History Readings

Even if the AfD can form a coalition government somewhere in the east of the country, where all three of next month’s elections — in Saxony and Brandenburg, in addition to Thuringia — are taking place, it may not be able to rule.

he German Constitution includes provisions that allow the federal government to depose a regional government that intends to undermine democratic norms. While the law is unclear, it seems inevitable that an AfD government would create some form of constitutional crisis.

Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution, a powerful domestic intelligence service, has identified the AfD in Saxony and Thuringia as right-wing extremist organizations. Sharing information with extremist organizations is a serious crime. On the other hand, there are legal obligations to share information among law enforcement agencies.

the party’s ideas and electoral tactics have quietly gone mainstream. Who needs the AfD when Chancellor Olaf Scholz is willing to call for deportations “on a grand scale” on the cover of Der Spiegel or when the Green Party leader Robert Habeck is happy to traffic in fear and xenophobia? In the aftermath of last week’s terrorist attack in the western city of Solingen, in which three people were killed, politicians of all stripes have predictably pushed for more deportations and tighter restrictions on migration.

all too often, Germany has focused on the symbols of Nazi injustice while ignoring or even condoning the continuation of the brutality they represent. In practice, that has meant the far-right penetration of the security services, the laundering of extreme ideas in the media and the willingness of other political parties to adopt racialized fearmongering as an electoral tactic.

While the AfD has been kept from power, the kind of hateful language that built its support has become a significant part of German political life.

This maneuver, sanitizing the past by selectively rebuking it, has held Germany in fairly good stead until now. But as September’s elections will make plain, the demons of both past and present cannot be denied.

But the C.D.C. director, Dr. Mandy Cohen, called the disease endemic last week, and the agency decided earlier this year to retire its five-day Covid isolation guidelines and instead include Covid in its guidance for other respiratory infections, instructing people with symptoms of Covid, RSV or the flu to stay home for 24 hours after their fever lift

For vulnerable groups, the coronavirus will always present a heightened risk of serious infection and even death. Long Covid, a multifaceted syndrome, has afflicted at least 400 million people worldwide, researchers recently estimated, and most of those who have suffered from it have said they still have not recovered.

“But it certainly has a sort of social definition — a virus that’s around us all the time — and if you want to take that one, then we’re definitely there.”

In a Gallup poll this spring, about 59 percent of respondents said they believed the pandemic was “over” in the United States, and the proportion of people who said they felt concerned about catching Covid has been generally declining for two years. Among people who rated their own health positively, almost 9 in 10 said they were not worried about getting infected.

“But,” he said, “it is just as important to help people onto an off-ramp — to be clear when we are no longer tied to the train tracks, staring at the headlights barreling down.”

“We’ve decided, ‘Well, the risk is OK.’ But nobody has defined ‘risk,’ and nobody has defined ‘OK,’” Dr. Osterholm said. “You can’t get much more informed than this group.”

Dr. Hanage defended the hard-line mandates from the early years of the pandemic as “not just appropriate, but absolutely necessary.”

in Paris last month, the organizing committee for the 2024 Olympics offered no testing requirements or processes for reporting infections, and so few countries issued rules to their athletes that the ones that did made news.

There were high-fives, group hugs, throngs of crowds and plenty of transmission to show for it. At least 40 athletes tested positive for the virus, including several who earned medals in spite of it — as well as an unknowable number of spectators, since French health officials (who had once enforced an eight-month-long nightly Covid curfew) did not even count.

In the United States, about 57 percent of people said their lives had not returned to prepandemic “normal” — and the majority said they believed it never would. But the current backdrop of American life tells a different story.

the newfound complacency can as much be attributed to confusion as to fatigue. The virus remains remarkably unpredictable: Covid variants are still evolving much faster than influenza variants, and officials who want to “pigeonhole” Covid into having a well-defined seasonality will be unnerved to discover that the 10 surges in the United States so far have been evenly distributed throughout all four seasons, he said.

Those factors, combined with waning immunity, point to a virus that still evades our collective understanding — in the context of a collective psychology that is ready to move on. Even at a meeting of 200 infectious disease experts in Washington earlier this month — a number of whom were over 65 and had not been vaccinated in four to six months — hardly anybody donned a mask.

That could be, at least partly, a result of personal experience: About 70 percent of people said they had been through a Covid infection already, suggesting that they believed they had some immunity or at least that they could muscle through it again if need be.

Asked about how the perception of risk has evolved over time, Dr. Osterholm laughed.

