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Worldwide, more than 5,500 private vessels clock in about 100 feet or longer, the size at which a yacht becomes a superyacht.

France’s minister of the environment, dismissed calls to regulate yachts and chartered flights as “le buzz” — flashy, populist solutions that get people amped up but ultimately only fiddle at the margins of climate change.

Private aviation added 37 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in 2016, which rivals the annual emissions of Hong Kong or Irelan

Indeed, a 200-foot vessel burns 132 gallons of diesel fuel an hour standing still, and can guzzle 2,200 gallons just to travel 100 nautical miles.

this misses a much more important point. Research in economics and psychology suggests humans are willing to behave altruistically — but only when they believe everyone is being asked to contribute. People “stop cooperating when they see that some are not doing their part,” as the cognitive scientists Nicolas Baumard and Coralie Chevallie

In that sense, superpolluting yachts and jets don’t just worsen climate change, they lessen the chance that we will work together to fix it. Why bother, when the luxury goods mogul Bernard Arnault is cruising around on the Symphony, a $150 million, 333-foot superyacht?

making these overgrown toys a bit more costly isn’t likely to change the behavior of the billionaires who buy them. Instead, we can impose new social costs through good, old-fashioned shaming.

“kylie jenner is out here taking 3 minute flights with her private jet, but I’m the one who has to use paper straws,” one Twitter user wrote.

When billionaires squander our shared supply of resources on ridiculous boats or cushy chartered flights, it shortens the span of time available for the rest of us before the effects of warming become truly devastating. In this light, superyachts and private planes start to look less like extravagance and more like theft.

After the 2008 financial crisis, it took 12 years for employment rates to get back to pre-crisis levels. But only three years after Covid struck, employment is fully back for almost every age and demographic group.

At this point the employed percentage of adults is at or above early 2020 levels for every age group except those 70 or older.

The overall unemployment rate is only 3.5 percent; we haven’t had that spirit here since 1969. Black unemployment is at a record low. There’s good news everywhere you look.

So whaddya know: Provide enough job opportunities, and lazy video-game-playing Americans will take those jobs and, apparently, demonstrate enough skill that employers want to keep them.

Full employment also turns out to be a powerful force for equality, on multiple dimensions. The gap between Black and white unemployment is now a fifth of what it was when Ronald Reagan proclaimed “morning in America.” A tight labor market has led to big gains for low-wage workers, sharply reducing overall wage inequality.

The big question now is whether the good news on jobs is somehow a mirage, based on an unsustainably hot labor market that will have to cool off drastically to contain inflation.

what does the current data say? To some extent the answer is, whatever you want to hear.

maybe the important point is that almost every measure of inflationary pressure I’m aware of has improved substantially over the past year, with no increase in the unemployment rate

there’s good reason to believe that we can sustain the incredibly good job market we have right now, even while getting inflation under control. And it will be a real tragedy if exaggerated fear of inflation causes the Federal Reserve to push interest rates too high for too long, leading to a gratuitous recession that throws away many of the gains we’ve made.

Republicans keep insisting President Biden’s policies have been an economic disaster, and that even the mainstream news media has tended to emphasize inflation — which has been a nasty shock, even though it may be subsiding — rather than job gains.

So it does seem worth pointing out that at this point Biden is presiding over the best job market America has seen in a generation — specifically since the boom of the late Clinton years. And that, as Biden himself might (almost) say, is a big something deal.

it is easy to forget how much we have in common as people. I can’t think of any major nation after the United States with more of a Protestant work ethic and naturally capitalist population than China.

These days, it is extremely difficult for a visiting columnist to get anyone — a senior official or a Starbucks barista — to speak on the record. It was not that way a decade ago.

The Communist Party’s hold is also a product of all the hard work and savings of the Chinese people, which have enabled the party and the state to build world-class infrastructure and public goods that make life for China’s middle and lower classes steadily better.

Beijing and Shanghai, in particular, have become very livable cities, with the air pollution largely erased and lots of new, walkable green spaces.

some 900 cities and towns in China are now served by high-speed rail, which makes travel to even remote communities incredibly cheap, easy and comfortable

Just when trust has become more important than ever between the U.S. and China, it also has become scarcer than ever. Bad trend.

China’s stability is a product of both an increasingly pervasive police state and a government that has steadily raised standards of living. It’s a regime that takes both absolute control and relentless nation-building seriously.

For an American to fly from New York’s Kennedy Airport into Beijing Capital International Airport today is to fly from an overcrowded bus terminal to a Disney-like Tomorrowland.

China got an early jump on A.I. in two realms — facial recognition technology and health records — because there are virtually no privacy restrictions on the government’s ability to build huge data sets for machine learning algorithms to find patterns.

“ChatGPT is prompting some people to ask if the U.S. is rising again, like in the 1990s,”

“I understand your feeling: You have been in the first place for a century, and now China is rising, and we have the potential to become the first — and that is not easy for you,” Hu said to me. But “you should not try to stop China’s development. You can’t contain China in the end. We are quite smart. And very diligent. We work very hard. And we have 1.4 billion people.”

Before the Trump presidency, he added: “We never thought China-U.S. relations would ever become so bad. Now we gradually accept the situation, and most Chinese people think there is no hope for better relations. We think the relationship will be worse and worse and hope that war will not break out between our two countries.”

A lot of people hesitated when I asked. Indeed, many would answer with some version of “I’m not sure, I just know that it’s THEIR fault.”

t was repeated conversations like these that got me started asking American, Chinese and Taiwanese investors, analysts and officials a question that has been nagging at me for a while: What exactly are America and China fighting about?

the real answer is so much deeper and more complex than just the usual one-word response — “Taiwan” — or the usual three-word response — “autocracy versus democracy.”

Let me try to peel back the layers. The erosion in U.S.-China relations is a result of something old and obvious — a traditional great-power rivalry between an incumbent power (us) and a rising power (China) — but with lots of new twists

One of the twists, though, is that this standard-issue great-power rivalry is occurring between nations that have become as economically intertwined as the strands of a DNA molecule. As a result, neither China nor America has ever had a rival quite like the other.

in modern times, China, like America, has never had to deal with a true economic and military peer with which it was also totally intertwined through trade and investment.

Another new twist, and a reason it’s hard to define exactly what we’re fighting about, has a lot to do with how this elusive issue of trust and the absence of it have suddenly assumed much greater importance in international affairs.

