Group items tagged

The modern Republican Party, by contrast, is built upon a loathing of the government.

Some of its members want to see the government shrunk and hamstrung

The Trumpist faction is more focused on purging government institutions of the disloyal. “I think that what Trump should do, like if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single middle-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,” JD Vance said in a 2021 podcast interview. “Replace them with our people, and when the courts — because you will get taken to court — and when the courts stop you, stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

Either way, to become part of the government as it exists now — to be engaged in the day-to-day process of governing — is to open yourself to suspicion and potentially mark yourself for a later purge.

Democrats have their own ideological tensions. But Trump’s victory turned Democrats into a ruthlessly pragmatic party.

Nancy Pelosi told me something similar when I asked her why House Democrats have held together more easily than House Republicans. “It’s very hard to find leverage with people who don’t have really any beliefs or any agenda,” she said. “It’s hard to negotiate with somebody who wants nothing.”

It was that pragmatism that led them to ultimately nominate Joe Biden in 2020. It was that same pragmatism that led them to abandon him in 2024.

“This was what the Biden people fundamentally misunderstood,” he told me. “They thought it was all about Joe. But it has been about Trump and about stopping him since 2017, and we will unite and do whatever we have to do to be successful in the face of that threat.”

These were discussions less about who Democrats loved than what they feared. “A lot of Democrats view Trump as antithetical to the whole American project,” David Axelrod, the chief strategist of President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, told me. “If Haley had been running, I’m not sure you’d have had the same sense of urgency that Democrats feel about Trump.”

Crucially, this was a belief that Biden shared, too. “Nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy, and that includes personal ambition,” he said when he dropped out.

This is the formula Democrats have found for maintaining coherence as a political party. They are unified in wanting to use the government to make people’s lives better. They are unified in believing Trump must be stopped.

so it is not quite true that this election is just a contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. It is that, but it is also a contest between Donald Trump and the Democratic Party.

This is something the Trump campaign knows — and fears. “I don’t think Joe Biden has a ton of advantages,” one of his campaign managers, Susie Wiles, told The Atlantic in March. “But I do think Democrats do.”

Even if the AfD can form a coalition government somewhere in the east of the country, where all three of next month’s elections — in Saxony and Brandenburg, in addition to Thuringia — are taking place, it may not be able to rule.

he German Constitution includes provisions that allow the federal government to depose a regional government that intends to undermine democratic norms. While the law is unclear, it seems inevitable that an AfD government would create some form of constitutional crisis.

Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution, a powerful domestic intelligence service, has identified the AfD in Saxony and Thuringia as right-wing extremist organizations. Sharing information with extremist organizations is a serious crime. On the other hand, there are legal obligations to share information among law enforcement agencies.

the party’s ideas and electoral tactics have quietly gone mainstream. Who needs the AfD when Chancellor Olaf Scholz is willing to call for deportations “on a grand scale” on the cover of Der Spiegel or when the Green Party leader Robert Habeck is happy to traffic in fear and xenophobia? In the aftermath of last week’s terrorist attack in the western city of Solingen, in which three people were killed, politicians of all stripes have predictably pushed for more deportations and tighter restrictions on migration.

all too often, Germany has focused on the symbols of Nazi injustice while ignoring or even condoning the continuation of the brutality they represent. In practice, that has meant the far-right penetration of the security services, the laundering of extreme ideas in the media and the willingness of other political parties to adopt racialized fearmongering as an electoral tactic.

While the AfD has been kept from power, the kind of hateful language that built its support has become a significant part of German political life.

This maneuver, sanitizing the past by selectively rebuking it, has held Germany in fairly good stead until now. But as September’s elections will make plain, the demons of both past and present cannot be denied.

Another way to think of him: as perhaps the single most influential person in the United States. His YouTube channel has 17 million subscribers. His podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, which launched in 2009, has held the top spot on the Spotify charts consistently for the past five years

Go to a cocktail mixer, an ayahuasca party, or a Brazilian-jiu-jitsu gym here and you might run into Tim Ferriss, the author of The 4-Hour Workweek; or the podcasters Lex Fridman, Chris Williamson, Ryan Holiday, Michael Malice, or Aubrey Marcus. Elon Mus

Rogan and his fans are often called “heterodox,” which is funny, because this group has converged on a set of shared opinions, creating what you might call a heterodox orthodoxy:

Diversity-and-inclusion initiatives mean that identity counts more than merit; COVID rules were too strict; the pandemic probably started with a lab leak in China; the January 6 insurrection was not as bad as liberals claim; gender medicine for children is out of control; the legacy media are scolding and biased; and so on

The Roganverse neatly caters to this audience because it is, in essence, a giant talk-show circuit:

The heterodox sphere has low trust in institutions—the press, academia, the CDC—and prefers to listen to individuals

Follow his Instagram, and his tastes soon become apparent: energy drinks, killing wild animals, badly lit steaks, migraine-inducing AI graphics, dad-rock playlists, and shooting the breeze with his buddies.

Rogan’s support of Gillis demonstrates why members of his inner circle are so loyal to him. Not only has Rogan personally boosted their careers on his podcast and in his club, but his popularity has forced the comedy industry to recalibrate its tolerance for offense.

What fans love about Rogan is the same thing his critics hate: an untamable curiosity that makes him open to plainly marginal ideas. One guest tells him that black holes are awesome. A second tells him that the periodic table needs to be updated because carbon has a “bisexual tone.” A third tells him that a deworming drug could wipe out COVID. He approaches all of them—tenured professors, harmless crackpots, peddlers of pseudoscience—with the same stoner wonderment.

Media Matters for America, a progressive journalism-watchdog organization, has accused Rogan and his guests of using his podcast to “promote conspiracy theorists and push anti-trans rhetoric.”

The liberal case against Rogan usually references one of two culture-war flash points: COVID and gender

“Free health care—yes!” Rogan tells his audiences these days onstage in Austin, riffing on the political demands of the left. “Education for all—right on! … Men can get pregnant—fuck! I didn’t realize it was a package deal.”

During the pandemic, The JRE also drew audience members who were frustrated with the limits of acceptable discussion, at a time when Facebook and YouTube were banning or restricting what they labeled misinformation. Rogan didn’t accept the proposition that Americans should shut up and listen to mainstream experts, and that led to him hosting vaccine denialists and conspiracists, and promoting an unproven deworming drug as a treatment for COVID

noble lie. This refers to the fact that Anthony Fauci initially told regular people not to wear masks in part because he was worried about supply shortages for doctors and nurses, but it has come to stand in for the wider accusation that public-health experts did not trust Americans with complex data during the pandemic, and instead simply told them what to do.

Her experience echoes that of other Rogan fans on the coasts, for whom the pandemic brought the realization that their values differed from those around them; at the time, the persistence of masking was a visible symbol of that difference. “It’s the Democrats’ MAGA hat,” Rogan told a guest in November 2022. “They’re letting you know, I’m on the good team.” Move to Texas, went the promise, and you won’t have to see that anymore.

When I visited the UATX offices, in an Art Deco building in downtown Austin, the provost, Jacob Howland, told me that he wanted “to get the politics out of the classroom,” and that faculty members will have succeeded if the students can’t guess how they vote from what they say in class. Just as in Rogan’s comedy club, smartphones are banned in class—“so that students can’t be distracted by them, or, for example, record other students and tell the world, ‘Oh, you know, this student had this opinion, and it’s unacceptable, and I’m putting it out there on TikTok.’ ”

Many on the left, however, suspect that heterodox just means “right-wing and in denial.” An attendee at last year’s Forbidden Courses sent me a slide showing survey results about the students’ political leanings: Out of 29 respondents, 19 identified as conservative

One major UATX donor is Harlan Crow, the billionaire who has bankrolled Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s lifestyle for years; he sat in the back of some 2023 summer-school lectures. Another is the Austin-based venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, who co-founded Palantir with Peter Thiel and others. He recently gave $1 million to a pro-Trump super PAC.

