the caucuses ended, the Iowa Democratic Party released updated figures with 97% of precincts reporting. They showed Mr. Buttigieg leading Mr. Sanders by only 0.1% in state delegate equivalents, while Mr. Sanders was shown winning the popular vote by about 6,000 votes on the first alignment.

“We here in northern New England call that a victory,” declared Mr. Sanders in Manchester on Thursday.

Minutes before he spoke, DNC Chair Tom Perez called for an immediate recanvass of the Iowa caucus results. 

Mary Altaffer/AP

Supporters cheer as Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks during a campaign rally, Feb. 4, 2020, in Milford, New Hampshire.

“I think what has happened with the Iowa Democratic Party is an outrage – that they were that unprepared, that they put forth such a complicated process, relied on untested technology,” said Mr. Sanders.

When asked whether the current mess has caused him to doubt the results of the 2016 Iowa caucuses – in which he lost to Mrs. Clinton by just .25% – he responded: “I don’t want to revisit 2016.”  

He did, however, credit reforms that came about as a result of his campaign’s complaints last time around. “The fact that we now have clear results from the popular vote [in Iowa] is something that we fought for,” he said.

Those reforms were specifically meant to help heal the breach between Mr. Sanders and the establishment wing of the party, which blamed the senator’s less-than-enthusiastic backing of Mrs. Clinton as contributing to the party’s loss to Mr. Trump. One of the biggest changes has to do with superdelegates, another sore spot from 2016. At this summer’s nominating convention, superdelegates will not be able to vote on the first ballot unless a candidate has already secured a majority of pledged delegates.

“Certainly there are grievances that the Sanders people had going back to the party in 2016, where it was very clear that the party’s thumb was on the scale in favor of Clinton,” says Professor Smith. Nevertheless, he adds, “parties exist to win elections – if you don’t win elections, you’re out of business.”

Style vs. substance

In 2016, the party didn’t see a self-proclaimed democratic socialist as able to win a national election. And many appear to have the same reservations in 2020.

The tension has as much to do with style as substance.

“My concern with Bernie is he never talks about what he’s accomplished in the Senate,” says Camille Brown, waiting in line for a selfie with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren at an event in Nashua. She notes that Mr. Sanders can claim very few concrete accomplishments after nearly 30 years in Congress. “I don’t see him working with other senators. ... He has very much an attitude of ‘my way or the highway.’”

Some Democrats see that same uncompromising – even combative – approach reflected in his supporters.

“It’s ‘either my candidate or I’m not going to vote,’ which is not useful when we really need to unite and defeat Trump,” says Caroline Yang, a soft-spoken mother of two from Massachusetts lingering at the Warren event after getting a selfie with her senator. She voted for Mr. Sanders in the 2016 primaries, and understands the fervor for him then, especially given the antipathy for a candidate with as much baggage as Mrs. Clinton. But Ms. Yang sees far better options this time.

“Among the candidates, I think [Ms. Warren] is the one – she has the plans, she has the heart,” she says.

Ms. Brown echoes that thought almost precisely. In the end, though, she’ll support whoever is on the Democratic ticket. “Would I vote for [Mr. Sanders] if it came down to it? Yes.”

Still, these measured comments don’t come close to matching the fervor of the Sanders supporters back in Derry.

“Bernie is going to crush this primary,” says Mr. Dooley.

Scott Keeler/Tampa Bay Times/AP/File

People file into the Florida Supreme Court in Tallahassee.

When the Florida Supreme Court ruled late last month that a unanimous jury is not required for the state to hand down a death sentence, the decision reverberated in the state prisons that house hundreds of felons already sentenced to death.

The legal wrangling over their fate overnight became “chaos,” says Marty McClain, a death-penalty lawyer.

After all, only four years earlier, Florida had struck down the power of judges, not juries, to decide whether or not to execute convicted felons. That ruling followed a landmark U.S. Supreme Court finding that Florida’s system for capital sentencing was unconstitutional and led nearly 100 inmates on death row there to challenge their sentences.

But a new conservative majority on Florida’s highest court has begun taking a shredder to this and other seemingly settled rulings, part of a national rollback of what conservatives see as an era of liberal judicial activism. That ideological rollback is embodied in President Donald Trump’s appointment of 187 U.S. judges, including two to the Supreme Court, since 2017. Under his watch, three U.S. appeals courts have flipped from liberal to more conservative majorities.

