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In no other high-income country — and in only a few countries, period — have political leaders departed from expert advice as frequently and significantly as the Trump administration. President Trump has said the virus was not serious; predicted it would disappear; spent weeks questioning the need for masks; encouraged states to reopen even with large and growing caseloads; and promoted medical disinformation.

many agree that the poor results in the United States stem in substantial measure from the performance of the Trump administration.

“As an American, I think there is a lot of good to be said about our libertarian tradition,” Dr. Jared Baeten, an epidemiologist and vice dean at the University of Washington School of Public Health, said. “But this is the consequence — we don’t succeed as well as a collective.”

That tradition is one reason the United States suffers from an unequal health care system that has long produced worse medical outcomes — including higher infant mortality and diabetes rates and lower life expectancy — than in most other rich countries.

First, the United States faced longstanding challenges in confronting a major pandemic. It is a large country at the nexus of the global economy, with a tradition of prioritizing individualism over government restrictions.

The New York Times set out to reconstruct the unique failure of the United States, through numerous interviews with scientists and public health experts around the world. The reporting points to two central themes.

When it comes to the virus, the United States has come to resemble not the wealthy and powerful countries to which it is often compared but instead far poorer countries, like Brazil, Peru and South Africa, or those with large migrant populations, like Bahrain and Oman.

That’s more than five times as many as in all of Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea and Australia, combined.

Over the past month, about 1.9 million Americans have tested positive for the virus.

one country stands alone, as the only affluent nation to have suffered a severe, sustained outbreak for more than four months: the United States.

Nearly every country has struggled to contain the coronavirus and made mistakes along the way.

it quickly became clear that the United States’ policy was full of holes. It did not apply to immediate family members of American citizens and permanent residents returning from China, for example. In the two months after the policy went into place, almost 40,000 people arrived in the United States on direct flights from China.

On Jan. 31, his administration announced that it was restricting entry to the United States from China: Many foreign nationals — be they citizens of China or other countries — would not be allowed into the United States if they had been to China in the previous two weeks.

A travel policy that fell short

In retrospect, one of Mr. Trump’s first policy responses to the virus appears to have been one of his most promising.

The administration’s policy also did little to create quarantines for people who entered the United States and may have had the virus.

ven more important, the policy failed to take into account that the virus had spread well beyond China by early February. Later data would show that many infected people arriving in the United States came from Europe

South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan largely restricted entry to residents returning home. Those residents then had to quarantine for two weeks upon arrival

South Korea and Hong Kong also tested for the virus at the airport and transferred anyone who was positive to a government facility.

“People need a bit more than a suggestion to look after their own health,” said Dr. Mackay, who has been working with Australian officials on their pandemic response. “They need guidelines, they need rules — and they need to be enforced.”

Travel restrictions and quarantines were central to the success in controlling the virus in South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Australia, as well as New Zealand, many epidemiologists believe. In Australia, the number of new cases per day fell more than 90 percent in April. It remained near zero through May and early June, even as the virus surged across much of the United States.

the tolls in Australia and the United States remain vastly different. Fewer than 300 Australians have died of complications from Covid-19, the illness caused by the virus. If the United States had the same per capita death rate, about 3,300 Americans would have died, rather than 158,000.

there is a good chance that a different version of Mr. Trump’s restrictions — one with fewer holes and stronger quarantines — would have meaningfully slowed the virus’s spread.

travel restrictions had been successful enough in fighting the coronavirus around the world that those views may need to be revisited.“Travel,” he said, “is the hallmark of the spread of this virus around the world.”

Traditionally, public health experts had not seen travel restrictions as central to fighting a pandemic, given their economic costs and the availability of other options, like testing, quarantining and contact tracing

But he added that

By early March, with the testing delays still unresolved, the New York region became a global center of the virus — without people realizing it until weeks later. More widespread testing could have made a major difference, experts said, leading to earlier lockdowns and social distancing and ultimately less sickness and death.

While the C.D.C. was struggling to solve its testing flaws, Germany was rapidly building up its ability to test. Chancellor Angela Merkel, a chemist by training, and other political leaders were watching the virus sweep across northern Italy, not far from southern Germany, and pushed for a big expansion of testing.

By the time the virus became a problem in Germany, labs around the country had thousands of test kits ready to use. From the beginning, the government covered the cost of the tests. American laboratories often charge patients about $100 for a test.

Without free tests, Dr. Hendrik Streeck, director of the Institute of Virology at the University Hospital Bonn, said at the time, “a young person with no health insurance and an itchy throat is unlikely to go to the doctor and therefore risks infecting more people.”

