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The first great work of political philosophy, Plato’s “Republic”, was, in part, a meditation on the evils of mob rule. Plato regarded democracy as little more than mob rule by another name—perhaps without the violence, at least at first, but with the same lack of impulse control.

He noted that democracies are hard-wired to test boundaries.

Plato also argued that democracies inevitably degenerate into anarchy, as the poor plunder the rich and profligacy produces bankruptcy.

Anarchy leads to the rule of tyrants: a bully can appeal to the mob’s worst instincts precisely because he is ruled by his own worst instincts

this changed with the French and American revolutions, which were based on contrasting approaches to mob rule.

Aristotle, Plato’s great pupil, distinguished between three legitimate forms of government: kingship, aristocracy and democracy. He argued that they each have their dark shadows: tyranny, oligarchy and mob rule

He then outlined the ways in which these virtuous forms of government evolve into their opposites: democracy becomes mob rule when the rich hog the society’s wealth

A more practical thinker than Plato, Aristotle argued that there were two ways of preventing democracy from degenerating into mobocracy: mix in elements of kingship and aristocracy to restrain the will of the people; and create a large middle class with a stake in stability.

Machiavelli speculated that clever princes might be able to profit from chaos if they could forge the mob into a battering-ram against a decaying regime

Mostly elites were content with demonisation

He is, as it were, the mob in the form of a single person

The French Revolution also produced a robust conservative critique of mob rule—first in Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France

Samuel Huntington warned that “democratic overload”, with too many interest groups demanding too much from the state, would lead to democratic disillusionment as the state failed to live up to its ever-escalating promises.

Burke recognised that the mob has a collective psychology that makes it uniquely dangerous. It is a “monstrous medley of all conditions, tongues, and nations”. It relishes wild abandon—“horrid yells”, “shrilling screams” and the “unutterable abominations of the furies of hell”. It gets so carried away with its own righteous bloodlust that even normally decent people can be transformed into monsters.

He predicted that the revolution would end in the massacre of thousands (including the king, queen and priests) and the rise of a dictator who could restore law and order.

The cycle of mass protest followed by violence followed by dictatorship set a pattern for subsequent revolutions in Russia (1917), Cuba (1958) and elsewhere.

The American revolution succeeded where the French revolution and its progeny failed because it was based on a considered fear of “the confusion and intemperance of a multitude”.

“Federalist No. 55”, written by either James Madison or Alexander Hamilton, is particularly sharp on the way that ill-designed institutions can turn even sensible citizens into a baying crowd: “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob”.

The Founding Fathers argued that democracy could avoid becoming mobocracy only if it was hedged with a series of restraints to control the power of the people.

Alexis de Tocqueville added his own worries about mob rule in “Democracy in America”. For him the constitution alone is not strong enough to save democracy from the mob. A vigorous civic culture rooted in self-governing communities (he was particularly keen on New England’s townships) and a self-reliant and educated population are also necessary

So too is a responsible elite that recognises that its first duty is to “educate democracy”

The 19th century saw the world’s ruling elites reconciling themselves to the fact that democracy was the wave of the future. How you dealt with this wave depended largely on your attitude to the mob.

Pessimists held that delay was the best way to avert the mob.

This sort of pessimism has been out of fashion for a long time. The second world war and the defeat of Nazism led to an era of democratic self-confidence, and the fall of the Berlin Wall to one of democratic euphoria.

But a few pessimists continued to warn that democracies might well degenerate into mob rule if they neglected the health of their political institutions and civic culture. Seymour Martin Lipset, an American sociologist, echoed Aristotle’s view that a healthy democracy requires broad-based prosperity.

Harvey Mansfield, a political philosopher, reiterated Tocqueville’s worry that civic decay might corrupt democracy

many changed their minds when they discovered that, far from unleashing man’s natural goodness, the revolution had set free his inner demons. Those who stuck with the revolution despite the guillotine and the Terror did so on two grounds: that the old regime was responsible for the violence because it created so much pent-up hatred; and that you cannot improve the world without bloodshed.

In recent years the pessimists have grown in number

The election of Mr Trump, a reality-TV star, raised profound questions about the health of America’s political regime. Can democracy survive if television channels make billions of dollars by peddling misinformation and partisanship?

Or if wealthy people can invest vast sums of money in the political process?

Or if society is polarised into a superclass and a demoralised proletariat? Recent events suggest that the answer is “no”.

The age of democratic naivety died on January 6th. It is time for an age of democratic sophistication

Democracies may well be the best safeguard against mob rule, as liberal democrats have been preaching for centuries. But they can be successful only if countries put the necessary effort into nurturing democratic institutions: guarding against too much inequality, ensuring that voters have access to objective information, taming money in politics and reinforcing checks and balances.