“Lewis Carroll once said something like, ‘If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there,’” he said. “I feel in many ways, that’s where we’re at.”Image

We are also producing ever more powerful weapons of mass destruction, from thermonuclear bombs to doomsday viruses. Our leaders don’t lack information about these dangers, yet instead of collaborating to find solutions, they are edging closer to a global war.

Despite – or perhaps because of – our hoard of data, we are continuing to spew greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, pollute rivers and oceans, cut down forests, destroy entire habitats, drive countless species to extinction, and jeopardise the ecological foundations of our own species

For most of our networks have been built and maintained by spreading fictions, fantasies and mass delusions – ranging from enchanted broomsticks to financial systems. Our problem, then, is a network problem. Specifically, it is an information problem. For information is the glue that holds networks together, and when people are fed bad information they are likely to make bad decisions, no matter how wise and kind they personally are.

Traditionally, the term “AI” has been used as an acronym for artificial intelligence. But it is perhaps better to think of it as an acronym for alien intelligence

AI is an unprecedented threat to humanity because it is the first technology in history that can make decisions and create new ideas by itself. All previous human inventions have empowered humans, because no matter how powerful the new tool was, the decisions about its usage remained in our hands

Nuclear bombs do not themselves decide whom to kill, nor can they improve themselves or invent even more powerful bombs. In contrast, autonomous drones can decide by themselves who to kill, and AIs can create novel bomb designs, unprecedented military strategies and better AIs.

AI isn’t a tool – it’s an agent. The biggest threat of AI is that we are summoning to Earth countless new powerful agents that are potentially more intelligent and imaginative than us, and that we don’t fully understand or control.

repreneurs such as Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Mustafa Suleyman have warned that AI could destroy our civilisation. In a 2023 survey of 2,778 AI researchers, more than a third gave at least a 10% chance of advanced AI leading to outcomes as bad as human extinction.

As AI evolves, it becomes less artificial (in the sense of depending on human designs) and more alien

AI isn’t progressing towards human-level intelligence. It is evolving an alien type of intelligence.

generative AIs like GPT-4 already create new poems, stories and images. This trend will only increase and accelerate, making it more difficult to understand our own lives. Can we trust computer algorithms to make wise decisions and create a better world? That’s a much bigger gamble than trusting an enchanted broom to fetch water

it is more than just human lives we are gambling on. AI is already capable of producing art and making scientific discoveries by itself. In the next few decades, it will be likely to gain the ability even to create new life forms, either by writing genetic code or by inventing an inorganic code animating inorganic entities. AI could therefore alter the course not just of our species’ history but of the evolution of all life forms.

“Then … came move number 37,” writes Suleyman. “It made no sense. AlphaGo had apparently blown it, blindly following an apparently losing strategy no professional player would ever pursue. The live match commentators, both professionals of the highest ranking, said it was a ‘very strange move’ and thought it was ‘a mistake’.

as the endgame approached, that ‘mistaken’ move proved pivotal. AlphaGo won again. Go strategy was being rewritten before our eyes. Our AI had uncovered ideas that hadn’t occurred to the most brilliant players in thousands of years.”

“In AI, the neural networks moving toward autonomy are, at present, not explainable. You can’t walk someone through the decision-making process to explain precisely why an algorithm produced a specific prediction. Engineers can’t peer beneath the hood and easily explain in granular detail what caused something to happen. GPT‑4, AlphaGo and the rest are black boxes, their outputs and decisions based on opaque and impossibly intricate chains of minute signals.”

Yet during all those millennia, human minds have explored only certain areas in the landscape of Go. Other areas were left untouched, because human minds just didn’t think to venture there. AI, being free from the limitations of human minds, discovered and explored these previously hidden areas.

Second, move 37 demonstrated the unfathomability of AI. Even after AlphaGo played it to achieve victory, Suleyman and his team couldn’t explain how AlphaGo decided to play it.

Move 37 is an emblem of the AI revolution for two reasons. First, it demonstrated the alien nature of AI. In east Asia, Go is considered much more than a game: it is a treasured cultural tradition. For more than 2,500 years, tens of millions of people have played Go, and entire schools of thought have developed around the game, espousing different strategies and philosophies

The rise of unfathomable alien intelligence poses a threat to all humans, and poses a particular threat to democracy. If more and more decisions about people’s lives are made in a black box, so voters cannot understand and challenge them, democracy ceases to functio

Human voters may keep choosing a human president, but wouldn’t this be just an empty ceremony? Even today, only a small fraction of humanity truly understands the financial system

As the 2007‑8 financial crisis indicated, some complex financial devices and principles were intelligible to only a few financial wizards. What happens to democracy when AIs create even more complex financial devices and when the number of humans who understand the financial system drops to zero?