The Joe Rogan coalition may indeed represent a real strand in American intellectual and political life—a normie suspicion of both MAGA hats and eternal masking, mixed with tolerance for kooky ideas. But it is fracturing.

Today, fractures are obvious across the wider anti-woke movement—and they must be serious, because people have started podcasting about them.

There’s a real tension in the Roganverse between the stated desire to escape polarization and the appeal of living in an endless 2020, when the sharp definition of the opposing sides yielded growing audiences and made unlikely political alliances possible.

Those contradictory impulses are evident in Austin. Jon Stokes, a co-founder of the AI company Symbolic, described the city to me as the “DMZ of the culture wars,” while the podcaster David Perell put it like this: “Moving to Austin is the geographical equivalent of saying ‘I don’t read the news anymore.’ ”

relentless criticism from the left has pushed him and his fellow travelers closer to people who talk like this. Look at Elon Musk, who has developed an obsession with defeating the “woke mind virus” and an addiction to posting about his grievances.

During his stand-up set, Rogan said that Jones was right about the existence of “false flags”—events staged by the government or provocateurs to discredit a cause. Then he whispered to himself that Jones had gotten “one thing wrong.” He had gotten a lot of things right too, Rogan said at normal volume. Then his voice dropped again: “It was a pretty big thing, though.”

Rogan is a guy who started a podcast in 2009 to smoke weed with his fellow comics and talk about martial arts—and who, like many Americans, has taken part in a great geographical sorting, moving to be closer to people whose values he shares. He speaks to people who feel silenced, both elite and normie, even as he’s turned the very idea that opinions like his are being “silenced” into a joke in itself.

The second argues that the digital network is both quantitatively and qualitatively different from the print network that created modern democratic societies

All “true believers” are delusional. Anyone who calls a religion “a true representation of reality” is “lying.”

Information, Mr. Harari writes, creates a “social nexus” among its users. The “twin pillars” of society are bureaucracy, which creates power by centralizing information, and mythology, which creates power by controlling the dispersal of “stories” and “brands.”

Societies cohere around stories such as the Bible and communism and “personality cults” and brands such as Jesus and Stalin.

The third presents the AI apocalypse. An “alien” information network gone rogue, Mr. Harari warns, could “supercharge existing human conflicts,” leading to an “AI arms race” and a digital Cold War, with rival powers divided by a Silicon Curtain of chips and code.

“Subjective facts” based on “beliefs and feelings” cannot be true. The collaborative cacophony of “intersubjective reality,” the darkling plain of social and political contention where all our minds meet, also cannot be fully true.

Mr. Harari agrees that “truth is an accurate representation of reality” but argues that only “objective facts” such as scientific data are true

When the attempt is convincing, the naive “call it truth.”

Digitizing our naivety has, Mr. Harari believes, made us uncontrollable and incorrigible

He consistently confuses democracy (a method of gauging opinion with a long history) with liberalism (a mostly Anglo-American legal philosophy with a short history).

Digital networks overwhelm us with information, but computers can only create “order,” not “truth” or “wisdom.”

AI might take over without developing human-style consciousness: “Intelligence is enough.”

The nexus of machine-learning, algorithmic “user engagement” and human nature could mean that “large-scale democracies may not survive the rise of computer technology.”

The “main split” in 20th-century information was between closed, pseudo-infallible “totalitarian” systems and open, self-correcting “democratic” systems.

after the flood of digital information, the split will be between humans and machines

The machines will still be fallible.

Will they allow us to correct them

Mr. Harari nevertheless argues that “social media algorithms” play such a “divisive” role that free speech has become a naive luxury, unaffordable in the age of AI. He “strongly disagrees” with Louis Brandeis’s opinion in Whitney v. California (1927) that the best way to combat false speech is with more speech.

The survival of democracy requires “regulatory institutions” that will “vet algorithms,” counter “conspiracy theories” and prevent the rise of “charismatic leaders.”

Unfortunately, his grasp of politics is tenuous and hyperbolic. He seems to believe that populism was invented with the iPhone rather than being a recurring bug that appears when democratic operating systems become corrupted or fail to update their software

Mythologies of religion, history and ideology, Mr. Harari believes, exploit our naive tendency to mistake all information as “an attempt to represent reality.

He defines democracy as “an ongoing conversation between diverse information nodes,”

but the openness of the conversation and the independence of its nodes derive from liberalism’s rights of individual privacy and speech. Yet “liberalism” appears nowhere in “Nexus.

Mr. Harari isn’t much concerned with liberty and justice either.

Nexus” is a mirror to the unease of our experts and elites. It divides people into the cognitively unfit and the informationally pure and proposes we divide power over speech accordingly

Call me naive, but Mr. Harari’s technocratic TED-talking is not the way to save democracy. It is the royal road to tyranny.

2. They are interested in history and in geography, but do not accept either as fate. Political choices are decisive

3. Political choices have ultimately to be explained by struggles within elites and between elites and the populations they govern.

They will go on, as the Nobel citation explains, to combine an account of historical opportunities, provided by crises, with a study of elite dynamics and struggles between the population and the ruling elite.

because they operate in the sphere of economics it is often also cast in terms of models that formalize political economy in mathematical terms. To be honest it is not obvious what is gained by those exercises in formalization. But they are de rigeur in the discipline.

Already in 2009 James Robinson was pleading for an empirical approach to industrial policy.

hose institutions are decided by politics. And the most propitious institutions for long-run economic growth driven by innovation, are institutions based on rights and freedom

This is Acemoglu writing in 2012:

Boushey cites Acemoglu’s work from the 2010s where he moved beyond the consensus amongst economists that focused on carbon pricing and carbon taxing to insist on the need to use policy to promote the development of clean energy technology, thus enabling more rapid switching to renewable energy.

The head of President Biden’s CEA, Jared Bernstein, studied music and social work. He has no degree in economics. Some of Kamala Harris’ top economic advisers — from Brian Deese to Mike Pyle to Deanne Millison — are all lawyers. And on issues from free trade to immigration to tax policy to rent and price controls, both the Trump and Harris campaigns are throwing bedrock economic ideas in the trash can and embracing heterodox, populist ideas that might get you laughed at in economics courses.

I discuss the role of industrial policy in development. I make five arguments. First, from a theoretical point of view there are good grounds for believing that industrial policy can play an important role in promoting development

Second, there certainly are examples where industrial policy has played this role

Third, for every such example there are others where industrial policy has been a failure and may even have impeded development.

Fourth, the difference between these second and third cases rests in the politics of policy. Industrial policy has been successful when those with political power who have implemented the policy have either themselves directly wished for industrialization to succeed, or been forced to act in this way by the incentives generated by political institutions

These arguments imply that we need to stop thinking of normative industry policy and instead begin to develop a satisfactory positive approach if we are ever to help poor countries to industrialize.

The general conclusion, however, is extremely familiar. Technology and capital accumulation are key to economic growth. They themselves are shaped by institutions.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that leading economic advisors in the Biden administration see them as kindred spirits. After all, the prevailing tone around the White House in recent years has been described by Allison Schrager at Bloomberg as Yale Law School economics.