This is a byproduct of our new technological ecosystem in which more and more devices and services that we both use and trade are driven by microchips and software, and connected through data centers in the cloud and high-speed internet

so many more things became “dual use.” That is, technologies that can easily be converted from civilian tools to military weapons, or vice versa.

no one country or company can own the whole supply chain. You need the best from everywhere, and that supply chain is so tightly intertwined that each company has to trust the others intimately.

when we install the ability to sense, digitize, connect, process, learn, share and act into more and more things — from your GPS-enabled phone to your car to your toaster to your favorite app — they all become dual use, either weapons or tools depending on who controls the software running them and who owns the data that they spin off.

As long as most of what China sold us was shallow goods, we did not care as much about its political system — doubly so because it seemed for a while as if China was slowly but steadily becoming more and more integrated with the world and slightly more open and transparent every year. So, it was both easy and convenient to set aside some of our worries about the dark sides of its political system.

when you want to sell us ‘deep goods’ — goods that are dual use and will go deep into our homes, bedrooms, industries, chatbots and urban infrastructure — we don’t have enough trust to buy them. So, we are going to ban Huawei and instead pay more to buy our 5G telecom systems from Scandinavian companies we do trust: Ericsson and Nokia.”

as we’ve seen in Ukraine, a smartphone can be used by Grandma to call the grandkids or to call a Ukrainian rocket-launching unit and give it the GPS coordinates of a Russian tank in her backyard.

So today, the country or countries that can make the fastest, most powerful and most energy efficient microchips can make the biggest A.I. computers and dominate in economics and military affairs.

As more and more products and services became digitized and electrified, the microchips that powered everything became the new oil. What crude oil was to powering 19th- and 20th-century economies, microchips are for powering 21st-century economies.

When you ask them what is the secret that enables TSMC to make 90 percent of the world’s most advanced logic chips — while China, which speaks the same language and shares the same recent cultural history, makes zero — their answer is simple: “trust.”

TSMC is a semiconductor foundry, meaning it takes the designs of the most advanced computer companies in the world — Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD and others — and turns the designs into chips that perform different processing functions

TSMC makes two solemn oaths to its customers: TSMC will never compete against them by designing its own chips and it will never share the designs of one of its customers with another.

“Our business is to serve multiple competitive clients,” Kevin Zhang, senior vice president for business development at TSMC, explained to me. “We are committed not to compete with any of them, and internally our people who serve customer A will never leak their information to customer C.”

But by working with so many trusted partners, TSMC leverages the partners’ steadily more complex designs to make itself better — and the better it gets, the more advanced designs it can master for its customers. This not only requires incredibly tight collaboration between TSMC and its customers, but also between TSMC and its roughly 1,000 critical local and global suppliers.

As the physics of chip making gets more and more extreme, “the investment from customers is getting bigger and bigger, so they have to work with us more closely to make sure they harvest as much [computing power] as they can. They have to trust you.”

China also has a foundry, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, which is partly state-owned. But guess what? Because no global chip designers trust SMIC with their most advanced designs, it is at least a decade behind TSMC.

It’s for these reasons that the erosion in U.S.-China relations goes beyond our increasingly sharp disagreements over Taiwan. It is rooted in the fact that just when trust, and its absence, became much bigger factors in international affairs and commerce, China changed its trajectory. It made itself a less trusted partner right when the most important technology for the 21st century — semiconductors — required unprecedented degrees of trust to manufacture and more and more devices and services became deep and dual use.

when American trade officials said: “Hey, you need to live up to your W.T.O. commitments to restrict state-funding of industries,” China basically said: “Why should we live by your interpretation of the rules? We are now big enough to make our own interpretations. We’re too big; you’re too late.”

Combined with China’s failure to come clean on what it knew about the origins of Covid-19, its crackdown on democratic freedoms in Hong Kong and on the Uyghur Muslim minority in Xinjiang, its aggressive moves to lay claim to the South China Sea, its increasing saber rattling toward Taiwan, its cozying up to Vladimir Putin (despite his savaging of Ukraine), Xi’s moves toward making himself president for life, his kneecapping of China’s own tech entrepreneurs, his tighter restrictions on speech and the occasional abduction of a leading Chinese businessman — all of these added up to one very big thing: Whatever trust that China had built up with the West since the late 1970s evaporated at the exact moment in history when trust, and shared values, became more important than ever in a world of deep, dual-use products driven by software, connectivity and microchips.

it started to matter a lot more to Western nations generally and the United States in particular that this rising power — which we were now selling to or buying from all sorts of dual-use digital devices or apps — was authoritarian.

eijing, for its part, argues that as China became a stronger global competitor to America — in deep goods like Huawei 5G — the United States simply could not handle it and decided to use its control over advanced semiconductor manufacturing and other high-tech exports from America, as well as from our allies, to ensure China always remained in our rearview mirror

Beijing came up with a new strategy, called “dual circulation.” It said: We will use state-led investments to make everything we possibly can at home, to become independent of the world. And we will use our manufacturing prowess to make the world dependent on our exports.

Chinese officials also argue that a lot of American politicians — led by Trump but echoed by many in Congress — suddenly seemed to find it very convenient to put the blame for economic troubles in the U.S.’s middle class not on any educational deficiencies, or a poor work ethic, or automation or the 2008 looting by financial elites, and the crisis that followed, but on China’s exports to the United States.

As Beijing sees it, China not only became America’s go-to boogeyman, but in their frenzy to blame Beijing for everything, members of Congress started to more recklessly promote Taiwan’s independence.

Xi told President Biden at their summit in Bali in November, in essence: I will not be the president of China who loses Taiwan. If you force my hand, there will be war. You don’t understand how important this is to the Chinese people. You’re playing with fire.

at some level Chinese officials now understand that, as a result of their own aggressive actions in recent years on all the fronts I’ve listed, they have frightened both the world and their own innovators at precisely the wrong time.

I don’t buy the argument that we are destined for war. I believe that we are doomed to compete with each other, doomed to cooperate with each other and doomed to find some way to balance the two. Otherwise we are both going to have a very bad 21st century.

I have to say, though, Americans and Chinese remind me of Israelis and Palestinians in one respect: They are both expert at aggravating the other’s deepest insecurities.