Germany was soon far ahead of other countries in testing. It was able to diagnose asymptomatic cases, trace the contacts of new patients and isolate people before they could spread the virus. The country has still suffered a significant outbreak. But it has had many fewer cases per capita than Italy, Spain, France, Britain or Canada — and about one-fifth the rate of the United States.

One measure of the continuing troubles with testing is the percentage of tests that come back positive. In a country that has the virus under control, fewer than 5 percent of tests come back positive, according to World Health Organization guidelines. Many countries have reached that benchmark. The United States, even with the large recent volume of tests, has not.

In Belgium recently, test results have typically come back in 48 to 72 hours. In Germany and Greece, it is two days. In France, the wait is often 24 hours.

The conflicting advice, echoed by the C.D.C. and others, led to relatively little mask wearing in many countries early in the pandemic. But several Asian countries were exceptions, partly because they had a tradition of mask wearing to avoid sickness or minimize the effects of pollution.

The double mask failure

By January, mask wearing in Japan was widespread, as it often had been during a typical flu season. Masks also quickly became the norm in much of South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan and China.

In the following months, scientists around the world began to report two strands of evidence that both pointed to the importance of masks: Research showed that the virus could be transmitted through droplets that hang in the air, and several studies found that the virus spread less frequently in places where people were wearing masks.

what do we do once we see that some of those choices threaten the health and lives of others? We will have to strike a new equilibrium between what society has the right to demand of us and what we have a right to retain for ourselves.

Liberal societies, in short, have always faced the problem of secondhand smoke, but what once was exceptional has now become endemic. One man’s meat is another man’s poison

Can we forge a new equilibrium before Miami is under water? I would like to think we’ll do so as part of a larger process of democratic deliberation. The Green New Deal envisions a 10-year phase of “transparent and inclusive consultation,” which sounds just about right.

The Dutch can reach consensus on painful social questions because they’ve spent the last thousand years working cooperatively to build dikes; the climate accord adopted last year came after a full year of discussion among representatives of all interest groups.

That’s not how American democracy works, and especially so in recent years. We allow those interest groups to wage a pitched battle using all the money and influence they can muster against one another. Legislation emerges only after a war of attrition.

just maybe we’ll rise to the occasion: With the flood upon us, we, too, will learn how to build dikes together.

Crushing the curve isn’t easy, but it’s very possible. In fact, many other countries, from South Korea to New Zealand to, believe it or not, Greece have already done it.

Bringing the infection rate way down was a lot easier for countries that acted quickly to contain the coronavirus, while the rate was still low, rather than spending many weeks in denial.

even places with severe outbreaks can bring their numbers down if they stay the course. Consider New York City

Trump is a quitter. Faced with the need to actually do his job and do what it takes to crush the pandemic, he just gave up.

And this retreat from responsibility won’t just kill thousands. It might also turn the Covid slump into a depression.

Here’s how it would work:

it becomes clear that Covid-19 is spiraling out of control. People retreat back into their homes, whatever Trump and Republican governors may say.

So we’re back where we started in economic terms, and in worse shape than ever in epidemiological terms. As a result, the period of double-digit unemployment, which might have lasted only a few months, goes on and on.

In other words, Trump’s search for an easy way out, his lack of patience for the hard work of containing a pandemic, may be precisely what turns a severe but temporary slump into a full-blown depression.

Paul's letters, which comprise 21 of 27 books in the New Testament, were addressed to "Greek speakers in Greek places." While the roots of Christianity are in Galilee and Jerusalem, the seeds were planted in Corin, Ephesus, and Rome. And if the Greek language underlies early Christian thought, then so do the philosophy and rituals.

"Would you study the Torah with somebody who didn't know Hebrew? Would you study the Quran with somebody who didn't know Arabic? It's really hard to make a left turn into Christianity and divorce everything that came before, which is not what happened, obviously."

Muraresku was drawn into this research due to the mystical concept of dying before dying, as expressed during the Mysteries of Eleusis. He uncovered parallel narratives while conducting research with God's librarian in the Vatican Secret Archives

"This is something preserved in St. Paul's monastery, for example: if you die before you die, you won't die when you die. That's the key. It's not psychedelics; it's not drugs. It's this concept of navigating the liminal space between what you and I are doing right now, and dreaming, and death. In that state, the mystics tell us, is the potential to grasp a very different view of reality."

