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David Kaiser, a professor of military history at the Naval War College, charged “A People’s History” — which has sold more than two million copies since its initial publication in 1980 — with damaging the country, “By convincing several generations of Americans that leadership does not matter and that all beneficial change comes from the bottom,” he wrote, “it has played a significant role in the destruction of American liberalism.”

Others, however, said Mr. Zinn’s faults were dwarfed by those of the other finalists.“I don’t really enjoy defending Zinn, but the other four are clearly on another level of awful,” wrote another commenter. “Zinn is tendentious and strident and polemical and oversimplifies everything, the others are obviously all worse.”

many of the new salaried arrangements have evolved from hospitals looking for new revenues, and could have the opposite effect. For example, when doctors’ practices are bought by a hospital, a colonoscopy or stress test performed in the office can suddenly cost far more because a hospital “facility fee” is tacked on. Likewise, Mr. Smith said, many doctors on salary are offered bonuses tied to how much billing they generate, which could encourage physicians to order more X-rays and tests.

“From the hospital end there’s a big feeding frenzy, a lot of bidding going on to bring in doctors,” Mr. Mechanic said. “And physicians are going in so they don’t have to worry

The base salaries of physicians who become employees are still related to the income they can generate, ranging from under $200,000 for primary care doctors to $575,000 in cardiology to $663,000 in neurosurgery,

Dr. Jacowitz said that the economics drove the choice and that the only other option would have been to bring in more revenue by practicing bad medicine — ordering more heart tests on patients who did not need them

“The question now is how to shift the compensation from a focus on volume to a focus on quality,” said Mr. Smith of Merritt Hawkins. He said that 35 percent of the jobs he recruits for currently have such incentives, “but it’s pennies, not enough to really influence behavior.”

There were many reasons Franz Ferdinand was the perfect target for the Serbian-sponsored terrorists of 1914. They knew that his plans for reform within the empire were a profound threat to them.

The fates of the countries of the former empire, as they fell into the hands first of Hitler and then of Stalin, represented nightmarish “solutions” to the challenge of multinational rule, solutions based on genocide, class war and mass expulsions of kinds unimaginable in 1914.

Franz Ferdinand was probably the most senior antiwar figure in Central Europe, a man acutely aware of Hapsburg weakness, scathing about the delusions of his generals and a close friend of the German monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm. The recklessness and stupidity of the Hapsburg response to the assassination — the ultimatum of humiliating demands served on Serbia, a response so crucial to the outbreak of the World War I — would not have occurred in the face of some other provocative outrage that had left Franz Ferdinand alive.

Instead, Britain instituted a remote blockade, declaring most of the North Sea a war zone and enforcing the blockade from a distance. Much of the war was passed in attempts by each side to lure the other into a naval ambush.

The climax of World War I at sea was the Battle of Jutland on May 31, 1916. There, in the North Sea off Denmark, a sortie by German battle cruisers led to the greatest naval battle of the last century, involving at one time or another more than 200 vessels, including 44 battleships.

The British lost more ships and men than their enemies in the resulting melee, in part because of the rugged construction of the German ships.

If those effects were repeated in Medicaid, it could prove disastrous for the health of the program’s beneficiaries. Especially in states that expanded Medicaid under Obamacare, work requirements could create a new underclass of people ineligible for any health insurance. That includes a large contingent of people with disabilities who don’t qualify for Supplemental Security Income and vulnerable populations like young men with felonies. Caught in a vicious cycle, those people would then be less healthy and less financially secure, and thus less likely to be able to work and make it out of poverty

Such a program would have its most drastic effects on wages, productivity, and reducing racial and class-based wealth inequality if it were implemented as a universal program. But it could probably achieve CMS’s goals of long-term health benefits and poverty reduction if it were instituted solely for current Medicaid beneficiaries. If the 4.4 million non-elderly adults who aren’t working; aren’t caregivers, retired, or students; and don’t qualify for disability insurance are used as a floor, providing jobs for them would cost a little more than Lowrey’s total of $158 billion, around 30 percent of Medicaid’s annual budget of over $550 billion. If people who self-report as ill or disabled are excluded from that number, Medicaid would need to pay for a maximum of 880,000 jobs, or $35 billion a year, 6 percent of the annual Medicaid budget.

A Medicaid jobs guarantee could serve to amplify both of those roles. It could essentially set a wage floor for Medicaid enrollees, who often work near the bottom of the wage scale and often barely crack the poverty line even while working full-time hours (or more). Integrating Medicaid into bespoke job structures for people with disabilities could provide transportation and rehabilitation, and further increase the accessibility of those positions, thus creating more synergy between health and employment.

