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In this system, African captives "could be mortgaged, bred, won in a bet, given as wedding presents, bequeathed to heirs, sold away from spouses or children to cover an owner's debt or to spite a rival or to settle an estate," Wilkerson writes.

That Barr painted a few months of being told -- or really, in many cases, asked -- to stay home during a global pandemic as even remotely in the same category as the practice of enslavement is ridiculous. (To say nothing of the fact that he skipped over, among other things, Jim Crow, Japanese internment during World War II, and the slaughter of Native Americans.)

You know, I think the narrative that the police are on some, you know, epidemic of shooting unarmed Black men is simply a false narrative and also the narrative that that's based on race," Barr said earlier this month

According to The Washington Post's police shootings database, Black Americans are killed by police at more than twice the rate of their White counterparts, despite the fact that the former make up less than 13% of the country's population.

"It was also Barr, serving as then-President George H.W. Bush's attorney general, who helmed the federal response during 1992's Los Angeles riots, which came after four officers were acquitted of beating Rodney King," Vazquez wrote. "That was, in fact, the last time the Insurrection Act was invoked -- the 1807 law allowing for the use of US military on US soil.

Democrats were making a last-ditch effort to provide emergency aid to states, which they argued was critical to helping states weather the pandemic and avoid huge layoffs and cuts in services that could reverberate through the economy. Republicans were working to limit the power of the Federal Reserve to bail out businesses, municipalities or other institutions in the future.

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has chosen Representative Deb Haaland, Democrat of New Mexico, to lead the Interior Department, according to people familiar with the decision, a move that would make history: If confirmed by the Senate, she would be the first Native American appointed to a cabinet secretary position.

As head of the agency that oversees 500 million acres of public lands, including national parks, oil and gas drilling sites, and endangered species habitats, she would be entrusted to restore federal protections to vast swathes of land and water that the Trump administration has opened up to drilling, mining, logging and construction.

A July Reuters-Ipsos poll found that 78 percent “support teaching high school students about the impacts of slavery” and 73 percent support teaching high school students about the impacts of racism.

If critical race theory isn’t being taught to children — and in a technical sense, it isn’t — then it’s hardly illogical to suppose that some other concern may be afoot.

The problem lies in the name “critical race theory.” It’s a no-brainer that the legal doctrine developed decades ago by scholars such as the Harvard Law professor Derrick Bell and the Columbia University and U.C.L.A. law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw is not being taught to tots.

today, this isn’t what most voters mean when they object to critical race theory, and to participate in this debate as if otherwise is quibbling at best, and a smoke screen at worst.

consider the cultural critic Helen Pluckrose’s — fair, I think — summary of the original body of critical race theory work:C.R.T. is not just talking about historical and contemporary racism with a view to overcoming it — something that all approaches to addressing racism do — but a set of core beliefs that racism is ordinary and/or permanent; that white supremacy is everywhere; that white people don’t oppose racism unless it suits them; that there is a unique voice of color that just so happens to be the one that agrees with C.R.T.; that lived experience and story-telling are primary ways of revealing racism; that liberalism and the civil rights movement approach are bad; and that working for social justice means using the critical theories of race set out above.

this “critical” approach has trickled down, in broad outline, into the philosophy of education-school pedagogy and administration — call it C.R.T.-lite or, if you prefer, C.R.T. Jr. — and from there migrated into the methods used by graduates of those education programs into the way they wind up running schools.

Under this approach, what alarms many parents and other observers is that kids will absorb the idea that it is enlightened to see white people as potential oppressors and Black people as perpetual victims of an inherently oppressive system. That it is therefore appropriate to ascribe certain traits to races, rather than individuals, and that education must “center” the battle against power differentials between groups

An implication some educators draw from these tenets is that various expectations of some of their students, based on what are generally thought to be ordinary mainstream assumptions, are instead onerous stipulations from an oppressive white-centric view.

Hence an idea that it is white to be on time, arrive at precise answers and reason from A to B, rather than holistically, etc. Again, this is not what decades-old critical race theory scholarship proposed, but yes, the idea is descended from original C.R.T.’s fundamental propositions about white supremacy.

these guidelines, apparently sanctioned by state departments of education, contradict the notion that concepts derived from critical race theory — or are, at least, C.R.T.-lite — is nowhere near our schools, that the C.R.T.-in-schools debate “isn’t real,” merely a fiction designed to cloak racism.