Muraresku, who has never taken a psychedelic drug, read about terminally-ill patients having a similar revelation after ingesting psilocybin. "Dying before dying" succinctly describes what they felt; the overwhelming sensations prepared them to actually die with confidence and grace. Could this be the same experience discovered by initiates at Eleusis and, later, early Christians?

The key to immortality might be dying before dying, and psychedelics appear to be one method for unlocking this mystery.

Muraresku spends the bulk of 400 pages chasing down archaeological and scriptural evidence for spiked wine. The wine and wafer of today is a far cry from the kukeon of the ancient Greeks, drunk by pilgrims, who were given the title epoptes, "the one who has seen it all." That's a heavy ask for a grape.

the Greek language is descriptively rich and extensive, yet these philosophers somehow never invented a word for "alcohol." Their chalices weren't for wine alone.

But if you were to mix that grape with blue water lily (with its psychoactive compounds, apomorphine and nuciferin), henbane, lizards—ancestral food choices that put Brooklyn hipsters to shame—or ergot, the fungal disease that gives LSD its kick, you might just "see it all."

While he calls psychedelics "just one, perhaps very tiny piece" of early Christian rituals, it could be an essential one. Sadly, archaeochemistry isn't the most funded discipline,

"It's no mistake that the Eucharist is described as the 'drug of immortality' by the early Church fathers because there was this sense of really sophisticated botanical understanding that goes all the way back to Homer. Obviously, it goes back a lot further

part of the reason I wrote the book is to show people that within Western civilization—at its roots, in fact—is this very pharmacopoeia. This tradition was certainly there, and it begs the question of how prevalent and widespread it really was."

While in the Archives, Muraresku found evidence of at least 45,000 so-called witches being executed, with "countless more" tortured or imprisoned. The patriarchy initiated a pattern:"[The leadership] wasn't just trying to rid Christianity of folk healers. It was trying to erase a system of knowledge that had survived for centuries in the shadows."

The knowledge was the pharmacological expertise these women had amassed over untold generations. The two banes of the Church—mind-altering substances that afford the initiate a mindset comparable (or, perhaps exactly akin) to prophets and sages and women, the holders of the Secrets—were swept up in one millennia-long cover-up

Interestingly, this 12-year-long odyssey only deepened Muraresku's Catholicism, which is rooted in the Jesuit tradition. As he says, Christianity—a religion that was a cult for over 300 years before being catapulted onto the global stage—has always evolved. Could the Church possibly change again and offer the psychedelic sacrament that might lie at the heart of the religion?

As Muraresku concludes during our talk, each attempt to get back to the roots, beginning with Martin Luther and continuing right through to Pope Francis, is an analysis of the origins of the faith. To know your history is to understand where you're heading.

"When I look and see Hellenic Christianity that was very much at the roots of the Catholic Church, and the more I found that Greek influence underneath the Vatican—in some cases, literally, in the catacombs—the more I began to really love and appreciate what this was all about.

A different plague strain enters Europe through Genoa, brought by another Caffan ship that docks there. The Genoans attack the ship and drive it away, but they are still infected. Italy faces this second strain while already battling the previous one.

Y. pestis also heads east from Sicily into the Persian Empire and through Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and Poland, and south to Egypt, as well as Cyprus, which is also hit with destruction from an earthquake and deadly tidal wave at the same time.

The plague also moves through Austria and Switzerland, where a fury of anti-Semitic massacres follow it along the Rhine after a rumor spreads that Jews had caused the plague by poisoning wells

The plague awakes an anti-Semitic rage around Europe, causing repeated massacres of Jewish communities, with the first one taking place in Provence, where 40 Jews were murdered.

The plague enters England through the port of Melcombe Regis, in Dorset. As it spreads through the town, some escape by fleeing inland, inadvertently spreading it further.

A group of religious zealots known as the Flagellants first begin to appear in Germany. These groups of anywhere from 50 to 500 hooded and half-naked men march, sing and thrash themselves with lashes until swollen and bloody. Originally the practice of 11th-century Italian monks during an epidemic, they spread out through Europe. Also known for their violent anti-Semitism,

the plague kills 60 percent of the Venetian population.

An English ship brings the Black Death to Norway when it runs aground in Bergen

While waiting on the border to begin the attack, troops became infected, with 5,000 dying. Choosing to retreat, the soldiers bring the disease back to their families and a third of Scotland perishes.

The plague’s spread significantly begins to peter out, possibly thanks to quarantine efforts, after causing the deaths of anywhere between 25 to 50 million people, and leading to the massacres of 210 Jewish communities. All total, Europe has lost about 50 percent of its population.

