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This is not what the G.O.P. seems inclined to do. Instead it lets lukewarmers poke holes in liberal proposals for climate insurance policies, and then sits back satisfied that no insurance policy, no extra effort, is necessary at all.

the anti-Paris sentiments that moved Trump weren’t entirely reality-based either. And a clear Republican plan for how to “prepare for and adapt to whatever climate change brings” does not actually exist.

In its absence, lukewarmism is a critique without an affirmative agenda, a theory of the case without a party that’s prepared to ever act on it.

I also want to concede two problems with this approach. The first is that no less than alarmism, lukewarmism can be vulnerable to cherry-picking and selection bias

when you’re dealing with long-term trends, there’s a lot of evidence to choose from

This means that every lukewarmer, including especially those in positions of political authority, should be pressed to identify trends that would push them toward greater alarmism and a sharper focus on the issue.

the closer the real trend gets to the worst-case projections, the more my lukewarmism will look Pollyannish and require substantial reassessment.

Republicans need to recognize finally that secure property rights, openness to global trade and a relatively low regulatory burden are much more important than fiscal policy for innovation, job creation and rising standards of

not only are sound safety nets popular, but they also increase the public’s tolerance for the dislocations of a dynamic free-market economy

Third, the idea that reducing taxpayer-financed government spending is the key to giving people more freedom and revving up the economy encourages conservative hostility to government as such

The Republican legislative agenda is stalled because party members have boxed themselves in with their own bad ideas about what freedom and rising prosperity require. A new pro-growth economic platform that sets aside small-government monomania and focuses instead on protecting citizens’ basic rights to commit “capitalist acts between consenting adults,” as the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick put it, has both practical and political advantages

a generous and effective safety net can be embraced as a tool to promote and sustain a culture of freedom, innovation and risk taking. Politically, repairing and improving the slipshod infrastructure of the safety net would liberate Republicans from the bad faith of attacking the welfare state in one breath, halfheartedly promising not to cut entitlements in the next and then breaking that promise once in power.

Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe in their Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing (2010) state that such wisdom is greatly needed

The authors quote Aristotle and give the example of a man practicing practical wisdom and mention that “he had the self-control—the emotion-regulating skills—to choose rightly.”

Psychologist, futurist, and editor of The Wisdom Page Tom Lombardo also stresses the importance of temperance and self-control. In his new book on Future Consciousness

he includes a whole chapter (of 45 pages) on “Self-Control and Self-Responsibility.” In it he cites favorably two authors who claim that “most human problems are due to a lack of self-control.” He also states that “we cannot flourish without self-responsibility, self-control, and . . . . one of the most unethical forms of thinking and behavior in life . . . is to abdicate self-responsibility and self-control in ourselves.”

In Inside Obama’s Brain (2009), journalist Sasha Abramsky talked to over a hundred people who knew Obama and reported that “during the election campaign Obama almost never got upset, or panicked, by day-to-day shifts in momentum, by the ups and downs of opinion polls.” Almost a year into his presidency, Abramsky refered to the president as “a voice of moderation in a corrosively shrill, partisan political milieu.”

Up until the end of his presidency, Obama maintained his self-control and temperance. As a Huffington Post piece noted in 2016, he “has been the model of temperance in office on all fronts.”

Just as many individuals have commented on Obama’s self-discipline and temperance, so too have many remarked on Trump’s lack of these virtues

In May 2017, Brooks stated: “At base, Trump is an infantalist. There are three tasks that most mature adults have sort of figured out by the time they hit 25. Trump has mastered none of them. Immaturity is becoming the dominant note of his presidency, lack of self-control his leitmotif.”

Two months later, Douthat opined about Trump: “He is nonetheless clearly impaired, gravely deficient somewhere at the intersection of reason and judgment and conscience and self-control. . . . This president should not be the president, and the sooner he is not, the better.”

Karl Rove, a former senior adviser to President George W. Bush, insisted that Trump “lacks the focus or self-discipline to do the basic work required of a president.”