Similar to how employer-sponsored insurance has become a backbone to the economic growth of the middle class, a jobs guarantee for Medicaid would take the largest health-insurance program in America and transform it into a nexus of anti-poverty policy and health equity. Put more simply: The easiest way to make sure people receive the health benefits of employment could be to employ them.

The consequences were astonishing: World War I left more people dead than any war in history and left Europe in shambles. By then, Queen Victoria had been dead for 17 years, but the marriages she pushed for with such authority and optimism still reverberated through Europe.

Today, Britain’s monarch exercises less power over royal marriages. Though the monarch must still give approval for royal weddings, sprawling royal dynasties are no longer engineered via matchmaking. But for many, says Cadbury, the idea of royal matchmaking feels like “the ultimate fairytale.”

The findings suggest that political efforts to cut welfare programs are driven less by conservative principles than by racial anxiety, the authors conclude

Those results show that the push to cut welfare programs is not driven by pure political motives, such as decreasing government spending or shrinking government bureaucracy, Wetts said.

Between 2008 and 2012 in particular, they found, opposition to welfare rose among all Americans -- but far more sharply among whites, who also began scoring higher on racial resentment scales during that period

These trends weren’t necessarily linked, however. So to determine if there was a connection, Wetts and Willer designed two more experiments: one in which they quizzed respondents on their feelings about welfare after seeing a graph about U.S. demographic change, and another in which respondents took a similar quiz after viewing information on average income by race and the demographics of welfare beneficiaries.

White Americans called for deeper cuts to welfare programs after viewing charts that showed they would become a racial minority within 50 years. They also opposed welfare programs more when they were told that people of color benefit most from them.

“My main hope here is that people take a step back, look at what these sorts of programs do for the poor, and think about what’s driving opposition to them.”

“We find evidence that these shifts [in sentiment against welfare programs] are specifically directed at programs people see as benefiting minorities instead of whites,” she added.

Wetts isn’t ruling out the possibility that alternate factors could also be at play, of course. Some researchers have found that people embrace more conservative politics during periods of rapid social change -- not necessarily because they fear their racial status is threatened, but because they fear change is happening too fast

Researchers have also shown that white Americans' racial prejudice affects their views on everything from healthcare policy to the death penalty to dogs

On the same day Wetts' paper published, a separate study in the journal Environmental Politics found that people with high levels of "racial resentment" are more likely to believe that the scientific consensus on climate change is false.

"More and more, white Americans use their racial attitudes to help them decide their positions on political questions such as whom to vote for or what stance to take on important issues including welfare and health care."

The Trump administration has begun allowing states to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients, and has proposed tripling the rents for the poorest households receiving federal housing assistance. The House is also scheduled to vote again next month on a plan to cut $9 billion from food-stamp benefits over 10 years and require most adults to hold a job  to receive payments.

Figures from the federal government and the Kaiser Family Foundation show that white Americans make up 36 percent of food-stamp recipients, 43 percent of Medicaid recipients and 28 percent of recipients for cash welfare.

at least 650 of them are armed and about 1,000 have been identified by the state as right-wing “extremists”

Last year the interior ministry detected their hand in 157 “politically motivated” acts of violence, up from 115 in the year before. In 2016 a Reichsbürger named only as Wolfgang P shot four Bavarian police commandos who had come to confiscate his armoury of weapons, killing one of them.

None of these far-right groups is anything like as numerous, as well organised or as semi-officially tolerated as the Nazi Sturmabteilung of the 1920s. Yet there are far more of them than the authorities could realistically watch at any given time.

nother reason for the mounting concern is the likelihood that far-right extremists have contrived to infiltrate the police, the armed forces and even the spy agencies

The Basic Law, the Federal Republic’s de facto constitution, is girded with an iron perimeter of safeguards that were not afforded to its Weimar predecessor: anti-democratic parties are proscribed, the possession of weapons is heavily regulated, and the army is at least theoretically the servant of the Bundestag. It is no accident that the German equivalent of MI5 is known as the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. These matters are taken with the utmost seriousness.

A New York Times investigation in Brazil found that, time and again, videos promoted by the site have upended central elements of daily life

YouTube’s recommendation system is engineered to maximize watchtime, among other factors, the company says, but not to favor any political ideology.

