Opinion | The Reason People Aren't Telling Joe Biden the Truth - The New York Times - 0 views
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They entered with courage and exited as cowards. In the past two weeks, several leaders have told me they arrived at meetings with President Biden planning to have serious discussions about whether he should withdraw from the 2024 election. They all chickened out.
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There’s a gap between what people say behind the president’s back and what they say to his face. Instead of dissent and debate, they’re falling victim to groupthink.
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According to the original theory, groupthink happens when people become so cohesive and close-knit that they put harmony above honesty. Extensive evidence has debunked that idea
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Opinion | J.D. Vance Keeps Selling His Soul. He's Got Plenty of Buyers. - The New York ... - 0 views
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what’s most Faustian about Mr. Vance — and by proxy Mr. Trump. Their belief that a movement built on aggrievement and rage can be easily controlled, that there is some way in which you can trick the Devil while holding onto what he’s given you.
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In my book on Faust, I argue that the politics of authoritarianism is often embraced as a tool by those who believe that they can contain such forces and use them for political gain.
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There is a lesson for Mr. Vance from the Faust story, however, assuming he can hear it. Beyond mere self-interest, what the legend warns against is the embrace of irrational forces and powers, especially when there is the delusion that the person trading their soul can wrangle the Devil
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Book Review: 'The Bright Sword,' by Lev Grossman - The New York Times - 0 views
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His journey is poignant and essential as he moves from trying to become part of a story to realizing that stories are lies we tell to make sense of a reality that defies simple narrative.
Opinion | Give Me Laundry Liberty or Give Me Death! - The New York Times - 0 views
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it seemed pretty clear that what really bothered conservatives was the very suggestion that American consumers should take into account the adverse effects their choices might have on other people. That sort of consideration, after all, is what the right mainly seems to mean when it condemns policies as “woke.”
Opinion | We're Asking the Wrong Question About Kamala Harris and Race - The New York T... - 0 views
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Harris often mentions the South Asian half of her heritage, but in traditional American discourse, it feels off to categorize her as simply South Asian — like Aziz Ansari or Mindy Kaling — and leave it there. Yet calling her just Black, as a kind of shorthand, feels right. Blackness is treated as blacking out, so to speak, whatever other race is involved. Most people default to this perspective — myself included.
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This approach contradicts not just logic, but also itself. In contrast to the centuries-old “one-drop rule” that segregationists have invoked to describe the indelible ancestral stain of so-called Black blood, enlightened people are supposed to believe that race is purely a social construct, with no biological basis. If so, then why does having some Black forebears make you Black, regardless of the rest of the family tree?
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I’ve fielded questions from people from France to Japan about why Obama is considered Black, rather than both Black and white. The question always feels naïve to me at first, but if you imagine stepping outside our particular national framework, it’s the foreigner who is making sense and the American version that is weird.
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Opinion | What Has Happened to My Party Haunts Me - The New York Times - 0 views
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Jonathan Rauch, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and my sometime co-author, told me that to begin to understand what has happened, you have to understand the difference between a personal political machine and a traditional political machine.
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Personal machines are different from party machines, Mr. Rauch added, because they’re inconsistent with democratic politics
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Even a corrupt party machine maintains institutional interests separate from those of its leader. It rewards and punishes behavior based on the electoral interests of the party, prioritizing winning elections over personal loyalty to the boss. A party machine thus rewards followers by getting them elected and then sustaining them in office
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'The Interview': Robert Putnam Knows Why You're Lonely - The New York Times - 0 views
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I think we’re in a really important turning point in American history. What I wrote in “Bowling Alone” is even more relevant now. Because what we’ve seen over the last 25 years is a deepening and intensifying of that trend. We’ve become more socially isolated, and we can see it in every facet in our lives.
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Social isolation leads to lots of bad things. It’s bad for your health, but it’s really bad for the country, because people who are isolated, and especially young men who are isolated, are vulnerable to the appeals of some false community. I can cite chapter and verse on this: Eager recruits to the Nazi Party in the 1930s were lonely young German men, and it’s not an accident that the people who are attracted today to white nationalist groups are lonely young white men.
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You distinguish between two types of social capital, right? There’s bonding social capital and there’s bridging social capital.
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