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Early 2017 Gallup data echoed this. It showed 32 percent of Republicans suddenly liked the man who had just interfered in an American election.

But a significant and influential segment of the party has demonstrated a tendency toward a brand of moral relativism and even authoritarianism that creates an opening for giving Putin a pass.

Maybe these Republicans just disliked Biden that much, or maybe they saw something admirable in Putin’s strongman mystique (a sentiment Trump has spent years cultivating). It certainly wouldn’t be the only evidence of Trump supporters flirting with the merits of authoritarianism.

Regardless, the data show how, when these loud voices on the right project softness on Putin or his invasion of Ukraine, there’s a willingness to hear that out — even if the base doesn’t actually like Putin. Influential voices on the right have spent years creating a permission structure for shrugging at things like Navalny’s death (see: Jamal Khashoggi).

there’s been little in the way of a desire to fight back against these noisy and influential forces — in part because that would entail going against the most powerful Republican and the onetime most influential conservative commentator.

warn that Twitter was a threat to national unity,

Many Saudis have seized on Twitter as the most immediate and effective way to open little windows into a traditionally opaque society.

A number of web activists have been detained, including at least one for the alleged apostasy, a charge that could carry the death penalty.

Billionaire businessman Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, who presents himself as a reformist, has described attempts to restrict social media as a losing battle.

This vision involves “a mix of dependence on others and obligations to them,” Levin writes, “and so a connection with specific people with whom you share some meaningful portion of the actual experience of life.”

Levin understands the allure of nostalgia; indeed, he believes that almost all contemporary politics is based on it

These competing nostalgias, though more sophisticated than Trump’s, are no less misguided, and lead to bad politics and policy.

Sure, there is plenty to long for, Levin says. In the early decades of the post-World War II era, the United States enjoyed “relative cultural cohesion, low economic inequality, high confidence in national institutions, and widespread optimism about the nation’s prospects” (especially if you were white and male). But that was a unique pivot point in U.S. history, a time when the country was straddling two opposing forces that would define the American century: consolidation and diffusion.

The first half of the 20th century, Levin contends, was an age of consolidation, with a peerless industrial economy, a strong centralized government and a relatively uniform cultural identity shaped by a powerful mass media.

In the century’s second half, by contrast, the U.S. economy became more diversified and deregulated, while cultural conformity broke down in favor of individualism and the politics of personal identity.

for a fleeting moment at midcentury, it enjoyed the best of both. “The social, political, and economic forms of American life at midcentury made possible a degree of prosperity and cohesion that in turn enabled many Americans to flourish,”

“Democrats talk about public policy as though it were always 1965 and the model of the Great Society welfare state will answer our every concern,”

Republicans talk as though it were always 1981 and a repetition of the Reagan Revolution is the cure for what ails us.”

This stale — and stalemated — debate leaves people discouraged with politicians who don’t seem engaged with their current struggles. “In the absence of relief from their own resulting frustration, a growing number of voters opt for leaders who simply embody or articulate that frustration,”

the nostalgia of the traditional political class is also pernicious and “blinding,” Levin argues, because it keeps us from grappling with the real problems assaulting us in the age of diffusion

“In liberating many individuals from oppressive social constraints, we have also estranged many from their families and unmoored them from their communities, work, and faith,”

“Rather than decrying the collapse of moral order, we must draw people’s eyes and hearts to the alternative.” Their incessant focus on religious liberty, for example, while important, may be counterproductive, “a fundamentally plaintive and inward-looking minority asking to protect what it has and in essence to be left alone,”

In unleashing markets to meet the needs and wants of consumers, we have freed them also to treat workers as dispensable and interchangeable.

In pursuing meritocracy, we have magnified inequality.”