Translating Goethe’s cautionary fable into the language of modern finance, imagine the following scenario: a Wall Street apprentice fed up with the drudgery of the financial workshop creates an AI called Broomstick, provides it with a million dollars in seed money, and orders it to make more money.

n pursuit of more dollars, Broomstick not only devises new investment strategies, but comes up with entirely new financial devices that no human being has ever thought about.

many financial areas were left untouched, because human minds just didn’t think to venture there. Broomstick, being free from the limitations of human minds, discovers and explores these previously hidden areas, making financial moves that are the equivalent of AlphaGo’s move 37.

For a couple of years, as Broomstick leads humanity into financial virgin territory, everything looks wonderful. The markets are soaring, the money is flooding in effortlessly, and everyone is happy. Then comes a crash bigger even than 1929 or 2008. But no human being – either president, banker or citizen – knows what caused it and what could be done about it

AI, too, is a global problem. Accordingly, to understand the new computer politics, it is not enough to examine how discrete societies might react to AI. We also need to consider how AI might change relations between societies on a global level.

As long as humanity stands united, we can build institutions that will regulate AI, whether in the field of finance or war. Unfortunately, humanity has never been united. We have always been plagued by bad actors, as well as by disagreements between good actors. The rise of AI poses an existential danger to humankind, not because of the malevolence of computers, but because of our own shortcomings.

errorists might use AI to instigate a global pandemic. The terrorists themselves may have little knowledge of epidemiology, but the AI could synthesise for them a new pathogen, order it from commercial laboratories or print it in biological 3D printers, and devise the best strategy to spread it around the world, via airports or food supply chain

desperate governments request help from the only entity capable of understanding what is happening – Broomstick. The AI makes several policy recommendations, far more audacious than quantitative easing – and far more opaque, too. Broomstick promises that these policies will save the day, but human politicians – unable to understand the logic behind Broomstick’s recommendations – fear they might completely unravel the financial and even social fabric of the world. Should they listen to the AI?

Human civilisation could also be devastated by weapons of social mass destruction, such as stories that undermine our social bonds. An AI developed in one country could be used to unleash a deluge of fake news, fake money and fake humans so that people in numerous other countries lose the ability to trust anything or anyone.

Many societies – both democracies and dictatorships – may act responsibly to regulate such usages of AI, clamp down on bad actors and restrain the dangerous ambitions of their own rulers and fanatics. But if even a handful of societies fail to do so, this could be enough to endanger the whole of humankind

Thus, a paranoid dictator might hand unlimited power to a fallible AI, including even the power to launch nuclear strikes. If the AI then makes an error, or begins to pursue an unexpected goal, the result could be catastrophic, and not just for that country

magine a situation – in 20 years, say – when somebody in Beijing or San Francisco possesses the entire personal history of every politician, journalist, colonel and CEO in your country: every text they ever sent, every web search they ever made, every illness they suffered, every sexual encounter they enjoyed, every joke they told, every bribe they took. Would you still be living in an independent country, or would you now be living in a data colony?

What happens when your country finds itself utterly dependent on digital infrastructures and AI-powered systems over which it has no effective control?

In the economic realm, previous empires were based on material resources such as land, cotton and oil. This placed a limit on the empire’s ability to concentrate both economic wealth and political power in one place. Physics and geology don’t allow all the world’s land, cotton or oil to be moved to one country

t is different with the new information empires. Data can move at the speed of light, and algorithms don’t take up much space. Consequently, the world’s algorithmic power can be concentrated in a single hub. Engineers in a single country might write the code and control the keys for all the crucial algorithms that run the entire world.

AI and automation therefore pose a particular challenge to poorer developing countries. In an AI-driven global economy, the digital leaders claim the bulk of the gains and could use their wealth to retrain their workforce and profit even more

Meanwhile, the value of unskilled labourers in left-behind countries will decline, causing them to fall even further behind. The result might be lots of new jobs and immense wealth in San Francisco and Shanghai, while many other parts of the world face economic ruin.

