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just as Pascal argued that we’re better off betting on God’s existence than not, because the consequences are so much worse if we wrongly disbelieve than if we wrongly believe, so we’d be foolish to think, as the Germans did, “it can’t happen here.”

The problem with the Pascal analogy is that there are very real, and sometimes ruinous, consequences to betting on the unspeakable.

Is it really 1933? Donald Trump would plainly like to be an authoritarian, and some fraction of his supporters would egg him on if he began dismantling key institutions. Fortunately, Trump has neither a plan nor the evil gifts required to sustain one.

What’s more, American institutions are far stronger than those of any European country in the 1930s. Levels of political violence are much lower.

Levitsky and Ziblatt (let’s call them L & Z for short) also scare us with tales from the fascist past. But the story they tell is one of a sapping of faith slow enough that it may pass unnoticed at the time.

L & Z make what seems to me a very important contribution to our understanding of why we’re heading wherever it is we’re heading. Functioning democracies, they argue, depend on two norms: mutual tolerance and forbearance.

The first, and more obvious, entails according legitimacy to our opponents. The populist hatred for elites has made this principle feel as archaic as the code of the World War I flying ace

Forbearance is a more elusive idea; L & Z describe it as the principled decision not to use all the powers at one’s disposal — to eschew “constitutional hardball.”

This, then, is how democracies die: through the slow erosion of norms that underpin democratic institutions

Maybe the something that is dying is not “democracy.” According to Yascha Mounk, who is on the faculty at Harvard just like L & Z, democracy, understood as a political system designed to assure majority rule, is doing just fine, indeed all too well; what is under threat are the values we have in mind when we speak of “liberal democracy.”

populist parties across Europe. What these parties have in common, he writes, is an eagerness to seize on majoritarian mechanisms — above all, the ballot — in order to promote a vision hostile to individual rights, the rule of law, respect for political and ethnic minorities, and the willingness to seek complex solutions to complex problems

This is illiberal democracy.

Liberal principles are not intrinsically majoritarian.

Mounk concludes that liberal democracy flourished under three conditions: a mass media that filtered out extremism; broad economic growth and social mobility; and relative ethnic homogeneity. All three of those solid foundations have now crumbled away. And as they have done so, illiberal democracy and undemocratic liberalism have increasingly squared off against each other

Mounk says that the time has come to reconsider the shibboleth that liberal democracies become “consolidated,” and are no longer at risk of backsliding, after two consecutive peaceful exchanges of power. Poland and Hungary, he observes, are “deconsolidating” into illiberal democracies before or eyes.

I wonder if, in fact, failures of liberalism and of democracy are reinforcing each other. Determined minorities have increasingly learned how to prevent majorities from turning their will into legislation. In the United States, this takes the form of business interests or groups like the NRA using their financial muscle to block popular legislation, and to advance their own interests.

Runciman questions the premise of “modernization theory” that democracy is the end point of political development. Perhaps democracies, like all things made by men, are mortal objects that age and die.

The coup d’état is now a strictly Third World affair; advanced democracies, by contrast, become endangered in the name of preserving democracy

Even if Trump is as dark a force as Timothy Snyder thinks he is, Runciman writes, we’ll never have the clarity we need to fight the good fight because he and his followers will be busy defending democracy from us.

Western democracies have been sorely tested before, Runciman says, whether in Europe in the 1930s or the United States in the populist era at the turn of the 20th century. But democracy was then young; the system had “slack,” as Runciman puts it. Democracies could respond to economic crisis by growing new capacities for state intervention. Now, Runciman hypothesizes, democracy is in “middle age.” The era of shape-shifting mutation lies in the past

If it is true, as Thomas Piketty argues in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, that a brief and aberrational era of relative equality has now given way to the capitalist default of extreme inequality, does democracy have the capacity to change the rules in order to more justly distribute the fruits of enterprise? Probably not, says Runcima

Runciman thinks that perfectly rational citizens might choose an alternative to democracy.

For example, today’s pragmatic, non-ideological authoritarianism offers “personal benefits” like shiny consumer products, and “collective dignity” in the form of aggressive nationalism. That accounts for the appeal of both Xi Jinping and Donald Trump

What about “epistocracy,” or rule by the knowledgeable few? Much likelier in Mill’s era, Runciman concedes, than our own.

Or perhaps, as all the machines in our lives learn to talk to one another, and come to treat us as just so much data, the whole idea of discrete selves, with their accompanying packet of individual liberties, will become obsolete

Runciman has a sufficiently low opinion of democracy’s ability to deal with really catastrophic problems like climate change that he does not shed a tear over the thought of its coming demise.

I have been brought up short by an observation I found in each of these works (save the Snyder pamphlet): Our good fortune depends on calamity. Runciman claims that democracies require the binding effect of all-out war to put an end to divisive populism and persuade citizens to make decisions in the public good. In the absence of war, natural disaster will do.

L & Z observe that mutual toleration remained an unattainable good in the United States so long as Americans were divided by the great question of race. Only when Reconstruction failed, and the Republicans abandoned black citizens, did southern Democrats fully accept their place in the Union. And when the Democrats, in turn, took up the cause of civil rights after 1948, they reignited those old racial fears and ushered in our own era of mutual intolerance

Now diversity threatens again: The greatest peril to liberal democracy in today’s Europe is nationalist outrage at immigration and refugees.

Insofar as any or all of these observations are true, we must shed our end-of-history triumphalism for a more tragic sense of liberal democracy and its prospects

If, that is, inequality flourishes in conditions of peace, tolerance depends upon exclusion, or diversity undermines the commitment to liberalism, our deepest values will always be at odds with one another.

Perhaps democratic majorities really will prove unappeasable without a real sacrifice of liberal values. That may be the destiny toward which we are plunging.

