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because it has no canon, liberalism perpetually redefines and renews itself

mankind is fallible; our saving grace is that our errors are “corrigible.” We acknowledge our fallibility by listening to those with whom we disagree, and testing our ideas against the strongest possible counter-argument

In our own world, after all, free speech abounds while the intellectual habits that make free speech actually matter degenerate.

How can the quintessentially rationalist faith of liberalism flourish in an age that systematically demeans rationality?

all early liberals would have accepted Adam Smith’s proposition that prosperity will be best served if men are given free rein to pursue their self-interest

In 1909, Herbert Croly published The Promise of American Life, an immensely influential book that argued that Jeffersonian individualism no longer offered a real guarantee of freedom. “The democratic principle requires an equal start in the race,” Croly wrote, but so long as private property was sacred, equal rights could not guarantee equal opportunity to citizens not born to privilege.

The trunk of liberalism now separated into two boughs. One revived the free-market tradition, arguing that political freedom could not flourish absent full economic freedom.

The other liberalism was buoyed up by FDR’s New Deal and then sustained as the bulwark against totalitarianism by mid-century thinkers like Popper, Isaiah Berlin and George Orwell. This was the moderately interventionist, secular, empirical, pragmatic doctrine that became something like a civic religion in the United States after World War II

The “vital center,” as Arthur Schlesinger called it, occupied a spot midway between the strict individualism of 19th-century England and the collectivist social democracy of post-war Europe.

by the 1960s it was not white middle-class American who needed state intervention, but minorities, above all African Americans, who had been left behind as American became a broadly prosperous nation. This moral commitment carried obvious political dangers, for liberals were now asking Americans to make sacrifices for others.

By the end of the decade, liberalism had begun to lose its hold on the white working-class, once the prime beneficiary of government programs. Liberalism has never regained its appeal for those voters

“Neoliberals” or advocates of a “Third Way” like Bill Clinton (or Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder in Europe) endorsed the conservative emphasis on economic growth but applied liberal principles of social justice to public investment and the distribution of wealth; they aspired to forge a liberalism of the middle class.

The right-liberal and left-liberal parties traded power; each appeared to have almost exactly half the country on its side. Then, in 2016, the seesaw stopped: Both parties were rejected in favor of a candidate who simultaneously attacked Wall Street and the welfare state

Liberals have a problem of a different order; they need to reconstruct their faith as they did in 1912 and 1964 and 1992, when they learned or relearned how to speak to the broad middle of the country.

rather, liberals need to decide whether that is their goal. Can they, should they, seek to address the deep sense of grievance that the election exposed?

In The Once and Future Liberal, Mark Lilla argues that the growing obsession with identity politics has stripped liberals of the civic language they long used to address the American people collectively.

One way of thinking about the choice liberals face is this: At a moment of intense polarization, they must either return to the old “we” or deploy their own version of “us and them.”

liberalism simply cannot survive the violent division that now afflicts our culture. Intellectual polarization follows, and reinforces, social polarization. It is in the interest of liberals to take seriously the dictum of Lincoln that a house divided cannot stand.

What would it mean to address the sense of grievance that cost Hillary Clinton the election? Doing so requires liberals to find ways of buffering the effects of the globalization of jobs and products and people, without surrendering to Trump’s xenophobia and isolationism.

And it requires addressing the issue of inequality

But the inequality that makes Trump voters seethe is not the same one that enrages voters on the left; not the “1 percent,” but liberals themselves

The meritocracy of professionals and academics and upper-white-collar workers has ossified in recent years into something that looks to people on the outside more like an oligarchy. In The Retreat of Western Liberalism, Edward Luce dubs this phenomenon “hereditary meritocracy.

about a quarter of American children from the top 1 percent of the income scale attend an elite university, while only 0.5 percent of those from the bottom fifth do

Patrick Deneen, the author of Why Liberalism Died, has a word for this class: the “liberalocracy.” While the aristocratic family perpetuated itself through the landed estate, Deneen writes, the liberalocratic family rests upon the legacy of liberal individualism “loose generational ties, portable credentials, the inheritance of fungible wealth, and the promise of mobility.”

, standing apart from his fellow man, his past and his place. Liberty, in this formulation, means freedom from coercion, freedom to do as you wish—“negative liberty,” as Isaiah Berlin called it

Deneen reminds us of an older tradition, reaching back to Plato, which argues that citizens must gain self-mastery in order to be capable of exercising self-government. Liberty of this sort presupposes an “education in virtue”

Deneen is a Catholic conservative who offers an alternative reading of history that will be appealing to other Catholic conservatives, though perhaps only very reactionary ones.

In The Promise of American Life, Herbert Croly writes that in a free society, men of talent will naturally rise to the top. But that privileged position begins to corrode social bonds when it threatens to become permanent, whether through inheritance or through the exploitation of privilege. “The essential wholeness of the community,” he writes, “depends absolutely on the ceaseless creation of a political, economic, and social aristocracy and their equally incessant replacement.”

Croly hoped to preserve the “essential wholeness of the community” in part through a steeply progressive estate tax. Teddy Roosevelt, his great patron, agreed

There is, in fact, no sharper difference between left-liberalism and right-liberalism than the estate tax, with its implicit principle that privilege ought not be transmitted generationally

No less important, the willingness of the left, unlike the right, to gore its own ox might demonstrate to hard-pressed Americans that the liberal elite understands, as it once understood, the meaning of sacrifice.

But do liberals understand sacrifice? Liberalism did grave damage to its reputation in the 1960s by demanding real sacrifices from ordinary people and very little from elites, whose children were not the ones being bused to inner-city schools, nor drafted and sent off to fight in Vietnam. Has anything changed today?

So many of the things liberals favor—globalization, a generous immigration policy, an increase in the minimum wage, affirmative action—do them real good and little harm, while impinging, or at least seeming to impinge, on Americans a few steps down the ladder.

What do liberals favor that’s good for America broadly but not good for them?

liberals fancy themselves idealists. They need to prove it by pulling themselves off their perch. What about mandatory national service?

National service and even the estate tax are essentially emblems; perhaps sacrifice itself is a kind of emblem. But it is a language that Americans understand, and appreciate. If liberals are to find a way to speak to Americans who have been trained to regard them as the spawn of Satan, it will not be enough, as Hillary Clinton amply demonstrated, to have the best policies.

The need to let the Baltic states go was clear—and when they left the Soviet Union in 1990, Solzhenitsyn, Yeltsin and most of Russia rallied against revanchist attempts to keep them in. Much the same was true of Central Asia and the Caucasus; they were colonies. Belarus and Ukraine were part of the metropolitan core. The bonds which tied “Little Russians” (ie Ukrainians), “Great Russians” and Belarusians together, Solzhenitsyn argued, must be defended by all means short of war.

The agreement reached, in draft form, at 4am on Sunday morning achieved those aims with a rather neat piece of casuistry. For Russia simply to have followed Ukraine into independence would have left moot the question of the Soviet Union’s residual powers. So instead they abolished the union itself.

“the Kyivan myth of origins…became the cornerstone of Muscovy’s ideology as the polity evolved from a Mongol dependency to a sovereign state and then an empire.” Russian empire required Ukraine; and Russia had no history other than one of empire. The idea of Kyiv as just the capital of a neighbouring country was unimaginable to Russians.

When, as the economy worsened, Mr Gorbachev went to President George Bush for $10bn-15bn, Bush’s top concern was the nuclear threat. The same worry had led him to oppose Ukraine’s secession in a speech given just before the August coup. “Do you realise what you’ve done?” Mr Gorbachev demanded of Mr Shushkevich. “Once Bush finds out about this, what then?”

Yeltsin was overcome by a sense of lightness and freedom. “In signing this agreement,” he later recalled, “Russia was choosing a different path, a path of internal development rather than an imperial one…She was throwing off the traditional image of ‘potentate of half the world’, of armed conflict with Western civilisation, and the role of policeman in the resolution of ethnic conflicts. The last hour of the Soviet empire was chiming.” Maybe the convoluted interdependency of Russia and Ukraine did not matter as much as people thought; maybe democratic nationhood was enough. Maybe the problem had been a failure of imagination.

But when pollsters asked people what they expected of their incoming president, reducing this corruption was not their highest priority. The standing of the state was. Russians wanted a strong state and one respected abroad. As Mr Putin’s successful manifesto put it,

The strong state which provided an effective cover for kleptocracy in Mr Putin’s Russia was not an option for Mr Kuchma’s similarly oligarchic Ukraine. It had no real history as a state, let alone a strong one. Its national myth was one of Cossacks riding free. So in Ukraine the stealing was instead dressed up in terms of growing into that distinctive national identity. The essence of the argument was simple. As Mr Kuchma put it in a book published in 2003, “Ukraine is not Russia”.

