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Feudal lords and leaders of political blocs, including Druze officials and powerful militia, Hezbollah, have begun stockpiling food, while warning that a nationalistic spirit so vividly on display could be splintered by renewed sectarianism if and when times get tougher.

U.S. natural gas is far less damaging to the environment than coal. It has become so cheap that it is displacing coal in electricity generation, driving down emissions. To others, Cove Point is an environmental catastrophe. Natural gas is still a fossil fuel, and burning it releases lots of greenhouse-gas emissions, which cause climate change. Both arguments are right.

society must eliminate its carbon dependency. It cannot burn vast amounts of any fossil fuel for “decades and decades,” as Mr. Farrell hopes, unless there is a revolution in emissions capture technology. Even in the short term, U.S. emissions are rising, despite the restraint that stepped-up natural-gas burning has provided. The government must demand more change, more quickly.

One objection is that carbon pricing is not powerful enough. The European Union’s carbon pricing program has not worked well. But that is a failure of design and political will. A carbon price equal to the challenge would start high and rise higher, sending a much stronger price signal.

carbon pricing is still the best first-line policy

A high-enough carbon price would shape millions of choices, small and large, about what to buy, how to invest and how to live that would result in substantial emissions cuts. People would prioritize the easiest changes, minimizing the costs of the energy transition. With a price that steadily rose, market forces would steadily wring carbon dioxide out of the economy — without the government trying to dictate exactly how, wasting money on special-interest boondoggles.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found last year that an average carbon price between 2030 and the end of the century of $100, $200 or even $300 per ton of carbon dioxide would result in huge greenhouse-gas emissions cuts, could restrain warming to the lowest safety threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius and would almost certainly prevent the world from breaching the traditional warming limit of 2 degrees Celsius

Republicans never embraced the market-based idea, even though conservative economists admit its appeal, because they never accepted the need to act at all. Some environmentalists, meanwhile, are increasingly wary of carbon pricing. The Democrats’ Green New Deal, which is noncommittal on the policy, reflects the accelerating drift from the obvious.

A third objection is that carbon pricing is politically impossible, because it reveals the cost of fighting global warming in the prices people pay

Another criticism is that carbon pricing hurts the poor, who would suffer most when prices rose. But the revenue from carbon pricing could be recycled back to Americans in a progressive way, and most people would end up whole or better off.

This is a leadership challenge, not a policy challenge. More than 40 governments globally, including several states, have found the political will to embrace carbon pricing programs, which is the only option that would plausibly be bipartisan.

One objection does have merit: Though carbon pricing would spur huge change in infrastructure and power generation, that alone would not be enough. It would not stimulate all the innovation the nation needs in the climate fight, nor would it change behaviors in circumstances where the desired price signal is muted or nonexistent

Foreign aid to prevent deforestation could be among the most cost-effective climate-preserving measures. Helping other countries to replace archaic cooking stoves that produce noxious fumes would help cut emissions and improve quality of life across the developing world.

, economists know that companies that invest in research and development do not get rewarded for the full social value of their work. Others benefit from their innovations without paying. Consequently, firms do not invest in research as much as society should want

It would take only a small fraction of the revenue a carbon pricing system would produce to fund a much more ambitious clean-energy research agenda. Basic scientific research and applied research programs such as ARPA-E should be scaled up dramatically

The government must also account for the fact that not all greenhouse-gas emissions come from burning the fuels that a carbon pricing program would reach — coal, oil and gas. How would the government charge farmers for the methane their cows emit or for the greenhouse gases released when they till their soil? How about emissions from cement, ammonia and steel production? The federal government would have to tailor programs to the agricultural and industrial sectors, which might include judicious use of incentives and mandates.

only government can ensure adequate mass transit options. Local governments could help with zoning laws to encourage people to live in denser, more walkable communities. The federal government should also press automakers to steadily improve fuel efficiency.

That starts with making sure that emissions-cutting efforts at home do not have unintended consequences. If the United States puts a price on greenhouse-gas emissions, other countries would lure U.S. manufacturers with the promise of lax environmental rules. Relocated manufacturers could then export their goods to the United States. The net effect would be no benefit for the planet but fewer U.S. manufacturing jobs.

One response is a kind of tariff on goods entering the country from places with weaker carbon-dioxide policies. That would both eliminate the incentive to offshore manufacturing and encourage countries to strengthen their own rules.