Otherwise the rule of the people will indeed become the rule of the mob, and the stable democratic order that flourished from the second world war onwards will look like a brief historical curiosity.

What happens next? Well, Sanders has the AOC endorsement as well as $30+ million in the bank -- two very good things with about 100 days left until Iowa. The question now becomes: Does he have another issue on the campaign trail related to his health or age? If not, Sanders' heart attack might seem like a million years ago by the time Iowa Democrats turn out to vote in the caucuses. But if Sanders has any sort of problem between now and then, it's likely the end of his campaign.

Hillary Clinton started one of the strangest news cycles in the 2020 race at the end of the last week when she seemed to suggest that the Russians were "grooming" Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard to run as a third-party candidate. Gabbard, thrilled with the unexpected chance to battle with one of the biggest figures in the party, called Clinton the "queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long."

And yet, there are cracks. Over the weekend, former Ohio Gov. John Kasich announced that he supported the impeachment and removal of Trump. Florida Rep. Francis Rooney, a Republican, said he would consider impeaching Trump -- and then promptly announced his plan to retire from Congress in 2020.

1. The new Democratic front-runner ... now what?: There's a new top dog in the Democratic field: Elizabeth Warren. As Harry Enten and I noted in our brandnew rankings of the 10 Democrats most likely to wind up as the party's nominee, Warren has overtaken Biden not just in polling but also in money and organization. She also has the clearest path to be the nominee, with a polling and organizational edges in Iowa and a geographic connection in New Hampshire.

Warren's most obvious weakness -- from a policy perspective -- is on her ongoing unwillingness to state, clearly, whether or not middle-class families will see their taxes go up under her "Medicare for All" plan. The answer to that is almost certainly yes -- as Sanders, another "Medicare for All" proponent, acknowledged in the debate.  

They were incredibly efficient.

they often followed a remarkably straight trail across the countryside

weary travelers could guide themselves by a detailed collection of mile markers.

their design always employed multiple layers for durability and flatness.

Roads were built with a crown and adjacent ditches to ensure easy water drainage, and in some rainy regions they were even nestled on raised berms known as “aggers” to prevent flooding.

They were easy to navigate.

They were expertly engineered.

Roman roads were also lined with state-run hotels and way stations.

They included a sophisticated network of post houses and roadside inns.

“all roads lead to Rome,”

horse changing stations, or “mutationes,” which were located every ten miles along most routes.

Switching horses was especially important for imperial couriers, who were tasked with carrying communications and tax revenues around the Empire at breakneck speed.

They were well-protected and patrolled.

most Roman roads were patrolled by special detachments of imperial army troops known as “stationarii” and “beneficiarii.”

hey also doubled as toll collectors.

They allowed the Romans to fully map their growing empire.

the Peutinger Table is a 13th century copy of an actual Roman map created sometime around the 4th century A.D.

They were built to last.

Roman roads remained technologically unequaled until as recently as the 19th century.

Many Roman roads were used as major thoroughfares until only recently,

Rome’s enduring engineering legacy can also be seen in the dozens of ancient bridges, tunnels and aqueducts still in use today.

Spawforth notes that the palace contained about 350 living units varying in size, from multi-room apartments to spaces about the size of an alcove. The size and location of the room a person got depended on their rank and standing with the king. While the crown prince (known as the dauphin) got a sprawling apartment on the ground floor, a servant may have nothing more than a space in an attic or a makeshift room behind a staircase.

Scholars have suggested a number of factors that led him to build a great palace complex at Versailles and move the French government there. It's been noted that by keeping the king's residence some distance from Paris, it offered him protection from any civil unrest going on in the city. It also forced the nobles to travel to Versailles and seek lodging in the palace, something that impeded their ability to build up regional power bases that could potentially challenge the king.

A series of gardens, created in a formal style, stood to the west of the palace (one of them today is in the shape of a star) and contained sculptures as well as the pressurized fountains capable of launching water high into the air. The formality and grandeur of the gardens symbolized Louis XIV's absolute power, even over nature

Despite the richness of the palace, the kings had to make do with makeshift theaters up until 1768 when Louis XV allowed the building of the royal opera. It contained a mechanism that allowed the orchestra level to be raised to the stage allowing it to be used for dancing and banqueting. Spawforth notes that the opera required 3,000 candles to be burned for opening night and was rarely used due to its cost and the poor shape of France's finances.

After the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette would be stripped of power, brought to Paris and ultimately beheaded. The palace fell under the control of the new republican government.Many of its furnishings were sold to help pay for the subsequent Revolutionary Wars. When Napoleon came to power, he had an apartment created for himself in the Grand Trianon, complete with a map room.