AI is expected to add $15.7tn (£12.3tn) to the global economy by 2030. But if current trends continue, it is projected that China and North America – the two leading AI superpowers – will together take home 70% of that money.

uring the cold war, the iron curtain was in many places literally made of metal: barbed wire separated one country from another. Now the world is increasingly divided by the silicon curtain. The code on your smartphone determines on which side of the silicon curtain you live, which algorithms run your life, who controls your attention and where your data flows.

Cyberweapons can bring down a country’s electric grid, but they can also be used to destroy a secret research facility, jam an enemy sensor, inflame a political scandal, manipulate elections or hack a single smartphone. And they can do all that stealthily. They don’t announce their presence with a mushroom cloud and a storm of fire, nor do they leave a visible trail from launchpad to target

The two digital spheres may therefore drift further and further apart. For centuries, new information technologies fuelled the process of globalisation and brought people all over the world into closer contact. Paradoxically, information technology today is so powerful it can potentially split humanity by enclosing different people in separate information cocoons, ending the idea of a single shared human reality

For decades, the world’s master metaphor was the web. The master metaphor of the coming decades might be the cocoon.

Other countries or blocs, such as the EU, India, Brazil and Russia, may try to create their own digital cocoons,

Instead of being divided between two global empires, the world might be divided among a dozen empires.

The more the new empires compete against one another, the greater the danger of armed conflict.

The cold war between the US and the USSR never escalated into a direct military confrontation, largely thanks to the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. But the danger of escalation in the age of AI is bigger, because cyber warfare is inherently different from nuclear warfare.

US companies are now forbidden to export such chips to China. While in the short term this hampers China in the AI race, in the long term it pushes China to develop a completely separate digital sphere that will be distinct from the American digital sphere even in its smallest buildings.

The temptation to start a limited cyberwar is therefore big, and so is the temptation to escalate it.

A second crucial difference concerns predictability. The cold war was like a hyper-rational chess game, and the certainty of destruction in the event of nuclear conflict was so great that the desire to start a war was correspondingly small

Cyberwarfare lacks this certainty. Nobody knows for sure where each side has planted its logic bombs, Trojan horses and malware. Nobody can be certain whether their own weapons would actually work when called upon

Such uncertainty undermines the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. One side might convince itself – rightly or wrongly – that it can launch a successful first strike and avoid massive retaliation

Even if humanity avoids the worst-case scenario of global war, the rise of new digital empires could still endanger the freedom and prosperity of billions of people. The industrial empires of the 19th and 20th centuries exploited and repressed their colonies, and it would be foolhardy to expect new digital empires to behave much better

Moreover, if the world is divided into rival empires, humanity is unlikely to cooperate to overcome the ecological crisis or to regulate AI and other disruptive technologies such as bioengineering.

The division of the world into rival digital empires dovetails with the political vision of many leaders who believe that the world is a jungle, that the relative peace of recent decades has been an illusion, and that the only real choice is whether to play the part of predator or prey.

Given such a choice, most leaders would prefer to go down in history as predators and add their names to the grim list of conquerors that unfortunate pupils are condemned to memorise for their history exams.

These leaders should be reminded, however, that there is a new alpha predator in the jungle. If humanity doesn’t find a way to cooperate and protect our shared interests, we will all be easy prey to AI.

As the architect of RealPage once explained, “[i]f you have idiots undervaluing, it costs the whole system.” The complaints showed that it’s more than just information sharing; RealPage has “pricing advisors” that monitor landlords and encourage them to accept suggested pricing, it works to get employees at landlord companies fired who try to move rents lower, and it even threatens to drop clients who don’t accept its high price recommendations. The suits have passed important legal hurdles and are going to trial.

Private antitrust lawyers filed multiple lawsuits, which were consolidated in Tennessee by 2023. Their argument “is that RealPage has been working with at least 21 large landlords and institutional investors, encompassing 70% of multi-family apartment buildings and 16 million units nationwide, to systematically push up rents.”

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes sued RealPage and corporate landlords, alleging that rent increases of 30% in just two years are a result of the conspiracy. Seven out of ten multifamily apartment units in Phoenix are run by landlords who use the software. D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalbe sued as well, noting that “in the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria Metropolitan Area, over 90% of units in large buildings are priced using RealPage’s software.”

