Group items tagged

The goal is to put the offense on a higher level than one of just lying. That way, if the Sanders campaign decides to point to all of the lies Warren has told throughout her career – that her father was a janitor, that she is Native American – her lies won’t matter as much because she’s just electioneering while his lies are rooted in misogyny. It’s a trick that still works for Hillary Clinton, who has repeatedly complained about the lack of support Sanders gave to her campaign, despite all of the evidence to the contrary. (Clinton, after losing the primary to Obama in 2008, appeared at two rallies with Obama and did 10 solo campaign appearances to help him get elected. Sanders, after losing the primary to Clinton in 2016, did three events with Clinton and 37 solo events.)

Early accusers of Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein were deemed golddiggers, looking for an easy settlement to shut them up. Even when there’s some form of evidence, such as when photographs show Donald Trump with E Jean Carroll, who accused him of rape, even while he insists he doesn’t know her, supporters are still willing to take his word for it.

She built a huge and devoted following on Facebook, which is widely and often accurately viewed in media circles as a home of misinformation, and where most journalists don’t see their personal pages as meaningful channels for their work.

She also contradicts the stereotype of Substack, which has become synonymous with offering new opportunities for individual writers to turn their social media followings into careers outside big media, and at times appears to be where purged ideological factions go to regroup

it’s true of left-leaning writers who have broken bitterly with elements of the mainstream liberal consensus, whether around race or national security, from the Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald to the Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias to the firebrand Matt Taibbi,

When readers on Facebook started suggesting she write a newsletter, she realized she didn’t want to pay hundreds of dollars a month for a commercial platform, and jumped at Substack because it would allow her to send out her emails without charge to her or her readers

Substack makes its money by taking a percentage of writers’ subscription revenue, and she said she felt guilty that the company’s support team wasn’t getting paid for fixing her recurring problem: that her extensive footnotes set off her readers’ spam filters.

She thinks of her politics as Lincoln-era Republican, but she is in today’s terms a fairly conventional liberal, disturbed by President Trump and his attacks on America’s institutions.

she published her sixth book, “How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America,” an extended assault on the kind of nostalgia that animates Mr. Trump’s fight to preserve Confederate symbols

The face of the South in Dr. Richardson’s book is a bitterly racist and sexually abusive South Carolina planter and senator, James Henry Hammond, who called Jefferson’s notion that all men are created equal “ridiculously absurd.”

Dr. Richardson’s “readers are people who have been orphaned by the changes in media and the sensationalism and the meanness of so much of Twitter and Facebook, and they were surprised to find her there and pleased and spread the word,” said Bill Moyers

“You live in a world of thunderstorms,” he said, “and she watches the waves come in.”

The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Our government provides critical social services to people in need, including through partnerships with private secular and religious organizations,” Cooper said. “Discrimination has no place there.

Under President Donald Trump, the Department of Justice has not shied away from weighing in on LGBTQ rights cases at the Supreme Court. I

The Trump administration has unrelentingly undermined proven international relationships.

Trump is far more comfortable with autocrats like Putin and Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia than with a democratic leader like Merkel. (She has, for the president, the added drawback of being a woman.)

Trump has trampled on the idea of America as a land of immigrants.

The democratic framework of the United States rests on certain principles: checks and balances, a vigorous free press, an independent judiciary, protection of the individual against forms of racial, religious or sexual prejudice. All these principles, inspirations to democracies across the world, have been attacked by Trump. He has turned the Department of Justice into his personal fief. The president has even refused to commit to leaving office if he loses the election.

“Ultimately, masculinity still matters, we’ve learned. It’s how candidates still try to prove they are the best candidate,” said Ms. Cooper. “And so, even in 2020, Democrats decided the safest bet to beat a white man in his 70s is another white man in his 70s.”

He has said he believes men who change diapers are “acting like the wife.” “Macho Man” is the song that plays at his rallies, even after the Village People objected. “He seeks to distinguish himself as the manliest — and thus, in his mind, the most-qualified — person to be president,” said Kelly Dittmar, a scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

On the other end of the spectrum, or perhaps somewhere in the middle, is Mr. Biden, a “Dad-like” figure, as the philosopher Kate Manne put it, who has vowed to be America’s protector through a dark period, with some combination of strength, empathy and compassion.

“He’s offering a more paternalistic type of masculinity, in that you can be a strong leader, but still be compassionate and empathetic,” said Marianne Cooper, a sociologist at Stanford University who studies gender and work.

On the one extreme is President Trump, who leaves little subtlety in his approach: Bragging about his sexual prowess, along with the size of his nuclear button, proclaiming “domination” over coronavirus and mocking his opponent for the size of his mask (“the biggest mask I’ve ever seen”), as if mask-wearing is somehow weak.

From Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan and right on through Mr. Trump, largely white, Christian, heterosexual presidential candidates have “performed” manhood in all sorts of ways: Donning hard hats and posing inside military tanks; battling over who would be the better guy to have a beer with; and implying their opponents were soft, weak, or “sleepy.”

“Michael Dukakis had a 17-point lead over Bush in the summer of 1988,” said Mr. Katz, whose book on presidential masculinity has been adapted into a documentary called “The Man Card.” “So what did they do? They relentlessly attacked his manhood. They suggested he was a failed protector, that he was ‘soft,’ that he wasn’t a ‘real man.’”

