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to the dismay of many on the left, and to the continuing disbelief of many on the right, Obama never dramatically departed from the approach of presidents who came before him. There’s a simple reason: Barack Obama is a conservative.

his constant search for consensus, for ways to bring Blue America and Red America together, sometimes led him to policies that used Republican means to achieve more liberal ends.

Though cast as a “dithering” peacenik who led “from behind,” he stuck with his thesis that the imperative “to end the war in Iraq is to be able to get more troops into Afghanistan,” and he prosecuted a drone war in Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen.

the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy.

On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000

Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median

Biden has laid out a comprehensive plan to address racial disparities within the United

He also calls for an end to discriminatory housing policies, stressing the need to penalize financial institutions perpetuating such policies and outlining policies to strengthen renters' rights and provide more housing vouchers.

Biden pledges to support minority-owned small businesses by allocating $30 billion —

E-mail addthis_pub = 'nybooks'; addthis_logo = 'http://www.nybooks.com/images/logo-150.gif'; addthis_logo_background = 'ffffff'; addthis_logo_color = '666666'; addthis_brand = 'NYRB'; addthis_options = 'favorites, facebook, twitter, tumblr, reddit, digg, stumbleupon, delicious, google, more'; Share Print Comments (function() { var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0], rdb = document.createElement('script'); rdb.type = 'text/javascript'; rdb.async = true; rdb.src = document.location.protocol + '//www.readability.com/embed.js'; s.parentNode.insertBefore(rdb, s); })(); Young Israelis: A Turn to the Right? Eyal Press Uriel Sinai/Getty Images Children at the local school in the village of Ghajar, on Israeli-Lebanese border, which was recaptured during the 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, November 10, 2010 Shortly after the democratic uprising began in Egypt, a group of young Israelis led by freelance journalist Dimi Reider launched Kav Hutz (“Outside Line”), a Hebrew-language blog devoted to covering the events across the border. Unable to enter Egypt on short notice with his Israeli passport—a predicament all Israeli correspondents faced—Reider chronicled the insurrection by posting minute-by-minute updates culled from an array of online sources on the ground: Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Egyptian bloggers. The tone of Reider’s blog was reportorial, but hardly detached. “Good luck,” he wrote on the eve of the huge “Day of Departure” rally in Tahrir Square—a sentiment rarely voiced in Israel’s mainstream media, which stressed the danger of a takeover by the Muslim Brotherhood if the protesters prevailed. By the time Egyptians had succeeded in overthrowing Hosni Mubarak, Kav Hutz was getting up to 12,000 visitors a day and had been singled out in Haaretz for leaving the rest of the Israeli press “in the dust.” As the story suggests, Egypt’s uprising managed to inspire not only countless young Arabs but also some young Israelis. A contributor to +972, an Israel-based online magazine that features commentary and reporting by mostly young progressives—it is named after the area code shared by Israel and the Palestinian territories—Reider was deeply moved by the courage of the protesters in Cairo and dismayed by the patronizing reaction of many Israelis. “The line the establishment took was that it’s all very nice but they’re going to end up like Iran,” he recalls. “I didn’t take that line because I bothered to read stuff by Egyptians and it quickly became apparent that the Muslim Brotherhood was just one player. It also felt distasteful to me to judge the extraordinary risks Egyptians were taking solely by our profit—by how it would affect Israeli security and the policy of a government I don’t support anyway.” For observers troubled by Israel’s alarming recent shift to the right, the emergence of Internet-savvy liberal voices like Reider’s may seem heartening. But while such bloggers appear more capable of reaching a younger demographic than Haaretz—the venerable leftist newspaper whose aging readership seems likely to shrink in the years to come—it’s not clear how many of their contemporaries are listening to them. One reason is apathy. Increasingly cynical about politics and the prospects of peace, not a few young Israelis I’ve met in recent years have told me they’ve stopped following the news. When they go online, it’s to chat with friends, not to check out sites like +972. There are also growing numbers of young Israelis who simply don’t share Reider’s views. Against the 12,000 readers of Kav Hutz were countless others who didn’t question the alarmist tone of their country’s mass-circulation tabloids when the revolt in Egypt began, as NPR discovered when it aired a segment on what Israeli youth thought of the uprising. “For us it is better to have Mubarak,” one young Israeli said. “I kind of feel sad for President Mubarak,” said another. “For the last two or three years, we’ve been seeing a very consistent trend of younger Israelis becoming increasingly right-wing,” Dahlia Scheindlin, a public opinion analyst who also contributes to +972, told me. Last year, Scheindlin carried out a survey on behalf of the Kulanana Shared Citizenship Initiative that showed eroding support for democratic values among Israeli youth, at least insofar as the rights of non-Jews go. One question in the survey asked whether there should be “Equal access to state resources, equal opportunities [for] all citizens.” Among Jewish respondents between the ages of 16-29, a mere 43 percent agreed.