At about the same time former Republican senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) declared “The question is, does he have the self-discipline and some control over his ego to be able to say ‘I’m wrong’ every now and then? I haven’t seen that.

it is Trump’s narcissism and lack of humility that are his chief faults and hinder him most from being even a mediocre president.

It’s because he’s a reactionary fantasist, whose policies stir the emotions but are stalled in the headwinds of reality

These are not conservative reforms, thought-through, possible to implement, strategically planned. They are the unhinged fantasies of a 71-year-old Fox News viewer imagining he can reconstruct the late 1950s. They cannot actually be implemented, without huge damage.

In Britain, meanwhile, Brexit is in exactly the same place — a reactionary policy that is close to impossible to implement without economic and diplomatic catastrophe

Brexit too was built on Trump-like lies, and a Trump-like fantasy that 50 years of integration with the E.U. could be magically abolished overnight, and that the Britain of the early 1970s could be instantly re-conjured. No actual conservative can possibly believe that such radical, sudden change won’t end in tears.

“The researchers start by simulating what happens when extra links are introduced into a social network. Their network consists of men and women from different races who are randomly distributed. In this model, everyone wants to marry a person of the opposite sex but can only marry someone with whom a connection exists. This leads to a society with a relatively low level of interracial marriage. But if the researchers add random links between people from different ethnic groups, the level of interracial marriage changes dramatically.”

the line to draw, it seems to me, is when a speech is actually shut down or rendered impossible by disruption. A fiery protest that initially prevents an event from starting is one thing; a disruption that prevents the speech taking place at all is another.

Maybe a college could set a time limit for protest — say, ten or fifteen minutes — after which the speaker must be heard, or penalties will be imposed. Heckling — that doesn’t prevent a speech — should also be tolerated to a reasonable extent. There’s a balance here that protects everyone’s free speech

dating apps are changing our society, by becoming the second-most common way straights meet partners, and by expanding the range of people we can meet.

here’s what’s intriguing: Correlated with that is a sustained, and hard-to-explain, rise in interracial marriage.

“It is intriguing that shortly after the introduction of the first dating websites in 1995, like Match.com, the percentage of new marriages created by interracial couples increased rapidly,” say the researchers. “The increase became steeper in the 2000s, when online dating became even more popular. Then, in 2014, the proportion of interracial marriages jumped again.” That was when Tinder took off.

Disruptions of events are, to my mind, integral to the exercise of free speech. Hecklers are part of the contentious and messy world of open debate. To suspend or, after three offenses, expel students for merely disrupting events is not so much to chill the possibility of dissent, but to freeze it altogether.

Even more encouraging, the marriages begun online seem to last longer than others.

I wonder if online dating doesn’t just expand your ability to meet more people of another race, by eliminating geography and the subtle grouping effect of race and class and education. Maybe it lowers some of the social inhibitions against interracial dating.

It’s always seemed to me that racism is deeply ingrained in human nature, and always will be, simply because our primate in-group aversion to members of an out-group expresses itself in racism, unless you actively fight it. You can try every law or custom to mitigate this, but it will only go so far.

I discovered that thoughtful progressives and thoughtful conservatives each suffered from different, deep fears about our political future. Progressives feared minoritarian rule. Conservatives feared majoritarian domination. Ending the filibuster, perversely enough, makes both fears more real.

The Republican Party has won exactly one popular vote for president since 1988, George W. Bush’s narrow 2.4 percent edge over John Kerry in 2004. Yet it won three presidential elections in that span of time

Republicans not only have a present electoral college advantage over Democrats, they also have inherent advantages in both the House and the Senate.

Do away with the filibuster, and it’s entirely possible that the next Republican government could enjoy immense legislative power without a majority of the popular vote. In fact, they could lose voters by margins numbering in the millions, yet still exercise decisive control over the government.