“I think the performance of masculinity means a lot,” he noted, “because it has the potential to eclipse all else.”

Girls receive a message that they “become” women — typically through a biological event like menstruation — while men are told throughout their lives to “be” men or to “man up,” as if masculinity is something that can be easily lost.“You don’t really say ‘be a woman’ the way you say ‘be a man’ or ‘man up,’” she said.Image

“Trump is the personification of this masculinity contest culture,” Ms. Cooper said. “It’s bad for organizations, it’s terrible for a country.”

Maybe women were always the intended audience for the contests. Whether that’s true, they seem to be ready to render a clear judgment. Mr. Biden is leading among women by as much as 20 points.

Central to Islamic beliefs are the Five Pillars of Faith, which all followers of Islam — called Muslims — must follow:: There is only one universal God: Allah. Followers of Islam (Muslims) are expected to pray five times each day while facing Mecca. All Muslims are expected to pay a yearly tax that is mostly intended to help the poor and needy. For the entire month of Ramadan, Muslims must not eat, smoke, drink, or have sexual relations from sunrise to sunset. All able Muslims must make a pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca at least once in their lifetimes.

Muhammad's message was especially well received by the poor and slaves.

In 622, fearing for his life, Muhammad fled to the town of Medina. This flight from Mecca to Medina became known as the Hegira

Muhammad fought a number of battles against the people of Mecca. In 629, Muhammad returned to Mecca with an army of 1500 converts to Islam and entered the city unopposed and without bloodshed. Before his death two years later, he forcefully converted most of the Arabian Peninsula to his new faith and built a small empire.

Unfortunately, Muhammad had not designated a successor. The struggle over leadership that followed his death has divided Muslims to this day, creating a division in Islam between the Sunnis and Shiites.

Despite these problems, a vast Islamic empire was created over the next 12 centuries that would build a base of worshipers unrivaled by any other religion.

I’d add a few more: the conservative influence of John Paul II’s papacy for Generation-X Catholics

the seemingly positive trendlines on race relations (visible in polls of African-Americans as well as whites) from the 1990s through the early Obama years

By virtue of having “adulted” more successfully than millennials — marrying, homebuying and having kids earlier and in larger numbers — Generation X enjoys a certain bourgeois realism about what sustains human societies, what choices in your 20s will make you happiest in your 40s, that’s absent from the very-online progressivism of the young

and the effects of the Reagan and Clinton economic growth spurts, which enabled my generation to enter adulthood under more prosperous conditions than the Great Recession-era landscape that hobbled millennials

On economics, meanwhile, Gen X conservatives can be tempted into uncharity toward younger Americans, interpreting their struggles and sympathies for socialism as a moral failure, as opposed to a response to a more hostile economic landscape than we faced

Zombie Reaganism, sticking with a conservative policy agenda that’s lost much of its relevance, precisely because the Reagan agenda helped make the world in which we came of age.

the characteristic Gen X weakness on race is a complacent assumption that the Clinton-to-Obama period resolved issues like the wealth gap or police misconduct, instead of just tabling them

There is an emotivism and narcissism that millennial liberalism and boomer liberalism seem to share, and in strong doses it’s poison for institutions.

The ironic communitarianism of Gen-X conservatism probably isn’t the perfect antidote, but it may be all we’ve got.

To grow up in the ’70s or ’80s was to come of age just after liberalism’s last high tide, and to see evidence of its failures all around — from the urban blight and ugliness left by utopian renewal projects to the adult disarray and childhood misery sowed by the ideology of sexual liberation in its Hefnerian phase.

After emancipation, Black people in Canada still faced segregation, and the looming threat of hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

According to Henry’s research, the earliest record of African enslavement in colonial Canada was the sale of a young boy, named Olivier LeJeune in 1629.

Slavery was formally ended in the British empire in 1834, including British North America, but legislation was repeatedly passed that would weaken anti-slavery laws in the years leading up to abolition.

by the end of the 1700s, as many as 2,000 Black people were enslaved in the Maritimes region. About 300 more people were enslaved in the area known as Lower Canada (what is now the province of Quebec) and as many as 700 in Upper Canada (Ontario).

Only in recent years has Canada grappled with the legacy of its residential schools – where many Indigenous students were sent against their will and experienced verbal, physical and sexual abuse – a period which schools have now started to teach.

Many people may rightly say: “I had nothing to do with how this all started. I have nothing to do with the sins of the past. My ancestors never attacked Indigenous people, never owned slaves.” And yes

Live with it long enough, and the unthinkable becomes normal. Exposed over the generations, we learn to believe that the incomprehensible is the way that life is supposed to be.

Like other old houses, America has an unseen skeleton: its caste system, which is as central to its operation as are the studs and joists that we cannot see in the physical buildings we call home.

Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions. It is the architecture of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a 400-year-old social order.

Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The lingering, millenniums-long caste system of India. The tragically accelerated, chilling and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States. Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement.

Race does the heavy lifting for a caste system that demands a means of human division. If we have been trained to see humans in the language of race, then caste is the underlying grammar that we encode as children

We may mention “race,” referring to people as Black or white or Latino or Asian or Indigenous, when what lies beneath each label is centuries of history and assigning of assumptions and values to physical features in a structure of human hierarchy.