In some cases, evidence of C.R.T.-lite is easier to spot at various private schools.

Some of those who say that critical race theory isn’t being taught in schools may not be aware of these developments. Others most likely are, and suppose that they are healthy, that this is indeed how education should be.

That’s a respectable stance, but one ought not harbor it in disbelief that any intelligent, morally concerned person could feel differently

One can ardently support that students learn about racism and its legacies in a way that doesn’t crowd out obvious lessons about the history of undeniable racial progress. One can do that while questioning whether students should be immersed in a broader perspective that offers overbroad, clumsy and, frankly, insulting portraits of what is inherently white and what is Black, Latino, Asian American or Native American, and fosters — even if unintentional — a sense of opposition between the groups in question.

The horror of slavery, the hypocrisy of Jim Crow, the terror of lynching, the devastating loss of life and property in Tulsa and in other massacres — no student should get through, roughly, middle school ignorant of these things, and anyone who thinks that is “politics” needs to join the rest of us in the 21st century.

But the insistence that parents opposed to what is being called critical race theory are rising against a mere fantasy and simply enjoying a coded way of fostering denial about race is facile

To varying degrees, we have all inherited a muddled understanding of race, ancestry and phenotype from the Enlightenment,

if we don’t disentangle these concepts, we may miss the great promise of using genetics to push back against a very long and sad history of the misuse of science for pernicious purposes.

One of the key moments in the evolution of modern concepts of race occurred in France in 1741, when the members of Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences held a continentwide essay contest on the “cause” of dark skin and textured hair among African populations. Why, they asked, were Black people Black?

this contest signaled a new era of “scientific racism.” In the decades that followed, naturalists increasingly subdivided the human species into several so-called races by things like skin color, hair texture, skull shape and, most perniciously, according to supposedly transcendent essences.

genetics — or, for that matter, any science — has the potential to be misused, co-opted by racist ideologies and employed to bolster harmful narratives about racial purity or biological superiority.

There is no category for white in genetic analysis; half of his ancestry traces back to regions in Europe. We should never forget that whiteness, like Blackness, is just another social fiction.

If, throughout the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, science put an enormous amount of effort into dividing the human species into separate categories, 21st-century genetic analysis promises to reveal just how meaningless those categories are — and how connected we’ve been all along.

it feels urgent that we develop new language for discussing the relationship between identity, ancestry, history and science

DNA analysis could help create that language by offering more nuanced ways of looking at individual origins and a more unifying narrative about our shared heritage

While, biologically speaking, the idea of individual human races with different origins is as farcical as the medieval belief that elves cause hiccups, the social reality of race is undeniable.

The multitude of population clusters, regions and genetic groups reflected in DNA tests counters existing narratives that try to reduce the astonishing variety of the human community to the four or five socially constructed races of man

But if we can, at the very least, embrace the understanding that race (a toxic social construction) and ancestry (a shared genetic history) are not only distinct but also fundamentally opposed — and teach that in our classrooms — it could go a long way toward freeing us from some of the binds in which scientific racism have trapped us.

The stories embedded in our genes beg to be told. They tell of ancestral diversity that stretches back thousands of years and ultimately underscores all that we — despite superficial physical differences — have in common.

Fresh estimates from the Congressional Budget Office this month said the U.S. labor force in 2023 had grown by 5.2 million people, thanks especially to net immigration

The sudden snapback in demand sent inflation soaring. Supply chain issues were a main reason prices rose quickly. But labor shortages posed a problem, too, and economists feared that rising wages — as employers scrambled to find workers — would keep price increases dangerously high.

he flow of migrants to the United States started slowing during the Trump administration, when officials took hundreds of executive actions designed to restrict migration.

Right before the pandemic, there were about 1.5 million fewer working-age immigrants in the United States than pre-2017 trends would have predicted, according to the San Francisco Fed. By the end of 2021, that shortfall had widened to about 2 million

But the economy overall wound up rebounding aggressively from the sudden, widespread closures of 2020, bolstered by historic government stimulus and vaccines that debuted faster than expected.

economy grow. But today’s snapshot still represents a stark turnaround from just a short time ago.