The Democratic Party is seeking to pass laws that would introduce dramatic changes in American elections, transform free speech doctrine, and potentially limit religious liberty.

The GOP, for example, is currently in the grips of a Trumpist base that prioritizes angry opposition over compromise. The party largely lacks a positive agenda, so (with some notable exceptions) its priority is clear: No compromise, even when compromise might be prudent. Stop the Democrats. Some Republicans have gone further, descending into a fantasy world of dark conspiracies.

Yes, through decentralization, de-escalation, and strategic moderation.

That means most Americans live in jurisdictions where, for example, election rules, civil rights laws, gun laws, and a wide variety of economic and social policies are within their partisan control.

Gridlock in Washington does not have to mean gridlock in government,

Research demonstrates that a majority of Americans are exhausted by partisan politics. Motivated minorities drive most American polarization.

A combination of redistricting reform and voting reforms like ranked-choice voting can limit the powers of partisan extremists. Ranked-choice voting—which allows voters to list candidates in order of preference—most notably can reduce the chances of highly-partisan pluralities dominating political primaries.

The answer to polarization and gridlock is not partisan escalation. Ending the filibuster would only ramp up partisan acrimony and increase the level of fear and anxiety around American elections. There are better paths through American division. We should try those before we enable drastic measures like majoritarian dominance or minoritarian control.

“What I’ve found throughout life is doing those things which you know are right, which respond to the promptings of your conscience, allows you to have a greater degree of happiness and satisfaction than if you just do things to try and get ahead,”

The thing that I’ve been most assiduously tracking for the last 20 years is the sort of crossover and mainstreaming of the radical right within the mainstream conservative movement. We saw it during the Bush years, but it really started taking off after Obama was elected.

During the Trump years, he just basically took the lid off Pandora’s box and all the demons came out. Right now, we’re hoping at least to try to get the lid back on, but we’re going to be dealing with all those demons that came flying out for many years afterwards.

There’s now a sizable section of America that might not be violent extremists or adhere to violent extremist ideology but has been radicalized to this point that they believe in conspiracies and openly support anti-democratic action.

I don’t see removing Fox News from the air, but I think that the organization itself really needs a come-to-Jesus moment to recognize that it’s inflicted tremendous harm on the country and really work to repair that damage.

But after so many years, a lot of these radicalizing elements have become so embedded in politics and in the media. It seems like that is a very difficult thing to disentangle.

The plan on Gretchen Whitmer is particularly striking. If I had to guess, what we’re going to be seeing in the next four years is a combination of lone wolf action, as well as organized paramilitary bands engaging in domestic terrorism.

He was part of the group that managed to get on the grounds last week during a protest, and there is this video of him talking to this news reporter from one of the local TV stations and telling her “we’re gonna start killing you, rest in peace, better start looking over your shoulder because we’re gonna start killing all of you.”

I believe, there was a lot of talk about “we need to start targeting the media.” 

. I think that journalists would be wise, especially if they’re doing any reporting on this stuff, to take measures to increase their personal security, and I think news organizations need to be providing bodyguards and security assistance for reporters who are out there in the field.

a recent psychological study suggests a simpler explanation. Its core idea is what you might call “oppression creep” or, more neutrally, “prevalence-induced concept change.” The more progress we observe, the greater the remaining injustices appear.

We seem incapable of keeping a concept stable over time when the prevalence of that concept declines.

lthough modern societies have made extraordinary progress in solving a wide range of social problems, from poverty and illiteracy to violence and infant mortality, the majority of people believe that the world is getting worse. The fact that concepts grow larger when their instances grow smaller may be one source of that pessimism.

“In other words, when the prevalence of blue dots decreased, participants’ concept of blue expanded to include dots that it had previously excluded.”

When blue dots became rare, purple dots began to look blue; when threatening faces became rare, neutral faces began to appear threatening … This happened even when the change in the prevalence of instances was abrupt, even when participants were explicitly told that the prevalence of instances would change, and even when participants were instructed and paid to ignore these changes.