Participating in the agreement would give the United States a forum — and a basis — to press other nations to reduce emissions.

Start with carbon pricing. Then fill in the gaps.

There are a lot of bad ideas out there.

The Green New Deal that some Democrats have embraced is case in point. In its most aggressive form, the plan suggests the country could reach net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030, an impossible goal

that would be more spent every three years than the total amount the country spent on World War II.

At the same time, the Democratic plan would guarantee every American “high-quality health care” and “a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security.” These expensive aspirations, no matter how laudable, would do nothing to arrest greenhouse-gas emissions.

Massive social reform will not protect the climate. Marshaling every dollar to its highest benefit is the strongest plan.

“He was the model of what you aspire to be as governor,” Ray Mabus, who worked in Mr. Winter’s administration and served as governor himself from 1988 to 1992, said in an interview. “He was the best governor Mississippi ever had.”

Almost immediately, he set a new tone for state leadership. He and his wife held a series of dinners at the governor’s mansion featuring prominent Mississippians, and not just white people like Walker Percy and Eudora Welty. Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of the slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, dined with them, as did Leontyne Price, the world-famous soprano whom previous governors had shunned. The Winters invited her to stay overnight in the Bilbo Room, named for Theodore G. Bilbo, an infamously racist governor and senator; the next day Mr. Winter renamed it the Leontyne Price Room.

"Who built the cages, Joe?" Trump said. 

"You have 525 kids not knowing where in God's name they're going to be and lost their parents," Biden replied, bringing up the family separation policy again.

After Welker asked Biden about whether increasing the minimum wage to $15 per hour might hurt small businesses, Biden appeared not to understand the question and advocated for small-business bailouts. 

This exchange may be considered Biden's biggest blunder of the evening, as he appeared to initially completely miss the point of Welker's question. The moment also played into Trump's larger economic message, which his allies have been practically begging him to highlight in the late stages of the campaign. 

The comments from Biden were in response to claims from Trump that he is "the least racist person in this room.""I got criminal justice reform done and prison reform, and opportunity zones," the president said, elaborating on his race record. "I took care of black colleges and universities."

"Anybody responsible for that many deaths should not remain president of the United States of America," Biden said of Trump's handling of the pandemic that's killed over 200,000 Americans. "We can’t lock ourselves in a basement like he does. ... He has this thing about living in a basement," Trump said, echoing his previous exhortations to Americans to not be afraid of the virus. 

Biden also advocates for reforming the current Opportunity Zone tax deferral passed under the Trump administration to help distressed communities

Biden wants to create 1.5 million new homes and public housing units and provide up to $15,000 in tax credits for people buying their first homes.

States on issues ranging from health to policing, zeroing in on measures to advance economic equality, access to affordable housing, education and a fair criminal justice system.

On education reform, Biden wants to expand student loan forgiveness and make public universities as well as private historically Black colleges and universities and minority-serving institutions tuition-free for students with household incomes under $125,000.

Trump has not outlined a broad policy plan to address racial inequity. Trump has repeatedly questioned whether systemic racism is a problem in the United States

On June 11, Trump spoke about a four-step policy geared toward building "safety and opportunity and dignity." He highlighted a need for increased federal support toward minority-owned small businesses and addressed "health care disparities," saying more funding should go toward medical facilities that serve largely nonwhite populations.

Trump has also called for

expanding Opportunity Zones, a tax deferral for distressed communities passed as part of the 2017 tax bil

Gaius Octavian Thurinus, Julius Caesar's nephew and heir, became the first emperor of Rome and took the name Augustus Caesar. Although Julius Caesar is often regarded as the first emperor of Rome, this is incorrect; he never held the title `Emperor' but, rather, `Dictator', a title the Senate could not help but grant him, as Caesar held supreme military and political power at the time. In contrast, the Senate willingly granted Augustus the title of emperor, lavishing praise and power on him because he had destroyed Rome's enemies and brought much-needed stability.