That’s because the labor force that emerged as the pandemic ebbed was smaller than it had been: Millions of people retired early, stayed home to take over child care or avoid getting sick, or decided to look for new jobs entirely

In the span of a year or so, employers went from having businesses crater to sprinting to hire enough staff to keep restaurants, hotels, retail stores and construction sites going. Wages for the lowest earners rose at the fastest pace.

About the same time, the path was widening for migrants to cross the southern border, particularly as the new Biden administration rolled back Trump-era restrictions.

Experts argue that the strength of the U.S. economy has benefited American workers and foreign-born workers alike. Each group accounts for roughly half of the labor market’s impressive year-over-year growth since January 2023

But the past few years were extremely abnormal because companies were desperate to hire.

lus, it would be exceedingly difficult for immigration to affect the wages of enormous swaths of the labor force,

“What it can do is lower the wages of a specific occupation in a specific area, but American workers aren’t stupid. They change jobs. They change what they specialize in,” Nowrasteh said. “So that’s part of the reason why wages don’t go down.”

In normal economic times, some analysts note, new immigrants can drag down wages, especially if employers decide to hire them over native-born workers. Undocumented workers, who don’t have as much leverage to push for higher pay, could lower average wages even more.

Particularly for immigrants fleeing poorer countries, the booming U.S. job market and the promise of higher wages continue to be an enormous draw.

“More than any immigration policy per se, the biggest pull for migrants is the strength of the labor market,” said Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes, an economics professor at the University of California at Merced. “More than any enforcement policy, any immigration policy, at the end of the day.”

Upon arriving in Denver in October, Santander hadn’t acquired a work permit but needed to feed his small children. Even without authorization, he found a job as a roofer for a contractor that ultimately pocketed his earnings, then one cleaning industrial refrigerators on the overnight shift for $12 an hour. Since receiving his work permit in January, Santander has started “a much better job” at a wood accessories manufacturer making $20 an hour.

But for the vast majority of migrants who arrive in the United States without prior approval, including asylum seekers and those who come for economic reasons, getting a work permit isn’t easy.

Federal law requires migrants to wait nearly six months to receive a work permit after filing for asylum. Wait times can stretch for additional months because of a backlog in cases.

While they wait, many migrants find off-the-books work as day laborers or street vendors, advocates say. Others get jobs using falsified documents, including many teenagers who came into the country as unaccompanied minors.

Still, many migrants miss the year-long window to apply for asylum — a process that can cost thousands of dollars — leaving them with few pathways to work authorization, advocates say. Those who can’t apply for asylum often end up working without official permission in low-wage industries where they are susceptible to exploitation.

Ammon and Ryan Bundy, who led a group of armed militia members as they occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeast Oregon in what they claimed was a protest against federal land management

The Bundy brothers, along with their father, Cliven, still face an array of felony charges in Nevada for another armed standoff with federal agents in 2014.

Mumford was reportedly taken into custody, cited for both failure to comply with a federal lawful order and disturbance, and released with orders to return to federal court in January.

It’s exceedingly rare for federal prosecutors to lose one case during a trial, let alone seven at once.

an FBI agent testified that the agency found 16,636 rounds of ammunition and nearly 1,700 spent shell casings, according to the Associated Press.

Ammon Bundy even compared himself to Martin Luther King Jr. when he took the stand in his own defense.

Jurors for the case were pulled from across Oregon, which may have helped the Bundys since many parts of the state are rural, conservative, and distrustful of the federal government. One of the jurors was even dismissed for bias during deliberations

the timing of the verdict with recent events in North Dakota, where Native American tribes have been protesting against the construction of an oil pipeline. Violence erupted on Thursday when riot police descended on the demonstration and tried to clear out the protesters, after hundreds of arrests a few days before. Others claimed the acquittals were proof of a double standard in the U.S. justice system that benefits white men like the Bundys

But the fallout of Thursday’s not guilty verdict could have troubling implications for the rise of paramilitary groups in the United States.

militias operating along the U.S.–Mexico border, more than 275 such groups are believed to be operating in at least 41 states

“He disavowed us,” Mr. Johnson acknowledged, “but he explained why there is so much anger in America that I couldn’t have asked for a better approach from him.”