What people look like, or rather, the race they have been assigned or are perceived to belong to, is the visible cue to their caste. It is the historic flashcard to the public of how they are to be treated, where they are expected to live

in recent decades, we have learned from the human genome that all human beings are 99.9 percent the same. “Race is a social concept, not a scientific one,” said J. Craig Venter, the genomics expert who ran Celera Genomics when the initial sequencing was completed in 2000. “We all evolved in the last 100,000 years from the small number of tribes that migrated out of Africa and colonized the world.

Which means that an entire racial caste system, the catalyst of hatreds and civil war, was built on what the anthropologist Ashley Montagu called “an arbitrary and superficial selection of traits,” derived from a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of genes that make up a human being

“The idea of race,” Montagu wrote, “was, in fact, the deliberate creation of an exploiting class seeking to maintain and defend its privileges against what was profitably regarded as an inferior social caste.”

Caste is the bones, race the skin. Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place.

Caste is rigid and deep; race is fluid and superficial, subject to periodic redefinition to meet the needs of the dominant caste in what is now the United States

While the requirements to qualify as white have changed over the centuries, the fact of a dominant caste has remained constant from its inception — whoever fit the definition of white, at whatever point in history, was granted the legal rights and privileges of the dominant caste.

Thus we are all born into a silent war game, centuries old, enlisted in teams not of our own choosing. The side to which we are assigned in the American system of categorizing people is proclaimed by the team uniform that each caste wears, signaling our presumed worth and potential.

he said to himself, “Yes, I am an untouchable, and every Negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.” In that moment, he realized that the Land of the Free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India and that he had lived under that system all his life.

One afternoon, King and his wife journeyed to the southern tip of the country, to the city then known as Trivandrum in the state of Kerala, and visited with high school students whose families had been untouchables. The principal made the introduction.“Young people,” he said, “I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.”

Social scientists often define racism as the combination of racial bias and systemic power, seeing racism, like sexism, as primarily the action of people or systems with personal or group power over another person or group with less power

over time, racism has often been reduced to a feeling, a character flaw, conflated with prejudice, connected to whether one is a good person or not. It has come to mean overt and declared hatred of a person or group because of the race ascribed to them, a perspective few would ever own up to

Who is racist in a society where someone can refuse to rent to people of color, arrest brown immigrants en masse or display a Confederate flag but not be “certified” as a racist unless he or she confesses to it or is caught using derogatory signage or slurs?

With no universally agreed-upon definition, we might see racism as a continuum rather than an absolute. We might release ourselves of the purity test of whether someone is or is not racist and exchange that mind-set for one that sees people as existing on a scale based on the toxins they have absorbed from the polluted and inescapable air of social instruction we receive from childhood.

Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy.

Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred; it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.

Any action or institution that mocks, harms, assumes or attaches inferiority or stereotype on the basis of the social construct of race can be considered racism

Because caste and race are interwoven in America, it can be hard to separate the two

Any action or structure that seeks to limit, hold back or put someone in a defined ranking, seeks to keep someone in their place by elevating or denigrating that person on the basis of their perceived category, can be seen as casteism.

Casteism is the investment in keeping the hierarchy as it is in order to maintain your own ranking, advantage or privilege or to elevate yourself above others or keep others beneath you

What race and its precursor, racism, do extraordinarily well is to confuse and distract from the underlying structural and more powerful Sith lord of caste. Like the cast on a broken arm, like the cast in a play, a caste system holds everyone in a fixed place.

For this reason, many people — including those we might see as good and kind people — could be casteist, meaning invested in keeping the hierarchy as it is or content to do nothing to change it, but not racist in the classical sense

Actual racists, actual haters, would by definition be casteist, as their hatred demands that those they perceive as beneath them know and keep their place in the hierarchy.

Caste, along with its faithful servant race, is an X-factor in most any American equation, and any answer one might ever come up with to address our current challenges is flawed without it.

Race and caste are not the cause of and do not account for every poor outcome or unpleasant encounter. But caste becomes a factor, to whatever infinitesimal degree, in interactions and decisions across gender, ethnicity, race, immigrant status, sexual orientation, age or religion that have consequences in our everyday lives

The younger country, the United States, would become the most powerful democracy on Earth. The older country, India, would become the largest.

as if operating from the same instruction manual translated to fit their distinctive cultures, both countries adopted similar methods of maintaining rigid lines of demarcation and protocols.

The American system was founded as a primarily two-tiered hierarchy with its contours defined by the uppermost group, those identified as white, and by the subordinated group, those identified as Black, with immigrants from outside Europe forming blurred middle castes that sought to adjust themselves within a bipolar structure, and Native Americans largely exiled outside it.

The Indian caste system, by contrast, is an elaborate fretwork of thousands of subcastes, or jatis, correlated to region and village, which fall under the four main varnas — the Brahmin, the Kshatriya, the Vaishya, the Shudra and the excluded fifth, the Dalits. It is further complicated by non-Hindus — including Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs and Christians — who are outside the original caste system but have incorporated themselves into the workings of the country, at times in the face of resistance and attack, and may or may not have informal rankings among themselves and in relation to the varnas.

African-Americans, throughout most of their time in this land, were relegated to the dirtiest, most demeaning and least desirable jobs by definition. After enslavement and well into the 20th century, they were primarily restricted to the role of sharecroppers and servants — domestics, lawn boys, chauffeurs and janitors. The most that those who managed to get an education could hope for was to teach, minister to, attend to the health needs of or bury other subordinate-caste people.

the caste lines in America may have at one time appeared even starker than those in India. In 1890, “85 percent of Black men and 96 percent of Black women were employed in just two occupational categories,” wrote the sociologist Stephen Steinberg, “agriculture and domestic or personal service.”