“In loosening the reins of cultural conformity and national identity we have weakened the roots of mutual trust.

he worries that the price of this new freedom has been high. “We have set loose a scourge of loneliness and isolation that we are still afraid to acknowledge as the distinct social dysfunction of our age of individualism, just as crushing conformity was the characteristic scourge of an era of cohesion and national unity,”

The answer to all this is the pursuit of what Levin describes as a “modernized politics of subsidiarity — that is, of putting power, authority and significance as close to the level of interpersonal community as reasonably possible.”

He is most concerned with the thicket of institutions in the middle — families, schools, religious organizations, all the things usually lumped together as civil society.

“we should see it as an effort to open up the space between them — the space where a free society can genuinely thrive.” Our objective should be to “channel power and resources to the mediating institutions of society and allow for bottom-up problem solving that takes a variety of specialized, adapted forms.”

It is a very Tocquevillian vision, with a dash of Catholic social teaching thrown in. No doubt, to yearn for the renewal of these traditional institutions is its own kind of nostalgia.

So how do we go about strengthening families, religious organizations, schools and all those mediating institutions?

He calls for a “mobility agenda,” with economic growth spurred by tax and regulatory reform

a more competitive and low-cost health-care system, lower budget deficits — all part of a standard conservative recipe.

He proposes education reform that includes more professional certificates, apprenticeships “and other ways of gaining the skills for well-paid employment that do not require a college degree.”

Levin’s intention here is less to offer detailed proposals than to shift the locus of policymaking itself — and to infuse it with greater humility. “There is not much that public policy can do,” he admits, “to create communities that do a better job of encouraging constructive behavior: it could, however, do less harm, and it could leave room for such communities to form, and protect the space in which they take root and grow.”

The result is a bifurcated America, torn between wealth and poverty, order and disorder. “Increasingly, society consists of individuals and a national state, while the mediating institutions — family, community, church, unions, and others — fade and falter.”

Instead, social and religious conservatives should “assert themselves by offering living models of their alternative to the moral culture of our hyper-individualist age.”

In other words, less hectoring and lecturing, less trying to remake the culture at large, and more strengthening one’s “near-at-hand community,” Levin writes. He calls this approach “subcultural traditionalism

he sees it in “civic groups that channel their energies into making neighborhoods safe and attractive, or into helping the poor, or protecting the vulnerable, or assimilating immigrants, or helping fight addiction

in schools that build character and inculcate the values parents think are most important; in religious congregations that mold themselves into living communities of like-minded families, and that turn their faiths into works to improve the lives of others;

in the work of teachers and students who are committed to liberal learning and engagement with the deepest questions.”

Such a localized focus, Levin maintains, is not “an alternative to fighting for the soul of the larger society, but a most effective means of doing so.”

I suspect the fulfillment of Levin’s vision would require a party and a movement that grasp the exhaustion of their current approach. A November defeat, especially a landslide, might accomplish that

“Within French republicanism, which is today the dominant political language, the fear of fragmentation is very powerful and very real,” Mr. Chabal said in an interview. “This means any political process that is seen to encourage that — community leaders, accommodations to certain groups — is seen as a threat to the unity of the nation.”

In fact, he said, the differences between the two approaches are narrowing. In France, despite their allegiance to republican values, local politicians are compelled to deal with competing concerns of diverse communities. “It is the reality of a pluralistic society,” Mr. Chabal said. “Pressure groups are part and parcel of modern democracy.”

The social realities of urbanization, race and deindustrialization are the true engines of change rumbling beneath our politics and driving these changes. But conservative media - Fox News, Talk Radio, Drudge, Breitbart - has been the mechanism of the transformation within the GOP.

The biggest frustration reported by Republicans who have met with Trump is his inability to focus for any period of time. He is impatient with facts and charts and he changes the subject every few minutes. Republican leaders need policy leadership — or permission to provide it themselves.

this is also a governing crisis. Trump won office promising to undo globalization, bring back manufacturing jobs and fulfill “every dream you ever dreamed.” So expectations are pretty high. But Trumpism, for the most part, consists of cultural signals and symbolic goals, not a set of developed proposals.

