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If Republicans are ever to recover their moral balance, they will need to dispose of three pervasive assumptions

The first is the assumption of rough equality — the belief that most racial prejudice was addressed by the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and, phew, aren’t we glad all that is over with.

In this view, every abuser of rights is dismissed as one of a few bad apples — even when it is clear that some institutions (say, police forces or the Trump GOP) are engaged in the mass production of rotting fruit.

The first institution Maoists captured was not the academy, it was the state. The seeds of the Cultural Revolution were not in the academy, but in the perceived weakness of the communist party in China, and Mao’s position within the party, after the failures of the Great Leap Forward. Maoists took over the state first, and 17 years later launched a campaign to force cultural change in the academy and elsewhere.

Cultural power, and related concepts like “privilege,” aren’t nothing, but they’re vaguer and less impactful than the state, which can credibility threaten, authorize, excuse, and utilize force.

State-backed violence made the Cultural Revolution, and if you think the social justice movement is similar, you misunderstand it.

the church does not allow nations to take up arms and go to war merely when they have a high moral cause on their side. Justice is necessary, but it is not sufficient:

Peaceful means of ending the evil in question need to have been exhausted, there must be serious prospects of military success, and (crucially) “the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.”

What this teaching suggests is that we should have a strong bias in favor of peaceful deliberation so long as deliberation remains possible.

Lexington is unexpectedly struck on election eve by echoes from America’s stand-your-ground movement. That movement has led dozens of states to pass laws which allow gun-owners to use lethal force when they reasonably believe that their safety is threatened, with no duty to retreat when they are in their home or other lawful place. Vitally, this defence can be invoked even if householders misjudge the perils that they face, in the heat of the moment.

Quite a few Republicans, including those who initially backed more mainstream rivals in their party’s presidential primaries, sound strikingly like stand-your-ground advocates when defending a vote for Mr Trump.

they feel heeded and respected when someone of his stature—a very rich man who could be a member of the elite, but instead chooses to side with them—agrees that their home, America, is under assault, whether from foreign governments scheming to “rape” the economy or by Muslim terrorists allowed in as refugees.

This isn’t a political divide between left and right, Democrats and Republicans; it’s an immeasurable moral chasm.

This election has uncovered something vile about America. That so many people would support a despicable candidate is not news to those hurt every day by racism, sexism and xenophobia; we know it’s alive and well in our country. We’ve been dealing with it our whole lives. But to see this hatred on such flagrant, unapologetic display is something else entirely.

A common refrain I’ve heard from Clinton supporters is that we’re better than this – the hatred, the harassment. But if this race has shown us anything, it’s that we’re not better than this. The bigotry and misogyny – that’s who we are. That’s what this country was built on. And even if Clinton wins next week, that’s who we will remain.

What was it in white Southern mores, folkways or history that made this such an indelible — though not unique — characteristic of theirs, that allowed so many of them to do such things or simply to stand in complicit silence, without a peep from conscience, as such things were done all around them?

“The Making of a Racist” is at its best in its early chapters as it recounts the author’s childhood indoctrination into the casual racism of the Jim Crow South. Racism was in the books he read. It was in the history he was taught. It was in the social conventions he observed. It was in the jokes he learned. It was like air or water, something that you didn’t question or think about, something that was just . . . there.

both were racists in an explicitly racist region, and both passed that to their son. One comes away from those coming-of-age chapters with renewed appreciation for the subtle yet ruthless efficiency with which systemic bigotry reinforces itself. And Dew’s recounting of his slow break from that system is compelling.

This is what Trump has done over the last year: He’s whipped up the darkest, angriest demons in the electorate. He has not simply given people permission to indulge any racist, sexist, xenophobic, or religiously intolerant tendencies they may harbor. He has insisted—loudly—that such bigotry is only common sense and mocked anyone who refuses to see the danger presented by “the other” as a blind idiot. Those not sharing Trump’s grim vision are, by definition, suckers being taken for a ride.

If anything, Trumpism has, in part, made the rest of the nation all the more eager to ignore the millions of white voters living on the edges of the economy. Many may now be written off without guilt, because they have shown themselves to be not just unfortunates but undesirables—irredeemable hate-mongers itching to reassert their cultural dominance.