So, too, with groups trained to believe in their inherent sovereignty. “The essence of this overestimation of one’s own position and the hate for all who differ from it is narcissism,” wrote Erich Fromm, a leading psychoanalyst and social theorist of the 20th century. “He is nothing,” Fromm wrote, “but if he can identify with his nation, or can transfer his personal narcissism to the nation, then he is everything.”

“Narcissus could not conceive that he was in love with his own reflection,” wrote the Harvard clinical psychologist Elsa Ronningstam in her 2005 book, “Identifying and Understanding the Narcissistic Personality.” “He was caught in an illusion.”

The political theorist Takamichi Sakurai, in his 2018 examination of Western and Eastern perspectives on the topic, and channeling Fromm, wrote bluntly: “Group narcissism leads people to fascism.” He went on, “An extreme form of group narcissism means malignant narcissism, which gives to rise to a fanatical fascist politics, an extreme racialism and so on.”

“The survival of a group,” Fromm wrote, “depends to some extent on the fact that its members consider its importance as great as or greater than that of their own lives.”Thus, when under threat, they are willing to sacrifice themselves and their ideals for the survival of the group from which they draw their self-esteem.

Battleground states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Florida and North Carolina are no-excuse absentee states.

“We certainly have seen very active, very active efforts by the Russians to influence our election in 2020,”

Amy Dorris, a former model, alleges that Trump sexually assaulted her at the U.S. Open.

Arizona, the poll found, is one of the few battlegrounds in which a third-party candidate is likely to play a significant role on the presidential level. The Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen gets between 3 and 4 percent of the presidential vote, depending on the turnout model used.

“Look at her. … I don’t think so,” he said.

All of this rancor comes as absentee voting is already underway in multiple states. By the end of this week, voters will be able to cast in-person ballots in eight states.

Mr. Ratcliffe, a former Republican congressman from Texas who fiercely defended the president during the Russia investigation, has downplayed such threats, an approach the president prefers.

Joseph R. Biden Jr. holds a four-point edge over President Trump among registered voters in Arizona, though that advantage fades when the sample focuses only on likely voters, according to a Monmouth University poll released Thursday.

The woman, Amy Dorris, a former model, said she was invited, along with her boyfriend at the time, to Mr. Trump’s private box to watch the tennis match. Ms. Dorris was 24.

In Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, Mr. Biden held a 6-point lead among likely voters — a nine-point swing from 2016, when Mr. Trump won the county by 3 percentage points.

The news for Mr. Biden was a little rosier when the poll examined critical regions in the state.

Only one Democratic presidential candidate has prevailed in Arizona in the past 70 years: Bill Clinton in 1996.

“Joe Biden just has a fundamentally different view of what it means for the economy to be doing well than Donald Trump does,” she continued. “Joe Biden believes the economy is not doing well unless middle-class families and working people are doing well.”

“If Joe Biden gets elected, we can kiss goodbye to the economy that we’ve been enjoying,” a woman who describes herself as a small-business owner says in one ad. “He’s going to raise taxes, he’s already said that.”

On Tuesday night, President Trump returned to the theme during a town-hall-style meeting broadcast on ABC, where he was taken to task by Ellesia Blaque, an assistant professor at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania. She told him she had a congenital illness, demanded to know what he would do to keep “people like me who work hard” insured.

“We’re going to be doing a health care plan very strongly, and protect people with pre-existing conditions,” Mr. Trump told her, adding, “I have it all ready, and it’s a much better plan for you, and it’s a much better plan.”

And with tens of thousands of Americans losing their coverage to a coronavirus-induced economic turndown, fears of inadequate or nonexistent health insurance have never been greater.

MIAMI — Jeff Gruver voted for the first time ever in March, casting an enthusiastic ballot for Bernie Sanders in Florida’s presidential primary.

Mr. Gruver does not have the money. And he does not want to take any risk that his vote could be deemed illegal. Like more than a million other ex-felons, he has learned that even an overwhelming 2018 vote approving a state referendum to restore voting rights to most people who had served their sentences does not necessarily mean that they will ever get to vote.

Mike PenceTo be determined.

“I think he made a mistake when he said that,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “It’s just incorrect information.” A vaccine would go “to the general public immediately,” the president insisted, and “under no circumstance will it be as late as the doctor said.” As for Dr. Redfield’s conclusion that masks may be more useful than a vaccine, Mr. Trump said that “he made a mistake,” maintaining that a “vaccine is much more effective than the masks.”

“So let me be clear. I trust vaccines. I trust the scientists. But I don’t trust Donald Trump,” Mr. Biden said. “And at this moment, the American people can’t either.”

Attorney General William P. Barr has ratcheted up his involvement in partisan politics in recent days, floating federal sedition charges against violent protesters and the prosecution of a Democratic mayor; asserting his right to intervene in Justice Department investigations; warning of dire consequences for the nation if President Trump is not re-elected; and comparing coronavirus restrictions to slavery.

“Because I am ultimately accountable for every decision the department makes, I have an obligation to ensure we make the correct ones,” he said.

