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Not surprisingly, Kahan's study found that the more numerate you are, the more likely you are to get the answer to this "skin cream" problem right. Moreover, it found no substantial difference between highly numerate Democrats and highly numerate Republicans in this regard. The better members of both political groups were at math, the better they were at solving the skin cream problem.

So how did people fare on the handgun version of the problem? They performed quite differently than on the skin cream version, and strong political patterns emerged in the results—especially among people who are good at mathematical reasoning. Most strikingly, highly numerate liberal Democrats did almost perfectly when the right answer was that the concealed weapons ban does indeed work to decrease crime (version C of the experiment)—an outcome that favors their pro-gun-control predilections. But they did much worse when the correct answer was that crime increases in cities that enact the ban (version D of the experiment).

The opposite was true for highly numerate conservative Republicans

these results are a fairly strong refutation of what is called the "deficit model" in the field of science and technology studies—the idea that if people just had more knowledge, or more reasoning ability, then they would be better able to come to consensus with scientists and experts on issues like climate change, evolution, the safety of vaccines, and pretty much anything else involving science or data

Kahan's data suggest the opposite—that political biases skew our reasoning abilities, and this problem seems to be worse for people with advanced capacities like scientific literacy and numeracy.

What's happening when highly numerate liberals and conservatives actually get it wrong? Either they're intuiting an incorrect answer that is politically convenient and feels right to them, leading them to inquire no further—or else they're stopping to calculate the correct answer, but then refusing to accept it and coming up with some elaborate reason why 1 + 1 doesn't equal 2 in this particular instance. (Kahan suspects it's mostly the former, rather than the latter.)

This new study is just one out of many in this respect, but it provides perhaps the most striking demonstration yet of just how motivated, just how biased, reasoning can be—especially about politics.

Above all, there were many dire warnings about the evils of “printing money.” For example, in May 2009 an editorial in The Wall Street Journal warned that both interest rates and inflation were set to surge “now that Congress and the Federal Reserve have flooded the world with dollars.” In 2010 a virtual Who’s Who of conservative economists and pundits sent an open letter to Ben Bernanke warning that his policies risked “currency debasement and inflation.”

Although the Fed continued on its expansionary course — its balance sheet has grown to more than $4 trillion, up fivefold since the start of the crisis — inflation stayed low. For the most part, the funds the Fed injected into the economy simply piled up either in bank reserves or in cash holdings by individuals — which was exactly what economists on the other side of the divide had predicted would happen.

the similar state of affairs when it comes to economics, monetary economics in particular.

Mainly, though, the currency-debasement crowd just keeps repeating the same lines, ignoring its utter failure in prognostication.

Isn’t the question of how to manage the money supply a technical issue, not a matter of theological doctrine?

Well, it turns out that money is indeed a kind of theological issue. Many on the right are hostile to any kind of government activism, seeing it as the thin edge of the wedge — if you concede that the Fed can sometimes help the economy by creating “fiat money,” the next thing you know liberals will confiscate your wealth and give it to the 47 percent.

if you look at the internal dynamics of the Republican Party, it’s obvious that the currency-debasement, return-to-gold faction has been gaining strength even as its predictions keep failing.

And he enacted a health reform that went into full effect in 2014, amid claims that it would have catastrophic effects on employment.

what do we learn from this impressive failure to fail? That the conservative economic orthodoxy dominating the Republican Party is very, very wrong.

conservative orthodoxy has a curiously inconsistent view of the abilities and motivations of corporations and wealthy individuals — I mean, job creators.

On one side, this elite is presumed to be a bunch of economic superheroes, able to deliver universal prosperity by summoning the magic of the marketplace. On the other side, they’re depicted as incredibly sensitive flowers who wilt in the face of adversity — raise their taxes a bit, subject them to a few regulations, or for that matter hurt their feelings in a speech or two, and they’ll stop creating jobs and go sulk in their tents, or more likely their mansions.

It’s a doctrine that doesn’t make much sense, but it conveys a clear message that, whaddya know, turns out to be very convenient for the elite: namely, that injustice is a law of nature, that we’d better not do anything to make our society less unequal or protect ordinary families from financial risks. Because if we do, the usual suspects insist, we’ll be severely punished by the invisible hand, which will collapse the economy.

From a conservative point of view, Mr. Obama did everything wrong, afflicting the comfortable (slightly) and comforting the afflicted (a lot), and nothing bad happened. We can, it turns out, make our society better after all.