In 1871, after France had lost a war against Prussia, Kaiser Wilhelm I was proclaimed Emperor of Germany in the Hall of Mirrors, adding an extra layer of humiliation to the French defeat. For several years after this defeat, the situation in France was so bad that its Chamber of Deputies and Senate opted to meet at Versailles, rather than Paris, for reasons of safety.

Today, Versailles is one of the most-visited sites in France. Visitors are drawn to its architectural grandeur, the stunning water features (concerts are often played in the gardens during the summer) and its sense of history. 

Historians aren’t certain how many people lived there at its height, but press spokesperson Catherin Steventon told ABC News that about 140 people live at the Tower now. “We can imagine more people probably lived here, we minted all of the coins of the realm in the tower so we had mint workers here, more buildings, and temporary buildings, we had more pubs. It shows the Chapel would have been used."

In 2015, shortly after he took over as Labour’s leader, he refused to sing the national anthem—“God Save the Queen”—during a memorial service for the Battle of Britain, the air war, in 1940, in which the Royal Air Force fought off Hitler’s marauding Luftwaffe.

As the national-anthem example indicates, Corbyn isn’t a very skilled politician—or, alternatively, he is a man of such high principle that he refuses to trim his positions at all to win votes.

Johnson and his chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, sensed the intense public frustration and built their entire election campaign around the slogan “Get Brexit Done.”

Like Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again,” Johnson’s slogan was simple, catchy, and misleading.

Voters often say that they support individual policies of progressive and left-wing parties, but history suggests that getting the public to elect such parties to government requires a plausible, persuasive leader and a favorable environment.

Tech isn't what everyone talks about in San Francisco. It's money. Real estate, income inequality, $20 salads, the homeless, adult children unable to move out, non-tech workers unable to move in.

What residents resent now is the shift to one industry, a monoculture.

Julie Levak-Madding, who manages the VanishingSF page on Facebook, documenting the “hyper-gentrifiction” of her city. “It’s so devastating to a huge amount of the population.”

Too homogenous. Too expensive. Too tech. Too millennial. Too white. Too elite. Too bro.

Everyone has a story about what isn’t here anymore. The inability to find a hardware store, a shoe repair, a lesbian bar, a drag-queen bar, an independent music club

San Francisco has less of what makes a city dynamic. It has the lowest percentage of children, 13.4 percent, of any major American city, and is home to about as many dogs as humans under the age of 18.

To take a midday tour downtown is to be enveloped by a jeaned and athleisured army of young workers, mostly white and Asian, and predominantly male. The presence of a boomer or toddler is akin to spotting an endangered species

“I don’t know anyone in San Francisco who is making a full-time living as an artist,” says Victor Krummenacher of the band Camper Van Beethoven, who left the city in April after 30 years, moving an hour east of Los Angeles. “Part of being an artist is being an observer of what is going on. In the Bay Area, you’re so mired in the congestion and costs.

San Francisco has also become less welcoming of altruistic professions, as teachers and social workers are priced out of housing.

The Sierra Club, founded in 1892, decamped to Oakland three years ago after its annual rent was projected to increase by almost $1.5 million. “Nonprofits are fleeing San Francisco. They can no longer afford it, ”

“You’re constantly trying to justify why you stay. There’s this blanket of anxiety and frustration that lives on top of everything,” says Talbot, a white fifth-generation San Franciscan. “You’re heartbroken because it’s changed so much and so quickly. This nostalgia is baked into everything, of missing what was here.

and now the gayborhoods are going away.” A resident of the Castro, the city’s famed gayborhood that’s been transformed by record prosperity, he bemoans the loss of cultural vitality and lack of caring for the less fortunate. “I don’t hear people talking about poetry. I still love my town. I still love my neighborhood, but it is changing very rapidly. It’s quite harsh and quite brutal and it frightens me.”

this is what happens when unbridled capitalism collides with progressive ideals.”

Benioff, the city’s largest employer, says residents are at “the beginning of our journey in San Francisco of understanding who we’ve become and where we’re going,” he says. Yet, he acknowledges, “there are a lot of people who are not willing to do the work. They’re here to make money. They’re not here for the long haul.”

“This is a place none of us would have moved to. It’s Monaco,” Levak-Madding says. “It’s urban blight by excess.”

The device soon became known as the “guillotine” after its advocate, and more than 10,000 people lost their heads by guillotine during the Revolution, including Louis XVI and Mary Antoinette, the former king and queen of France.

the last execution by guillotine occurred in 1977. In September 1981, France outlawed capital punishment altogether, thus abandoning the guillotine forever.