China’s Communist Party is now convinced that America wants to bring it down, which some U.S. politicians are actually no longer shy about suggesting. So, Beijing is ready to crawl into bed with Putin, a war criminal, if that is what it takes to keep the Americans at bay.

Americans are now worried that Communist China, which got rich by taking advantage of a global market shaped by American rules, will use its newfound market power to unilaterally change those rules entirely to its advantage. So we’ve decided to focus our waning strength vis-à-vis Beijing on ensuring the Chinese will always be a decade behind us on microchips.

I don’t know what is sufficient to reverse these trends, but I think I know what is necessary.

If it is not the goal of U.S. foreign policy to topple the Communist regime in China, the United States needs to make that crystal clear, because I found a lot more people than ever before in Beijing think otherwise.

As for China, it can tell itself all it wants that it has not taken a U-turn in recent years. But no one is buying it. China will never realize its full potential — in a hyper-connected, digitized, deep, dual-use, semiconductor-powered world — unless it understands that establishing and maintaining trust is now the single most important competitive advantage any country or company can have. And Beijing is failing in that endeavor.

In his splendid biography of the great American statesman George Shultz, Philip Taubman quotes one of Shultz’s cardinal rules of diplomacy and life: “Trust is the coin of the realm.”

The 2024 election will not be the usual battle between parties, platforms and policies. It is a battle between those who fundamentally respect and abide by the ground rules of democracy and those who do not.

To underline his case most forcefully, Mr. Biden didn’t need to use his own words. He could rely on the words of his opponent: revenge, retribution, fight like hell, terminate the Constitution, suckers and losers, vermin, poisoning the blood of our country, dictator on Day 1, American carnage. There is no subtext here; it’s all text. As Mr. Biden put it, “We all know who Donald Trump is.”

And yet, apparently, we need to keep reminding ourselves. Otherwise, we fall into the trap of normalization that Mr. Trump laid from the start.

Today he can call for the execution of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or tell the Biden administration to “rot in hell,” or promote a video claiming he is literally a gift from God, and it gets less attention in both mainstream and social media than Mr. Biden tripping over a sandbag.

How did we end up here? Mr. Biden offered one compelling explanation: complacency. “We’ve been blessed so long with a strong, stable democracy, it’s easy to forget why so many before us risked their lives and strengthened democracy,

In that sense, democracy is like vaccines. Few people today have firsthand memories of the horrors of diseases that were rampant before vaccines largely eradicated them, which makes it easier for vaccine hesitancy to take root

Similarly, when a country has no history of living under a dictatorship, it can be easier to lose sight of what it means to live in a representative democracy, and to be caught flat-footed when a real authoritarian comes knocking.

Parents need to know that when children go online, they are entering a world of influencers, many of whom are hoping to make money by pushing dangerous products. It’s a world that’s invisible to us

when we log on to our social media, we don’t see what they see. Thanks to algorithms and ad targeting, I see videos about the best lawn fertilizer and wrinkle laser masks, while Ian is being fed reviews of flavored vape pens and beautiful women livestreaming themselves gambling crypto and urging him to gamble, too.

Smartphones are taking our kids to a different world

Greyson Imm, an 18-year-old high school student in Prairie Village, Kan., said he was 17 when Zyn videos started appearing on his TikTok feed. The videos multiplied through the spring, when they were appearing almost daily. “Nobody had heard about Zyn until very early 2023,” he said. Now, a “lot of high schoolers have been using Zyn. It’s really taken off, at least in our community.”

all of this is, unfortunately, only part of what makes social media dangerous.

The tobacco conglomerate Philip Morris International acquired the Zyn maker Swedish Match in 2022 as part of a strategic push into smokeless products, a category it projects could help drive an expected $2 billion in U.S. revenue in 2024.

P.M.I. is also a company that has long denied it markets tobacco products to minors despite decades of research accusing it of just that. One 2022 study alone found its brands advertising near schools and playgrounds around the globe.

the ’90s, when magazines ran full-page Absolut Vodka ads in different colors, which my friends and I collected and taped up on our walls next to pictures of a young Leonardo DiCaprio — until our parents tore them down. This was advertising that appealed to me as a teenager but was also visible to my parents, and — crucially — to regulators, who could point to billboards near schools or flavored vodka ads in fashion magazines and say, this is wrong.

Even the most committed parent today doesn’t have the same visibility into what her children are seeing online, so it is worth explaining how products like Zyn end up in social feeds

influencers. They aren’t traditional pitch people. Think of them more like the coolest kids on the block. They establish a following thanks to their personality, experience or expertise. They share how they’re feeling, they share what they’re thinking about, they share stuff they l

With ruthless efficiency, social media can deliver unlimited amounts of the content that influencers create or inspire. That makes the combination of influencers and social-media algorithms perhaps the most powerful form of advertising ever invented.

Videos like his operate like a meme: It’s unintelligible to the uninitiated, it’s a hilarious inside joke to those who know, and it encourages the audience to spread the message

Enter Tucker Carlson. Mr. Carlson, the former Fox News megastar who recently started his own subscription streaming service, has become a big Zyn influencer. He’s mentioned his love of Zyn in enough podcasts and interviews to earn the nickname Tucker CarlZyn.

was Max VanderAarde. You can glimpse him in a video from the event wearing a Santa hat and toasting Mr. Carlson as they each pop Zyns in their mouths. “You can call me king of Zynbabwe, or Tucker CarlZyn’s cousin,” he says in a recent TikTok. “Probably, what, moved 30 mil cans last year?”

Freezer Tarps, Mr. VanderAarde’s TikTok account, appears to have been removed after I asked the company about it. Left up are the large number of TikToks by the likes of @lifeofaZyn, @Zynfluencer1 and @Zyntakeover; those hashtagged to #Zynbabwe, one of Freezer Tarps’s favorite terms, have amassed more than 67 million views. So it’s worth breaking down Mr. VanderAarde’s videos.

All of these videos would just be jokes (in poor taste) if they were seen by adults only. They aren’t. But we can’t know for sure how many children follow the Nelk Boys or Freezer Tarps — social-media companies generally don’t release granular age-related data to the public. Mr. VanderAarde, who responded to a few of my questions via LinkedIn, said that nearly 95 percent of his followers are over the age of 18.