The FBI conducted a dawn raid of corporate landlord Cortland, a giant that rents out 85,000 units across thirteen states. Today, the Antitrust Division and eight states sued RealPage, alleging not just a price-fixing conspiracy to raise rents, but also monopolization in the market for commercial real estate management software

The gist of the complaint is that large landlords and RealPage work together to (1) share sensitive information and (2) raise rents and hold units off the market. This activity hits at least 4.8 million housing units under the direct control of landlords using RealPage software, and according to the corporation itself, its products cause rents to increase by between 2-7% more than they otherwise would, year over year. "Our tool,” said RealPage, “ensures that [landlords] are driving every possible opportunity to increase price even in the most downward trending or unexpected conditions.”

“They keep saying the networks are dinosaurs,” Stringer said. “What they don’t say is that the dinosaurs ruled the Earth for millions of years.”

The Village tends toward risk aversion, as evident in its Covid caution and its increasing wariness about free speech (which very much can have sticks-and-stones consequences). It tends to make decisions by consensus, with dissenters punished by ostracization

The River has been on a winning streak in terms of its impact on society and our economy: Its core industries, tech and finance, continually grow as fractions of the economy, and Las Vegas is bringing in record revenues

So far in the 2024 election, the Village has been making better risk-management decisions — out-Rivering the River. The presidential race remains close, but at least for now it looks like the Village is winning.

At least the Village got the most important decision right: kicking President Biden to the curb. In so doing, they roughly doubled their chances of winning

To understand why, it helps to know that the River can be prone to contrarianism. As the Village has become bluer and bluer, some communities within the River have rebelled by becoming, to varying degrees, red-pilled in response.

It’s much harder to see the upside for Mr. Trump’s choice of Senator JD Vance of Ohio.

The poker player in me would have played the percentages and taken the calculated risk in Mr. Shapiro. The choice of Mr. Walz has grown on me as Ms. Harris has sustained her momentum in the polls — but Pennsylvania still looms large.

But the River is by no means a bloc, whereas the Village’s penchant for consensus helped it, when Mr. Biden stepped aside, to consolidate quickly around Ms. Harris

Mr. Trump himself straddles the River-Village boundary awkwardly as a former casino magnate (though not a successful one), but he’s more intuitive than analytical and obsessed with his news coverage in the Village.

The Trump campaign made two classic mistakes with his V.P. choice, though Silicon Valley’s conservatives cheered. One was counting their chickens before they hatched.

The second error was a failure to practice strategic empathy, meaning a willingness to put yourself in your opponent’s shoes.

This is generally something that people in the River are good at; it’s essential in poker.

There’s another term from the poker world that describes Mr. Trump’s recent decision-making:

He may be on tilt, the condition of making suboptimal choices because your emotions get in the way. Every poker player has seen it: An opponent builds up a huge stack, looks forward to treating himself to a steak dinner and bragging to his buddies. But then he loses a big pot — and before he knows it, the rest of his chips are gone as he tries to chase his losses.

Some of the disconnect is because of the temporal dynamics of climate change — it’s the ultimate long-term problem in a world consumed by short-term crises.

“Three of the ads, shared with The New York Times before their release, frame President Biden’s climate policies and Harris’s prospective policies in terms of economic benefits rather than environmental ones, and also touch on economic issues not directly related to the climate,” Maggie Astor reported.

on Monday, the Democratic National Convention opened in Chicago, with President Biden touting the success of the Inflation Reduction Act, which has unleashed billions of dollars in clean energy investments. “With your support, we passed the most significant climate law in the history of mankind,” he said.

Former President Donald J. Trump, by contrast, has called climate change a hoax, has pledged to expand oil and gas production from already record highs and recently appeared to confuse nuclear power and nuclear weapons. On Monday, he called for rolling back pollution regulations. If elected, Trump has vowed to undo parts of the Inflation Reduction Act.

This assumption shapes our politics so deeply that it’s almost invisible. But the idea that modern life is a story of constant economic and technological progress steadily making the world a better place has stopped lining up with how Americans feel.

no statistics really capture the feeling, shared by growing numbers of Americans, that the world is just getting worse.

It’s a “metaphysical” problem, as Mr. Murphy put it. And he began to think that the economic metrics used by economists and presidents to capture the state of the nation were masking a vast “spiritual crisis.”

he was homing in on a problem that Democrats have yet to figure out how to address. Donald Trump and the movement around him have tapped into a sense of deep alienation and national malaise. Democrats often have trouble even acknowledging those feelings are real.