Mr Kuchma could have used force against them; Mr Putin encouraged him to do so. But various considerations, including Western opprobrium, argued against it.

Mr Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 came at a time when the global financial crisis had choked the Russian economy.

The degree to which Ukraine was not Russia became clearer, though, in 2004, when a rigged presidential election saw hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians protesting in the streets.

Mr Yanukovych did not want to be Russia’s vassal. Nor did he share western Europe’s values—especially when applied to matters of anti-corruption. But eventually he had to choose a side. At a secret meeting in Moscow in November 2013, as European leaders were preparing to sign their agreement with Ukraine, he was promised a $15bn credit line with $3bn paid up front. He ditched the European deal. And at 4am on November 30th his goons bludgeoned a few dozen students protesting against his betrayal in Kyiv’s Independence Square, known as Maidan.

This was far worse, for Mr Putin, than the Orange revolution. Ukraine had made geopolitical reality, to coin a phrase, of the independence it had claimed two decades before. Its demands for dignity resonated with Russia’s middle class and some of its elite, making it a genuinely dangerous example. So Mr Putin annexed Crimea and started a war in Donbas.

According to Russian state media, Mr Putin was not undermining a revolution against a corrupt regime quite like his own; he was protecting the Russian people and language from extermination at the hands of western Ukrainian fascists. The relevance to Russia of the issues that had led to what was being called in Ukraine “the revolution of dignity” was thus obscured

the annexation was supported by nearly 90% of the Russian population.

tract published in both Russian, Ukrainian and English in July 2021, Mr Putin described how the inheritors of “Ancient Rus” had been torn apart by hostile powers and treacherous elites, and how Ukraine had been turned from being “not Russia” into an anti-Russia, an entity fundamentally incompatible with Russia’s goals.

The only way Russia can escape chaos, he argued, is to export it to a neighbouring country.

Ukraine is not a province, or a colony; it is a beleaguered nation in a messy, perilous process of self-realisation. Belarus, for its part, is a grim illustration of how “severe and inflexible” things have to get in order to stop such aspirations welling up. Mr Lukashenko has met a nationalist resurgence with ever more brutal and well-orchestrated repression—a bloody irony given that he helped start it.

But change is afoot; it can be seen in the way that demography increasingly trumps regional allegiance. Even in the east nearly 60% of those born since 1991 see their future as in the EU—countrywide, the figure is 75%. All told 90% want Ukraine to stay independent, and nearly 80% are optimistic about its future.

That is why Alexei Navalny was first poisoned and is now jailed. As the leader of the opposition to Mr Putin he has championed the idea of Russia not as an empire but as a civic nation: a state for the people. It is why Russia has recently become much more repressive. It is why Mr Putin cannot tolerate a true peace on his borders.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thinking that they could ultimately control Hitler while enjoying the benefits of his popular support, the conservatives were initially gratified by the fulfillment of their agenda: intensified rearmament, the outlawing of the Communist Party, the suspension first of freedom of speech, the press, and assembly and then of parliamentary government itself, a purge of the civil service, and the abolition of independent labor unions. Needless to say, the Nazis then proceeded far beyond the goals they shared with their conservative allies, who were powerless to hinder them in any significant way.

If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama’s first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell’s unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the “steal” of Antonin Scalia’s seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings.

Like Hitler’s conservative allies, McConnell and the Republicans have prided themselves on the early returns on their investment in Trump. The combination of Trump’s abasement before Putin in Helsinki, the shameful separation of families at the border in complete disregard of US asylum law (to say nothing of basic humanitarian principles and the GOP’s relentless claim to be the defender of “family values”), and most recently Michael Cohen’s implication of Trump in criminal violations of campaign finance laws has not shaken the fealty of the Republican old guard, so there is little indication that even an explosive and incriminating report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller will rupture the alliance.

Republicans begin with a systemic advantage in electing senators and representatives, because the Democratic Party’s constituency has become heavily concentrated in big states and big cities. By my calculation every currently serving Democratic senator represents roughly 3.65 million people; every Republican roughly 2.51 million. Put another way, the fifty senators from the twenty-five least populous states—twenty-nine of them Republicans—represent just over 16 percent of the American population, and thirty-four Republican senators—enough to block conviction on impeachment charges—represent states with a total of 21 percent of the American population. With gerrymandering and voter suppression enhancing even more the systemic Republican advantage, it is estimated that the Democrats will have to win by 7 to 11 points (a margin only obtainable in rare “wave” elections) in the 2018 elections to achieve even the narrowest of majorities in the House of Representatives

In France the prospect of a Popular Front victory and a new government headed by—horror of horrors—a Socialist and Jew, Léon Blum, led many on the right to proclaim, “Better Hitler than Blum.” Better the victory of Frenchmen emulating the Nazi dictator and traditional national enemy across the Rhine than preserving French democracy at home and French independence abroad under a Jewish Socialist.

The fascist movements of that time prided themselves on being overtly antidemocratic, and those that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted that their regimes were totalitarian. The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power

the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.

Total control of the press and other media is likewise unnecessary, since a flood of managed and fake news so pollutes the flow of information that facts and truth become irrelevant as shapers of public opinion. Once-independent judiciaries are gradually dismantled through selective purging and the appointment of politically reliable loyalists. Crony capitalism opens the way to a symbiosis of corruption and self-enrichment between political and business leaders. Xenophobic nationalism (and in many cases explicitly anti-immigrant white nationalism) as well as the prioritization of “law and order” over individual rights are also crucial to these regimes in mobilizing the popular support of their bases and stigmatizing their enemies.

Both Mussolini and Hitler came to power in no small part because the fascist-conservative alliances on the right faced division and disarray on the left. The Catholic parties (Popolari in Italy, Zentrum in Germany), liberal moderates, Social Democrats, and Communists did not cooperate effectively in defense of democracy.

In the five presidential elections of the twenty-first century, Democrats have won the popular vote four times. Two of these four (2000 and 2016) nonetheless produced Republican presidents, since the Electoral College reflects the same weighting toward small, more often Republican states as the Senate. Given the Supreme Court’s undermining of central provisions of the Voting Rights Act (Shelby County v. Holder), its refusal to take up current flagrant gerrymandering cases (Gill v. Whitford for Wisconsin; Benisek v. Lamone for Maryland), and its recent approval of the Ohio law purging its voting rolls (Husted v. Randolph Institute), it must be feared that the Court will in the future open the floodgates for even more egregious gerrymandering and voter suppression.

The unprecedented flow of dark money into closely contested campaigns has distorted the electoral process even further. The Supreme Court decision declaring corporations to be people and money to be free speech (Citizens United v. FEC) in particular has greatly enhanced the ability of corporations and wealthy individuals to influence American politics

To consolidate his dictatorship, Hitler had to abolish the independent unions in Germany in a single blow. Trump faces no such problem. In the first three postwar decades, workers and management effectively shared the increased wealth produced by the growth in productivity. Since the 1970s that social contract has collapsed, union membership and influence have declined, wage growth has stagnated, and inequality in wealth has grown sharply. Governor Scott Walker’s triumph over public sector unions in Wisconsin and the recent Supreme Court decision striking down mandatory public sector union dues (Janus v. AFSCME) simply accelerate a process long underway.

Alongside the erosion of an independent judiciary as a check on executive power, other hallmarks of illiberal democracy are the neutralization of a free press and the steady diminution of basic human rights

In Trump’s presidency, those functions have effectively been privatized in the form of Fox News and Sean Hannity. Fox faithfully trumpets the “alternative facts” of the Trump version of events, and in turn Trump frequently finds inspiration for his tweets and fantasy-filled statements from his daily monitoring of Fox commentators and his late-night phone calls with Hannity. The result is the creation of a “Trump bubble” for his base to inhabit that is unrecognizable to viewers of PBS, CNN, and MSNBC and readers of The Washington Post and The New York Times. The highly critical free media not only provide no effective check on Trump’s ability to be a serial liar without political penalty; on the contrary, they provide yet another enemy around which to mobilize the grievances and resentments of his base. A free press does not have to be repressed when it can be rendered irrelevant and even exploited for political gain.

the curtailment of many rights and protections Americans now enjoy is likely. Presumably marriage equality will survive, given the sea change in American public opinion on that issue. But the right of businesses and individuals to discriminate against gays is likely to be broadly protected as a “sincerely held religious belief.” Chief Justice John Roberts’s favorite target, affirmative action, is likely to disappear under his slogan that to end racial discrimination, one must end all forms of racial discrimination. And a woman’s right to abortion will probably disappear in red states, either through an outright overturning of Roe v. Wade or more likely through narrower rulings that fail to find any “undue burden” in draconian restrictions that in practice make abortion unavailable. And equal protection of voting rights is likely to be eroded in red states through ever more insidiously designed voter suppression laws and gerrymandering once the Supreme Court makes clear that it will not intervene to curb such measures

No matter how and when the Trump presidency ends, the specter of illiberalism will continue to haunt American politics. A highly politicized judiciary will remain, in which close Supreme Court decisions will be viewed by many as of dubious legitimacy, and future judicial appointments will be fiercely contested. The racial division, cultural conflict, and political polarization Trump has encouraged and intensified will be difficult to heal. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and uncontrolled campaign spending will continue to result in elections skewed in an unrepresentative and undemocratic direction. Growing income disparity will be extremely difficult to halt, much less reverse.

