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watching Obama both be black and speak for the state was torturous. One got the sense of a man fatigued by people demanding he say something both eminently profound and only partially true. This must be tiring.

Black people know what cannot be said. What clearly cannot be said is that the events of Ferguson do not begin with Michael Brown lying dead in the street, but with policies set forth by government at every level. What clearly cannot be said is that the people of Ferguson are regularly plundered, as their grandparents were plundered, and generally regarded as a slush-fund for the government that has pledged to protect them. What clearly cannot be said is the idea of superhuman black men who "bulk up" to run through bullets is not an invention of Darren Wilson, but a staple of American racism.

As it happens, there is nothing about a congenitally racist country that necessarily prevents an individual leader hailing from the pariah class. The office does not care where the leader originates, so long as the leader ultimately speaks for the state.

What clearly cannot be said is that violence and nonviolence are tools, and that violence—like nonviolence—sometimes works. "Property damage and looting impede social progress," Jonathan Chait wrote Tuesday. He delivered this sentence with unearned authority. Taken together, property damage and looting have been the most effective tools of social progress for white people in America. They describe everything from enslavement to Jim Crow laws to lynching to red-lining.

What cannot be said is that America does not really believe in nonviolence—Barack Obama has said as much—so much as it believes in order. What cannot be said is that there are very convincing reasons for black people in Ferguson to be nonviolent. But those reasons emanate from an intelligent fear of the law, not a benevolent respect for the law.

Perhaps one day we won't, and maybe that is reason to hope. Hope is what Barack Obama promised to bring, but he was promising something he could never bring.

And that is because the death of all of our Michael Browns at the hands of people who are supposed to protect them originates in a force more powerful than any president: American society itself. This is the world our collective American ancestors wanted. This is the world our collective grandparents made. And this is the country that we, the people, now preserve in our fantastic dream. What can never be said is that the Fergusons of America can be changed—but, right now, we lack the will to do it.

The fact is that when the president came to the podium on Monday night there actually was very little he could say. His mildest admonitions of racism had only earned him trouble. If the American public cannot stomach the idea that arresting a Harvard professor for breaking into his own home is "stupid," then there is virtually nothing worthwhile that Barack Obama can say about Michael Brown.

Hope is not feel-goodism built on the belief in unicorns. Martin Luther King had hope, but it was rooted in years of study and struggle, not in looking the other way. Hope is not magical. Hope is earned.

It is my guiding thesis that people who claim a serious interest in America but consider racism to be a niche topic are divided against themselves. You can't understand American politics, without understanding the Civil War. You can't understand the suburbs, without understanding redlining. You can't understand the constitution, without understanding slavery. In effect if you are an American who avoids understanding the force of racism, you are avoiding an understanding of yourself and your country. 

The East was the Nazi Manifest Destiny. In Hitler’s view, “in the East a similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America.” As Hitler imagined the future, Germany would deal with the Slavs much as the North Americans had dealt with the Indians. The Volga River in Russia, he once proclaimed, will be Germany’s Mississippi.

It's easy to consider the reduction of this hemisphere's aboriginal people, the seizure of their land, their enslavement, the importation of African labor, the creation of a "black race," the profitable murder of black families, the perpetual warring against black people, the subsequent campaigns of terrorism which followed, as without analogue or global import. As though the land simply appeared beneath our feet, and by God's decree, delivered onto us its wealth. As though our state was not founded in plunder of land, labor and lives.

When Americans complained about Nazi anti-Semitism, party officials rejoined by citing southern racial practices, claiming a kinship. The Völkischer Beobachter, the oldest Nazi Party newspaper, routinely disparaged Africans and African-Americans. Like much of the German press, it frequently printed antiblack cartoons, reminded its readers that southern public accommodations were segregated, and delighted in reporting how blacks, like German Jews, could not sleep in Pullman cars and could not exercise the right to vote. Lynching was a favorite subject. Neues Volk celebrated southern lynching for protecting white women from unrestrained black desire. The Völkischer Beobachter published many graphic stories that were intended to support lynching as a tool to shield white sexual purity. “The SS journal Schwarze Korps exclaimed that if lynching occurred in Germany as it did in the American South, the whole world would complain loudly.” 

The desire to put a history of American racism, which is to say a portion of America's roots, in a corner is a kind of wish-fulfillment. It would be so much easier if "black studies" really were niche, if it really weren't that important, if racism really was a minor thread in the history of the West.

At West Point, he is commonly referred to as the ideal cadet — not just for his lack of demerits, but for his closely held values and his academic achievements. But although the history was well-known, I cannot recall ever debating Lee’s decision to command the Confederate Army against his nation, nor any serious discussion about his attitude toward slavery.