Like others in his world, Mr. Taylor does not know if Mr. Trump agrees with him on everything. In an interview, he suggested that it did not really matter, and that Mr. Trump was expressing the discomfort many white people felt about other races.

“He says what everyone thinks,” Mr. Conrad said of Mr. Trump. “He says what we’re all thinking. He’s bringing people together. We say, ‘Hey, that’s right; we can say this.’

But on the flatlands of social media, the border between Mr. Trump and white supremacists easily blurs. He has retweeted supportive messages from racist or nationalist Twitter accounts to his nine million followers. Last fall, he retweeted a graphic with fictitious crime statistics claiming that 81 percent of white homicide victims in 2015 were killed by blacks. (No such statistic was available for 2015 at the time; the actual figure for 2014 was 15 percent, according to the F.B.I.)

In January and February he retweeted messages from a user with the handle @WhiteGenocideTM, whose profile picture is of George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party. A couple of days later, in quick succession, he retweeted two more accounts featuring white nationalist or Nazi themes. Mr. Trump deleted one of the retweets, but white supremacists saw more than a twitch of the thumb. “Our Glorious Leader and ULTIMATE SAVIOR has gone full wink-wink-wink to his most aggressive supporters,” Mr. Anglin wrote on The Daily Stormer.

In fact, Mr. Trump’s Twitter presence is tightly interwoven with hordes of mostly anonymous accounts trafficking in racist and anti-Semitic attacks. When Little Bird, a social media data mining company, analyzed a week of Mr. Trump’s Twitter activity, it found that almost 30 percent of the accounts Mr. Trump retweeted in turn followed one or more of 50 popular self-identified white nationalist accounts.

After Mr. Trump attacked a profile of his wife, Melania, in GQ, the article’s author, the journalist Julia Ioffe, who is Jewish, was inundated with anti-Semitic abuse on social media, including a cartoon depicting Ms. Ioffe in a concentration camp.Asked whether he condemned the attacks, Mr. Trump told an interviewer: “I don’t have a message to the fans. A woman wrote an article that’s inaccurate.

here everything is plentiful that in the United States is rare: indigenous ruins, ancient languages, signs of direct lineage. And there is an edge to it all. Centers like Monte Albán are monuments to power and accumulated material wealth; they are also clearly evidence of a large-scale political organization, relics of perhaps the earliest state in the Americas.

how different all of this is from images of the indigenous past north of the border! There are few areas where evidence of ancient state-size power exists (mainly in the 2,000-year-old relics of societies that once thrived along the Ohio, Tennessee and Mississippi Rivers). There are few places where cultural continuity is even remotely clear, and where ancient languages are still widely spoken. Even before colonization, cultures disappeared, leaving behind neither oral traditions nor written records. And forced migrations and centuries of warfare so disrupted native traditions that the past now seems little more than an identity-affirming fantasy.

the head of Mexico’s national archaeological administration, explained in her dissertation that it was not easy to balance the needs of archaeologists with a sensitivity toward the local community, which also has its set of demands. “An experienced archaeologist,” she writes, “on hearing ‘the community will decide,’ immediately abandons hope of success.”

The project would demand that Habermas reconsider the major philosophers of world-rationalization—Kant, Hegel, Weber—to wrest from their theories all that might enrich a new model of truly human freedom while dispensing with their impoverished conception of reason as a mere instrument for the mastery of nature.

The very armature of the Enlightenment tradition had to be excavated and reset, like a bone that had once broken and never properly healed.

Security forces entered the hotel early Saturday and freed 126 hostages, half of whom were hospitalized, according to Burkina Faso's foreign minister, Alpha Barry.Read More

Of the 29 people who died, 22 have been identified, Ouagadougou prosecutor Maïza Sereme said, according to state broadcaster RTB.

President Roch Marc Christian Kabore told the nation more than 50 people were wounded. The injured included two Burkinabe police officers, one soldier and one service member from France.It was unclear whether the death toll included the three attackers that Kabore said were killed.

Survivors described horrific scenes as the attackers paced and fired in the hotel Friday night.

The West African nation's forces received logistical support from American and French troops. Shortly after the forces stormed the hotel, the sounds of gunshots faded.