Not everyone who helps a president become president is fit to help him govern. Bannon — whose Breitbart News invited the alt-right into the conservative mainstream and who has made a business model out of spreading conspiratorial nonsense — belongs in this category, along with Sarah Palin, Rudy Giuliani, Corey Lewandowski and the rest of the distracting campaign sideshow.

The final crisis faced by the GOP — and just about everyone else — relates to the quality of our political culture. Trump won office in a way that damaged our democracy. He fed resentment against minorities, promised to jail his opponent and turned shallow invective into an art form. If he governs as he campaigned, Trump will smash the unity of our country into a thousand shards of bitterness.

the long-term political crisis faced by the triumphant GOP. Trump won the presidency in a manner that undermines the GOP’s electoral future. He demonstrated that the “coalition of the ascendant” — including minorities, millennials and the college-educated — is not yet ascendant. But in a nation where over half of children under 5 years old are racial or ethnic minorities, it eventually will be.

Republicans may end up depending on a younger generation of leaders — Ryan, Ben Sasse, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Jeff Flake, Marco Rubio — to demonstrate the possibility of unifying aspiration and civil disagreement.

What are the Democratic options moving forward? First, there is the Bernie Sanders option — the embrace of a leftist populism that amounts to democratic socialism. This might also be called the Jeremy Corbyn option, after the leftist leader of the British Labour Party who has ideologically purified his party into political irrelevance.

Second, there is the Joe Biden option — a liberalism that makes a sustained outreach to union members and other blue-collar workers while showing a Catholic religious sensibility on issues of social justice

Third, there is the option of doubling down on the proven Barack Obama option, which requires a candidate who can excite rather than sedate the Obama-era base.

the Democratic candidate for president can’t prevail — at least at the moment — when she receives less than 30 percent of the vote from the white, non-college-educated Americans who live in the spaces between the cities

Democrats have become symbolically estranged from white, working-class America.

here is the largest, long-term Democratic challenge: It has become a provincial party. It is highly concentrated in urban areas and clings to the coasts. But our constitutional system puts emphasis on holding geography, particularly in the House of Representatives and the electoral college

In 2012, President Obama won the presidency with fewer than 700 counties out of more than 3,000 in the United States — a historical low. Clinton carried a little under 500 — about 15 percent of the total.

But why was the election even close enough for bad strategy in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, or utter incompetence by the FBI director, to matter?

Donald Trump was riding a modest electoral wave in certain parts of the country, but it was not large enough to overwhelm a reasonably capable Democratic candidate with a decent political strategy. Trump’s vote did not burst the levees; it barely lapped over the top of them in the industrial Midwest. The “blue wall” was too low by just a foot or two.

The Democratic candidate and her team could not protect the United States from a serious risk to its ideals and institutions by an untested and unstable novice who flirted with authoritarianism and made enough gaffes on an average Tuesday to sink a normal presidential campaign.

Hillary Clinton proved incapable of defeating a reality-television host whom more than 60 percent of Americans viewed as unfit to be president. It is perhaps the most humiliating moment in the long history of Mr. Jefferson’s party.

But a re-election to the speakership would allow Mr. Ryan to pick up the pieces of a party that splintered during the 2016 election cycle.

Republicans’ willingness to anoint Mr. Ryan again for speaker will face its first test with the leadership votes that follow close on the heels of the Nov. 8 election. Mr. Ryan remains popular with many House Republicans, and perhaps his biggest advantage is that no one so far has emerged as a viable alternative to replace him.

Being outside the single market could damage Britain’s important financial services sector and is likely to hit the value of the pound again, at least temporarily.

We don’t want the E.U. to fail, we want it to prosper economically and politically, and we need to persuade our allies that a strong new partnership with the U.K. will help the E.U. to do that.”

A week ago, Mrs. May said in a television interview that post-Brexit Britain would not be able to keep “bits” of its European Union membership.