Finally, within several decades after Trump’s presidency has ended, the looming effects of ecological disaster due to human-caused climate change—which Trump not only denies but is doing so much to accelerate—will be inescapable. Desertification of continental interiors, flooding of populous coastal areas, and increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, with concomitant shortages of fresh water and food, will set in motion both population flight and conflicts over scarce resources that dwarf the current fate of Central Africa and Syria. No wall will be high enough to shelter the US from these events. Trump is not Hitler and Trumpism is not Nazism, but regardless of how the Trump presidency concludes, this is a story unlikely to have a happy ending.

to silence speech for fear of reprisal is a cowardly, a surrender of our most basic constitutional rights.

Early commitment to free speech has become an integral part of the American psyche, and it remains clear that to limit speech because of the viewpoint it represents is unconstitutional.

As Americans, we must recognize freedom of speech not only as an issue worthy of our respect and attention but as a constitutional imperative and one of the core principles upon which our nation was founded.

The simplest way of outlining the ideal university policy toward protest is to say that it should protect free speech, respect civil disobedience and uphold the rule of law

universities should protect the rights of students and faculty on a viewpoint-neutral basis, and they should endeavor to make sure that every member of the campus community has the same access to campus facilities and resources.

That also means showing no favoritism between competing ideological groups in access to classrooms, in the imposition of campus penalties and in access to educational opportunities

Indefinitely occupying a quad violates the rights of other speakers to use the same space. Relentless, loud protest violates the rights of students to sleep or study in peace. And when protests become truly threatening or intimidating, they can violate the civil rights of other students, especially if those students are targeted on the basis of their race, sex, color or national origin.

Noise limits can protect the ability of students to study and sleep. Restricting the amount of time any one group can demonstrate on the limited open spaces on campus permits other groups to use the same space.

Civil disobedience is distinct from First Amendment protected speech. It involves both breaking an unjust law and accepting the consequences.

In a 1965 appearance on “Meet the Press,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described the principle perfectly: “When one breaks the law that conscience tells him is unjust, he must do it openly, he must do it cheerfully, he must do it lovingly, he must do it civilly — not uncivilly — and he must do it with a willingness to accept the penalty.”

But what we’re seeing on a number of campuses isn’t free expression, nor is it civil disobedience. It’s outright lawlessness

reasonable time, place and manner restrictions are indispensable in this context. Time, place and manner restrictions are content-neutral legal rules that enable a diverse community to share the same space and enjoy equal rights.

Administrators and faculty members will often abandon any pretense of institutional neutralit

For many administrators, the very idea of neutrality is repugnant. It represents a form of complicity in injustice that they simply can’t and won’t stomach. So they nurture and support one side. They scorn the opposition, adopting a de facto posture that says, “To my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”

In March, a small band of pro-Palestinian students at Vanderbilt University in Nashville pushed past a security guard so aggressively that they injured him, walked into a university facility that was closed to protest, and briefly occupied the building. The university had provided ample space for protest, and both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students had been speaking and protesting peacefully on campus since Oct. 7.

But these students weren’t engaged in free speech. Nor were they engaged in true civil disobedience. Civil disobedience does not include assault, and within hours the university shut them down. Three students were arrested in the assault on the security guard, and one was arrested on charges of vandalism. More than 20 students were subjected to university discipline; three were expelled; and one was suspended.

The University of Chicago has long adhered to the Kalven principles, a statement of university neutrality articulated in 1967 by a committee led by one of the most respected legal scholars of the last century, Harry Kalven Jr. At their heart, the Kalven principles articulate the view that “the instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars.”

“A warped freedom obsession is killing us,” said the writer Anand Giridharadas, in reference to those coughing in the faces of others in the name of freedom

It is, of course, a minority of people willfully misinterpreting what freedom means – freedom to choose, until the choice is one that they do not like

In Franklin D Roosevelt’s famous 1941 Four Freedoms speech, he detailed that, yes, Americans are owed a right to freedom of speech and expression and to worship whom they please – but he also mentioned the freedom from fear

two themes that keep growing brighter — or maybe I should say darker — in Republican politics now.

One is the reflexive attempt to divert attention from the florid craziness in their own ranks and own base by screaming “communist,” “socialist” or “radical left.”

The other is to claim that they’re protecting freedom when they’re sanctioning nonsense.

How did Marco Rubio, emblematic of all the Republican senators who are determined to stay cozy with Trump’s supporters, respond to Trump’s richly earned second impeachment?

By saying that the “radical left” was out of control. Mind you, the radical right, bloated by Trump’s fictions and most Republican senators’ silence, orchestrated the deadly events of Jan. 6, but confronting that head-on is of no political use to Rubio. So, instead: socialism! Cancel culture! The radical left!

Many Republicans immediately accepted Greene’s speech on the House floor on Thursday — during which she disavowed QAnon and the idea that school massacres and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were hoaxes — as a redemptive apology. It was nothing of the kind.

Sensible firearms restrictions aren’t an insult to freedom. They’re a bulwark against bloodshed and chaos, protecting the freedom of high school students and others to go about their days without the constant, gnawing fear of being shot.

“I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true,” she said. Allowed to? No, ready to. Eager to. Itching with paranoia and hate, which she then spread.

Removing Representative Greene from her House committee assignments — which the House did on Thursday night by a 230-to-199 vote, with 11 Republicans joining 219 Democrats in favor of her ouster — wasn’t the death of free speech. Greene remains free, as an individual, to spout the bunk she once spouted

But Congress has the right — and, I’d argue, the responsibility — to make crystal clear that such bunk is vile, dangerous and antithetical to anything and everything that democratic government should be about, and to hold Greene to account for her actions. What happened to Republicans’ belief in personal responsibility?

Requiring that people wear face masks in crowded settings in the middle of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic doesn’t repress individualism. It protects many individuals, so that they’re free to continue breathing and living

She played the victim, deriding “big media companies” and “cancel culture,” and insisting that she “never once said any of the things that I am being accused of today during my campaign” or since being elected.

That brings us back to those metal detectors in the U.S. Capitol

context is everything. The new detectors popped up after a violent invasion of the Capitol. Proudly gun-loving Republican members of Congress have bragged about carrying their firearms everywhere and have coddled voters on the far right who espouse violence against Democrats.

Representative Greg Steube, a Florida Republican, had previously delivered a floor speech in which he said that the detectors weren’t merely unnecessary. They were “atrocities.” Once upon a time, that word had meaning. But then, once upon a time, “freedom” did, too.

Still others believe that the advent of civil rights laws created, in essence, a second Constitution entirely, one that privileges group identity over individual liberty.

Protestant Christian nationalists tend to have a higher regard for the American founding, but they believe it’s been corrupted. They claim that the 1787 Constitution is essentially dead, replaced by progressive power politics that have destroyed constitutional government.

Catholic post-liberals believe that liberal democracy itself is problematic. According to their critique, the Constitution’s emphasis on individual liberty “atomizes” American life and degrades the traditional institutions of church and family that sustain human flourishing.

The original Constitution and Bill of Rights, while a tremendous advance from the Articles of Confederation, suffered from a singular, near-fatal flaw. They protected Americans from federal tyranny, but they also left states free to oppress American citizens in the most horrific ways

if your ultimate aim is the destruction of your political enemies, then the Constitution does indeed stand in your way.

Right-wing constitutional critics do get one thing right: The 1787 Constitution is mostly gone, and America’s constitutional structure is substantially different from the way it was at the founding. But that’s a good thing

its guardrails against tyranny remain vital and relevant today.

Individual states ratified their own constitutions that often purported to protect individual liberty, at least for some citizens, but states were also often violently repressive and fundamentally authoritarian.

The criminal justice system could be its own special form of hell. Indigent criminal defendants lacked lawyers, prison conditions were often brutal at a level that would shock the modern conscience, and local law enforcement officers had no real constitutional constraints on their ability to search American citizens and seize their property.