The figure for whom this quip was coined was Jake Sullivan, who has had a huge influence in setting the economic agenda of the administration

the point has wider application

Clearly, AJR’s work over the last quarter century fits well with the new tone and self-conception of economics in policy-making in Washington today. Though highly competent in technical terms, they are not debating the finer points of monetary economics or time series econometrics. They are interested in the interface between economics, politics, law and institutions.

they share a worldview. They are skeptical of free trade. They bash big business. They see the decline of manufacturing not as a natural evolution of the economy but as a policy catastrophe that needs fixing. They support industrial policy, or a more muscular role for the government in shaping industry with policies like tariffs and subsidies

The President personally is enamored of the democracy v. autocracy framing. The more technical side of policy-making wagers that Western models of innovation and research will out perform their Chinese counterparts

The rise of the Yale Law School of Economics seems to say more about the political winds of our times and the declining popularity of economists and their ideas than anything. Free-market policies — sometimes called “neoliberalism” — are unpopular on both sides of the political aisle right now.

All this also means, that folks that I once described as gatekeepers - blue-blooded economists like Larry Summers, for instance - have lost influence.

Not that AJR are outsiders. But their arguments are capacious enough to embrace a variety of disciplines, to address big question and yet also avoid being excessively technically prescriptive. Their writing is policy relevant without intruding on the discretion of the actual policymakers.

Though Boushey and Bernstein point to more technical essays, in the current moment, it is actually’s AJR’s macrohistorical narrative that is most in keeping with the mood in Washington.

If there is a red thread running through the Biden administration it is a return to a neoconservative framing of the relationship between the US and China

China owes the growth it has so far achieved to the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. In AJR’s terms these were a move towards a rights-based inclusive order. The slow down in recent year is then attributed to the failure to continue that reform momentum.

The link between the two levels is the presumption that “free societies” produce more first-class patents and top-class STEM researchers. This is precisely what Acemoglu’s “rights revolution” promises.

The historical narrative developed by Acemoglu and Robinson in books like Why Nations Fail, is very much in tune with this kind of thinking. Encompassing inclusive institutions brought about by political revolutions replace extractive elitist institutions and thus set the incentives for investment and private accumulation.

AJR do not simply dismiss the Chinese growth experience. As Acemoglu acknowledges: China has posed a “bit of a challenge” to that argument, as Beijing has been “pouring investment” into the innovative fields of artificial intelligence and electric vehicles.

The CCP in short acts as a non-liberal but inclusive regime. Its anti-corruption drives confirm this ambition and the work necessary to maintain that claim.

AJR are too realistic simply to deny these facts. But their claim is that though such structures can work for a while, in due course, if growth is to continue, there must be a transition.

They think a lot about dividing up the economic pie, Schrager says, and less about growing it

“Our analysis,” says Acemoglu, “is that China is experiencing growth under extractive institutions — under the authoritarian grip of the Communist Party, which has been able to monopolize power and mobilize resources at a scale that has allowed for a burst of economic growth starting from a very low base,” but it’s not sustainable because it doesn’t foster the degree of “creative destruction” that is so vital for innovation and higher incomes.

As Acemoglu remarked: “… my perspective is generally that these authoritarian regimes, for a variety of reasons, are going to have a harder time in achieving long-term, sustainable innovation outcomes,” he said.

“I think the conclusion of their work tells us that institutions are the most critical [to a country’s economic development]. This also has big implications for China’s way forward,” said prominent Chinese economist Xiang Songzuo, who added that the scholars’ conclusions were applicable to the China model. “Only by moving towards further marketising our economy, emphasising on the protection of intellectual property, private companies, fair market competition and upholding the spirit of entrepreneurship, can our economy attain sustainable growth, and our people can have higher incomes.”

tinkering with 77-article proposals from the NDRC does not do justice to the historical vision of Acemoglu and Robinson.

AJR’s agenda was once tightly formulated and specified. In recent years it has become increasingly wide-ranging. Whereas their aim at first was to insist on the exogenous importance of political institutions in economic development, increasingly their thinking has circled around the development of political institutions themselves and the interaction between politics, culture and the economy

As Cam and I discuss on the podcast, some of their arguments about culture are, frankly, hair-raising. With regard to China the issue they take to be at stake is the influence of Confucianism on Chinese institutions and, specifically, the prospects for the “rights revolution” and thus for innovation and long-run growth.

On the whole, their approach is non-dogmatic. Confucianism, they insist, offers many possibilities for the development of political culture and institutions. But for Acemoglu and Robinson what this entails is greater militancy.

While Confucius did say that “commoners do not debate matters of government,” he also emphasized that “a state cannot stand if it has lost the confidence of the people.” Confucian thought recommends respect and obedience to leaders only if they are virtuous. It thus follows that if a leader is not virtuous, he or she can – and perhaps should – be replaced. This perfectly valid interpretation of Confucian values underpins Taiwanese democracy

By contrast, CPC propaganda holds that Confucian values are utterly incompatible with democracy, and that there is no viable alternative to one-party rule. This is patently false. Democracy is as feasible in China as it is in Taiwan. No matter how strident the CPC’s bluster becomes, it will not extinguish people’s desire to participate in politics, complain about injustices, or replace leaders who misb

After reading those words you realize that the kind words from the Council of Economic Advisors undersell the association between the Biden administration’s agenda and AJR view of history. What are at stake here are not only freedom and prosperity, but injustice and ultimately nothing less than human desire

Regime changed advocated in the name of philosophical anthropology. As Cam remarked on the show, it makes one miss Frances Fukuyama and Kojève. Instead, the interpretation of modern history offered to us by this year’s Nobel prize winners in economics is an unreconstructed 21st-century Whiggery, fully in keeping with today’s neoconservative turn in America’s policy. It is Nobel sendoff for the Biden era.

Right until they didn’t. Trump has changed the equation entirely. He’s a big-government, isolationist libertine who — despite nominating half the justices who helped overturn Roe — has made the G.O.P. platform more pro-choice than it’s been in almost 50 years

Don’t think for a moment this is because he won an intelligent ideological argument. When he gained a critical mass of support, millions of Republicans faced a stark choice: ideology or community?

It soon became clear that even some friends viewed the debate less as a disagreement and more as a betrayal. How could you break ranks with us?

I thought ideology defined the community, but the community existed regardless of the ideology, and breaking with the community was the far graver sin.

We don’t know our true values until they’re tested.

the Southern Baptist Convention convened in Salt Lake City and voted to approve a resolution on the importance of moral character in public officials

On June 1, 199

“Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.”

I think the vast majority of Baptists who voted for the resolution believed those words. But I also think their commitment was untested.

something a liberal friend told me when we were reminiscing about the Clinton years before the Trump era. “I’m not proud of some of our defenses of Clinton,” he said, “But I wonder if Republicans would behave any differently if the cost of holding to their values was losing a president.”

C.S. Lewis wrote, “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.” We don’t know if we’re actually honest until we tell the truth when the truth will hurt us.

Evangelicals thought they valued integrity in politicians, and they held to that conviction until the very moment it carried a cost. That is when courage failed.

Hatred is the prime motivating force in our politics.

why the Republican community abandoned its ideology, much less why it abandoned its morality and began to support Trump, I’d say, “It’s negative partisanship.” A central fact of American politics is that partisans on both sides utterly loathe the opposition.

According to a recent study by More in Common, a nonpartisan organization that does research on political and cultural differences, 86 percent of Republicans believe Democrats are brainwashed, 84 percent believe Democrats are hateful and 71 percent believe Democrats are racist

Democrats have an even dimmer view of Republicans — 88 percent believe Republicans are brainwashed, 87 percent believe Republicans are hateful and 89 percent believe Republicans are racist.

if the Republican view of Democrats is that low, then there are no normal Democrats. Instead, they’re a collection of depraved zealots, Marxists who are actively trying to destroy the United States. And desperate times require desperate measures

Finally, trust is tribal

Central to MAGA culture is the idea that its rage and anger against the so-called mainstream media is completely justified by the media’s bias and the media’s mistakes.

I’m curious as to what specifically made them angry. Rarely do I get a precise answer. There is simply a sense that we can’t be trusted, that we’re on the other side.