Membership in the customs union would mean that Britain would have to obey European Union regulations on manufacturing standards and would be banned from making separate trade deals with countries

two main priorities are ending the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice over British law, and restoring British control over its borders and immigration, including from the European Union

Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, said that Mr. Hammond “appears to be making a sort of threat to the European community

Britain already runs a significantly higher yearly deficit than most European countries, about 4.4 percent of gross domestic product, and its cumulative debt is estimated at nearly 85 percent of G.D.P. Mainstream economists — under fire for wrongly predicting an immediate recession after the Brexit vote last June — say those figures are likely to worsen as the pound falls and the economy slows

While Trump said he had great respect for Merkel, he accused her of making “a catastrophic mistake,” which triggered Brexit.

"We’re gonna work very hard to get it done quickly and done properly. Good for both sides."

Trump's remarks stand in contrast to President Obama's warning before the June vote that Britain would be at the “back of the queue” for a trade deal if it voted to leave.

“I was delighted to hear Mr. Trump speak so positively about Brexit,” U.K. Independence Party MP Douglas Carswell told FoxNews.com. “It means so much to me -- and to the millions of Brits who voted to leave the EU.  It is good to know that our American ally will help us make it work.”

Trump’s remarks come as Prime Minister Theresa May is set to make a major speech on the subject Monday, in which she is expected to call for a so-called “hard Brexit”

“As is the case with Brexit, the best way of defending Europe, which is rather what Mr. Trump has invited us to do, is to remain united, to remain as a bloc, not to forget that the strength of the Europeans lies in their unity,” he said, according to the Journal.

“Europe needs to start meeting its responsibilities as part of the wider West -- and post-Brexit Britain can be part of making that happen,” he said.

Many pro-life women felt just as outraged as pro-choice women about Donald Trump’s conduct and comments, including the revelation that he once bragged about groping women without their permission.

the organizers say pro-lifers will be welcome to march on January 21st.

Perhaps the Women’s March on Washington is a sign that feminism is changing, too, ever so slightly: a first gathering of a truly “intersectional” movement which makes room for women with diverse convictions, including a moral opposition to abortion.

Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, the Texas-based president of a group called New Wave Feminists. “I get that he applied this pro-life label, but I don’t know very many people who genuinely believe he’s pro-life.”

A small group of marchers associated with the pro-life publication Life Matters Journal will be there to support “this actual affirmation of peace and human rights, not just for women, but for all people of any or no gender, ethnicity, religion, immigration status, age, or disability,

Some groups seem more interested in spinning up controversy than actually participating, though. Students for Life of America has invited hundreds of women to attend on Facebook, proclaiming that “we will not sit by as Planned Parenthood, our nation’s abortion Goliath and a sponsor of this march, betrays women into thinking abortion is their only choice.”

The Women’s March, in all its grassroots chaos, might be a feminist space where they’re actually welcome—or, at least, where they can inconspicuously march along with everyone else

advance did signal a new setback for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, at a time when it is already under concerted attack in Falluja, Iraq, and in parts of Syria.

risks destabilizing the fragile peace effort by fostering violent competition between rival groups

slamic State fighters have presided over a brutal rule in the city, with public executions and floggings, as well as shortages of food and medicines

a potential plan for extensive airstrikes against the militant group’s camps,

faltered badly as the unity government, which arrived in the capital, Tripoli, in March, has failed to gain broad political acceptance.

a significant prize because its loss to the Islamic State last June was seen as a significant step in the group’s domination of the Surt region.

seized the coastal town of Bin Jawad and claimed on Tuesday to have moved on nearby Nawfaliyah.

principally involved in intelligence gathering and reconnaissance.

such efforts are being frustrated by the tribal and personal rivalries that have fueled chaos in Libya since the fall of Colonel Qaddafi in 2011

“These forces lack crucial capabilities,”

The coastal city is thought to be home to a majority of the Islamic State fighters in Libya, estimated to number between 3,000 and 6,500.

the eastern branch of the country’s central bank this week announced that it had printed 4 billion Libyan dinars through a company in Russia, drawing a furious reaction from the main central bank in Tripoli.