But over the past decade, I can recall conversations with some of these individuals in which they refused to accept that there was any problem within the Republican Party, attributing such criticism to media bias.

We still see this denial, with the truly bizarre claim by some in the media that the rise of Trump is really all the fault of . . . Obama. The logic is varied.

Here is a much simpler explanation for Donald Trump: Republicans have fed the country ideas about decline, betrayal and treason. They have encouraged the forces of anti-intellectualism, obstructionism and populism. They have flirted with bigotry and racism. Trump merely chose to unashamedly embrace all of it, saying plainly what they were hinting at for years. In doing so, he hit a jackpot.

The problem is not that Republican leaders should have begun to condemn Trump last year. It is that they should have condemned the ideas and tactics that led to his rise when they began to flourish 20 years ago.

it appeared that people felt dissonance only when their choices had negative consequences, but people still felt dissonance when they wrote something inconsistent with their prior beliefs and then threw it in the trash, never to be seen again

For years, it remained a mystery why people would feel dissonance even when there were no negative consequences. But recently, it was solved

Using neuroscience to track the activation of different brain regions, Professor Harmon-Jones and colleagues found that inconsistent beliefs really bother us only when they have conflicting implications for action

If I’m socially liberal and fiscally conservative, and I want to vote for a candidate with a decent shot at winning, my beliefs are contradictory. One way to reconcile them is to change my opinion on abortion or tax policies. Goodbye, dissonanc

This helps to explain why many people’s political beliefs fall on a simple left-right continuum, rather than in more complex combinations. Once, we might have held more nuanced opinions, but in pursuit of consistency, we’ve long since whitewashed the shades of gray

It also explains why we can’t stand to vote for flip-floppers. We worry that they don’t have clear principles; we think they lack integrity

t consistency is especially appealing to political conservatives, who report a stronger preference for certainty, structure, order and closure than liberals. If you favor predictability over ambiguity and stability over change, a candidate who holds fast to his ideology has a lot of curb appeal.

When historians and political scientists rate the presidents throughout history, the most effective ones turn out to be the most open-minded

This is true of both conservative and liberal presidents. Abraham Lincoln was a flip-flopper: He started out pro-slavery before abolishing it. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a flip-flopper, too: Elected on a platform of balancing the budget, he substantially increased spending with his New Deal.

we should be wary of electing anyone who fails to evolve. “Progress is impossible without change,” George Bernard Shaw observed, “and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”

when it comes to facing our own contradictions, perhaps we should be more open as well. As the artist Marcel Duchamp observed, “I have forced myself to contradict myself, in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.”

It’s true there are “extremists on both sides,” but as this Wonk Blog post showed, the percentage of non-centrist Republicans skyrocketed from under 10 percent in the Ford years (less than Democrats) to almost 90 percent today, while the Democratic percentage has stayed basically flat [chart].

What’s more, in the last session (2013-2014), the data shows that 147 House Republicans — more than half the caucus — were more ideologically extreme than the most extreme Democrat in the House. There is simply no comparison between the two partie

But it’s a fact that “balanced” journalism has to ignore. To admit that the political world isn’t balanced would shake their whole belief system to its core. And yet, the shaking seems to have begun

The GOP’s strategic logic is simple and straightforward: If the media is going to split the difference between what Democrats and Republicans say, then if Republicans simply double their demands, suddenly the media, embracing the “sensible center,” will now articulate the old GOP position as the “sensible center,” the “common sense” place to be

Their stubborn adherence to a false balance narrative has, ironically, become an integral part of the GOP’s relentless rightward push. By talking about “government dysfunction” instead of “Republican obstruction,” the media actively helps the most extreme anti-government Republicans thwart any efforts at competent governance and it helps promote their “government is horrible” worldview

There was once a penalty for becoming too politically extreme: one’s actions would be characterized as unrealistic, destructive, heedless of past experience, etc. Sometimes this was justified, sometimes not (as with the Civil Rights movement). But right or wrong, this media practice inhibited radical movements in either direction.

For quite some time now, however, conservative Republicans have realized that by moving right and attacking the media for any criticism, they can turn the media into a tacit ally, forcing them to treat preposterous claims as serious ideas, or even proven facts

Norm’s response underscores the reality of asymmetric polarization, which the mainstream media and most good government groups have avoided discussing — at great costs to the country

Thus, when they were planning to force a government shutdown, a key part of their strategy was spinning the media with a preposterous argument that it was the Democrats who were shutting down the government, even though, as the New York Times reported, the shutdown plan traced back to a meeting early in President Obama’s second term, led by former Attorney General Edwin R. Meese.