In its Jan. 23 verdict, the Florida Supreme Court said it had “got it wrong” in 2016 when it curbed the power of judges to effectively overrule split juries on capital cases. That case, Hurst v. State, was supposed to have a “limited practical effect on the administration of the death penalty,” Chief Justice Charles Canady wrote. But he said it had led to legal maneuvering that was undermining “decades of settled Supreme Court and Florida precedent.”

Critics say the court’s abrupt reversal – the 2016 ruling was more than a decade in the making – has caused chaos for inmates on death row and attorneys like Mr. McClain. Some argue it violates the legal concept of stare decisis, which holds that rulings that overturn established law should be “well thought-out and pretty rare,” says Kenneth Williams, a professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston.

Life and death

In states that practice capital punishment, juries who find a suspect guilty are required to weigh the “aggravating sentences” and decide whether they justify execution or not. Florida’s twist on this safeguard is that judges aren’t bound by a jury’s advisory finding and can hold a separate hearing and decide that the death penalty is justified.

This power was struck down, however, in 2016 by the U.S. Supreme Court, which said in its decision that the Sixth Amendment “requires a jury, not a judge, to find each fact necessary to impose a sentence of death. A jury’s mere recommendation is not enough.”

This then led to Hurst v. State, in which the Florida Supreme Court set a new precedent for the state’s death-penalty system.

The new interpretation by Florida’s highest court serves to “remove your friends and neighbors from the awesome power of the state to kill one of your neighbors,” says Eric Freedman, a Hofstra University law professor.

The reason for the about-turn is the court’s makeup: Republican governors have replaced four of the justices who ruled on the 2016 case under Florida’s mandatory retirement law, tilting it to conservatives.

Whether justified or not, the impulse in Florida to rewrite law as soon as a new court is seated shows how judges taking cues from national political tides – and the U.S. Supreme Court itself ­– can affect lives in profound ways.

These are judges “who have a very narrow interpretation of the Constitution and they will come out with really narrow decisions,” says law professor Stephen Harper, director of the Death Penalty Clinic at Florida International University in Miami. “That means the country is reverting to a much more conservative outlook and jurisprudence – more conservative than I think the public wants, or is.”

History’s scrapyard

To be sure, the U.S. legal landscape is littered with scrapped ideas. Rulings like Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that enshrined “separate but equal” racial segregation and Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) that upheld a state law against homosexual acts have long been overturned. Such reexaminations of settled law require careful reading of the Constitution but also the ability for appeals courts to absorb evolving societal norms into the law.

By contrast, Florida’s reconstituted court took only a year or so to reverse the 2016 verdict and failed to show “powerful reasons” to do so, says Professor Harper, a former public defender in Miami-Dade County. The issues at hand were “way too close.”

Mr. Freedman agrees. “There is nothing wrong with the concept that you want to reexamine old precedents to see if they make sense,” he says. “But does it make institutional, practical sense, both in terms of where we are now and where we are likely to be?”

To many conservative thinkers, the answer is yes. The Senate Republicans Communications Center tweeted “Merry Christmas!” in applauding the latest wave of White House appointments to the federal bench in December.

These judges’ extended terms mean the effects of their rulings could be felt for decades to come. But the impacts may not be as revolutionary as progressives fear, because conservative jurists don’t make up a monolith and, moreover, will be leery of upending established case law, say analysts.

Take the Supreme Court: The four liberal justices tend to rule more as a pack than the other five. That suggests an awareness, says Mr. Freedman, that the power of the court comes in large part from its ability to project stability.

Moreover, “there is a split of thinking on [the power of precedent] in conservative circles,” writes Brian Fitzpatrick, who studies judicial selection at Vanderbilt Law School in Nashville, in an email.

This divide is seen in the reasoning of late Justice Antonin Scalia, who “thought that every day could not be a new day in the law,” putting a strong emphasis on stare decisis, Mr. Fitzpatrick points out. Whereas “people like Justice [Clarence] Thomas think it is wrong to prolong mistaken decisions – that his oath is to the Constitution, not to what his colleagues said about the Constitution.”

Challenging judicial consensus

This readiness to challenge precedent was seen last year when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned 40 years of labor law by making it illegal to force non-union workers to pay union fees. Meanwhile, states like Alabama and Georgia have passed laws intended to set up a challenge to the seminal Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. Given that one Texas state judge has already ruled “Obamacare” unconstitutional, some progressives fear that conservatives hope to stack the courts in order to have the health care law overturned at the federal level.

“How can we order our lives if the law is constantly changing” in a cavalier manner, asks Mr. Williams, the Houston law professor. “If it becomes completely unpredictable, it becomes almost anarchy.”