The military prides itself on being apolitical and focused on the moral good. Yet these tenets have also served as an excuse to avoid conversations about contentious or uncomfortable topics, such as race, politicsand sexuality.

War is often subjected to this tendency to clean up, or at least oversimplify. It is hard to discuss the periodic incompetence, cowardice and criminality that are associated with every military campaign in history without seeming to detract from the very real courage and sacrifice of the vast majority of soldiers

When we choose how we view history, we risk mythologizing events and people, reducing them to two-dimensional stories. It takes nothing away from Abraham Lincoln’s heroic stewardship of our nation through the Civil War, for instance, to admit that he was still a creature of his era

Frustratingly, our instinct to sanitize history ensures that we are always looking backward for our better angels, struggling to meet a standard that remains forever out of reach.

There is, in the end, little point in studying a version of history that contains cartoons and monuments rather than real people with nuanced actions and decisions — people whose complexities can teach us about our own

Organizations are often at their finest when they are used as instruments for social change, especially when that change is necessary for the greater good

President Harry S. Truman’s executive order desegregating the military is a magnificent example of how leaders can help speed up institutional change. We are a long way from solving racism in our country, but Truman’s decision was an important step in changing the hearts and minds of our soldiers, their families and society writ larg

As President John F. Kennedy put it, “The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.”

We must combat our desire to mythologize our history and our leaders, while retaining our belief in the qualities and ideals those myths often reflect.

But reporters today are more likely to encounter Pepe’s smug visage in his latest incarnation, as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes put it, people with “Nazi frog avatars” who are “tweeting about the Jews.”

Donald Trump Jr. tweeted out a modified image of the poster for the action movie The Expendables with prominent Trump supporters’ faces photoshopped onto those of the action stars. The image, which introduces the group as The Deplorables, includes Pepe in a Donald Trump wig.

Reporters now often describe Pepe as a “white-nationalist symbol”

The internet is basically encompassing some kind of mass consciousness, and Pepe, with his face, he’s got these large, expressive eyes with puffy eyelids and big rounded lips, I just think that people reinvent him in all these different ways, it’s kind of a blank slate.

The interesting thing about this situation, is that I’m talking to you, and it’s like a newsworthy thing that this cute, generally happy frog character has taken on a life of its own for better or worse.

In a since-deleted tweet, Ahmari praised Alabama Public Television for refusing to air an episode of the cartoon Arthur in which the titular character’s male teacher marries another man; his attack on French was preceded by another since-deleted eruption, over Drag Queen Story Hour at a public library, in which he cried, “To hell with liberal order”; and he has since suggested the humanities should be defunded because “they may be lost to us for good.

the United States that illiberals would like to see: one that resembles Orbán’s Hungary, where rigged electoral systems ensure that political competition is minimal, the press is tightly controlled by an alliance between corporations and the state on behalf of the ruling party, national identity is defined in religious and ethnic terms, and cultural expressions are closely policed by the state to ensure compliance with that identity

Although the intraconservative critiques leveled by Ahmari and his allies sometimes take on the language of opposition to market fundamentalism, they are not truly opposed to the concentration of power and capital.

These critics observe the decline in wages and community that has resulted from this concentration, and propose to do nothing at all about it other than seize that power for themselves

The same sort of protests that the right decries as illiberal when deployed against right-wing speakers on college campuses are suddenly a legitimate tactic when used against Drag Queen Story Hour. The objective here, in Ahmari’s words, is to defeat “the enemy,” not adhere to principle

Indeed, the illiberal faction in this debate retains Trump as its champion precisely because the president is willing to use the power of the state for sectarian ends, despite being an exemplar of the libertinism to which it is supposedly implacably opposed

Sohrab Ahmari, writing at First Things, attacked National Review’s David French for adhering to a traditional commitment to liberal democracy while “the overall balance of forces has tilted inexorably away from us.”

the support Ahmari has drawn suggests that the conservative intelligentsia will offer less resistance to authoritarianism than it did in 2015 and 2016.

even before Trump ran for president, some Republican elites were plotting to diminish the political power of minorities and enhance those of white voters. Whatever their disagreements, the leaders of both the populist and establishment wings of the Republican Party have concluded that they cannot be allowed to lose power simply because a majority of American voters do not wish them to wield it.

Black Americans did not abandon liberal democracy because of slavery, Jim Crow, and the systematic destruction of whatever wealth they managed to accumulate

Latinos did not abandon liberal democracy because of “Operation Wetback,” or Proposition 187,

Gay, lesbian, and trans Americans did not abandon liberal democracy over decades of discrimination and abandonment in the face of an epidemic.