Long after their dishonesty was exposed, the MAGA faithful continue to believe their reports and share their stories. It turns out that people will in fact trust liars — so long as the liars keep telling them what they want to hear.

aren’t the only lessons I’ve learned these last nine years, but they are among the most universally salient. They reflect not just MAGA tendencies, but human tendencies. Fear and anger can make any person more vulnerable to charlatans. We all need community and are understandably reluctant to alienate those closest to us.

If I could talk to my 2015 self, I’d deliver a simple, dispiriting message: There isn’t a specific tactic or argument that will win back the Republican Party from Donald Trump.You’ve already lost.

Despite his fears of Trump’s fascist tendencies, Hughes found the reality of the Trump administration much less dramatic. “He governed a lot more like a normal Republican,” he said. “In fact, many of his policies would be seen as not right-wing enough.” He’s learned, he told me, to “discount” much of what Trump says: “It’s basically just his businessman instinct. He literally talks about this in The Art of the Deal. You start by saying something crazy, and then you walk your way back to a point of leverage in negotiations.”

Harris, whom he sees as aligned with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, and “deeply destructive to the long-term flourishing of the country.” When it comes to foreign policy, “I haven’t seen even a 10-second clip of her impressing me by analyzing anything going on in the world related to geopolitics, foreign conflicts and so forth,” he told me. “I have basically zero signals of her competency as a manager or executive.”

Foster is most concerned about “the excesses of the culture war” and how, “when they become a part of the bureaucracy, whether it’s on a university campus or within the federal government, [they] can actually become weirdly totalitarian,” he told me. He thinks the left is blind to the fact that it, too, has “a profound capacity for the abuse of power.” He pointed, among other examples, to “gender issues,” the movement to defund the police, and the criminal prosecutions of Trump, which, he said, have “a political taint” to them.

Many of the concerns Hughes and Foster raise are compelling. And yet, to a disconcerting degree, it all seems beside the point—as though we are debating the temperature of the water and the features and specifications of the life rafts as our proverbial ship is sinking.

Both Hughes and Foster were signatories on the Harper’s letter of 2020, a bipartisan statement against creeping illiberalism. (I was one of the writers of the letter.) It has frequently been misrepresented by its critics as an anti-woke document, but it began with an explicit condemnation of Donald Trump, “who represents a real threat to democracy.” As Mark Lilla, one of the letter’s other writers, noted recently in The New York Review of Books, this election is not ultimately about change or policy, or even about blocking Trump; “it is more fundamentally about preserving our liberal democratic political institutions.”

If we cannot manage that, with whatever flawed custodian we have been provided, we may look back on these nuanced policy discussions as an extravagant luxury that we squandered.

he climactic chapter, “Snow,” felt as though it were addressed to me. Hans Castorp, lost in a snowstorm, falls asleep and then awakens from a mesmerizing and monstrous dream with an insight toward which the entire story has led him: “For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts.”

Hans Castorp remains on the mountain for seven years—a mystical number. The Magic Mountain is an odyssey confined to one place, a novel of ideas like no other, and a masterpiece of literary modernism.

Mann analyzes the nature of time philosophically and also conveys the feeling of its passage, slowing down his narrative in some spots to take in “the entire world of ideas”—a day can fill 100 pages—and elsewhere omitting years

As I made my way through the novel by kerosene lamplight, I took Mann’s bildungsroman as a guide to my own education among the farmers, teachers, children, and market women who became my closest companions, hoping to find myself on a journey toward enlightenment as rich and meaningful as its hero’s

Mann has something important to tell us as a civilization. The Mann who began writing the novel was an aristocrat of art, hostile to democracy—a reactionary aesthete. Working on The Magic Mountain was a transformative experience, turning him—as it turned his protagonist—into a humanist

What Hans Castorp arrives at, lost and asleep in the snow, “is the idea of the human being,” Mann later wrote, “the conception of a future humanity that has passed through and survived the profoundest knowledge of disease and death.”

In our age of brutal wars, authoritarian politics, cultures of contempt, and technology that promises to replace us with machines, what is left of the idea of the human being? What can it mean to be a humanist?

For Mann, the Great War was more than a contest among rival European powers or a patriotic cause. It was a struggle between “civilization” and “culture”—between the rational, politicized civilization of the West and Germany’s deeper culture of art, soul, and “genius,” which Mann associated with the irrational in human nature: sex, aggression, mythical belief.

The kaiser’s Germany—strong in arms, rich in music and philosophy, politically authoritarian—embodied Mann’s ideal. The Western powers “want to make us happy,” he wrote in the fall of 1914—that is, to turn Germany into a liberal democracy. Mann was more drawn to death’s mystery and profundity than to reason and progress, which he considered facile values

This sympathy wasn’t simply a fascination with human evil—with a death instinct—but an attraction to a deeper freedom, a more intense form of life than parliaments and pamphleteering offered.

Mann scorned the notion of the writer as political activist. The artist should remain apart from politics and society, he believed, free to represent the deep and contradictory truths of reality rather than using art as a means to advance a particular view

Settembrini, like Heinrich, is a “humanist”—but in Mann’s usage, the term has an ironic sound. As he wrote elsewhere, it implies “a repugnant shallowness and castration of the concept of humanity,” pushed by “the politician, the humanitarian revolutionary and radical literary man, who is a demagogue in the grand style, namely a flatterer of mankind.”

As an artist above politics, Mann didn’t want simply to criticize “civilization’s literary man,” but to show him as “equally right and wrong.” He intended to create an intellectual opponent to Settembrini in a conservative Protestant character named Pastor Bunge—but the war intruded.

He published his wartime writings in the genre-defying Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man in October 1918, one month before the armistice. Katia Mann later wrote, “In the course of writing the book, Thomas Mann gradually freed himself from the ideas which had held sway over him … He wrote Reflections in all sincerity and, in doing so, ended by getting over what he had advocated in the book.”

The war that had just ended enlarged the novel’s theme into “a worldwide festival of death”; the devastation, he would go on to write in the book’s last pages, was “the thunderbolt that bursts open the magic mountain and rudely sets its entranced sleeper outside the gates,” soon to become a German soldier. It also confronted Mann himself with a new world to which he had to respond.

Some German conservatives, in their hatred of the Weimar Republic and the Treaty of Versailles, embraced right-wing mass politics. Mann, nearing 50, vacillated, hoping to salvage the old conservatism from the new extremism. In early 1922, he and Heinrich reconciled, and, as Mann later wrote, he began “to accept the European-democratic religion of humanity within my moral horizon, which so far had been bounded solely by late German romanticism, by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wagner.”

in a review of a German translation of Walt Whitman’s selected poetry and prose, he associated the American poet’s mystical notion of democracy with “the same thing that we in our old-fashioned way call ‘humanity’ … I am convinced there is no more urgent task for Germany today than to fill out this word, which has been debased into a hollow shell.”

when ultranationalists in Berlin murdered his friend Walther Rathenau, the Weimar Republic’s Jewish foreign minister. Shocked into taking a political stand, Mann turned a birthday speech in honor of the Nobel Prize–winning author Gerhart Hauptmann into a stirring call for democracy. To the amazement of his audience and the German press, Mann ended with the cry “Long live the republic!”

Abandoning Pastor Bunge as outmoded, he created a new counterpart to Settembrini who casts a sinister shadow over the second half of the novel: an ugly, charismatic, and (of course) tubercular Jesuit of Jewish origin named Leo Naphta. The intellectual combat between him and Settembrini—which ends physically, in a duel—provides some of the most dazzling passages in The Magic Mountain.

Naphta is neither conservative nor liberal. Against capitalist modernity, whose godless greed and moral vacuity he hates with a sulfurous rage, Naphta offers a synthesis of medieval Catholicism and the new ideology of communism. Both place “anonymous and communal” authority over the individual, and both are intent on saving humanity from Settembrini’s soft, rational humanism.

