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Schulberg and Kazan’s real achievement wasn’t anticipating Trump. It was appreciating, at the dawn of the television era, how susceptible the American public would be to his pitch. As Trump’s first term comes to a close, A Face in the Crowd is worth revisiting—less for what it reveals about the president than for what it says about the rest of us.

As much as Lonesome Rhodes may remind contemporary Americans of Donald Trump, he was modeled on one of the nation’s most famous Democrats: Will Rogers.

“My father was so full of shit, because he pretends he’s just one of the people, just one of the guys,” Rogers told Schulberg. “But in our house the only people that ever came as guests were the richest people in town, the bankers and the power-brokers of L.A. And those were his friends and that’s where his heart is and he (was) really a goddamned reactionary.”

Based strictly on the standard of advancing causes that conservative evangelicals most care about, a fair-minded assessment of the Trump record is that some important things were achieved, especially in appointing federal judges. That clearly would not have happened in a Hillary Clinton presidency. But in virtually every other area, including the outcome of several key Supreme Court decisions, Trump has fallen short of the promises and expectations.

My hunch is that at the beginning of this Faustian bargain, most evangelicals didn’t imagine it would come to this, with them defending the indefensible, tarnishing their reputations, and doing incalculable damage to their causes.

This is the worst year for America in more than a half century; a stunning 87 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the way things are going and only 17 percent feel proud when thinking about the state of the nation, while 71 percent feel angry and 66 percent are fearful

The newest Social Progress Index, shared with me before its official release Thursday morning, finds that out of 163 countries assessed worldwide, the United States, Brazil and Hungary are the only ones in which people are worse off than when the index began in 2011. And the declines in Brazil and Hungary were smaller than America’s.

The index, inspired by research of Nobel-winning economists, collects 50 metrics of well-being — nutrition, safety, freedom, the environment, health, education and more — to measure quality of life.

Norway comes out on top in the 2020 edition, followed by Denmark, Finland and New Zealand.

Nonetheless, Stevens’s forthcoming book, “It Was All A Lie,” makes the case that President Trump is the natural outcome of a long chain of events going back to the 1964 election when Barry Goldwater ran for president as an opponent of the Civil Right Act passed earlier that year.

“I have no one to blame but myself,” he declares on the first page. “What I missed was one simple reality: it was all a lie.”

What were the lies? That the Republican Party “espoused a core set of values: character counts, personal responsibility, strong on Russia, the national debt actually mattered, immigration made America great, a big-tent party.”And what is the truth? The Republican Party is “just a white grievance party.”

ll this has many observers — even in the White House — speaking of a new “Cold War” between the United States and China. Some even argue that this is desirable, presumably with the belief that our side will naturally emerge victorious.

the phrase is a misleading one. It assumes that the terms of the old Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, which we fought and won, are relevant, and that the tools used successfully then could be used again now.

This conceptual error ignores the many differences between then and now. It is worth recalling that the Soviet Union was not our major trading partner, was not a major holder of our debt and was not tightly interconnected in the supply chains critical to our (and the world’s) economy.

From the Black Death of the 14th century to cholera in war-torn Yemen, it was a baleful history. But Professor Whitty, who had spent most of his career fighting infectious diseases in Africa, was reassuring. Britain, he said, had a special protection.

Wealth “massively hardens a society against epidemics,” he argued, and quality of life — food, housing, water and health care — was more effective than any medicine at stopping the diseases that ravaged the developing world.

Professor Whitty’s confidence was hardly unique. As recently as February, when European health ministers met in Brussels to discuss the novel coronavirus emerging in China, they commended their own health systems and promised to send aid to poor and developing countries.

Foreign-policy observers have long debated: What if Beijing were handed a golden opportunity to strut on the world stage, absent a more powerful United States? Would it seize the opportunity, acting for the good of all and convincing the globe of its peaceful intentions? Or would it pursue a cramped vision of national interest? The world has inadvertently run that very experiment since January.