Some parents look to “Dr. YouTube” for health advice but get dangerous misinformation instead, hampering the nation’s efforts to fight diseases like Zika. Viral videos have incited death threats against public health advocates.

And in politics, a wave of right-wing YouTube stars ran for office alongside Mr. Bolsonaro, some winning by historic margins. Most still use the platform, governing the world’s fourth-largest democracy through internet-honed trolling and provocation

Teachers describe classrooms made unruly by students who quote from YouTube conspiracy videos or who, encouraged by right-wing YouTube stars, secretly record their instructors

But the emotions that draw people in — like fear, doubt and anger — are often central features of conspiracy theories, and in particular, experts say, of right-wing extremism

As the system suggests more provocative videos to keep users watching, it can direct them toward extreme content they might otherwise never find. And it is designed to lead users to new topics to pique new interest

The system now drives 70 percent of total time on the platfor

Zeynep Tufekci, a social media scholar, has called it “one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.”

Danah Boyd, founder of the think tank Data & Society, attributed the disruption in Brazil to YouTube’s unrelenting push for viewer engagement, and the revenues it generates.

Maurício Martins, the local vice president of Mr. Bolsonaro’s party in Niterói, credited “most” of the party’s recruitment to YouTube — including his own.

“Before that, I didn’t have an ideological political background,” Mr. Martins said. YouTube’s auto-playing recommendations, he declared, were “my political education.”

“It was like that with everyone,”

Sometimes I’m watching videos about a game, and all of a sudden it’s a Bolsonaro video,”

More and more, his fellow students are making extremist claims, often citing as evidence YouTube stars like Mr. Moura, the guitarist-turned-conspiracist.

“If social media didn’t exist, I wouldn’t be here,” he said. “Jair Bolsonaro wouldn’t be president.”

In the months after YouTube changed its algorithm, positive mentions of Mr. Bolsonaro ballooned. So did mentions of conspiracy theories that he had floated. This began as polls still showed him to be deeply unpopular, suggesting that the platform was doing more than merely reflecting political trends.

Jonas Kaiser and Yasodara Córdova, with Adrian Rauchfleisch of National Taiwan University, programmed a Brazil-based server to enter a popular channel or search term, then open YouTube’s top recommendations, then follow the recommendations on each of those, and so on.

By repeating this thousands of times, the researchers tracked how the platform moved users from one video to the next. They found that after users watched a video about politics or even entertainment, YouTube’s recommendations often favored right-wing, conspiracy-filled channels like Mr. Moura’s

Crucially, users who watched one far-right channel would often be shown many more.

The algorithm had united once-marginal channels — and then built an audience for them

One of those channels belonged to Mr. Bolsonaro, who had long used the platform to post hoaxes and conspiracies

The conspiracies were not limited to politics. Many Brazilians searching YouTube for health care information found videos that terrified them: some said Zika was being spread by vaccines, or by the insecticides meant to curb the spread of the mosquito-borne disease that has ravaged northeastern Brazi

The videos appeared to rise on the platform in much the same way as extremist political content: by making alarming claims and promising forbidden truths that kept users glued to their screens.

Doctors, social workers and former government officials said the videos had created the foundation of a public health crisis as frightened patients refused vaccines and even anti-Zika insecticides.

Not long after YouTube installed its new recommendation engine, Dr. Santana’s patients began telling him that they’d seen videos blaming Zika on vaccines — and, later, on larvicides. Many refused both.

Medical providers, she said, were competing “every single day” against “Dr. Google and Dr. YouTube” — and they were losing

Brazil’s medical community had reason to feel outmatched. The Harvard researchers found that YouTube’s systems frequently directed users who searched for information on Zika, or even those who watched a reputable video on health issues, toward conspiracy channels

As the far right rose, many of its leading voices had learned to weaponize the conspiracy videos, offering their vast audiences a target: people to blame

Eventually, the YouTube conspiracists turned their spotlight on Debora Diniz, a women’s rights activist whose abortion advocacy had long made her a target of the far right

Bernardo Küster, a YouTube star whose homemade rants had won him 750,000 subscribers and an endorsement from Mr. Bolsonaro, accused her of involvement in the supposed Zika plots.

As far-right and conspiracy channels began citing one another, YouTube’s recommendation system learned to string their videos together

However implausible any individual rumor might be on its own, joined together, they created the impression that dozens of disparate sources were revealing the same terrifying truth.

When the university where Ms. Diniz taught received a warning that a gunman would shoot her and her students, and the police said they could no longer guarantee her safety, she left Brazil.

