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Open-seat presidential elections are shaped by perceptions of the style and personality of the outgoing incumbent. Voters rarely seek the replica of what they have. They almost always seek the remedy, the candidate who has the personal qualities the public finds lacking in the departing executive.

As the 2008 campaign began, many Americans and most Democrats saw Mr. Bush as rash, bellicose, divisive — oblivious to the demands and opportunities of a rapidly changing world. His presidency had come to be defined by the momentous decision to invade Iraq, which became a quagmire.

Senator Obama had publicly opposed the war from the start, which separated him from most of the Democratic field. But more than that, his profile, temperament and approach offered the sharpest departure from those of the embattled, retiring president he would ultimately replace

whence Britain’s radicalization? One answer is that respectable nationwide averages mask the tough experiences of subgroups. Between 2010-2011 and 2014-2015, more than a third of Britons suffered a fall in household income of more than 5 percent. Those depending heavily on the state have suffered the effects of harsh cuts in government spending. Young workers, who have provided much of the support for Labour’s lurch leftward, have fared worse than old ones. The shocking price of homes has made it difficult for non-owners to live in regions with good job prospects.

But the larger explanation is cultural. On the left and the right, there is a sense that society is changing rapidly and unfairly. The right-wing version of this insecurity centers on migration. Between 1964 and 1989, the number of migrants arriving to live in Britain never exceeded 250,000 in a year. But in the two years leading up to the Brexit vote, new arrivals exceeded 600,000 annually. When Conservative populists rant xenophobically about “taking back control,” they are exploiting the backlash from that surge in foreign voices.

left-wing cultural insecurity centers on a form of inequality that goes beyond the data on incomes, encompassing ownership of assets and the sense of job stability. The haves can count on a salaried job, a stake in the housing market and perhaps some corporate shares or share options. The have-nots face short-term work contracts, high rents and no prospect of a stake in the profits generated by capitalism.

“The goal in America today,” Rosen said on our walk, “is to resurrect the primacy of reason over passion—what we are watching now is the struggle between logos and pathos. The central question in our democratic age is this: Is it possible to slow down the direct expression of popular passion? The answer to this question is not obvious.”

The leaders of Facebook and its Silicon Valley cousins argue that instantaneous, universal communication is a boon to democracy and freedom. Constitutional scholars such as Rosen argue that the rapid diffusion of all manner of information—the false and the decontextualized, especially—can just as easily expedite the formation of mobs.

I asked Rosen to imagine what Madison, the main proponent among the Founders of indirect democracy, would have made of Trump, of Trumpism, and of our coarse and frenzied political age. Rosen’s eloquent answer is contained in his essay, “Madison vs. the Mob,” which is an anchor article in this special issue on democracy in peril.

In his new book, “AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order,” Dr. Lee argues that advances in artificial intelligence — the future of computing — will be enjoyed only by those with the ability to essentially shove increasing amounts of data into the maw of the machine.Right now, he notes, with China’s aggressive use of sensors and you-say-facial-recognition-I-say-surveillance, a population hooked on mobile in a much more significant way than here and consumers more willing to trade away their privacy for digital convenience, China’s internet companies have access to 10 to 15 times more data than American ones. Dr. Lee and others have called it a “data gap” that Google has to bridge, and soon, if it wants to remain competitive.

“To develop really strong A.I., you need a lot of data. Well, if you have an authoritarian government that says, ‘Hey, we’re now all doing facial recognition,’ you suddenly have a lot of data,” she said. “If you’re in the United States or Europe or whatever, you have to get consent, and that consent can be withdrawn. There are all kinds of hurdles to collecting the data, which means we’ll be slower. And I don’t have an issue with that except for the fact that China has the ability to employ technology that will simply be the dominant technology if they get there first.”

By placing Trump in transnational and transhistorical perspective, Stanley sees patterns that others mis

He notes the apparent paradox that Trump — like many fascist politicians — rode to power in part by attacking government “corruption,” yet practices it even more brazenly himself. The explanation, Stanley suggests, lies in what fascists actually mean by the term. “Corruption, to the fascist politician,” he argues, “is really about the corruption of purity rather than of law. Officially, the fascist politician’s denunciations of corruption sound like a denunciation of political corruption. But such talk is intended to evoke corruption in the sense of the usurpation of traditional order.