With the Black Death considered safely behind them, the people of Europe face a changed society

It becomes easier to get work for better wages and the average standard of living rises.

But Ziblatt and Levitsky missed another important norm: Don’t make unsubstantiated allegations or false accusations.

rtunately.In ancient Greece, Athenian democrats understood that establishing social sanctions against false accusations — and avoiding situations in which people are being asked to prove a negative — was one of the most important pillars of maintaining a healthy democratic culture.

For this reason, they reserved one of their most bitter epithets for people who trafficked in false accusations. They were “sycophants,”

Sycophants were the lowest of the low because they took the best of democracy — the rule of law, process and procedure — and sought to turn it against itself in order to incapacitate opponents and secure power.

Yet quarantine compliance is essential for the combination of testing, contact tracing, and isolation of sick people to work. Simply telling people they’ve been exposed and letting them loose on the nation’s Outback Steakhouses is not sufficient

Public-health departments are reluctant to seem like bad cops—or cops at all.

Hawaii created its quarantine law as a travel quarantine, stopping everyone at the airport. These types of quarantines are logistically easier to implement—they don’t require contact tracers—than medical quarantines, in which the state orders a certain individual to stay in isolation

Some other countries have imposed much tougher travel restrictions and quarantine policies. At one point, Greeks were required to text authorities to explain why they needed to go out. Norway quarantined its own citizens under threat of a fine or imprisonment. Most foreigners still can’t fly to Vietnam.

Keen believes that Hawaii residents are on such high alert because of long-ago pandemics that came to the islands and killed large percentages of the population

“Generations of stories you hear, from great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, that the pandemics nearly killed off Native Hawaiians,” she told me. “So there is a great fear here of outsiders coming in and bringing it with them.”

On the mainland, states cite a combination of COVID-19 denial, logistical hurdles, and funding and personnel shortages to explain why they haven’t been willing or able to enforce quarantines.

scofflaws: Some people stay inside for three or four days, then decide, “I’m bored with staying home,”

Even if a North Dakotan wants to do the right thing, she might not be able to without going hungry or losing her job. Grocery delivery isn’t available in parts of the large and rural state

Some states can’t quarantine people, because they have too many cases to trace

In fact, many COVID-exposed Americans who want to stay home and quarantine have an intractable problem: Their bosses won’t let them

The Families First Coronavirus Response Act granted paid leave to recover from COVID-19 to many Americans. But the law doesn’t cover everyone: Large companies aren’t included, and small companies can claim an exemption. Because of these exemptions, only 47 percent of private-sector workers have guaranteed access to coronavirus-related sick leave,

The U.S. is the only country out of 193 nations to exclude workers from sick-leave benefits based on the size of the company they work for, according to a recent UCLA study.

“We don’t really pay people to stay at home to quarantine,” Polly Price, a global-health professor at Emory University, says. But that’s exactly the problem: In a study in Israel, people were more likely to quarantine after exposure to COVID-19 if they were paid during their isolation.

Months into the pandemic, half of Americans didn’t know they might have the right to stay home with pay if they contracted the coronavirus.

even if they did, employers might have pressured them to come to work if they were no longer showing symptoms,

“After testing positive, employees are being scheduled and expected to work as long as they don’t show symptoms and [are] not placed in quarantine,” a worker at a Georgia taco restaurant complained in July. OSHA has formally inspected just 11 of the employers in these incidents. “Under the Trump administration, OSHA decided to do almost no enforcement,”

America’s laissez-faire federal pandemic response has, in effect, treated each state like its own country

When it comes time to isolate sick people, though, it becomes painfully clear that states aren’t countries. Wisconsin can’t stop Iowans from driving into it. North Dakota doesn’t have enough health workers to trace all of its infected citizens. The governor can’t help you when your employer is—legally—dragging you back into the office.

the reason Hawaii has been so ruthlessly effective at quarantine is that it in some ways still acts as its own country with its own border controls.

The state consistently has some of the lowest case numbers in the nation. As with so many other pandemic rules, Americans might not like quarantine, but it works.

The S-400 purchase drove a rift between the two countries that has resisted repair. Mr. Cevik said the country hasn’t yet deployed the missile batteries, though Mr. Erdogan has said he wants to buy more.

“The United States and Turkey have longstanding and deep bilateral defense ties, and Turkey’s continued NATO interoperability remains a priority,” a State Department spokesman said. Several NATO member states fly F-16s, including Turkey.

