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Once a cohort or society builds a hateful mindset, the hatred takes on a life of its own. Extremist ideology not only hurts a society's enemies, but also eventually attacks from within and harms the society from which it originated.

Consider how the kingdom of Saudi Arabia disseminated the Wahhabi sect's fundamentalist attitudes against Jews and Christians at home and abroad. It helped to fund the madrassas that fostered the extreme perspectives that eventually contributed to the September 11th terror attacks on New York and Washington.

The great irony is that his unbridled hatred had also prompted him to attack the Saudi kingdom, too. Bin Laden's extremist hunger was such that even the Saudi Wahhabis who helped inculcate his all-consuming intolerance could no longer prove pious enough in his eyes.

More than half of Chinese in their 20s express a desire to start their own business. Others will climb up the ranks of the ruling Communist Party

How they understand their country’s past and what they ask of its future are essential to understand how they might one day lead China.

Youth often stands for trendsetting and rebellion. In China, the young must navigate an authoritarian state and a bruisingly competitive education system. This is when big life decisions are made and adult identities formed.

Joe Biden promised, if elected, to create a bipartisan commission to study court reform proposals

But who would sit on the commission? And would it have any teeth?

With Democrats now in control, some liberals are clamoring for quick action on Supreme Court reform, and some Republicans are proposing a constitutional amendment that would lock in the number of justices at nine.

The picture which Mr. Brezhnev paints will be a flattering one to the Communist Party which, in its 59 years of rule, has transformed Russia from the most backward power Europe into a superpower.

The Soviet Union now not only leads the United States in many basic categories but also leads the world. It last year produced 770 million short tons of coal against 643 million by the United States;

These are no small achievements for a party which started out with a furtive meeting in Minsk in March 1898, attended by nine persons representing six different revolutionary factions.

Tim, and that he meant to ask his question “in all due respect.”Warren, a year and more than a hundred and fifty town halls into her Presidential campaign, seemed to know what was coming. She said, “Why does this make me uneasy?” People in the crowd laughed, and then, with a spirited, resigned air, she said, “Go ahead, Tim.”Tim said that he was an evangelical Christian, and that he found himself “continually bombarded by Democratic candidates who demonize my beliefs, calling them bigoted and intolerant.” On issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, he said, he and Warren were bound to disagree, but he wanted to know what she might offer to voters like him. A man in a “Make America Great Again” hat stood and applauded vigorously, as if something brave had been said.

“I was born and raised Methodist,” Warren said. “I’ve been a Sunday-school teacher. Most of the scripture I quote is still King James. I’m old school on this.”

“I understand that you and I may have differences—there may be a lot of different views in this room,” Warren said. “But here’s what I’m certain about. And that is, a woman who is in the position of trying to decide what she’s going to do about a pregnancy that she may not have planned for, may not have hoped for, may have been forced upon her, is a woman who should be able to call on anyone for help. She should be able to call on her partner, she should be able to call on her mom, she should be able to call on her priest or rabbi or pastor. But the one entity that should not be in the center of that very hard decision is the federal government.”

picking someone who has bent the truth so often about so many things — her ancestry, her commitment to serving a full term as senator, the schools her kids went to, the job her father had (according to her brother), or the time she was “fired” for being pregnant — is an unnecessary burden.

The Democrat I think is most likely to lose to Trump is Elizabeth Warren.I admire her ambition and grit and aggression, but nominating a woke, preachy Harvard professor plays directly into Trump’s hands

Pete Buttigieg’s appeal has waned for me.

For many, the process will be familiar territory. But for most of the incoming lawmakers, it's the beginning of a brand new chapter.

After electing a speaker of the House, one of the first orders of business for the new Congress will be adopting a set of rules to govern the much-talked-about Jan. 6 joint session, when both chambers meet to formally count the votes of the Electoral College. Several House members and a group of senators have said they plan to object, which will cause a delay in the proceedings.

A record number of women, racial minorities and members of the LGBTQ community make the 117th Congress the most diverse in history.

Progressive activists are working to turn this year's nationwide protests over police brutality and racial injustice into results at the polls on Election Day,

Georgia Democrats need to flip 16 seats out of 180 to take control of the chamber.

In addition, the Color of Change PAC, the political arm of a longstanding civil rights organization, has endorsed a slate of what it defines as progressive prosecutors. And liberal organizations recently created The Frontline initiative to turn out young people of color.

news outlets and social media are crackling with a debate over the value of free speech vs. the rooting out of systemic bias.

It’s past time we stopped attaching labels such as “liberal” or “progressive” to a movement that is anything but.

whether I agree with anything Pinker says — whether any of us do, really — is beside the point. What struck me most, reading about the coordinated attack on his integrity, is something Pinker said in his own defense.

The newest Social Progress Index, shared with me before its official release Thursday morning, finds that out of 163 countries assessed worldwide, the United States, Brazil and Hungary are the only ones in which people are worse off than when the index began in 2011. And the declines in Brazil and Hungary were smaller than America’s.

The index, inspired by research of Nobel-winning economists, collects 50 metrics of well-being — nutrition, safety, freedom, the environment, health, education and more — to measure quality of life.

Norway comes out on top in the 2020 edition, followed by Denmark, Finland and New Zealand.

"We may be in for a very apocalyptic fall, I'm sorry to say," said Dr. Peter Hotez,

"And it's happening because we're forcing schools to reopen in areas of high transmission. We're forcing colleges to reopen, and we don't have the leadership nationally,

Despite slow, steady progress after an abysmal July, daily new cases have once again soared above 40,000, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The US is on the cusp of 200,000 Covid-19 deaths.