Caesar Rodney, who signed the declaration of independence, is described by the History Channel’s website as “the founding father you’ve probably never heard of”

His victory speech at the Chase Center on the Riverfront, and his transition events unveiling cabinet picks at the Queen theatre, have drawn thousands of supporters and journalists. Suddenly thrust centre stage, the city and state are emerging – at least momentarily – from the daunting shadow of New York, Washington and neighbouring Philadelphia.

“I’m sure he’s proud of this state and he’s going to show it off the best he can. At a time that things seem so dark and so bleak, it’s nice to have a little light shone on the place that you live and work. Not everyone has that.”

The aura of the presidency can lift small-town America out of obscurity.

“Our train station is small, our convention space is much smaller than you find in the big cities. We have an intimate scale to the city, which I think is a pretty accurate reflection of Joe Biden.”

“Joe’s being elected has created this curiosity about Wilmington that people just never had before.

It might be said to be fitting that Donald Trump – whose brash personality is reflected by garish Trump Tower in New York and opulent Mar-a-Lago in Florida – is about to be supplanted by a man who honed his common touch in Delaware, a low-key state whose riches are less instantly obvious

Now it is the turn of Biden’s modest home to get name-checked on the nightly news.

Owens said: “Because we’re a small city, I feel as though we’re connected. We have a very strong sense of self and unity. Everyone knows each other. In some neighbourhoods in the big cities you grew up on your block so you know people on your block. In the city of Wilmington, you know people throughout the city and that’s one of the unique things.

we don’t have an Empire State building, we don’t have a Rockefeller. In Washington you have the monuments; we don’t have that here.

Local tourism officials are also hoping for a post-pandemic boom courtesy of their local hero.

it wasn’t until 2017, when a group of Swedish archaeologists and geneticists extracted DNA from the remains, that the sex of the warrior indeed proved to be female.

In archaeology, as the researchers admitted, we can’t always know why a community buried someone with particular objects. And one female warrior does not mean that many women were leaders, just as the reign of Queen Elizabeth I was not part of a larger feminist movement.

These findings don’t reveal an ancient matriarchy. But neither do they reaffirm the idea of societies in which men dominate completely. What they indicate is a lot more mundane and relatable: Some women were warriors and leaders; many weren’t. There was inequality, but it wasn’t absolute, and there were a lot of shifts over time.

reflects the advancements in technology and interest in astronomy of the time, for instance Petrus Apianus’ Astronomicum Caesareum (25.17ArtworkMichael Ostendorfer Astronomicum Caesareum ). This extraordinary Renaissance book contains equatoria supplied with paper volvelles, or rotating dials, that can be used for calculating positions of the planets on any given date as seen from a given terrestrial location. The celestial globe with clockwork (17.190.636) is another magnificent example of an aid for predicting astronomical events, in this case the location of stars as seen from a given place on earth at a given time and date. The globe also illustrates the sun’s apparent movement through the constellations of the zodiac.

Portable devices were also made for determining the time in a specific latitude. During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the combination of compass and sundial became an aid for travelers.

It also reflects a transformation within the meritocracy itself — a sense in which, since 2001, the system has consistently been asking more of ladder climbers and delivering less as its reward.

the “overproduction of elites.” In the context of college admissions that means exactly what it sounds like: We’ve had a surplus of smart young Americans pursuing admission to a narrow list of elite colleges whose enrollment doesn’t expand with population, even as foreign students increasingly compete for the same stagnant share of slots.

Then, having run this gantlet, our meritocrats graduate into a big-city ecosystem where the price of adult goods like schools and housing has been bid up dramatically, while important cultural industries — especially academia and journalism — supply fewer jobs even in good economic times

And they live half in these crowded, over-competitive worlds and half on the internet, which has extended the competition for status almost infinitely and weakened some of the normal ways that local prestige might compensate for disappointing income.

And wouldn’t it be especially appealing if — and here I’m afraid I’m going to be very cynical — in the course of relaxing the demands of whiteness you could, just coincidentally, make your own family’s position a little bit more secure?

if your bourgeois order is built on a cycle of competition and reward, and the competition gets fiercer while the rewards diminish, then instead of young people hooking up safely on the way to a lucrative job and a dual-income marriage with 2.1 kids, you’ll get young people set adrift, unable to pair off, postponing marriage permanently while they wait for a stability that never comes.

the increasing appeal, to these unhappy young people and to their parents and educators as well, of an emergent ideology that accuses many of them of embodying white privilege, and of being “fragile,”

there is also something important about its more radical and even ridiculous elements — like the weird business that increasingly shows up in official documents, from the New York Public Schools or the Smithsonian, describing things like “perfectionism” or “worship of the written word” or “emphasis on the scientific method” or “delayed gratification” as features of a toxic whiteness.