Augustus ruled the empire from 31 BCE until 14 CE when he died. In that time, as he said himself, he "found Rome a city of clay but left it a city of marble." Augustus reformed the laws of the city and, by extension, the empire’s, secured Rome's borders, initiated vast building projects

The Pax Romana (Roman Peace), also known as the Pax Augusta, which he initiated, was a time of peace and prosperity hitherto unknown and would last ove

Domitian's successor was his advisor Nerva who founded the Nervan-Antonin Dynasty which ruled Rome 96-192 CE.  This period is marked by increased prosperity owing to the rulers known as The Five Good Emperors of Rome. Between 96 and 180 CE, five exceptional men ruled in sequence and brought the Roman Empire to its height

Nerva (r. 96-98 CE) Trajan (r. 98-117 CE) Hadrian (r. 117-138 CE) Antoninus Pius (r. 138-161 CE) Marcus Aurelius (r. 161-180 CE)

Under their leadership, the Roman Empire grew stronger, more stable, and expanded in size and scope

This period, also known as The Imperial Crisis, was characterized by constant civil war, as various military leaders fought for control of the empire. The crisis has been further noted by historians for widespread social unrest, economic instability (fostered, in part, by the devaluation of Roman currency by the Severans), and, finally, the dissolution of the empire which broke into three separate regions.

Even so, the empire was still so vast that Diocletian divided it in half in c.285 CE to facilitate more efficient administration by elevating one of his officers, Maximian (r. 286-305 CE) to the position of co-emperor. In so doing, he created the Western Roman Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire (also known as the Byzantine Empire).

In 312 CE Constantine defeated Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge and became sole emperor of both the Western and Eastern Empires

Believing that Jesus Christ was responsible for his victory, Constantine initiated a series of laws such as the Edict of Milan (313 CE) which mandated religious tolerance throughout the empire and, specifically, tolerance for the faith which came to known as Christianity.

Constantine chose the figure of Jesus Christ. At the First Council of Nicea (325 CE), he presided over the gathering to codify the faith and decide on important issues such as the divinity of Jesus and which manuscripts would be collected to form the book known today as The Bible. He stabilized the empire, revalued the currency, and reformed the military, as well as founding the city he called New Rome on the site of the former city of Byzantium (modern-day Istanbul) which came to be known as Constantinople.

He is known as Constantine the Great owing to later Christian writers who saw him as a mighty champion of their faith

His three sons, Constantine II, Constantius II, and Constans divided the Roman Empire between them but soon fell to fighting over which of them deserved more

From 376-382 CE, Rome fought a series of battles against invading Goths known today as the Gothic Wars. At the Battle of Adrianople, 9 August 378 CE, the Roman Emperor Valens (r. 364-378 CE) was defeated, and historians mark this event as pivotal in the decline of the Western Roman Empire.

The ungovernable vastness of the empire, even divided in two, made it difficult to manage. The Eastern Empire flourished while the Western Empire struggled and neither gave much thought to helping the other. Eastern and Western Rome saw each other more as competitors than teammates and worked primarily in their own self-interest.

The Roman military, manned largely with barbarian mercenaries who had no ethnic ties to Rome, could no longer safeguard the borders as efficiently as they once had nor could the government as easily collect taxes in the provinces.

The Western Roman Empire officially ended 4 September 476 CE, when Emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed by the Germanic King Odoacer (though some historians date the end as 480 CE with the death of Julius Nepos). The Eastern Roman Empire continued on as the Byzantine Empire until 1453 CE, and though known early on as simply `the Roman Empire’, it did not much resemble that entity at all.

The inventions and innovations which were generated by the Roman Empire profoundly altered the lives of the ancient people and continue to be used in cultures around the world today. Advancements in the construction of roads and buildings, indoor plumbing, aqueducts, and even fast-drying cement were either invented or improved upon by the Romans. The calendar used in the West derives from the one created by Julius Caesar, and the names of the days of the week (in the romance languages) and months of the year also come from Rome.

Apartment complexes (known as `insula), public toilets, locks and keys, newspapers, even socks all were developed by the Romans as were shoes, a postal system (modeled after the Persians), cosmetics, the magnifying glass, and the concept of satire in literature. During the time of the empire, significant developments were also advanced in the fields of medicine, law, religion, government, and warfare. The Romans were adept at borrowing from, and improving upon, those inventions or concepts they found among the indigenous populace of the regions they conquered

No matter that weighted exit polling data found that Donald Trump increased his margins among minorities, drawing the support of 32 percent of Hispanics and double-digits among black voters, and Democrats improved their showing among whites.