Needless to say, there wasn’t. Most women did indeed vote for Hillary Clinton, but Trump won either a plurality or an outright majority of white women, enough to give him the presidency. There turned out to be far less of a political penalty for vulgar misogyny than some of us realized.

Then Trump’s incompetence came home. “Once the pandemic hit, once there were personal consequences for their lives, there was an absolute shift in how people talked about Donald Trump,” said Longwell.

She tries to avoid almost all political news, and doesn’t trust what she does come across. Where she lives, she said, she hasn’t seen a single Biden sign, and she knows very little about the former vice president. But she’s planning to vote for him. If women defeat Trump next month, it will be because of everything he’s done to defeat them first.

Justice Scalia, who died in 2016, repeatedly and unequivocally urged that Roe be overruled, arguing that the Constitution says nothing about abortion and states should be allowed to decide the question for themselves. Judge Barrett’s scholarly writings suggest she would have no hesitation in overruling Roe, either, nor those “liberty” decisions. She wrote, “I tend to agree with those who say that a justice’s duty is to the Constitution and that it is thus more legitimate for her to enforce her best understanding of the Constitution rather than a precedent she thinks clearly in conflict with it.”

The court, voting 5-4, said that this violated the principle that Congress must treat all states alike. But no such requirement is found in the Constitution. Moreover, the Congress that ratified the 14th Amendment imposed Reconstruction on Southern states, showing that it did not mean to treat all states alike.

But now, with the confirmation of Judge Barrett, it will be a dominant theory on the Supreme Court. Make no mistake, it is just as much a threat to all of our rights as when Robert Bork espoused it more than 30 years ago.

They found that “at least 60 percent of them are white, Christian and male. Further, around half are retired, over 65 years of age, and earn at least $50K per year. Finally, roughly 30 percent have at least a college degree.” More than 50 percent were born at a time of white hegemony, before the civil rights and women’s rights movements and the sexual revolution.

whether Trump “bears responsibility for the Capitol riot.” They found that “barely 30 percent of these respondents believe Trump bears any responsibility whatsoever,” and, of those, more than half said Trump bears “a little” responsibility.

Not only are these voters partisan, the authors note, but “when we asked our respondents about whether or not they agreed with Trump’s fraud claims, 98 percent believed them valid.”

“75 percent of Americans believe that Trump bears at least some responsibility” for the Jan. 6 mob attack on Congress. Among all Republicans, “this figure declines significantly to 52 percent.”

These MAGA supporters, who were recruited after signaling sympathy for the movement on Facebook, were rock-solid Republicans, Blum and Parker found, voting at or near 100 percent for the party’s House and Senate candidates in 2018 and 2020, and for Trump last year. They are far more engaged in politics — contributing money, going to meetings and volunteering — than the average American. “By any metric, this group appears committed to the political process,” Blum and Parker wrote.

Should Trump be “charged with the crime of inciting a riot?” All adults: yes 54, no 43. Republicans: yes 12, no 84.

Along similar lines, a Washington Post/ABC News survey taken Jan. 10-13 demonstrated how the views of a majority of Republicans stand far apart from the views of a majority of Americans.

Asked if Trump has acted “responsibly” or “irresponsibly” since the Nov. 3 election, the 1002 adults polled chose “irresponsibly” by 66-30. Republicans, in contrast, chose “responsibly” by 66-29.

It would come at a cost: more government instability as potential coalition allies jockey over cabinet posts, a particular issue or a budget item. It would also give the far ends of the political spectrum continuous formal representation in the political system. The Trumps could more easily realize their goal of becoming the Le Pens of America.

Using their accusations almost as a lingua franca, a way to identify the like-minded, MAGA partisans and followers of QAnon signal one another by alleging that pedophile rings seek to wrest control of government or by alleging that school shootings were staged by leftists to win passage of gun control. They evoke a world in which unknown forces pull the levers of government, where nothing is as it seems to be. Professing your belief in claims like these attests to MAGA loyalties while expressing — in an arcane, politicized shorthand — your fervent opposition to liberalism and racial and cultural change

In contrast, they wrote, “roughly 95 percent of MAGA supporters believe Antifa — the left wing protest group — bears some responsibility for the riots,” with more than 85 percent agreeing that Antifa bears “a great deal” or “a lot” of responsibility.

Drutman wrote that he has “come to realize how much of an existential threat the current Republican Party is to the continuation of America democracy.” A two-party democracy cannot survive “for very long if one of two dominant parties gives up on the foundational institution of democracy: free and fair elections, in which all votes count equally.”

I’ve also come to appreciate how much democracy depends on a conservative party that believes in democracy, and thus how important it is to create electoral institutions in this moment that will allow the currently-marginalized small “l” liberal Republicans to separate from the MAGA wing of the party and still win some representation in the Congress.

Proportional representation, he argued “is the only way to break up the current Republican coalition and free the pro-democracy forces within the Republican Party to compete on their own.”

Representative Don Beyer, Democrat of Virginia, plans to reintroduce The Fair Representation Act, which would, if enacted, put into place many of the reforms Drutman supports. Beyer wrote on his website that the measurewould move U.S. House elections into multi-member districts drawn by independent redistricting commissions and elected through ranked choice voting. The multi-member districts would be effective in states apportioned six or more seats in the House, and would elect three to five Representatives each, depending on the size of the state. Taken together, these three measures would incentivize congressional candidates to appeal to a broader range of voters.