The assault appeared well-planned, with some of the attackers coming to the hotel during the day and mingling with guests, authorities said. When darkness fell, more attackers joined them.

Before the hotel assault, they attacked the Cappuccino café across the street, which had about 100 people, according to the state broadcaster. They then took off to the Splendid Hotel, where they seized hostages. Witnesses said the attackers wore turbans and spoke a language not native to Burkina Faso, a former French colony.

Cruz is particularly ill-equipped to play this role. He is actually more of a demagogue than an ideologue. So he has changed his views on immigration to compete with Trump — and raised the ante by promising that none of the deported 11 million will ever be allowed back in the country. Instead of demonstrating the humane instincts of his Christian faith — a faith that motivated abolition and the struggle for civil rights — Cruz is presenting the crueler version of a pipe dream.

Just two blocks away, a big order of tacos was picked up after midnight on Jan. 8 by a man driving a white van, like the one believed to be driven by Mr. Guzmán’s associates, witnesses said.

Hours later, on a highway heading out of town, the authorities finally got Mr. Guzmán, arguably the most powerful drug dealer in the history of the trade, for the third time since 1993.

Mr. Guzmán’s capture — described using information from interviews with witnesses and government officials, police reports, military video and Mexican news reports confirmed by officials — brings to a close, for now, one of the most exhaustive manhunts the Mexican government has conducted, an endeavor that drew in more than 2,500 people across the nation.

As the head of the Sinaloa cartel, Mr. Guzmán is the embodiment of an identity the country has fought to shed for decades.

Either way, Mr. Guzmán represents a deep crisis for Mexico’s leaders as they struggle to define the country’s image.

His daring escape from prison last July, in view of the video camera in his cell, cast a lurid spotlight on the incompetence and corruption that has long dogged the Mexican state, driving many to view the government on a par with criminals.

El Chapo’s image, by contrast, seemed only to grow after his escapes. Perhaps more than the infamy he gained as a cartel chief — responsible for shipping tons of drugs to more than 50 countries around the world, with a wider reach than even Pablo Escobar in his heyday — Mr. Guzmán has earned a reputation as the world’s pre-eminent escape artist.

During the 17 months Mr. Guzmán was locked up, he met often with associates, not only to plan his legal defense, but also to plot his escape, Mexican officials said. His men purchased land within sight of the prison, constructing an outer wall and an unfinished building on the site. From there, a mile away, the digging began.

The Mexican authorities were monitoring the phones of Mr. Guzmán and his accomplices, reading the odd and unexpectedly tender exchanges between him and the actress. Mr. Guzmán promised to protect Ms. del Castillo as he would his own eyes, an affectionate phrase Mexican parents often say of their children.

Six days later, a detachment of marines swept in to capture Mr. Guzmán on his ranch, acting with information from American authorities. During the raid, Mr. Guzmán, who always took his two cooks with him wherever he went, darted into a gully as he fled, injuring his face and leg.

In the following weeks, operations continued in and around areas under Mr. Guzmán’s control. The brutal weather of an approaching winter also concerned the cartel leader — Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa, where life could be more comfortable, was under constant surveillance. He needed to go somewhere outside his traditional zone of influence.

The government, aware that Mr. Guzmán was planning a trip to an urban center, followed one of his associates to a house in Los Mochis, on a busy road with a movie theater, restaurants and shopping nearby.

A commander ordered one of the marines to toss a grenade in front of one of the many doors blocking their advance. As the mission continued, two marines advanced down another hallway, pressing cautiously toward a staircase used by the surviving gunmen to escape to the roof, drawing fire away from the interior of the house.

After the marines arrived, Mr. Guzmán was taken to Mexico City in a helicopter, the capture finally over. Soon everyone was gone, leaving behind just one thing: an unpaid bill, according to an employee of the hotel.

To keep him locked up this time, the authorities said they would rotate his cells, never allowing him to stay anywhere long enough to burrow his way out again. Vigilance would be enhanced, with more officers and round-the-clock surveillance from extra cameras.

But to many, the longer the drug lord remains in prison in Mexico, the higher the risk of flight. His imprisonment could drag on for a year, perhaps longer, given the numerous — and creative — injunctions filed by his team of lawyers to fight his extradition to the United States, where he faces federal indictments on charges that include narcotics trafficking and murder.