What’s more, once the media plays along, it’s a trick that can be used over and over again. One can keep moving farther and farther right indefinitely, pulling the “objective” media along for the ride, every step of the way. (Conservatives even developed an operational model to describe the process, known as the “Overton Window,” explained by a conservative activist here.)

The basis for all this is a cultural illusion that the “nonpartisan” media is somehow objective, philosophically in tune with science.

historically, this is far from true. Up until the late 19th century, American journalism was quite partisan, serving substantial “niche” audiences, sustained by subscriptions.

hen advertising exploded as a revenue source in the early 20th century, a new journalistic model emerged, trying to appeal across parties, while taking care not to anger large advertisers. The broader story is well told by Paul Starr in “The Creation of the Media

Jeremy Iggers incorporates this history into his account of how journalism ethics confuses the purposes of journalism in “Good News, Bad News: Journalism Ethics and the Public Interest.”

Such is the basis for the media’s claims of “objectivity.” Starr’s history explains the forces leading to why this happened.

the blogosphere’s origins were not just Usenet, email lists and the like, they were also the underground press tracing back to IF Stone’s Weekly and George Seldes’ In Fact; the black press, both commercial and movement-based; political journals of the left and right; and so on

These underappreciated traditions provide largely untapped examples of how to do quality political journalism outside of the artificial construct in which false balance is rooted. They point the way forward for us, beyond our current state of asymmetrical dysfunction.

Reich simply points out that this utopian fiction is in danger of collapse because it is not true and because genetic research is increasingly proving it untrue.

“You will sometimes hear that any biological differences among populations are likely to be small, because humans have diverged too recently from common ancestors for substantial differences to have arisen under the pressure of natural selection. This is not true. The ancestors of East Asians, Europeans, West Africans and Australians were, until recently, almost completely isolated from one another for 40,000 years or longer, which is more than sufficient time for the forces of evolution to work.” Which means to say that the differences could be (and actually are) substantial.

If you don’t establish a reasonable forum for debate on this, Reich argues, if you don’t establish the principle is that we do not have to be afraid of any of this, it will be monopolized by truly unreasonable and indeed dangerous racists. And those racists will have the added prestige for their followers of revealing forbidden knowledge.

so there are two arguments against the suppression of this truth and the stigmatization of its defenders: that it’s intellectually dishonest and politically counterproductive.

Klein seems to back a truly extreme position: that only the environment affects IQ scores, and genes play no part in group differences in human intelligence. To this end, he cites the “Flynn effect,” which does indeed show that IQ levels have increased over the years, and are environmentally malleable up to a point. In other words, culture, politics, and economics do matter.

But Klein does not address the crucial point that even with increases in IQ across all races over time, the racial gap is still frustratingly persistent, that, past a certain level, IQ measurements have actually begun to fall in many developed nations, and that Flynn himself acknowledges that the effect does not account for other genetic influences on intelligence.

In an email exchange with me, in which I sought clarification, Klein stopped short of denying genetic influences altogether, but argued that, given rising levels of IQ, and given how brutal the history of racism against African-Americans has been, we should nonetheless assume “right now” that genes are irrelevant.

My own brilliant conclusion: Group differences in IQ are indeed explicable through both environmental and genetic factors and we don’t yet know quite what the balance is.

We are, in this worldview, alone on the planet, born as blank slates, to be written on solely by culture. All differences between men and women are a function of this social effect; as are all differences between the races. If, in the aggregate, any differences in outcome between groups emerge, it is entirely because of oppression, patriarchy, white supremacy, etc. And it is a matter of great urgency that we use whatever power we have to combat these inequalities.

Liberalism has never promised equality of outcomes, merely equality of rights. It’s a procedural political philosophy rooted in means, not a substantive one justified by achieving certain ends.

A more nuanced understanding of race, genetics, and environment would temper this polarization, and allow for more unifying, practical efforts to improve equality of opportunity, while never guaranteeing or expecting equality of outcomes.

In some ways, this is just a replay of the broader liberal-conservative argument. Leftists tend to believe that all inequality is created; liberals tend to believe we can constantly improve the world in every generation, forever perfecting our societies.

Rightists believe that human nature is utterly unchanging; conservatives tend to see the world as less plastic than liberals, and attempts to remake it wholesale dangerous and often counterproductive.