The combination of China’s early coronavirus recovery, the catastrophic health and economic situation in the United States, an administration whose “America First” instincts have turned the country inward, and a mostly every-country-for-itself response to the global pandemic has put China in the geopolitical driver’s seat. So far, Beijing has squandered the opportunity in dramatic fashion

Former Indian National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon wrote this month that “it is hard to think of a time since the Cultural Revolution when China’s international prestige and reputation have been lower.” That’s a remarkable statement, given the advantages Beijing possessed just a few months ago. Machiavelli said that it’s better to be feared than loved. He didn’t say hated.

What are we to think, then, when we find that the world’s major military powers, which are also among the world’s richest nations, are failing badly when it comes to enhancing public happiness?

According to the most credible study of military expenditures (with figures drawn from 2018), three out of the top four military spenders, in rank order, are the United States, China, and India.

Ranked by total wealth, the United States is 1st, China 2nd, India 5th, and Russia 11th.  If ranked by their number of billionaires, the United States is 1st, China 2nd, India 4th, and Russia 5th.

here are questions as to whether the leftward shift seen in the polls “is short-term or reflects a long-term trend.” Whites’ racial attitudes, Banks wrote:are fairly stable. Once their attitudes are crystallized, they tend not to change. It would take a shifting of racial norms to change the country’s (e.g. whites’) views about policing and the black community.” He added that “much more would need to be done from both political parties and activists to cause a major change in the politics of race.

White Americans have a history of losing interest in racial justice soon after they acknowledge injustice, as if their acknowledgment, rather than actual changes in the world, was the end of the matter. We saw as the Sixties progressed, many whites who were appalled by dogs attacking black children eventually lost patience with demands for greater economic equality for blacks and resisted changes in their own communities.

He warned that “this is a moment when it’s especially dangerous to misunderstand what public opinion surveys tell us.”The fundamental analytical danger is to believe that the result of opinion polling matters in any straightforward way. That’s not how America works, otherwise we would have had stricter gun control after Parkland, etc. The actual question is not whether a majority of Americans say they want X on a survey, but whether enough Americans care enough about X in their lives to overcome the resistance and resources of those who benefit from/believe in X as well as a system of government that puts up enormous procedural barriers against the kinds of X’s we are talking about.

A Facebook Inc. team had a blunt message for senior executives. The company’s algorithms weren’t bringing people together. They were driving people apart.

“Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” read a slide from a 2018 presentation. “If left unchecked,” it warned, Facebook would feed users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.”

That presentation went to the heart of a question dogging Facebook almost since its founding: Does its platform aggravate polarization and tribal behavior? The answer it found, in some cases, was yes.

Attorney General William P. Barr acknowledged on Tuesday that the Justice Department has uncovered no voting fraud “on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” a striking repudiation of President Trump’s groundless claims that he was defrauded.

Mr. Barr has advanced Mr. Trump’s political agenda perhaps more than any other cabinet member, bringing the Justice Department as close to the White House as it has been since Watergate.

And Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, who has refused to recognize Mr. Trump’s election loss, moved closer to overtly accepting the reality that Mr. Biden would be in the White House next year as he discussed the prospects for more pandemic stimulus in 2021.

It didn't take long for Neff to find the hashtag's meaning. "Where We Go One We Go All" is one of several mottoes of QAnon, a collective of online conspiracists.

The pastor and his wife, who live in Arcola, Mississippi, began watching the vast collection of QAnon videos posted online by "researchers" who decipher the cryptic messages of "Q," an anonymous online persona who claims to have access to classified military and intelligence operations.

Since its inception in 2017 QAnon has quickly metastasized, infiltrating American politics, internet culture and now -- religion.

The ICU at Tampa General Hospital in Tampa, Fla., was 99% full this week, according to an internal report produced by the federal government. It's among numerous hospitals the report highlighted with ICUs filled to over 90% capacity.

As coronavirus cases rise swiftly around the country, surpassing both the spring and summer surges, health officials brace for a coming wave of hospitalizations and deaths. Knowing which hospitals in which communities are reaching capacity could be key to an effective response to the growing crisis. That information is gathered by the federal government — but not shared openly with the public.