Mr. Murphy has been warning for years that by failing to offer a clear vision of the future, Democrats risk losing to a “postdemocracy” Republican Party that might rig the electoral system “in order to make sure Democrats never win again.”

he is far from the only Democrat raising these concerns. Just a few days before the convention, Mr. Murphy’s good friend Ben Rhodes, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama, told me that in the age of Mr. Trump, Democrats have found themselves in a “trap”: How can they present themselves as the party of fundamental change when they spent the past eight years arguing that America’s institutions need to be shored up against the urgent threat of Trumpism?

“Can you reform that system so much that it ceases to be that and starts to be something else?” Mr. Rhodes asked me. “Or does it have to be blown up?

Many on the center-left worry that, absent a liberal vision for how this reform may work, Americans will opt to blow things up.

He has worked with Republicans like Mr. Vance, who share much of his criticism of our current order, and he has pushed for Democrats to listen to, learn from and try to win over social conservatives with a “pro-family, pro-community program of economic nationalism.

It has all rapidly built him into a singular figure in the party, someone who is being whispered about as a future presidential candidate.

“The postwar neoliberal economic project is nearing its end, and the survival of American democracy relies on how we respond.”

“What I discovered, much to my chagrin,” he told me when we met last fall in his Senate office, “was that the right — some really irresponsible corners of the right — were having a conversation about the spiritual state of America that was in ways much more relevant than conversations that were happening on the left.”

I had written the piece because I was interested in critiques like those from New Right-ish thinkers like the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen, who had been arguing that the story we often tell ourselves — of a society constantly getting better through an inexorable process of economic growth and technological advancement — was too simple and benefited the powerful corporations and political elites that profit most from the status quo.

This story, they say, suggested that there was no possible alternative to the world where technological gadgets had colonized our brains and every aspect of our existence seemed to be reduced to a set of decisions determined by corporations in a market system. We were, after all, supposed to be richer and better off than any humans who lived before us. Why would anyone complain?

He was worried that the New Right was offering two things mainstream Democrats were not: a politics that spoke directly to feelings of alienation from America as we know it today and a political vision of what a rupture with that system might look like.

I recommended David Graeber and David Wengrow’s recent best seller, “The Dawn of Everything,” which critiques the story of progress from the left, and Mr. Deneen’s book “Why Liberalism Failed.”

he began to engage with a small but increasingly influential political ecosystem of heterodox thinkers who write for magazines like the journal Compact or receive funding from networks like the Hewlett Foundation’s economy and society initiative, which advances a view that neoliberalism “has outlived its usefulness.

Julius Krein, the founder of the quarterly American Affairs, which publishes the work of many figures on the New Righ

the labor theorist Oren Cass, a former adviser to Mitt Romney, who soured on pro-business policies and who has been the key figure in pushing Republicans toward a conservative vision of worker power.

Mr. Murphy emailed me a piece he’d just written for The Atlantic, titled “The Wreckage of Neoliberalism.” He said it was going to be the start of a public push to advance his new line of thinking. He argued that Democrats, facing the possibility of a “postdemocracy” Republican Party seizing the levers of state after the 2024 election, risked political extinction if they waved away the deep sense of malaise and resentment that brought Mr. Trump to power the first time

a program of “a pro-family platform of economic nationalism salted with a bit of healthy tech skepticism” and offered it as a salve for a deeper crisis of meaning and belief in our national project.

“Talking openly about spiritualism is true to the best traditions of the left,” Mr. Murphy told me. “So there’s no reason why this conversation about the emotional state of America and the good life has to be a conversation that only the right has. Some of the left’s most inspiring leaders have talked in these terms. But I guess I’ve come to the conclusion that you first have to diagnose why people are feeling so shitty and to really understand what you need to do next.”

he started a Substack. He began to post slightly searching thoughts on his journey and often drew bafflement or outrage from liberals who knew him best as a gun control advocate

“The Reason to Care About the Plight of Men,” a piece he later told me his teenage son had warned him might be too edgy for prime time.

He also published a piece he titled “What We Can Learn From Rich Men North of Richmond,” about the Oliver Anthony hit, arguing that the song resonated with more than just conservatives and that the left was making a mistake if it ignored the vein of alienation from and anger with the “new world” that Mr. Anthony sang about.

Mr. Murphy’s program of “pro-family, pro-community economic nationalism” is less one of social welfare than an attempt to give regular people agency in the face of the supersized corporations he believes wield far too much influence today

He calls for sectorwide collective bargaining of the kind that exists in some European countries, an expansion of antimonopoly efforts and something like a reimagining of our political value system: “We’re going to have to upset this cult of efficiency,” he told me recently, “establishing a clear preference for local ownership, local industry.”