Smith's journey from Auburn Avenue to Morehouse College to regional division manager of the Federal Aviation Administration is in many ways a realization of King's dream of upward mobility for African-Americans.

ned funeral homes, a fast-food seafood joint and a convenience store -- is the masonic hall that was home to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's first office and its new Atlanta headquarters. Around the corner is a restored Madam C. J. Walker salon featuring antique hair care products.

"He would be disappointed in all the violence that still goes on and the crime. He would've thought that we would've advanced more toward peace and liberty and respecting everybody's rights. I know we're not there yet."

History hides in plain sight; blink and you might miss the explanatory signs hanging on poles and historic plaques on sides of buildings. One block from Smith's childhood home -- past Atlanta's two oldest

Today, the gas station is gone, replaced by a shopping plaza with a barber shop and a store selling homeopathic remedies, both popular with the seniors who live across the street in Wheat Street Towers. Ebenezer is still there, adjacent to the King Center, and King's birth home is up the street. The landmarks are the main destinations for tourists disembarking at the King historic district. Due to its relative high foot traffic, the streetcar stop attracts panhandlers offering tour guide services in exchange for donations to get them a bed at the Atlanta Mission.

lack-o

Today, it's home to a community urban garden, which started in 2010 and has proven sustainable through community farming initiatives.

A professional stylist who moved to Atlanta in the 1980s, de Forest was enchanted by the abandoned storefront with the salon's original signage miraculously preserved. Even better were the antique hair care products left behind.

Ten years ago, Sweet Auburn Bread Company owner Sonya James moved from the Sweet Auburn Curb Market on Edgewood into the Odd Fellows building, the former headquarters of the Atlanta Chapter of the Grand Order of Odd Fellows. The building's Jacobean revival architecture recalls the grandeur of the era when it served as a hub for black businesses and the site of a black social club.

General manager Douglas Jester, another Atlanta native, remembers when Auburn was the epicenter of the civil rights movement. Some of the pictures hanging on the restaurant's wall are of politicians -- Maynard Jackson, Andrew Young -- who visited Jester's school in the nearby Summerhill neighborhood to talk to students about black pride and the value of an education

"You're a product of your environment. I'm a good example of that. I would not have advanced in my life like I did had it not been for the environment I grew up in with Ebenezer and the Kings, feeling that failure is not an option," he said. "Then, there is systematic organized racism, against males and females and Hispanics and it's not getting any better with this presidential stuff we got going now. I think Dr. King and "Daddy King" would disappointed with some of the rhetoric we're hearing and the anti-Muslim stuff."

It's just one block away, but unlike on Auburn Avenue, white-owned businesses have anchored Edgewood Avenue for decades, many of which are still standing, said Joe Stewardson, president of the Old Fourth Ward Business Association. Even if white-owned businesses outnumber black-owned businesses on Edgewood, he says it's still among the most diverse business corridors and neighborhoods in Atlanta.

And if he won many of Trende’s missing whites, he also lost other (female, educated) whites whom past Republicans had won.

Turning out disaffected whites is more politically effective than most people imagined after 2012, but white voters are ultimately too divided to make a “white strategy” work as a foundation for a real governing majority.

Indeed, as David French writes in National Review, American politics is still defined primarily by a “great white culture war,” with competing tribes of conservative and liberal whites divided by many, many things besides their attitudes toward race.

for the G.O.P. there is an obvious and morally superior alternative, which is to return to Trende’s original insight, recognize that Trump’s populist rhetoric as well as his race-baiting helped win the white Midwest, and instead of a white strategy pursue a populist strategy shorn of white-identity appeals.

A performative anti-whiteness is common among white lefties seeking a rhetorical cudgel against blue-collar Archie Bunkers and popped-collar frat bros

And some conservative-white anxiety about the browning of America reflects a fear that minority votes will put the real enemy, white liberals, into power permanently.