Through much of American history, various American states protected slavery, enforced Jim Crow, suppressed voting rights, blocked free speech, and established state churches.

As a result, if you were traditionally part of the local ruling class — a white Protestant in the South, like me — you experienced much of American history as a kind of golden era of power and control.

The Civil War Amendments changed everything. The combination of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments ended slavery once and for all, extended the reach of the Bill of Rights to protect against government actions at every level, and expanded voting rights.

But all of this took time. The end of Reconstruction and the South’s “massive resistance” to desegregation delayed the quest for justice.

decades of litigation, activism and political reform have yielded a reality in which contemporary Americans enjoy greater protection for the most fundamental civil liberties than any generation that came before.

And those who believe that the civil rights movement impaired individual liberty have to reckon with the truth that Americans enjoy greater freedom from both discrimination and censorship than they did before the movement began.

So why are parts of the right so discontent? The answer lies in the difference between power and liberty

One of the most important stories of the last century — from the moment the Supreme Court applied the First Amendment to state power in 1925, until the present day — is the way in which white Protestants lost power but gained liberty. Many millions are unhappy with the exchange.

Consider the state of the law a century ago. Until the expansion of the Bill of Rights (called “incorporation”) to apply to the states, if you controlled your state and wanted to destroy your enemies, you could oppress them to a remarkable degree. You could deprive them of free speech, you could deprive them of due process, you could force them to pray and read state-approved versions of the Bible.

The argument that the Constitution is failing is just as mistaken as the argument that the economy is failing, but it’s politically and culturally more dangerous

Powerful people often experience their power as a kind of freedom. A king can feel perfectly free to do what he wants, for example, but that’s not the same thing as liberty.

Looked at properly, liberty is the doctrine that defies power. It’s liberty that enables us to exercise our rights.

Think of the difference between power and liberty like this — power gives the powerful freedom of action. Liberty, by contrast, protects your freedom of action from the powerful.

At their core, right-wing attacks on the modern Constitution are an attack on liberty for the sake of power.

An entire class of Americans looks back at decades past and has no memory (or pretends to have no memory) of marginalization and oppression. They could do what they wanted, when they wanted and to whom they wanted.

Now they don’t have that same control

Muslims, Sikhs, Jews, Buddhists and atheists all approach the public square with the same liberties. Drag queens have the same free speech rights as pastors, and many Americans are livid as a result.

when a movement starts to believe that America is in a state of economic crisis, criminal chaos and constitutional collapse, then you can start to see the seeds for revolutionary violence and profound political instability. They believe we live in desperate times, and they turn to desperate measures.

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” So much American angst and anger right now is rooted in falsehoods. But the truth can indeed set us free from the rage that tempts American hearts toward tyranny.

In one of the most subtle early analyses of what he tellingly called “Liberation Technology,” Larry Diamond argued that new digital tools would empower “citizens to report news, expose wrongdoing, express opinions, mobilize protest, monitor elections, scrutinize government, deepen participation, and expand the horizons of freedom.” Diamond’s article was published in the summer of 2010.

Twitter, Andrew Sullivan wrote in The Atlantic, had proven to be a “critical tool for organizing.” In twenty-first-century conflict, Nicholas Kristof echoed in The New York Times, “government thugs firing bullets” would increasingly come up against the resistance of “young protesters firing ‘tweets.’”

As Clay Shirky argued in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, even in longstanding democracies like the United States the power of digital technology made it much easier for activists to coordinate

thanks to Twitter, Donald Trump did not need the infrastructure of traditional media outlets. Instead, he could tweet messages directly to his millions of followers. Once he had done so, established broadcasters faced a stark choice: ignore the main subject of conversation and make themselves irrelevant—or discuss each tweet at length, thereby amplifying Trump’s message even as they ostensibly scrutinized it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they chose the latter course of action.

Breathless claims about digital technology’s liberating potential turned into equally breathless prognostications of doom. Social media was declared the most dangerous foe of liberal democracy.

The truth about social media is not that it is necessarily good or bad for liberal democracy. Nor is it that social media inherently strengthens or undermines tolerance.

On the contrary, it is that social media closes the technological gap between insiders and outsiders.

At times, this meant marginalizing passionate critics of the status quo—and thus making it harder for the weak and powerless to make their voices heard. At other times, it meant declining to publish conspiracy theories, outright lies, or racist rants—and thus stabilizing liberal democracy

The credibility of those claims depends on what they are compared to. So long as the memory of absolute monarchy was recent, and a more directly democratic system seemed unfeasible, liberal democracies could claim to empower the people.

One response has been to put pressure on Twitter and Facebook to change their algorithms and enforce stricter community guidelines; this is the tack that most tech critics have taken in the United State

Another response has been to limit what can be said on social media platforms by coercive legislation; this is the stance that European governments have adopted, with remarkable speed.

it seems at least as plausible to think that Americans won’t be willing to compromise on their First Amendment rights; that they will decamp to more freewheeling alternatives if existing social media platforms are tamed; and, indeed, that more subtle, yet no less powerful, forms of hate will continue to spread on existing platforms even if its most outrageous manifestations are suppressed.

There is, then, a very real possibility that the rise of digital technology, and the concomitant spread of essentially costless communication, have set up a direct clash between two of our most cherished values: freedom of speech and the stability of our political system.

the challenge is even more fundamental.

Rather, the daily experience of liking and sharing posts on social media may habituate users to a simulated form of direct democracy that makes the existing institutions of representative democracy appear intolerably outmoded.

Could digital natives—reared on the direct efficacy of social media—simply be less willing to tolerate the slow, indirect workings of analogue institutions designed in the eighteenth century?

And might they therefore be more resistant to accepting the democratic myth that has long underwritten the stability of the American Republic?

The political systems of countries like Great Britain and the United States were founded not to promote, but to oppose, democracy; they only acquired a democratic halo in retrospect, thanks to more recent claims that they allowed the people to rule.

the rise of the Internet and social media is making the ideological foundation of liberal democracy—which has had a tight hold over our imagination for the better part of two centuries—look increasingly brittle.

This held true for the century or so during which democracy enjoyed an unprecedented ideological hegemony. In the age of the Internet, it no longer does. As a result, the democratic myth that helped to make our institutions look uniquely legitimate is losing its hold.

The undemocratic roots of our supposedly democratic institutions are clearly on display in Great Britain. Parliament was not designed to put power in the hands of the people; it was a blood-soaked compromise between a beleaguered monarch and the upper echelons of the country’s elite

Because the US was founded in a more ideologically self-conscious manner, the same history is even more evident here. For the Founding Fathers, the election of representatives, which we have come to regard as the most democratic way to translate popular views into public policy, was a mechanism for keeping the people at bay

In short, the Founding Fathers did not believe a representative republic to be second best; they found it far preferable to the factious horrors of a true democracy.

It was only in the nineteenth century, as egalitarian sentiment rose on both sides of the Atlantic, that a set of entrepreneurial thinkers began to dress an ideologically self-conscious republic up in the unaccustomed robes of a born-again democracy.

Only gradually did the US make real improvements to its democratic process.

And crucial to that transformation was a story about the limits of democratic governance under modern conditions.

In ancient Athens, so the story went, the people—or at least those who were regarded as the people, which is to say adult male citizens—could rule directly because there were relatively few of them, because the territory of the state was so small, and because they had leisure to govern since so many of them owned slaves who took care of their daily needs

As John Adams noted, the people “can never act, consult, or reason together, because they cannot march five hundred miles, nor spare the time, nor find a space to meet.” In industrial nations that expanded over a huge territory direct democracy was thought to be impossible.

While representative institutions had been founded in ideological opposition to democracy, they were now re-described as the closest instantiation of that ideal possible under modern conditions. Thus, the founding myth of liberal-democratic ideology—the improbable fiction that representative government would facilitate the rule of the people—was born.

we have not even started to address the issue of how to make the democratic promise of our political system ring true for a new generation.

or a long century, the founding myth of liberal democracy retained sufficient footing in reality to keep a deep hold over the popular imagination, and help one political system conquer half the globe. But that basis is now crumbling

With the advent of the Internet, John Adams’s worry about the people’s inability to deliberate together has come to seem quaint

The physical agora of ancient Athens could be replaced by a virtual agora that would allow millions to debate and vote on policy proposals with even greater ease. As a result, citizens now have a much more instinctive sense that our democratic institutions are highly mediated.

They know that if we wanted to design a system of government that truly allowed the people to rule, it would not look much like the representative democracy of today.

