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The irony is that abortion foes have seen this movie before. More than anyone, those in the antiabortion movement should know that obsessing over the Supreme Court can get you only so far. After all, way back in 1973, Justice Harry Blackmun issued a decision he firmly believed would end conflicts about abortion. That decision was called Roe v. Wade.

Biden’s decision to stand down was a puzzling development given that there is no indication whatsoever that the Democratic legislation – which would create a national registry of police misconduct, ban chokeholds and no-knock warrants, and overhaul qualified immunity protections for police officers – has any chance in the 50-50 Senate after it passed the House in March without GOP support.

The deep fissures in the Democratic party over what to do on the issue of policing have put Democrats in a difficult spot. During the 2020 elections, Republican hammered their Democratic opponents over radical calls to “defund the police” – attempting to portray all Democrats as sympathetic to a view that is held by a small minority.

It’s a major reason why congressional leaders like House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, the No. 3 Democrat in the chamber, were quick to refute Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s argument that there should be “no more policing,” because, in her view, it cannot be reformed. “We’ve got to have police,” Clyburn said in an interview this week with CNN’s Don Lemon.

Protests erupted this week after the death of Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man who was shot by veteran Minnesota police officer Kimberly Potter in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center after he was initially pulled over for an expired tag and police learned that he had an outstanding warrant for a gross misdemeanor weapons charge.

Biden’s reticence reflects not only the deadlock in the deeply divided Congress, but also the fact that Democrats are still struggling to refine their message on police reform – knowing the issue will be a vulnerability at the ballot box in 2022 and 2024.

“There’s never gonna be justice for us,” Wright’s mother, Katie Wright, told reporters on Thursday. “Justice would bring our son home, knocking on the door with a big smile, coming in the house, sitting down eating dinner with us, going out to lunch, playing with his one-year-old – almost two-year-old-son, giving him a kiss before he walks out the door.”

in another difficult case, the Chicago Civilian Office of Police Accountability released body-worn camera footage Thursday that shows a police officer shooting 13-year-old Adam Toledo last month.

“The officer screamed at him, ‘Show me your hands,’ Adam complied, turned around, his hands were empty when he was shot in the chest at the hands of the officer,” Weiss-Ortiz told reporters Thursday. “If you’re shooting an unarmed child with his hands in the air, it is an assassination.”

Biden’s cautious posture on policing issues since he has become President reflects the arms-length distance that he has maintained from the progressive left on a number of politically-fraught issues, including calls from some Democrats to expand the size of the Supreme Court, the suggestion that he should be doing more on gun control following a recent spate of mass shootings, and fulfilling his own promise to raise the cap set on refugee admissions.

“I want to make it clear again: There is absolutely no justification – none – for looting, no justification for violence. Peaceful protest, understandable,” Biden said Monday. “We do know that the anger, pain, and trauma that exists in the Black community in that environment is real – it’s serious, and it’s consequential. But it will not justify violence and/or looting.”

t this pivotal moment when the nation is once again focused on the need to end these all-too-common occurrences, Biden seems uniquely positioned to take a leading role in brokering a compromise with Congress after his lifetime of work on crime and justice legislation.

Democrats’ sensitivity to those attacks was magnified this week by the swift response to Tlaib, a liberal Democrat, when she tweeted Monday that Wright’s death was not accident and “policing in our country is inherently & intentionally racist.

“This is not about policing. This is not about training. This is about recruiting. Who are we recruiting to be police officers? That to me is where the focus has got to go. We’ve got to have police officers,” Clyburn told Lemon on “CNN Tonight.”

But as incomprehensible police shootings multiply with devastating consequences for the families, there is a fierce urgency in this moment, particularly as the nation waits for the verdict in the Chauvin trial. Justice in policing might be “a cause” that is more convenient for Biden to tackle later in his presidency. But by standing down and waiting for others to act, he may well miss this moment.

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.

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The level of the bath water is very low. But it’s being filled rapidly. However, the spigot is being tightened so the pace at which the water is rising has slowed.

Disney’s plan to cut 28,000 theme park workers. Major airlines are poised to cut tens of thousands of jobs after the expiration of a provision requiring them to keep workers on their payrolls as a condition of bailout money.