Why did Trump win?

any attentive reader of the more sophisticated forecasters in the game should have known that Tuesday’s outcome was one of the likely scenarios. As Silver emphasized throughout, polls have historically been off by an average of about three points—and given how close the race looked in many swing states, a three point miss in one or another direction would likely hand a clear victory to either Harris or Trump.

That is pretty much exactly what happened. And so anyone who now claims that forecasters did not consider Tuesday’s results a realistic possibility has failed a simple test of reading comprehension.

I’m a center-left Democrat with lots of degrees. I’m aghast and frightened by Trump’s victory. But I think it’s due to the opposite of racism and misogyny and transphobia. I think he won because of anti-anti-racism and anti-misandry and love of children combined with acceptance of gays.

Normies not overeducated out of common sense rejected identitarian politics. DEI departments, struggle sessions, Robin Angelo and Ta-Nehisi Coates, quotas limiting Asian-Americans, literacy and math as white supremacy, buying a fixer-upper in a poor neighborhood as settler colonialism, all of it.

Men—a rainbow coalition of them—finally got fed up with decades of rhetoric about toxic masculinity, testosterone poisoning, rape culture, patriarchy. They saw that for most men in this country, the reality was poor results in school, lousy job prospects, inability to form a family, and a culture in which dissing any identity group is a capital offense unless it’s men you’re dissing and then that’s fine.

And regular folks not caught up in the strange mania to over-treat the normal nuttiness of puberty with life-altering chemicals and surgery said stop—confusion is fine, it’s not a disease, and didn’t we recently decide that homosexuality is okay, so why are doctors suddenly trying to cut it out of children?

Revulsion at these things is viscerally powerful, existentially clear. Trump’s unfitness for office is more abstract, more distant. The calculation for many was he will mess up Washington, DC and the rest of the globe but it’s more important to save myself and mine. Voting for more of the same will just lead to more of the same. And enough of that. Enough.

I will tell you why I voted for Trump. My wife and I are masters/PhD educated Brooklynites who work in academia. Several weeks ago my wife was teaching a class and a student very proudly mentioned they would never willingly collect anything produced by a white man. It’s not that this was said, it’s that this is a common and acceptable position for democrats even though you’ll say it isn’t. I’m tired of the hypocrisy. What the democrat worldview says reality is like is neither true nor morally supportable.

many NYT comments the other day that said things like “Trump and Musk are the true elitists.” No, guys. No they’re not. It’s not about money. It’s about who gets to tell you what to say and who gets to break “the rules” and who doesn’t. It’s about what you can talk about and what you can’t. It’s about laws for some presented as if they’re for all. It’s about what you’re allowed to see. It is a fundamental, hypocritical rot that is just so clearly there

In one of the most subtle early analyses of what he tellingly called “Liberation Technology,” Larry Diamond argued that new digital tools would empower “citizens to report news, expose wrongdoing, express opinions, mobilize protest, monitor elections, scrutinize government, deepen participation, and expand the horizons of freedom.” Diamond’s article was published in the summer of 2010.

Twitter, Andrew Sullivan wrote in The Atlantic, had proven to be a “critical tool for organizing.” In twenty-first-century conflict, Nicholas Kristof echoed in The New York Times, “government thugs firing bullets” would increasingly come up against the resistance of “young protesters firing ‘tweets.’”

As Clay Shirky argued in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, even in longstanding democracies like the United States the power of digital technology made it much easier for activists to coordinate

thanks to Twitter, Donald Trump did not need the infrastructure of traditional media outlets. Instead, he could tweet messages directly to his millions of followers. Once he had done so, established broadcasters faced a stark choice: ignore the main subject of conversation and make themselves irrelevant—or discuss each tweet at length, thereby amplifying Trump’s message even as they ostensibly scrutinized it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they chose the latter course of action.

Breathless claims about digital technology’s liberating potential turned into equally breathless prognostications of doom. Social media was declared the most dangerous foe of liberal democracy.

The truth about social media is not that it is necessarily good or bad for liberal democracy. Nor is it that social media inherently strengthens or undermines tolerance.

On the contrary, it is that social media closes the technological gap between insiders and outsiders.

Until a few decades ago, governments and big media companies enjoyed an oligopoly over the means of mass communication. As a result, they could set the standards of acceptable political discourse.

The credibility of those claims depends on what they are compared to. So long as the memory of absolute monarchy was recent, and a more directly democratic system seemed unfeasible, liberal democracies could claim to empower the people.

One response has been to put pressure on Twitter and Facebook to change their algorithms and enforce stricter community guidelines; this is the tack that most tech critics have taken in the United State

Another response has been to limit what can be said on social media platforms by coercive legislation; this is the stance that European governments have adopted, with remarkable speed.

it seems at least as plausible to think that Americans won’t be willing to compromise on their First Amendment rights; that they will decamp to more freewheeling alternatives if existing social media platforms are tamed; and, indeed, that more subtle, yet no less powerful, forms of hate will continue to spread on existing platforms even if its most outrageous manifestations are suppressed.

There is, then, a very real possibility that the rise of digital technology, and the concomitant spread of essentially costless communication, have set up a direct clash between two of our most cherished values: freedom of speech and the stability of our political system.

the challenge is even more fundamental.

Rather, the daily experience of liking and sharing posts on social media may habituate users to a simulated form of direct democracy that makes the existing institutions of representative democracy appear intolerably outmoded.

Could digital natives—reared on the direct efficacy of social media—simply be less willing to tolerate the slow, indirect workings of analogue institutions designed in the eighteenth century?

And might they therefore be more resistant to accepting the democratic myth that has long underwritten the stability of the American Republic?

the rise of the Internet and social media is making the ideological foundation of liberal democracy—which has had a tight hold over our imagination for the better part of two centuries—look increasingly brittle.