Floridians, for one, are feeling the effects of a whipsaw state Supreme Court, says Daniel Goldberg, legal director at the Alliance for Justice, a progressive judicial advocacy group in Washington, D.C. Last year it blocked Miami Beach’s minimum wage ordinance on the grounds that it preempted state and federal authority to set a minimum wage.

“That means that 24,000 Miami workers are losing a total of $117 million annually. Talk about real-world impacts,” says Mr. Goldberg, referring to estimates of how much the ordinance would have raised earnings.

Florida has 384 inmates on death row, one of the highest of all states. Last month’s ruling has scrambled the work of capital defense attorneys, who were challenging the soundness of sentences based on a judge’s discretion to overrule a jury.

“A death sentence can’t be arbitrary, can’t be struck by lightning,” says Mr. McClain. “This is about the importance of finality.”

Walking on the two-lane road that loops behind the Longview plant – West Virginia’s newest and cleanest coal-fired power facility – Steve Nelson and his boss had what he describes as a “slow epiphany.”

“Why fight with this?” he recalls asking about the relentless competition from natural gas. Now, on the same road where that discussion took place two years ago, he shows off where Longview Power, an independent power producer, plans to build a natural gas-fired facility as well as a solar-power installation.

It’s a diversification that the rest of the state has yet to make. While the nation is moving rapidly away from coal power, West Virginia remains firmly committed to it. Some 92% of its electric power still comes from burning the black mineral.

The inertia is partly political. The coal industry remains a powerful force statewide. It’s also cultural. For more than 200 years, ever since workers mined coal to fire evaporation furnaces to create salt near Charleston, the future state capital, West Virginia and this fossil fuel have been inextricably linked. By clinging to coal, local politicians hope to avoid further losses of coal jobs, one of the few high-paid jobs in a state with the third-highest unemployment rate in the nation. But that choice is also holding back a transition that could lead to the arrival of new industries and jobs. 

“The big thing is culture. It’s just a source of great pride in West Virginia that the United States industrialized on the backs of the coal miners,” says James Van Nostrand, a law professor at West Virginia University in Morgantown and author of an upcoming book, “Coal Trap: How West Virginia was Left Behind in the Clean Energy Revolution. “In this state we tend to think that what is good for the coal industry is what is good for everybody.”

Even today, as markets for West Virginia coal dry up in surrounding states, the industry is sounding confident. 

“I’m not prepared to concede that we are not part of the future,” says Chris R. Hamilton, senior vice president of the West Virginia Coal Association in Charleston. He points to a rise in coal exports, mostly powered by metallurgical coal, the type used to create steel. There are also experiments underway to turn coal into liquids, such as diesel fuel, and solids, such as carbon steel. And as the prospects dwindle for selling West Virginia thermal coal, used to create electricity, to other states, some say the argument to keep using coal for West Virginia’s electricity grows stronger. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Steam rises from a smokestack at Longview Power, a coal-powered energy plant, on Jan. 23, 2020, in Maidsville, West Virginia. Longview is one of the most efficient coal plants in the U.S., with low emission rates compared with other coal facilities. It recycles most of its byproducts so as not to add to landfills. The company plans to add solar and natural gas facilities.

For his part, President Donald Trump has tried mightily to prop up coal sales by rolling back environmental restrictions that constituted what many in the industry called a war on coal. Since he took office, the industry has bounced back from its lows during the Obama administration and stabilized.

But there’s only so much the president can do. There’s little hope that thermal coal will grow. When West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, a coal business owner himself, asked Appalachian Power to burn more coal three years ago, the company’s president reportedly rejected the idea. It’s far cheaper to build new natural gas plants than coal-fired plants. And West Virginia happens to sit atop the nation’s largest shale gas deposits. (It is moving to drill those deposits, but for now is sending that energy to utilities in other states rather than taking advantage of the cheap fuel to generate electricity itself.)

And there are costs involved with continuing to prop up coal. One is electricity costs. Between 2008 and 2017, West Virginia saw its electricity costs soar 6% per year, the fastest increase of any state, according to a 2019 McKinsey report. That rise has blunted a key advantage West Virginia once had in attracting new industries. Now, instead of sporting the third-lowest power costs in the nation, it ranks 21st.

The other cost is environmental. Increasingly, big companies are demanding that their power come, at least in part, from renewables. 

“We definitely see the need for renewable power,” says Jeri Matheney, a spokeswoman for Appalachian Power, one of the state’s two major utilities. “Some investors are looking for renewable power when they look for locations to place their business.”

