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It is often said that caste is to India what race is to America. Yet, the attitudes of the dominant social class in the two countries couldn’t be more different

Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of Gujarat, continues to thrive after calling the Dalits ‘mentally retarded children’ who gain ‘spiritual experience’ from manual scavenging. The media has little interest or insight into Dalit lives, nor hires low-caste journalists.[11] Major atrocities against Dalits still go unreported. Law enforcement is often indifferent or worse. There is no effective prosecution for discrimination in employment and housing. A Dalit politician can’t get a majority of upper-caste votes even in South Mumbai. Even among those few elites who read books, how many have read a single novel or memoir by a Dalit? In what is perhaps the most diverse country in the world, there is no commitment to diversity in the elite institutions that decide what is worthy art, music, and literature, or what is the content of history textbooks. In book after book of stories for children, both the protagonist and the implicit audience are elite and upper-caste.[12] Much the same is true of sitcoms, soap operas, and commercials on TV. Dalits are invisible from all popular culture that gets any airtime. The Indian army still has many upper-caste-only regiments. There is nothing like an Indian ACLU. Or a Dalit history month on public TV, or exhibits in museums, that seek to educate the upper-castes about a long and dark chapter of their past (and present)

The Middle Class Is No Longer The Majority in the U.S.

The middle class dropping below 50% could mark a 'tipping point' for the U.S.

Americans as those with annual household incomes between two-thirds and double the national median – or from about $46,000 to $126,000. Under this definition, the middle class is now only 50% of the U.S. adult population, down from 61% in 1971.

a truth that everyone who’s come up through Ivy League culture knows intuitively — that elite universities are about connecting more than learning, that the social world matters far more than the classroom to undergraduates, and that rather than an escalator elevating the best and brightest from every walk of life, the meritocracy as we know it mostly works to perpetuate the existing upper class.

Every elite seeks its own perpetuation, of course, but that project is uniquely difficult in a society that’s formally democratic and egalitarian and colorblind. And it’s even more difficult for an elite that prides itself on its progressive politics, its social conscience, its enlightened distance from hierarchies of blood and birth and breeding.

The intermarriage of elite collegians is only one of these mechanisms — but it’s an enormously important one.

the gathering, like similar ones held in the electoral battleground states of Ohio, Minnesota and North Carolina, was also the clearest sign yet of a simmering ideological movement on the right resisting government mandates over the virus.

The protests at state capitals in recent days had the feel of early Tea Party rallies in 2009, with far-right conservatives taking a lead role and more cautious elected Republicans keeping their distance.

In a survey released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, very conservative Americans were twice as likely as others to worry that businesses would reopen too slowly.

The Democratic candidates for mayor of New York City forcefully attacked their opponents’ records and ethics in starkly personal terms on Wednesday night, tangling over how they would address growing concerns over rising violent crime and the city’s economic recovery.In their first in-person debate of the campaign, the eight leading contenders battled over crime, justice and the power of the police, questions of education and charter schools and, in the debate’s most heated moments, the issue of who is qualified to lead the nation’s largest city.

The candidates took the stage at a moment of extraordinary uncertainty in the race, even as the contest nears its conclusion.

Those three candidates all have distinct bases, but they are in direct competition over some moderate white voters, and Mr. Yang and Mr. Adams have both criticized Ms. Garcia in recent weeks in a sign of her emerging strength — and a sharp departure from their previous friendly postures toward her.

he expressed reluctance to be drafted as white America’s designated racial explainer or the activist whom some at the church on Wednesday seemed to want.“I’m a writer, and for me, writing is a very internal process that’s all about trying to learn something and then show it to people,” he said in the interview.In a brief talk to a group of students from a local school before the reading, he had put it more bluntly. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Understanding how an unjust situation came about “is deeply therapeutic,” he told them.“It will keep you from going crazy,” he continued.

In the book, Mr. Coates describes racism in terms of assaults on the free movement of the black body, whether by the officers who shoot unarmed men or in more everyday incidents, like the casual shoving of Samori when he was 4 by a white woman on an Upper West Side escalator.

“I wanted to make racism tactile, visceral,” he said. “Because it is.”

serious parties eventually pull back from the fever swamps. That’s what’s happening to the Republican Party. It has re-established itself as the nation’s dominant governing party. Republicans now control 69 of 99 state legislative bodies. Republicans hold 31 governorships to Democrats’ 18.

When the next Congress convenes in January, Republicans will have their largest majority in the House of Representatives since 1931; they will have a majority in the Senate, dominate gubernatorial power in the Midwest, and have more legislative power nationwide than anytime over the past century.

They did it because they have deep roots in four of the dominant institutions of American society: the business community, the military, the church and civic organizations.

The story of the Democratic Party’s journey leftward has two chapters. The first is about the presidency of George W. Bush. Before Bush, unapologetic liberalism was not the Democratic Party’s dominant creed. The party had a strong centrist wing

Centrist Democrats believed that Reagan, for all his faults, had gotten some big things right. The Soviet Union had been evil. Taxes had been too high. Excessive regulation had squelched economic growth. The courts had been too permissive of crime. Until Democrats acknowledged these things, the centrists believed, they would neither win the presidency nor deserve to.

In the late 1980s and the 1990s, an influential community of Democratic-aligned politicians, strategists, journalists, and wonks believed that critiquing liberalism from the right was morally and politically necessary.

two of the more critical takes on Bush nostalgia got closer to the heart of what was being mourned, in distant hindsight, with his death.