They’re incentivized to increase their following and, in turn, often their bank accounts. Young people are particularly susceptible to this kind of promotion because their relationship with influencers is akin to the intimacy of a close friend.

The helicopter video has already been viewed more than one million times on YouTube, and iterations of it have circulated widely on TikTok.

YouTube said it eventually determined that four versions of the Carlson Zyn videos were not appropriate for viewers under age 18 under its community guidelines and restricted access to them by age

Mr. Carlson declined to comment on the record beyond his two-word statement. The Nelk Boys didn’t respond to requests for comment. Meta declined to comment on the record. TikTok said it does not allow content that promotes tobacco or its alternatives. The company said that it has over 40,000 trust and safety experts who work to keep the platform safe and that it prevented teenagers’ accounts from viewing over two million videos globally that show the consumption of tobacco products by adults. TikTok added that in the third quarter of 2023 it proactively removed 97 percent of videos that violated its alcohol, tobacco and drugs policy.

Greyson Imm, the high school student in Prairie Village, Kan., points to Mr. VanderAarde as having brought Zyn “more into the mainstream.” Mr. Imm believes his interest in independent comedy on TikTok perhaps made him a target for Mr. VanderAarde’s videos. “He would create all these funny phrases or things that would make it funny and joke about it and make it relevant to us.”

It wasn’t long before Mr. Imm noticed Zyn blowing up among his classmates — so much so that the student, now a senior at Shawnee Mission East High School, decided to write a piece in his school newspaper about it. He conducted an Instagram poll from the newspaper’s account and found that 23 percent of the students who responded used oral nicotine pouches during school.

“Upper-decky lip cushions, ferda!” Mr. VanderAarde coos in what was one of his popular TikTok videos, which had been liked more than 40,000 times. The singsong audio sounds like gibberish to most people, but it’s actually a call to action. “Lip cushion” is a nickname for a nicotine pouch, and “ferda” is slang for “the guys.”

“I have fun posting silly content that makes fun of pop culture,” Mr. VanderAarde said to me in our LinkedIn exchange.

I turned to Influencity, a software program that estimates the ages of social media users by analyzing profile photos and selfies in recent posts. Influencity estimated that roughly 10 percent of the Nelk Boys’ followers on YouTube are ages 13 to 17. That’s more than 800,000 children.

I’ve spent the past three years studying media manipulation and memes, and what I see in Freezer Tarps’s silly content is strategy. The use of Zyn slang seems like a way to turn interest in Zyn into a meme that can be monetized through merchandise and other business opportunities.

Such as? Freezer Tarps sells his own pouch product, Upperdeckys, which delivers caffeine instead of nicotine and is available in flavors including cotton candy and orange creamsicle. In addition to jockeying for sponsorship, Mr. Carlson may also be trying to establish himself with a younger, more male, more online audience as his new media company begins building its subscriber base

This is the kind of viral word-of-mouth marketing that looks like entertainment, functions like culture and can increase sales

What’s particularly galling about all of this is that we as a society already agreed that peddling nicotine to kids is not OK. It is illegal to sell nicotine products to anyone under the age of 21 in all 50 states

numerous studies have shown that the younger people are when they try nicotine for the first time, the more likely they will become addicted to it. Nearly 90 percent of adults who smoke daily started smoking before they turned 18.

Decades later — even after Juul showed the power of influencers to help addict yet another generation of children — the courts, tech companies and regulators still haven’t adequately grappled with the complexities of the influencer economy.

Facebook, Instagram and TikTok all have guidelines that prohibit tobacco ads and sponsored, endorsed or partnership-based content that promotes tobacco products. Holding them accountable for maintaining those standards is a bigger question.

We need a new definition of advertising that takes into account how the internet actually works. I’d go so far as to propose that the courts broaden the definition of advertising to include all influencer promotion. For a product as dangerous as nicotine, I’d put the bar to be considered an influencer as low as 1,000 followers on a social-media account, and maybe if a video from someone with less of a following goes viral under certain legal definitions, it would become influencer promotion.

Laws should require tech companies to share data on what young people are seeing on social media and to prevent any content promoting age-gated products from reaching children’s feeds

hose efforts must go hand in hand with social media companies putting real teeth behind their efforts to verify the ages of their users. Government agencies should enforce the rules already on the books to protect children from exposure to addictive products,

I refuse to believe there aren’t ways to write laws and regulations that can address these difficult questions over tech company liability and free speech, that there aren’t ways to hold platforms more accountable for advertising that might endanger kids. Let’s stop treating the internet like a monster we can’t control. We built it. We foisted it upon our children. We had better try to protect them from its potential harms as best we can.

guided by a fascination with the wayward paths to fame, he half-unwittingly sows doubt about the justice of the American rise to artistic leadership in the postwar era. In his erudite account, artistic success owes little to vision and purpose, more to self-promotion, but most to unanticipated adoption by bigger systems with other aims, principally oriented toward money, political advantage, or commercial churn

For the greatness and inevitability of artistic consecration, Menand substitutes the arbitrary confluences of forces at any given moment.

The curriculum runs chapter by chapter through George Kennan, George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, Jackson Pollock, Lionel Trilling, Allen Ginsberg, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage, Elvis and the Beatles, Isaiah Berlin, James Baldwin, Jack Kerouac, Andy Warhol, Susan Sontag, and Pauline Kael. Each biography opens a door to a school or trend of work

Menand’s is not a “great man” view of history, because no one seems particularly great. One gets a feeling for Sartre as a person, a limited knowledge of how Sartre made Being and Nothingness, and a vivid sense of how the book made Sartre a celebrity. Then one learns how a troupe of others came along and rode his success like a sled.

Menand zooms in and out between individual egomaniacs and the milieus that facilitated their ascent and profited from their publicity.

group biographies, in miniature, of the existentialists, the Beats, the action painters, the Black Mountain School, the British Invasion, the pop artists, and many coteries more—are enchanting singly but demoralizing as they pile up

All of these enterprises look like hives of social insects, not selfless quests for truth or beauty. Menand is a world-class entomologist: He can name every indistinguishable drone, knows who had an oversize mandible, who lost a leg, who carried the best crumbs.

From this vantage, the monuments really are just anthills.

Menand is truly one of the great explainers. He quotes approvingly a lesson taken by Lionel Trilling from his editor Elliot Cohen: “No idea was so difficult and complex but that it could be expressed in a way that would make it understood by anyone to whom it might conceivably be of interest.”