Wouldn’t it come as a relief, in some way, if it turned out that the whole “exhausting ‘Alice in Wonderland’ Red Queen Race of full-time meritocratic achievement,” in the words of a pseudonymous critic, was nothing more than a manifestation of the very white supremacy that you, as a good liberal, are obliged to dismantle and oppose?

If all the testing, all the “delayed gratification” and “perfectionism,” was, after all, just itself a form of racism, and in easing up, chilling out, just relaxing a little bit, you can improve your life and your kid’s life and, happily, strike an anti-racist blow as well?

These stresses have exposed the thinness of meritocracy as a culture, a Hogwarts with SATs instead of magic, a secular substitute for older forms of community, tradition or religion

For instance: Once you dismiss the SAT as just a tool of white supremacy, then it gets easier for elite schools to justify excluding the Asian-American students whose standardized-test scores keep climbing while white scores stay relatively flat

it’s worth considering that maybe a different kind of fragility is in play: The stress and unhappiness felt by meritocracy’s strivers, who may be open to a revolution that seems to promise more stability and less exhaustion, and asks them only to denounce the “whiteness” of a system that’s made even its most successful participants feel fragile and existentially depressed.

“Everybody was at the top of their class. They were homecoming queen or king, they were student body president, valedictorian, and they all came together in this place called Howard University,” said Lorri Saddler-Rice, who joined the sorority at the same time. “You’re talking about some standout students, but then you had some who were standouts among the standouts and she was definitely one of them. She was very visible.”

This transition, from outsider to insider, was typical for Black activism in the 1980s, said Jennifer Thomas, a Howard professor who did not know Ms. Harris but attended the college in the same decade and had overlapping social circles with her. During those years, a generation of students felt a burden to carry the mantle of the civil rights movement of their parents, but there was no consensus on how to do so.

When an 18-year-old Ms. Harris arrived in Washington in 1982, more than 70 percent of the residents in the nation’s capital were Black and Howard was the hub of the city’s Black elite, a speaking stop for dignitaries and a social hub for Washington’s Black political class.

“She was so spirited and cogent in her arguments,” Ms. Rosario said. “I remember her enthusiasm. And I mostly remember that she was never intimidated.”

“What you begin to see at Howard is that Black people are involved in every area of life,” said Eric Easter, who graduated from Howard in 1983 and knew Ms. Harris. “The mayor, the prosecutors, the defense attorneys, everybody’s Black.

Younger Black activists now largely reject this framework. They don’t see Blackness, or Black leadership inside a system, as an inherent step toward progress.

Dr. Wayne A.I. Frederick, the president of Howard, believes the distance between Ms. Harris’s generation and some students today is a natural outcome of progress. Newer movements expand the range of Black possibility, he said, but the pursuit of justice is constant.

“Howard alums, every day, they are out in the communities blocking and tackling and giving agency to those who otherwise feel under represented,” Mr. Frederick said.

However, he added, “younger people today, there is less willingness to have a conversation with people who don’t agree with you. Because I think younger people today feel that just hasn’t worked for us well in the past.”

Mr. Frederick, the Howard president, saw Ms. Harris a few weeks ago, while she was working out of an office at the school. At one point while preparing for the debate, she huddled with staff at the school’s Founders library, the same place that lawyers for Brown v. Board of Education prepared before they argued before the Supreme Court.“She was so nostalgic about being in that space, and that history was not lost on her,” Mr. Frederick said. “It was good to be home.”

As a writer, I know that such a choice exists in the middle of a story. It is the turning point. A hero — in this case, the American body politic, not to mention the president — is faced with a crucial decision that will reveal who he or she fundamentally is.

We are not yet at the halfway point of our drama. We have barely made it to the end of the first act, when we slowly awaken to the threat coming our way and realize we must take some kind of action. That action, for now, is simply doing what we must to fight off Covid-19 and survive as a country, weakened but alive.

The halfway point comes only when the hero meets a worthy opponent — not one who is weak or marginal or different, but someone or something that is truly monstrous. Covid-19, however terrible, is only a movie villain.

we have a choice: Will we accept a world of division and scarcity, where we must fight over insufficient resources and opportunities, or imagine a future when our society is measured by how well it takes care of the ill, the poor, the aged and the different?

America has a history of settler colonization and capitalism that ruthlessly exploited natural resources and people, typically the poor, the migratory, the black and the brown.

That history manifests today in our impulse to hoard, knowing that we live in an economy of self-reliance and scarcity; in our dependence on the cheap labor of women and racial minorities; and in our lack of sufficient systems of health care, welfare, universal basic income and education to take care of the neediest among us.

What this crisis has revealed is that, while almost all of us can become vulnerable — even corporations and the wealthy — our government prioritizes the protection of the least vulnerable.