The incumbent party points to whatever looks good in the data as proof that its policies are working, and the challenger identifies flaws that remain.

We may not know the answers to those questions, but it matters a lot for understanding what kind of economy either a second-term President Trump or President Joe Biden will have to handle. For now it’s not looking good.

Democrats were bullish about expanding their majority in the U.S. House of Representatives ahead of the election, but ended up losing at least seven seats

We keep making that mistake. This foolishness about, 'You got to be this progressive or that progressive

we were not able to discipline ourselves

That phrase — 'defund the police' — cost Jaime Harrison tremendously,

Stop sloganeering

Sloganeering kills people. Sloganeering destroys movements

let's go about the business of representing people and building hopes and aspirations for people.

Rep. Marc Veasey of Texas said these slogans gave Republicans ammunition to use in “commercial after commercial” against their candidates.

Aides have told Mr. Trump that he would face stiff resistance from both Republicans and Democrats in Congress to firing General Milley, who is in the middle of a four-year term as the military’s top officer.

The Pentagon, more than other departments, has resisted Mr. Trump’s directives, slowing the withdrawal of troops from Syria and Afghanistan, a breach that led to the resignation of Jim Mattis as defense secretary.

these documents define the American social compact—the mutual responsibilities of citizen and state—that define the American experiment.

Here’s the first pair, from the Declaration:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

The first sentence recognizes the inherent dignity of man as human beings created in the image of God. The second sentence, nearly as important, recognizes the unavoidable duty of government to recognize and protect that dignity. While the sole purpose of government isn’t to protect liberty, a government that fails to protect liberty fails in an essential function. 

Adams wrote to the officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts to outline the responsibilities of the citizens of the new republic.

The letter contains the famous declaration that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” But I’m more interested in the two preceding sentences:

Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.

Put in plain English, this means that when public virtue fails, our constitutional government does not possess the power to preserve itself.

the American experiment depends upon both the government upholding its obligation to preserve liberty and the American people upholding theirs to exercise that liberty towards virtuous purposes. 

Citizen and state both have obligations, and if either side fails, it imperils the republic.

We see this reality play out in American history.

The seeds for the first great American crisis were sown in the original Constitution itself. By failing to end slavery and by failing to extend the Bill of Rights to protect citizens from the oppression of state and local governments, the early American government flatly failed to live up to the principles of the Declaration, and we paid the price in blood.

our nation seethes again today

The response to John Adams’s warning is not to arm the government with more power but to equip citizens with more virtue.

Its politics are gripped by deep hatred and abiding animosity, and its culture groans under the weight of human despair. Hatred rules our politics; anxiety, depression, and loneliness dominate our culture.

Those many cultural critics who look at the United States of America and declare that “something is wrong” are exactly right

here’s the difference—unlike the days when we could point to a specific source of government oppression, such as slavery or Jim Crow, the American government (though highly imperfect) currently protects individual liberty and associational freedoms to a degree we’ve never seen in American history.

Even after the Civil War, the quick end of Union occupation of the Confederacy enabled the creation of an apartheid substate in the South. Once again, the government failed to live up the core principles of the founding. It is by God’s grace that the Jim Crow regime ended primarily as the result of one of the Civil Rights Movement—one of the great Christian justice movements in history—and not as the result of another convulsive civil conflict.

But what can the government do about friendlessness? About anxiety? What can the government do to make sure that we are not—in Robert Putnam’s memorable phrase—“bowling alone?

that challenge is compounded by the fact that the most engaged American citizens are its most angry partisans.

And if you think that most-partisan cohort is seething with anger because they suffer from painful oppression, think again. The data is clear. As the More in Common project notes, the most polarized Americans are disproportionately white and college-educated on the left and disproportionately white and retired on the right. 

The people disproportionately driving polarization in the United States are not oppressed minorities, but rather some of the most powerful, most privileged, wealthiest people who’ve ever lived.

They enjoy more freedom and opportunity than virtually any prior generation of humans, all while living under the protective umbrella of the most powerful military in the history of the planet.