By 2033, the utility expects to rely on solar to produce 11% of its electricity, up from essentially zero today, while its reliance on coal would fall slightly. Even so, coal would still provide nearly three-quarters of the power for the utility, which also serves Virginia. The company has three big coal-fired power plants in West Virginia and expects to continue to use them for the next 20 years, Ms. Matheney says.

“It’s not just the Amazons” looking for cleaner power, says Mr. Van Nostrand of West Virginia University. “It’s Procter & Gamble, Toyota. ... We need to get away from being a coal state and become an energy state.”

“It’s zero-sum-game thinking,” says Mr. Nelson, back at the Longview plant. In reality, natural gas may provide more economic opportunity than what is lost by the coal industry. And “the clock is ticking.” Those aging coal plants will eventually have to be replaced anyway. By the time they are, he adds, West Virginia may have lost permanently its role as an exporter of electric power.

Faisal Saeed al-Mutar grew up in Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad. His neighborhood sat along the highway to the international airport. He was 12 when he watched American troops arrive in 2003. The U.S. military didn’t fix things, though, he says. Families moved out of the neighboring houses, and men with guns moved in.

But something good also happened: Iraq got the internet.

“It was just the best thing ever,” Mr. Mutar says. “It was kind of like a black market that existed for knowledge.”

Almost two decades later, Iraq’s internet has matured. Facebook, streaming services, and even “The Handmaid’s Tale” on Hulu are popular. But so much is still inaccessible. Less than 1% of internet content is available in Arabic, rendering much of Wikipedia’s trove unusable.

In 2017 Mr. Mutar, then a refugee living in New York, wanted to change that. He founded the nonprofit Ideas Beyond Borders (IBB) and has since hired 120 young people across the Middle East to translate Wikipedia pages into Arabic, starting with subjects they thought were most needed: female scientists, human rights, logical reasoning, and philosophy. They’ve since expanded their work to translate books like “Enlightenment Now,” by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, and “Free Will,” by Sam Harris.

In less than three years, they’ve translated 12 books and more than 8,000 Wikipedia pages, attracting 17 million views. The project is called Bayt al-Hikma 2.0, or House of Wisdom 2.0 – a reference to the Baghdad library and intellectual hub during the Islamic golden age.

“Many younger Arabs have benefited profoundly from English-based information widely available on the internet or through traditionally published material. Some of these sources offer perspectives that develop critical thinking in areas that are taboo or suppressed not just in the Middle East but also in the West,” writes Natalie Khazaal in an email. Dr. Khazaal teaches Arab media at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and volunteers on IBB’s advisory board. “Unfortunately, most of that information isn’t available yet in Arabic and one needs to speak a foreign language to be able to access it online.

Mr. Mutar sees the project as a long-term investment in the region. “My goal is to prevent refugee crises from happening in the first place, rather than dealing with refugees,” he says. “I strongly believe that education and really changing the ecosystem of information is the way to go.”

COURTESY OF IDEAS BEYOND BORDERS

Ideas Beyond Borders has translated 12 books and it has distributed copies during protests in Baghdad.

Promoting independent thinking

As a teenager in Iraq, Mr. Mutar first encountered translation-sharing in an online forum about heavy metal music. People would post translations of works by Thomas Paine and George Orwell interspersed in chats about metal.

“That metal community became kind of the counterculture,” he says.

As the internet expanded, those exchanges moved to Facebook. “I Believe in Science,” a volunteer-run initiative that translates scientific research and articles to Arabic, began on Facebook in 2011 and migrated to its own website in 2013. Today, I Believe in Science has more than 300 volunteers and has translated over 10,000 articles. Its founder, Ahmed al-Rayyis, now organizes the translation team for IBB, and many of those volunteers have since been hired as Bayt al-Hikma translators.

Alber Saud, a Bayt al-Hikma translator and medical student at Al-Baath University in Homs, Syria, began translating material from medical books with a group of other students. They posted translations on Facebook to counteract phony health advice they saw online.

“I would search for medical information online and couldn’t find it in Arabic,” he says.

Mr. Rayyis says the most commonly searched articles on I Believe in Science are about women’s health and pregnancy. Bayt al-Hikma’s top-read Wikipedia page is gender equality. The second most-read page? Margaret Thatcher.

“Our goal is to make Arab youth think for themselves. We don’t want them to be sheep,” Mr. Rayyis says.