The political systems of countries like Great Britain and the United States were founded not to promote, but to oppose, democracy; they only acquired a democratic halo in retrospect, thanks to more recent claims that they allowed the people to rule.

This held true for the century or so during which democracy enjoyed an unprecedented ideological hegemony. In the age of the Internet, it no longer does. As a result, the democratic myth that helped to make our institutions look uniquely legitimate is losing its hold.

The undemocratic roots of our supposedly democratic institutions are clearly on display in Great Britain. Parliament was not designed to put power in the hands of the people; it was a blood-soaked compromise between a beleaguered monarch and the upper echelons of the country’s elite

Because the US was founded in a more ideologically self-conscious manner, the same history is even more evident here. For the Founding Fathers, the election of representatives, which we have come to regard as the most democratic way to translate popular views into public policy, was a mechanism for keeping the people at bay

The rising tide of egalitarian sentiment during the nineteenth century should, by rights, have come into conflict with a set of avowedly aristocratic institutions. Instead, its fresh packaging gave the representative institutions of the United States and the United Kingdom a new lease on life. It pleased the elites who continued to get their way on the most important issues as much as it pleased the egalitarians who came to see it as a realization of their aspirations.

It was only in the nineteenth century, as egalitarian sentiment rose on both sides of the Atlantic, that a set of entrepreneurial thinkers began to dress an ideologically self-conscious republic up in the unaccustomed robes of a born-again democracy.

Only gradually did the US make real improvements to its democratic process.

And crucial to that transformation was a story about the limits of democratic governance under modern conditions.

In ancient Athens, so the story went, the people—or at least those who were regarded as the people, which is to say adult male citizens—could rule directly because there were relatively few of them, because the territory of the state was so small, and because they had leisure to govern since so many of them owned slaves who took care of their daily needs

As John Adams noted, the people “can never act, consult, or reason together, because they cannot march five hundred miles, nor spare the time, nor find a space to meet.” In industrial nations that expanded over a huge territory direct democracy was thought to be impossible.

While representative institutions had been founded in ideological opposition to democracy, they were now re-described as the closest instantiation of that ideal possible under modern conditions. Thus, the founding myth of liberal-democratic ideology—the improbable fiction that representative government would facilitate the rule of the people—was born.

we have not even started to address the issue of how to make the democratic promise of our political system ring true for a new generation.

or a long century, the founding myth of liberal democracy retained sufficient footing in reality to keep a deep hold over the popular imagination, and help one political system conquer half the globe. But that basis is now crumbling

With the advent of the Internet, John Adams’s worry about the people’s inability to deliberate together has come to seem quaint

The physical agora of ancient Athens could be replaced by a virtual agora that would allow millions to debate and vote on policy proposals with even greater ease. As a result, citizens now have a much more instinctive sense that our democratic institutions are highly mediated.

They know that if we wanted to design a system of government that truly allowed the people to rule, it would not look much like the representative democracy of today.

The rise of the Internet and social media has thus created a giant mismatch between the direct efficiency of our digital lives and the cumbersome inefficiency of our formal institutions—and that has accentuated the contrast between our system’s promise to let the people rule and the reality that the people rarely feel as though they can have a real impact on the most important decisions facing their country

The Internet threatens to end the hegemony of liberal democracy not only by amplifying the voice of a small band of haters and extremists, but also by alienating a much larger number of digital natives from the decidedly analogue institutions by which they are governed.

We have only just begun to face up to the first big corrosive influence of digital technology on our politics: the way in which social media has helped to mainstream extremists

We’re only beginning to understand how we can stop vast platforms like Facebook and Twitter from spreading hate and fake news—and whether that will even prove possible without sacrificing constitutive elements of our political system

In short, the Founding Fathers did not believe a representative republic to be second best; they found it far preferable to the factious horrors of a true democracy.

the widespread frustration with the state has less to do with excessive bureaucracy or overly cumbersome processes than it does with the underlying reality of the economy and the welfare state: what political scientists call the “performance legitimacy” of our political system has suffered from a combination of rising living costs, stagnating real wages, growing inequality, and dwindling social services.

More important, the real barrier to public participation in politics has always been interest, time, and expertise as much as it has been technology

Even if it were easy to weigh in, even vote, on every decision made at the local, county, state, and federal level, most citizens would hardly marshal the enthusiasm to be so intimately engaged with such a wide variety of questions of public policy.

Nor would most citizens miraculously develop the expertise to assess, for example, what kinds of regulations are needed to keep a power plant safe

A dozen years after the invention of Facebook, by contrast, the new technology has spread to every corner of the globe. Some two billion people actively use the platform.

there can be little doubt that, in the short run—which is to say, for the rest of our lives—it will make for a more chaotic world.

Unfettered by the constraints of the old media system, and buoyed by a growing popular cynicism about democracy’s promise, the demagogues have been willing to say whatever it takes to get elected—to flatter and deceive, to obfuscate, and even to incite hatred of their fellow citizens. Perhaps their rhetoric will prove to be unstoppable. As one state legislator recently pointed out to me, it is difficult for a rational politician to win a debate with a three-sentence answer when his rival is offering a one-sentence answer—especially when the other candidate can blast his simplistic take all over Twitter and Facebook.

All is not lost. But to revitalize liberal democracy in the digital age, it will not be enough to think carefully about how to enforce privacy rights or stifle the most hateful voices on the Internet. We must also think anew about how to fill the democratic promise with meaning for a new generation that has lost the belief in the democratic myth that long provided legitimacy for our political system.

The importance of identity creation for Spencer cannot be overstated. It is why every black-on-white rape must be portrayed as the ravishing of all white womanhood, and every Syrian orphan who moves into an American city as the general of a colonizing army.