It’s simply an astonishing level of discontent in the midst of astonishing wealth and power.

maybe it’s not so astonishing, because accumulating wealth and power is not and never was the path to meaning and purpose.

much of both the right and left postliberal impulse is related to the first of John Adams’s two key sentences. If we don’t have a government “armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion,” then their solution is to increase the power of government. Arm it with more power. 

But when it comes to government, you’re never arming an “it,” you’re arming a “them”—a collection of human beings who suffer from all the same character defects and cultural maladies as the rest of us

As James Madison observed in Federalist 51 (the second-best Federalist Paper), “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” Yet American postliberalism asks us to empower men and women who frequently don’t even pretend to be virtuous, who often glory in their vice, all for the “common good.” 

We still battle the legacy of past injustice and the present reality of lingering discrimination, but there’s just no comparison between the legal systems that destabilized America and the legal systems that exist today. 

how do we do that? The path past animosity and against despair can be as short and simple as the path from Twitter to the kitchen table

It’s shifting the focus from the infuriating thing you can’t control to the people you can love, to the institutions you can build.

in this present time, thanks to the steadily-expanding sphere of American liberty, we have more ability to unite—including for religious purposes—than at any time in American history. Yet we still bowl alone. We tweet alone. We rage alone, staring at screens and forming online tribes that provide an empty simulacrum of real relationships.

for all too many of us that feels empty, like our small actions are simply inadequate to address the giant concerns that dominate our minds

To do the big thing—to heal our land—we have to do the small things.

We need a frame shift. Do not think of doing the small things as abandoning the larger quest. See every family, every friendship, every healthy church, every functioning school board as indispensable to our continued American experiment. 

For those who think and obsess about politics, this shift from big to small is hard. It’s hard to think that how you love your friends might be more important to our nation than what you think of CRT

When our crisis is one of hatred, anxiety, and despair, don’t look to politics to heal our hearts. Our government can’t contend with “human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion.” Our social fabric is fraying. The social compact is crumbling. Our government is imperfect, but if this republic fractures, its people will be to blame. 

But the fate of southern Black Americans changed in 1916 when news of better jobs and conditions up North started spreading in rural communities. Black newspapers, like The Chicago Defender, ran stories about opportunities for African Americans in steels mills and factories and encouraged them to leave the South.

"They actually interfered with the U.S. Mail to prevent the Defender from being distributed,” says James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association and author of Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners and the Great Migration.

“They believed, incorrectly, that what was really happening was Black people were being stirred up by labor agents from northern industries coming South to round up Black workers.

African American field workers waiting to be paid near Homestead, Florida, 1939.Photo 12/Universal Images Group via Getty Image

“Police literally went up to the platforms and rounded people up,” says Grossman, to dissuade Black people from traveling. And the intimidation tactic worked.

A common belief among white southerners was that Black people were intellectually inferior and would not think to move to the North in search of better opportunities.

Black Americans who fled racial oppression either returned to retrieve the rest of their family or sent train tickets back home. In response, as white southerners observed train platforms packed with African Americans, several cities passed ordinances that made it illegal for trains to accept pre-paid tickets.

Although there were instances of African Americans being recruited to work as Pullman porters on railways and seasonally on tobacco farms in Connecticut, the true northern labor agents were African Americans themselves, says Grossman.

Still, the Great Migration powered on. With a promise of a better life, more dignity and employment, African Americans began to leave from a train station further away, so they wouldn’t be recognized by locals or police officers.

White southerners, anticipating more labor shortages, utilized the mechanical cotton picker more in the 1940s, often evicting Black sharecroppers from their land, who in turn migrated elsewhere in search of work. These developments cemented the African American pilgrimage from the South until the 1970s.

The new American right, however, has blown past the relatively innocuous populism of the past 40 years and added a fetid cynicism about almost everything related to public life.

Not only are the MAGA Republicans seemingly repelled by the idea of voting for someone better than they are; they support candidates who are often manifestly worse people than the average citizen, so that they may slather their fears about their own shortcomings and prejudices under a sludgy and undifferentiated hatred about almost everyone in public office.