Say goodbye to the Green New Deal, a Universal Basic Income, “debt-free” college, single-payer health care, the dissolution of the Department of Homeland Security’s border enforcement agencies, or half a dozen other big ideas that loomed ominously over American heads for the better part of two years.

because the consequences of Democratic weakness at the polls on Tuesday fell disproportionately on the party’s moderates in purple districts, there will be fewer voices around in 2021 to push back against what is essentially a tantalizing conspiracy theory.

Progressives can say goodbye to their already tenuous hopes for dramatic reforms to the institutions that govern American political life. There will be no filibuster nuking, no punitive expansion of the federal judiciary, no sweeping institutional reforms to “restructure things to fit our vision.”

where is the good news in all this, you ask? These voices have once again been relegated to the fringes of their respective parties. It’s the quisling moderates and dealmakers they so hate who will soon find themselves in the driver’s seat.

It is unlikely that we will see much productivity under divided government, but that is not the same thing as dysfunctional government—precisely the opposite,

If we’re entering into a period defined by equilibrium in which the federal government is all but paralyzed in the absence of some bipartisan consensus, that would at least be predictable. And predictability has been in short supply these last four years.

Much to the chagrin of the American system’s would-be demolishers, no one assuming the reins of power in Washington seems to have much interest in blowing anything up.

All of which is fuelling the fear that it will be Britain’s fate to get the worst of both worlds: a higher death rate than comparable countries and a more ravaged economy. That dread now radiates from Tories like a pungent musk

public approval of the government’s handling of the crisis has fallen to a new low of just 3 in 10.

the inevitable public inquiry is convened it will have to decide how much blame should be allocated to longstanding institutional weaknesses and how much can be attributed to the actions and inactions of particular individuals.

Many Tory MPs are flashing knives at Public Health England, which they blame for early mis-steps in establishing an adequate testing regime

The Tories have been in power for more than a decade and the NHS’s current configuration is a result of the “Lansley reforms” implemented during David Cameron’s premiership.

The scientific advisers on the Sage group flagged up the vulnerability of care homes as early as February. Yet the government devoted more zeal to protecting the prime minister’s rule-breaking adviser, Dominic Cummings, than it did to safeguarding the lives of the fragile elderly. A just-released report by the National Audit Office estimates that 25,000 elderly people were discharged from hospitals into homes without being tested at the height of the pandemic.

Time and again, I have heard accounts from inside government of warnings given and action exhorted only for the machinery never to properly click into gear for want of decisive leadership.

Boris Johnson was complacently late to grasp the gravity of the crisis and then animated by a panic-driven urge to try to impress the public by throwing out pledges he could not deliver. One critique, often to be heard now even from erstwhile admirers, is that his outfit at Number 10 is not so much a government as a campaign

, this Number 10 is obsessed with polling and focus grouping, which they conduct daily, and how things are projected in the media. “The problem with this government is that it is led by journalists,”

Where energy ought to have been directed to making important things happen, it was expended on concocting brags that might temporarily garner approving headlines or neutralise hostile ones. The result has been a persistent pattern of over-promising and underperforming.

His weaknesses have been magnified because he deliberately appointed a cabinet conspicuously light on talent – “the nodding dogs”, as one senior Tory labels them. The cabinet were chosen not for their ability, dynamism or independence of thought, but for their devotion to a hard Brexit and obedience to Number 10.

No other European country has made such an abysmal mess of reopening schools.

When you are dealing with multiple crises, each demanding your full attention, it is hard to focus on the underlying causes. However, if you don’t make the time to address the cause, you will eventually be overwhelmed by the effects. You must prioritize strategic planning, the future impact of your current decisions.

At RDI, we focus on the importance of an engaged and informed citizenry, but the political system must reward that engagement. Proposals to achieve this should include:

A form of national popular vote for president Guarantees of voter access and voting system integrity (including vote by mail)

Stricter regulations for campaign finance transparency

Binding disclosure and divestment laws for candidates and elected officials

yet most of these proposals are mere proposals. Even if the goal extends only to reforming Police Departments, pressure must still come from the streets; white people will have to continue to show up.

The speech could also double as a prompt for a full-throated debate on the left about the complex interplay between representation-based identity politics and other political goals.