Within a few years, he was defending the nearly complete annihilation of law and politics as the Führer’s prerogative as champion of the German race. In times of emergency, Schmitt argued, the leader can declare the law null (he called this a “state of exception”) and use force at will to serve the state.

eventually, Schmitt argued, the parliamentary debate does end, and someone gets his way while someone else does not. The state’s job is to provide not the coffeehouse for the debate, but the threat of a beating to compel the loser to accept the result. “Politics is inherently brutal,” Spencer told me. “It’s nonconsensual by its very nature. The state is crystallized violence.”

. Given that debate, procedure, and politics all end in the same place—crystallized violence—what or whom should the violence serve? The answer, he said, is some group of close affinity. And the groups with the most full-bodied affinity, a common mythology and experience, are races.

Liberalism accepts that disagreement is part of the political process, and that people who disagree profoundly can live together

The upshot of this philosophy is, in Spencer’s interpretation, to devalue the homespun truths that have united America’s political parties for decades. Good ol’ boys, neoconservatives, and liberals all honor democracy, freedom, markets, human rights, and various other abstractions. To Spencer, these are idols, and their twilight is upon us

Spencer’s ideas themselves are Nazi to the core, and he knows it, even if many of his followers do not. Hitler, too, viewed politics as a struggle and disdained those who imagined it instead as cooperative.

Thwarting the competition among races, Hitler proposed in Mein Kampf, was a cavalcade of abstractions: justice, human rights, democracy, communism, capitalism. Spencer mocks these same abstractions as shibboleths of the modern age. Members of the mainstream right, he said in a December 2016 speech, “talk about global capitalism, and free markets, and the Constitution, and vague Christian values of some sort. But they never ask that question of Who are we? They never ask that question of identity.”

It is impossible to hear Spencer or Trump speak about the “filth” and “carnage” of America without sensing that many of their followers consider the whole American project discredited. Spencer’s is only one philosophy offering itself as an alternative.

Millennials are rapidly untethering themselves from American values that until recently have been described as bedrock. The political scientists Yascha Mounk and Roberto Stefan Foa have noted that belief in the essential importance of living in a democracy has dropped off dramatically among the young, and support for “Army rule” has increased to one in six Americans. A generation ago it was one in 16.

The closest connection between Spencer and the White House is Stephen Miller, a senior policy adviser to President Trump. In an interview with The Daily Beast, Spencer called himself a “mentor” to Miller. He told me that the two of them worked and socialized with each other as members of Duke University’s conservative union, while Miller was an undergraduate and Spencer a graduate student in intellectual history.

There are many people who assume that liberalism and nationalism are opposites. Liberalism, in their mind, is modern and progressive. It’s about freedom of choice, diversity and individual autonomy. Nationalism, meanwhile, is primordial, xenophobic, tribal, aggressive and exclusionary.

it has become clear that there are two kinds of nationalism: the illiberal nationalism of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, and the liberal nationalism of Zelensky. The former nationalism is backward-looking, xenophobic and authoritarian.

The latter nationalism is forward-looking, inclusive and builds a society around the rule of law, not the personal power of the maximum leader. It’s become clear that if it is to survive, liberalism needs to rest on a bed of this kind of nationalism.

Nationalism provides people with a fervent sense of belonging. Countries don’t hold together because citizens make a cold assessment that it’s in their self-interest to do so. Countries are held together by shared loves for a particular way of life, a particular culture, a particular land

Nationalism provides people with a sense of meaning. Nationalists tell stories that stretch from a glorious if broken past forward to a golden future

Democracies need nationalism if they are to defend themselves against their foes. Democracies also need this kind of nationalism if they are to hold together.

Yascha Mounk celebrates the growing diversity enjoyed by many Western nations. But he argues they also need the centripetal force of “cultural patriotism,” to balance the centrifugal forces that this diversity ignites.

Finally, democracies need this kind of nationalism to regenerate the nation. Liberal nationalists are not stuck with a single archaic national narrative. They are perpetually going back, reinterpreting the past, modernizing the story and reinventing the community.

Over the past decades this kind of ardent nationalism has often been regarded as passé within the circles of the educated elites

The first problem with this posture is that it opened up a cultural divide between the educated class and the millions of Americans for whom patriotism is a central part of their identity

Liberal nationalism believes in what liberals believe, but it also believes that nations are moral communities and the borders that define them need to be secure

It believes that it’s sometimes OK to put Americans first — to adopt policies that give American workers an edge over workers elsewhere. It believes it’s important to celebrate diversity, but a country that doesn’t construct a shared moral culture will probably rip itself to shreds.

It shows what a renewed American liberal nationalism could do, if only the center and left could get over their squeamishness about patriotic ardor and would embrace and reinvent our national tradition.

“Self-centered individualism must therefore be replaced with a more collectivist spirit that nationalism knows how to kindle.”

policy makers and environmentalists need to get smart about political capital: how to build it and, most importantly, how to avoid wasting it.

Environmentalist policies don’t just need to be well-intentioned or feel virtuous; they need to be effective in accomplishing their stated goals.

Cumulatively, they risk giving citizens the impression that those in charge care more about forcing them to change their lifestyle than about solving real problems

If we want to win the fight against climate change, we need to get serious about achieving the biggest possible environmental impact for the smallest possible price in quality of life and political goodwill

Low-impact policies that demand small, if frequent and highly salient, sacrifices feel virtuous. But they deplete a disproportionate amount of political capital.

It’s time for a new paradigm. Call it “effective environmentalism.”

This is driven by a deeper sense, widespread in the environmental movement, that the fight against climate change is coterminous with the fight to remake the world from scratch. To many, social ills like racism, sexism and even capitalism itself are facets of one interrelated system of oppression. A victory against any one facet requires a victory against all.