The rise of the Internet and social media has thus created a giant mismatch between the direct efficiency of our digital lives and the cumbersome inefficiency of our formal institutions—and that has accentuated the contrast between our system’s promise to let the people rule and the reality that the people rarely feel as though they can have a real impact on the most important decisions facing their country

The Internet threatens to end the hegemony of liberal democracy not only by amplifying the voice of a small band of haters and extremists, but also by alienating a much larger number of digital natives from the decidedly analogue institutions by which they are governed.

We have only just begun to face up to the first big corrosive influence of digital technology on our politics: the way in which social media has helped to mainstream extremists

We’re only beginning to understand how we can stop vast platforms like Facebook and Twitter from spreading hate and fake news—and whether that will even prove possible without sacrificing constitutive elements of our political system

The rising tide of egalitarian sentiment during the nineteenth century should, by rights, have come into conflict with a set of avowedly aristocratic institutions. Instead, its fresh packaging gave the representative institutions of the United States and the United Kingdom a new lease on life. It pleased the elites who continued to get their way on the most important issues as much as it pleased the egalitarians who came to see it as a realization of their aspirations.

the widespread frustration with the state has less to do with excessive bureaucracy or overly cumbersome processes than it does with the underlying reality of the economy and the welfare state: what political scientists call the “performance legitimacy” of our political system has suffered from a combination of rising living costs, stagnating real wages, growing inequality, and dwindling social services.

More important, the real barrier to public participation in politics has always been interest, time, and expertise as much as it has been technology

Even if it were easy to weigh in, even vote, on every decision made at the local, county, state, and federal level, most citizens would hardly marshal the enthusiasm to be so intimately engaged with such a wide variety of questions of public policy.

Nor would most citizens miraculously develop the expertise to assess, for example, what kinds of regulations are needed to keep a power plant safe

A dozen years after the invention of Facebook, by contrast, the new technology has spread to every corner of the globe. Some two billion people actively use the platform.

there can be little doubt that, in the short run—which is to say, for the rest of our lives—it will make for a more chaotic world.

Unfettered by the constraints of the old media system, and buoyed by a growing popular cynicism about democracy’s promise, the demagogues have been willing to say whatever it takes to get elected—to flatter and deceive, to obfuscate, and even to incite hatred of their fellow citizens. Perhaps their rhetoric will prove to be unstoppable. As one state legislator recently pointed out to me, it is difficult for a rational politician to win a debate with a three-sentence answer when his rival is offering a one-sentence answer—especially when the other candidate can blast his simplistic take all over Twitter and Facebook.

All is not lost. But to revitalize liberal democracy in the digital age, it will not be enough to think carefully about how to enforce privacy rights or stifle the most hateful voices on the Internet. We must also think anew about how to fill the democratic promise with meaning for a new generation that has lost the belief in the democratic myth that long provided legitimacy for our political system.

Consider the furore over the recent letter in Harper’s magazine in defence of free speech signed by 153 public figures

A key criticism of the letter is that it is the voice of privilege.

It’s the “little people” without power or platforms whose lives are particularly disrupted if they say the “wrong” thing, whether that be Muslim students in Britain, Mexican-American truck drivers, children’s authors, shopworkers, anti-Israel protesters or political activists.

the harsh conditions make Arab activists aware of the significance of free speech in a way that many in the west no longer seem to be

Being able to dismiss concerns about censorship? Now, that’s the voice of privilege.

In the United States, this story is perhaps best exemplified by Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross and one of the most celebrated figures in the nation's history. Her lifesaving work on Civil War battlefields and her lasting contributions to the betterment of society are a reminder of how much a determined woman can do.

In this historic year of celebrating the 19th Amendment giving women the power of the vote, I'm still a believer in Bella's prediction because I have witnessed what can happen when women bring forward the full scope of our experiences as mothers, daughters and sisters, individually and collectively, to redefine power by how we use it and share it. From negotiating peace to leading toward climate justice, we have, as a global women's community, the opportunity to fully actualize Bella's faith in us.

Although recent victories against these companies are encouraging, there is a long fight ahead of us still, and Rachel will continue to inspire. Because she never gave up, and she succeeded in banning DDT despite the vested interests of corporations and the government—despite the fact that she was secretly battling the cancer that killed her. In addition, I was always supported and encouraged by my mother.

My first reaction to learning about Claudette Colvin was, "How did I not know about her until now?" In 1955, Claudette was 15 and living in Montgomery, Alabama. On her ride home from school one day, the driver ordered her to give up her seat to a white woman. Claudette refused, and two police officers dragged her off the bus in handcuffs.

When I first met Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, I was a young, single mom on public assistance and food stamps. I was active in the community—serving as president of the Black Student Union, volunteering with the Black Panther Party, while raising two young boys. The time I spent on her campaign deeply impacted my life.

As soon as she finished her speech, I offered to do anything I could for her campaign. But when she asked me if I was registered to vote, I admitted that I was not. She was not pleased. She looked at me and said: "Little girl, you can't change the system if you're on the outside looking in. Register to vote."

Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm remains an inspiration to little girls and women everywhere, including myself, reminding us to strive for what's possible, unburdened by what's been. As my mother—another hero in my eyes—used to say, "You may be the first to do many things, but make sure you're not the last."

When the New York Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights passed 10 years ago, I knew I was both witnessing a massive historical achievement in that moment and riding the crest of a longer historical arc, lifted up by millions of women who have been fighting for respect and dignity for generations.

Along with nearly one thousand other women from all over the world, I traveled to Brussels in May of 1989 for the first-ever international peace conference convened by women. Proudly hanging on the front of the European Parliament building was a banner: "WOMEN: GIVE PEACE A CHANCE."

One of the people who has inspired me is Mariame Kaba, one of the nation's leading prison abolitionists and the founder of the organization Project NIA, which works to end youth incarceration. She's truly remarkable. One of the attributes I most admire about her is the resilience she embodies and the genuine sense of hope she exudes. She is deeply principled and warm hearted in her pursuit of justice. She said something years ago that has stayed with me: "Hope is a discipline." When things feel bleak, I come back to these words to maintain perspective and to persevere.

In 1962, after two years studying chimpanzees, I went to Cambridge University to read for a PhD in ethology. There I was told there was a difference in kind between humans and other animals, that only we humans had personalities, minds, and emotions. But I had learned that this was not true from my childhood teachers, my wonderful mother and my dog, Rusty! So I refused to comply with this reductionist thinking. Eventually, because the chimpanzees are so similar to us biologically as well as behaviorally, most scientists accepted that we are part of the animal kingdom. But I received much criticism.

Amelia Earhart broke the barrier for women in aviation, then Jackie Cochran founded the WASP, a WWII Women Pilots Service, paving the way for Sally Ride, the first American woman in space.

And finally, suffragists rallied and marched for women's equality starting in 1848, seeking the basic right to vote and assure their voices were counted. It took over 50 years before their dream was realized and none of the brave early leaders lived to celebrate or exercise this important right. It opened so many doors for the next steps to true equality.

More than 20 years ago in Beijing, Hillary Clinton stood in front of the United Nations World Conference on Women and declared that "human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights." Although Hillary's history-making speech was directed at the world, it felt like she was speaking directly to me. At the time, I was a young lawyer, but Hillary's words forced me to ask myself tough questions about what I was doing to make the world a better place.

During times of uncertainty, it's important to reach for inspiration as a way to stay connected to what's possible. I'm grateful for my own mother, Lynette Schwartz, who taught me from a young age to always expect the unexpected and be prepared for the things that you cannot see. When I was growing up, I used to think that my mother was unnecessarily worried about everything and overly prepared. Her advice and habits have become especially helpful in the last few weeks as uncertainty spreads. Because of her, our home has become a sanctuary for those who don't have the same.

The women of color who founded the movement we carry forward today are my inspiration. Their persistence to be seen and heard gives me strength to carry on in uncertain times. The term "women of color" was born in 1977 in Houston, Texas, at the first and only National Women's Conference. There, among more than 20,000 mostly white women, a cadre of Black, Latina, Asian American and Native women redefined the women's agenda to include race, class and solidarity. They inspired entire generations of us to step fully into our collective leadership and power. Now women of color—a majority of women in several states—are leading progressive reforms as voters, organizers and courageous elected leaders.

I can still remember standing with my mother, Ann Richards, on the floor of the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. It was the first time we'd done anything like this together. As State Treasurer of Texas, Mom had been asked to give a speech seconding Walter Mondale's nomination for the presidency, and she asked me to go along. Even though her speech was the next day, it was the furthest thing from our minds while we waited for Mondale's running mate, Geraldine Ferraro, to take the stage. That night, she would become the first woman ever nominated as vice president on a major party ticket.

As a young girl impacted by over-policing and over-incarceration in my communities, I was particularly grateful when I learned about the abolitionist movement that helped support enslaved Africans to gain their freedom. I would learn and relearn the brilliant story of Harriet Tubman—a young enslaved woman who would free herself from slavery and eventually free so many others including her entire family. This kind of bravery helped me assess the life I was living and created a courage in me that translated into the work I currently do today.