In October, a poll conducted by New Wave Research asked, “If Palestinians and Israelis reach an agreement… and the Israeli government brings the agreement to a referendum, would you vote for or against?” Among voters over 55, 61 percent—nearly two out of three—said they would support a deal. Among those younger than 35, it was the opposite: only one in three (37 percent) would vote in favor of an agreement.

One reason tolerance may be less widespread among young Israelis is that they rarely interact with Palestinians or Arab-Israelis. “You don’t see Palestinians on the streets of Israel,”

What is a neoconservative? From the etymology of the word, it should refer either to someone who has newly become conservative—having been born a little liberal—or to someone who has revised conservatism into something new, without causing it thereby to cease to be conservative. It should, perhaps, refer to a political perspective that takes il Gattopardo’s maxim, “everything must change so that everything can remain the same,” very much to heart and to whatever lengths necessary.

In 1976 Kristol asked, “What is a ‘Neoconservative’?” and answered, in so many words, someone who wants to make liberalism work. Someone with a preference for incorporating market mechanisms into regulatory policy rather than operating by bureaucratic fiat. With a hostility to the erstwhile “counterculture” and a preference for art or “quality.” Who believes in providing equality of opportunity rather than mandating equality of result. And who holds to a conviction that a world hostile to American values will also be hostile to American interests.

“Neoconservatism … had no program of its own. Basically, it wanted the Republican Party to cease playing defensive politics, to be forward-looking rather than backward-looking … the substance of any specific agenda may not have much to do with neoconservatism, but the moving spirit does.”

McGovern was on to something that is still misunderstood today: Republicans had capitalized upon a strong advantage with anti-feminist white women, most notably in the South. The GOP had wooed these women by dropping its previous support for the Equal Rights Amendment and offering up a new dog-whistle tactic: preaching the politics of “family values.”

In 1976, 64 percent of Southern white women supported the ERA, while 16 percent were opposed. By 1980, however, support had dropped to 42 percent, while opposition swelled to 44 percent — a much more drastic shift than in other regions of the country.

In fall 1971 and spring 1972, the ERA sailed through the House of Representatives and the Senate by votes of 354 to 24 and 84 to 8. It received such broad bipartisan support because legislators understood that the amendment would create equal opportunities for women should they choose to pursue them.

Equal Pay Day marks the date in the calendar when women are finally able to catch up to what men earned the year before. It's sad, but not surprising, that women in the US still earn far less than men, and the pandemic has only heightened the economic hardships for women.

It's a reminder that future historians will judge us on how women fared coming out of this once-in-a-century phenomenon. Will this be known as the year women fell into an abyss with no hope of climbing out? Or can women experience a "V" shaped recovery, falling fast and hard but rebounding higher than they were before?

My fear is that because of this pandemic, 2021 will go down in history as the time when American women fell further backward, instead of taking leaps forward.Think this is an exaggeration? Just ask any woman how the coronavirus recovery is going for her.

Just as aggressive treatment was necessary to save his life, Kendi proposes similarly aggressive treatment for the nation. The medicine, he says, is called antiracism.

Antiracism does not mean what you probably think it means. For most of our history, the term has been used sporadically to describe efforts or policies to oppose racism. Most Americans likely still understand it as such

But in the past decade, the term has taken on a different meaning—one that describes a very specific way of thinking about and confronting racism.

Another racial text—published by the nation’s premier social-science organization, the American Economic Association, and classified by the historian Evelynn Hammonds as “one of the most influential documents in social science at the turn of the 20th century”—elicited more shock in 1896.

“Nothing is more clearly shown from this investigation than that the southern black man at the time of emancipation was healthy in body and cheerful in mind,” Frederick Hoffman wrote in Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro. “What are the conditions thirty years after?” Hoffman concluded from “the plain language of the facts” that black Americans were better off enslaved. They are now “on the downward grade,” he wrote, headed toward “gradual extinction.”

Hoffman knew his work was “a most severe condemnation of moderate attempts of superior races to lift inferior races to their elevated positions.” He rejected that sort of assimilationist racism, in favor of his own segregationist racism. The data “speak for themselves,” he wrote. White Americans had been naturally selected for health, life, and evolution. Black Americans had been naturally selected for disease, death, and extinction. “Gradual extinction,” the book concluded, “is only a question of time.

Since he came to power he maintained the empire and created a legislative process. The Legislative process was divided between four bodies: the Council of State which would draw up legislative proposals, the Tribunate which could vote on legislation but not vote on it, a legislative body which could vote on legislation but not discuss it, and the Senate which would consider whether the proposed legislation conformed to the Constitution.

Napoleon introduced the Civil Code, which guaranteed legal rights. In 1804 he published the Civil Code that still forms the basis of French law. The code, followed by codes for civil procedure, commerce, criminal procedure and punishment was the product of a committee of legal experts, whose work was considered in over a hundred sessions of the Council of State, often chaired by Napoleon personally.