Naomi Klein’s bestselling This Changes Everything is a classic of the genre. Tellingly, the first change she admonishes her readers to make concerns their lifestyle: “For us high consumers,” she writes, preventing the dire future that awaits humanity requires “changing how we live.”

Even more tellingly, Klein maintains that making these changes will require nothing short of the abolition of capitalism. To her, the right way to understand this historical moment is as “a battle between capitalism and the planet.”

it turns out that you can’t scare and shame people into taking action on climate change. If anything, this political moment seems to be characterized by a mix of apathy and backlash. In the United States, a recent poll of young voters reveals that only 6 percent of them consider “environmental issues” their top priority, the same number who say their top priority is immigration (economic issues easily eclipse both).

As recently as four years ago, Germany’s Green Party was polling around 25 percent of the vote, and looked likely to lead a federal government for the first time in the country’s history. Now, its support is down to about ten percent, with the decline among young voters especially dramatic. Opinions about the party in the electorate give a clue about the source of its troubles:

In a recent exit poll conducted during the state election in Brandenburg, 71 percent of voters complained that the party “has insufficient concern with the economy and creating jobs.” 66 percent complained that the party “wants to tell us how to live.”

The environment, like most areas of public policy, is the realm of painful trade-offs. Efforts to fix the climate crisis will involve a significant degree of expense and inconvenience. For both moral and strategic reasons, the goal of environmental regulation should therefore be to accomplish important goals while minimizing these costs insofar as possible

effective environmentalism consists in actions or policies which maximize positive impact on the environment while minimizing both the price for humans’ quality of life and the depletion of a collective willingness to adopt other impactful measures.

most of the time, such a definition is less helpful than the spirit which animates it. And that spirit is best captured in a more informal register. So rather than focusing on the definition, effective environmentalists should evaluate any proposed action, policy or regulation by asking themselves three questions:

. How big a positive impact (if any) will the proposed action have?

In politics, it’s easy to obsess over whatever happens to be salient. If some question touches a cultural nerve, or has given rise to major political battles in the past, its stakes can come to seem existential—even if not much hinges on it in the real world. This is part of what makes it so tempting to obsess about such things as banning plastic straws or detachable bottle caps (which have little impact) rather than tax incentives or cap-and-trade schemes (which would have a vastly larger impact)

2. To what extent will the proposed action lead to a deterioration in quality of life?

this also gives them reason to care about the negative consequences that environmental policies may have for human welfare. So the extent of the trade-off needs to be a key consideration. The bigger an adverse impact a particular policy has on people’s quality of life, the more skeptical we should be about implementing it.

For the most part, people who worry about climate change and other forms of environmental degradation are motivated by a concern about human welfare. They worry about the negative consequences that runaway climate change would have for humankind

3. To what extent will the proposed action lead to backlash?

Political capital is limited. In most democracies, a clear majority of the population now cares about climate change to some extent. But this genuine concern competes with, and tends to be eclipsed by, voters’ concern about economic priorities like the availability of good jobs

This context makes it all the more important for voters to feel that governments and environmental groups are focusing on impactful steps that leave them in charge of decisions about their own lives; otherwise, support for any environmental policy is likely to polarize along partisan lines, or even to crater across the board. 

When I coined the term “effective environmentalism,” I was of course inspired by an earlier movement: “effective altruism.”

for all of the problems with effective altruism, the original insight on which it is built is hard to contest. People spend billions of dollars on charitable contributions every year. Much of that money goes to building new gyms at fancy universities or upgrading the local cat shelter. Wouldn’t it be better to direct donors’ altruistic instincts to more impactful endeavors, potentially saving the lives of thousands of people?

Something similar holds true for the environmental movement. Many activists are more focused on interventions that feel virtuous than on ones that will make a real difference. As a result, much of the movement has proven ineffective

Effective altruists pride themselves in adopting principles and mental heuristics that are supposed to help them assess what to do in a more rational way. These include not judging an idea based on who says it; reserving judgment about an idea until you’ve analyzed both its benefits and its costs; paying attention to the relative weight of different priorities; and being skeptical about forms of symbolic politics that don’t lead to real change

these norms make a lot of sense, and have relevance for environmentalists focused on having real impact.

So, to figure out what policies can make the biggest difference in the fight against climate change, and actually win the political capital to put these into practice, effective environmentalists should:

Assess Policies on the Basis of their Impact, not Their Perceived Purity:

Prioritize Actions that Solve the Biggest Problems:

It would be a mistake to subsume all environmental concerns to the fight against climate change. People have reasons to care about living in a clean environment or alleviating animal suffering even if it does not help to protect us from the threat posed by climate change

There are a variety of environmental goals, and it makes sense to recognize this plurality of goods. And yet, those who care about environmental goals need to have a clear sense of relative priorities. Some goals are more important than others

effective environmentalists should unflinchingly give precedence to the most important goals.

Be Willing to Build Cross-Ideological Coalitions:

Activists increasingly pride themselves in being “intersectional.” Since they believe that various forms of oppression intersect, people who want to participate in the fight against one form of injustice must also get on board with a set of progressive assumptions about how to combat other forms of perceived injustice

This can raise the entrance ticket for anyone who wants to get involved in fighting for an environmental cause; distract major environmental organizations from fighting for their stated goals; and make powerful players unwilling to forge tactical coalitions with partners whose broader worldview they disdai

Effective environmentalists should reject this purist instinct, making common cause with anyone who favors impactful action irrespective of the views they may hold about unrelated issues.