Dr. Khazaal says the learning flows both to the East and West, as there’s a need for audiences to recognize overlooked Arab thinkers. “[M]any progressive ideas, books, thinkers from the Arab world – throughout the centuries – remain like gems hidden from the West,” she writes. “There is a dire need in the West and beyond to ‘rediscover’ those sides of the Arab world that are genius, diverse, and innovative. These are the kinds of areas that IBB strives to cover.”

They’re also creating a space where people can seek answers to questions too taboo to ask publicly.

IBB also offers translators another form of anonymity online: They can submit their translated material to be posted from the United States, rather than from their home countries where they could be tracked. Also, translators are paid for work they were previously doing for free, and they can earn translation certifications endorsed by organizational partners.

Mr. Mutar says he makes a point of hiring people from some of the most conflict-torn countries of the region, usually without formal translation training, because he wants to offer jobs and professional development where 20-somethings need them most.

Raghad al-Katlabe, a medical student at the University of Damascus in Syria, is one of those 20-somethings. She started translating for Bayt al-Hikma about nine months ago, and has since translated more than 200 articles. The work has allowed her to buy a laptop and pay for German-language courses. She can also afford to move out of university dorms into a home of her own – a first since her family’s home in Damascus was destroyed by war. 

“Plus I met a number of great people who are facing similar life conditions,” she writes in an email. “It felt great to know I’m not alone.”

Investing in ideas

As a teenager, Mr. Mutar became more interested in online discourse and the varied viewpoints it offered. In high school, he started a blog, where he says he mostly posted about anti-extremism. He also passed out Arabic copies of the Bill of Rights at school.

Members of Al Qaeda threatened Mr. Mutar, saying he should shut down his blog. His parents had reason to worry: Their family is Shiite and was living in a Baghdad neighborhood controlled by radical Sunnis. He and his brothers used fake IDs with Sunni-sounding names to get through Al Qaeda-controlled checkpoints in their neighborhood. In 2007 his brother disappeared at a checkpoint and was presumed to have been killed. Mr. Mutar shut down his blog.

He left Iraq and moved to Lebanon in 2009, then enrolled in college in Malaysia, where he studied computer science. He applied for United Nations refugee status there and was accepted to the U.S. in 2013. Mr. Mutar worked for an international nonprofit before he planned IBB and began pitching to donors for startup funds.

Since its founding in 2017, IBB has also started translating texts into Kurdish and Farsi. Last fall it partnered with the University of Mosul, where 10 students each semester will earn translation certification while working with Bayt al-Hikma.

In November, three people from IBB handed out 500 abridged, Arabic-language copies of “Enlightenment Now” to protesters in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square, where anti-government demonstrations have rocked the country since October.

“We won’t see immediate results,” says Mr. Rayyis. “But if we invest in ideas, we can invest in a better future for everyone.”

[Editor's Note: This story has been updated to specify which family member was targeted by Al Qaeda and which members were issued fake IDs.]

Empanoply.

Definition: to dress in a full suit of armor. 

E-M-P-A-N-O-P-L-Y, Empanoply.

It was a fitting word to send a champion into battle, and that’s exactly what it did Saturday, when 11-year-old Nadia Chelpang Mashoud rattled off those nine letters to clinch her victory as Ghana’s 2020 national spelling bee champion.

“I was so happy – I was actually overwhelmed with happiness,” Nadia says, remembering the moment when she realized she’d taken the title.

Every year, across the United States, more than 10 million precocious American children stuff their heads full of prefixes and suffixes, etymology and root words. A suit of armor, if you will, for the battle that is a spelling bee.

Of these, just a few hundred will make it to the pinnacle of their sport – the Scripps National Spelling Bee, held each spring in Washington, D.C., where they’ll compete for the chance at $50,000 and a quirky kind of American fame. (Jimmy Kimmel, for instance, hosts the winner most years on his show for a spelling showdown against … himself.)

The American finalists are joined by a small number from abroad, including exactly one African speller. Ghana’s national spelling bee is currently the continent’s only Scripps qualifier, a fact the tournament’s organizer Eugenia Tachie-Menson says makes them a certain kind of ambassador.

“The image of Africa lots of people in America grow up with is hungry, skinny kids with flies stuck to their faces, and then we show up with kids who can compete with the best spellers in the world,” she says. “That changes minds.”

Courage Ahiati/Courtesy of The Young Educators Foundation

Children compete in the 13th edition of Ghana’s national spelling bee in Kumasi, Ghana. The winner will attend the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C.