I think the genius of the West lies in having all these strands in our politics competing with one another.

Where I do draw the line is the attempt to smear legitimate conservative ideas and serious scientific arguments as the equivalent of peddling white supremacy and bigotry. And Klein actively contributes to that stigmatization and demonization. He calls the science of this “race science” as if it were some kind of illicit and illegitimate activity, rather than simply “science.”

He goes on to equate the work of these scientists with the “most ancient justification for bigotry and racial inequality.” He even uses racism to dismiss Murray and Harris: they are, after all, “two white men.

He still refuses to believe that Murray’s views on this are perfectly within the academic mainstream in studies of intelligence, as they were in 1994.

Klein cannot seem to hold the following two thoughts in his brain at the same time: that past racism and sexism are foul, disgusting, and have wrought enormous damage and pain and that unavoidable natural differences between races and genders can still exist.

, it matters that we establish a liberalism that is immune to such genetic revelations, that can strive for equality of opportunity, and can affirm the moral and civic equality of every human being on the planet.

We may even embrace racial discrimination, as in affirmative action, that fuels deeper divides. All of which, it seems to me, is happening — and actively hampering racial progress, as the left defines the most multiracial and multicultural society in human history as simply “white supremacy” unchanged since slavery; and as the right viscerally responds by embracing increasingly racist white identity politics.

liberalism is integral to our future as a free society — and it should not falsely be made contingent on something that can be empirically disproven. It must allow for the truth of genetics to be embraced, while drawing the firmest of lines against any moral or political abuse of it

If we look back over the past 100 years, perhaps the lowest tolerance for academic freedom has coincided with war and global tensions. The enemies of dissent frequently invoked menaces from abroad as they clamped down on speech.

With the dawning of the 21st century, arguments against free speech as such became commonplace, and passions rose to the point of outright violence.

Before this year, I doubt that we would have seen an opinion editor of Berkeley’s Daily Californian maintain, in defense of violent “black bloc” protests against right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, that “asking people to maintain peaceful dialogue with those who legitimately do not think their lives matter is a violent act.”

The intense hatred of racial “microaggressions” is flourishing on campuses just as state and national Republican officials are zealously practicing macroaggressions: infringing on voting rights, affirmative action and progressive advances in criminal justice.

While shortsighted activists focus on slights (real, imagined and arguable) at hand, the political powers that be are indisputably rolling back equal rights directly and profoundly where most people live — off campus.

When defenders of racial equality take the bait and obsess about a few loathsome provocations, they plunge into their adversaries’ trap, diverted from the political arena where democracy and equality badly need them.

The idea that there is no way for the vast accumulation of money to “go right” is hardly anywhere to be seen.

extreme wealth remained morally suspect, with the rich bearing particular scrutiny and stigmatization during periods like the Gilded Age. This stigma persisted until relatively recently; only in the 1970s did political shifts cause executive salaries skyrocket, and the current effectively unprecedented inequality in income (and wealth) begin to appear, without any significant public complaint or lament.

The story of how a stigma fades is always murky, but contributing factors are not hard to identify. For one, think tanks have become increasingly partisan over the past several decades, particularly on the right: Certain conservative institutions, enjoying the backing of billionaires such as the Koch brothers, have thrown a ton of money at pseudo-academics and “thought leaders” to normalize and legitimate obscene piles of lucre. They produced arguments that suggest that high salaries naturally flowed from extreme talent and merit, thus baptizing wealth as simply some excellent people’s wholly legitimate rewards. These arguments were happily regurgitated by conservative media figures and politicians, eventually seeping into the broader public and replacing the folk wisdom of yore

If you’ve got as little as 30 seconds and a decent internet connection, you can help combat the deforestation of the Amazon. 

to build an artificial intelligence model that can recognize signs of deforestation. That data can be used to alert governments and conservation organizations where intervention is needed and to inform policies that protect vital ecosystems. It may even one day predict where deforestation is likely to happen next.

To monitor deforestation, conservation organizations need an eye in the sky.

WRI’s Global Forest Watch online tracking system receives images of the world’s forests taken every few days by NASA satellites. A simple computer algorithm scans the images, flagging instances where before there were trees and now there are not. But slight disturbances, such as clouds, can trip up the computer, so experts are increasingly interested in using artificial intelligence.

Inman was surprised how willing people have been to spend their time clicking on abstract-looking pictures of the Amazon.