But when those anxieties are translated into white-identitarian rhetoric, they cost Republicans not only minority votes but white votes as well, repelling anti-racist white suburbanites

the Republican Party would still need either some of the white voters Trump alienated or some of the minority votes he didn’t really try to win — and neither can be delivered by the white strategy alone

In this landscape even some racialized arguments are really white culture wars by proxy

just because this alternative is obvious doesn’t mean it’s operable. Some Republicans really welcome racial polarization; others, a larger group, are hoping to simply return to the ideological comforts of zombie-Reaganism once Trump has vanished from the scene. Meanwhile Trump himself seems mostly content to fight from within the redoubt the white strategy built for him rather than expand it.

A white-as-Moby-Dick Republican Party whose very whiteness ensures that it will lose the next battle in the great white civil war.

Across the democratic world, an enormous divide has opened between affluent metropolitan areas and the smaller cities, towns and rural regions far removed from tech booms and knowledge industries

Globalization married to rapid technological change has been very good to the well-educated folks in metro areas and a disaster for many citizens outside of them. This is now a truism, but it took far too long for economic and policy elites to recognize what was happening

This is a central theme of the political writer John Judis’s excellent and compact book “The Nationalist Revival,” published this fall

Judis sees the rise of nationalism as a reaction to “the illusions and excesses of globalization.” By unleashing footloose capital and undercutting national and even international efforts to regulate the economy in the public interest, globalization “is incompatible with social democracy in Europe or with New Deal liberalism in the United States.”

He proposes a useful distinction between “globalism” and “internationalism.” He’s against the first but for the second

Globalism, Judis argues, “subordinates nations and national governments to market forces or to the priorities of multinational corporations.

Internationalism, on the other hand, accepts that nations may sometimes have to “cede part of their sovereignty to international or regional bodies to address problems they could not adequately address on their own.”

critics of Trumpism need to recognize the ways in which globalism undercuts the rights and fortunes of large numbers of democratic citizens. The dispossessed often turn to nationalism for relief against their own sense of powerlessness.

Thinking about powerlessness is also important for understanding the backlash against immigration

there is nothing new (or necessarily indecent) about citizens saying that nations have a right to control their borders and to decide what levels of immigration they want to accept at any given time.

The challenge for the left and for all advocates of humane immigration policies is to move the debate from angry abstractions about “open borders” and toward a practical engagement with basic questions:

What level of immigration is optimal at this moment for the nation as a whole? What will it take to reach a consensus for creating a path toward citizenship for immigrants who are here illegally? And how do we build a stronger civic culture that acknowledges the rights but also the duties of the native-born and immigrants alike?

friends of liberal democracy need to keep two ideas in mind at the same time.

On the one side, they should not automatically cast those who worry about the decay of national sovereignty as reactionaries. On the other, they must continue to insist — and urgently so in 2019 — that American patriotism and the defense of constitutional democracy are one and the same.

The threat was defined as liberal activism to promote “the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty.”

In this secularized eschatology, alarmism is combined with nativism

Before the Civil War, many evangelical Christians held a postmillennial eschatology. They believed that society, through acts of mercy and grace, would become better and better, eventually ushering in the benevolent rule of Christ

Toward the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century, however, more Christians adopted a premillennial eschatology — a belief that the world would get worse and worse until Christ intervened to save it.

the populist right has taken on a distinctively religious tone. Rather than offering a vision of salvation, it has embraced a certain eschatology — a theory of the end times. The threat of liberalism, in this view, has become so dire that the wrong outcome of a presidential race could mean the end of U.S. civilization

If the political world is really headed toward disaster, then the normal political tools — things such as civility, persuasion and governing skill — are outmoded.

maybe the situation requires an abrasive outsider willing to fight fire with napalm. Desperation increases the appetite for political risk.

There are serious dangers to the cultivation of desperation. It transforms opponents into enemies. It turns compromise into heresy. And it paves the way for authoritarian thinking and measures.

It is also not an accurate description of a flawed but wonderful country

There are disturbing trends in modern liberalism — a secularism that sometimes slips into intolerance of religious people and institutions; a form of multiculturalism that despairs of unifying American ideals; the elevation of human autonomy above other humane values.

the country’s problems are not rooted in the ethnic makeup of its people

Our challenges — from government debt to educational failure — require reform, not revolution

After that, you see for the first time people related to later European hunter-gatherers who have contributed a little bit to present-day Europeans. That happens beginning 35,000 to 37,000 years ago. Then the ice sheets descend across northern Europe and a lot of these populations are chased into these refuges in the southern peninsulas of Europe. After the Ice Age, there’s a repeopling of northern Europe from the southwest, probably from Spain, and then also from the southeast, probably from Greece and maybe even from Anatolia, Turkey

Again, after 9,000 years ago, there’s a mass movement of farmers into the region which almost completely replaces the hunter-gatherers with a small amount of mixture

And then again, after 5,000 years ago, there’s this mass movement at the beginning of the Bronze Age of people from the steppe, who also probably bring these languages that are spoken by the great majority of Europeans today.