This is, in part, because doing so would be tantamount to giving the state permission to destroy them, a thought so foreign to these defenders of the supposedly endangered religious right that the possibility has not even occurred to them

a peculiar irony of American history: The American creed has no more devoted adherents than those who have been historically denied its promises, and no more fair-weather friends than those who have taken them for granted.

Undetectable in the dispute on the right is any acknowledgment of the criticisms of liberal democracy by those who have been fighting for their fundamental rights in battles that are measured in decades and even centuries; that the social contract implicitly excluded them from the very rights white Christian men have been able to assert from the beginning

. Lopped off the district was Cherokee County, which favored the president over Hillary Clinton by 50 points last November.

Ossoff nearly won the seat outright during the first vote on April 18, coming just two points short of the necessary 50 percent. Handel, a former Georgia secretary of state, bested 10 GOP rivals to advance to the June 20 runoff.

He initially pledged to "make Trump furious," and a fundraising haul unprecedented for a House race followed: $8.3 million in the first quarter with 95 percent of the donors from outside Georgia. Having quickly overshadowed the rest of his party's field, Ossoff made the sort of strategic pivot that generally typifies presidential contests between the primary season and the general election.

What he talks like is a professional politician, going before the cameras to proclaim that "both parties in Congress waste a lot of your money."

Do voters trust his posturing, she asks, or do they see "the most liberal of the left who are the power behind his campaign"?

Chinese internet companies conduct their own censorship, but they do so out of fear of what Beijing officials might do to them. Last February, ifeng.com, a news portal, was punished for running original content about the coronavirus outbreak. Under the Chinese regulations, these websites can’t produce original news content.

For those reasons, many Chinese are dumbfounded by the idea that private companies such as Twitter and Facebook have the power to reject a sitting American president.

But when Mr. Kuang created two cartoons to express his displeasure at Mr. Trump’s bans, China’s censors did nothing. In one of them, President Trump’s mouth was brutally sewn up. In another, the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is portrayed as Qin Shi Huang, China’s first emperor, a brutal tyrant who burned books and executed scholars more than 2,000 years ago.

The journalist Zhao Jing, who goes by the name Michael Anti, is puzzled why Chinese Trump supporters so zealously defend his freedom of speech. Mr. Trump has the White House, executive orders and Fox News, he wrote: “What else do you want for him to have freedom of speech?”

One kindergarten in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou interspersed its lessons in September with four days of what it called “military training” for its 5- and 6-year-olds. The children, dressed in military fatigues, held Chinese flags and performed salutes, according to the school’s official WeChat social-media account.

In 2016, the party issued what it said were reform guidelines calling on its Communist Youth League to help lead on social media. The Youth League began opening accounts on platforms including Douyin, China’s version of TikTok. It also started an official account on Bilibili, a video-hosting platform akin to China’s YouTube whose users are mainly under 25. The Youth League and its regional arms now have almost 11.5 million followers there.

3. Fox’s aim is to entertain and stir emotions, not primarily to inform.

Mao’s model is instructive in another way. It shows you what happens when a mob is actually quietly supported by elites, who use it to advance their own goals. The Red Guards did what they did — to their friends, and parents, and teachers — in the spirit of the Communist regime itself.

bram X. Kendi, the New York Times best seller who insists that everyone is either racist or anti-racist, now has a children’s book to indoctrinate toddlers on one side of this crude binary

Revolutionary moments also require public confessions of iniquity by those complicit in oppression.

These now seem to come almost daily. I’m still marveling this week at the apology the actress Jenny Slate gave for voicing a biracial cartoon character. It’s a classic confession of counterrevolutionary error: “I acknowledge how my original reasoning was flawed and that it existed as an example of white privilege and unjust allowances made within a system of societal white supremacy … Ending my portrayal of ‘Missy’ is one step in a life-long process of uncovering the racism in my actions.” For Slate to survive in her career, she had to go full Cersei in her walk of shame.

They murdered and tortured, and subjected opponents to public humiliations — accompanied by the gleeful ransacking of religious and cultural sites. In their attack on the Temple of Confucius, almost 7,000 priceless artifacts were destroyed. By the end of the revolution, almost two-thirds of Beijing’s historical sites had been destroyed in a frenzy of destruction against “the four olds: old customs, old habits, old culture, and old ideas.” Mao first blessed, then reined in these vandals.

take this position voiced on Twitter by a chemistry professor at Queen’s University in Canada this week: “Here’s the thing: If whatever institution you are a part of is not COMPLETELY representative of the population you can draw from, you can draw only two conclusions. 1) Bias against the underrepresented groups exists or 2) the underrepresented groups are inherently less qualified.”