If this was a classic Hollywood narrative, the exceptionally American superhero, reluctant and wavering in the first act, would make the right choice at this turning point. The evil Covid-19 would be conquered, and order would be restored to a society that would look just as it did before the villain emerged.

But if our society looks the same after the defeat of Covid-19, it will be a Pyrrhic victory. We can expect a sequel, and not just one sequel, but many, until we reach the finale: climate catastrophe

amid the bumbling, there are signs of hope and courage: laborers striking over their exploitation; people donating masks, money and time; medical workers and patients expressing outrage over our gutted health care system; a Navy captain sacrificing his career to protect his sailors; even strangers saying hello to other strangers on the street

the racial contract is a codicil rendered in invisible ink, one stating that the rules as written do not apply to nonwhite people in the same way.

The Declaration of Independence states that all men are created equal; the racial contract limits this to white men with property

The law says murder is illegal; the racial contract says it’s fine for white people to chase and murder black people if they have decided that those black people scare them.

“The terms of the Racial Contract,” Mills wrote, “mean that nonwhite subpersonhood is enshrined simultaneously with white personhood.”

as the process in the Arbery case shows, the racial contract most often operates unnoticed, relying on Americans to have an implicit understanding of who is bound by the rules, and who is exempt from them.

Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, with its vows to enforce state violence against Mexican immigrants, Muslims, and black Americans, was built on a promise to enforce terms of the racial contract that Barack Obama had ostensibly neglected, or violated by his presence.

Struggling white farmers in Iowa taking billions in federal assistance are hardworking Americans down on their luck; struggling single parents in cities using food stamps are welfare queens.

Black Americans struggling in the cocaine epidemic are a “bio-underclass” created by a pathological culture; white Americans struggling with opioid addiction are a national tragedy.

Poor European immigrants who flocked to an America with virtually no immigration restrictions came “the right way”; poor Central American immigrants evading a baroque and unforgiving system are gang members and terrorists.

The coronavirus epidemic has rendered the racial contract visible in multiple ways. Once the disproportionate impact of the epidemic was revealed to the American political and financial elite, many began to regard the rising death toll less as a national emergency than as an inconvenience.

The lives of workers at the front lines of the pandemic—such as meatpackers, transportation workers, and grocery clerks—have been deemed so worthless that legislators want to immunize their employers from liability even as they force them to work under unsafe conditions.

In East New York, police assault black residents for violating social-distancing rules; in Lower Manhattan, they dole out masks and smiles to white pedestrians.

The implied terms of the racial contract are visible everywhere for those willing to see them. A 12-year-old with a toy gun is a dangerous threat who must be met with lethal force; armed militias drawing beads on federal agents are heroes of liberty.

by mid-April, conservative broadcasters were decrying the restrictions, small bands of armed protesters were descending on state capitols, and the president was pressing to lift the constraints.

the pandemic has introduced a new clause to the racial contract. The lives of disproportionately black and brown workers are being sacrificed to fuel the engine of a faltering economy, by a president who disdains them. This is the COVID contract.

In the interim, data about the demographics of COVID-19 victims began to trickle out. On April 7, major outlets began reporting that preliminary data showed that black and Latino Americans were being disproportionately felled by the coronavirus. That afternoon, Rush Limbaugh complained, “If you dare criticize the mobilization to deal with this, you’re going to be immediately tagged as a racist.”

That night, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson announced, “It hasn’t been the disaster that we feared.” His colleague Brit Hume mused that “the disease turned out not to be quite as dangerous as we thought.” The nationwide death toll that day was just 13,000 people; it now stands above 70,000, a mere month later.

That more and more Americans were dying was less important than who was dying.

The disease is now “infecting people who cannot afford to miss work or telecommute—grocery store employees, delivery drivers and construction workers,”

Containing the outbreak was no longer a question of social responsibility, but of personal responsibility. From the White House podium, Surgeon General Jerome Adams told “communities of color” that “we need you to step up and help stop the spread.”

Public-health restrictions designed to contain the outbreak were deemed absurd. They seemed, in Carlson’s words, “mindless and authoritarian,” a “weird kind of arbitrary fascism.” To restrict the freedom of white Americans, just because nonwhite Americans are dying, is an egregious violation of the racial contract.

majority-black counties “account for more than half of coronavirus cases and nearly 60 percent of deaths.” The disproportionate burden that black and Latino Americans are bearing is in part a direct result of their overrepresentation in professions where they risk exposure, and of a racial gap in wealth and income that has left them more vulnerable to being laid off. Black and Latino workers are overrepresented among the essential, the unemployed, and the dead.