In my life, I have had many moments of self-doubt when I have felt that I lacked the knowledge, the background, the expertise necessary to deal with vexing issues. Most women have had such experiences.

Born into slavery and orphaned as a young woman, Ida B. Wells-Barnett was an uncompromising and courageous voice for race and gender justice. She resisted not just the terror of racism and the suffocation of sexism, but also the conventions that artificially limited advocacy against these "isms."

When I wrote "American Heroines: The Spirited Women Who Shaped Our Country" an observation jumped out: in many instances in the remarkable progress of women in history, the first barrier breakers worked for years to be recognized in their fields, but never saw their success.

We went out into one of the tiny rice-paddy villages, a cluster of six tin open-sided lean-to huts. It's a day's trek, by minibus from the little town of Bontoc, then by foot up and down steep hillsides and across fragile rope bridges, then teetering along thin strips of earth that divide the paddies. Finally we sit on the mud floor of one of the huts, drinking peanut coffee from a shared tin cup. Urban Filipinas speak English, some Spanish and only a little Filipino (Tagalog); the tribal people of the North have their own languages. One woman translates.

Later that afternoon, each of us clutching at the ropes of a swaying bridge, my activist translator shouted to me that somehow, she must find the funding to start an adult literacy program for the women of this rice paddy. And so we all did. But Gunnawa is always with me. Because all of us need to know how to read the signs that tell us where we are. So we can know where we're going.

Anton’s critique was that I was half-right and half-wrong. I was right to see democracy degenerating into tyranny but wrong to see any way to avoid it. What he calls “Caesarism” is already here, as Obama’s abuse of executive power proved. Therefore: “If we must have Caesar, who do you want him to be? One of theirs? Or one of yours (ours)?”

he writes a reactionary blog, Unqualified Reservations, under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug and has earned a cult following among the alt-right. His magnum opus — “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives” — is an alternately chilling and entertaining assault on almost everything educated Westerners hold to be self-evidently true.

Yarvin believes that the Western mind became corrupted during the Enlightenment itself. The very idea of democracy, allied with reason and constitutionalism, is bunk: “Washington has failed. The Constitution has failed. Democracy has failed.” His golden era: the age of monarchs. (“It is hard not to imagine that world as happier, wealthier, freer, more civilized, and more pleasant.”) His solution: “It is time for restoration, for national salvation, for a full reboot. We need a new government, a clean slate, a fresh hand which is smart, strong and fair.”

The assumption that all of history has led inexorably to today’s glorious and democratic present is, he argues, a smug and self-serving delusion. It’s what used to be called Whig History, the idea that all of human history led up to the democratic institutions and civilizational achievements of liberal Britain, the model for the entire world.

Why do so many of us assume that progress is inevitable, if never complete? Yarvin, like the Claremonters and American Greatness brigade, blames an elite that he calls by the inspired name “the Cathedral,” an amalgam of established universities and the mainstream press. It works like this: “The universities make decisions, for which the press manufactures consent.

for Yarvin, the consent is manufactured not by capitalism, advertising, and corporations but by liberal academics, pundits, and journalists. They simply assume that left liberalism is the only rational response to the world. Democracy, he contends, “no longer means that the public’s elected representatives control the government. It means that the government implements scientific public policy in the public interest.”

His solution is not just a tyrannical president who hates all that the Cathedral stands for but something even more radical: “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law, and the transfer of absolute power to a mysterious figure known only as the Receiver, who in the process of converting Washington into a heavily armed, ultra-profitable corporation will abolish the press, smash the universities, sell the public schools, and transfer ‘decivilized populations’ to ‘secure relocation facilities’ where they will be assigned to ‘mandatory apprenticeships.’ ”

This is 21st-century fascism, except that Yarvin’s Receiver would allow complete freedom of speech and association and would exercise no control over economic life. Foreign policy? Yarvin calls for “a total shutdown of international relations, including security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.” All social policy also disappears: “I believe that government should take no notice whatsoever of race — no racial policy. I believe it should separate itself completely from the question of what its citizens should or should not think — separation of education and state.”

I never doubted the cogency of many reactionary insights — and I still admire minds that have not succumbed to the comfortable assumption that the future is always brighter. I read the Christian traditionalist Rod Dreher with affection. His evocation of Christian life and thought over the centuries and his panic at its disappearance from our world are poignant. We are losing a vast civilization that honed answers to the deepest questions that human beings can ask, replacing it with vapid pseudo-religions, pills, therapy, and reality TV

Because in some key respects, reactionaries are right. Great leaps forward in history are often, in fact, giant leaps back. The Reformation did initiate brutal sectarian warfare. The French Revolution did degenerate into barbarous tyranny. Communist utopias — allegedly the wave of an Elysian future — turned into murderous nightmares. Modern neoliberalism has, for its part, created a global capitalist machine that is seemingly beyond anyone’s control, fast destroying the planet’s climate, wiping out vast tracts of life on Earth while consigning millions of Americans to economic stagnation and cultural despair.

And at an even deeper level, the more we discover about human evolution, the more illusory certain ideas of progress become. In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari points out that hunter-gatherers were actually up to six inches taller than their more “civilized” successors; their diets were much healthier; infectious disease was much rarer; they worked less and goofed off more than we do.

Harari notes another paradox: Over hundreds of millennia, we have overcome starvation … but now are more likely to die of obesity than hunger. Happiness? Globally, suicide rates keep rising.

We are tribal creatures in our very DNA; we have an instinctive preference for our own over others, for “in-groups” over “out-groups”; for hunter-gatherers, recognizing strangers as threats was a matter of life and death

We also invent myths and stories to give meaning to our common lives. Among those myths is the nation — stretching from the past into the future, providing meaning to our common lives in a way nothing else can. Strip those narratives away, or transform them too quickly, and humans will become disoriented. Most of us respond to radical changes in our lives, especially changes we haven’t chosen, with more fear than hope

If we ignore these deeper facts about ourselves, we run the risk of fatal errors. It’s vital to remember that multicultural, multiracial, post-national societies are extremely new for the human species, and keeping them viable and stable is a massive challenge.

Globally, social trust is highest in the homogeneous Nordic countries, and in America, Pew has found it higher in rural areas than cities. The political scientist Robert Putnam has found that “people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down,’ that is, to pull in like a turtle.” Not very encouraging about human nature — but something we can’t wish away, either

In fact, the American elite’s dismissal of these truths, its reduction of all resistance to cultural and demographic change as crude “racism” or “xenophobia,” only deepens the sense of siege many other Americans feel.

When this velocity of cultural change combines with a deepening — and accurate — sense of economic anxiety, is it shocking that human beings want to retreat into a past, to resuscitate the nation-state, and to reach backward for a more primeval and instinctual group identity? Or that they doubt the promise of “progress” and seek scapegoats in the governing classes that have encouraged all of this to happen?

The tragedy of our time, of course, is that President Obama tried to follow Lincoln’s advice. He reached out to those who voted against him as often as he could. His policies, like Obamacare, were aimed at helping the very working poor who gave Trump the White House. He pledged to transcend the red-blue divide. He acknowledged both the necessity of law enforcement and the legitimate African-American fear of hostile cops

A black man brought up by white people, he gave speech after speech attempting to provide a new narrative for America: one of slowly integrating moral progress, where racial and class divides could be overcome. He criticized the reductive divisiveness of identity politics. And yet he failed

he couldn’t stem the reactionary tide that now washes ever closer ashore. If a man that talented, with that biography, found himself spitting into the wind, a powerful storm is indeed upon us.

how can you seriously regard our political system and culture as worse than ever before in history? How self-centered do you have to be to dismiss the unprecedented freedom for women, racial minorities, and homosexuals? Or the increased security for the elderly and unemployed, and the greater access to health care by the poor and now the working poor? Compare the air we breathe today with that of the 1950s. Contrast the religious tolerance we take for granted today with the enmities of the past.

Over the very long haul, too, scholars such as Steven Pinker have found convincing evidence that violence among humans is at the lowest levels since the species first emerged.

It is also one thing to be vigilant about the power of the administrative state and to attempt to reform and modernize it; it is quite another to favor its abolition. The more complex modern society has become, the more expertise is needed to govern it — and where else is that expertise going to come from if not a professional elite?

the liberal media has nothing like the monopoly it once enjoyed. There are two “Cathedrals” in the 21st century — and only one has helped produce a conservative Supreme Court, a Republican Congress, a Republican president, and near-record Republican majorities in statehouses around the country

Beyond all that, neo-reactionaries have a glaring problem, which is that their proposed solutions are so radical they have no chance whatsoever of coming into existence — and would be deeply reckless to attempt.