Last fall, after working on the issue with Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah, a Republican, Mr. Murphy introduced the National Strategy for Social Connection Act, a bill to fight the epidemic of loneliness that he believes has been driven by the pervasive communications technology and malignant commercialization of American life.

It’s hard to believe that even Mr. Murphy thinks that a metaphysical crisis can be meaningfully addressed with a few million dollars for research or directives to federal agencies to address loneliness.

serve a calculated purpose: to push our politics toward a national discussion of the “emotional state of America” and to show that highly placed people in both parties are coming to believe that this presents a state of real crisis.

he has tried to work with Republicans on immigration. He was the lead Democratic negotiator on the bipartisan immigration bill that came very close to passage in February

Without much fanfare, the Biden administration has already embraced many of the policies Mr. Murphy is calling for: industrial policy, tariffs, a campaign against corporate monopolies

His vision of economic nationalism can look very similar to the one offered by “America First” Republicans, but the specifics reveal very different priorities; Mr. Murphy supports far higher levels of immigration and paid family leave over the child tax credits increasingly favored by conservatives

they have a common goal: to remake the incentive structure of our economy. “The core issue is that our economy became one based on extracting rents,” Mr. Krein told me, “rather than building things.” It rewards those who invent clever ways to squeeze money out of government and regular people

This is the simple explanation for why so many jobs feel soulless and so many Americans feel harried and troubled amid the vast material wealth our country produces.

“That’s what people are really complaining about when they talk about neoliberalism,” Mr. Krein said. “But that’s tough to fit on a bumper sticker.”

“Great leaders tell stories that fit within the cultural and religious contexts of nations,” the Bay Area representative Ro Khanna told me. He helped write the CHIPS and Science Act, but he thought that the Demo

crats had failed to explain what they wanted it to achieve

“Politics is not just about policy,” he said. “It’s about the vision of a nation. It’s about signaling that we’re heading somewhere.”

Republicans are beginning to coalesce around a vision for the future. It begins with plans to fire thousands of civil servants in an attempt to unmake the so-called administrative state, which they believe promotes liberal values and has enveloped America in bureaucracy. They seek to pull back from the internationalist foreign policy and free-trade policies that have guided both parties for decades. They hope to increase America’s birthrate and cut immigration and may pursue steps like reducing the value of the dollar, which they argue would help American-produced goods compete in an international marketplace

the people there represented a decent cross-section of American political views, from people keeping the Sanders-style left-wing populist faith to centrist civil servants to more or less avowed reactionaries.

I attended a dinner hosted by Sohrab Ahmari, a co-founder of Compact,

All the attendees seemed to take for granted that the neoliberal era was nearing its endpoint — a fact notable only because it reflected a consensus that has still barely filtered into our mainstream political conversations.

The problem, for any Democrat, is to find a way to turn this understanding into winning politics

Steve Bannon, Mr. Trump’s onetime chief White House strategist, late last year, he was very clear that he didn’t think Mr. Murphy’s vision went far enough. Mr. Bannon has frequently praised Mr. Khanna — jocularly accusing him of stealing “our” ideas in his proposals to rebuild America’s manufacturing capacity. But Mr. Bannon was savagely and profanely dismissive of Mr. Murphy

“He has a very tough road ahead, and here’s why,” Mr. Bannon said. “There’s no audience for what he’s saying on the Democratic side. Democratic voters like the system.”

Mr. Bannon called Mr. Murphy a “neoliberal neocon,” a double epithet Mr

Unlike many on both the right and left, he has shown little desire to unmake the complex military and financial systems that critics on both sides often describe as the American Empire.

The trouble is that orienting the American economy back toward producing things and building a strong middle class may mean reassessing those old ideas and asking tough questions about whether we can afford to maintain our military might or continue financing the federal government with deb

These are now common talking points on the right, and at a time when Mr. Trump and his allies hint at ideas like withdrawing from NATO and curtailing the independence of the Federal Reserve, even a critic of the globalized economic order like Mr. Murphy can end up looking like a milquetoast defender of the status quo.

I asked Mr. Murphy if I was right that his aim really was to unmake the neoliberal system as we knew it. “You are,” he said. He anticipated my next question, about whether it would ever be possible to translate this kind of big-picture conversation to mainstream politics. I mentioned

As if anticipating the Harris/Trump race, he described an electoral landscape where Democratic candidates who won a majority of the popular vote might still lose the presidency if they couldn’t win states in the Upper Midwest. “I think that our coalition is bound to lose if we don’t find a way to reach out to some element of the folks who have been hoodwinked by Donald Trump. We don’t have to win over 25 percent of his voters

“But I do believe,” he said, “that we have to tell a story about what makes America different. To make people proud of being American. And make them believe that that identity is more important than their individual political identity.”