Naphta argues that love of freedom and pleasure is weaker than the desire to obey. “The mystery and precept of our age is not liberation and development of the ego,” he says. “What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.” Mann understood the appeal of totalitarianism early on.

It’s Naphta, a truly demonic figure—not Settembrini, the voice of reason—who precipitates the end of the hero’s romance with death. His jarring arrival allows Hans Castorp to loosen himself from its grip and begin a journey toward—what? Not toward Settembrini’s international republic of letters, and not back toward his simple bourgeois life down in the flatlands

Hans Castorp puts on a new pair of skis and sets out for a few hours of exercise that lead him into the fateful blizzard and “a very enchanting, very dreadful dream.”

In it, he encounters a landscape of human beings in all their kindness and beauty, and all their hideous evil. “I know everything about humankind,” he thinks, still dreaming, and he resolves to reject both Settembrini and Naphta—or rather, to reject the stark choice between life and death, illness and health, recognizing that “man is the master of contradictions, they occur through him, and so he is more noble than they.”

e’s become one of death’s intimates, and his initiation into its mysteries has immeasurably deepened his understanding of life—but he won’t let death rule his thoughts. He won’t let reason either, which seems weak and paltry before the power of destruction. “Love stands opposed to death,” he dreams; “it alone, and not reason, is stronger than death.”

We succumb to the impulse to escape our humanness. That urge, ubiquitous today, thrives in the utopian schemes of technologists who want to upload our minds into computers; in the pessimism of radical environmentalists who want us to disappear from the Earth in order to save it; in the longing of apocalyptic believers for godly retribution and cleansing; in the daily sense of inadequacy, of shame and sin, that makes us disappear into our devices.

the vision of “love” that Hans Castorp embraces just before waking up is “brotherly love”—the bond that unites all human beings.

he emerged as the preeminent German spokesman against Hitler who, in lectures across the United States in 1938, warned Americans of the rising threat to democracy, which for him was inseparable from humanism: “We must define democracy as that form of government and of society which is inspired above every other with the feeling and consciousness of the dignity of man.”

Mann urged his audiences to resist the temptation to deride humanity. “Despite so much ridiculous depravity, we cannot forget the great and the honorable in man,” he said, “which manifest themselves as art and science, as passion for truth, creation of beauty, and the idea of justice.”

Could anyone utter these lofty words today without courting a chorus of snickers, a social-media immolation? We live in an age of human self-contempt. We’re hardly surprised when our leaders debase themselves with vile behavior and lies, when combatants desecrate the bodies of their enemies, when free people humiliate themselves under the spell of a megalomaniacal fraud

In driving our democracy into hatred, chaos, and violence we, too, grant death dominion over our thoughts.

Mann now recognized political freedom as necessary to ensure the freedom of art, and he became a sworn enemy of the Nazis.

The need for political reconstruction, in this country and around the world, is as obvious as it was in Thomas Mann’s time.

Mann also knew that, to withstand our attraction to death, a decent society has to be built on a foundation deeper than politics: the belief that, somewhere between matter and divinity, we human beings, made of water, protein, and love, share a common destiny.

It’s just that the American people voted against.

America chose this, and there’s nothing ambiguous about it

it was his strongest showing in three elections (five if you count the 2018 and 2022 midterms). The tallying isn’t over, but Trump is on track to sweep all seven swing states, and possibly win the popular vote for the first time.

This time it’s after a coup attempt, criminal prosecutions, prominent officials from his first administration warning he’s a fascist, and a presidential campaign that lived down to that label.

In 2016, Trump’s narrow Electoral College victory coupled with a popular vote loss meant just about anything could’ve made the difference, but this time it was outside that margin

Post-election analysis will comb through the Harris campaign for mistakes, pundits and activists will claim that precisely following their personal advice would’ve transformed the race, but I still think it was well executed, and I’m skeptical anyone could’ve done better.

while some will claim that their favorite alternative would have beat Trump, no one can possibly know, and Trump’s margin of victory appears insurmountable.

It’s fantasy to think a different Democrat could have won millions more votes by running hard against Biden. The vast majority who want that vote Republican

As for any Biden administration policies that created a drag on Harris’s campaign, they’d drag on another nominee’s too. Trump had a strong showing in a variety of regions and demographics,

Biden’s Gaza war policies were expected to weaken Harris politically in Michigan among its relatively high population of Muslim and Arab Americans. But while we’ll need to see final totals and more detailed analysis, it looks like Trump’s gains in Michigan were similar to those in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Whatever number of votes Harris lost due to U.S. support for Israel — or any specific issue, for that matter — it was decently smaller than Trump’s across-the-board gains. Even if Harris or another candidate could have expressed opposition to Biden’s policies in a way that won over more votes than it lost, there’s no way it would’ve been enough.

To the extent racism and sexism helped Trump against Harris, it likely would’ve helped him against any Democratic nominee. The Democrats are the party of objecting to racism and sexism.

Countries that slide into populist authoritarianism typically see it happen amidst big dislocations like a depression with mass unemployment and the legacy of losing a major war, but not this time

The U.S. economy is doing well, outperforming every other developed country. The average price of gas is back near $3.00 per gallon, over $0.30 lower than a year ago. Crime is down. For the first time since 2001, American troops aren’t fighting in a “forever war.” The Biden-Harris administration got big bills through Congress, many of them bipartisan, directing hundreds of billions of dollars around the country, with an emphasis on “left behind” areas. That would buoy any Democrat, but apparently not enough.

Harris did all the stuff people say Democratic campaigns should do

She offered appealing progressive policies, such as expanding Medicare to cover home care of elderly relatives. With abortion rights, she had a popular position on a highly salient issue, and hit it hard, but not so much that it took away from talking about the economy. Besides policies, she did the abstract “something to vote for, not just against” thing with her pitch to turn the page on the divisive period America entered into with Trump’s 2016 campaign.  

It’s a stretch to say this was a policy election at all. Trump’s policy platform was mass deportation, tariffs, and putting himself above the law. Otherwise, he just said he’d make everything better and didn’t explain how, or proposed things that nearly all policy experts said would make things worse. It didn’t matter

Donald Trump 2024 was the worst candidate in modern American history. I’m talking basic things like sounding incoherent and unhinged, demeaning the United States and various groups of Americans, being a convicted felon, having blatant financial corruption, and facing numerous accusations of sexual assault.

I’m skeptical of the theory that Trump voters simply didn’t know a lot of this, and wouldn’t vote for him if they did. He’s done so many awful things, as have the people around him

Millions voted for it anyway. Some revel in the awfulness, some don’t care for it but obviously don’t mind it that much, some deny it to rationalize their partisanship. But they saw it. 

I think this will go very bad, and the near future will likely be darker than anything most living Americans have ever experienced.

I hope I’m wrong, more than I’ve ever hoped to be wrong in my life. I really don’t think I am.

Pro-democracy voices did what we could with the tools we had.

We weren’t just talking to ourselves, but we never had a large enough audience, with enough people we were able to convince. There just aren’t enough Americans who are interested, or care.

I do not regret believing in the America of “a shining city on a hill” and “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice” when it still had a chance, even though it turned out to not exist in 2024, and maybe never did.

This election result isn’t because we were unclear, complacent, or excessively cautious.

There was the illusion that a secure Jewish community would remain so.

In 2013 the A.D.L. recorded just 751 antisemitic incidents in the United States. In 2023 the organization counted 8,873 incidents, an increase of over 1,000 percent.

Backward in literary circles, where being identified as a Zionist — even if it’s of the most progressive kind or has little to do with an author’s work — can lead to ostracism and cancellation.