The proposed deal illustrates the complex national-security issues in the U.S. relationship with Turkey, a NATO ally and regional power that hosts thousands of American soldiers.

The deal faces significant skepticism among key senators who object to Turkey’s purchase of the Russian missile system, according to congressional aides. The leaders of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sens. Robert Menendez (D., N.J.) and James Risch (R., Idaho), have yet to take public positions on the deal.

“Our concern is, if we’re giving them military equipment, if they are going to be continuing to act in this aggressive manner towards Cyprus, toward the Greek islands,” said Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R., N.Y.). “We’re concerned about our intellectual property being shared with Russia. [Turkey] is acting in many ways like an adversary.”

British sanctions over Turkey’s incursion into Syria would hinder Ankara’s purchase of the Eurofighter Typhoon, and France is unlikely to approve a sale of its Dassault Rafale fighters, in part because it sold planes to Turkey’s rival Greece last year, said Mr. Forrester.

“They may go to the Russians,” Mr. Jeffrey, the former ambassador, said. “And then you’ll have a descending spiral of accusations and bad feelings, and it will just reinforce going in the wrong direction. That’s why the F-16 is so important.”

Stoics are making a comeback—and they have been for several years. From discussions among Silicon Valley elites to podcasts and newsletters, the school of thought that once flourished in ancient Greece and Rome has been seeing a revival in recent years. The pandemic supercharged this.

men react poorly to loss of status. A 2005 study by the University of Newcastle upon Tyne found that men who experience downward mobility are four times more likely to suffer from depression—and although women are twice as likely to be downwardly mobile, they don’t experience the same drop in well-being.

Today’s backlash against diversity and inclusion efforts can also be seen through this lens: a third leg of men’s status being chopped off.

The Roman Empire did not invent the patriarchy—but it did codify it into law. Pater familias was a legal status that gave the patriarch authority over the family and its estate, two status-granting privileges that contemporary men took for granted but may never achieve

The Roman legal concept of bonus pater familias, or diligens pater familias, became the benchmark for reasonable and diligent behavior when courts seek to establish negligence, from Spain to Canada.

Status (and gender) no longer mattered. What matters is the behavior: Is it that of a proverbial good family father? This has become a stand-in for the standard of care required, underpinning how we may not all think of the Roman Empire all that often, but it’s all around us.

In an age of crises, competence commands a premium—but what we’re getting instead is misogyny, anger, and poor mental health

no wonder that men are vocally demanding to spend more time with their families—perhaps the most potent cure to these struggles.

Today, men are craving answers, purpose, and family. If that’s unachievable, we can expect much worse than fantasies about bygone empires.

Bertrand Russell’s observation that philosophy was born out of the ‘conflict of two very different human impulses, the one urging men towards mysticism, the other urging them towards science’.

the Odyssey is crammed with life lessons. That could be a book in itself. Each adventure yields a moral, from the dangers of drugs (the Lotus Eaters) to the superiority of brains over brawn (the Cyclops) to the nature and essential value of love (the ending)

How to Be, then, is best taken not as the self-help book its title implies but as a poetic tour of philosophical thought which persuades us that, on the contrary, the pre-Socratics are the last people to look to for life advice. As Socrates himself observed wryly about Thales’s pratfall: ‘Philosophers always look like idiots.’

The rescue efforts also couldn’t be more different: a frantic rush to save five wealthy people versus a shoulder shrug at the idea of 100 children dead at the bottom of the sea.

The Greek coastguard and government officials, in response to criticism of their handling of the disaster, have said that people on board refused any help. Activists, on the other hand, have said the people on board were pleading for help more than 15 hours before it sank. In any case, is it really the job of a coast guard to look at a ship full of desperate people, full of innocent children, and decide they don’t want help

Nobody looked at the Titan and thought: ahh well, they signed a waiver saying they accepted death was a possibility, there’s no point saving them.

If you find yourself more captivated by the story of five rich people in a submersible rather than the 750 people who sank on a fishing trawler, it’s not because you’re a bad person. It’s because it’s human nature to be feel overwhelmed by suffering at scale; it’s called psychic numbing. As the saying goes, one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

They deserve the same sort of resources and attention and empathy that five rich adventurers, who put themselves in harm’s way for the fun of it, rather than because they were desperate for a better life, have had.

I hope it makes it uncomfortably clear that, in the eyes of the media and policymakers, one missing billionaire is seemingly more important than hundreds of missing migrants.

I hope it makes more people interrogate the ways in which migrants are blamed for their deaths, blamed for seeking out better lives – and how completely different that is from the empathy afforded to millionaires seeking out underwater thrills.