The underlying theory of the book rests on a picture of what makes for “cultural winners,” works and ideas that Menand defines as

He is accurate, he is insightful, and he is not a dumber-downer

Menand’s account of each is an abbreviated tour de force. His explanations work at all levels: interpretation for scholars, review for general readers, introductions for neophytes. Where another writer would take 20 pages to tell us why someone or something mattered historically, Menand does it in two.

goods or styles that maintain market share through “generational” taste shifts—that is, through all the “the king is dead; long live the king” moments that mark the phases of cultural history for people living through it.

Menand’s recountings are less concerned with the changing meanings of individual works than with their successive adoptions and co-optations, in defiance of depth and meaning. It is a process of “winning” often based on cults of personality, indifference to complex origins, and the fortune or misfortune of timing

Menand is notably excellent on how commercial, regulatory, and technological changes determined which kinds of artwork made it to the public. His analysis helps demystify trends in commercial forms like film and pop music, especially when they otherwise seemed to run against the grain of pure profit

Often Menand’s point seems to be that the culture’s reigning talkers and salespeople and debaters need to conjure figures to venerate and attack (in ceaseless alternation) for short-range purposes of attention and competition. Any given work—1984, say, or Bonnie and Clyde—isn’t much of anything until it becomes a counter in other people’s games.

The central question of this period in culture might be whether U.S. artists lived up to expectations

In 1945, Europe was in ruins. America was rich and productive and dictated the terms of the postwar economic and political order. Certainly the U.S. had the power to pretend to cultural glory, too. But was it a pretense, or did Americans really continue and exceed the prewar triumphs of European modernism?

Most histories of the arts after 1945 assume that the greatest American successes deserved their fame.

The thrust of many of Menand’s retellings is that “in the business of cultural exchange, misprision is often the key to transmission.” Fame comes through misreadings, fantasies, unintended resonances, charisma, and publicity.

Menand’s book bequeaths the sense that the last laugh may truly have been on the self-seriousness of a whole historical period, one that treated its most publicized and successful arts figures far too generously, giving them too much credit for depth and vision, while missing the cynical forces by which they’d been buoyed up and marketed

“Foreign film” in America in the ’50s and ’60s—when independent art cinemas emerged, showing imports such as work by Ingmar Bergman and the French New Wave—proves to have been energized by a successful federal-government antitrust action against the monopolistic Hollywood studios

The idea of a “culture industry”

is used unironically by Menand to name the vastly scaled-up production and consumption of all artistic experience. “The culture industries, as they expanded, absorbed and commercialized independent and offbeat culture-makers, and the university, as it expanded, swallowed up the worlds of creative writing and dissident political opinion.”

With his eye on this process, we miss out on artists and thinkers who dug deep and stayed home, who produced as hermits or eccentrics or introverted students of their art

Where did rock ’n’ roll come from?” Menand wonders. He answers that it was “the by-product of a number of unrelated developments in the American music business” that redirected sales to teenagers, and also the result of new radio-station competition, the partial racial desegregation of the music charts, and the arrival of 200-disc jukeboxes

I can imagine The Free World leaving my hypothetical college senior, denizen of the bleak attention economy of the 21st century, feeling liberated to discover that culture was no better—no more committed to a quest for what is true, noble, lasting, and beautiful—in the world of the Baby Boomers and beaming grandparents.

The book is so masterful, and exhibits such brilliant writing and exhaustive research, that I wonder whether Menand could truly have intended where his history of the postwar era landed me. I learned so much, and ended up caring so much les

People might not agree on much, Chandler says, but the “veil of ignorance” encourages us to find a mutually agreeable starting point. If we don’t know what community we are born into, we should want a “reasonable pluralism.” We should also want the state “to maintain the conditions that are the basis for our freedom and equality as citizens.”

As an example, Chandler raises the thorny issue of free speech. “Political, moral and religious” speech “is integral to developing our sense of what is fair and how to live,” he writes, which is why it deserves robust protection. But since some speech, such as advertising, plays “no meaningful role” in helping us figure out how to live a good life, such speech can be limited. The idea is to balance individual and group freedoms with the need for peaceful coexistence

The state should protect the rights of gay people not to be discriminated against — even though the state cannot force anyone or any group to approve of gay relationships. Chandler, who is gay, suggests that premising gay rights on getting everyone to agree on the question of morality is a waste of energy: “For some people this” — the belief that homosexuality is a sin — “is part of their faith and no reasoned argument will persuade them otherwise.”

The last two-thirds of “Free and Equal” are given over to specific policy proposals. Some of them sound familiar enough — restricting private money in politics; beefing up civic education — while others are more far-reaching and radical, including the establishment of worker cooperatives, in which “workers decide how things are done,” and the abolition of private schools.

t despite his valiant efforts, the book enacts both the promise and the limitations of the theory it seeks to promote. It didn’t leave me cold, but it did leave me restless.

He persuasively refutes the conflation of liberal egalitarianism with technocracy, and helpfully points out that an emphasis on technocratic competence “leaves many voters cold.

For anyone who venerates consensus in politics, this sounds appealing; given the fissures of our current moment, it also comes across as wildly insufficient.

that’s part of Chandler’s point: A Rawlsian framework encourages people with a variety of deeply held commitments to live together in mutual tolerance, free to figure out questions of individual morality and the good life for themselves.

Regarding Katrina Forrester’s “In the Shadow of Justice” (2019), a searching and brilliant history of how his ideas presumed a postwar consensus that was already fracturing at the time that “A Theory of Justice” was published, Chandler has little to say.

“Free and Equal” includes a detailed chapter on “Rawls and His Critics,” but mostly navigates around anything that might truly rattle the Rawlsian framework.

Perhaps Forrester wouldn’t be surprised by this move; as she puts it, “The capaciousness of liberal philosophy squeezed out possibilities for radical critique.”

Biden’s Department of Education has interpreted Title VI to apply when students “experience discrimination, including harassment,” on the basis of their “shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics.”

these statements — even if fairly rooted in the text of Title VI — are not a solution

Executive orders and administrative regulations are more ephemeral than federal statutes. The next president (or one elected in 2036 or 2052) may choose to interpret Title VI differently. Biden’s interpretation is broader than Trump’s, for example. Courts will also have their own say, and they are now less deferential to presidential interpretations of the law than they’ve been in decades.