Put People in Charge of Their Own Lives:

Effective environmentalists should fight to transition as much of the economy as possible to forms of energy that do not emit carbon. This will require broad political support and, yes, real financial trade-offs

effective environmentalists should avoid overly intrusive regulations about how people then go about using that energy. If consumers are willing to pay an elevated price for the pleasure of sitting on an outside terrace in the late fall, it shouldn’t be for the government or for environmental activists to decide that a different use of energy is more morally righteous.

No-Bullshit Environmentalism

For the last decades, the environmentalist movement has tried its hand at fear-mongering.

this kind of rhetoric is factually misleading and politically disastrous.

This is why I favor a different approach. This approach centers the serious risks posed by climate change. But it also insists that humans are capable of meeting this moment with a mix of collective action and ingenuity.

With the right investments and regulations, we can reduce carbon emissions and mitigate the impact of a warming planet. And while this transition will exact considerable costs, it need not make us poor or require us to abstain from putting plentiful energy to its many miraculous uses.

at a start, the mix of policies advocated by effective environmentalists is likely to include: a commitment to creating energy abundance while transitioning towards a low-carbon economy; significant investment in both renewable and nuclear energy; regulatory action to raise the price of fossil-fuels; the adoption of genetically-modified crops that can withstand a changing climate; public and private investment to mitigate the effects of the warming that is already underway; the development and adoption of new technologies that can capture carbon; and a willingness to do serious research on speculative ideas, such as marine cloud brightening, that have the potential to avert worst-case outcomes in the case of a climate emergency. 

In life as in economics, trade-offs are real. But in the context of a growing economy, we should be able to bear those costs without suffering any overall reduction in human affluence or well-being. If we adopt the principles of effective environmentalism and take energetic action, our future shines bright.

A lot of the news, however, is bad.

The bad news includes examples of people who reacted to Saturday’s events by glorifying violence, or by mocking its victims

The abject tactical failures of the Secret Service pose structural questions that urgently need to be answered.

The first conspiracies came from Trump’s detractors. As soon as the first pictures of his injury emerged, some influential Democratic activists and advisors suggested that this was a false flag operation, designed to strengthen his appeal.

Biden has, for example, repeatedly claimed that he decided to enter the 2020 presidential race after hearing Trump referring to the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who assembled for a deadly rally in Charlottesville in 2017 as “very fine people.” But while Trump was characteristically meandering and irresponsible in his remarks after that rally, he explicitly stated that “I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”

Parts of the left have justified some forms of violence in the last years. Movements like Antifa explicitly glorify political violence, reserving for themselves both the right to take action against anyone they consider fascist, and the right to determine who should be included in that category

All of this is shameful. It must be called out and condemned without hedging or special pleading. But it also shouldn’t be inflated to imply that the Democratic establishment or the mainstream media has in general started to glorify violence.

Conversely, there is no doubt that parts of the Republican Party and the conservative movement have glorified political violence in the last years.

All of this is shameful, all the more so for coming from the most senior officials within the Republican Party. All of this must be called out and condemned without hedging or special pleading, something that the conservative media ecosystem have notably failed to do.

no excuse for overstating the extent to which the other side embraces political violence. And that is something that the most senior Democrats, from Joe Biden on down, have consistently done.

But the extent of conspiracism was much worse on the right.

he question of the day has come to be whether it is appropriate to portray Trump as an existential threat to democracy.

If it was appropriate to resist Hitler by violent means, and Trump is his modern-day equivalent, then (so goes the tacit implication of the New Republic’s cover), why shouldn’t it be legitimate to resist Trump by violent means?

Depressingly often, in American politics, both sides are badly wrong. In this particular case, it seems to me that both sides are mostly right.

It is perfectly appropriate—even in the aftermath of Saturday’s unconscionable attack on Trump—to warn about what his presidency may mean for America’s democracy. But there is never an excuse—even and especially when the stakes are truly high—for fear-mongering that distorts the exact nature of that threat.

if moments of tragedy and upheaval reveal the true state of a country, the first draft of America’s report card puts it in danger of failing. Most Americans continue to abhor violence. Our mutual hatred still knows limits. And yet the mix of institutional failure, conspiracist thinking, and partisan fear-mongering is very potent. The risk that it may yet set in motion dynamics which overwhelm the decent instincts of most ordinary Americans remains very real

As a history teacher in a large, diverse suburban high school, I have spent more and more time in recent years trying (with mixed results) to "win back" white boys falling down dark internet rabbit holes of racist, Islamophobic and antisemitic conspiracy theories, misogyny, etc. Most of these boys of course do not end up as shooters (when I suspect that might be the case I go right to administration), but they do end up holding horrifying views that bode ill for the future of our polity.

What defies the typical "shooter" stereotype among most in this larger universe of white boys getting radicalized online is that most, though not all, of the latter (in my experience) are among my most intellectually curious, thoughtful and sensitive students. But, to use Professor Henderson's phraseology, they are not "alphas." Some have friends, even girlfriends, but none of them are part of the "popular" crowd. They are bright, but not "good at school" like the students who end up in your Ivy League courses. At 15 or 16 or 17, they feel (correctly) that they have something to offer the world, but feel they have been locked out of all the paths to success in their narrow world: They'll never be star athletes, or valedictorian, or one of the popular kids.

They feel like the message we as a society (schools, YA literature, "mainstream media") are sending them is that "You are privileged; you are the oppressor, you are the cause and beneficiary of all the world's injustices." The complexities of graduate level political theory are generally lost on a teenage boy who feels like the whole world is against him. The irony is these are the boys who actually care about issues of justice. The quarterback and the debate champion don't care if you throw their privilege in their face. They know their worth and are too busy to care.