This is what connects figures as disparate as Jordan Peterson and J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel and Donald Trump. These are the ideas that unite both the mainstream and the weirder figures of the so-called postliberal right, from Patrick Deneen to the writer Bronze Age Pervert.

I think the Republican Party’s collapse into incoherence reflects the fact that much of the modern right is reactionary, not conservative

As Paul Valéry, the French poet, once said, “Ancient Greece is the most beautiful invention of the modern age.” To treat Andreessen’s essay as an argument misses the point. It’s a vibe. And the vibe is reactionary.

It’s a coalition obsessed with where we went wrong: the weakness, the political correctness, the liberalism, the trigger warnings, the smug elites. It’s a coalition that believes we were once hard and have become soft; worse, we have come to lionize softness and punish hardness.

The story of the reactionary follows a template across time and place. It “begins with a happy, well-ordered state where people who know their place live in harmony and submit to tradition and their God,” Mark Lilla writes in his 2016 book, “The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction.”

He continues:Then alien ideas promoted by intellectuals — writers, journalists, professors — challenge this harmony, and the will to maintain order weakens at the top. (The betrayal of elites is the linchpin of every reactionary story.) A false consciousness soon descends on the society as a whole as it willingly, even joyfully, heads for destruction. Only those who have preserved memories of the old ways see what is happening. Whether the society reverses direction or rushes to its doom depends entirely on their resistance.

The Silicon Valley cohort Andreessen belongs to has added a bit to this formula. In their story, the old way that is being lost is the appetite for risk and inequality and dominance that drives technology forward and betters human life. What the muscled ancients knew and what today’s flabby whingers have forgotten is that man must cultivate the strength and will to master nature, and other men, for the technological frontier to give way

Now Andreessen has distilled the whole ideology to a procession of stark bullet points in his latest missive, the buzzy, bizarre “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.”

it’s the pairing of the reactionary’s sodden take on modern society with the futurist’s starry imagining of the bright tomorrow. So call it what it is: reactionary futurism

Andreessen’s argument is simple: Technology is good. Very good. Those who stand in its way are bad.

“The Enemy.” The list is long, ranging from “anti-greatness” to “statism” to “corruption” to “the ivory tower” to “cartels” to “bureaucracy” to “socialism” to “abstract theories” to anyone “disconnected from the real world … playing God with everyone else’s lives”

So who is it, exactly, who extinguishes the dancing star within the human soul?

Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades — against technology and against life — under varying names like “existential risk,” “sustainability,” “E.S.G.,” “sustainable development goals,” “social responsibility,” “stakeholder capitalism,” “precautionary principle,” “trust and safety,” “tech ethics,” “risk management,” “degrowth,” “the limits of growth.”

The enemy, in other words, is anything or anyone who might seek to yoke technology to social goals or structures

For years, I’ve been arguing for politics to take technology more seriously, to see new inventions as no less necessary than social insurance and tax policy in bringing about a worthier world. Too often, we debate only how to divvy up what we already have. We have lost the habit of imagining what we could have; we are too timid in deploying the coordinated genius and muscle of society

I’ve been digging into the history of where and when we lost faith in technology and, more broadly, growth. At the core of that story is an inability to manage, admit or even see when technologies or policies go awry

The turn toward a less-is-more politics came in the 1970s, when the consequences of reckless growth became unignorable

Did we, in some cases, overcorrect? Absolutely. But the only reason we can even debate whether we overcorrected is because we corrected: The Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and a slew of other bills and regulations did exactly what they promised.

It is telling that Andreessen groups sustainability and degrowth into the same bucket of antagonists

Degrowth is largely, though not wholly, skeptical of technological solutions to our problems

But the politics of sustainability — as evidenced in legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act — have settled into another place entirely: a commitment to solving our hardest environmental problems by driving technology forward, by investing and deploying clean energy infrastructure at a scale unlike anything the government has done since the 1950s.

Andreessen focuses at some length on the nuclear future he believes we’ve been denied —

but curiously ignores the stunning advances in solar and wind and battery power that public policy has delivered.

He yearns for a kind of person, not just a kind of technology. “We believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness — strength,” he writes, italics included. “We believe in merit and achievement. We believe in bravery, in courage.”

There are ways in which these virtues have become undervalued, in which the left, in particular, has a dysfunctional relationship with individual achievement and entrepreneurial élan.