No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, this is a tragic outcome. It leaves Americans that much more segregated and alienated from one another. It’s exactly this kind of cross-cultural suspicion and mistrust that has enabled Trump to come within spitting distance of the presidency.

How many times in a lifetime does your party control all levers of power? When that happens you’re willing to tolerate a little Trumpian circus behavior in order to get things done.

But if the last 10 days have made anything clear, it’s this: The Republican Fausts are in an untenable position. The deal they’ve struck with the devil comes at too high a price. It really will cost them their soul.

In the first place, the Trump administration is not a Republican administration; it is an ethnic nationalist administration.

The argument is that even if you don’t particularly like or trust Mr. Trump, he will not redefine the Republican Party.

But he already has. Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee, is waging an open attack on what have long been the party’s core views.

For at least three decades Republican politics have been defined by the centrality of conservatism in the party’s governing philosophy. Modern conservatism has three elements: a commitment to limited government and economic liberty that enables prosperity; moral traditionalism that conserves our capacity for liberty by producing responsible citizens; and a belief that America, confidently and carefully engaged in international affairs, can be a force for good in the world.

“People now feel that it is O.K. to say things that they might not have said a year ago,” she said. “Trump played a big role.”

Among any nation’s most precious possessions is its social fabric, and that is what Donald Trump is rending with incendiary talk about roughing up protesters and about gun owners solving the problem of Hillary Clinton making judicial nominations.

We need not be apocalyptic about it. This is not Kristallnacht. But Trump’s harsh rhetoric tears away the veneer of civility and betrays our national motto of “e pluribus unum.” He has unleashed a beast and fed its hunger, and long after this campaign is over we will be struggling to corral it again.

Trump is not just winning; he is also redefining how politics is done. Out: policy speeches, white papers, paid media, the ground game. In: monologues, social media, free media, advance work on big rallies. Few politicians in history — Franklin D. Roosevelt’s mastery of radio and Ronald Reagan’s use of television come to mind — have more instinctually and effectively adapted to new communication methods.

justifications are not insane, but they are ultimately not persuasive. Trump has little history of changing or refining his views through study and policy advice. Many of his goals, while too foolish to implement, are too vivid to revise. Try to imagine President Trump backing down on building the great wall or halting Muslim migration.

On these matters, Trump is entirely unmoored and unpredictable. It is hard to justify a presidency, which would be dangerous and destabilizing in other ways, on odds this long

Within a decade or so, in 1994, Berlusconi was prime minister, at the head of a right-of-center political party he’d concocted the previous year, thrust to power on the basis that he would break with Italy’s dysfunctional politics and that, as a self-made billionaire, he knew how to fix problems. He used television unsparingly to buttress his meteoric rise through the wreckage of Italy’s post-1945 political order, which had recently collapsed with the end of the Cold War.

Nobody who knows Berlusconi and has watched the rise and rise of Donald Trump can fail to be struck by the parallels. It’s not just the real-estate-to-television path. It’s not just their shared admiration for Vladimir Putin. It’s not just the playboy thing, and obsession with their virility, and smattering of bigotry, and contempt for policy wonks, and reliance on a tell-it-like-it-is tone. It’s not their wealth, nor the media savvy that taught them that nobody ever lost by betting on human stupidity.

No, it’s something in the zeitgeist. America is ripe for Trump just as Italy was ripe for Berlusconi. Trump, too, is cutting through a rotten political system in a society where economic frustration at jobs exported to China is high. He is emerging after two lost wars, as American power declines and others strut the global stage, against a backdrop of partisan political paralysis, in a system corrupted by money. To Obama’s Doctrine of Restraint, Trump opposes a Doctrine of Resurgence. To reason, he counters with rage

Why couldn’t the GOP have figured all this out before Trump got to 1,237 delegates?