Look at these nine blocks and make a judgment about each one. Does that satellite image look like a situation where human beings have transformed the landscape in some way?” Inman explained.

It’s not always easy; that’s the point. For example, a brown patch in the trees could be the result of burning to clear land for agriculture (earning a check mark for human impact), or it could be the result of a natural forest fire (no check mark). Keen users might be able to spot subtle signs of intervention the computer would miss, like the thin yellow line of a dirt road running through the clearing. 

SAS’s website offers a handful of examples comparing natural forest features and manmade changes. 

users have analyzed almost 41,000 images, covering an area of rainforest nearly the size of the state of Montana. Deforestation caused by human activity is evident in almost 2 in 5 photos.

The researchers hope to use historical images of these new geographies to create a predictive model that could identify areas most at risk of future deforestation. If they can show that their AI model is successful, it could be useful for NGOs, governments and forest monitoring bodies, enabling them to carefully track forest changes and respond by sending park rangers and conservation teams to threatened areas. In the meantime, it’s a great educational tool for the citizen scientists who use the app

Users simply select the squares in which they’ve spotted some indication of human impact: the tell-tale quilt of farm plots, a highway, a suspiciously straight edge of tree line. 

we have still had people from 80 different countries come onto the app and make literally hundreds of judgments that enabled us to resolve 40,000 images,

one that has conservative groups wrestling for control over how climate science will be taught to American students. The science classroom, after all, remains the dominant venue in which those students first encounter the topic, and it greatly informs how students eventually square-up to the veracity of climate change — either as something they believe to be happening and worth responding to politically, or as a phenomenon of nature, underserving of public funds and political action.

The outcome matters: Whoever wins over the minds of this upcoming cohort of American voters will, to a large extent, shape the nation’s policies on climate change for decades to come.

“Teachers are facing pressure to not only eliminate or de-emphasize climate change science, but also to introduce non-scientific ideas in science classrooms,” the statement said.

For advocates of inserting climate change skepticism into the classroom, the notion of “teaching both sides of the debate” is a familiar refrain, and it’s one used to mask the more fundamental motive: Fostering doubt in students that the scientific community conclusively agrees climate change is occurring.

For those science teachers who remain in the classroom, a comprehensive understanding of climate science itself is not a given. One recent report found that less than half of K-12 science teachers received formal climate science training during their own college education — a comprehension void that helps explain why political ideology has been shown to be the most consistent indicator of how a teacher presents climate science to their own students.

Trying to continue with lessons on climate science despite this intensifying atmosphere of hostility has forced some teachers to become savvier — or more secretive — about how they present the information to their students. In Texas, Nina Corley is careful to keep explicit mentions of climate change out of her lessons, for fear that her skeptical administrators might try to censor the science. “The administrators in a school can have total control, because they’re your boss, you have to remember that. It’s going to be how you word it,” she said. “I’m not going to say my lesson plan is on climate change today, I’ll just talk about how we’re investigating the effects of carbon dioxide.”

Recalling one student who was hostile to her lessons on climate change, Erin Stutzman realized the more personal ramifications catalyzed by the student changing his mind. “He was tightly engrossed in the skepticism, that belief was engrained in him. And his initial resistance wasn’t to the science, really, it was that someone was challenging his parents and his friend’s parents,”

Saying he had no regrets, he added: "I believe in all circumstances I behaved reasonably and legally. The legal rules do not inevitably cover all circumstances - including those I found myself in." Also on Monday, Johnson expressed "regret" for the "confusion, anger and pain" experienced by the British people as a result of the controversy; when pressed on whether he believes Cummings' decision has compromised the government's coronavirus message, Johnson doubled down on his support for Cummings, asserting, "I do not believe that anybody at Number 10 has done anything to undermine our message."

"The regulations made clear, I believe, that risks to the health of a small child were an exceptional situation."

To talk of the British sense of fair play is almost a cliché. But there is certainly a particular sensitivity among Britons to suggestions of hypocrisy which have thus far thwarted Cummings' attempts to brush off criticism of his excursion, and which contrast with, say, the relative lack of fuss in the US over the revelation that Ivanka Trump, President Donald Trump's daughter, traveled from Washington DC to New Jersey to celebrate Passover last month.

A controversial figure who relishes his role as an outsider, he also has a common touch when it comes to distilling a message with a brilliance complemented by Johnson's own flair for capturing the national mood. So while it was Johnson, then-Mayor of London, who in 2016 sensed an appetite for leaving the EU which his more senior colleagues missed, it was Cummings, head of the Vote Leave Campaign, who boiled it down to the simple and devastatingly effective slogan of "Take Back Control."