I am sharing this comment not so much to identify what motivates shooters - I have no expertise in criminal pathology - but more in terms of the educational vacuum creating a generation of disaffected young men open to believe conspiracy theories because we are no longer offering them an alternative narrative of Americanism that speak to them as powerfully as those of the conspiracy theorists, the White Nationalists, and the miraculously save man who will be their retribution.

my book is a full-throated defense of liberalism. But it starts at a prior question, which is where do we find ourselves today? And especially for people who aren't religious, where is it that we're getting our big values, our big moral ideals from? And my gambit is that liberalism is the thing

t the biggest growing group of religious affiliation today is non-affiliation

in the United States, it's a rather low number (still a gigantic population) of around 30%. You move to godless New Zealand and it's clocking almost at 60% now. Here in Australia, it's around 50%

That's my audience. I'm trying to speak to people who don't have a prior religion that they can point to as the source for who they are

if we're not religious then I think that the one that we've probably absorbed and adopted is this liberal framework, precisely because (and we can talk about this) liberalism is the official hegemonic morality of our time. It's sort of what we are bombarded with 24/7. We just kind of grew up in those waters and that's who we are now. And so what I'm trying to do is to get liberals to recognize how deep it runs

I don't know if there's a God-sized hole in our heart, but I do know there's a Christianity-sized hole in our culture.

There's all kinds of casting about for meaning. And I'm an academic, I'm a philosopher, and in my neck of the woods everyone and their mother is writing a book about wisdom from whatever tradition they are doing. So you have books coming out every day on how to live well according to the Scottish Enlightenment, Chinese philosophy, whatever. Everyone's trying to go somewhere else to try to find meaning and pull it into our world

Maybe we already have a robust philosophy and we've already absorbed it and we just need to double down on the thing that we already have.

You asked me about its top-line values. In my book, I nominate three that I think are really at the center of this thing. One is a commitment to personal freedom—to my freedom, to your freedom.

Another is a commitment to fairness.

And the third is a commitment to reciprocity in the sense that I matter no more than you and you matter no more than me

And you take those three things together—freedom, fairness, and reciprocity—and you put them in a constellation,  and I think you have something like liberalism. So those are typically seen as political values. But again, what I'm trying to say is that they've descended into the background culture.

great book written ten years ago by an author named Melissa Mohr and it has this fantastic title. It's called Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing. And in those two words, “holy” and “shit,” what she does is effectively summarize the history of swear words over a 3,000-year tradition in the West, and her point is that at different moments and times, under different moral and religious paradigms, you have different kinds of swear words.

And very quickly, by finding out what a society thinks is bad and taboo and can't be said, you very quickly reverse engineer what its main moral commitments are. 

we love the swear words that are safe to say and we can say the “holy” and “shit” kind of words all we like on this podcast and no one's gonna bat an eye

But there's a different kind of word today that if we were to say that would get your podcast in hot water and me fired within a week, which are of course slurs, right? Those are the truly unsayable words that we have today. And the reason why swear slurs are the big no-no word today is because they impugn the self-respect and the dignity of all people. We've so absorbed certain liberal commitments that our liberalism runs right deep down to our bones in the kinds of words that we reflexively do and don't use. 

Talk us a little bit through what those three values mean and why it is that they're specifically liberal.

Lefebvre: So a book that has really inspired me in this is Helena Rosenblatt's work, The Lost History of Liberalism. It's just terrific because it goes into the history of the word “liberal” and tries to see what it means right from the start.

It's 200 years old, which is like a newborn by the standards of intellectual history. But on the other hand, it is really old because the roots of the word go right back to Roman times. And the word liber means a couple of things; on the one hand, freedom and the quality of being free and being a freeborn person, but also the quality or the characteristic of being generous and a generous person. And it's those two qualities that are at the heart of what liberalism means in this tradition.

Now, we tend to quickly associate liberalism with liberty and (critics would say) with individualism, egoism, selfishness, all that kind of stuff. But it's pointing to the freedom half of that equation, and we tend to forget the generosity half

When liberalism is born in the 19th century, though, those two ideas of being free and generous are really robustly connected. And the big question that I think animates almost all 19th century liberals, whatever their fascinating disagreements, whether we're talking the Frenchies like Tocqueville, Constant or Madame De Stael, or we're talking about the British tradition, all of them are asking, basically, looking at the modern world, how is it that human beings could remain on the one hand free, and on the other hand, generous, given all of these new pressures and temptations that the modern world is throwing at us.

They were worried about capitalism and how it not just threatens inequality, but it threatens to turn us into nasty little consumerists who care only about our material satisfactions and pleasures; they were worried about nationalism and the closing of the mind in that sense; and they were especially freaked out by democracy.

Today we think that liberalism and democracy are like peaches and cream. But the reconciliation between liberalism and democracy took 200 years to achieve, and hard-fought negotiation and compromise on the part of each of those bits. Because, initially, liberalism was established in order to counteract all of the perceived dangers of democracy.

Mounk: And just to briefly double-down on that point

If you think of democracy as something like translating the preferences of the people into public policy, and you think of liberalism as something, among other things, as constraints on what the state can do to individual citizens, those two things can come to be in tension when majorities of people persistently want laws and legislation and rules that constrain what individuals can do. 

at the same time, conversely, it's very hard, I think, in the long run to maintain either element without the other. So once you start having a political system that is deeply illiberal, it's very easy for the government to stay in power because it controls the media, because it has control over the judiciary and so on. And conversely, if you have a sort of technocratic elite that guarantees certain kinds of freedoms—as was the case under military domination in Turkey until relatively recently, as is the case in Singapore in certain ways—in order to sustain themselves, they're also going to limit the freedom of people, at the very least to criticize the government and probably to do other things as well

So the relationship between liberalism and democracy is very complicated because I think that they do effectively stand in tension. But once you give up on one of them, the other becomes really vulnerable. 