We seem to be wired to assume a given threat remains just as menacing even when its actual prevalence has declined:

We see relatively, not absolutely. We change our standards all the time, depending on context.

This study may help explain why, in the midst of tremendous gains for gays, women, and racial minorities, we still insist more than ever that we live in a patriarchal, misogynist, white supremacist, homophobic era.

We never seem to be able to say: “Okay, we’re done now, we’ve got this, politics has done all it reasonably could, now let’s move on with our lives.” We can only ever say: “It’s worse than ever!” And fe

whatever the cause, the result is that we steadfastly refuse to accept the fact of progress, in a cycle of eternal frustration at what injustices will always remain

picking someone who has bent the truth so often about so many things — her ancestry, her commitment to serving a full term as senator, the schools her kids went to, the job her father had (according to her brother), or the time she was “fired” for being pregnant — is an unnecessary burden.

The Democrat I think is most likely to lose to Trump is Elizabeth Warren.I admire her ambition and grit and aggression, but nominating a woke, preachy Harvard professor plays directly into Trump’s hands

Pete Buttigieg’s appeal has waned for me.

over time, the combination of his perfect résumé, his actorly ability to change register as he unpacks a sentence, and his smoothness and self-love have begun to worry me. My fear is that his appeal will fade

Klobuchar, to my mind, is the better midwestern option. She is an engaging and successful politician. But there’s a reason she seemingly can’t get more traction. She just doesn’t command a room

I so want Biden to be ten years younger. I can’t help but be very fond of the man, and he does have a mix of qualities that appeal to both African-Americans and white working-class midwesterners. What I worry about is his constant stumbling in his speech, his muddling of words, those many moments when his eyes close, and his face twitches, as he tries to finish a sentence

Sanders has been on the far left all his life, and the oppo research the GOP throws at him could be brutal. He’s a man, after all, who sided with a Marxist-Leninist party that supported Ayatollah Khomeini during the hostage crisis in 1979. He loved the monstrous dictator Fidel Castro and took his 1988 honeymoon in the Soviet Union, no less, where he openly and publicly criticized his own country and praised many aspects of the Soviet system

On two key issues, immigration and identity politics, Bernie has sensibilities and instincts that could neutralize these two strong points for Trump. Sanders has always loathed the idea of open borders and the effect they have on domestic wages, and he doesn’t fit well with the entire woke industry. He still believes in class struggle, not the culture war

Biden has an advantage because of Obama, his appeal to the midwestern voters (if he wins back Pennsylvania, that would work wonders), and his rapport with African-Americans. But he also seems pretty out of it.

they are rebuking Trump and the Republicans in a way we haven’t seen since the 2008 presidential” race

We see even people who self-identify as young Republicans disagree with Trump on almost every issue

A leftist activist in France was convicted and fined for insulting former French President Nicolas Sarkozy by holding a sign that said “get lost, jerk”; ironically, those were the exact words Sarkozy himself uttered when a citizen refused to shake his hand at a public fair (the European Court of Human Rights ultimately overturned the Frenchman’s conviction).

Even if “hate speech” laws were magically applied by authorities exactly as advocates would wish — whereby only the ideas one hates would be suppressed and punished while the ideas one loves would be allowed to flourish — there would still be very good reasons to oppose such laws.

As Cole wrote: “When white supremacists called a rally the following week in Boston, they mustered only a handful of supporters. They were vastly outnumbered by tens of thousands of counter-protesters who peacefully marched through the streets to condemn white supremacy, racism, and hate. Boston proved yet again that the most powerful response to speech that we hate is not suppression but more speech.”

As The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf recently explained, there is a grave irony at the heart of these newfound liberal desires for “hate speech” censorship laws: The people who would implement and interpret them are those in power, people like Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions, GOP governors and legislators, and their litany of right-wing judges. It takes little imagination to see how such laws would be applied, and against whom. Indeed, the U.S. history of allowing such restrictions is that they have been used against exactly the groups that censorship advocates think they are protecting.