For a man known for his gregarious nature, the British Prime Minister has few close political friends; his inexperienced cabinet was appointed as much for their loyalty and support for his key policy of leading the UK out of the European Union as any long-term affinity with Johnson.

At the start of the lockdown, Dr. Catherine Calderwood, Scotland's Chief Medical Officer, fell on her sword after admitting two overnight visits at her seaside holiday cottage, having fronted the campaign urging Scots to stay home. Though Calderwood apologized for her actions and initially said she planned to stay on in her post, she later released a statement that she had quit and acknowledging that the "justifiable focus" on her actions could pose a distraction to the response to the pandemic.

As senior adviser since summer 2019 when Johnson became Prime Minister, the notoriously prickly Cummings has rubbed many Downing Street denizens the wrong way. But when coronavirus hit, it was he who crafted the message, "Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives," which has come to define Britain's battle against the virus and the protective shield the country threw around its beloved health service.

The hitherto wildly popular Johnson's favorability ratings have begun to slip while a recent poll by YouGov found 49% disapproved of the Prime Minister's path out of lockdown compared to 36% who supported it.

The former Chief Constable of Durham Police, Mike Barton, has warned that Cummings' behavior, and the Prime Minister's defense of it, will make attempts to enforce the lockdown impossible, potentially endangering the slow but steady progress the UK has made in reducing the spread of the virus.

The consequences could be even more serious if a mass loss of faith in both the Johnson government and his lockdown results in the public breaking the rules just at the moment the Prime Minister is urging them to stand firm.

Federal judges who have reached age 65 are eligible to take "senior status" depending on their number of years on the bench. That allows them to maintain a reduced caseload, while creating a vacancy on the court

Should Trump lose his reelection bid to presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, any future vacancies could potentially be filled by liberal judges. If Trump remains in office but Democrats take control of the Senate, his nominations could be blocked by the new majority.

"Obviously, the senior judges need to let the White House know in advance of the actual date so that we can be prepared to move the new nominee. As I said, my motto for the year is leave no vacancy behind, and that's exactly what I mean," the Kentucky Republican told Hewitt in an interview in February.

Speaking late last year to Hewitt, McConnell remarked that "one of every four of the US circuit judges in the country have been put on the bench" during Trump's tenure.

The simple framework that Haaland and Botero describe can be applied to any kind of environmental extreme including flooding, wildfires, heatwaves, droughts, cold spells, tornadoes and hurricanes -- any and all of which might be considered part of the "new normal" under climate change.

"Our results challenge the idea that species that have been historically exposed to more variable environments are better suited to cope with climate change," Botero said.

"In this case, our model suggests that the typical inhabitants of these places are likely to be more vulnerable to hotter temperatures than to longer or more widespread heat waves."

"While this simple conservation action is unlikely to completely shift the balance from a 'conservative' to a 'care-free' evolutionary response to extreme events, it may nevertheless reduce the strongest vulnerability of these 'conservative' lizard populations," Botero said. "It might just buy them enough time to accumulate sufficient evolutionary changes in their toes and limbs to meet the new demands of their altered habitat."

The wiser response to the impending Republican electoral defeat is to learn from Trump's insights—separate them from Trump’s volatile personality and noxious attitudes—and use them to develop better, more workable, and more broadly acceptable policies for a 21st-century center-right.

The democratic world today is roiled by a tide of nationalist populism.

According to many theorists, reminders of death compel us to seek immortality.

In exposure therapy, carefully exposing patients to the source of their anxiety – an object, an animal, or even a memory – reduces their fear. In the same way, perhaps this most recent taboo-breaking trend will inoculate us psychologically, and make us stronger in the face of death.

But political puritans such as Cruz and Sanders tend to make policy the way they explain the world — with unwarranted, clumsy simplicity.

Authentically believing that the whole country secretly agrees with your agenda and will join you on the barricades is not a virtue, it is a fantasy. Sincerely proposing poorly thought-out policy does not change the fact that it is poorly thought-out policy.

A five-member conservative or liberal majority on the Supreme Court can impose a partisan political agenda on the country without too much difficulty, often with one key justice dictating the results. With eight justices equally divided among conservative and liberals, the court can only act decisively when at least one justice switches sides. This is a state of affairs to be celebrated, not lamented, and may be appreciated when the court is fully staffed again.