Right-wingers will smell a plot. (The MSM held back until he had the nomination!) But there were a number of factors in the primary — a huge field (dividing the not-Trump vote and shielding him in debates), a press entranced with his media show, the novelty of his “act,” and the collapse of his opponents at critical times (e.g., Sen. Marco Rubio’s pre-New Hampshire primary debate) — that aided Trump.

there is something fundamentally amiss on the right that in a mere six weeks the country has figured out Trump, whereas Republicans in nine months plainly could not see the character they were embracing. That should highlight some troubling deficiencies on the right.

why the weekend frenzy, the screaming headlines, the surge of protest? Because of several features inherent to populism, which tend to undermine its attempts to govern no matter the on-paper popularity of its ideas.

First, populism finds its voice by pushing against the boundaries of acceptable opinion. But in the process it often embraces bigotries and extremisms that in turn color the reception of its policies.

Second, having campaigned against elites and experts and all their pomps and works, populists imagine that their zeal can carry all before it, that proceduralism and institutional knowledge are for losers and toadies

Trump isn’t ending American exceptionalism. He’s redefining it in ironic and disturbing ways.

“American exceptionalism” began as a way to explain why working-class Americans found communism less appealing than did their European counterparts.

For the American communist leader Jay Lovestone, who coined the phrase, it was an excuse for his frustrating lack of success. For post-war sociologists like Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset, it was a source of national strength. The American poor didn’t seethe with class resentment and turn to revolutionary ideologies because upward mobility gave them the chance to rise.

On news sites like this one, in newspapers, and even on TV, Americans have been grappling with concepts that normally don't get mentioned outside of a comparative literature class or liberal arts college symposium: neocolonialism, white man's burden, paternalism.

Maybe this is a conversation that started with the decline of the Iraq war. A February 2003 poll estimated that nearly 60% of Americans supported an invasion. By May 2007, 61% said the U.S. should have stayed out. The lessons were about more than the limits of American power or the wisdom of this particular conflict (although those are both important), but, underneath all of the questions and national soul-searching, the first hints in a century of American dominance that maybe our power isn't always and necessarily a force of good

during the two weeks of wall-to-wall American media coverage of the Egyptian revolution, hardly 10 minutes of cable news could go by without someone mentioning U.S. support for Mubarak. Americans were rooting for Egyptian protesters but, at the same time, they were helping to prop up Mubarak by participating in an American system that proudly promotes American hegemony by backing guys like him. The big contradiction in how Americans see our role in the world, obvious for so long to people in Africa and Asia and the Middle East, was finally becoming clear to us.

Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that more than 40 percent of the variation in average reading scores and 46 percent of the variation in average math scores across states is associated with variation in child poverty rates

No Child Left Behind required all schools to bring all students to high levels of achievement but took no note of the challenges that disadvantaged students face. The legislation did, to be sure, specify that subgroups — defined by income, minority status and proficiency in English — must meet the same achievement standard. But it did so only to make sure that schools did not ignore their disadvantaged students — not to help them address the challenges they carry with them into the classroom.

requiring all schools to meet the same high standards for all students, regardless of family background, will inevitably lead either to large numbers of failing schools or to a dramatic lowering of state standards. Both serve to discredit the public education system

I think the 1960s were definitely a net positive for America and Americans. Civil rights and women's rights were unequivocal triumphs, as was the newly heightened awareness of what we then called "ecology." The greater tolerance for different kinds of people and for weirdness were excellent changes. Pop music had its awesome big-bang moment, as you say, and movies and visual art were transformed in interesting ways, and we middle-aged people now get to wear blue jeans and sneakers and go to rock concerts and generally behave as if we're young until we die. But we threw some baby out with the bath water. The mistrust of government that blossomed in the late '60s has become a chronic and in some ways pathological condition. We got carried away with the idea of victimhood, so that now white people and Christians and Wall Street guys cast themselves categorically as victims of bigotry. The latent American tendency toward self-righteousness and apocalyptic thinking got ratcheted up. The idea of one's "own truth" started propagating, and that solipsism is now pandemic. And as I recently argued in a Times op-ed which bugged a lot of of '60s-romanticizers on the left and libertarians on the right, I think the "if it feels good do it"/"do your own thing" paradigm of the 1960s also helped enable the greed-is-good hypercapitalism and general selfishness that grew and grew afterward.