Pippa Norris, a political scientist at Harvard who examined different levels of dissatisfaction in democratic countries in “Is Western Democracy Backsliding?” finds evidence supportive of Drutman’s argument:Parliamentary democracies with PR elections and stable multiparty coalition governments, typical of the Nordic region, generate a broader consensus about welfare policies addressing inequality, exclusion, and social justice, and this avoids the adversarial winner-take-all divisive politics and social inequality more characteristic of majoritarian systems.

I would prefer ranked-choice voting with some multi-member districts for state and national legislatures, and proportional representation (by state popular vote, not by Congressional district which are already gerrymandered) for the Electoral College.” These, she wrote, “could all be accomplished with just legislative change, no constitutional amendments.

Stephen Ansolabehere, a political scientist at Harvard, said by email that “a PR system would be political suicide for the parties.” Why, he asked, “would either party — let alone both — want to change?”

Several political scholars and strategists argue that the fault lies in our political system, that the unique way America has combined its government structure with the mechanics of its elections serves to exacerbate conflict in a deeply polarized country. These scholars have produced a variety of proposals, many involving the creation of multi-member congressional districts and the encouragement of proportional representation to replace the current single district, winner-take-all system.

a separate 2019 survey by Echelon Insights, a survey research firm, that asked voters “Suppose the Democratic and Republican Parties were replaced by a new set of political parties. Which of these parties would you be most likely to support?”

A center-left party committed to putting “the middle class first, pass universal health insurance, strengthen labor unions, and raise taxes on the wealthy to support programs for those less well off” amassed 28 percent.A green party with a platform calling for passage of “a Green New Deal to build a carbon-free economy with jobs for all, break up big corporations, end systemic inequality, and promote social and economic justice” picked up 10 percent.

A traditional-right party, committed to “defend the American system of free enterprise, promote traditional family,” won 21 percent.A culturally liberal and globalist party with a platform committed to “advance social progress including women’s rights and LGBTQ rights, to work with other countries through free trade and diplomacy, to cut the deficit, and reform capitalism with sensible regulation” gathered 12 percent.

The firm gave respondents five choices,A nationalist-right party promising to “stop illegal immigration, put America First, stand up to political correctness” attracted 19 percent.

H-E-B issued a statement on Sunday saying that its focus was still on operations after the storm, noting that the weather had been “incredibly difficult” on its employees as well as the rest of the state.

Allegiances to brands are often about more than just the product; they can be a proxy for consumers to telegraph their stances on political or social issues. Yet H-E-B reflects another kind of virtue signaling, one that often supersedes race, class, religion, gender or sexual orientation: a display of Texan identity.H-E-B falls into a class of companies that Texans instantly identify with their state in a way that transcends commerce, particularly for expatriates outside state lines. There is Whataburger, the fast food chain; Blue Bell ice cream; and Buc-ee’s supersized convenience stores. Many a Texan in New York City has spotted an orange-striped bag from Junior’s Cheesecake and thought someone stepped on the E train with a Whataburger.

“That’s what we’ve come to expect of H-E-B,” Professor McAlister added. “It’s from the heart and they’re good at logistics. If their Texans need water, they can get it to them, because it’s their Texans who are thirsty.”

The shelves in many stores were light on inventory, if not entirely bare, especially for water. In a store packed with customers in the Las Palmas neighborhood of San Antonio, notices warned people could only take two gallons of water. “Limits are temporary and necessary for you and your neighbors to find the products you need,” a sign said.

But Judith Chevalier, a Yale economist who chairs the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession, said rules intended to improve seminars wouldn’t address the underlying problems that Dr. Modestino’s research revealed.

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

Evangelicals did not support Mr. Trump in spite of who he is. They supported him because of who he is, and because of who they are. He is their protector, the bully who is on their side, the one who offered safety amid their fears that their country as they know it, and their place in it, is changing, and changing quickly.

White straight married couples with children who go to church regularly are no longer the American mainstream. An entire way of life, one in which their values were dominant, could be headed for extinction. And Mr. Trump offered to restore them to power, as though they have not been in power all along.

“You are always only one generation away from losing Christianity,” said Micah Schouten, who was born and raised in Sioux Center, recalling something a former pastor used to say. “If you don’t teach it to your children it ends. It stops right there.”

“The one group of people that people felt like they could dis and mock and put down had become the Christian. Just the middle-class, middle-American Christians,” Ms. Burg said. “That was the one group left that you could just totally put down and call deplorable. And he recognized that, You know what? Yeah, it’s OK that we have our set of values, too. I think people finally said, ‘Yes, we finally have somebody that’s willing to say we’re not bad, we need to have a voice too.’”

“I feel like on the coasts, in some of the cities and stuff, they look down on us in rural America. You know, we are a bunch of hicks, and don’t know anything. They don’t understand us the same way we don’t understand them. So we don’t want them telling us how to live our lives.”

“You joke that we don’t get it, well, you don’t get it either. We are not speaking the same language.”

Those in the town, though, ultimately heard something else entirely. What mattered was not just what Mr. Trump said. It was where he said it. And to whom.

Mr. Driesen spoke of the policies that were important to him, all the usual conservative issues. Small government. Ending abortion. Judges who share his political views. “Traditional families,” he said.“Unfortunately, there’s just more divorce than there used to be,” he said. “There’s more cohabitating. I think it is detrimental to the family. I just think kids do better in a two-parent home, with a mom and a dad.”