These populists not only look past the sins of their candidates but also defend and even celebrate them

The same Republicans who claim to venerate the Founders and the Constitution have intentionally turned our politics into a scuzzy burlesque.

consider how many people cheer on unhinged cranks such as Marjorie Taylor Greene or allow themselves to be courted by smarmy opportunists such as Vance and Ted Cruz.

This new populism, centered in the modern Republican Party, has no recognizable policy content beyond the thrill of cruelty and a juvenile boorishness meant largely to enrage others.

The GOP’s goals now boil down to power for its elected royalty and cheap coliseum pleasures for its rank and file.

Republicans, therefore, are forced to lower their—and our—standards for admission to public office, because the destruction of dignity is the only way they can find the candidates who will do what decent men and women will not, including abasing themselves to Donald Trump.

Let us leave aside the cult around Trump, which has now reached such levels of weirdness that the specter of Jim Jones is probably pacing about the netherworld in awe.

I’m an adult. I get it. Our elected officials aren’t saints, and only rarely are they heroes. But must they now be a cavalcade of clowns and charlatans, joyously parading their embrace of vice and their rejection of virtue? The Republican Party seems to think so.

The book recounts four peak periods in the conflict between white Alabamians and the federal government: the wild rush, in the early 19th century, to seize and settle lands that belonged to the Creek Nation; Reconstruction; the reassertion of white supremacy under Jim Crow; and the attempts of Wallace and others to nullify the civil rights reforms of the 1950s and 1960s.

Throughout, as Cowie reveals, white Southerners portrayed the oppression of Black people and Native Americans not as a repudiation of freedom, but its precondition, its very foundation.

Following the election of Ulysses S. Grant in 1868 and the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments, the federal presence in the South was finally robust. So was the spirit of local defiance. In post-bellum Barbour County, Cowie writes, “peace only prevailed for freed people when federal troops were in town” — and then only barely

White men did all this in Barbour County, by design and without relent, and Cowie’s account of their acts is unsparing. His narrative is immersive; his characters are vividly rendered, whether familiar figures like Andrew Jackson or mostly forgotten magnates like J.W. Comer, a plantation owner who became, in the late 19th century, the architect of a vast, sadistic and extremely lucrative system of convict labor

Thus were white men, in the words of the scholar Orlando Patterson, whom Cowie quotes, “free to brutalize.” Thus were they free “to plunder and lay waste and call it peace, to rape and humiliate, to invade, conquer, uproot and degrade.”

the chaos in Alabama offended Jackson’s sense of discipline and made a mockery of his treaties with the Creeks. Beginning in 1832, and in fits and starts over the following year, federal troops looked to turn back or at least contain the white wave. Instead, their presence touched off a series of violent reprisals, created a cast of martyrs and folk heroes, and gave rise to the mythology of white victimization. Self-rule and local authority — rhetorical wrapping for this will to power — had become articles of faith, fervid as any religious belief.

The federal government is a character here, too — sometimes in a central role, sometimes remote to the point of irrelevance, and all too often feckless in the defense of a more inclusive, affirmative model of freedom.

When Grant stepped up the enforcement of voting rights, whites in Eufaula, Barbour County’s largest town, massacred Black citizens and engaged in furious efforts to manipulate or overturn elections. As in the 1830s, the federal government showed little stamina for the struggle. Republican losses in 1874 augured another retreat, this time for the better part of a century. In the vacuum, Cowie explains, emerged “the neoslavery of convict leasing, the vigilante justice of lynching, the degradation and debt of sharecropping and the official disenfranchisement of Blacks” under Jim Crow.

Wallace, as Cowie makes clear, had bigger ambitions. Instinctively, he knew that his brand of politics had an audience anywhere that white Americans were under strain and looking for someone to blame. Wallace became the sneering face of the backlash against the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, against any law or court ruling or social program that aimed to include Black Americans more fully in our national life. Racism was central to his appeal, yet its common note was grievance; the common enemies were elites, the press and the federal government. “Being a Southerner is no longer geographic,” he declared in 1964, during the first of his four runs for the White House. “It’s a philosophy and an attitude.”

That attitude, we know, is pervasive now — a primal, animating principle of conservative politics. We hear it in conspiracy theories about the “deep state”; we see it in the actions of Republican officials like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who built a case for his re-election in 2022 by banning — in the name of “individual freedom” — classroom discussions of gender, sexuality and systemic racism.