If every action turns into a voter-registration party, the movement will have failed to secure the bare minimum of what it set out to accomplish: a radical change in policing.

he future of these national protests depends, in no small part, on the careful navigation between Swalwell’s sloganeering, gestural version of identity politics and a Black-centered radical movement that calls, in the words of the C.R.C., for an inclusive politics that also fights for “women, third world and working people.”

I have sensed in them an intense desire for some message of solidarity focused squarely on the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. This, as the City Hall speaker pointed out, cannot be a carrot to keep white people engaged, nor should it stop only at police reform.

Mr. Friedman’s cramped vision enhanced the power of the stock market and silenced the voice of workers, leading to profound inequality.

Mr. Friedman’s adherents gained influence in government and the business community. At the same time as Mr. Friedman’s adherents disparaged government’s role, they sought enormous tax subsidies, greatly reducing the share of taxes that corporations paid.

The promise of vital legislative protections against the excesses of unconstrained capitalism — including the National Labor Relations Act, minimum wage laws, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, antitrust regulations and consumer safety laws, to name a few — were undercut by two generations of ceaseless attack.

The concerns Mr. Friedman lampooned as obsessions of the “contemporary crop of reformers” in 1970 remain urgent problems

As would be expected when business leaders were told not to worry about “providing employment,” wages stagnated and inequality grew.

In the past 50 years, instead of gains for stockholders and top management tracking gains for workers — as characterized by the period when Mr. Friedman wrote — the returns of our capitalist system have become skewed toward the haves.

From 1948 to 1979, worker productivity grew by 108.1 percent and wages grew by 93.2 percent, with the stock market growing by 603 percent.

By contrast, from 1979 to 2018, worker productivity rose by 69.6 percent, but the wealth created by these productivity gains went predominately to executives and stockholders. Worker pay rose by only 11.6 percent during this period, while compensation for chief executives grew by an enormous 940 percent and the stock market grew by 2,200 percent.

As would be expected when corporate leaders were told not to worry about “eliminating discrimination,” corporate political spending was used to help seat elected officials who opposed measures designed to reduce racial disparities in education, pay and wealth, and to support gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts.

As would be expected when corporations were told not to worry about “avoiding pollution,” they used their muscle to undermine environmental protection and to conceal the dangers of climate change

the entire future of humanity is now at risk.

To reverse the Friedman paradigm, companies should embrace an affirmative duty to stakeholders and society. This requires tangible, publicly articulated goals, such as paying living wages to their workers, respecting workers’ right to join a union, promoting racial and gender inclusion and pay equity, enhancing safety protocols, and reducing carbon emissions

In doing so, corporate leaders will also set an example that institutional investors should be required to follow in their own investing and voting policies.

But adopting a stakeholder-centric governance model is only half the battle. Business leaders must support the restoration of fair rules of the game by government; respect the need for strong and resilient public institutions to govern a complex society; pay their fair share of taxes; and stop using corporate funds to distort our nation’s political process

Mr. Friedman wrote the influential essay at a time when economic security was strong, as the New Deal’s principles produced widespread prosperity, reduced poverty and helped Black Americans take their first real strides toward economic inclusion

Since then, the United States has gone backward in economic equality and security — a situation that the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed for all to see

America’s business community should heed these lessons of history and help restore the ideals of fairness, equality and economic common sense that showed that a capitalist economy could work for the many.

National Greatness Conservatism. We argued that the G.O.P. had become too anti-government. “How can Americans love their nation if they hate its government?” we asked. Only a return to the robust American nationalism of Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay and Theodore Roosevelt would do: ambitious national projects, infrastructure, federal programs to increase social mobility.

George W. Bush, who made his own leap, to Compassionate Conservatism. (You know somebody has made a paradigm leap when he or she starts adding some modifying word or phrase before “Conservatism.”) This was an attempt to meld Catholic social teaching to conservatism.

am’s Club Republicans, led by Reihan Salam and my Times colleague Ross Douthat, pointed a way to link the G.O.P. to working-class concerns

Front Porch Republicans celebrated small towns and local communities.

The Reformicons tried to use government to build strong families and neighborhoods

The Niskanen Center is an entire think tank for people who have leapt from libertarianism.