Andreessen’s ideas trace an odd, meme-based philosophy that has flourished in some corners of the internet known as effective accelerationism

“Effective accelerationism aims to follow the ‘will of the universe’: leaning into the thermodynamic bias towards futures with greater and smarter civilizations that are more effective at finding/extracting free energy from the universe,”

“E/acc has no particular allegiance to the biological substrate for intelligence and life, in contrast to transhumanism.” OK!

Take Andreessen’s naming of trust and safety teams as among his enemies.

That, in a way, is my core disagreement with Andreessen. Reactionary futurism is accelerationist in affect but deccelerationist in practice

How has that worked out? A new analysis by Similarweb found that traffic to twitter.com fell in the United States by 19 percent from September 2022 to September 2023 and traffic on mobile devices fell by almost 18 percent. Indications are that advertising revenue on the platform is collapsing.

Andreessen spends much of his manifesto venerating the version of markets that you hear in the first few weeks of Econ 101, before the professor begins complicating the picture with all those annoying market failures

Throughout his essay, Andreessen is at pains to attack those who might slow the development of artificial intelligence in the name of safety, but nothing would do more to freeze progress in A.I. than a disaster caused by its reckless deployment

It is hard to read Andreessen’s manifesto, with its chopped-up paragraphs and its blunt jabs of thought delivered for maximum engagement and polarization, and not feel that Andreessen now reflects the medium in which he has made his home: X. He doesn’t just write in the way the medium rewards. He increasingly seems to think in its house style, too.

One reason I left Twitter long ago is that I noticed that it was a kind of machine for destroying trust. It binds you to the like-minded but cuts you from those with whom you have even modest disagreements

There is a reason that Twitter’s rise was conducive to politics of revolution and reaction rather than of liberalism and conservatism. If you are there too often, seeing the side of humanity it serves up, it is easy to come to think that everything must be burned down.

Musk purchased Twitter (in an acquisition that Andreessen Horowitz helped finance) and gutted its trust and safety teams. The result has been a profusion of chaos, disinformation and division on his platform

Treating so much of society with such withering contempt will not speed up a better future. It will turn people against the politics and policies of growth, just as it did before. Trust is the most essential technology of all.

In 1453, Mehmed II the Conqueror led the Ottoman Turks in seizing the ancient city of Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire’s capital. This put an end to 1,000-year reign of the Byzantine Empire.

Sultan Mehmed renamed the city Istanbul, meaning “the city of Islam” and made it the new capital of the Ottoman Empire.

By 1517, Bayezid’s son, Selim I, brought Syria, Arabia, Palestine, and Egypt under Ottoman control.

The Ottoman Empire reached its peak between 1520 and 1566, during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent

The Ottomans were known for their achievements in art, science and medicine.

Some of the most popular forms of art included calligraphy, painting, poetry, textiles and carpet weaving, ceramics and music.

The Ottomans learned and practiced advanced mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, physics, geography and chemistry.

Under Sultan Selim, a new policy emerged, which included fratricide, or the murder of brothers.

The threat of assassination was always a concern for a Sultan. He relocated every night as a safety measure.

the millet system, a community structure that gave minority groups a limited amount of power to control their own affairs while still under Ottoman rule.

The devshirme system lasted until the end of the 17th century.

Starting in the 1600s, the Ottoman Empire began to lose its economic and military dominance to Europe.

n 1878, the Congress of Berlin declared the independence of Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria.During the Balkan Wars, which took place in 1912 and 1913, the Ottoman Empire lost nearly all their territories in Europe.

At the start of World War I, the Ottoman Empire was already in decline. The Ottoman Turks entered the war in 1914 on the side of the Central Powers (including Germany and Austria-Hungary) and were defeated in 1918.

In 1915, Turkish leaders made a plan to massacre Armenians living the Ottoman Empire. Most scholars believe that about 1.5 million Armenians were killed.

After ruling for more than 600 years, the Ottoman Turks are often remembered for their powerful military, ethnic diversity, artistic ventures, religious tolerance and architectural marvels.

The mighty empire’s influence is still very much alive in the present-day Turkish Republic, a modern, mostly secular nation thought of by many scholars as a continuation of the Ottoman Empire.

The Ukrainian exodus is nearly triple the size of the wave of Syrians and others who reached Europe in 2015.

In response to the Ukrainian crisis, Europe has rolled out welcome mats, both metaphorical and literal.

On March 3rd the European Union invoked for the first time its temporary-protection directive, giving Ukrainians the right to live, work and receive benefits in 26 of its 27 member countries.