Other factors — such as economics or culture or individual choice or group preference — are banished from consideration.

Revolutions also encourage individuals to take matters in their own hands. The distinguished liberal philosopher Michael Walzer recently noted how mutual social policing has a long and not-so-lovely history — particularly in post–Reformation Europe, in what he has called “the revolution of the saints.”

Revolutionaries also create new forms of language to dismantle the existing order. Under Mao, “linguistic engineering” was integral to identifying counterrevolutionaries, and so it is today.

The use of the term “white supremacy” to mean not the KKK or the antebellum South but American society as a whole in the 21st century has become routine on the left, as if it were now beyond dispute.

The word “women,” J.K. Rowling had the temerity to point out, is now being replaced by “people who menstruate.”

The word “oppression” now includes not only being herded into Uighur reeducation camps but also feeling awkward as a sophomore in an Ivy League school.

The word “racist,” which was widely understood quite recently to be prejudicial treatment of an individual based on the color of their skin, now requires no intent to be racist in the former sense, just acquiescence in something called “structural racism,” which can mean any difference in outcomes among racial groupings. Being color-blind is therefore now being racist.

And there is no escaping this. The woke shift their language all the time, so that words that were one day fine are now utterly reprehensible.

You can’t keep up — which is the point. (A good resource for understanding this new constantly changing language of ideology is “Translations From the Wokish.”) The result is an exercise of cultural power through linguistic distortion.

So, yes, this is an Orwellian moment

It’s not a moment of reform but of a revolutionary break, sustained in part by much of the liberal Establishment.

Even good and important causes, like exposing and stopping police brutality, can morph very easily from an exercise in overdue reform into a revolutionary spasm. There has been much good done by the demonstrations forcing us all to understand better how our fellow citizens are mistreated by the agents of the state or worn down by the residue of past and present inequality.

But the zeal and certainty of its more revolutionary features threaten to undo a great deal of that goodwill.

The movement’s destruction of even abolitionist statues, its vandalism of monuments to even George Washington, its crude demonization of figures like Jefferson, its coerced public confessions, its pitiless wreckage of people’s lives and livelihoods, its crude ideological Manichaeanism, its struggle sessions and mandated anti-racism courses, its purging of cultural institutions of dissidents, its abandonment of objective tests in higher education (replacing them with quotas and a commitment to ideology), and its desire to upend a country’s sustained meaning and practices are deeply reminiscent of some very ugly predecessors.

But the erasure of the past means a tyranny of the present. In the words of Orwell, a truly successful ideological revolution means that “every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

We are not there yet. But unless we recognize the illiberal malignancy of some of what we face, and stand up to it with courage and candor, we soon will be.

There is also a tendency in our moment to prioritize the distant over the proximate and the big over the small.

We can seek to have all the right political opinions and still not really love our actual neighbors, those right around us, in our homes, in our workplaces or on our blocks.

Modernity, he thought, was exhausting itself. Humanity could not “carry on any longer merely on the surface, a purely external life”; we must either “go deep or peter out altogether.”

In our time of digitization and rapid information, our temptation is what the philosopher Charles Taylor called “excarnation” — the opposite of “incarnation,” it makes our life into an abstraction.

We become like Linus in the old “Peanuts” cartoons who famously said: “I love mankind. It’s people I can’t stand.”

True community, however, is made of real people with names, of friends with true faults, of congregations with faces, of the local, the small.

Global and national news is important and I will continue to read news and opinion pieces nearly every day. But for me, as for most of us, the places we meet God — the places we become human — are not primarily in abstract debates about culture wars or the role of religion in society, but in worship on a Sunday morning or in dropping off soup for a grieving friend, in a vulnerable conversation or in making breakfast at the homeless shelter down the street, in celebration with a neighbor or in the drowsy prayers uttered while rocking a feverish toddler in the middle of the night.

The way to battle abstraction in our time is to embrace the material, the incarnation of our lives, the fleshy, complicated, touchable realities right around us in our neighborhoods, churches, friends and families

China’s drop was much much bigger; the Japan of the 80s was never the export machine people believed it to be. Both countries turned to investment in real estate and infrastructure as a replacement growth driver — although again, China did this much more than Japan did. Essentially, China did all the the things we typically think of Japan as having done 25 years earlier, but much more than Japan actually did them.