Most actual Republican politicians rejected all of this. They stuck, mostly through dumb inertia, to an anti-government zombie Reaganism long after Reagan was dead and even though the nation’s problems were utterly different from what they were when he was alive

Donald Trump and Bannon took a low-rent strand of conservatism — class-based ethnic nationalism — that had always been locked away in the basement of the American right, and overturned the Reagan paradigm.

Bannon and Trump got the emotions right. They understood that Republican voters were no longer motivated by a sense of hope and opportunity; they were motivated by a sense of menace, resentment and fear. At base, many Republicans felt they were being purged from their own country — by the educated elite, by multiculturalism, by militant secularism.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump and Bannon discarded the Republican orthodoxy — entitlement reform, fiscal restraint, free trade, comprehensive immigration reform. They embraced a European-style blood-and-soil conservatism. Close off immigration. Close trade. We have nothing to offer the world and should protect ourselves from its dangers.

Over the last three years, it’s been interesting to watch a series of Republican officeholders break free from old orthodoxies and begin to think afresh.

future is embodied by a small group of Republican senators in their 40s, including Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton and Ben Sasse.

they start with certain common Trumpian premises:

Everything is not OK. The free market is not working well. Wages are stagnant. Too much power is in the hands of the corporate elites. Middle America is getting screwed. Finance capitalism is unbalanced. American society is in abject decline. If Reaganism was “Let’s be free,” the new mood is “Take control.

Economic libertarianism is not the answer. Free markets alone won’t solve our problems

We need policies to shore up the conservative units of society — family, neighborhood, faith, nation. We need policies that build solidarity, not just liberty.

The working class is the heart of the Republican Party. Once, businesspeople and entrepreneurs were at the center of the Republican imagination. Now it’s clear that the party needs to stop catering to the corporate class and start focusing on the shop owners, the plumbers, the salaried workers

China changes everything. The rise of a 1.4-billion-person authoritarian superpower means that free trade no longer works because the Chinese are not playing by the same rules

The managerial class betrays America. Many of the post-Reagan positions seem like steps to the left. But these Republicans combine a greater willingness to use government with a greater hostility to the managerial class.

From these common premises the four senators go off in different directions.

Hawley is the most populist of the group. His core belief is that middle-class Americans have been betrayed by elites on every level — political elites, cultural elites, financial elites

The modern leadership class has one set of values — globalization, cosmopolitanism — and the Middle Americans have another set — family, home, rootedness, nation

Cotton has a less developed political vision but a more developed attitude: hawkishness.

Sasse is the most sociological of the crew. He is a Tocquevillian localist, who notes that most normal Americans go days without thinking of national politics. His vision is centered on the small associations — neighborhood groups, high school football teams, churches and community centers — where people find their greatest joys, satisfactions and supports.

over the long term, some version of Working-Class Republicanism will redefine the G.O.P. In the first place, that’s where Republican voters are

Government’s job, he says, is to “create a framework of ordered liberty” so that people can make their family and neighborhood the center of their lives.

Levin thinks the prevailing post-Trump viewpoints define the problem too much in economic terms. The crucial problem, he argues, is not economic; it’s social: alienation. Millions of Americans don’t feel part of anything they can trust. They feel no one is looking out for them.

“What’s needed,” Levin says, “is not just to expand economic conservatism beyond growth to also prioritize family, community and nation, but also to expand social conservatism beyond sexual ethics and religious liberty to prioritize family, community and nation

The Republican Party looks completely brain-dead at every spot Trump directly reaches. Off in the corners, though, there’s a lot of intellectual ferment on the right.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page stands as a vigilant guardian of the corpse, eager to rebut all dissenters. The former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley and Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania are staunch defenders of Minimal-Government Conservatism

there’s also the possibility that Republicans will abandon any positive vision and revert to being a simple anti-government party — a party of opposition to whatever Biden is doing.

Behind these public figures there is a posse of policy wonks and commentators supporting a new Working-Class Republicanism,

Second, the working-class emphasis is the only way out of the demographic doom loop. If the party sticks with its old white high school-educated base, it will die. They just aren’t making enough old white men.

None of this works unless Republicans can deracialize their appeal — by which I mean they must stop pandering to the racists in the party and stop presenting themselves and seeing themselves as the party of white people

I spent much of that year as an industry spokesman, my last after 20 years in the business, spreading AHIP’s “information” to journalists and lawmakers to create the impression that our health-care system was far superior to Canada’s, which we wanted people to believe was on the verge of collapse.