In addition, he reformed the religion with the population. At the time France saw the Catholic Church as fundamentally anti-revolutionary. Partly to assuage such concerns about the new religious framework, Napoleon added the “organic Articles” to the Concordat in April 1802. These guaranteed the revolutionary principle of religious toleration and made the Protestant and Jewish churches similarly subject to state authority. In the shorter term the Concordat did reconcile the Catholic Church to the regime, help to pacify unrest in the Vendee and help secure the Napoleonic Regime. This is seen as an example of how Napoleon maintain the ideals of the French Revolution because he did introduce the enlightened idea of religious toleration, people should have “freedom and conscience” and freedom to practice their chosen religion.

Preface

“No teacher can doubt that his real task is to assist his pupil to fulfill human nature against all the deforming forces of convention and prejudice.” p. 20

A liberal education is one that helps students to ask themselves and answer the question, “what is man?… In our chronic lack of certainty, this comes down to knowing the alternative answers [to that question] and thinking about them.” p. 21

The American colonies were first settled by Protestant dissenters.

They created an American creed, built, as the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset put it, around liberty, individualism, equal opportunity, populism and laissez-faire.

this worldview is innately suspicious of government. Its adherents generally believe in the equation that more government equals less individual and civic vitality. Growing beyond proper limits, government saps initiative, sucks resources, breeds a sense of entitlement and imposes a stifling uniformity on the diverse webs of local activity.

The issue at hand was—and still is—the city’s nine elite public high schools. Like most public high schools in the city, these schools can choose who attends. But the elite schools are their own animal: Whereas other schools look at a range of criteria to determine students’ eligibility, eight of these nine elite institutions admit applicants based exclusively on how the students score on a rigorous, two-and-a-half-hour-long standardized test.

The test-only admissions policy is touted by supporters as a tactic that promotes fairness and offers the best way to identify the city’s most gifted students. But the complaint, which is still pending, tells a different story—one of modern-day segregation, in which poor kids of color are getting left behind.

Public schools in cities across the country—schools intended to break down the walls typical of expensive, elite private institutions by opening up access to stimulating, quality education for kids of all means—are closed in their admissions. In other words, kids aren’t just automatically enrolled because they live in the neighborhood—they have to apply to get in

This Monday, we commemorate the 30th anniversary of the federal holiday in honor of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.It's a holiday that thankfully has been gaining in recognition since Congress passed a bill and President Ronald Reagan signed it in 1983, designating the third Monday in January, starting in 1986, to honor the civil rights leader. For years, some states declined to participate in the holiday, and Arizona lost the opportunity to host a Super Bowl over it. In 2000, South Carolina became the last state to recognize the holiday.

Had an assassin's bullet not taken his life at the age of 39, King would have turned 87 on Friday.Read MoreHad he lived, I believe King would have continued to inspire hope and would challenge us to fulfill his dream of a more inclusive society -- where everyone would have an equal opportunity for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Not only are we reopening old wounds with regard to confrontation with law enforcement, we are also relitigating everything from voting rights to affirmative action. And now we confront, for the second year in a row, Hollywood -- which somehow ignores the talent of people of color when it comes to the Oscars.

today, digital platforms—which deliver exponentially more ads than their newsprint predecessors—are making these core civil-rights laws increasingly challenging to enforce. The opacity of the digital-ad ecosystem is a major barrier to ensuring justice and equal opportunity.

The study’s results show digital advertising working exactly as designed—and exactly in ways that can perpetuate the types of harms that civil-rights laws are meant to address. Simply put, ad platforms such as Facebook make money when people click on ads. But an individual’s tendency to click on certain types of ads (and not others) often reflects deep-seated social inequities: the neighborhood they live in, where they went to school, how much money they have. An ad system that is designed to maximize clicks, and to maximize profits for Facebook, will naturally reinforce these social inequities and so serve as a barrier to equal opportunity.

These dynamics are a perfect illustration of why the “disparate impact” doctrine—a bedrock principle of civil-rights law—is such an important tool in the era of algorithms. Under disparate impact, even unintentional actions can amount to illegal discrimination if they have an adverse impact on protected groups.

Instead of self-confident and self-centered answers, the author humbly asks fundamental questions: What is economics? What is its meaning? Where does this new religion, as it is sometimes called, come from? What are its possibilities and its limitations and borders, if there are any? Why are we so dependent on permanent growing of growth and growth of growing of growth? Where did the idea of progress come from, and where is it leading us? Why are so many economic debates accompanied by obsession and fanaticism?

The majority of our political parties act with a narrow materialistic focus when, in their programs, they present the economy and finance first; only then, somewhere at the end, do we find culture as something pasted on or as a libation for a couple of madmen.

most of them—consciously or unconsciously—accept and spread the Marxist thesis of the economic base and the spiritual superstructure.