Under-funding this stimulus will drag the global economy down. And any appearance that corporations are getting a more fair deal than individuals will make people not want to comply. A lack of compliance will drag on the crisis.

When it falls into ruin, the entire global economy drags. We saw that happen during the financial crisis of 2008.

Congress could under-fund the US coronavirus stimulus package. If they do, they put not only the economy but the effort to fight the virus at risk.

this weekend the Senate was unable to pass aid legislation

Democrats also rejected the bill over a lack of labor protections that would only mandate corporations keep employees "to the extent possible." They want more limits on executive compensation and share buybacks, and they want more money for healthcare workers. They accuse Republicans of being cheap, and writing a deal that favors corporations over average Americans.

The only proposal that comes close to being generous enough for individuals comes from Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib. It would give a prepaid card with $2,000 to every American. That card would then be recharged with $1,000 monthly until one year after the end of the coronavirus crisis. This is the kind of plan that will make Americans believe the government has their back, not just the backs of big corporations.

The distrust that is bred by corruption will make it much harder to fight this virus, potentially dragging out the crisis. The vast majority of Americans already think that our lack of trust in each other and our government makes it hard to solve problems, according to Pew Research. If Americans feel like this whole aid package is a handout to big corporations — which they also distrust — they may stop listening to authorities.

Goldman Sachs estimates that the recession brought on by fighting off coronavirus will trough in April, knocking 10% off US GDP. Over time, bank analysts wrote last week, the economy should begin to grow again incrementally. How fast depends on how well Americans comply with government social-distancing mandates. Americans have to want to comply.

Small and midsize companies make up 83% of the US economy, and thousands of workers are already out of a job across the country. Means-testing initial payments to individuals — that is, restricting who gets the checks based on income — is a waste of time.

And yet, those accounts, while surely sincere, are also so simplistically heartwarming that they're misleading -- bowing to America's impulse to see certain black lives as a balm for the bruises of the political moment.

Consider the congressman's relationship with President Donald Trump. In March 2017, when the administration was only a few months old, Cummings met with Trump in the Oval Office. The two reportedly spoke openly about race, with the former explaining how the latter's comments about black communities, which he had characterized as poverty-addled hellscapes, were "insulting" and that "probably nobody (had) ever told (him) that."

Rather than retreat into defensiveness, Trump replied: "You're right -- nobody has ever told me that."

"To know our whites is to understand the psychology of white people and the elasticity of whiteness. It is to be intimate with some white persons but to critically withhold faith in white people categorically," Cottom explained. "It is to anticipate white people's emotions and fears and grievances because their issues are singularly our problem. To know our whites is to survive without letting bitterness rot your soul."

Last week alone, though, 1.6 million people newly applied for unemployment benefits. That’s the equivalent of 2,300 Carrier plants

Somehow, for years, the four tragic deaths in Benghazi consumed the agenda of six GOP-controlled congressional committees and the programming of the most-watched cable news channel. But today, a deadly shock magnified by government ineptitude that has led to 46,000 times as many lives lost “is what it is.”

the coronavirus death toll is about 46,000 Benghazis

According to congressional investigators, Navarro negotiated a contract that resulted in the government overpaying for ventilators by $500 million. (The contract was canceled Monday.) He also championed a $765 million federal loan to Eastman Kodak to transform it into a drugmaker. (The loan has since unraveled and is the subject of a securities investigation.)

So how many taxpayer dollars was Navarro involved in wasting through these two deals alone? Measured in units that should be familiar to consumers of right-wing news, it’s roughly two Solyndras.

The debt increase under Trump during a single term is on track to surpass that under Obama across two terms.

For each Hillary Clinton private email scandal (one), there are at least eight senior Trump officials who have reportedly used private email to conduct official business

For every Obama-era incident involving supposed retaliation against political opponents, there are literally dozens of instances of Trump trying to use the power of his office to punish perceived enemie