The campaign worked. Stories began to appear in the press that cast the Canadian system in a negative light. And when Democrats began writing what would become the Affordable Care Act in early 2009, they gave no serious consideration to a publicly financed system like Canada’s.

Today, the respective responses of Canada and the United States to the coronavirus pandemic prove just how false the ideas I helped spread were.

There are more than three times as many coronavirus infections per capita in the United States, and the mortality rate is twice the rate in Canada.

The most effective myth we perpetuated — the industry trots it out whenever major reform is proposed — is that Canadians and people in other single-payer countries have to endure long waits for needed care.

While it’s true that Canadians sometimes have to wait weeks or months for elective procedures (knee replacements are often cited), the truth is that they do not have to wait at all for the vast majority of medical services.

And, contrary to another myth I used to peddle — that Canadian doctors are flocking to the United States — there are more doctors per 1,000 people in Canada than here. Canadians see their doctors an average of 6.8 times a year, compared with just four times a year in this country.

Most important, no one in Canada is turned away from doctors because of a lack of funds, and Canadians can get tested and treated for the coronavirus without fear of receiving a budget-busting medical bill.

In America, exorbitant bills are a defining feature of our health-care system. Despite the assurances from President Trump and members of Congress that covid-19 patients will not be charged for testing or treatment, they are on the hook for big bills, according to numerous reports.

That is not the case in Canada, where there are no co-pays, deductibles or coinsurance for covered benefits. Care is free at the point of service. And those laid off in Canada don’t face the worry of losing their health insurance. In the United States, by contrast, more than 40 million have lost their jobs during this pandemic, and millions of them — along with their families — also lost their coverage.

Then there’s quality of care. By numerous measures, it is better in Canada. Some examples: Canada has far lower rates than the United States of hospitalizations from preventable causes like diabetes (almost twice as common here) and hypertension (more than eight times as common).

And even though Canada spends less than half what we do per capita on health care, life expectancy there is 82 years, compared with 78.6 years in the United States.

Of the many regrets I have about what I once did for a living, one of the biggest is slandering Canada’s health-care system. If the United States had undertaken a different kind of reform in 2009 (or anytime since), one that didn’t rely on private insurance companies that have every incentive to limit what they pay for, we’d be a healthier country today.

Living without insurance dramatically increases your chances of dying unnecessarily. Over the past 13 years, tens of thousands of Americans have probably died prematurely because, unlike our neighbors to the north, they either had no coverage or were so inadequately insured that they couldn’t afford the care they needed. I live with that horror, and my role in it, every day.

here were more specific reasons to be skeptical of those claims. We didn’t know, for example, who conducted that 2004 survey or anything about the sample size or methodology — or even what criteria were used to determine who qualified as a “business leader.” We didn’t know if the assertion about imaging equipment was based on reliable data or was an opinion. You could easily turn up comparable complaints about outdated equipment at U.S. hospitals.

Another bullet point, from the same book, quoted the CEO of the Canadian Association of Radiologists as saying that “the radiology equipment in Canada is so bad that ‘without immediate action radiologists will no longer be able to guarantee the reliability and quality of examinations.’ ”

Here’s an example from one AHIP brief in the binder: “A May 2004 poll found that 87% of Canada’s business leaders would support seeking health care outside the government system if they had a pressing medical concern.” The source was a 2004 book by Sally Pipes, president of the industry-supported Pacific Research Institute,

We enlisted APCO Worldwide, a giant PR firm. Agents there worked with AHIP to put together a binder of laminated talking points for company flacks like me to use in news releases and statements to reporters.

Clearly my colleagues and I would need a robust defense. On a task force for the industry’s biggest trade association, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), we talked about how we might make health-care systems in Canada, France, Britain and even Cuba look just as bad as ours.

That summer, Michael Moore was preparing to release his latest documentary, “Sicko,” contrasting American health care with that in other rich countries. (Naturally, we looked terrible.) I spent months meeting secretly with my counterparts at other big insurers to plot our assault on the film, which contained many anecdotes about patients who had been denied coverage for important treatments.

“This is not an either-or,” he said. “This is a both-and.”

“And they offer an opportunity for us to all work together to tackle them, to take them on, to change America and make it live up to its highest ideals.