Poland has taken in 2.2m. Hungary, whose prime minister, Viktor Orban, was the first European leader to build a fence to keep out refugees in 2015, has admitted 340,000.

Poland’s government encourages such generosity by offering hosts 40 zloty ($9) per day per refugee for two months.

Britain’s is giving £350 ($460) a month per household, although its forbidding bureaucracy has made it hard for many Ukrainians to come.

Ukraine’s closest neighbours are already feeling strained. Moldova, which has received 370,000 refugees, equivalent to about a tenth of its population, is overwhelmed.

Newer refugees, who tend to be poorer and are less likely to have family already in western Europe, may also stay in larger numbers.

Parts of Poland, too, are buckling. Around 300,000 refugees have come to Warsaw, the capital, increasing its population by 17%. More than 100,000 are in Krakow, the second-largest city, which is usually home to 780,000 people. “[T]he more people, the worse the conditions will be,”

Countries on the route taken by refugees in 2015, from Greece to Belgium, have greatly improved their ability to register and process them.

Some, such as Germany, passed laws and set up institutions to integrate refugees.

For economies, refugees could be both a burden and a boon.

the EU’s four biggest countries will spend nearly 0.2% of GDP to support the influx, assuming 4m refugees come to the region.

Ukrainians already in Germany have higher qualifications than did Syrian refugees, which should help them find work. The relative abundance of work means that there is little risk that Germans will accuse the newcomers of taking their jobs.

The forecasters may also be overestimating how much work single mothers, traumatised by their flight from Ukraine and worried about the husbands they left behind, will be able to do, especially where day-care places are scarce and expensive.

If the war grinds on, economies slow and governments fail to provide the newcomers with housing, services and jobs, Europe’s welcome mats could be withdrawn.

Dissent can already be heard in some overburdened countries. In Romania a nationalist fringe contends that Ukraine, not Russia, is the enemy. In Moldova some Ukrainians’ cars have been vandalised. Filippo Grandi, the head of the UN’s refugee agency, fears that hostility will spread.

the First Amendment and Bill of Rights—cornerstones of the American system of government—limit what laws Congress may pass and therefore what the majority may do. That is their whole point.

Clearly what we want is not unlimited majority rule, but liberal democracy: a majority vote, within the context of protections for fundamental rights. This is still “democracy” in the literal sense—rule by the people—but that rule is limited by liberal principles.

The usual case for liberal democracy is captured in a quote from 20th-century political philosopher Judith Shklar that has been making the rounds recently: “Liberalism is monogamously, faithfully, and permanently married to democracy—but it is a marriage of convenience.”

The idea is that it is impossible to maintain a liberal system—“liberal” in the political philosopher’s sense, meaning a free society—without representative government and other democratic institutions. But democracy is merely a means to an end. It is justified not by an imperative to manifest some kind of mystical collective will, but as a safeguard for individual liberty.

Both liberalism and democracy—as words and as ideas—have their roots in the classical world, and there are two stories from Ancient Greece and Rome that define their proper relationship.

These two stories sum up the promise and peril of rule by the people. The whole trick of liberal democracy is to create a system that will protect us from Tarquin, while protecting Socrates from us.

Yet I think we can encourage a little more love in the marriage between liberalism and democracy by finding some common ground in the basic principles behind them.

The principle behind representative government is the same as that underlying liberalism: the equal rights of individuals. Democracy is founded on the recognition that some men are not born with saddles on their backs, as Thomas Jefferson put it, while others are not born booted and spurred. If all men are created equal, with equal rights, they are entitled to an equal say over how they are governed and by whom.

The populist leader pretends to speak for the people and to champion their interests, but he always defines “the people” to mean his faction. They alone are the real Americans who represent the heartland. Everyone else doesn’t count: Their preferences are presumed to be manufactured and illegitimate—and their rights and interests do not have to be respected.

there is a deeper common value that bonds liberalism and democracy. In a free society, respect for the rights of others requires that you deal with them through bargaining and persuasion rather than coercion. Same for democracy.

A liberal democracy protects against democratic abuses of power through a system of checks and balances, in which some democratic institutions are given the power and incentive to limit other democratic institutions

The reward of a democratic system is not just that it limits the power of our leaders, but that it holds them to account for their mistakes and allows a country to reverse their errors.

Freedom of speech has been called the “first freedom,” but part of the point of protecting speech is to allow us to criticize our leaders so we can then vote them out. Historically, the vote is the first freedom and the origin of all the others

This is why it is so important to protect liberal democracy when any party threatens it and why voters are right to make this a higher priority than other, seemingly more immediate problems