The definitions don’t just implicate the First Amendment, they also breed confusion around the very concept of harassment itself. Hearing unpleasant or even hateful thoughts or ideas isn’t “harassment.”

The best parts of the Antisemitism Awareness Act explicitly incorporate discrimination based on “actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics” into federal statutory law, elevating the legal protections well beyond the executive orders and guidance letters of previous administrations.

If the law had stopped there — or even if it had gone further and explicitly stated that discrimination on the basis of actual or perceived Jewish identity is by definition discrimination on the basis of shared ancestry, then it would be a vital addition to federal law.

But the law did not stop there. It goes on to require schools to consider the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism when determining whether there has been a violation of Title VI

This is a serious mistake. The alliance’s definition includes examples of antisemitism that encompass a broad range of statements that are protected by the First Amendment.

Both the Trump and the Biden administrations attempted to solve the problem by interpreting Title VI to apply to antisemitism, at least in some circumstances. The Trump administration issued an executive order stating that “discrimination against Jews may give rise to a Title VI violation when the discrimination is based on an individual’s race, color or national origin.”

That’s an inescapable part of life in a free, pluralistic nation

Harassment is something else entirely.

In a 1999 case, Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, the Supreme Court defined student-on-student harassment under Title IX (the federal statute prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded education) as conduct “so severe, pervasive and objectively offensive, and that so undermines and detracts from the victims’ educational experience, that the victims are effectively denied equal access to an institution’s resources and opportunities.”

Harassment doesn’t depend so much on the content or viewpoint of the objectionable speech as where, when and how it happens.

If students chant, “Globalize the intifada,” at a lawful public protest, then that’s protected

If they shout down Jewish students in class using the same phrase, or chant it outside the dorm rooms of Jewish students at 3 a.m., then they’re engaging in harassment. Jewish students can’t study or sleep on an equal basis with other students.

In both of those circumstances, the actual content of the words is less important than the timing and the targets. A person can commit an act of antisemitic harassment if he targets Jewish students with words that have nothing to do with ancestry or ethnicity

For example, if someone stands outside a Jewish student’s room night after night yelling, “Michael Jordan is the GOAT” relentlessly so that the student can’t sleep or targets her Jewish roommate with constant interruption and distraction then she’s engaging in antisemitic harassment not because of the content or viewpoint of the words, but rather because of the identity of the target and the time and manner of the speech.

I’d like to humbly offer a better way. Strip the problematic incorporation of the alliance’s antisemitism definition and examples from the bill entirely. Instead, simply amend Title VI itself to make it explicit that discrimination based on “actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics” is prohibited by the statute and that antisemitic discrimination meets that definition.

by revising Title VI to clearly prohibit discrimination against Jews without any further amplification or definition, antisemitic harassment will fit neatly into existing case law that has longed harmonized free speech principles and nondiscrimination law

American health experts advocated almost universal child vaccination; meanwhile, in Europe, experts cautioned against vaccinating young children, who were at low risk for serious illness, without more long-term data. “Were we pushing to vaccinate children for their sake or for ours?” Galea asks. “Were we doing it to support health or to make a political point?”

Scientists should have made more nuanced risk assessments and revisited them regularly. They should have taken into account the consequences and the disproportionate impact of strict lockdowns on lower-income workers and at-risk youth

This zero-sum mode of thinking — neglecting to take into account one’s own biases, succumbing to groupthink, operating according to the expectations of one’s “side,” discouraging good-faith debate — persisted even as the pandemic eased.

this tendency to view “core issues in Manichaean terms, with certain positions seen as on the side of good and others on the side of evil, with little gray area between,” as Galea puts it, has continued to inform public health postpandemic

It also undermines public faith in science, one of the few institutions that had maintained a high level of trust into the Trump era.

the percentage of Americans who believe science has a mostly positive effect on society dropped to 57 percent in 2023, from 67 percent in 2016. Those who say they have a great deal of confidence in scientists dropped to 23 percent, from 39 percent in 2020. And these declines took place among both Republicans and Democrats.

In my talks with more than 100 voters, no one mentioned the word “authoritarian.” But that was no surprise — many everyday people don’t think in those terms. Focusing solely on these labels can miss the point.

Authoritarian leaders project qualities that many voters — not just Trump voters — admire: strength, a sense of control, even an ends-justify-the-means leadership style

Our movie-hero presidents, Top Gun pilots and crusading lawyers often take matters into their own hands or break the rules in ways that we cheer.

they have something in common with Trump: They are seen as having special or singular strengths, an “I alone can fix it” power.

argued that it’s just Trump who’s strong and honest enough to say it out loud — for them, a sign that he’s honest.

also see him as an authentic strongman who is not a typical politician

during Trump’s presidency, “there weren’t any active wars going on except for Afghanistan, which he did not start. He started no new wars. Our economy was great. Our gas prices were under 2 bucks a gallon. It’s just common sense to me. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Trump’s vulgar language, his penchant for insults (“Don’t call him a fat pig,” he said about Chris Christie) and his rhetoric about political opponents (promising to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country”) are seen as signs of authenticity and strength by his supporters

Jan. 6, 2021, at the Capitol. I didn’t encounter a single outright supporter of what happened, but many people explained the events away. Increasingly separate information environments and our fractured media ecology shape the way people view that day.

they think Biden is too weak and too old to be president. They talk about him with attack lines frequently used by Trump, saying that he’s senile, falling down stairs, losing his train of thought while talking and so on

What I heard from voters drawn to Trump was that he had a special strength in making the economy work better for them than Biden has, and that he was a tough, “don’t mess with me” absolutist, which they see as helping to prevent new wars.

Many Trump supporters told me that had Trump been president, the war in Ukraine wouldn’t have happened because he would have been strong enough to be feared by Vladimir Putin or smart enough to make a deal with him, if necessary

Neither would Hamas have dared attack Israel, a few added. Their proof was that during Trump’s presidency, these wars indeed did not happen.

Like many of these right-wing populists, Trump leans heavily on the message that he alone is strong enough to keep America peaceful and prosperous in a scary world

In Iowa, Trump praised Orban himself before telling a cheering crowd: “For four straight years, I kept America safe. I kept Israel safe. I kept Ukraine safe, and I kept the entire world safe.”

from Trump, these statements often resulted in the crowds leaping to their feet (actually, some rallygoers never sat down) and interrupting him with applause and cheering.