Where we find ourselves today is that we've inherited a liberal tradition that in so many respects privileges freedom over all equalities.

they don't entertain the notion that someone's liberalism can run all the way down into them. And that's what my beef or my complaint with political liberalism is—it obscures what I think is the major morality of our time because a whole bunch of people aren't liberal plus something, they're just liberal all the way down. And I'm not saying the state should force that one. What I'm saying is that we need to recognize empirical reality for what it is.

he digs and digs and he finds this one concept, which he names fairness. And he says that —and this is the fundamental proposition of Rawls—that society should be a fair system of cooperation from one generation to the next

in the book, what I tried to do is flesh out a little bit more what it demands of ourselves, especially once these ideas have ceased to be just kind of political stuff, but have gone into a much broader cultural frame.

what I want to try to do is to insist again on the essential connection between the notion of freedom and of generosity. And the thinker that does this for me most powerfully is John Rawls,

I do definitely think I'm not a perfectionist liberal, by which I mean that I do not think that the liberal state should promote a certain way of life. All political liberals make one assumption, which is that everyone living in a liberal democratic society is, let's say, liberal plus something else. So they believe in liberalism, they uphold the Constitution, all that stuff, equal rights. but they are also something else: they're Christian, Muslim, Jewish. But there's always a composite identity between liberalism and some other form of identity

what I'm trying to do in my book is insist on a certain vision of generous and free living and how it can be revived for us today, especially for those of us who basically can profess no other values because we've been born in this liberal world.

So what would it mean for us as a society and what would it mean for me, for you, for all of our listeners to be more genuine, more authentic, more real liberals rather than ones that simply pay lip service to these moral ideals?

Lefebvre: One main thing is whether a lot of your day-to-day behaviors support fairness in some really simple way. We live, of course, in compromised societies and with deep inequalities, but there are certain things that we do here and now that are definitely illiberal.

I'll confess my great sin: I send my daughter to a private school here in Australia. Now, if I think about that for a moment, I don't think I can square that with my liberal commitments. I'm taking her talents, I'm taking some revenue out of the public system, and then putting it into this other thing which will lavish generational advantage on it, generating all this meritocracy business that we know and hate and love and participate in

I think all of us do game the systems in that way. We file for taxes, we try to claim any deduction we can, we treat others ungenerously, we always try to assert our privileges and prerogatives above those of others. They just insinuate themselves into our everyday behavior. So what I'm trying to say is that we have to call ourselves out for not living up to it.

the book isn't scolding. I'm not trying to say that you're a bad liberal

What I'm trying to do in the book is I'm trying to furnish readers with reasons as to why they might want to adhere to their liberal values. And so I outline all the kinds of pleasures and joys and what I call felicities (or perks) of living a liberal way of life. I think there are a great many. I think it's joyful, it's cheerful, it's redemptive in some important way. It leads to all kinds of wonderful ideas like being more impartial, more autonomous, more free. So that's the pitch that I'm trying to make.

Citizens’ trust in mainstream institutions has been absolutely shattered. Corporations and the military, universities and the courts, all used to enjoy a certain modicum of residual trust. That trust is now gone. It is unlikely to return anytime soon.

America remains one of the most affluent and successful societies in the history of humanity. And while ideological excesses have significantly weakened American institutions over the course of the last years, these institutions do remain capable of impressive work: For every ridiculous article about racism in the knitting community that The New York Times publishes, for example, it also puts out several sober reports about important world events.

And yet, we must admit that the wound is to a significant degree self-inflicted. A small cadre of extreme activists obsessed with an identitarian vision of the world—a vision that pretends to be left-wing but in many ways parallels the tribalist worldview that has historically characterized the far-right—has gained tremendous influence over the last years. And even those institutional insiders who were able to keep this influence at bay through clever rearguard actions were rarely willing to oppose them in explicit terms.

Sensing that the political winds had shifted, she did not reprise her flirtations with the idea of defunding the police or decriminalizing illegal border crossings. But neither did she have the courage to explicitly call out the ideological foundations for these deeply unpopular positions—or to reassure millions of swing voters that she would be willing to stand up for common sense when doing so might risk inspiring a little pushback within her coalition.

he problem is that Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party, and the wider world of establishment institutions with which they are widely associated are also far outside the American cultural mainstream. 

Harris’ campaign had many opportunities to address that problem. She could have asked her supporters not to self-segregate by race and gender the moment she became the official nominee. She could have defended a woman’s right to choose without condoning late-term abortions and stood up for the value of vaccines while acknowledging pandemic-era overreach by public health authorities. She could have chosen to make her case to the millions of swing voters who listen to the most popular podcast in the country. But she did not do any of that

I don’t know whether Harris’ failure to mitigate Democrats’ glaring political weaknesses was due to fear and indecision or due to ideological conviction and a distorted perception of reality. But I do know that the price that she—and the rest of the world—is paying for that failure goes by the name of Donald J. Trump.

it should by now be amply evident that every country is vulnerable to this form of political appeal. French and German elites have done a somewhat better job of protecting their countries’ institutions from the ideological capture that has contributed to the profound breakdown in trust in the American establishment. But many of the same trends are well underway in those countries as well.

Today, it seems much more likely that he has cemented his standing as the figurehead of a political movement that will lastingly transform the politics of the United States—and, perhaps, much of the democratic world.

Democrats would be making a big mistake if they simply reverted to the #resistance playbook which has failed to inflict a decisive defeat on Donald Trump or his movement in the past.

What they need to do if they want to ensure that the Trump era lasts fifteen rather than thirty or even fifty years is much harder than that: They need to build a political coalition that is broad enough to win durable and sizable majorities against Trump as well as other politicians of his ilk. And that will prove impossible without a serious reckoning with the ways in which they, and the wider ecosystem for which they stand, have lost the trust of most Americans.