Stanley’s comparative perspective is particularly effective in illustrating how fascists use fears of sexual violence. He notes that fascist politicians, who portray themselves as defenders of a pure, mythic, patriarchal past, frequently play on fears that alien groups pose a sexual threat. Segregationists used the specter of black rape to justify lynchings. After World War I, Germans “promulgated racial fantasies of mass rape of white women” by African soldiers serving among the French occupying forces, fantasies embraced in the United States by the renascent Ku Klux Klan. Nearly half a century later, the wave of Middle Eastern migrants entering Germany has spawned another sexual terror, which has again crossed the Atlantic, and become a staple of pro-Trump platforms like Breitbart.

at the 2019 Munich Security Conference, which took place over the weekend, the charade ended.

The American position is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. The Europeans are defaulting to nostalgia for a multilateral order. Meanwhile, the true challenge of a rising authoritarian bloc goes largely ignored.

The substance of Pence’s speech, though, was more significant and worrying. In 2017, Pence spoke at length about the importance of the NATO alliance and its historic accomplishments. In 2019, there was none of that. The only praise of NATO was for its response to Trump’s leadership on defense spending. Otherwise, Pence offered a litany of criticism leveled against NATO and the EU—for not doing enough on Iran, Nord Stream 2, or Venezuela. (Ironically, the EU would have had a common position on this last item were it not for the effective veto of the pro-Trump Italian government.)

his accent and vocabulary combine to make him seem like a man out of time and out of place, especially in America.

His central message is a thoroughgoing critique of modern liberal culture, which he views as suicidal in its eagerness to upend age-old verities.

a possibly spurious quote that nevertheless captures his style and his substance: “Sort yourself out, bucko.”

The cold wind of intolerance, authoritarianism, and nationalism is blowing across America and Europe. The unexpected rise of Trump as the presumptive Republican nominee in the United States and the recent political stirrings in Europe are oddly built of the same cloth. Intolerance of non-citizens, the belief that present governments have subordinated their countries best interests for outsiders, and the need for new leaders, whose view of their countries best interests seems to call for an upending of the joint efforts to build a collective defense system like NATO and an economic union like the EU.

Norbet’s message is in effect “Make Austria Great Again.”

“The first thing these kinds of ideological movements target are people and institutions that produce knowledge,” Uzgel said. “They have to clear those areas in order to establish their own power. Because they represent the only dissenting forces in a society. The business class does not speak up against the government.

Universities with strong traditions are critical because they recruit younger generations. You have to break institutions. Authoritarian regimes don’t necessarily send everyone to jail.”

It is conventional wisdom that populists are against “elites” – and experts in particular. But rightwing populists aren’t opposed to all elites – they only denounce professionals who claim authority on the basis of special knowledge. Their perverse version of rightwing anti-authoritarianism implies that there is nothing wrong with the wealthy; in fact, the latter can be superior sources of wisdom. Trump putting the advice of “business leaders” above that of infectious disease experts is likely to yield deadly results. But it’s important to understand that the systematic denigration of professionalism started not with the populists – Reagan, Thatcher and other cheerleaders for neoliberalism led the way.

But this picture is itself simplistic. Populists are not by definition liars. They are only committed to one particular empirical falsehood: the notion that they, and only they, represent what populists often call “the real people” – with the implication that other politicians are not only corrupt and “crooked”, but traitors to the people, or, as Trump has often put it, “Un-American”.

These supposed movers and shakers contrast starkly with professionals who claim authority on the basis of education and special licensing – think lawyers, doctors and professors. Such figures can automatically be maligned by rightwing culture warriors as “condescending” – after all, they tell other people what to do, because they claim to know better. According to Nigel Farage, for instance, the World Health Organization is just another club of “clever people” who want to “bully us”.

The autocratic political culture that has propped up the Trump administration has left the nation entirely unprepared for an economic and public-health calamity.

The president of the United States is a menace to public health

I don’t mean that I disagree with him on policy, although I do

Through Southern eyes, this election is not about policy or personality. It’s about something much darker.

Not long ago, these Americans lived under violent, anti-democratic governments. Now, many there say they see in President Trump and his supporters the same hostility and zeal for authoritarianism that marked life under Jim Crow.

“People are prideful of being racist again,” said Bobby Caradine, 47, who is black and has lived in Memphis all his life. “It’s right back out in the open.”

CASALPUSTERLENGO, Italy — Europe confronted its first major outbreak of the coronavirus as an eruption of more than 150 cases in Italy prompted officials on Sunday to lock down at least 10 towns, close schools in major cities and cancel sporting events and cultural touchstones, including the end of the Venice carnival.

The perception of a rising threat was amplified on television channels, newspaper headlines and social media feeds across Europe, where leaders could face their greatest challenge since the 2015 migration crisis.