That’s charisma. Charisma is an underrated aspect of political success — and it’s not necessarily a function of political viewpoint. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama oozed it, for example, and so does Trump.

Charismatic leaders, Weber wrote, “have a certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men,” and is sought as a leader, especially when people feel the times are troubled.

Polls also show that voters believe that Trump would do a better job than Biden on the economy, foreign policy and immigration. It was Trump’s perceived strength, in contrast with Biden’s perceived weakness, that was the common theme that tied it all together for his supporters.

“I’m not concerned with Jan. 6,” Finch said. “I don’t trust our government. I don’t trust anything they’re saying. They’ve been doing this to Black people for so long, railroading them, so they have zero credibility. So I don’t even care about it, and I don’t want to hear about Jan. 6.”

For her, biased mainstream media is misrepresenting him. “He was making the point that he’d use executive orders on Day 1, like the others do — executive orders bypass Congress, but that’s how it’s done these days,” she said. “He was being sarcastic, not saying he’d be a real dictator.”

What’s a bit of due process overstepped here, a trampled emoluments clause there, when all politicians are believed to be corrupt and fractured information sources pump very different messages about reality?

Politicians projecting strength at the expense of the rules of liberal democracy isn’t a new phenomenon in the United States, or the world. Thomas Jefferson worried about it. So did Plato. Perhaps acknowledging that Trump’s appeal isn’t that mysterious can help people grapple with its power.

there’s little reason to enserf or enslave a worker (not quite the same thing, but let’s leave that aside) if labor is abundant and land is scarce, so that the amount that worker could earn if he ran away barely exceeds the cost of subsistence.

But if land becomes abundant and labor scarce, the ruling class will want to pin workers in place, so they can forcibly extract the difference between the value of what workers can produce — strictly speaking, their marginal product — and the cost of keeping them alive.

Labor was scarce in pre-Civil War America, so free workers earned high wages by European standards. Here are some estimates of real wages in several countries as a percentage of U.S. levels on the eve of the Civil War:

In fact, the real historical puzzle is why high wages didn’t always lead to widespread slavery or serfdom

serfdom in the West had more or less withered away by around 1300, because Western Europe was overpopulated given the technologies of the time, which in turn meant that landowners didn’t need to worry that their tenants and workers would leave in search of lower rents or higher wages.

But the Black Death caused populations to crash and wages to soar. In fact, for a while, real wages in Britain reached a level they wouldn’t regain until around 1870:

Yet serfdom wasn’t reimposed, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. One thought, however, is that holding people captive in order to steal the fruits of their labor isn’t easy.

Indeed, slaveholders and their defenders lashed out at anyone who even suggested that slavery was a bad thing. As Abraham Lincoln said in his Cooper Union address, the slave interest in effect demanded that Northerners “cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right.”

Notice that Australia — another land-abundant, labor-scarce nation — more or less matched America; elsewhere, workers earned much less.

Landowners, of course, didn’t want to pay high wages. In the early days of colonial settlement, many Europeans came as indentured servants — in effect, temporary serfs

landowners quickly turned to African slaves, who offered two advantages to their exploiters: Because they looked different from white settlers, they found it hard to escape, and they received less sympathy from poor whites who might otherwise have realized that they had many interests in common. Of course, white southerners also saw slaves as property, not people, and so the value of slaves factored into the balance sheet of this greed-driven system.

Hence the rise of serfdom as Russia expanded east, and the rise of slavery as Europe colonized the New World.

Because U.S. slavery was race-based, however, there was a limited supply of slaves, and it turned out that slaves made more for their masters in Southern agriculture than in other occupations or places

Black people in the North were sold down the river to Southern planters who were willing to pay more for them, so slavery became an institution peculiar to one part of the country.

As such, slaves became a hugely important financial asset to their owners. Estimates of the market value of slaves before the Civil War vary widely, but they were clearly worth much more than the land they cultivated, and may well have accounted for the majority of Southern wealth.

Inevitably, slaveholders became staunch defenders of the system underlying their wealth

again, the dynamic was one in which greedy slaveholders used and perpetuated racism to sustain their reign of exploitation and terror.

But Northerners wouldn’t do that. There were relatively few Americans pushing for national abolition, but Northern states, one by one, abolished slavery in their own territories

This wasn’t as noble an act as it might have been if they had been confiscating slaveholders’ property, rather than in effect waiting until the slaves had been sold. Still, it’s to voters’ credit that they did find slavery repugnant.

And this posed a problem for the South

Anyone who believes or pretends to believe that the Civil War was about states’ rights should read Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs, which point out that the truth was almost the opposite. In his conclusion, Grant noted that maintaining slavery was difficult when much of the nation consisted of free states, so the slave states in effect demanded control over free-state policies.

This should sound familiar. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, states that have banned abortion have grown increasingly frantic over the ability of women to travel to states where abortion rights remain; it’s obvious that the right will eventually impose a national abortion ban if it can.

For a long time, the South actually did manage to exercise that kind of national control. But industrialization gradually shifted the balance of power within the United States away from the South to the North:

So did immigration, with very few immigrants moving to slave states.And the war happened because the increasingly empowered people of the North, as Grant wrote, “were not willing to play the role of police for the South” in protecting slavery.

So yes, the Civil War was about slavery — an institution that existed solely to enrich some men by depriving others of their freedom

And there’s no excuse for anyone who pretends that there was anything noble or even defensible about the South’s cause: The Civil War was fought to defend an utterly vile institution.

Anecdotally, it seems like everybody knows someone who has dropped out of the mainstream, vowing to vote for the AfD or talking about emigrating

What has started to dawn on us in recent months, and what the meeting in Potsdam laid bare, is that the far right is not about having horrific ideas — it is about enacting horrific ideas.

Germany’s far-right adherents really mean it. With funding, support and a very real chance of winning federal states this year, they are closer to power than they have ever been in the nearly 75-year history of post-Nazi Germany.