Reich: Archaeology has always been political, especially in Europe. Archaeologists are very aware of the misuse of archaeology in the past, in the 20th century. There’s a very famous German archaeologist named Gustaf Kossinna, who was the first or one of the first to come up with the idea of “material culture.” Say, you see similar pots, and therefore you’re in a region where there was shared community and aspects of culture.

He went so far as to argue that when you see the spread of these pots, you’re actually seeing a spread of people and there’s a one-to-one mapping for those things. His ideas were used by the Nazis later, in propaganda, to argue that a particular group in Europe, the Aryans, expanded in all directions across Europe.

This was used to justify their expansionism in the propaganda that the Germans used in the run-up to the Second World War.

So after the Second World War, there was a very strong reaction in the European archaeological community—not just the Germans, but the broad continental European archaeological community—to the fact that their discipline had been used for these terrible political ends. And there was a retreat from the ideas of Kossinna.

one of the things the ancient DNA is showing is actually the Corded Ware culture does correspond coherently to a group of people. [Editor’s note: The Corded Ware made pottery with cord-like ornamentation and according to ancient DNA studies, they descended from steppe ancestry.] I think that was a very sensitive issue to some of our coauthors

Our results are actually almost diametrically opposite from what Kossina thought because these Corded Ware people come from the East, a place that Kossina would have despised as a source for them.

it is true that there’s big population movements, and so I think what the DNA is doing is it’s forcing the hand of this discussion in archaeology, showing that in fact, major movements of people do occur. They are sometimes sharp and dramatic, and they involve large-scale population replacements over a relatively short period of time. We now can see that for the first time.

Zhang: As you say, the genetics data is now often ahead of the archaeology, and you keep finding these big, dramatic population replacements throughout human history that can’t yet be fully explained. How should we be thinking about these population replacements? Is there a danger in people interpreting or misinterpreting them as the result of one group’s superiority over another?

When you see these replacements of Neanderthals by modern humans or Europeans and Africans substantially replacing Native Americans in the last 500 years or the people who built Stonehenge, who were obviously extraordinarily sophisticated, being replaced from these people from the continent, it doesn’t say something about the innate potential of these people. But it rather says something about the different immune systems or cultural mismatch.

Zhang: On the point of immune systems, one of the hypotheses for why people from the steppe were so successful in spreading through Europe is that they brought the bubonic plague with them. Since the plague is endemic to Central Asia, they may have built up immunity but the European farmers they encountered had not.

ut there have been profound and Earth-shattering events, again and again, every few thousand years in our history and that’s what ancient DNA is telling us.

if you actually take any serious look at this data, it just confounds every stereotype. It’s revealing that the differences among populations we see today are actually only a few thousand years old at most and that everybody is mixed.

I think that if you pay any attention to this world, and have any degree of seriousness, then you can’t come out feeling affirmed in the racist view of the world. You have to be more open to immigration. You have to be more open to the mixing of different peoples. That’s your own history.

When many black or Latino or, in some parts of the country, Native American people read about a police shooting of someone like them, the reaction is often more “That could have been me. “There are no precautions to take. It isn’t about not hanging with the wrong crowd, or not talking back to cops, or not engaging in criminal behavior.

The “sorts of things” they do that attract police attention are things such as being a U.S. senator driving a nice car, standing outside of a store, walking home after a long shift  at a restaurant, trying to make a living by selling CDs, or waiting for a business associate at a Starbucks. It is simply to exist.

we shouldn’t need a viral video and the word of white witnesses to understand that being black or brown often means negotiating an entirely different landscape when it comes to the police (as well as the white people who tend to call the police after seeing black people behave in a way that’s even the slightest bit abnormal).