NPR has obtained documents that give a snapshot of data the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services collects and analyzes daily.

A US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee has voted to recommend the Pfizer and BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine for people 16 and older a day after the US Food and Drug Administration issued emergency use authorization (EUA) for the vaccine.

CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield must accept the committee's recommendation before the vaccine can be administered. But on Sunday morning, the first shipments had left a Pfizer plant in Michigan, bound for all 50 states.

Once the CDC accepts the recommendation, vaccinations can begin.

Putnam refers to Upswing as a “an exercise in macrohistory,” which “inevitably involves the simplification of complex stories.” And a “simplification” it may be, but then so too are almost all history books, for they attempt to describe or analyze in mere fallible words an immensely complex reality.

Putnam begins Chapter 1 by examining what Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the 1830s about the American ability to balance individual liberty with the common good. He then looks ahead to the decades of the post-Civil War Gilded Age, when the USA “was startlingly similar to today. Inequality, political polarization, social dislocation, and cultural narcissism prevailed—all accompanied, as they are now, by unprecedented technological advances, prosperity, and material well-being.”

Figure 1.1, the first of many charts, is labeled “Economic, Political, Social, And Cultural Trends, 1895–2015.” Each of the trend lines indicates if the country was moving toward 1) “greater or lesser economic equality?” 2) “greater or lesser comity and compromise in politics?” 3) “greater or lesser cohesion in social life?” 4) “greater or lesser altruism in cultural values?” Answers to all four: 1890s to 1960s = “greater”; 1970s to present = “lesser.”

On October 8, the Fifth Circuit summarily reinstated Texas’s “heartbeat” anti-abortion law, overturning district court Judge Robert Pitman’s careful, 113-page October 6 decision enjoining the onerous law. And so, the Supreme Court may soon have an opportunity to weigh in again, via its “emergency docket,” on the most restrictive abortion law in the nation. It authorizes “bounty-hunters” to inform on anyone helping a woman protect her right to control her body.

. The Court’s legitimacy is bound up with its ability to convince litigants and citizens alike that its rulings are the result of a careful, deliberative, and fair process. Its increasing resort to the emergency docket, dubbed the “shadow docket” in 2015 by law school professor William Baude, calls those virtues into question.

Critics rightly say that the Court’s use of emergency orders, issued without oral argument and full legal briefing, to decide issues with enormous substantive effect on the nation, may help its conservative members advance their agenda. But reconciling this development and the requirements of judicial legitimacy is no easy task.

We’re increasingly encouraged to dwell on “white privilege” and “systemic racism” as key impediments, if not the key impediments, to Black progress. But we must ask just what purpose fostering white guilt serves.

Of course, there is a visceral sense of power in fostering white guilt: One has made people realize something and made them see you as deserving of recompense, as harmed and therefore owed. There can be a sense of accomplishment in just demanding that white Americans sit with past wrongs.

But presumably, the goal is to make America “a more perfect union,” as the Constitution has it. And if that’s the goal, our collective efforts to reach it presumably would be about addressing societal conditions rather than these more soul-focused endeavors.

as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”

Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”

when the coronavirus pandemic reached the United States, it found a public-health system in disrepair. That system, with its overstretched staff, meager budgets, crumbling buildings, and archaic equipment, could barely cope with sickness as usual, let alone with a new, fast-spreading virus.

By one telling, public health was a victim of its own success, its value shrouded by the complacency of good health

By a different account, the competing field of medicine actively suppressed public health, which threatened the financial model of treating illness in (insured) individuals

Detained protesters in Cuba could get up to 30 years in prison as they face the largest and most punitive mass trials on the island since the early years of the revolution.

Prosecutors this week put on trial more than 60 citizens charged with crimes, including sedition, for taking part in demonstrations against the country’s economic crisis over the summer, said human rights activists and relatives of those detained.

Those being prosecuted include at least five minors as young as 16.