There is, perhaps, a way to use reactionary insights and still construct a feasible center-right agenda. Such a program would junk Reaganite economics as outdated but keep revenue-neutral tax reform, it could even favor redistribution to counter the deep risk to democracy that soaring inequality fosters, and it could fix Obamacare’s technical problems. You could add to this mix stronger border control, a reduction in legal immigration, a pause in free-trade expansion, a technological overhaul of the government bureaucracy, and a reassertion of Americanism over multiculturalism.

The left, for its part, must, it seems to me, escape its own bubble and confront the accelerating extremism of its identity politics and its disdain for millions of “deplorable” white Americans. You will not arrest the reactionary momentum by ignoring it or dismissing it entirely as a function of bigotry or stupidity. You’ll only defuse it by appreciating its insights and co-opting its appeal.

Nation-states, when they form, imagine a past. That, at least in part, accounts for why modern historical writing arose with the nation-state.

For more than a century, the nation-state was the central object of historical inquiry.

studying American history meant studying the American nation. As the historian John Higham put it, “From the middle of the nineteenth century until the 1960s, the nation was the grand subject of American history.”

“A history in common is fundamental to sustaining the affiliation that constitutes national subjects,” the historian Thomas Bender once observed. “Nations are, among other things, a collective agreement, partly coerced, to affirm a common history as the basis for a shared future.”

in the 1970s, studying the nation fell out of favor in the American historical profession. Most historians started looking at either smaller or bigger things, investigating the experiences and cultures of social groups or taking the broad vantage promised by global history

The endurance of nationalism proves that there’s never any shortage of blackguards willing to prop up people’s sense of themselves and their destiny with a tissue of myths and prophecies, prejudices and hatreds, or to empty out old rubbish bags full of festering resentments and calls to violence.

When historians abandon the study of the nation, when scholars stop trying to write a common history for a people, nationalism doesn’t die. Instead, it eats liberalism. 

is there any option other than to try to craft a new American history—one that could foster a new Americanism? 

o review: a nation is a people with common origins, and a state is a political community governed by laws.

A nation-state is a political community governed by laws that unites a people with a supposedly common ancestry.

These Truths, “Very often, histories of nation-states are little more than myths that hide the seams that stitch the nation to the state.”

Not until the 1840s, when European nations were swept up in what has been called “the age of nationalities,” did Americans come to think of themselves as belonging to a nation, with a destiny

the state-nation, which arises when the state is formed before the development of any sense of national consciousness. The United States might be seen as a, perhaps the only, spectacular example of the latter”

Bancroft’s ten-volume History of the United States, From the Discovery of the American Continent, was published between 1834 and 1874.

An architect of manifest destiny, Bancroft wrote his history in an attempt to make the United States’ founding appear inevitable, its growth inexorable, and its history ancient. De-emphasizing its British inheritance, he celebrated the United States as a pluralistic and cosmopolitan nation, with ancestors all over the world:

Nineteenth-century nationalism was liberal, a product of the Enlightenment. It rested on an analogy between the individual and the collective

“The concept of national self-determination—transferring the ideal of liberty from the individual to the organic collectivity—was raised as the banner of liberalism.” 

Nineteenth-century Americans understood the nation-state within the context of an emerging set of ideas about human rights: namely, that the power of the state guaranteed everyone eligible for citizenship the same set of irrevocable political rights.

The American Civil War was a struggle over two competing ideas of the nation-state. This struggle has never ended; it has just moved around

Southerners were nationalists, too. It’s just that their nationalism was what would now be termed “illiberal” or “ethnic,” as opposed to the Northerners’ liberal or civic nationalism.

much of U.S. history has been a battle between them. 

“Ours is the government of the white man,” the American statesman John C. Calhoun declared in 1848, arguing against admitting Mexicans as citizens of the United States. “This Government was made by our fathers on the white basis,” the American politician Stephen Douglas said in 1858. “It was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever.” 

In 1861, the Confederacy’s newly elected vice president, Alexander Stephens, delivered a speech in Savannah in which he explained that the ideas that lay behind the U.S. Constitution “rested upon the assumption of the equality of races”—here ceding Lincoln’s argument—but that “our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery is his natural and moral condition.”

the battle between liberal and illiberal nationalism raged on, especially during the debates over the 14th and 15th Amendments, which marked a second founding of the United States on terms set by liberal ideas about the rights of citizens and the powers of nation-states—namely, birthright citizenship, equal rights, universal (male) suffrage, and legal protections for noncitizens

For Douglass, progress could only come in this new form of a nation, the composite nation. “We shall spread the network of our science and civilization over all who seek their shelter, whether from Asia, Africa, or the Isles of the sea,” he said, and “all shall here bow to the same law, speak the same language, support the same Government, enjoy the same liberty, vibrate with the same national enthusiasm, and seek the same national ends.”

that effort had been betrayed by white Northerners and white Southerners who patched the United States back together by inventing a myth that the war was not a fight over slavery at all but merely a struggle between the nation and the states. “We fell under the leadership of those who would compromise with truth in the past in order to make peace in the present,” Du Bois wrote bitterly.

Nationalism was taking a turn, away from liberalism and toward illiberalism, including in Germany

That “placed the question of the ‘nation,’ and the citizen’s feelings towards whatever he regarded as his ‘nation,’ ‘nationality’ or other centre of loyalty, at the top of the political agenda.”

began in the United States in the 1880s, with the rise of Jim Crow laws, and with a regime of immigration restriction, starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first federal law restricting immigration, which was passed in 1882. Both betrayed the promises and constitutional guarantees made by the 14th and 15th Amendments.

the white men who delivered speeches at the annual meetings of the American Historical Association during those years had little interest in discussing racial segregation, the disenfranchisement of black men, or immigration restriction

All offered national histories that left out the origins and endurance of racial inequality.

the uglier and more illiberal nationalism got, the more liberals became convinced of the impossibility of liberal nationalism

The last, best single-volume popular history of the United States written in the twentieth century was Degler’s 1959 book, Out of Our Past: The Forces That Shaped Modern America: a stunning, sweeping account that, greatly influenced by Du Bois, placed race, slavery, segregation, and civil rights at the center of the story, alongside liberty, rights, revolution, freedom, and equality. Astonishingly, it was Degler’s first book.

hatred for nationalism drove American historians away from it in the second half of the twentieth century.

with the coming of the Vietnam War, American historians stopped studying the nation-state in part out of a fear of complicity with atrocities of U.S. foreign policy and regimes of political oppression at home.

Bender observed in Rethinking American History in a Global Age in 2002. “Only recently,” he continued, “and because of the uncertain status of the nation-state has it been recognized that history as a professional discipline is part of its own substantive narrative and not at all sufficiently self-conscious about the implications of that circularity.” Since then, historians have only become more self-conscious, to the point of paralysis

If nationalism was a pathology, the thinking went, the writing of national histories was one of its symptoms, just another form of mythmaking

Beginning in the 1960s, women and people of color entered the historical profession and wrote new, rich, revolutionary histories, asking different questions and drawing different conclusions

a lot of historians in the United States had begun advocating a kind of historical cosmopolitanism, writing global rather than national history

Michael Walzer grimly announced that “the tribes have returned.” They had never left. They’d only become harder for historians to see, because they weren’t really looking anymore. 

Writing national history creates plenty of problems. But not writing national history creates more problems, and these problems are worse.

What would a new Americanism and a new American history look like? They might look rather a lot like the composite nationalism imagined by Douglass and the clear-eyed histories written by Du Bois

A nation born in contradiction will forever fight over the meaning of its history. But that doesn’t mean history is meaningless, or that anyone can afford to sit out the fight.

“The history of the United States at the present time does not seek to answer any significant questions,” Degler told his audience some three decades ago. If American historians don’t start asking and answering those sorts of questions, other people will, he warned

its misguided to appeal to the American creed as the basis of the American identity of the American people. There are multiple conceptions of American creed equally consistent with American history. That’s why movements to glorify, elevate, and honor a particular conception of American identity based on a particular conception of the American creed necessarily  marginalize equally or more historically plausible conceptions and therefore tend to suggest that citizens who favor those conceptions are less or even un-American.

The conservative conception of American identity is so selective and so specific that it tends to suggest to its adherents that many (maybe even most!) Americans aren’t real Americans, or are Americans who betray real American ideals.

Many of those who attached their names to the letter are longstanding cultural arbiters, who, in the past, would only have had to fear the disapproval of their peers. Social media has burst their bubble and they now find that anyone with a Twitter account can challenge their opinions.