In his recent book “Triggerpunkte,” or “Trigger Points,” Steffen Mau, a sociologist at Humboldt University in Berlin, rejects the notion that German society is polarized neatly in two. In Germany, he argues, divisions instead run through several areas such as climate, migration and social justice. You can be moved by some issues, indifferent to others

In recent months, those motivated by their opposition to migration or climate policies were the most vocal and visible. Now those who care about democracy, minority rights and the rule of law have reached their trigger point, too.

As for our continuing distress, the standard explanation is a uniquely American loneliness. The surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, declared it an epidemic in its own right.

The truth, however, is there’s no good evidence that Americans are lonelier than ever

a major recent poll shows that older Americans are now significantly less lonely than they were three years ago; a recent peer-reviewed study reports that middle-aged Americans describe themselves as less lonely than they were 20 years ag

Loneliness is more pervasive among younger Americans, but there too, the rates have also plummeted since 2020

Logically, we should be feeling better. Why can’t we shake this thing?

loneliness was never the core problem. It was, rather, the sense among so many different people that they’d been left to navigate the crisis on their own. How do you balance all the competing demands of health, money, sanity?

The answer was always the same: Figure it out.

while other countries built trust and solidarity, America — both during and after 2020 — left millions to fend for themselves.

For millions of Americans, distrust feels like the most rational state.

The very different people I spoke with that year all had one thing in common: a feeling that in the wake of Covid, all the larger institutions they had been taught to trust had failed them. At the most precarious times in their lives, they found there was no system in place to help.

four years later, the situation is, if anything, worse.

Nursing homes across the country, where poor labor conditions were linked to higher Covid mortality levels, remain understaffed, leaving old, frail residents more vulnerable than they should be. Hunger and food insecurity remain wrenching emergencies.

Students haven’t fully returned to school. Congress passed the Child Poverty Reduction Act of 2021, one of the most effective antipoverty measures in decades. Then a year later, Congress ended it, pushing some five million young people back down into extreme financial need.

When everything was uncertain and everyone’s future was on the line, we walked right up to the precipice of a moral breakthrough, and then we turned back.

Look at the way we all accustomed ourselves to the term “essential worker,” an ostensible term of respect that instead condemned people to work in manifestly dangerous conditions. The adoption of that term made visible something we now cannot unsee: In the United States the people we rely on most to keep our world functioning are the people we treated as disposable.

we might call the bigger problem structural isolation: abandoned by employers, deprived of shared purpose, denied care. The combined effect sent a strong message that individual lives weren’t worth as much anymore.

People treated one another accordingly. We all remember the viral videos of people screaming at one another in supermarkets and on public transportation. Violent crime spiked. Even reckless driving surged — but it happened only in the United States.

The reasons for that American exceptionalism become only more urgent in an election year, when, as in a public health crisis, presidents can try to bring people together or try to turn them against one another.

Research published in the weekly Der Spiegel shows that the AfD, a party started by nationally minded economists who advocated a return to the Deutsche mark as the national currency, now uses language nearly identical to that of the defunct National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), a small, virulently xenophobic, and openly neo-Nazi party that ran in German elections for decades but never managed to win seats in the Bundestag.

“They have major ideological overlaps. The AfD measures up to the NPD [of 2012] in almost all areas, even if the AfD appears more moderate in its party program.”

Documents attributed to both parties employ reactionary terminology, some of it straight from Nazi Germany, such as Umvolkung (population replacement) and Volkstod (death of the German nation), as well as Stimmvieh (voting cattle) for voters of opposing parties and Passdeutschen (foreign nationals holding German passports). And like the NPD, Spiegel reported in another study, the AfD maintains close links with violent militants.

this radicalism, which in the past had turned Germans off, has now lifted the AfD to new heights: It is polling at 22 percent support nationwide, second only to the Christian Democrats, and well over 30 percent in several states, making it the number one political force there in advance of autumn elections.

The current outburst of popular indignation at the AfD, echoed by all of the other major political parties, comes on the heels of an investigative exposé that found that at a clandestine meeting in November, ranking AfD personalities met with known neo-Nazis and wealthy financiers to hammer out plans for the forced deportation of foreign nationals and even foreign-born German citizens.

The extremists congregated at a hotel near Potsdam to design what they called a “remigration master plan” to forcibly repatriate millions of people. Shocked observers drew parallels to the 1942 Wannsee Conference, held not far from Potsdam, at which the Nazis coordinated their plan to deport and murder the entire Jewish population of Europe.

While some AfD politicos have tried to distance the party from the Potsdam meeting, others endorsed its purpose. “Remigration is not a secret plan, but a promise. … and there’s no better way to put it,” announced Hans-Christoph Berndt, the AfD point person in the Brandenburg state parliament, on Jan. 17.

they confirm the diagnosis of many experts that the AfD, under the leadership of its most extreme figures—particularly Björn Höcke, a member of the Thuringia legislature—has outpaced other European far-right parties in its radicalism. “The current AfD wouldn’t find a place in the ranks of the Sweden Democrats and most of the other more moderate far-right parties among the European Conservatives and Reformists faction in the European Parliament,”

She explained that like the AfD, the Sweden Democrats, the Finns Party (formerly the True Finns), and the Danish People’s Party are opposed to immigration and favor law-and-order states. But the Nordic rightists’ experiences in office pushed them to adapt to mainstream norms and policy options. (The Sweden Democrats are currently an informal supporter of the Swedish ruling coalition; the Finns are a coalition member in Finland; and the DPP acted as a support party to a conservative Danish government between 2001 and 2011, as well as from 2015 to 2019.)

The radicalized AfD, Jungar said, in contrast to these parties, actively courts militants, trades in antisemitic tropes, and toys with the proposition of Germany exiting NATO and the European Union

Moreover, AfD politicians have stood against adoption rights for same-sex couples, the inclusion of disabled kids in schools, and the legality of abortion. “These positions simply wouldn’t stand a chance in Sweden,”

“The FPO under Kickl has moved further to the right. It is now indistinguishable from the right-wingers in the AfD,” he argued. “They want people who they think don’t belong here out of Austria. They don’t want to gas them yet, but they want to strip people of their citizenship. They want to cut people’s social benefits to such an extent that their livelihoods are destroyed. That is essentially the program of parties like the AfD and the FPO. They harbor fantasies ranging from populist to fascist.

“By stacking the courts and clamping down on opposition forces, these parties gradually undermined the democratic order,” Opratko said. “This is the AfD’s model. It’s what they want to do.”