Yes, for those who were wondering, this does look a little bit like what happened to Japan in the 1990s

Already the country is not growing much faster than the G7, and as the ongoing real estate bust weighs on the economy, even that small difference may now be gone. The country’s surging auto industry is a bright spot, but won’t be big enough to rescue the economy from the evaporation of its primary growth driver.

Even if it manages to climb up to 40%, that’s still a fairly disappointing result — South Korea is at 71% and Japan at 65%

a re-acceleration would require a massive burst of productivity growth, which just seems unlikely.

That means China’s catch-up growth only took it to 30% of U.S. per capita GDP (PPP)

There’s one main argument that people make for a quick Chinese decline: rapid aging. But while I don’t want to wave this away, I don’t think it’s going to be as big a deal as many believe

This is another example of China’s peak being both awe-inspiring and strangely disappointing at the same time.

Now that China has hit its peak, will it decline? And if so, how much and how fast?

it seems likely that China’s growth will now slow to developed-country levels, or slightly higher, without much prospect for a sustained re-acceleration

when people contemplate Chinese decline, they’re not asking whether its economy will shrink; they’re asking whether its relative economic dominance and geopolitical importance will decrease.

If we just casually pattern-match on history, the answer would probably be “not for a long time”. Most powerful countries seem to peak and then plateau. Britain ruled the waves for a century.

U.S. relative power and economic dominance peaked in the 1950s, but it didn’t really start declining until the 2000s

Japan and Germany had their military power smashed in WW2, but remained economic heavyweights for many decades afterwards.

When the Roman Empire declined, it got a lot poorer. But in the modern economy, countries that decline in relative terms, and in geopolitical power, often get richer

he total fertility rate has been low since even before the one-child policy was implemented, but recently it has taken a nose-dive. Two years ago, the UN put it at 1.16, which is 40% lower than the U.S. and 22% lower than Europe

The country’s total population only started shrinking this year, but its young population started falling sharply 20 years ago, due to the echo of low fertility in the 80s. The most common age for a Chinese person is now about 50 years old, with another peak at 35:

The first reason is that power is relative, and China’s rivals have demographic issues of their own. The U.S., Europe, India and Japan all have higher fertility than China, but still below replacement level

demographics aren’t actually going to force Chinese power or wealth into rapid decline over the next few decades.

third of all, evidence suggests that population aging is really more of a persistent drag than a crisis or disaster.

Second, demographics won’t take away China’s biggest economic advantage, which is clustering and agglomeration effects. Asia is the world’s electronics manufacturing hub. It’s also by far the most populous region in the world, giving it the biggest potential market size

China will act as a key hub for that region, in terms of trade, supply chains, investment, and so on. China is shrinking, but Asia is not

As a result, there are suddenly many fewer Chinese people able to bear children, which is why the actual number of births in China has fallen by almost half since 2016:

we’d find that every percentage point of the senior population share that China gains relative to other countries might reduce its relative economic performance by about 1.15%. That’s not a huge number.

Now, if we look at the research, we find some estimates that are much larger than this — for example, Ozimek et al. (2018) look at specific industries and specific U.S. states, and find an effect on productivity that’s three times as large as the total effect on growth that I just eyeballed above. Maestas et al. (2022) look at U.S. states, and also find a larger effect. But Acemoglu and Restrepo (2017) look across countries and find no effect at all.

On top of that, there are plenty of things a country can do to mitigate the effects of aging. One is automation. China is automating at breakneck speed,

A second is having old people work longer; China, which now has higher life expectancy than the U.S., is well-positioned to do this.

Finally, aging will prompt China to do something it really needs to do anyway: build a world class health care system

this would help rectify the internal imbalances that Michael Pettis always talks about, shifting output from low-productivity real estate investment toward consumption.

if not aging, the only other big dangers to China are war and climate change.

To realize its full potential, Altasia will need integration — it will need some way to get Japanese and Korean and Taiwanese investment and technology to the vast labor forces of India, Indonesia, and the rest

the most likely outcome is that China sits at or near its current peak of wealth, power and importance through the middle of this century at least.

Altasia has more people and arguably more technical expertise than China. And it’s the only alternative location for the Asian electronics supercluster.

War was the big mistake that Germany made a century ago, so let’s hope China doesn’t follow in its footsteps.

The story of whether and how that complex web of investment, tech transfer, and trade develops will be the next great story of globalization.

But I think the very complexity of Altasia will lead to its own sort of adventure and excitement.

for Western companies looking for new markets, Altasia will potentially be more exciting than China ever was. The Chinese market delivered riches to some, but the government banned some products (especially internet services) and stole the technology used to make others. Ultimately, China’s billion consumers turned out to be a mirage for many. The economies and societies of Altasia, in comparison, are much more open to foreign products.