Obama did not mention Trump on Wednesday, though he has criticized the president’s actions more frequently in recent weeks.

He also implicitly rejected those, like Trump, who have focused criticism on the demonstrators.

“For those who have been talking about protests, just remember: This country was founded on protests,” he said. “It is called the American Revolution.”

That’s because the pandemic actually has created different political realities. The coronavirus has hit dense, racially diverse Democratic urban strongholds like New York much harder than sparsely populated rural areas, which lean strongly to the G.O.P.

That divergent impact — with help from the president and his acolytes — is feeding a dangerous partisan split about the nature of the virus itself.

In a book published more than a decade ago, I argued that the internet might lead to a choose-your-own-facts world in which different segments of society believe in different versions of reality. The Trump era, and now the coronavirus, has confirmed this grim prediction.

Worst of all, it’s possible that the pain of this crisis might not fully register in broad economic indicators , especially if, as happened after the 2008 recession, we see a long, slow recovery that benefits mainly the wealthy.

: The virus-induced recession could further destroy the news industry and dramatically reduce the number of working journalists in the country, our last defense against misinformation.

activists have lately been finding success in pushing to build more housing in restrictive regions like the San Francisco Bay Area. The virus may put such reforms on ice

consider the grim future of public transportation after the pandemic: Will people just get back in their cars, driving everywhere they go?

the United States has failed to make the best of our most recent national calamities. The 9/11 attacks pushed us into needless quagmires in the Middle East. The 2008 recession deepened inequality.

Calls for police divestment are a dominant theme of protesters’ policy demands. The radical idea is a product of how increased policing “has eaten up so much state and national resources at the expense of investment in black and brown communities,” says Vanita Gupta, the president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who worked to overhaul departments in Cleveland, Baltimore, Chicago, and Ferguson, Missouri, as the former head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.  

At the federal level, protesters and civil-rights groups are urging Congress to pass, among other reforms, a national prohibition on chokeholds; the elimination of federal programs that offer military equipment to local law enforcement; the creation of a national public database of abusive police officers; and an end to qualified immunity, a doctrine that prevents police from being held liable in certain cases for breaking the law.

“Moments of passion pass and then you have to have people who are still at the table pushing.”

But the protests aren’t all about politics or policy goals, organizers and protesters told me. They’ve been an outlet for black Americans to express their hurt and fury that 400 years after the start of slavery, five decades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and six years after the police shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, black Americans are still two and a half times more likely to be killed by police than white people. They are dying of COVID-19 at three times the rate of white people. And they’re more likely than white Americans to have lost jobs in the economic catastrophe spawned by the pandemic

“I remember a movie called Network. I remember [the news anchor] going to the window and saying ‘I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!’” she told me. That’s how she says she felt when she saw the video of Floyd’s arrest.

Community leaders throughout the city organized a coordinated response, which the police, military and disconnected elected officials never could. Widespread confusion created by decentralized sources of destruction all around the city required a carefully networked response that was grounded in trusted community relationships.

Leaders put out calls on social media and through their own networks, and more than 1,000 residents showed up for a public meeting in Powderhorn Park. They created a plan for community defense that got shared on Facebook almost 8,000 times and crashed the website of the organization that hosted it.

a network of community defenders quickly emerged to protect residents. Their goals? Protect people’s ability to safely protest and tamp down on the chaos. These community defenders sought to enable democracy, not squelch it, so that organizers could advance the struggle for reforms.

“No single person or organization made this happen. It took years of people, especially black women, doing the groundwork of building trust and accountability. It takes years of conversations about what it means to be community. That is what gave us the opportunity to align when we needed to.”

Those connections are like antibodies that can be activated to rapidly develop a community immune response, anchoring the community even in the midst of tremendous public confusion. The fast-moving information environment meant people were constantly trying to differentiate fact from fiction. Trusted sources of information became ever more important.

The solution is not to meet destruction with destruction, or to douse the flames of people’s pain with empty words. Instead, what we learn from Minneapolis is that when people create solidarity from the ground up, they can hold one another and public institutions accountable to a higher standard that reflects all of their shared interests

Alondra Cano, a member of the City Council who leads its public safety committee, captured it best when she said to a reporter, “Protesting is good and needed,” but “that third space is needed where we are committed to each other.”

how to create a system of public safety that does not depend on a domineering police force