In explaining how we got here, “Freedom’s Dominion” emphasizes race above economics, but this seems fitting. The fixation on the free market, so long a defining feature of the Republican Party, has loosened its hold; taxes and regulations do not boil the blood as they once did. In their place is a stew of resentments as raw as any since George Wallace stirred the pot.

the major finding of the survey “is that democratic norm violations of the sort many Republicans ran on are an electoral loser.”

Republican candidates, Westwood added, “running on platforms that supported democratic norm violations were standing behind a policy that seems to only resonate with Trump and a small minority of Republican voters.

A publicly released post-election analysis by Neil Newhouse and Jim Hobart, partners at the Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies, found, for example, that a far higher percentage of Democrats, 81 percent, believe “Republicans represent a threat to democracy that, if not stopped, will destroy America as we know it,” than Republicans (69 percent) believe the same thing about Democrats

the election outcomes are consistent with the interpretation that the candidates most closely associated with Trump suffered a penalty. Voters rejected all the Trump-endorsed secretary of state nominees in important swing states. Republicans unexpectedly lost seats in districts where Republican incumbents who supported Trump’s impeachment had been denied renomination. Republicans closely linked to Trump lost elections in winnable swing states

Both Democrats and Republicans, Westwood said,overestimate the extent to which the other side supports democratic norm violations by up to five times. There is a real risk that damage to our country could occur not because of support for norm violations but as a pre-emptive strike based on the faulty assumption that the other side has abandoned democracy.

abortion, which worked to the advantage of Democrats, “was more of a factor than the pre-election polls indicated,” with almost as many voters, 31 percent, saying it was a high-priority issue as the 32 percent who identified rising prices and inflation, an issue that benefited Republicans

Almost identical percentages identified concern over democratic backsliding, at 25 percent, a pro-Democratic issue, as the 26 percent who identified jobs and the economy, a pro-Republican concern.

through 2020, a larger percentage of Republicans considered themselves “to be more a supporter of Donald Trump” than “a supporter of the Republican Party.” That came to an end in January 2021, and by this month, 67 percent said they were “more a supporter of the Republican Party,” more than double the 30 percent who said they were “more a supporter of Donald Trump.”

Crime, Greenberg wrote,was a top issue for many Democratic base voters. A quarter of Blacks and half of Hispanics and Asians voters trusted Republicans more than Democrats to address the issue. With Democrats trailing Republicans by 10 points on crime, Democrats have a lot of work to do.There is another word of caution for Democrats. The party’s single most important achievement in 2022 was to maintain control of the Senate, preventing Republicans from blocking Biden’s judicial and executive branch appointments.

n 2024, however, 23 seats in the Democratic caucus will be up for grabs — including two independent seats (Angus King in Maine and Bernie Sanders in Vermont) — making it that much harder for Democrats to keep their thin majority. Eight of these Democratic seats are in purple or red states (Montana and West Virginia, for example), offering multiple opportunities to the Republican Party

In contrast, all 10 of the Republican-held seats up for election in 2024 are in solidly red states.

But as in so many corners of the Confederacy, the camps where former slaves lived swelled with the hungry, the sick, and those seeking to find opportunity and family.

This set the stage for the violent days of May 1866. When the rumor of the black-on-white crime spread, Fort Pickering’s commander, General George Stoneman, confiscated black soldiers’ weapons and ordered them to their barracks.

Around the same time, a white mob assembled, including police and firemen, and attacked the camp of former slaves and African American neighborhoods.

Violence resumed late the next morning when “a posse of police and citizens again appeared in South Memphis and commenced an indiscriminate attack upon the Negroes,

he Massacre showed the failures of Reconstruction even as congressional Republicans seized control from President Andrew Johnson, a Tennessean and former military governor of the state.

Newly elected legislators in states like South Carolina showed up in their old Rebel uniforms. And though white civil-rights supporters lived in Memphis and other cities, they were targets of violence—including during the Memphis Massacre.

After all, there was political benefit in this kind of aggressive legislating: African Americans made up the largest bloc of Union-loyal Southerners during the war and were potential Republican voters.