“The YouTube system of recommending the next video and the next video,” she said, had created “an ecosystem of hate.

“‘I heard here that she’s an enemy of Brazil. I hear in the next one that feminists are changing family values. And the next one I hear that they receive money from abroad” she said. “That loop is what leads someone to say ‘I will do what has to be done.’

In Brazil, this is a growing online practice known as “linchamento” — lynching. Mr. Bolsonaro was an early pioneer, spreading videos in 2012 that falsely accused left-wing academics of plotting to force schools to distribute “gay kits” to convert children to homosexuality.

Mr. Jordy, his tattooed Niterói protégé, was untroubled to learn that his own YouTube campaign, accusing teachers of spreading communism, had turned their lives upside down.One of those teachers, Valeria Borges, said she and her colleagues had been overwhelmed with messages of hate, creating a climate of fear.

Mr. Jordy, far from disputing this, said it had been his goal. “I wanted her to feel fear,” he said

The group’s co-founder, a man-bunned former rock guitarist name Pedro D’Eyrot, said “we have something here that we call the dictatorship of the like.”

Reality, he said, is shaped by whatever message goes most viral.

Even as he spoke, a two-hour YouTube video was captivating the nation. Titled “1964” for the year of Brazil’s military coup, it argued that the takeover had been necessary to save Brazil from communism.Mr. Dominguez, the teenager learning to play guitar, said the video persuaded him that his teachers had fabricated the horrors of military rule.

The poll by The Post and Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) is the first major survey of teenagers’ views since the explosion of the youth climate movement last year.

This week, in the run-up to a major United Nations summit, hundreds of thousands of school kids plan to abandon their classrooms to demand more aggressive measures to protect the planet.

“People feel very guilty when a child says, ‘You are stealing my future.’ That has impact,” Thunberg told The Post. “We have definitely made people open their eyes.”

More than 7 in 10 teenagers and young adults say climate change will cause a moderate or great deal of harm to people in their generation,

Both Lopez and Graham said thinking about climate change makes them afraid, an emotion they share with 57 percent of teens nationwide. Fewer than a third of teens say they are optimistic.

most say they rarely or never discuss the issue with family and friends.

Adults “think: ‘Oh you’re so young, you don’t know what you’re talking about,’” he said. “But I know the facts, and I know what the most drastic consequences will be. I know that people aren’t doing what needs to be done.”

Roughly a third of both teenagers and adults say the issue is “extremely important” to them personally

Just under half believe the United States must drastically reduce its fossil fuel use in the next few years to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

Adults, he said, don’t seem to take the issue as seriously, or as personally, as people his age

Teenagers also share adults’ questions and misconceptions about the ways the world is warming. In both age groups, no more than 2 in 10 say they know “a lot” about the causes of climate change and ways to reduce it

fewer than half say they’ve taken action to reduce their own carbon footprints

nd roughly 4 in 10 say mitigating the effects of warming will require major sacrifices from ordinary Americans.

the number of teenagers who say they’re being taught in school how to mitigate climate change appears to be on the decline

Fourteen percent say they have learned “a lot” about the subject, down from 25 percent in 2010

“It’s terrible,” said Sam Riley, 17, of Boston. “It’s hardly ever brought up at my school.”

The high school junior said he learned nearly everything he knows about climate change from reading the news and searching the Internet

Riley, who is black, believes that minorities and people in low income communities will be most severely impacted by warming, because they are more likely to live in vulnerable areas and less likely to be able to insulate themselves.“The wealthier you are, the more protection you have,”

black and Hispanic teens express a greater sense of urgency around climate change; 37 percent and 41 percent, respectively, say people need to act in the next year or two, compared with 24 percent of white teens.

About 4 in 10 of those under 18 call climate change a “crisis.” But unlike adults, most teenagers say they don’t feel helpless. More than half — 54 percent — say they feel motivated.

But,” she said, “this generation — we’re fighters. And we’re going to win.”

Facts First: This is partly true. As the experience of Italy and other countries shows, having universal coverage and a government-run health system is not enough on its own to stem the spread of coronavirus. But the US is at a disadvantage in fighting the coronavirus because tens of millions of Americans are uninsured or face high out-of-pocket costs before their insurance kicks in -- which may make people hesitant to seek testing or treatment.

"Addressing coronavirus with tens of millions of people without health insurance or with inadequate insurance will be a uniquely American challenge among developed countries," tweeted Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at Kaiser. "It will take money to treat people and address uncompensated care absorbed by providers."