“We have to build a uniquely American economy,” he said. “We have to convince people that there is a uniquely American identity while understanding that there are still important moments where you have to engage the rest of the world. That’s not a bumper sticker.” He paused. “That’s what makes this project really hard.”

Committed damages arise predominantly through changes in average temperature, but accounting for further climatic components raises estimates by approximately 50% and leads to stronger regional heterogeneity

Committed losses are projected for all regions except those at very high latitudes, at which reductions in temperature variability bring benefit

The largest losses are committed at lower latitudes in regions with lower cumulative historical emissions and lower present-day income.

Musk came out with an endorsement of Trump in a post on X to Musk’s almost 200 million followers. 

More recently, the Trump campaign said it raised more than $1 million from a link created specifically for Musk’s interview of the former president on X.

However, an 1807 law called the Insurrection Act creates an exception to that ban. It grants presidents the emergency power to use federal troops on domestic soil to restore law and order when they believe a situation warrants it. Those federal troops could either be regular active-duty military or state National Guard soldiers the federal government has assumed control over.

But parts of the Insurrection Act also allow presidents to send in troops without requiring the consent of a governor. Presidents last invoked the act to deploy troops without the consent of state authorities in the late 1950s and early 1960s during the civil rights movement, when some governors in the South resisted court-ordered school desegregation.

Mr. Trump has boasted that, if he returns to the White House, he will dispatch forces without any request for intervention by local authorities. At a campaign rally in Iowa last year, for example, he vowed to unilaterally use federal forces to “get crime out of our cities,” specifically naming New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco as “crime dens” he pointedly noted were run by Democrats.

“You look at what is happening to our country — we cannot let it happen any longer,” Mr. Trump said. “And one of the other things I’ll do — because you are not supposed to be involved in that, you just have to be asked by the governor or the mayor to come in — the next time, I am not waiting.”

Mr. Trump has long been attracted to the strongman move of using military force to impose and maintain domestic political control. In a 1990 interview with Playboy, he spoke admiringly about the Chinese Communist Party for displaying the “power of strength” a year earlier when it used troops and tanks to crush the pro-democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

The next day, on June 3, Mr. Esper contradicted Mr. Trump from the Pentagon podium, saying: “The option to use active duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations. We are not in one of those situations now. I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act.” Mr. Trump was outraged, seeing this as an act of defiance. He fired Mr. Esper that November.

Mr. Trump has broken with his former subordinates who raised objections to his desire to use federal troops that summer. Those who have stuck with Mr. Trump are working to ensure that a second administration would not contain politically appointed officials or lawyers who would be inclined to see it as their duty to constrain his impulses and desires — one of several reasons a second Trump presidency is likely to shatter even more norms and precedents than the first.

Indeed, even by the standards of various norm-busting plans Mr. Trump and his advisers have developed, the idea of using American troops against Americans on domestic soil stands apart. It has engendered quiet discomfort even among some of his allies on other issues.

In an interview with The New York Times last fall, Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s top immigration adviser, said Mr. Trump’s plans for an unprecedented crackdown on immigration included invoking the Insurrection Act to use troops as immigration agents.

An early 2023 email from a member of the center’s staff listed 10 agenda topics for papers that the center planned to write on legal and policy frameworks. An introduction to the email said the goal was to “help us build the case and achieve consensus leading into 2025.” The email went on to circulate more broadly, and The Times reviewed a copy.

The email placed each topic into one of three categories. One set involved Congress. A second involved “broader legal” issues — including “Christian nationalism” and “nullification,” the pre-Civil War idea that states should be able to negate federal laws they don’t like. The third category was “day one” ideas, meaning those whose legal frameworks were already well established, and which could be put into effect by a president unilaterally.No. 4 on the list: “Insurrection — stop riots ** — Day 1, easy.”

“George Floyd obviously was not about race — it was about destabilizing the Trump administration,” he said. “We put out, for instance, a 50-page paper designed for lawyers to know that the president has, you know, the ability both along the border and elsewhere to maintain law and order with the military and that’s something that, you know, that’s going to be important for him to remember and his lawyers to affirm. But we’ve given them the case for that.”