The Enforcement Act of 1870 outlawed both state and private violence against African Americans, reenacting the 1866 Civil Rights Act under the auspices of the Fourteenth Amendment.

In 1871, the federal government placed nine South Carolina counties under martial law, and federal courts convicted more than 100 defendants charged under these acts.

he U.S. Supreme Court held in U.S. v. Cruikshank that the perpetrators of the 1873 Colfax Massacre in Louisiana could not be convicted for federal civil-rights violations because the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause did not extend to individuals’ crimes,

It took 90 years for the state-built edifice of Jim Crow to be torn down by the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964,

A new retreat from Civil Rights is getting renewed momentum today in the wake of the 2013 decision Shelby County v. Holder. The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority invalidated sections 4 and 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

“We don’t have a body that we’re missing a heart from. So I guess it’s an unusual occurrence, is what you would say. It’s what’s listed on our report. We hope to be able to classify it as something else and close this out,” he said

“It could have come from a funeral home, an autopsy. There’s endless possibilities,” Fulton said.

When it was found, the heart had just started to decompose, so it could have been frozen or fresh, officials say. Fulton told WOIO they’re making the story public now in the hope of getting some public help identifying the heart.

But that correlation might exist because some of the factors in the way bail is set are likely related to guilt—so correlations found between bail and convictions have been hard to interpret in the sense that past studies have not been able to pinpoint whether those negative outcomes are really due to bail being assigned.

This randomness is ideal for what economists call a natural experiment

being assigned money bail increases the probability of conviction by about 6 percentage points and also causes a 4 percentage point increase in the risk that someone would go on to commit another crime.

: That paper used the same data set from Philadelphia, and concluded that pretrial detention led to a 6.6 percentage point increase in the likelihood of conviction.

“Many of these convictions appear to be the result of guilty pleas by detained persons,” says Ethan Frenchman, a public defender in Baltimore and co-author of the study. “Our paper further demonstrates how the American money-bail system is not only grossly unfair and irrational, but imposes far greater harms on defendants and the public than we realize.”

But they cut against the deeper wisdom of the American political tradition. The less-than-democratic side of party nominations is a virtue of our system, not a flaw, and it has often been a necessary check on the passions

That check has weakened with the decline of machines, bosses and smoke-filled rooms. But in many ways it remains very much in force — confronting would-be demagogues with complicated ballot requirements, insisting that a potential Coriolanus or a Sulla count delegates in Guam and South Dakota, asking men who aspire to awesome power to submit to the veto of state chairmen and local newspapers, the town meeting and the caucus hall.

Goldwater and McGovern were both men of principle and experience and civic virtue, leading factions that had not yet come to full maturity. This made them political losers; it did not make them demagogues.

But if that exercise is painful, it’s also the correct path to choose. A man so transparently unfit for office should not be placed before the American people as a candidate for president under any kind of imprimatur save his own. And there is no point in even having a party apparatus, no point in all those chairmen and state conventions and delegate rosters, if they cannot be mobilized to prevent 35 percent of the Republican primary electorate from imposing a Trump nomination on the party.

Denying him the nomination would indeed be an ugly exercise, one that would weaken or crush the party’s general election chances, and leave the G.O.P. with a long hard climb back up to unity and health.

Trump, though, is cut from a very different cloth. He’s an authoritarian, not an ideologue, and his antecedents aren’t Goldwater or McGovern; they’re figures like George Wallace and Huey Long, with a side of the fictional Buzz Windrip from Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here.” No modern political party has nominated a candidate like this; no serious political party ever should.

What Trump has demonstrated is that in our present cultural environment, and in the Republican Party’s present state of bankruptcy, the first lines of defense against a demagogue no longer hold. Because he’s loud and rich and famous, because he’s run his campaign like a reality TV show, because he’s horribly compelling and, yes, sometimes even right, Trump has come this far without many endorsements or institutional support, without much in the way of a normal organization

So in Cleveland this summer, the men and women of the Republican Party may face a straightforward choice: Betray the large minority of Republicans who cast their votes for Trump, or betray their obligations to their country.For a party proud of its patriotism, the choice should not be hard.