Unless this changes, the American Jewish community is on its way to living how the European Jewish community has for decades: apprehensive, suspected and under ever increasing layers of private and state protection.

There was the illusion that, having achieved a sense of belonging in America, we would keep it.

Today there’s a palpable sense of things going backward. Backward in the Ivy League, where Jewish enrollment has plummeted and Jewish students feel unwelcome and at times threatened.

That included over 1,000 bomb threats to Jewish institutions, thousands of acts of vandalism and harassment, the desecration of graves and more than 160 physical assaults

There was the illusion that antisemitism was a fever-swamp prejudice, to which virtually all educated people were immune.

For those versed in statistics, or Jewish history, this going backward has a term: regression toward the mean

Backward in social justice organizations, many of no apparent relevance to the Middle East, that nonetheless feel called to demand the end of the Jewish state.

People attracted to grand theories of everything, as intellectuals often are, tend to gravitate toward singular causes, sweeping solutions, unsuspected “facts” and decisive explanations.

A century ago, the grand theories were about the evils of capitalism or the hierarchies of race — and Jews wound up on the wrong end of both theories. Today, the grand theory concerns so-called settler colonialism.

Zionism, which since the days of the Maccabees has been the most enduring anticolonial struggle in history, is now the epitome of what college activists seem to think is colonialism, the only solution to which is its eradication

When people argue that education is the answer to bigotry, they often forget that bigotry is a moral failing, not an intellectual one — and few people are more dangerous than educated bigots.

Finally, there was the illusion that America was different, that it couldn’t happen here, that our neighbors and colleagues would never abandon us, that, as a people and a government, America would do right by the Jewish people at home and abroad.

That’s one illusion I still hold dear. My mother came to the United States after World War II as a stateless, penniless refugee; she, and therefore I, owe this country everything. I desperately want to believe that what’s happened since last year on college campuses won’t go far beyond the quads; that Joe Biden won’t be the last Democratic president to also be a sincere Zionist; that the Republican Party will snap out of the populism and nativism into which Trump has sunk it, which invariably produces antisemitism; that Black America won’t turn sharply against the Jews; that America’s exhaustion with being the world’s de facto policeman won’t lead it to forsake small countries faced with aggressive totalitarian neighbors; that Greene and Rashida Tlaib will never hold leadership positions in their parties; that young Americans drawn to anti-Israel politics will rethink their radicalism as they grow older; that envy won’t replace admiration as the way average Americans view personal and communal success; that an America that exists somewhere between Morningside Heights in Manhattan and Berkeley, Calif., still hasn’t lost its moral decency and common sense.

I want to believe all this. I’m just finding it harder than ever to do so.

There is a moving passage in “Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood” in which the German historian Joachim Fest recalled that his Catholic father, Johannes, had a personal fondness for their Jewish friends, along with his analysis of where German Jews had gone wrong politically: “They had, in tolerant Prussia, lost their instinct for danger, which had preserved them through the ages.”

There are larger strategic and perhaps moral ones. Namely: Are we going to be proud Jews or (mostly) indifferent ones? And if proud, what does that entail?

To have been born a Jew is the single most fortunate thing that ever happened to me. It is a priceless moral, spiritual, intellectual and emotional inheritance from my ancestors, some of whom were slaughtered for it. It’s a precious bequest to my children, who will find different ways to make it their own. It is therefore worth the time it takes to explore and worth the cost — including, tragically, the cost in bigotry and violence — it so often extracts.

To be a Jew obliges us to many things, particularly our duty to be our brother’s, and sister’s, keeper. That means never to forsake one another, much less to join in the vilification of our own people. It means to participate in the long struggle for our survival not only against enemies who mean us harm but also against those who excuse those enemies or those whose moral apathy speeds their way.

The MAGA/Republican coalition is clearly a viable competitor. Indeed, the coalition just won the White House — and the Senate. The coalition has proved its ability to retain strong support with the working-class, rural, non-college-educated base, still attract most of the rest of the older Republican electorate, and has demonstrated the capacity to grow into new areas such as Latino and Black men.

Early predictions of inevitable demographic shifts toward the Democrats missed how identity is complex, and how it can change. In our era of intense polarization, coalitions don’t have to be overwhelming. They just need to be big enough to push a party over in the swing states.

The first time a person is elected, for example, Reagan in 1980, we vote based on promise, aspiration and potential. The re-election campaign, which this is more comparable to, for Trump, is about legitimation. Voters know what they are getting and say that is who they want in office.

Trump, Zelizer pointed out, “has been extraordinarily transparent about his hostility toward core democratic principles — the peaceful transition of power, confidence in the election system, limitations on presidential power and more.”

“When you win an election this broadly,” Francis Fukuyama, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, argued in an email, “you’re entitled to move ahead with your agenda. The only limitations will be capacity (hard to deport 11 million people) and the courts which haven’t been completely made subservient.”

How big a role did gender play in Harris’s defeat?“Many men and non-college-educated women,” Cain argued, “still equate women with weakness and blustery masculinity with strength.”

conservative power is consolidated in a way that makes the Biden administration look like the fluke, the last gasp of a dying order.

The MAGA coalition, in contrast,doesn’t feel like the last stand of a dying electorate at all since Trump actually has managed to diversify the Republican electorate in a broad way. And doesn’t seem like the tyranny of a minority, because — though tyranny it may turn into — it would be the tyranny of the majority, since it looks like he’s clearly on track to win the popular vote.

The primary threat Trump poses, Fukuyama argued,is to the rule of law. He’s been very clear in the last few months and weeks that he’s really out for revenge. He wants to take revenge on all the people that he believes have been prosecuting him and or persecuting him. And I think that this is where Schedule F (Trump’s proposal to politicize the top ranks of the civil service) really matters. I think he’s going to put people in key positions in the Justice Department that will enable them to open up investigations.

Fukuyama expects Viktor Orban of Hungary to provide Trump a governing model with “this kind of steady, slow erosion of one check and balance against executive power after another.”

Donald Trump’s theory of the case was broadly correct. He and his campaign managers believed that it was possible to build on Republicans’ growing strength among white working-class voters to create a multiethnic working-class coalition. He was right: He made strides among Latinos and African Americans, especially men. He increased his share of the Black male vote from 12 percent to 20 percent and carried Hispanic men by nine points, 54 percent to 45 percent.

The Trump campaign, Galston went on to say,decided that Harris’s stance on transgender issues was the Willie Horton of 2024 and invested heavily in negative advertising that dominated the airwaves. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this campaign helped weaken Harris’s effort to portray herself as a common-sense center-left candidate rather than an emissary from San Francisco.

Once in power with a supine Republican-controlled Congress and judiciary, Trump will govern despotically as a populist based on his uninformed and increasingly delusional understanding of the nation and its challenges, wreaking havoc on the American political economy and the global political order.

The scale of Trump’s electoral success and the red shift in Congress makes it clear that Americans have rejected the policies and priorities of the Democratic Party. Many voters cast their ballots based on their perceptions of the economy. Although Harris attempted to highlight improvements in macroeconomic indicators, voters struggling with rising costs for essentials like milk, bread, and gas felt little connection between their financial troubles and abstract measures like G.D.P. growth.

According to Westwood, “What seems to unify the majority of voters is dissatisfaction with the vision of America articulated by Harris and the Democratic Party.”

The election outcome suggests that voters did not place much weight on the fear that Trump would undermine a “vision of America,” despite his history of doing just that.

The election results are in line with work suggesting that people care more about policy outcomes than democracy. Research shows that when people are asked whether they want a candidate that supports their preferred policy but subverts democracy versus a candidate that doesn’t support their preferred policy but is more democratic, they tend to choose the former. Policy trumps democracy.