President Donald Trump has tweeted his support of the package. The Senate is expected to take up the measure when it returns to session this week.

Laboratories in Germany developed tests to detect the coronavirus which the WHO adopted and by last week, the WHO sent out tests to 120 countries. Other countries, like the US and China, chose to develop their own tests, according to the Washington Post.

On February 12, the Center for Disease Control reported that some of the coronavirus test kits shipped to labs across the country were not working as they should.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the experts leading the administration's response to the coronavirus told Congress Thursday that the US was "failing" when it came to getting Americans tested.

In an exchange about how the government bailed out banks during the 2008 financial crisis, Biden asserted that Sanders voted against a bailout for the auto industry.

Facts First: Sanders is right, but this needs context. Sanders voted for a bill that would have bailed out the auto industry -- but it failed to pass the Senate. He voted against a different bailout measure, the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, which passed. That program released money to banks -- and a portion of that money eventually went to automakers.

Sanders on Sunday cited two figures about the number of people he claimed die because of the inadequacy of the US health care system.

Facts First: The true number of Americans who die because they are uninsured or lack adequate coverage is not known. Some studies suggest the number is in the tens of thousands per year, but other experts have expressed skepticism that the number is as high as Sanders says.

Biden, who was a US senator at the time of his vote, responded, "I learned that I can't take the word of a President when in fact they assured me that they would not use force. Remember the context. The context was the United Nations Security Council was going to vote to insist that we allow inspectors into determining whether or not...they were, in fact, producing nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction. They were not."

Facts First: Biden's claim is misleading by omission. Biden was an advocate of ending the Saddam Hussein regime for more than a year before the war began in 2003. While Biden did begin calling his 2002 vote a "mistake" in 2005, he was a public supporter of the war in 2003 and 2004 -- and he made clear in 2002 and 2003, both before and after the war started, that he had known he was voting to authorize a possible war, not only to try to get inspectors into Iraq. It's also unclear whether Bush ever made Biden any kind of promise related to the use of force.

During an exchange about Sanders' views on authoritarian countries, Biden claimed that China's income gains have been "marginal."

One way to measure standard of living is through a country's gross domestic product per capita at purchasing power parity. In other words, looking at a country's GDP per person in international dollars, a hypothetical currency used to measure purchasing parity between different countries.

Fact First: This Sanders' claim needs a lot of context. Biden did repeatedly support freezes in Social Security spending and at times called for raising the retirement age. In 2011, he said "changes" would have to be made to entitlements, saying they wouldn't be sustainable -- but he didn't specify what changes. Overall, the claim leaves out that Biden was typically talking about any changes to entitlements in the context of a broader legislative package.

And comments Biden made during a 1995 speech on the Senate floor show he was willing to make cuts to Medicare, but only as part of a broader deal that did not advocate cuts as big as Republicans want.

"If we are serious about saving Social Security, not raising taxes on the middle class, and not cutting back on benefits desperately needed by many senior citizens, we must adjust this artificial ceiling on Social Security taxes and make the Social Security tax more progressive."

Biden said upon his June 2019 reversal that he made "no apologies" for his past support of the amendment. He argued that "times have changed," since, he argued, the right to choose "was not under attack as it is now" from Republicans and since "women's rights and women's health are under assault like we haven't seen in the last 50 years."

Facts First: While it's unclear which ad Sanders was referring to, at least one super PAC connected to Biden, Unite the Country, ran a large television ad campaign that implicitly criticized Sanders without mentioning him by name..

For instance, it includes a clip from a Biden speech, in which Biden says" Democrats want a nominee who's a Democrat" -- an apparent challenge to the party bonafides of Sanders, who serves as an independent in the US Senate and describes himself as a democratic socialist.

Why does Bismarck escape blame as the chief architect of 20th-century Germany – and thus the man who created a militarised political machine that only he could handle? He used to get plenty of blame, but historical memory does funny things and the enormity of Hitler’s regime (he was “Vienna’s revenge on Berlin” wrote AJP Taylor) seems to have blotted out the significant past. When I ask Germans now they sometimes say: “Well, Bismarck is remembered mostly for the social security system he set up,” one designed to neutralise the appeal of socialism, still recognisable and admired today.