The January 6 invasion of the US Capitol laid bare many uncomfortable truths about American society.

Some of the danger comes directly out of Capitol attack coverage

it's critical not to let stereotypes about "hillbilly malignancy" or economic anxiety blind us to the role that "respectable people" — business owners, CEOs and real estate brokers; at least 19 state and local officials; and law enforcement and service members — played in the siege that left five dead and scores of police officers injured.

here are questions as to whether the leftward shift seen in the polls “is short-term or reflects a long-term trend.” Whites’ racial attitudes, Banks wrote:are fairly stable. Once their attitudes are crystallized, they tend not to change. It would take a shifting of racial norms to change the country’s (e.g. whites’) views about policing and the black community.” He added that “much more would need to be done from both political parties and activists to cause a major change in the politics of race.

White Americans have a history of losing interest in racial justice soon after they acknowledge injustice, as if their acknowledgment, rather than actual changes in the world, was the end of the matter. We saw as the Sixties progressed, many whites who were appalled by dogs attacking black children eventually lost patience with demands for greater economic equality for blacks and resisted changes in their own communities.

He warned that “this is a moment when it’s especially dangerous to misunderstand what public opinion surveys tell us.”The fundamental analytical danger is to believe that the result of opinion polling matters in any straightforward way. That’s not how America works, otherwise we would have had stricter gun control after Parkland, etc. The actual question is not whether a majority of Americans say they want X on a survey, but whether enough Americans care enough about X in their lives to overcome the resistance and resources of those who benefit from/believe in X as well as a system of government that puts up enormous procedural barriers against the kinds of X’s we are talking about.

“Capitalism and Slavery,” published in 1944 by Eric Williams, a young historian who later became the first Prime Minister of an independent Trinidad and Tobago. The book, which argued for the centrality of slavery to the rise of capitalism, was largely ignored for half a century; now its thesis is a starting point for a new generation of scholarship.

Large-scale Southern slaveholders are today understood as experts in such business practices as harsh, ever-increasing production quotas for workers and the creation of sophisticated credit instruments. Rather than representing an alternative system to industrial capitalism, American plantations enabled its development, providing the textile mills of Manchester and Birmingham with cotton to be spun into cloth by the new British working class

“There was no such thing as capitalism without slavery: the history of Manchester never happened without the history of Mississippi.”

Recognizing that Black people matter as much as all other Americans is only acknowledging what’s always been true. Embracing Blackness as a something of value and dignity is a baseline for progress, not progress; it is moving into position at the starting line, but it is not the race.

Going from the current enthusiasm to doing the million things that need to be done — simultaneously — to start correcting systemic racism (whoever thought that phrase would trend on social media?) will be daunting, not least because it is unprecedented.

Over and over, Black people have asserted the simple but radical truth of their own humanity and worthiness, and over and over, America has not fully heard them.

what does it say when a completely generic endorsement of free speech and open debate is in and of itself immediately diagnosed as anti-progressive, as anti-left?

There is literally no specific instance discussed in that open letter, no real-world incident about which there might be specific and tangible controversy. So how can someone object to an endorsement of free speech and open debate without being opposed to those things in and of themselves? You can’t.

people are objecting to it because social justice politics are plainly opposed to free speech.

But as an age of violently polarised, partisan and poisonous politics has taken hold, it is that early encounter with Reagan that has begun to play on his mind. “It taught me a lot about the importance of the ability to listen attentively,” he says, “which matters as much as the rigours of the argument. It taught me about mutual respect and inclusion in the public square.”

As American commentators warn of an “Armageddon” election in a divided country, how can a less resentful, less rancorous, more generous public life be revived?

The starting point, uncomfortably, turns out to be a bonfire of the vanities that sustained a generation of progressives.

Joe Biden may be running a safe and centrist campaign, but beneath the methodical calm is a genuinely innovative ideological appeal

The former vice president is updating and bringing back the long-dormant Democratic tradition of labor liberalism.

By addressing the climate crisis through investments in efficiency and new energy sources, Biden turns actions to try to avert environmental catastrophe into an engine of job creation.

Yglesias explained why pushing back against the “dominant sensibility” in digital journalism is important to him. He said he believes that certain voguish positions are substantively wrong—for instance, abolishing or defunding police—and that such arguments, as well as rhetorical fights over terms like Latinx, alienate many people from progressive politics and the Democratic Party.

there’s a dynamic where there’s media people who really elevated the profile of [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] and a couple of other members way above their actual numerical standing.”

“The people making the media are young college graduates in big cities, and that kind of politics makes a lot of sense to them,” he said. “And we keep seeing that older people, and working-class people of all races and ethnicities, just don’t share that entire worldview. It’s important to me to be in a position to step outside that dynamic …

President-elect Joe Biden is set to announce who will serve in top roles in his administration in the coming days and weeks.

Ron Klain, one of his most trusted campaign advisers, will serve as his incoming chief of staff. And Jen O'Malley Dillon, Biden's campaign manager, and Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, a co-chair of Biden's transition team and presidential campaign, will serve in top roles in the White House.

Each of Biden's Cabinet nominees will need to be confirmed by the US Senate, which is currently controlled by Republicans. Two runoff elections in Georgia on January 5 could determine which party controls the chamber and impact the Cabinet confirmation process.