“Due to the meatpacking, though, that’s where Brown County got the flare,” Roggensack interrupted to clarify. “It wasn’t just the regular folks in Brown County.”

Roggensack was drawing a line between “regular folks” and the workers who keep them fed, mobile, safe, and connected. And America’s leaders have treated those workers as largely expendable, praising their valor while disregarding their safety.

In South Dakota, where a Smithfield plant became the site of an outbreak infecting more than 700 workers, a spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that the issue was their “large immigrant population.”

“We can’t keep our country closed down for years,” Trump said Wednesday. But that was no one’s plan. The plan was to buy time to take the necessary steps to open the country safely. But the Trump administration did not do that, because it did not consider the lives of the people dying worth the effort or money required to save them.

the only tension between stopping the virus and reviving the economy is one the Trump administration and its propaganda apparatus have invented. Economists are in near-unanimous agreement that the safest path requires building the capacity to contain the virus before reopening the economy—precisely because new waves of deaths will drive Americans back into self-imposed isolation, destroying the consumer spending that powers economic growth

The frame of war allows the president to call for the collective sacrifice of laborers without taking the measures necessary to ensure their safety, while the upper classes remain secure at home.

But the workers who signed up to harvest food, deliver packages, stack groceries, drive trains and buses, and care for the sick did not sign up for war, and the unwillingness of America’s political leadership to protect them is a policy decision, not an inevitability

Trump is acting in accordance with the terms of the racial contract, which values the lives of those most likely to be affected less than the inconveniences necessary to preserve them.

Collective solidarity in response to the coronavirus remains largely intact—most Americans support the restrictions and are not eager to sacrifice their lives or those of their loved ones for a few points of gross domestic product. The consistency across incomes and backgrounds is striking in an era of severe partisan polarization

But solidarity with the rest of the nation among elite Republicans—those whose lives and self-conceptions are intertwined with the success of the Trump presidency—began eroding as soon as the disproportionate impact of the outbreak started to emerge.

The addition of colored lights started in 1976, with — what else? — red, white and blue to mark the country’s bicentennial. The patriotic lighting was brought back for months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Plastic gels offered an array of colors for special occasions from 1977 to 2012, when they were replaced by a completely computerized LED lighting system offering more than 16 million colors

Sometimes colors are chosen as tributes to notable figures who have died, such as former South African president Nelson Mandela in 2013 and, more recently, Kobe Bryant. They were dimmed in 2004 to mark the death of “King Kong” actress Fay Wray.

In 2002, they were purple and gold to honor Queen Elizabeth II’s 50 years on the British throne; in 2013, blue and yellow to commemorate the European Union; and in 2009, red and yellow to mark the 60th anniversary of communist China — a selection that drew protests over the country’s human rights record.

In 1611, while working in Rome, Orazio asked a colleague, the painter Agostino Tassi, to tutor his daughter privately. She was 17. One day, drawing Artemisia in close to examine a painting, Tassi pushed her into a bedroom, threw her on the bed, covered her mouth and raped her. She resisted, scratching his face, even trying to knife him in the chest.

In 2011, a trove of letters was discovered, some written by Artemisia and some by her husband. They included love letters between Artemisia and a wealthy Florentine nobleman named Francesco Maringhi. Their affair appears to have begun in 1618; the date of this self-portrait is given as 1615-1618.

Only when he reneged on his promise did Orazio take him to court. The 1612 trial lasted seven months. Not only did Artemisia have to describe the assault; she also had the veracity of her account “put to the test” by a device called a sibille. As cords of metal and rope were gradually tightened around her fingers (a particularly cruel form of torture for a painter) she repeated her testimony.

She was believed. Tassi, a known criminal, was convicted. As a favorite of the Pope, though, he served little time, and thrived in his subsequent career. But so did Artemisia.

He retweeted tweets asserting that Nancy Pelosi might be planning “a coup” against him. He asserted that law enforcement was “watching” Nevada’s governor for potential voter fraud.

After the FBI thwarted a kidnap attempt by right-wing militia against Michigan Gretchen Whitmer, he labeled her “the lockup queen”—a reference to her life-saving public-safety directives to stave off the pandemic. He complained that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had not yet released Hillary Clinton’s emails, exhuming his demented obsession from 2016.

All this in but a few hours.

Obviously, Trump has long since has become an unacceptable danger to the country he is sworn to protect—not only to our spirit, but to our safety, security, and the conduct of our democracy

Until now, only in feverish political potboilers do lunatic presidents propose to jail the opposing candidate. No man this unmoored should be permitted to hold—and abuse—such power.

What might that be? One cannot help but remember that John F. Kennedy’s coolheaded judgment during the Cuban missile crisis helped save the Western hemisphere from a nuclear catastrophe. One simply cannot know, and America should not risk, what Trump may do when his psychic thermometer passes the boiling point.