Ross, you got to the right conclusion, but you still can't bring yourself to connect all the dots. The disease is not Donald Trump. He's merely a symptom, albeit a malignant one. Rather, it is the party itself (and its enablers) that is sick unto death. Why not come clean and admit that you set sail on a pirate ship and now find yourself lost at sea?

Ross, you act as though Trump threatens to become the GOP's first "man unfit for office". In fact, the House and Senate are full of them.Please feel free to defend the "fitness" of Tom Cotton, Louis Gohmert, Jim Inhofe, Trey Gowdy and countless others. This is what your party has become. It's far, far worse than just Trump.

Oh, "the passions that mass democracy constantly threatens to unleash." As if Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, Dick Armey -- in the service of Ronald Reagan, the Bushes, and the Kochs et al. -- hadn't spent the last 40 years whipping up nasty passions and unleashing the beast. Well, now it's got you.

if you really want to go down an anti-democratic path to wrest the power from the people, be careful where that path takes you. You may be in for some blowback even worse than the blowback you're seeing now, in the form of Trump, from the right wing's years of fomenting ethnic animosity and pitting the working man against himself. Be careful about removing the last fig leaf of democracy. I can think of a place where a form of patriotic, faith-based, big-nation, orderly "democracy" has been perfected. That place is Vladimir Putin's Russia.

The other three Republican candidates stood there on that stage after Trump was reviled as a fraud and a con-man and repeated their pledge that they would support him if he won the nomination.Patriotism indeed!!

Ross Douthat's eloquent stop-Trump plea to what's left of the Republican party deserves to be taken seriously, not jeered at. Let's hope he's listened to, especially on the right.

So Mr. Douthat, your only answer to the candidacy of DT is for your Party to commit ritual suicide.But it is probably too late. to do the honorable thing. Your candidates and other Party leaders have committed to supporting him if he gains the nomination. and how can you deny the monster you have created. His lust for power is no different than that of Ted Cruz or Carl Rove who lords it over anyone who steps out of line.

An honest appraisal.Next week, maybe you could do an honest assessment of how the Republican Party strayed so far from its agenda.Those of us on the Left already know the answer to that question.You claim to be of the Party and the Faith that finds redemptive value in acknowledging personal transgressions. We look forward to Part Two.

my bet is, and its as good as anybody's for now, is that if elected (after the laughing and hand-wringing was over) is he'd cut deals on taxes on 1%, create jobs, global warming, start multiple trade wars and stop immigration of muslims. And I'm OK w/that.

Ross,We are a minority of commenters, but many applaud you. We have all made mistakes and should reflect upon them, but what is important now is for Americans to band together in order to stop a threat to the life of our Republic.

"That toothpaste is never going back in the tube."(I screenshot the exchange for my FB and Twitter page.)Even now, Chris Matthews, who interrupts everyone; didn't interrupt Trump.More disturbing? Reporters ignore Trump grading questions! If Trump doesn't like a question he attacks. Reporters respond by turing into slack-jawed statutes.But when Trump decides to answer, it's never with plausible detailsHard follow ups? Never happen.So make no mistake; the reason for the monster is media.The Republican Party is secondary.We need a dozens of Rachel Maddows.God help us.

Lets first put the blame where it belongs, considering Trump is a wholly, media-created monster. For six months all media invested not one Moment, digging in and reporting on Trump's background. For six months all media didn't earn their salaries as the political show pundits. each and every one, sat around desks saying,"Well, Trump *is* entertaining," and "I can't believe he gets away with that" as media continued allowing Trump to ignore questions. CBS's Les Moonves is on the record saying,"Trump may not be good for the country, but's he's very good for TV."Next, Joe Scarborough entered with his daily slobber over Trump's greatness; becoming an unofficial advisor, as MSNBC and NBC executives continued looking the other way. When I asked Chuck Todd about any chance of FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, (for the good of the country) would bring back the Fairness Doctrine, Chuck said,

Block him and the Party is torn apart. Too bad that when the Democrats should be nominating their strongest candidate they are left with a flawed "congenital liar" and a fringe leftist. If they can only get someone like Biden to run, they'll take back the Senate, and maybe even the House. Otherwise, they're taking a hell of a chance