The Trump administration has barred entry to the United States by most foreign nationals who have recently visited China, where the virus first appeared and spread. Much of the world has adopted similar controls, but the virus has continued to spread, most notably to South Korea, where more cases have been recorded than anywhere else outside China, and this past week to Iran, where eight deaths have been reported.

We have gone from rightly defending the minority to wrongly problematizing the majority. It should surprise no one that, at some point, the majority will find all of this, as Josh Barro recently explained, “annoying.”

I say this as someone happily in the minority — and who believes strongly in the right to subvert or adapt traditional gender roles.

But you can’t subvert something that you simultaneously argue doesn’t exist.

In many books and films, the prewar years appear as an age of prosperity and contentment in Europe, with the summer of 1913 featuring as the last golden summer.

But today, as racism and xenophobia return to the centre of western politics, it is time to remember that the background to the first world war was decades of racist imperialism whose consequences still endure. It is something that is not remembered much, if at all, on Remembrance Day.

In the early 20th century, the popularity of social Darwinism had created a consensus that nations should be seen similarly to biological organisms, which risked extinction or decay if they failed to expel alien bodies and achieve “living space” for their own citizens. Pseudo-scientific theories of biological difference between races posited a world in which all races were engaged in an international struggle for wealth and power

China has since banned BBC World News from airing in the country and denied the abuse, telling CNN that "it is strictly forbidden to insult and abuse trainees in any way."

But the women's accounts add to a record that includes reports of forced abortions and sterilizations, high-tech surveillance, and Uyghur children being separated from their parents.

Either the United States and the world will finally go beyond tepid criticism and respond with real action, or we can forget about values, universal rights, and international law.

"It was horrifying to see a presidency come to such a dishonorable and disgraceful end.... we conservatives find ourselves at a crossroads and here's the reality that we have to face. If the conservative cause depends on the populist appeal of one personality or of second-rate imitations, then we're not going anywhere. Voters looking for Republican leaders want to see independence in mettle. They will not be impressed by the sight of yes-men and flatterers flocking to Mar-a-Lago,"

What concerned me most about so many traditional conservatives during the Trump presidency was not their words but their silence and lack of meaningful action to resist the unprincipled cronyism pushed by the former president when they controlled the levers of power.

This pattern of Trump trampling on traditional GOP beliefs manifested itself in other ways on issues like cutting US financial contributions to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), showing a soft spot for Russia and its authoritarian leader, national security and the broader role of government, like ignoring fiscal restraint.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain offered a first detailed glimpse of what a post-pandemic society in England might look like on Monday, announcing free twice-weekly coronavirus tests and Covid status certificates that would allow people with immunity into crowded nightclubs and sporting events.

“I will be going to the pub myself and cautiously but irreversibly raising a pint of beer to my lips,” Mr. Johnson said at a news conference at 10 Downing Street, as he listed the next round of relaxed restrictions.

Trying to strike a balance between public health and personal liberties, he said Britain would design a system to certify the Covid status of anyone seeking to enter higher-risk settings.

As online life expands, neighborhood life and social trust decline. As the social fabric decays, social isolation rises and online viciousness and swindling accumulate, you tell people that the state has to step in to restore trust. By a series of small ratcheted steps, you’ve been given permission to completely regulate their online life.

This, too, is essentially what is happening in China.As George Orwell and Aldous Huxley understood, if you want to be a good totalitarian, it isn’t enough to control behavior. To have total power you have to be able to control people’s minds. With modern information technology, the state can shape the intimate information pond in which we swim

Human history is a series of struggles for power. Every few generations, just for fun, the gods give us a new set of equipment that radically alters the game. We thought the new tools would democratize power, but they seem to have centralized it. It’s springtime for dictators

a stunning 139 representatives—66 percent of the House GOP caucus—along with eight GOP senators, promptly voted to overturn the election, just as the mob and the president had demanded. Unlike the insurrectionists, they were polite and proper about it. But the danger they pose to our democracy is much greater than that posed by the members of the mob, who can be identified and caught, and who will face serious legal consequences for their acts

Donald Trump’s ignominious departure from office—whether he is impeached and removed, resigns, or simply sulks away in disrepute—will leave us to solve the problem of the politicians who worked hard to convince millions that the election had been stolen, and then voted to steal it themselves.

That mix of the serious and the absurd has characterized every step of Trump’s response to his defeat, the clownishness often hiding the gravity of the underlying reality. In the months leading up to January 6, the president attempted to coerce and threaten many elected officials and politicians into supporting his effort to overturn the election—including his own vice president, Republican senators, state election officials, and governors. His close allies openly voiced options such as staging a military takeover, suspending the Constitution, firing civil servants who wouldn’t go along, and executing the supposed traitors who refused to help the president steal the election.