For his own sake, and that of others, a president possessed of minimal self-awareness and empathy would refrain from debating in person—or demanding the presence of others.

Not Trump. “I’m back because I’m a perfect physical specimen and I’m extremely young,” announced our ill-conditioned, 74-year-old president

That this man has already threatened the peaceful transition of power—and clearly means it—is reason enough to remove him from office.

So is the worry that Trump will abuse our military power—potentially provoking an incendiary geopolitical crisis—in a reckless attempt to reverse his failing electoral fortunes. This need not involve that terrifying conceit of apocalyptic political fiction: the unhinged president reaching for the nuclear button. But whatever dangers Trump may pose, one cannot dismiss the deranged verbiage he used yesterday with Rush Limbaugh to threaten Iran

The language itself shows a president who has exceeded his limited capacities for self-control, rhetorical and behavioral. “If you fuck around with us,” he informed the Iranians, “if you do something bad to us, we’re gonna do things to you that have never been done before.”

But he does, and so we watch the spectacle of his unraveling

He has a pre-existing condition which made him a danger to our country since his first day in office: an ineradicable personality disorder which fatally compromises the ability to perceive anything outside his own stunted inner landscape. The only reality he has grasped, in his frighteningly feral way, is that Joe Biden is going to beat him—and it is making him more dangerous than ever.

Justice Scalia had famously written that the Roe v. Wade decision establishing abortion rights was wrongly decided and should be overturned, Judge Barrett refused to clarify her own views on the issue.

But at the same time, she declined to say whether she would recuse herself, if confirmed, from considering an upcoming case in which Republican states are trying again to get the Supreme Court to strike down the Affordable Care Act — or from any case that may arise if there is a legal dispute over the outcome of next month’s presidential election.

Judge Amy Coney Barrett declared at her Supreme Court confirmation hearing on Tuesday that she was “not here on a mission to destroy the Affordable Care Act” and would not “allow myself to be used as a pawn to decide this election for the American people.”

Supreme Court justices do not like to recuse themselves, in part because, unlike at the district and appeals court levels, there is no one to replace them if they step aside. If a justice decides to stay on a case despite accusations of a conflict of interest, there is no appeal.

Judge Barrett eventually defended herself to Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, insisting that she had integrity “to apply the law as the law” and was not trying to achieve any political end

Asked about other issues — notably abortion rights — Judge Barrett spoke about the doctrine of “stare decisis,” which says the Supreme Court should be reluctant to revisit issues it has previously decided.

“In English, that means I interpret the Constitution as a law,” said Judge Barrett. “The text is text, and I understand it to have the meaning that it had at the time people ratified it. It does not change over time, and it is not up to me to update it or infuse my own views into it.”

From research in psychology and neuroscience, there is a lot of evidence that we get a pleasurable kick from seeing justice done.

But that is not quite what is at stake with the Trump situation. It’s not that you’re enjoying seeing someone suffer in a random way. And it’s not that you’re enjoying a moment of slapstick. It comes down to this question of justice and just desserts.

Thinkers like William James in the 19th century thought a lot about why we might enjoy seeing someone else suffer in a visceral, bloody way. He thought it was an evolutionary throwback to our more violent past, a glitch

But the question of what is justice and who deserves what—of course that is based on our own perspectives and the groups we form.

Research has shown that schadenfreude is experienced very strongly when people divide themselves into camps or tribes because you’re using that schadenfreude to denigrate your rival, and also using it to bond your group, and give yourself a feeling of swagger and triumph.

Persuasion:If people are experiencing schadenfreude, should they suppress it?

Watt Smith:There is a question about how we share it and how we act on it.Face-to-face, it’s much harder to confess to your schadenfreude. Online, it is incredibly easy. So this mob sense can evolve fast and at no cost. I encourage people to take a breath and pause before being triumphant and gleeful on Facebook or Twitter—that’s the moment when it rolls out of private experience into something that has serious consequences.

Watt Smith: One of the motivations for writing my book was: “Are we living in an age of schadenfreude?” It’s a lot to do with the internet and the new social environments through which we’re navigating life. But it also has to do with this growing interest in empathy.

Empathy has become a hugely significant and loaded term in public discourse. In the last 10 to 15 years, it’s taught in our schools, seen as an unquestioned public good—something that we should all cultivate. In a lot of research on empathy, people say the opposite of empathy is schadenfreude, or that schadenfreude is the emotion felt by psychopaths.

[this emotion] is a window into parts of human life that are understandable and normal and relatable: things that make us most human, like justice—wanting to see hypocrites and queue dodgers taught a lesson.