“The religious part is huge for us, as we see religious freedoms being taken away,” Ms. Driesen said. “If you don’t believe in homosexuality or something, you lose your business because of it. And that’s a core part of your faith. Whereas I see Trump as defending that. He’s actually made that executive order to put the Bibles back in the public schools. That is something very worrisome and dear to us, our religious freedom.”

They want the Christian education for their children “so we don’t have to have them indoctrinated with all these different things,” he said. “We are free to teach them our values.”

“Silly things. Just let the boys go in the boys’ bathroom and the girls go in the girls’,” he said. “It’s just something you’d think is never going to happen, and nowadays it could. And it probably will.”“Just hope nobody turns it upside down,” he said.“But we feel like we are in a little area where we are protected yet,” she said. “We are afraid of losing that, I guess.”

She paused. “It’s almost like it is a reverse intolerance. If you have somebody that’s maybe on the liberal side, they say that we are intolerant of them. But it is inverse intolerant if we can’t live out our faith.”

“Trump’s an outsider, like the rest of us,” he said. “We might not respect Trump, but we still love the guy for who he is.” “Is he a man of integrity? Absolutely not,” he went on. “Does he stand up for some of our moral Christian values? Yes.” The guys agreed. “I’m not going to say he’s a Christian, but he just doesn’t attack us,” his friend Jason Mulder said.

“I do not love Trump. I think Trump is good for America as a country. I think Trump is going to restore our freedoms, where we spent eight years, if not more, with our freedoms slowly being taken away under the guise of giving freedoms to all,” she said. “Caucasian-Americans are becoming a minority. Rapidly.”

None of them said they had wanted to vote for Mr. Trump, but they did — “When he was the last option,”

But they agreed it would be easier to vote for him this time. Before, it was hard to know what he would be like as president. Now they knew, and they liked the results: Supreme Court justices, conservative judges

“Obama wanted to take my assault rifle, he wanted to take out all the high-capacity magazines,” Mr. Schouten said. “It just —” “— felt like your freedoms kept getting taken from you,”

“We have life very easy, it is laid back, it is like-minded people. And it’s just, I like the bubble,” she said. “I like not worrying about sending them outside to play, or whose house they are going to if they are going to the neighbors a few houses down, they might not go to the same church, they might not hold all the same beliefs, but I trust them. I don’t know, maybe that is naïve.”

The years of the Obama presidency were confusing to her. She said she heard talk of giving freedoms to gay people and members of minority groups. But to her it felt like her freedoms were being taken away. And that she was turning into the minority.

The Trump era has revealed the complete fusion of evangelical Christianity and conservative politics, even as white evangelical Christianity continues to decline as a share of the national population.

She explained what she meant. “If you are a hard-working Caucasian-American, your rights are being limited because you are seen as against all the races or against women,” she said. “Or there are people who think that because we have conservative values and we value the family and I value submitting to my husband, I must be against women’s rights.”

“People in my circles, you don’t really hear about racism, so I guess I don’t know too much about it,” Mr. Driesen said of the protests. “When I see the pictures, I thought they all should be at work, being productive citizens.”

“We are making this huge issue of white versus Black, Black Lives Matter. All lives matter,” she said. “There are more deaths from abortion than there are from corona, but we are not fighting that battle.”

“We are picking and choosing who matters and who doesn’t,” she said. “They say they are being picked on, when we are all being picked on in one shape or form.”

After the election of President Barack Obama, the country seemed to undergo a cultural shift, she said. “It was dangerous to voice your Christianity,” she said. “Because we were viewed as bigots, as racists — we were labeled as the haters and the ones who are causing all the derision and all of the problems in America. Blame it on the white believers.”

There are some signs of fraying at the edges of the coalition, among some women and young people. If even a small fraction turns away from Mr. Trump, it could make the difference to his re-election.

even if he loses in November, mainstream evangelical Christianity has made plain its deepest impulses and exposed where the majority of its believers pledge allegiance.

There is a straight line from that day at Dordt four years ago to a recent scene at a chapel in Washington, where armed officers tear-gassed peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square and shot them with rubber pellets. They were clearing the way for Mr. Trump to march from the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church and hold up a Bible, a declaration of Christian power.

“To me it was like, that’s great. Trump is recognizing the Bible, we are one nation under God,” Mr. Schouten said. “He is willing to stand out there and take a picture of it for the country to see.”He added: “Trump was standing up for Christianity.”

In the first wave, nearly 1 million children, hundreds of thousands of teachers and half-a-million mothers with babies were evacuated. The teachers were assigned groups of kids to find spaces for when their trains arrived in smaller towns and villages.

In September 1940, the predicted Nazi bombing campaign known as “the Blitz” began, and the last wave of child evacuations took place. Many well-to-do families also arranged for their children to be sent overseas to countries such as Canada, Australia and the United States.

For others, the evacuation was a nightmare. Their food rations from the government were confiscated by the families they ended up with; they were put to work in fields; many were physically and sexually abused. John Abbott told the BBC he was whipped by his host family whenever he spoke and was eventually rescued by local police, bruised and bleeding.

by January 1940, nearly half of parents had brought their children home, the museum said. The health ministry put up threatening posters to discourage this. One poster depicts a mother visiting her children in the country with a ghostly Adolf Hitler over her shoulder, tempting her like Satan to “Take them back! Take them back!”