While Mr. Ryan has weekly news conferences intended to talk about the House agenda, reporters tend to ask him almost exclusively about Mr. Trump.

The speaker is widely viewed as endorsing Mr. Trump to provide the party with the unity necessary to get House members re-elected and to help Mr. Ryan keep his day job.

The speaker has had a tough time getting enough votes to pass a budget in the House, let alone pass the rest of his agenda,

As Mr. Ryan was giving his modest endorsement to Mr. Trump, the Manhattan businessman was garnering his latest front page headlines by suggesting that a federal judge overseeing the class action suit against Trump University was biased because of his “Mexican heritage.”

His voice of skepticism, not his agenda, is what got Mr. Ryan the most attention, and putting it on the shelf may not serve him well

There is tremendous political pressure to be loyal to the team. The arguments against doing anything that might help Hillary Clinton are strong.

Republican leaders, in other words, thought they were in a normal political moment — a time for pragmatism, give-and-take, holding your nose and eventually getting past an unpleasant chore.

But it is not a normal political moment. It is one of those rare times — like the repudiation of Joe McCarthy, or consideration of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or the Watergate crisis — when the spotlight of history stops on a single decision, and a whole political career is remembered in a single pose. The test here: Can you support, for pragmatic reasons, a presidential candidate who purposely and consistently appeals to racism?

When the choice came, only a handful of Republicans at the national level answered with a firm “no.” A handful.

It is shocking to me — and depressing and infuriating — that almost no elected Republicans of national standing would stand up to it.

many of us will never be able to think about the Republican Party in quite the same way again.

It still carries many of the ideological convictions I share. Collectively, however, it has failed one of the most basic tests of public justice: Don’t support racists — or candidates who appeal to racism — for public office. If this commitment is not a primary, non-negotiable element of Republican identity, then the party of Lincoln is dead.

Without a passion for universal human dignity and worth — the commitment to a common good in which the powerless are valued — politics is a spoils system for the winners. It degenerates into a way for one group to gain advantage over another

for Trump in particular, politics seems to be a way for white voters to take back social power following the age of Obama.

in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of September 11, Democrats effusively praised George Bush for doing nothing more than making a couple of serviceable statements about our collective resolve. The news media immediately filled with paeans to his wise and steadfast leadership, and his approval ratings rocketed past 90 percent, all before he had actually done much of anything. Could you imagine the same thing happening today? Does anyone believe that there is some combination of words Obama could speak now that would cause the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Donald Trump to say, “That was really terrific; I’ve had my disagreements with him in the past, but today my hat’s off to him”? The very idea is laughable.

The second and related reason that it is impossible for Obama to unify us after this tragedy is that it is tied up with race, and there are significant numbers of white people who will always believe that on issues of race, Obama is intentionally trying to set Americans against each other, no matter what he actually does or says.

Republicans have told themselves a story in which the nation was moving toward racial harmony until Barack Obama came into office and immediately began dividing us over race, pitting blacks against whites and tearing the country asunder. And they have been telling their constituents this from the moment he took office.

Republicans have come to believe that they’re the real victims of racial discrimination — or as Bill O’Reilly, the highest-rated host on cable news, puts it, “If you’re a Christian or a white man in the USA, it’s open season on you.” According to a recent poll from the Public Religion Research Institute, 72 percent of Republicans and 81 percent of Trump supporters say that discrimination against whites is as big a problem in America today as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.

The final reason that President Obama can’t bring us all together is that today’s complex media environment makes it so difficult.

There was a time in which something important or tragic would happen, people would gather around their televisions, and everyone in the country would watch as the president (or maybe Walter Cronkite) told us how to interpret what had just occurred. We had only a few streams of information about national affairs, and that created a common text out of which we could come to understand what had happened.