Young men of lesser education are hit twice, both in marriage and in labor markets. It is not surprising that they are most likely to voice their grievances in expressions of political dissatisfaction with the status quo. Add onto this that almost without exception around the Western Hemisphere women now constitute the majority of college students and graduates and the full picture of change comes into view.

While most of the experts I contacted view the 2024 election as a major, and perhaps realigning, development in American politics, some were more cautious in their views.

my reading of 2024 is that this was a pedestrian “time for a change” election.

Polling, she added,had long shown that voters were very sour on the direction of the country, the high cost of living after the Covid shocks, and the scale of undocumented immigration. Polls were clear that Trump was more trusted on all those issues. Trump’s behavior on Jan. 6, 2021, probably was troubling to at least some of those who voted for him, as was his divisive rhetoric. But in a two-party system, voters’ choices were severely limited. They could either support Kamala Harris, the sitting vice president of an administration they blamed for the state of the country, or former President Trump, the only alternative on offer.

much of that expansion can be understood as swing voters moving against an unpopular administration. Harris underperformed Biden with almost all demographic groups. I wouldn’t see the voters who joined the Trump column this year as permanent parts of the Trump coalition. We need to see this expanded coalition hold together for additional cycles before we can draw firm conclusions about change in the G.O.P. generally.

Americans, in poll after poll, told us how this result should be interpreted — as a reaction to inflation and personal economic unease among many voters. Experts may understand that inflation was an inevitable outcome of successful efforts to save the economy during a global pandemic, that it is now largely under control in the United States, and that we fared better than most peer nations. But, average Americans have been feeling it in their pocketbooks for the last few years. It is incredibly difficult for the incumbent party to win when voters feel their spending power has decreased.

Donald Trump’s recasting of the Republican Party achieved a decisive victory over the combined forces of moderate center-left and radical left-libertarian political currents uneasily cohabiting under the umbrella of the Democratic Party. Historians may place the 2024 election, or the 2016-24 sequence, in significance for the United States on a par with the elections of 1860, 1876, 1896 and 1932.

The New Deal party system that was in full force until 1964 has been fully replaced by a new alignment. 2024 ratifies a lasting realignment in the American party system.

Driving the transformation of politics here and abroad, in Kitschelt’s view, are “changing ‘labor markets’ and changing ‘marriage/family markets.’”

These changes, according to Kitschelt,have produced new “winners” and “losers.” Changing labor markets have eroded the earnings potential of less educated people, and particularly those in occupations that were in demand in manufacturing. Changing marriage markets have reduced the bargaining power of men to dominate gender relations and the choice of offspring.

The problem now facing Democrats, Lelkes noted, is that they “will have to grapple with the fact that they are seen as the cultural elite and this is off-putting to a majority of the country, who do not see their values represented by highly educated city dwellers.”

The moderate and progressive left in the United States thought it could count on disadvantaged minorities as fixed components of a left-wing “rainbow coalition.” But it now turns out in the United States — and elsewhere — that these ethnic groups are internally divided by the same kinds of knowledge-society-induced divisions based on education, occupation and gender that run through the ethnic majority population

And right-wing populist authoritarians are increasingly skilled to sense these divisions and make their appeals resonate among the aggrieved elements of these minorities, especially younger people without college education, particularly young men.

The rise of Trumpism in the United States — and right-wing populist authoritarianism around the world — throws down the gauntlet to the remaining liberal and progressive forces to come up with new ideas for institutional innovation and policy reform that include those who have hitherto been losers of multiple decades of social change. The 2024 U.S. election is a signal that the political projects of the existing left have failed.

The pool of new “losers” is not represented by the Democratic Party and was not by the old Republican Party. A political entrepreneur — Donald Trump — has managed to activate them to drive his ascent. Aggrieved people look for an outlet and recently found one in Donald Trump, many of them never previously Republicans, but now Trumpists.

Kitschelt’s conclusion is both dark and bleak, suggesting that if Trump’s policies fail to produce a boom economy, his inclination toward authoritarianism will intensify as he tries to hold power in the face of growing public opposition:

When backed into a corner by policy failure, the greatest danger, then, becomes Donald Trump’s and his strategists’ inclination to suffocate opposition.

It is at this moment of policy failure, Kitschelt wrote, thatThe hour of political authoritarianism arrives, when the new wagers to create economic affluence among the less well-off and to resurrect the old kinship relations of industrial society turn sour and generate disenchantment among Trump’s own following.

Trump then may well want to make sure that his disenchanted supporters — as well as those who always opposed Trumpism — will not get another chance to express their opinions.

If the scenario Kitschelt depicts comes to pass, American voters will finally get to see the real Donald Trump — when it may be too late to do anything about it.

After the Civil War, a series of amnesties were passed, eventually encompassing almost all Confederate soldiers.

The complicit were so great in number that identifying and trying every one of them would come at significant cost, but more important, no law could sufficiently condemn what they had done, and no criminal procedure could adequately consecrate the memory of their wrongs.

the “act of oblivion,” an ancient, imperfect legal and moral mechanism for bringing an end to episodes of political violence. These acts were invoked when forgiveness was impossible, yet when pragmatism demanded a certain strain of forgetting — a forgetting that instead of erasing unforgivable transgressions, paradoxically memorialized them in the minds of all who had survived their assault

Rather than relying upon the courts to deliver impossible and unattainable forms of reckoning, oblivion provided opportunities for the extralegal recognition of political and moral wrongs, and reminded its subjects of the desire for, and necessity of, coexistence.

For centuries, legislative “acts of oblivion” were declared in times when betrayal, war and tyranny had usurped and undermined the very foundations of law; when a household or nation had been torn apart, its citizens pitted against one another; when identifying, investigating, trying and sentencing every single guilty party threatened to redouble the harm

Under the oblivions of old, the ringleaders of riots, insurrections and tyrannical reigns were prosecuted for their crimes and in many cases were forced out of the cities and states they had once claimed to rule. Treasonous leaders were prohibited from holding public office

I wondered what it would mean to revive the old idea of oblivion in our age of seemingly unending memory.

Oblivion demanded accountability for those who bore primary responsibility for political rupture and often required material compensation and restitution for the harms don

consecrating the facts of what had occurred while refusing to allow the misfortunes of the past to dictate the future.

over the course of the 20th century, as the cultural tide gradually turned toward an embrace of remembrance and recrimination, oblivion fell out of favor, and out of collective memory.

The oldest act of oblivion is usually dated to 403 B.C., when the Athenians, having survived the bloody reign of the Thirty Tyrants, swore to never remember the wrongs of a war within the family, a civil war that had divided Athens.

The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, the supposed origin point of our world of sovereign states, promised that all the violence, hostility, damage and expenses that had been incurred “on the one side, and the other … shall be bury’d in eternal Oblivion.”

In 1660, the Indemnity and Oblivion Act restored the British monarchy after the English Civil War

To remember the power of oblivion is not to naïvely wish away the wrongs of the recent past, but rather quite the opposite: By marking certain transgressions as unforgivable and unforgettable, it recognizes the depth of the loss while also opening a path toward political pragmatism

the Continental Congress passed a resolution recommending that states treat loyalists with leniency, “to receive such returning penitents with compassion and mercy, and to forgive and bury in oblivion their past failings and transgressions.” Punishments for loyalists were, according to the scholar Mugambi Jouet, “particularly mild” for the era.

Over the past several decades, our society has become oversaturated with memory. In our legal system, a single, low-level crime can ruin an individual’s life forever, people are forced to serve sentences for acts that are no longer illegal, and even a sealed conviction or an arrest with no charge can jeopardize job, housing and volunteer opportunities.

This virtual culture of incessant, uncompromising remembrance and recrimination has seeped from our screens, affecting the kinds of conversations we are willing to have in public, and with whom.