Peter Beinart described the elder Bush as the last president deemed “legitimate” by both of our country’s warring tribes — before the age of presidential sex scandals, plurality-winning and popular-vote-losing chief executives, and white resentment of the first black president

Franklin Foer described “the subtext” of Bush nostalgia as a “fondness for a bygone institution known as the Establishment, hardened in the cold of New England boarding schools, acculturated by the late-night rituals of Skull and Bones, sent off to the world with a sense of noblesse oblige. For more than a century, this Establishment resided at the top of the American caste system. Now it is gone, and apparently people wish it weren’t.”

DiAngelo, who is 63 and white, with graying corkscrew curls framing delicate features, had won the admiration of Black activist intellectuals like Ibram X. Kendi, author of “How to Be an Antiracist,” who praises the “unapologetic critique” of her presentations, her apparent indifference to “the feelings of the white people in the room.”

“White Fragility” leapt onto the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, and next came a stream of bookings for public lectures and, mostly, private workshops and speeches given to school faculties and government agencies and university administrations and companies like Microsoft and Google and W.L. Gore & Associates, the maker of Gore-Tex.

As outraged protesters rose up across the country, “White Fragility” became Amazon’s No. 1 selling book, beating out even the bankable escapism of the latest “Hunger Games” installment. The book’s small publisher, Beacon Press, had trouble printing fast enough to meet demand; 1.6 million copies, in one form or other, have been sold

American history is, in many ways, a story of grand protests. They generally come in two types.

There are protest movements that, even in ferocious dissent, believe that the American system is ultimately geared to fulfill its inner promises — of equality, unalienable rights, the pursuit of happiness, e pluribus unum, a more perfect union

And there are protest movements that have turned against the system, either because they don’t think the system can meet its promises, or because they never agreed with the promises in the first place.

Private lenders are pushing to break up the government’s near monopoly in the $100 billion-a-year student-loan market.

The banking industry’s main lobbying group, the Consumer Bankers Association, is pressing for the government to instate caps on how much individual graduate students and parents of undergraduates can borrow from the government to cover tuition. That would force many families to turn to private lenders to cover portions of their bills. While that could mean lower interest rates for some, it could constrain funding to households with blemished credit histories.

At stake is potentially billions of dollars in new business for private lenders, a group currently dominated by SLM Corp. , better known as Sallie Mae, Wells Fargo & Co., and Discover Financial Services .

A major winter storm system is expected to wallop parts of the United States with heavy snow and rain over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, meteorologists have warned.

The upper and the middle Mississippi Valley could get heavy snow Friday, with potentially freezing rain set to fall over parts of the Carolinas and the southern Appalachians this weekend, according to the National Weather Service.

“The snow will result in reduced visibility and hazardous driving conditions,” it said. The system is already prod

In the 1980s, on an 800-point SAT-type test scale, the average difference in test scores between two such children would have been about 90 points; today it is 125 points. This is almost twice as large as the 70-point test score gap between white and black children. Family income is now a better predictor of children’s success in school than race.

e proportion of students from upper-income families who earn a ba

chelor’s degree has increased by 18 percentage points over a 20-year period, while the completion rate of poor students has grown by only 4 points.

One is an egomaniacally unhinged, nuclear-armed neophyte, who scares his allies and enemies alike. So is the other. The extraordinary prospect of direct talks between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un would be a delicious moment of karma among kooky world leaders. If it weren’t for their ability to destroy half the planet.

One thing is already clear about this half-baked idea: Trump is more likely to spill his guts about classified intelligence than he is to get the upper hand with any kind of meaningful deal.

We have some recent history to underscore that point. It was only on Saturday that our dear leader spilled his guts about this North Korean deal at the Gridiron dinner.

hen the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years.

It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.

The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.

“This is what totalitarianism looks like in our century,” the Post’s Op-Ed editor, Sohrab Ahmari, wrote in response: “Not men in darkened cells driving screws under the fingernails of dissidents, but Silicon Valley dweebs removing from vast swaths of the internet a damaging exposé on their preferred presidential candidate.”

In his new book “Live Not By Lies,” for instance, Rod Dreher warns against the rise of a “soft totalitarianism,” distinguished not by formal police-state tactics but by pressure from the heights of big media, big tech and the education system, which are forging “powerful mechanisms for controlling thought and discourse.”

what we call the American “right” increasingly just consists of anyone, whether traditionalist or secularist or somewhere in between, who feels alarmed by growing ideological conformity within the media and educational and corporate establishments.

In 2016 the Pew Research Center released a study that examined 229 metropolitan areas across the country: In 203, the share of adults living in middle-­income households declined from 2000 to 2014, while the share of adults living in lower- and upper-income homes each rose in more than 150 areas.

At the same time, the cost of minivans, homes, health care and college tuition has increased. Families reacted to this new reality by plunging themselves into debt and neglecting to save,

in America, you become middle-class by consuming: If you cannot afford a home in a respectable school district, a pet, summer vacations and so on, you have not ‘‘made it.’’ Despite their outward trappings of prosperity — and often because of them — many middle-class families have negligible savings and too much debt.

“PROTECT PREEXISTING CONDITIONS. VOTE!”

Americans with pre-existing medical conditions are already protected by the Affordable Care Act, which his administration is asking the Supreme Court to overturn?

In any case, how the nation votes will indeed make a huge difference to the future of health care

Emwazi poses something of a problem for the Obama administration's narrative about who becomes a terrorist and why. Last week, the administration hosted a three-day conference on "Countering Violent Extremism," which is a government euphemism for how best to deal with Islamist terrorism.

Obama said that "we have to address grievances terrorists exploit, including economic grievances."

he President did acknowledge that terrorists can be rich like Osama bin Laden, who was the son of a Sau