An open letter that is clearly decrying cancel culture (without naming it as such), signed by 150 academics and writers from all sides of the political spectrum, appeared this week in Harper’s Magazine. The signatories complained of a censoriousness that was stifling debate and called for arguments to be settled by persuasion rather than action.

the main thrust of their argument was a howl of anguish from a group that has suddenly found its views no longer treated with reverence.

The latest creation in their war against accountability is “cancel culture”, an ill-defined notion

The ability of middle-aged gatekeepers to control the agenda has been usurped by a new generation of activists who can spread information through their own networks, allowing them to challenge narratives promoted by the status quo.

The great progressive movements of the 21st century have sprung from these networks: Black Lives Matter; #MeToo; Extinction Rebellion. While they may seem disparate in their aims, what they have in common is a demand for accountability.

Although free speech remains the fundamental bedrock of a free society, for everyone to enjoy the benefits of freedom, liberty needs to be tempered by two further dimensions: equality and accountability

Without equality, those in power will use their freedom of expression to abuse and marginalise others. Without accountability, liberty can mutate into the most dangerous of all freedoms – impunity.

a new generation has risen that prioritises accountability over free speech. To those whose liberal ideals are proving no defence against the rising tide of duplicitous authoritarianism, this has come as a shock. But when reason, respect and responsibility are all under threat, accountability offers us a better foundation on which to build a cohesive society, one where everyone feels that their voice is heard

The principle of the equality of taxation was maintained, all citizens were liable. This reflected a confirmation of the abolition of feudalism and an expressed belief in “career open to talent”. There was to be both formal legal equality and equality of opportunities, holding office would depend on ability, loyalty and experience, not accident of birth.

Analysis of the massive votes in favour had undermined their credibility. The organiser of the 1800 plebiscite, Napoleon’s brother, perhaps worried at the Jacobin sympathies of many soldiers, simply added 500,000 votes to the “yes” column for the army. What is more, the system of voting was open rather than by secret ballot and the question in the plebiscite only sought approval for a decision that had already been taken.

In the government Napoleon agreed with Sieyes concept, there should be authority from above and trust from below, of the general nature of the Constitution but instead of 3 Consuls as Sieyes thought Napoleon wanted political authority in his own hand. At the end he accepted maintaining the government with 3 consuls but he named himself the First Consul and ordered that the other two would have no independent executive authority. This showed how Napoleon wanted power. He reinforced his power when in the 2 Constitution he was made the First Consul for life and in the 3 Constitution named himself Emperor. Moreover, Napoleon established effective control over the legislative process. He established a similar control over the executive. Under the Constitution he could appoint the second and third consuls, government ministers, the prefects of the departments of France and the mayor of larger communes. The first three were appointed from the national list and the last from the communal lists. At the centre there was no cabinet system, individual ministers reported directly to Napoleon. All effective decision making was concentrated in his hands, no minister or prefect, for instance, could take action unless sure that it was authorised by Napoleon. This was top-down government, centralised and authoritarian. Even at the local level, holders of government posts were appointed from above, not elected from below. Napoleon’s control of the government system was more absolute than that of the monarchy that ruled in France before 1789.

In terms of liberty, it could be argued that Napoleon fundamentally violated revolutionary principles. Whilst he allowed religious freedom by tolerating all religions, as is expressed in the Organic Articles, the hierarchies of the various churches were under his control. What is more, there was no freedom of speech. Censorship was a key element of Napoleonic rule of France, and those suspected of sedition could be tried and punished outside the normal framework of the law. Nor was there freedom of movement for workers compelled to carry their livret. It also affected Napoleon’s view about the subordinate position of women and children. Whilst a man could imprison an adulterous wife or disobedient child, a married woman had few property rights and could only sue for divorce if a husband insisted on his mistress sharing the family home.

Secondary education was largely restricted to the middle classes and sons of officers in the army. In the 37 schools that were found in France the curriculum was closed supervised. Free thinking was discouraged. Schools taught a utilitarian curriculum based around France, mathematics, history, geography and science and inculcated both military values and loyalty to the regime. Alongside this state system, independent and Catholic schools continued to flourish, despite high fees. In order to bring such schools under closer government supervision, in 1806 Napoleon set up the Imperial University, which was in some respects a kind of nineteenth-century Ofsted, to oversee the curriculum and inspect schools.

The president of the United States, on the other hand, is restrained first and foremost by his own ethics and public spirit. What happens if somebody comes to the high office lacking those qualities?

Donald Trump, however, represents something much more radical. A president who plausibly owes his office at least in part to a clandestine intervention by a hostile foreign intelligence service? Who uses the bully pulpit to target individual critics? Who creates blind trusts that are not blind, invites his children to commingle private and public business, and somehow gets the unhappy members of his own political party either to endorse his choices or shrug them off? If this were happening in Honduras, we’d know what to call it. It’s happening here instead, and so we are baffled.

As politics has become polarized, Congress has increasingly become a check only on presidents of the opposite party. Recent presidents enjoying a same-party majority in Congress—Barack Obama in 2009 and 2010, George W. Bush from 2003 through 2006—usually got their way.

Trump has scant interest in congressional Republicans’ ideas, does not share their ideology, and cares little for their fate. He can—and would—break faith with them in an instant to further his own interests. Yet here they are, on the verge of achieving everything they have hoped to achieve for years, if not decades. They owe this chance solely to Trump’s ability to deliver a crucial margin of votes in a handful of states—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—which has provided a party that cannot win the national popular vote a fleeting opportunity to act as a decisive national majority.

What excites Trump is his approval rating, his wealth, his power. The day could come when those ends would be better served by jettisoning the institutional Republican Party in favor of an ad hoc populist coalition, joining nationalism to generous social spending—a mix that’s worked well for authoritarians in places like Poland.

A scandal involving the president could likewise wreck everything that Republican congressional leaders have waited years to accomplish. However deftly they manage everything else, they cannot prevent such a scandal. But there is one thing they can do: their utmost not to find out about it.

Ryan has learned his prudence the hard way. Following the airing of Trump’s past comments, caught on tape, about his forceful sexual advances on women, Ryan said he’d no longer campaign for Trump. Ryan’s net favorability rating among Republicans dropped by 28 points in less than 10 days. Once unassailable in the party, he suddenly found himself disliked by 45 percent of Republicans.

Ambition will counteract ambition only until ambition discovers that conformity serves its goals better. At that time, Congress, the body expected to check presidential power, may become the president’s most potent enabler.

Discipline within the congressional ranks will be strictly enforced not only by the party leadership and party donors, but also by the overwhelming influence of Fox News.

Fox learned its lesson: Trump sells; critical coverage does not. Since the election, the network has awarded Kelly’s former 9 p.m. time slot to Tucker Carlson, who is positioning himself as a Trump enthusiast in the Hannity mold.

Gingrich said: The president “has, frankly, the power of the pardon. It is a totally open power, and he could simply say, ‘Look, I want them to be my advisers. I pardon them if anybody finds them to have behaved against the rules. Period.’ And technically, under the Constitution, he has that level of authority.”

In 2009, in the run-up to the Tea Party insurgency, South Carolina’s Bob Inglis crossed Fox, criticizing Glenn Beck and telling people at a town-hall meeting that they should turn his show off. He was drowned out by booing, and the following year, he lost his primary with only 29 percent of the vote, a crushing repudiation for an incumbent untouched by any scandal.

Fox is reinforced by a carrier fleet of supplementary institutions: super pacs, think tanks, and conservative web and social-media presences, which now include such former pariahs as Breitbart and Alex Jones. So long as the carrier fleet coheres—and unless public opinion turns sharply against the president—oversight of Trump by the Republican congressional majority will very likely be cautious, conditional, and limited.

His immediate priority seems likely to be to use the presidency to enrich himself. But as he does so, he will need to protect himself from legal risk. Being Trump, he will also inevitably wish to inflict payback on his critics. Construction of an apparatus of impunity and revenge will begin haphazardly and opportunistically. But it will accelerate. It will have to.

By filling the media space with bizarre inventions and brazen denials, purveyors of fake news hope to mobilize potential supporters with righteous wrath—and to demoralize potential opponents by nurturing the idea that everybody lies and nothing matters

The United States may be a nation of laws, but the proper functioning of the law depends upon the competence and integrity of those charged with executing it. A president determined to thwart the law in order to protect himself and those in his circle has many means to do so.

The powers of appointment and removal are another. The president appoints and can remove the commissioner of the IRS. He appoints and can remove the inspectors general who oversee the internal workings of the Cabinet departments and major agencies. He appoints and can remove the 93 U.S. attorneys, who have the power to initiate and to end federal prosecutions. He appoints and can remove the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, and the head of the criminal division at the Department of Justice.