Accommodations varied wildly. Some children were virtually adopted by host families and given love and good care. Some lived in large manors housing dozens of children and run by teachers. Many of the urban children were seeing the countryside, agriculture and farm animals for the first time, finding it both inspiring and boring.

It was after this last wave, in October 1940, that Princess Elizabeth addressed the children of Britain.

When Elizabeth turned 18 in early 1945, she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, where she trained as a truck mechanic and driver. To this day, she is the only female member of the royal family to have served in the military.

In 1940, she told the children — her contemporaries — “When peace comes, remember it will be for us, the children of today, to make the world of tomorrow a better and happier place.”Now 93, she said Sunday: “I hope, in the years to come, everyone will be able to take pride in how they responded to this challenge. And those who come after us will say the Britons of this generation were as strong as any.”“Today, once again, many will feel a painful sense of separation from their loved ones,” she closed. “But now, as then, we know deep down that it is the right thing to do.”

they are men like my late father and his friends, who understood that a man’s word is his bond and that a handshake means something. They are men who still believe in a day’s work for a day’s wages. They feel that you should never thank another man when he hands you a paycheck that you earned.

courage, honesty, respect, an economy of words, a bit of modesty, and a willingness to take responsibility are all virtues prized by the self-identified class of hard-working men, the stand-up guys, among whom I was raised.

yet, many of these same men expect none of those characteristics from Trump, who is a vain, cowardly, lying, vulgar, jabbering blowhard

As the writer Windsor Mann has noted, Trump behaves in ways that many working-class men would ridicule: “He wears bronzer, loves gold and gossip, is obsessed with his physical appearance, whines constantly, can't control his emotions, watches daytime television, enjoys parades and interior decorating, and used to sell perfume.”

To reduce all of this to sexual inadequacy, however, is too facile. It cannot explain why millions of men look the other way when Trump acts in ways they would typically find shameful. Nor is arguing that Trump is a bad person and therefore that the people who support him are either brainwashed or also bad people helpful. He is, and some of them are. But that doesn’t explain why men who would normally ostracize someone like Trump continue to embrace him.

one must first grasp how deeply they are betraying their own definition of masculinity by looking more closely at the flaws they should, in principle, find revolting.

Is Trump honorable? This is a man who routinely refused to pay working people their due wages, and then lawyered them into the ground when they objected to being exploited. Trump is a rich downtown bully, the sort most working men usually hate.

the fact of the matter is that Trump is an obvious coward. He has two particular phobias: powerful men and intelligent women.

Whenever he is in the company of Russian President Vladimir Putin, to take the most cringe-inducing example, he visibly cowers.

he is eager to criticize China, until he is asked about Chinese President Xi Jinping.

This is related to one of Trump’s most noticeable problems, which is that he can never stop talking.

Is Trump a man who respects women?

Women clearly scare Trump. You don’t have to take my word for it. “Donald doesn’t like strong women,” Senator Ted Cruz said back in 2016

Trump never seems more fearful and insecure than when women question him

Does Trump accept responsibility and look out for his team? Not in the least. In this category, he exhibits one of the most unmanly of behaviors: He’s a blamer.

Stern’s observation opens the door to a better explanation of why—despite all of his whiny complaints, his pouty demeanor, and his mean-girl tweets—Trump’s working-class voters forgive him.

Trump’s lack of masculinity is about maturity. He is not manly because he is not a man. He is a boy.

Trump is a hero to a culture in which so many men are already trapped in perpetual adolescence.

especially for men who feel like life might have passed them by, whose fondest memories are rooted somewhere in their own personal Wonder Years from elementary school until high-school graduation, Trump is a walking permission slip to shrug off the responsibilities of manhood.

so many of the men who support Trump have morphed into childish caricatures of themselves. They, too, are little boys, playing at being tough but crying about their victimization at the hands of liberal elites if they are subjected to criticism of any kind.

Trump’s base of support among working-class white women. (Those numbers are now declining.) But perhaps these women, too, regard Trump as just one more difficult and mischievous man-child in their lives to be accommodated and forgiven.

The best example of women giving him a pass was after the Access Hollywood tape came to light in the fall of 2016.

Female Trump supporters were interviewed on national television and—in a tragic admission about the state of American families—seemed confused about why Trump would be considered any worse than the men around them.

In the end, Trump will continue to act like a little boy, and his base, the voters who will stay with him to the end, will excuse him. When a grown man brags about being brave, it is unmanly and distasteful; when a little boy pulls out a cardboard sword and ties a towel around his neck like a cape, it’s endearing. When a rich and powerful old man whines about how unfairly he is being treated, we scowl and judge; when a little boy snuffles in his tears and says that he was bullied—treated worse than Abraham Lincoln, even—we comfort.

Donald Trump is unmanly because he has never chosen to become a man. He has weathered few trials that create an adult of any kind. He is, instead, working-class America’s dysfunctional son, and his supporters, male and female alike, have become the worried parent explaining what a good boy he is to terrorized teachers even while he continues to set fires in the hallway right outside.

Howard Stern, of all people, said it best: “The oddity in all of this is the people Trump despises most, love him the most. The people who are voting for Trump for the most part … He’d be disgusted by them.” The tragedy is that they are not disgusted by him in return.