It’s also a reminder that English belongs to the world – and in particular, that it belongs to Africa. Today, there are more English speakers in Nigeria alone than in England itself. (Nigeria, indeed, has more English speakers than all but four other countries in the world.) In total, about 130 million Africans speak English, with many more speaking the English-based creoles and pidgins that African communities created as they stretched and bent the old colonial language to meet their own linguistic needs.

But few people – not just in Ghana or Africa, but anywhere in the world – speak English with quite the finesse of Ghana’s new top speller.  

Take, for example, her favorite word.

“Triskaidekaphobia,” Nadia tells the Monitor’s reporter, and before that reporter can even sheepishly ask for the spelling, she’s off. “T-R-I-S-K-A-I-D-E-K-A-P-H-O-B-I-A,” she recites, “the fear of the number 13.”

Again, a fitting word for the winner of Ghana’s 13th annual national bee. The competition has been running since 2008, and now draws more than 7,000 competitors annually in its regional qualifiers, Ms. Tachie-Menson says.

But Nadia is the first winner from the country’s northern region, which has historically lagged behind other parts of the country in literacy and education levels.

In that way, Nadia isn’t all that different than her fictional heroine Akeelah Anderson, the title character of the 2006 American film “Akeelah and the Bee,” which follows an African American girl from inner-city Los Angeles as she fights her way to the final round of the national spelling bee.

“I was inspired by Akeelah’s determination to win,” Nadia says, even as she’s already begun to serve as inspiration herself.

“You’ve got to remember that in this part of Ghana … it’s a very patriarchal sexist society,” says Mariama Alhassan, director of Alhassan Gbanzaba Memorial School in the city of Tamale, where Nadia is a sixth grader. “And so therefore her victory is huge. The ripple effect of it is so wide.”

But for a kid like Nadia, who dreams of becoming a doctor or engineer, and says she loves math and science as much as English – why devote so much time to what, let’s face it, seems a bit of an esoteric pursuit?

Ms. Tachie-Menson says that even – perhaps especially – in the age of autocorrect and spell check, spelling bees actually have a lot of practical value for the students who compete.

“At the heart of it, it’s about teaching people to communicate effectively,” she says. Not to mention, “you learn grace and grit under pressure – skills that everyone in this world needs” whether they intend to spell their way through it or not.

For Nadia, of course, there are tangible benefits as well. In May, she’ll travel to Washington, D.C. – her first trip to the United States – where she’ll not only compete in the Scripps Bee, but also be feted by the Ghanaian ambassador and the local Ghanaian community. She’s looking forward to seeing the Smithsonian museums, she says, and to meet her competitors from across the ocean.

“I’m most excited because I’ll be meeting children from America and making new friends,” she says. And then, of course, she’ll suit up for battle – make that, she’ll empanoply – and show her new friends just what a Ghanaian spelling champion can do.

AP

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, left, speaks with people at a supermarket in Wuhan Jan. 27.

Every year hundreds of books are written about leadership, reflecting not only a rising desire to understand it but also evolving ideas about what it is. Yet there is nothing like watching a country actively debate it. And not just any country.

China, with a fifth of the world’s population, seems to be in serious introspection about its top-down, one-man rule following widespread anger at the government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak. The introspection is even evident at the top.

On Monday, the head of the ruling Communist Party, Xi Jinping, met with other leaders and admitted there had been “shortcomings and deficiencies” in the response. The public health crisis, they said, is “a major test of China’s system and capacity for governance.” They also cited a need for a systematic review of “areas of weakness” in government.

For a party that regards both itself and its vision for Chinese society as infallible, this is a rare expression of humility, a character trait highly recommended in current books on leadership. Yet in another key trait – listening – the party has only stepped up censorship of any online criticism of officials. One prominent intellectual, Xu ­Zhiyong, wrote on social media that Mr. Xi should resign for his “inability to handle major crises.” Another, Xu Zhangrun, a law professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, wrote that the party’s restriction of freedoms only hindered the people’s ability to raise concerns during the early days of the outbreak. And instead of assigning party members by merit to serve the people, as the party did in the past, the leadership now deems loyalty to the party to be more important. 

“The political system has ­collapsed under the tyranny, and a governance system [made up] of bureaucrats, which has taken [the party] more than 30 years to build has foundered,” he said.

Many Chinese are trying to help their leaders be better leaders. As a prominent novelist, Xu Kaizhen, told The New York Times, “If they can rearrange the order in their hearts, we’ll see a very different governance style.” For China this is a healthy debate, made possible by a health crisis that is truly a test of leadership