In any case there is a sense in which the first world war was indeed over by Christmas 1914, only Bismarck’s autocratic heirs couldn’t accept it. Unlike in 1870 and again in 1940 the Germans had failed to take Paris in another lightning war that summer. At great cost in lives the armies of the despised French Third Republic – shovelling troops up from the capital in buses and taxis – and Britain’s “contemptible little army” (Kaiser Bill’s phrase) held the line at the first battle of the Marne, just 30 miles north-east of Paris.

Moltke was replaced as chief of the German general staff three days later, but the war went on: four Christmases, including one truce, to go. The winners would be the ones with the deepest pockets, not with the biggest Krupp gun or the silliest helmets.

“Sanders’ political failings are his own, and black people are not here to channel the political yearnings of white progressives. We are not here to carry your water or clean up your mess. It’s not that black people don’t believe you… You quite literally need more people.”

Including white people. So far in 2020, Sanders has lost college-educated whites, badly. More surprising, he has hemorrhaged the same working-class whites he carried in 2016—which suggests that their transient adherence was driven more by aversion to Hillary Clinton than enthusiasm for Sanders himself.

[M]any progressive activists misread public opinion. Their answer to almost every question of political strategy is to insist that Americans are a profoundly progressive people who haven’t yet been inspired to vote the way they think… They are conflating our own opinions with smart political advice. They are choosing to believe what they want to believe.

Second, Sanders’ alternative turnout model was delusional.

Sanders claimed that he could fuse young people with the previously disengaged—people who rarely, if ever, vote—into a decisive bloc of new voters who would respond to him alone. Wrong. In primary upon primary, Sanders’ phantom army never materialized.

In an extensive study of non-voters by the Knight Foundation the authors conclude that “If they all voted in 2020, non-voters would add an almost equal share of votes to Democratic and Republican candidates.”

In sum Sanders, his campaign, and too many of his followers embraced an electoral strategy premised on magical thinking.

Finally, Sanders “democratic-socialist” agenda unnerved many voters.

Actual votes here tell the story. To succeed, Democrats must begin with their base—the coalition which Sander is losing by a wide margin. But they also need to add the votes of the same people who buoyed Democratic candidates in 2018: moderates, independents, persuadable Republicans, suburbanites, and college-educated women.

Sanders insists that his campaign is winning on the issues, and losing only because primary voters fear that he’s not electable. But this misses the point: Voters fear he’s unelectable because of his positions on the issues.

And doing his damnedest to help Biden become president.

Take his centerpiece proposal: single-payer healthcare. A recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 60 percent of swing voters in the pivotal states of Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin consider it “a bad idea.” Without winning at least two of those states—and in reality they probably need all three —Democrats will lose to Trump.

To be sure, some of Sanders’ individual proposals are popular among Democrats. But Sanders should contemplate that the adverse verdict of primary voters implicates his overall agenda—and that, if anything, this judgement minimizes the misgivings among the electorate writ large.

Certain of Sanders’ fellow progressives get that. Here’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on appealing to voters: “I come from the lens of an organizer, and if someone doesn’t do what you want, you don’t blame them—you ask why. And you don’t demand that answer of that person—you reflect. And that reflection is where you can grow.”

It’s one thing to criticize Biden on the issues. But if one worries about Trump beating Biden at such terrible cost to the globe, then it would be best not to call Uncle Joe, as Robinson has, “a sleazy dishonest person, the kind who should not be rewarded with a position of extreme trust like the presidency.”

that’s what comes of treating the Democratic party as the target of a hostile takeover—as Sanders himself so often does. Soon enough, for his acolytes the party itself becomes the enemy, along with everyone within it who disagrees with their leader

From there, it is but one step further to sabotaging Biden as an act of revenge. After the Michigan primary, pro-Sanders commentator Krystal Ball said: “The responsibility is placed solely on the voters to suck it up and vote Joe. I’m not buying it. If the choice is Donald Trump or Joe Biden, you can mark me down as officially undecided.”

The essential choice for Sanders in 2020 is between facilitating Trump’s second term, and helping Biden become a candidate more of his voters can accept.

That involves doing four hard things:

Nudging Biden closer to his position, but only in areas where Biden has room to move

Reminding his supporters that their campaign was a cause, not a suicide mission.

Denouncing the rancor through which principled advocacy becomes personal animus.

Overall, Sanders never reached large chunks of the Obama coalition – an essential predicate to any chance of long-term success.

Very soon Sanders and his supporters will have to stop fabricating fantastical excuses for losing to Biden, look in the mirror, and decide what to do about Donald Trump.

But will he?

Trump must be defeated,” Bernie Sanders insists, “and I will do everything in my power to make that happen.”