Every day, we depend on our devices to store every photograph, every video, every file. We store all these things because we have learned a bit too well that it is important to remember, to archive, to keep receipts and screenshots. To create a faithful, digitized log not only of our own lives but also of those around us

we have been very good students of memory. So good that we have, I think, forgotten what all our memory is for — that it can guide us to choose justice over vengeance

Revisiting the forgotten idea of oblivion would give us permission to reconsider our unthinking overdependence on memory and perhaps to begin to let go of all the data, digital and otherwise, that we do not need

our personal and political memories, which, left to fester for too long, can corrode and transform, causing us to lose sight of their original force and feeling.

Gripped too tightly, memory can become a vengeful and violent force.

The unique power of oblivion is that it does not forgive the crimes committed on one side or the other, but rather consecrates and memorializes the profound gravity of the wrongs. It demands accountability and refuses absolution, yet it rejects the project of perpetual punishment.

Historically, appeals to oblivion offered political communities the prospect of rethinking the present, presenting a rare opportunity to re-evaluate and confront societal divisions.

Arguing that “culture war is class warfare,” Mr. Vance has repeatedly encouraged Republicans to use the machinery of government to reclaim institutions that he sees as wholly captured by the left.

In Mr. Vance’s telling, his perspective has been shaped most by his own biography: as a son of Middletown, Ohio; a veteran of a war defined by Washington’s mistakes; an author who was feted by coastal elites whom he came to despise

“You hear European elites and American elites talking in frightened tones about threats to democracy,” he told an interviewer this year. “Isn’t it a greater threat to democracy if people keep voting for less migration but don’t get it?”

He has said that Alex Jones, the Infowars conspiracy theorist, is a more reputable source of information than Rachel Maddow

Mr. Vance recently contributed an admiring blurb for a book co-written by the far-right activist Jack Posobiec, who promoted the “Pizzagate” hoax. He is also listed as the author of a foreword for an upcoming book by Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation and a leader of the Project 2025 initiative

People whom Mr. Vance has cited to explain his worldview or detail who helped shape his thinking include Patrick Deneen, a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame who has suggested that conservatives must harness the power of the state to counter “liberal totalitarianism”; Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist for whom Mr. Vance worked; and Curtis Yarvin, a prominent voice on the New Right who has argued that American democracy has devolved to the point that the country needs a monarchical leader.

Mr. Vance would not necessarily disagree, those who know him said. He has spent his recent years at the four-way intersection of intellectual debates, campaign rhetoric, outright trolling and actual policy —

Mr. Rufo described Mr. Vance’s intellectual evolution, “somewhat tongue-in-cheek,” as a journey “from the pages of National Review to the fever swamp of right-wing Twitter.”

“In the past, the political right operated under the illusion that institutions could be neutral,” Mr. Rufo said in an interview, “that any use of state power was illegitimate and that the only rightful policy would be to try to roll back or reduce the size of government.”

said the move from a traditionalist like Mr. Pence to Mr. Vance exemplified “how the Republican Party is going to think about power moving forward

Christopher Rufo

He speaks bluntly about what he sees as the limits of America’s reach and resources abroad — “Those days are over,” he has said of the 20th-century “glory years” of American hegemony — and even more forcefully about the prospect of right-wing victories at home if conservatives could only summon the requisite gumption.

In their place, Trump’s stump speech has become dominated by grievances about the wrongs he believes have been done to him and his promises to get even for them. It doesn’t quite create the festive atmosphere of eight years ago, when many attendees were clearly having a great time. Where the new, more prosaic feeling lacks the uplift of the past, though, it has still managed to generate enough enthusiasm

The lack of catchy slogans might not matter if they were just slogans. But in 2016, they were a symbol of Trump’s willingness to talk about things that other candidates, including other Republicans, shied away from.

Regarding the war in Gaza, he has criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and called for the conflict to end quickly—but on Israel’s terms.

He had several such policy positions, including breaking with the bipartisan consensus on free trade, pledging to protect Social Security and Medicare, and claiming to have opposed the Iraq War from the start.

The focus on the wall also showed that he was willing to deploy (putatively) “commonsense” ideas that other politicians weren’t. This helped Trump to appeal not just to Republicans but to disaffected voters of all stripes

Where Trump once trumpeted his appointment of justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, he is now fumblingly trying to formulate a position on abortion that doesn’t alienate either his base or swing voters, mostly relying on ambiguity

Trump is emphasizing fewer big transformational ideas compared with 2016. His promises are a scattershot collection of ideas targeted at particular segments of the electorate: ending taxes on salary earned from tips, defending TikTok (a platform he once tried to ban), declassifying files on John F. Kennedy’s assassination, rolling back fossil-fuel regulations. Although he promises to clamp down on the border and deport undocumented immigrants, you won’t catch a “Round ’em up” chant at his rallies. And Project 2025, his allies’ proposal to overhaul the federal government by massively expanding political patronage, doesn’t lend itself to a bumper sticker.

Trump allots a great deal of his stump speech to mocking Biden as incoherent and senile (sometimes awkwardly) while also warning that Biden’s administration has made the United States a failed nation, and that his reelection could be fatal to the country. The disconnect between the images of Biden as doddering fool and as evil schemer is one that Republicans have struggled to reconcile but that Trump has concluded doesn’t need resolving.

Grievance is not a new note at Trump rallies, but four and eight years ago, he used to talk about other people’s grievances and promise to redress them. Now the grievances are largely his own

One big problem for Clinton was the criticism that she had no compelling goal for her candidacy other than that she wanted to be president. Trump’s campaign now is about nothing so much as his desire to be president.

Even Project 2025 is about the accumulation of executive power itself, rather than any particular policy goal

Those are revolutionary aspirations in that they reject not a policy consensus, but social and governing compacts that date to the Founding. (Or at least the end of the Civil War.)

Most revolutions are borne of dissatisfaction.

The Trumpian revolution, on the other hand, seems to be the product of decadent boredom commingled with casual nihilism.

Circumstances for our revolutionaries have never been better. They are so flush that they parade on their boats. And fly upside-down flags outside of their million-dollar suburban homes. And put stickers depicting a hogtied president on their $75,000 pickup trucks. All while posting angry memes to Facebook on their $1,000 iPhones.

Unlike normal revolutionaries, the Trumpist revolutionaries risk nothing. If their gambit succeeds, then they overturn the Constitutional order. And if it fails? They go back to their boats, and trucks, and good-paying jobs, and iPhones.

What’s more, this revolution has discovered that it gets as many bites at the apple as it likes. All defeats and setback are temporary. The movement lives to fight again. They can lose a dozen times—they only have to win once more.

Trumpist revolutionaries get to tell themselves that they are part of a historic, final battle—but also that if they lose, they get to keep their normal, pampered lives. And four years from now they can try again.

In sum: While the revolutionaries get to have their glamorous Götterdämmerung, over and over, the forces of the status quo have to defend against wave after wave of challenges. And it doesn’t matter how many authoritarian attempts are beaten back. There’s always another one looming.That is why you’re exhausted.

let’s be honest about human nature: Breaking things is fun. Especially when you don’t experience any consequences. But running around putting out fires, and cleaning up broken glass, and asking people to stop breaking things? That is not fun. It is enervating.

So while the revolutionary feels like a hero, you feel like a scold.

To paraphrase Mr. Cobb, once an idea has taken hold in society, it’s almost impossible to eradicate.

the Trumpist revolution’s weakness is that it has no ideas. It has goals, but these are motivated by nothing more than will-to-power. There is no logic—not even a faulty logic—behind them.7

How do we fight the exhaustion?First, we try to have some fun while we are scolding the twits and defending the imperfect status quo.Second, we remain fearless about the fight and clear eyed about reality.

Third, we organize and build communities to rally normal people to the cause of democracy.